By Zach Semel
The day before I hopped on a cheap Las Vegas flight to Seattle, I apologized to one of my creative writing students. This student had sent me a beautiful lyric essay about mental illness and belonging, and I had torn it to shreds, dotting it with highlights and comments like a vengeful graffiti artist. I had marked countless moments where rather than describing a symptom or its roots or its meaning for the narrator, my student had written a quick, vague sum-up line. But as I scrolled down the document during our Zoom meeting, I recognized that much of what I had questioned in their piece was actually working. The point of the piece was to sometimes refuse length and clarity. When my student admitted they had been a little upset by my comments, I recognized that I'd been upset writing them, had been upset writing my students' feedback all semester.
For the past year, I've been writing a lyric memoir about my experiences living with PTSD in the wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing. A few months into the project, the stakes of my work suddenly felt dire. Partially due to not seeing a therapist during this period, I was approaching my book as I would an actual therapy session: wringing out each line for its deepest possible meaning, wanting writing to be the space in my life where I regularly discover, articulate, and heal. In the shower, during my daily commutes to campus, I'd often repeat to myself: Specificity is survival. I noticed this psychological shift and didn't try to change it. I didn't want to lose my grip on the growing book.
Three days into AWP, sometime between chomping on a greasy $12 pizza and steadying my vertigo-riddled torso on a 4th floor escalator, I realized my writing in survival mode had led me to read in survival mode too. Each time I'd see an author I admire, I'd remember how many times that last year I'd read against the belief that deeply reflecting upon my experiences would leave me in such distress that I'd want to die. Every night after AWP, I went to bed wishing it had been appropriate to admit to these famous writers that I'd pictured myself writing my book alongside theirs, us surviving authorship together. You might've seen me wandering around the convention center in scuffed-up khakis, my head swiveling back and forth like the Exorcist Girl on fast forward — revved up by how many presenters I'd developed one-sided trauma bonds with, by how I could encounter any of these people any time I turned a corner or glanced into a room.
I'd like there to be a scenario in which how I was feeling towards my favorite authors wasn't solely the result of my own therapy-deprivation and lack of boundaries. Are those imagined kinships necessary — or even natural — in a culture that often doesn't want to hear about trauma or long-term illness? In her introduction to the craft anthology Writing Hard Stories, Melanie Brooks describes how trauma memoir made the stakes of her work — and other authors' work — feel incredibly high. In the essay's climax, Brooks walks up to the author Kim Stafford after a conference panel, wanting to ask (but not knowing how to ask) Stafford how he had survived writing his memoir. Each time I sprang from my seat to talk to an author, there were nearly always a dozen folks close behind me. I never asked any of them what it meant that we were all moving so fast, so urgently.
Maybe it's unavoidable how bad it feels to be unable to ask a question like Melanie's. It doesn't help that survival isn't self-evident — without asking, the reader is unsure that the author even is surviving. The author could become depressed or re-traumatized or die tomorrow because of what their writing had required them to confront. Maybe this is all a set-up, and AWP wants to be a space for people like me to flock towards writers they idolize, with whom they have overly-emotional attachments. Maybe it's inherently too much to hear the writing and reflections of people you admire over only a few days — or maybe that's just me and Melanie Brooks.
I know that if I am to return to AWP in a future year, I will have to soothe the tension with which I view others' writing, as well as my own. Like the post-book question What will you write next?, I wonder with what mindset, going forward, I will try to read.
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Zach Semel (he/him) is a poet and essayist pursuing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Northern Arizona University. Some of his previous work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Salamander, CutBank: All Accounts & Mixture, Drunk Monkeys, Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, The Nervous Breakdown, Wordgathering, FreezeRay Poetry, and other places. His hybrid chapbook Let the tides take my body was awarded the 2021 May Day Mountain Prize by Hunger Mountain.
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