"Whether due to age, mental disability or personal involvement, an unreliable narrator provides the reader with either incomplete or inaccurate information as a result of these conditions"according to a wiki at Georgetown. More on being a reliable narrator despite a "mental disability" in that post.
But for now, I've found some pretty good writing over at Storied Mind written by John D. I left him a comment stating that even though he seemed to be writing primarily for healing he was committing literature anyway. This has me thinking a lot about the "whys" of telling one's story besides healing.
- To Come Out
- To Build Community
- To Spark Political Change
- To Make Something Beautiful
I saw Milk a week ago, and it is so, so inspiring. Harvey Milk made the argument that gay people HAD to come out because if straight people knew they knew a gay person they were much more likely to support issues important to gay people. I hope to God that this is true regarding mental illness. In other words let's come out and thereby become people with political power. Just imagine that.
There's power in numbers. It's pretty hard to feel isolated and alone when you realize you are one of millions. Furthermore, linking those millions together builds the previously mentioned political power.
Okay, just to be more explicit than I've already been, there are real injustices perpetuated in this society towards the mentally ill. Sure, the passage of the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act suggests we are so close to a huge shift in the way that stigma operates. However, there are still real inequities affecting all those with mental illness and unfortunately these inequities will probably continue to be with us long after parity goes into effect.
This is of course my favorite, not that I don't love the fight for equality for people with mental illness. I love choosing the right word, working until I've found the right structure, engaging in the craft of writing, and then letting it go into the world hopefully to work political magic, but also to impact people's senses.
These are my main reasons to write about mental illness besides for healing, and I've been thinking as I've been writing about why I am so opposed to writing for healing that doesn't attend to craft. Part of it is because that sort of writing turns inward away from the larger world and the political dimension is so important to me.
So, why do you write? For healing? For social change? For craft?
Also, I'll be teaching Writing Mental Illness online January 23rd to 25th, for more info click here.
4 comments:
Alison, I would also add that to write without attention to craft -- to *how* you are writing -- both replicates and reinforces the power of the writer's "disorder" over him, in that the way to triumph over the disorder is to bring a kind of order to it through one's writing about it -- through words and perspective and whatever stance or attitude towards it the narrator adopts.
The writer writes about his illness because he is seeking to find healing -- for example, through seeking an engagement with the larger world, the world beyond his individual plight -- through an awareness and attention to the reader -- which is done, of course, through his words, and his craft. So, yes, I agree that craft is of primary importance, and is, in the act of being written and being read, always political, even if not explicitly so. Best, Stephanie
hi there - great article. i responded to it with my own post (today's post - april 20)
I like the idea of "committing literature." I write to know and be known.
Hi, Alison - Sorry I didn't read this until isabella responded to it in her post - the last few months have been a busy time of starting new online projects. I'm really honored at your mention of Storied Mind and want to thank you.
Your post is deeply interesting for a lot of reasons. When I first decided to blog, I thought - oh, this is perfect - I'll just start posting my journal entries on what I've been going through. Then I looked at them, and each one had to be changed a lot - it wasn't long before I only turned to them to pull out ideas to develop. Those journal entries were indeed too inward, full of personal references no one would understand and condensed in ways that made them cryptic.
I realized that I wanted to communicate with people, not just mumble to myself, and for me that meant using what craft I knew to bring my experience home to readers emotionally. Writing needs to connect - that's part of the healing from depression - to get out of isolation and reach out to people. Without care with language and structure that can't happen.
So I think you're right - though many, many blogs are diaries that work just fine for the writer. If that works for them, great. For me, I can't set anything down without tinkering to make it sound a little better.
Thanks for this wonderful post.
John (by the way, I've blown my cover - no more nom de blog) Folk-Williams.
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