Research as Enabled Curiosity, or Monkeys on Planes

Recently I was flying across the country and my friendly seatmate told me she was a flight attendant. We chatted and then I asked her to tell me the weirdest thing she’d ever seen on her job.

            “I once delivered a dinner tray with grapes on it to a man in first class,” she said, “and a little hand reached out of his jacket and took a grape.”

It turned out the man had a monkey stowed away in his jacket, a small monkey I presume. But this is what she saw: a large hand attached to a man in first class reaching for a grape; a small hand emerging out of his chest also reaching for a grape.

 Did the man sneak through security clasping a monkey in his shirt? Did he bring it through in a carrier then tuck it away? So many questions! But the image of a little hand reaching out for the irresistible grape stays with me. And that this flight attendant thought at first it was a man harboring another, smaller, man.

 I tend to ask this what’s-the-weirdest-thing question of everyone I meet who seems game--cabbies, doctors, people who style hair. I have banks and banks of hidden-monkey type stories. Some make it into my writing; some just remind me of the fact that this strange experiment called life has more odd results than I could imagine on my own.

I do a lot of research, particularly interviewing, in my writing. In The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here I interviewed many scientists and much of what we talked about involved straightforward questions about theories of things like time. But I always try in my interviews—at the end, when I can’t mess things up—asking a curveball question. What obsesses you? What are you doing that’s exciting but maybe a little strange?

One scientist, Donald Hoffman, told me that he was trying to find a mathematical equation that would correlate in some way with the idea of God. Wow.

Researched nonfiction has become an important part of the genre, particularly the kind of personal yet fact-fueled work done by writers like Michael Pollan, Mary Roach, and Atul Gawande. When I teach research writing I teach it as cultivating and enabling curiosity before anything else. That means when you have a talkative seatmate on a plane, you try to figure out what they’ve seen and known that you haven’t. It also means being curious about those you know, like family members, and trying to draw out their stories. Maybe just cultivating the habit of believing that everyone who passes you by in this world has something interesting and unique to tell you.

The “I” of nonfiction is going to run out of steam sooner or later if it sticks too much to that pronoun. Sometimes that “I” needs to be not alpha and omega but conduit or channel.  

Looking things up is fine. I go online to find out facts many times a day. But information that’s on a website probably has been lifted from another website and that from another, etc. Sometimes you’re just tucking into a brew of common assumptions. Either way, individual human knowledge is different. It involves minds and perspectives that happen all of once in this world.

Ask five weird questions a day until you get in the habit of it. Write me and ask me a weird question, if you need some practice. Write an essay called “Five Weird Questions” with five different people and their answers. If other people do it too it can just be a thing, like writing about your thumbs. Which makes me wonder about the strangest thing you all have experienced while hitchhiking . . . I’ll stop now.

On Writing and Fear of Writing

I don’t write about my own work much in this blog. I’m not especially modest. It’s just not the vision I had for it.

As the author of a book about writing, Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and as a literary magazine editor, I like talking about writing and publishing. I think it matters. I’m aware of the extent to which similar life experiences get recorded in our literature, and different ones get lost.

I think the writers we should most be reading are often the least likely to try for publication. They think, as I once did (and do still, TBH), no one would want to read what they write about. Literature, like all art, can be gallinovular—a word I’m in love with that means chicken-egg.

 It’s easy to think that if anyone cared about my x experience, it would be out there already, burning up those ubiquitous bestseller lists. Which is an understandable way to think, but one that guarantees nothing new will ever be out there, to burn up bestseller lists, or just do whatever it does.

It’s scary to write about the things you don’t see all around you, in the literary air. You assume stories like yours aren’t there because that’s the last thing anyone wants to hear about, rather than assuming that your story NEEDS to be out there, for that very reason. It’s not all around you, not because no one shares your experience—that’s never the case—but because there’s still some taboo.

I dropped out of high school. I write about a subject that for many people is the ultimate unspoken: psychosis. And I just finished recording the last bit of a two-episode CBC Ideas radio documentary on neurodiversity, called (last I heard) Gifts of the Gods. It’s a series of interviews and readings with me and several other neurodiverse people, like Temple Grandin. It’s going to be aired across 98% of Canada, in eighty other countries, in the U.S. on Sirius XM and on NPR.

Am I bragging? No, promise. I’m sharing that the first episode airs in a little over a week (April 27) and I’m fairly terrified. How many people are going to know this thing about me, that I experience psychosis? And in an ableist culture, one with a very narrow bandwidth of the “normal,” it’s going to mean to a lot of people that I’m freakish and dismissable. I agree with Lisa Cosgrove and Robert Whitaker, two thinkers and researchers about psychiatry: psychiatry has become a philosophy of the normal, and as such, often offers an impoverished vision of what human existence can be.

I have faith that my own very different mindways have value. But it’s one thing to believe this, and another to feel like the word “crazy” is going to be plastered on your forehead as you weigh apples at the grocery store.

People ask me all the time how I find the “courage” to be so honest. Well, the answer is, I have no courage. Or I don’t feel like I have courage. Maybe I have a knack for not thinking too far ahead. I focus on deadlines, whether for interviews or manuscripts. Sometimes when those “revelation days” happen and my words are really out there, I wonder what I could possibly have been thinking.

I’ve been through this already, what’s happening with this show, and I know it’s never all that bad. I’ll get contacted by good people who are glad I said what I said. None of this prevents that heart-pounding fear of being exposed.

I think maybe my knack for focusing on the process isn’t a bad one. Once you get x experience down just right, it does scare you less and excite you more. Then you can figure out what you’re ready to do with it, and what noises you want to make.

On Confession Albums and Taking the Proust Questionnaire

I don’t know how I went through so much of my life not knowing about the Proust Questionnaire. It’s one of those things that shows up everywhere once you know about it. People during writer Marcel Proust’s time filled out personality questionnaires as an amusement (then called, charmingly, “confession albums”). This was before Facebook and its which-character-in-Game of Thrones-are-you quizzes, but the same idea.

The questions are things like “who would you want to be if you weren’t you,” and one has come to be called the Proust Questionnaire. The writer took it twice, once at age fourteen and once at twenty.

The unofficial social secretary of Balbec’s two sets of answers are revealingly different. His favorite virtue in himself, at fourteen, was the need to be “loved” as well as “caressed and spoiled.” This ranks as a serious surprise from a writer who’d spend much of his later life alone in a cork-lined room. At twenty Proust’s answer to the question was “the universal virtues.” Maybe then he saw cork in his future.

The younger Proust said that he’d want to be, if not himself, the person his friends wanted him to be. The older Proust wrote that he would not answer the question of who he wished to be, then said he’d like to be Pliny the Younger.

Odd Proustiana aside, the list has thirty-five questions and has been used by Vanity Fair to interview writers like Joan Didion and Norman Mailer. Sophia Loren answered it recently--turns out she admires Kamala Harris and her favorite thing to do is eat, especially pasta and whipped cream.

The questionnaire gets cited frequently as a device in writing fiction: have your characters take the Proust Questionnaire and you can deepen your sense of who they are. But I suggest using the Proust Questionnaire for nonfiction and doing it as Proust did: over time.

You may not have six years to wait and see how you’ve changed (though that’s not a bad idea). But we change each day and each hour and probably, minute. We have selves under this and that political leader; pre- and post-lockdown selves; selves during crises. People arrive in our lives, they depart, we gather new knowledge about our fears and desires and our bodies. Maybe, as it did with Proust, one day a cookie dipped in lime tea will change everything.

This doesn’t suggest all nonfiction will focus on the author. It will not. But something that doesn’t change the observer is unlikely to move the reader or auditor, unless they are predisposed to be so moved. It’s an essential question: how have things changed, and how have they changed you.

I once went through a life-or-death event with my child. After that, my answer to the “what would be my greatest happiness” question would simply be not being there, in that time. I’m a different person, with a greater sense of the beauty of the normal day. That fact carries a story, one that questions the nature of happiness itself. And it is, to be honest, a story I hadn’t thought about until just now.

Proust himself seemed to intuit that the questionnaire told a fairly complex tale, one greater than a momentary scribble. Why answer a question by first saying you won’t answer it? Maybe it means some questions shouldn’t have answers. Yet we can’t resist answering them anyway.

Try taking this questionnaire every week or month—take it at least four times. See what your answers tell you and ask yourself whether there’s a story in those changes. Freewrite (aka, scribble!) on why and how the changes you see have occurred. Those short answers will contain remarkably complex stories. Like my happiness answer, your answers will contain worlds.

Here’s the full questionnaire—or more delightfully, confession album.

The situation in Ukraine is unspeakable. Some places that can help include World Central Kitchen, founded by chef Jose Andres—it’s on the ground providing food for refugees and others impacted by the war. Doctors Without Borders is providing medical care. Razom for Ukraine, an organization that has worked to build democracy in Ukraine, is now buying medical supplies. If there are other organizations you can vouch for, send me an email and I’ll add them.