#1000WordsOfSummer Take 2—Plus Book Deal News!
you can write again (sort of)—now what?
News
I’m thrilled to finally share the news that I’ll be editing an anthology of writing by disabled Appalachian authors for the University of Press of Kentucky. Many thanks to my editor Abby Freeland and all the folks at UPK for supporting this project.
#1000WordsOfSummer Take 2: you can write again (sort of)—now what?
After Reading Women ended at the end of 2021, I decided to take it easy in 2022. For the first four or five months of that year, I rested. I slept. I drank countless cups of coffee while staring out into nature. I did every single thing I could think of to try to get back some sort of mental capacity. But instead of becoming a fully functioning, my brain grasped at words in my empty mind. My vision blurred into a marbled, figurative painting I couldn’t interpret no matter how long I stared at it. Even after all this time, I was still stuck.
For months, I made myself sit down write something for me. No articles for work, just me staring into the empty void of my computer screen and trying to figure out how to do this again. As a potential solution, I planned to go all in on #1000WordsOfSummer, blocking out that time in anticipation of writing ALL of the things. I wanted to start the summer in triumph, but instead the whole thing flopped. And my failure reminded me how fragile my body truly is. That’s the thing about chronic illness and disability: you can do everything “right” and your body will still ultimately do whatever it wants.
I’ve interviewed over one hundred authors, asking them about their writing process, secretly hoping to glean some small, magical tidbit that would help me understand what I was doing wrong. But whenever I sat down to write, my head refused to let me focus enough for me to put my thoughts into words and then to shove those words onto paper. I tried to pretend that maybe tomorrow I would wake up with a renewed ability to write whatever I pleased.
But that’s not how this works.
Back in 2018, my husband and I were at the beach celebrating our anniversary when I came down with a horrific migraine that lasted for months. But when the pain eased up and I could finally get back to some semblance of normal, I realized I could not read and write anymore. If I tried, I felt as if someone had just spilt open my skull like a melon on the 4th of July.
In the beginning, I wrote one sentence at a time. Just one good sentence, that’s all I needed. I often pulled open a new notebook, fresh and clean, ready for whatever I had to say. But after pushing myself beyond my limit for a few days, I’d abandon my attempt, shoving the notebook into a bag and out of sight. Later I’d rediscover half a dozen notebooks buried in a closet, each with just a few pages filled in the front documenting my repeated failures.
Eventually that sentence extended into two sentences, then three, then an entire paragraph. Time after time, I pushed my head to the edge, often triggering migraines that had me curling up into the corner of the couch with ice packs on my head. Too often, I’d try to write, only to end up vomiting in the bathroom and trying to take deep breaths while my eyes following the pattern of the linoleum on the floor.
But one magical day, almost year after I’d started, I got up from the computer after writing 600 words and said to myself, “I don’t feel terrible.”
When I first started to read back over my new work, I hardly recognized it. My sentences flopped and tripped across the page, words misplaced and confused as paragraphs tied themselves into knots. I saw what appeared to be someone else’s prose on my computer screen and realized that part of my writing identity had shifted. It felt disconcerting, like I was seeing the wrong reflection in the mirror. But at least I was writing. Something hit the page everyday and stuck. The next day I might hate everything and delete it all, but I still found words to work with on a regular basis.
When I started this substack, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with it. I played around with a few different ideas, but I landed on writing. Just me trying to herd words into some semblance of order, like a Corgi dropped into a farm yard full of chickens. I’ve written about grief, disability, burnout, chronic illness, and depression, each its own beast to tackle and render real on the page. But then I hit “publish” and send my words out into the world, wondering if anyone will understand or connect with what I’m writing about.
I decided that 2023 was the year that I’d draft my essay collection, finally putting pen to paper to tell my own story. This summer, I’ve created a writing routine for myself. I pour over personal essay collections and memoirs—The Crane Wife, A Living Remedy, The Yellow House, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Upstream—taking notes on craft in my long-suffering Hobonichi Techo Cousin. My project outline also resides in my Cousin, theoretically pointing the way towards my end goal, but we’ll see how long this outline will last before I trash it all and start over.
I’d love to wrap all of this in a neat little bow and say my writing has never come more easily, that I’m now longer plagued by horrific migraines when I try to write. But I can’t. Writing still feels like I’m wringing out every drop of creativity from my brain. Over the course of the last month, I’ve watched my word count rise, but know that none of it is usable towards my end goal. As I rub my head in frustration, I try not to imagine how much better my writing would be if I didn’t have to move mountains to write just a single sentence.
In a nonfiction writing class that I’m taking this summer, the teacher recommended that we journal about our writing, documenting our creative process. I was like, sure! Why not? It’s a lot of the usual rollercoaster of investing your time, energy, and emotion into any project—fear, frustration, discouragement. But looking back through my Cousin’s pages, I spot moments of insight.
Alone I might feel like I was losing my mind. But there’s one other person I know who moves through the world of words like I do: my brother. Our pediatric neurologist wanted to do a study on our family to figure out what about our genetics caused our migraines. Tired of being lab rats, we said no.
But here we are, twenty-five years later, still trying to ignore the vices around our skulls.
My brother calls me on my birthday. We might sit in silence most of the rest of the year, going about our lives, untethered from the rest of the family. But we don’t forget each other's birthdays.
We perform the how are you’s and nice to talk to you’s. We talk about the Corgis and my niece and nephew. He describes his new job. I talk about my new anthology project, a collection of disabled Appalachian writers. My brother’s silence squirms on the other end of the phone. I tell him about my clunky screen reader. Do you use one?
His words shuffle into line. No, I skim and my brain fills in the rest. I review it if I’m confused. But that’s it.
Do you think a screen reader would be helpful? I ask.
More shuffling. No. I don’t mention it at work. I know it would change their view of my work performance.
There it is. The silence of the disabled person in the workplace, always afraid someone will notice that they exist. The subconscious assumptions of the able-bodied. It follows us through our lives. We hide from their empty promises and false reassurance. We make do with what we can. We survive in a society filled with people who prefer we don’t exist.
Rereading my journal entry about our conversation, I realized that this moment captured a key reason why I write. I write because disabled people, especially those of us who struggle with written mediums, don’t often get to tell our own stories very often. But our lives, cultures, and experience deserve to celebrated.
As I write this, I’m sitting in my local Starbucks wearing a dark green “Decentralize Publishing” t-shirt while an uncomfortable chair reminds me to focus on my computer screen. Across from me is an industrial wooden wall that depicts the Coffee Belt on a world map. Pride decorations hang on the counters and walls. A softball team walks in, sprays of dirt across their pale blue and white uniforms. And #1000WordsOfSummer starts in just a few hours.
This year for #1000WordsOfSummer, I’m still writing, still forcing my brain to put words on a page. I know it will feel like it’s taking forever to eke out a single sentence and that most of what I write will be terrible. But I’m still plunking away. And right now, that’s all the matters. That’s the hope I need.
Around the Web
“Ancients & Ambrosia: Read Appalachia: An Interview with Kendra Winchester, founder of Read Appalachia” (The Devil’s Cut)
I did a Q&A with Lemon, author of Done Dirt Cheap, for her substack, The Devil’s Cut. It includes all things Appalachian Lit, Corgis, and jello salads.
Things I Made Recently
Read Appalachia
I’m still working on publishing the behind-the-scenes posts about each episode of the show, but the most recent episode, Ep. 7 | Appalachian Poetry, is live! I interviewed Bernard Clay and Lisa Kwong, two members of the Affrilachian poets.
Behind the Mic (AudioFile Magazine)
I’ve recorded SO MANY episodes for Behind the Mic, recommending audiobooks like The Great Reclamation, Quietly Hostile, and The Late Americans. Subscribe to never miss one of my audiobook recs!
Book Riot
Read or Dead
Last fall, I became the new co-host for Book Riot’s Read or Dead podcast. It’s about all things thrillers and mysteries. I’ve recorded several episodes now, and I’ve enjoyed exploring this genre.
Newsletters
I write two newsletters for Book Riot: True Story, and Read This Book. You can subscribe to them here.