The Trouble With Truth in Narrative Medicine
February 19, 2026 § 11 Comments
By Judy Sandler
Until I started to write my book, What Kind of Mother, A Reckoning, I didn’t understand how tainted and one-sided our memories can be. In court, eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, their different and often contradictory accounts based on what questions were asked, by whom, and their own identity, experiences, age, attention, and biases. I didn’t realize this applied to authorship.
Call me naive, unschooled in the ways of memoirists, dangerously gullible. Ever since I was a pre-teen, devouring the wild accounts of the “anonymously” written Go Ask Alice, I placed complete faith in the narrator’s story. Then, my jaw dropped along with the rest of the world when James Frey’s addiction story, A Million Little Pieces, turned out to be fiction. I felt misled when Vivian Gornick admitted she had “composed” events in her memoir Fierce Attachments, and “invented a scene” describing a street person and her mother. But these were aberrations, I assured myself. Surely, writers who set out to tell the truth did so, or at the very least wrote from a place of honest intent.
That changed when I sat down to write my own memoir and discovered how complicated the truth can be, and how murky are the waters of memory. That I am my own unreliable witness to the events I most want to convey through writing. Maybe Frey and Gornick wrote their truths, but their friends and family saw it another way. Or, maybe they’d crossed the line with their families in the stories they needed to tell, and they didn’t care.
Truth in memoir, as many writers have noted is a foggy topic. Lee Gutkind, founder of Creative Nonfiction Magazine says, “It’s your story. That’s what memoir is. It’s your own personal truth, and it is not necessarily factually accurate, and it’s not necessarily the truth that other people have possessed.” But there are precautions to take and concessions to make that can keep lawsuits at bay, and family members potentially still speaking to one another, even when one family member needs to be a memoirist.
Deep into my MFA, I was focused on telling my story, of a mother raising a son with substance use disorder and bipolar disease. I wrote and wrote about my son’s birth, signs of possible mental illness in his childhood, addiction issues in his adolescent years. I was confronted with ethical questions having to do with writing about children with illness or disability. When writing about one’s child the moral challenge feels like a balancing act, or like a shadow hovering as your write. You risk revealing medical information and portraying the child in a “disabled” way. Jill Christman addresses this issue in her essay, “Chewing Band-Aids: When Memoirists Take On The Telling of Family Secrets.” She wisely asks, “How will I know what is too private? How will I know when enough is enough?…Where does my story give over to my children? When does our story together become theirs to tell, or not to tell as only they can choose?”
I believe in the value and the power of sharing stories of narrative medicine to remove the stigma of mental illness and addiction. As a writer, you know when you have achieved the balance because you have told the story with empathy, shared the story with your child, and written only your story, and not your child’s. That is, indeed, theirs to tell.
Before this manuscript was published, I needed to make sure that every word of the story was what happened to me, and not my version of what happened to my son. I went through scenes, deleting phrases such as, “He felt hurt,” or “He was frustrated.” I had to remind myself I didn’t know how my son felt; I only knew how I felt in any given moment.
Another issue I faced was using my son’s journal entries as an important part of the structure of the book. Although my son’s journals remain in my possession, I do not own his words. I handed the manuscript over to a lawyer, and after reading each entry I wanted to use in the book, my son signed off on a publishing contract giving me permission to use his writing. I would not have been able to even come to the table to have the conversation with my son, if he had not, through the years, come to understand that there is his story, and there is my story. His journals help to convey his story.
What does my son think of this book? He thinks his mother wrote her truth, and he is separate from that truth. My son and I are very close, though it has taken years for both of us to come to the point where we can agree to disagree about how we remember particular events. Like me, he understands now that my story is not his. Until he has a child of his own, he may not understand what if feels like to speak to someone who looks like your child, sounds like your child, but in fact, has been taken over by a brain on fire. My son can tell you what it’s like to be manic; I can only tell you what it feels like to be his mother.
________
Judy Sandler holds a BA from The University of Pennsylvania, an MLA from Johns Hopkins University, and an MFA from Stonecoast at The University of Southern Maine. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Tiny Love Stories, Yale University Journal of Medicine’s The Perch, The Atticus Review and others. Her literary narrative, What Kind of Mother, A Reckoning, is due out in September, 2026 by West Virginia University Press, Connective Tissue series.
Writing for Comfort, Writing for Truth
February 18, 2026 § 19 Comments
By Mansi Bhatia
I stared at the last paragraph of my marriage essay for twenty minutes before choosing an ending that didn’t match my truth.
The brutally honest ending sat in my head: “I don’t know if staying is love or simply the path of least resistance. Maybe it’s both.”
After 25 years together, my husband and I had become expert roommates. We slept on opposite sides of a California king bed, backs turned, the dog stretched between us. Most nights we didn’t say goodnight. The silence was interrupted only by the puppy’s sighs and the ding of his phone as he played Spelling Bee.
But that truth felt too dark, too unresolved, almost devoid of hope.
So I wrote this instead: “Perhaps, this is a new beginning … a new way to the field can be found? One email. One response I almost didn’t send. One choice to see each other again, to make it all okay again. And here we are, rewriting.”
It ended with hopeful uncertainty. It was a craft choice shouldering the readers’ expectation of resolution.
In that essay, I gave readers what I thought they needed: the anniversary letter tucked behind my birth control pills. The hug that lasted longer than our usual three seconds. The pulled-out binder of our earliest emails—evidence that we once knew how to talk. I was writing the essay during that attempt, still believing that a relationship reset was possible.
By week three, the “new beginning” I had promised my readers dissolved back into the familiar silence of our separate sides of the bed. Recognition, I was learning, doesn’t always undo pattern.
But I’d already written the ending. And I’d written it for comfort.
When the essay was published and later nominated for a Pushcart Prize, I felt what I was supposed to: gratitude, pride and perhaps a tinge of validation. But there was also an unnamed discomfort that came from knowing I’d written an essay for my readers, not for myself.
Marriage essays often carry an invisible contract. When you write about distance, dysfunction, or disappointment, readers want to know: Did you fix it? Is it fixable? They need proof that attempts matter, that trying counts for something, that love—however compromised—can still be saved.
My inbox echoed it: “I’m glad that you are working this through… you provide so much light.”
Eight months after this essay’s publication, I wrote another piece about the same marriage—this time after living with the attempt’s failure.
“The letter was real,” I wrote. “The attempt was real. It just didn’t change our in-sync platonic housemate rhythm.”
The ending I landed on this time was the one I had deleted months prior: “I don’t yet know whether staying is an act of love—or simply the path of least resistance. Maybe it’s both.”
One ending offers hope. The other offers honesty. They’re not always the same thing.
My first essay avoided naming the “taboo” truth: the practicality of staying. The fact that my marriage gave me the luxury to be a present mother, an experimental artist, a kindness ambassador.
Those truths felt too uncomfortable. Too unresolved. Too loveless. I thought my responsibility as a writer was to leave readers with something they could hold onto. Hope, even if tentative. Possibility, even if uncertain. A romanticized version of marriage they could feel happy about.
What I’m learning now is that my responsibility isn’t to make readers comfortable with my marriage. It’s to write what’s actually true.
“Truth” begins with naming the vantage point.
I don’t regret the first essay; it told the truth of my hopeful vantage. The second tells the truth of my current one. Both are honest but only one is comforting.
If you’re in the middle of your own story and you want to write about it now, write your truth as you know it. Not the truth you hope will emerge. Not the truth that will comfort your readers. Just what’s actually happening, as honestly as you can see it.
Litmus test your last paragraph: if it requires a future to justify the past, you are writing for comfort, not truth.
The essay might be uncomfortable to read. Readers might want the reconciliation you can’t give them, the hope you don’t fully feel, the resolution that hasn’t arrived.
But if you’re living that discomfort daily—sleeping on opposite sides of the bed, translating silence for your daughter, wondering if staying is love or inertia—why shouldn’t your writing sit in it too?
Your readers can handle uncertainty. They can sit with discomfort. Sometimes they need to, the same way you do. And if some still need the hopeful version you can’t honestly offer, that’s theirs to carry.
Our work, as writers, isn’t to provide light for others at the expense of our own shadows. It is to share the truth we can stand behind.
___
Mansi Bhatia is a writer and creativity facilitator whose work explores identity, estrangement, and the push-and-pull between obligation and autonomy. Her essay “The Field Between Us” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Chicago Story Press. She is currently writing a book on art, storytelling, and everyday generosity, forthcoming from Schiffer Craft in Spring 2027. She lives in California with her family.
Dive and Glide: The Pauses in My Publishing Journey
February 17, 2026 § 24 Comments
By Nancy Pearson
Close to fifty swimmers in the masters club dive and glide in the pool like a pod of porpoises. The water churns with their energy. I join them in the slowest lane and begin practice in the same way: stride a few steps, tuck my chin, raise my arms and dive underwater, glide close to the bottom, pull my arms back, lift my chin to surface, and repeat for twenty metres before taking the first freestyle strokes.
“Feel the water,” the coach hollers over the cacophony. I do. The brief moments of serenity underwater during the glide feel beautiful, poetic even. My body wakes, my mind focuses. And then I surface, ready to carry on. For the next hour, I freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, flutter kick, dolphin kick, pant through sprints. The worries about my book project subside.
The worries resurface when I finish, and the exhilaration of a great swim winds down. For almost eight years, I have been researching a creative nonfiction book about public, self-serve laundromats. It took me across Canada, from coast to coast, up north, and beyond.
Life interrupted my progress—the deaths of my father, eldest sister, best friend in one year; the pandemic; caring for and losing my mother; injuries and two surgeries. I dove, glided, resurfaced, navigated the emotional churn. The book project prevailed, gave me focus and determination.
My literary agent provided input and guidance on the proposal over the past four years. I drafted, revised and finalized the numerous components of the first version in the first year: about the book; about the author; about the market; chapter summaries; three sample chapters; and so on. Because my research at that point was based in Canada only, she pitched to twenty Canadian publishers.
This phase of a book project includes long periods of waiting. More than six months later, she had heard from almost every editor. My concept was well received, but no deal.
Later, while dogsledding along the Takhini River in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, I decided to apply for a Canada Council for the Arts grant to extend my research into the United States. It was a very long shot, but six months later, to my surprise, I was awarded a grant. The funds allowed me to travel to twelve states—a cross-section of socio-economic and geographical regions, metropolises, small cities, rural communities.
The information I gathered in the U.S. meant a complete rewrite of my proposal. Hundreds of interviews and thousands of photographs of the more than two hundred laundromats I explored in both countries, and owners, employees, customers, industry experts, and others I spoke with filled folders on my laptop. After a couple of false starts, the third outline resonated with my agent. We discussed each draft section and sample chapter in detail over several months. The work was intense. I stayed focused but also kept an eye on how the world was changing. I started to swim more, took lessons, joined the masters club.
Recently, though, my agent and I had a difficult conversation. Political and economic pressures are affecting the publishing sector. Readers want fiction to escape the turmoil, rather than nonfiction. Editors are taking fewer chances on emerging writers like me. My proposal needs extensive revision. Again.
When the Zoom call with her finished, I put my forehead on my desk. The wood felt cool; it did not soothe. Is it possible, I wondered, to reframe the proposal in a new way that will capture that one publishing house editor—we need only one—who, no matter what changes the world brings, will say ‘yes,’ and dive in with me to create a book?
Or is it time to get out of the water? To shelve a goal that has been a force in my life for eight years? The questions are painful, as though I’ve been holding my breath far too long, but I don’t yet want to surface.
I talk with other writers and research the wisdom of people like Joan Didion, who said in an interview with Linda Kuehl back in 1977: “There’s a point when you go with what you’ve got. Or you don’t go.”
A similar belief was expressed by Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. “Own your disappointment,” she writes, “acknowledge it for what it is, and move on.”
The edge of that pool is where I now stand. I don’t have answers yet on which new direction to take, but I do know that writing a book takes endurance and an occasional pause, a refresh. For now, I seek those moments of beauty in the pool, the clarity and stillness.
________
Nancy Pearson is a Canadian writer who chronicles stories and issues on her Facebook blog, The Great Laundromat Adventure. She is a former government communications professional. In addition to the hundreds of government news releases and speeches she wrote, her published work includes literary and personal essays, as well as articles about laundromats.
Reading by email? Hit Reply to comment!
How Still Images Can Enhance Your Memoir
February 16, 2026 § 6 Comments
By John Garrison & Nicole Stanton
When we think of the role of photographs in memoir writing, we might immediately think of images used to capture “me through the years.” However, photographs can play a much more generative role in revealing new narrative pathways through your life. Photographer Diane Arbus famously said, “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”
Perhaps Arbus’ idea about photographs and secrets offers memoir writers a powerful reminder that the task of writing about our own lives is one of discovery — of uncovering what we did not see before.
What secrets do your photographs hide, for you to discover as well as for your reader to discover?
You do not need to be an expert photographer to include images in your writing. Certainly, that’s at the center of a memoir like It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love, War, and Loss where Lynsey Addario showcases her own work to relate her journeys through zones of conflict. But consider M Train, where Patti Smith includes Polaroids exclusively to both illuminate faces and places as well as to generate atmosphere. Or, even more evocatively, Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ The Man Who Could Move Clouds untangles the history hidden in lost memories of her Columbian family’s history by piecing together snapshots of relatives, locations, and mementos.
With photos, you already have an archive of your own life at your disposal. Here are a few ways you can use photography to elucidate mysteries awaiting in your personal story:
Photograph as an Absence
Write the story of everything around the photograph you’re observing, but not the image itself. If the photograph is of your child riding a pony at their birthday party, tell the story of the failed birthday cake not pictured. If the image is of a younger you, describe what the you in that image did not know yet.
This exercise will encourage your mind to use the image as a portal into memory, stirring up context that might give it new meaning in your narrative, or that might support you in crafting a more complex scene.
Unlikely Pairings
Choose two photographs from your life at random — truly, make it random. Try to write the story of your life that connects these photographs. This exercise will inspire creating thematic links between times in your life you might not otherwise link.
Or be more deliberate, as Saidaya Hartman is, in Lose Your Mother. To situate her personal and her cultural history, she contemplates two photographs: Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, first with Queen Elizabeth II and then with Martin Luther King, Jr.
Look with Neutrality
When beginning to work with a photograph from your life, begin by describing the image with complete neutrality. As though you were an outside observer. For example: a young-girl, perhaps four or five, sits on a pink bicycle on a cracked driveway beside a yellowing lawn. She wears a watch, and one shoe is untied. She smiles. She grips the handlebars with the help of adult hands, the adult is not pictured. By looking with neutrality, you might notice details or textures to your recollection otherwise blocked from your subjective perspective.
These can be jumping-off points. How do you feel about the person, seeing her now as a stranger? What would happen afterward to change the person in the image? How do you feel now, looking at that image as you write?
Treat the Past like a Foreign Country
This opening phrase of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” invites us to think about change. Think like an anthropologist who is uncovering an unstudied civilization. Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians does so by integrating a wide array of images — homework assignments, state bond certificates, historic California missions, public figures, and marriage certificates — to place her personal experiences growing up in her Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen family against the larger cultural backdrop of life in California decades ago.
Explain a town, a ritual, a routine, a custom as if the reader is unfamiliar with it (And they just might be! Use the photograph as a type of index. Cultural and historical context can help a reader understand where you come from, what you’ve inherited. Even experiences very familiar to your reader will take on new life.
Set aside some time to pull out old photo albums, ask friends and relatives to share images with you, or even look in your own camera roll with fresh eyes. Who knows what secrets await you!
___
Nicole E. Stanton is a writer, teacher, and death doula based in Los Angeles. John S. Garrison’s most recent book is the memoir Red Hot + Blue. Together, they teach the quarterly writing workshop “From Memory to Memoir.”
Editing an Anthology to Combat Isolation and Create Community
February 13, 2026 § 14 Comments
By Patrice Gopo
In the spring of 2021. I was deep in the midst of a complicated and confusing multi-year conflict with a dear white friend. For what felt like far too long, we had been trying to resolve our struggles so that we could return the friendship to what it once was. During that spring, my daily walks were soaked in endless ruminations about past conversations. Maybe if I’d just said this, I would think. Maybe if I had been a bit gentler in my tone of voice, I’d wonder. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe there was something I could have done so that I wouldn’t be in this situation now.
At the foundation of all this turmoil resided a tragic sort of isolation that never seemed to vanish. This feeling was an aloneness arising from a fear that I was by myself in these struggles and no one else had such challenges with their white friends. On one of those bright spring mornings that seem flush with new life and new beginnings, I walked through my neighborhood and recognized my desire to stop letting this conflict steal so much from me. I wanted to end those unhelpful, repeating thoughts. I wanted to banish the general sadness. I wanted to shatter the sense of isolation growing inside of me.
And there in the wanting, an idea made its way to me. I would gather other Black women to create an essay anthology where we reflected on our friendships with white women. Maybe other Black women had also experienced tension with a white friend and wondered at the impact racism had on that relationship. Maybe other Black women had felt hesitant to form new friendships with white women because of past hurts. Maybe if I built this space for other Black women writers, I might feel less alone.
*
I often think of writing as a place of isolation. I sit by myself in my office and construct the sentences and paragraphs that give voice to the images, ideas, and thoughts drifting through my mind. Every now and again, I may join a space where writers connect with one another: conferences, webinars, co-writing gatherings, or even this blog. In such settings, I may have physical or virtual proximity to another writer, but I am still alone in my work and often alone with my particular ideas.
Even as the act of writing is often a place of isolation, we’ve all encountered a moment of reading a book or an essay where we feel seen. Such moments often happen because we resonate with the particular topic, details, or words a writer brings to the page. Most writers—myself included—are no stranger to the way writing has the power to connect with another and usher in realizations that a person is actually not alone. This awesome dynamic is there for both the writer as their words make their way into the world and for the reader who finds the writer’s words.
What happens, though, when writers gather around a shared topic? What type of home can they construct together that might hold the multitude of angles and perspectives? And if these writers are together building a home with their words, what power might such actions have to disrupt the isolation an individual might feel—the isolation that I felt?
By its very nature, being part of a themed anthology draws seemingly individual, disparate conversations together. In this togetherness, a sort of magic can happen as everyone—contributors and the editor—recognize their story as being part of something larger. The ability to see ourselves not as oddities in our journeys but as traveling with others has the power to transform.
Editing an anthology enabled me to access that “Oh, wow! I am not alone” feeling that I often find as I read published work. As I gathered the contributors for this anthology, we shared stories about friendships with white women that somehow thrived and friendships that faltered. We wrote essays that put our emotions, reflections, and feelings at the center of our stories. More than anything else that happened, my creation of this space formed a warm community of Black women writers. I was not alone in my struggles. I was never alone.
*
Sometimes I look back on who I was when the idea for We Deserve to Heal: Black Women on the Perils & Promises of Friendship with White Women first arrived. I compare her to who I am today on the other side of co-creating this work. The difference is stark. Where once I was a jumble of endless thoughts without an exit ramp, my mind has quieted and those ruminations have faded. Where once I pursued conflict resolution with a sort of desperation, I now hold space for the reality that sometimes conflicts can’t find resolutions. Where once I lived with an overarching sadness at the loss of a friendship, now I’ve made peace with the truth that I’ll probably always feel some sense of grief when I recall that experience.
Most of all, though, where once I felt the heft of isolation burdening my body, I am now part of a group of other voices who have heard my journey and whose journeys I have heard as well. Editing We Deserve to Heal alleviated my sense of isolation and invited me to embrace a community that might help me heal.
_____
Patrice Gopo is the editor of the essay anthology We Deserve to Heal: Black Women on the Perils & Promises of Friendship with White Women (University Press of Kentucky | February 2026). She lives with her family in North Carolina, where she enjoys walks just after dawn and thinks a perfect day ends with ice cream. To learn more, please visit patricegopo.com or download the comic-book-style companion essay to We Deserve to Heal.
What We Owe the People We Write About
February 12, 2026 § 22 Comments
By Kathryn Smith
“You should give Katrina a heads-up,” my friend said. I had just sent her my essay about serial sexual assault that happened decades prior in our town.
“I don’t know,” I said. “This story happened fifty years ago.”
“For that very reason—the case is so old now. She’ll be blindsided if she randomly comes across your essay.”
Hmm. I hadn’t thought of that.
Katrina was a girl we’d gone to elementary school with. Her father had molested me, several of our classmates, and dozens of girls in our community in the 1970s and 80s. He’d been tried and sentenced in 2008. In the article, I didn’t mention Katrina’s name, but I did mention her father’s name, which could draw the story back to her. Maybe I should reach out to her. But what would I say?
“I think it’s the right thing to do,” my friend said.
Was it? I’d written about people in my life who’d grievously injured me. I hadn’t given them notice. But Katrina had been a friend of mine. What happened, happened to both of us.
The idea that my essay could act like a time machine—transporting Katrina back to a painful place without warning—weighed on me. I didn’t have to tell her. But courtesy seemed worth the cost, even if that cost was my own discomfort.
I wrote to her via Facebook. I explained about the article, attached it, and expressed the hope that she and her brother were safe.
She didn’t respond for several tortuous days, but when she did, it was simple. She thanked me for letting her know, and wished she could undo all the damage he had done. I was relieved and glad I’d reached out.
Disclosure isn’t permission-seeking or the promise of censorship. It’s a courtesy that allows the people we write about to prepare for parts of their lives to be revealed, sometimes in ways they might not like or appreciate. Reaching out gives them an opportunity to voice their opposition, though we as authors have the final call.
Shortly thereafter, I wrote an essay about the discovery of my mother’s early Alzheimer’s symptoms during the pandemic. Though this story was less fraught than my first essay, it occurred to me that I should share it with my mother out of respect. She was in it after all. And if I was unwilling to let her see it, how could I justify publishing it?
I called her and told her I’d written an essay about the two of us, and asked if I could read it to her. She’d be delighted, she said. As I read, I paused periodically to gather myself. My descriptions of her cognitive decline, such as when she poured laundry detergent in the dryer, were particularly difficult to read, precisely because she was still present enough to understand the meaning of what I was saying.
When I finished, she was silent for a long time.
“Thank you,” she said, and then, “When did I get so old?”
The next day, she remembered me reading to her, but she didn’t remember the content. The day after, she didn’t remember any of it. But I did. I knew I brought her into a story about the two of us. I gave her the chance to share how she felt, at least in the moment.
The experience set a standard for me—I wanted most people included in my stories to know what I’d written and give them a chance to prepare, even if it was awkward, uncomfortable, or painful for me. I wanted everything out in the open before publication.
When I wrote my third essay about the way a friend’s son’s suicide rippled throughout our community and my family, I knew I had to share the essay with her.
She and I had been close friends, but I had moved away. Though we still communicated over text, we hadn’t had a meaningful conversation in years. How would I broach the subject?
I called her and left a rambling message that I’d like to talk to her about an essay I’d written. I told her it was about the effect of suicide contagion on my family, and while I’d mentioned her son’s death, I didn’t share his name or our town. I said, “If there’s anything you object to, please let me know.”
She asked to read the essay. I told her I wanted to be sure I was respectful and loving enough. She texted me that I was. She said she appreciated the chance to read it before it was published, to prepare herself.
Disclosure makes sense for the people I care about, but not everyone qualifies.
What of our villains, the people who have done us grievous harm? The people who have injured us don’t get the automatic pass. Disclosure is a practice, not a rule. I alerted Katrina to the essay, for example, but not her dad.
It takes courage to write the truth about what happened to us. It takes another kind of courage to do right by the people who appear in our stories.
________
Kathryn Smith has published fiction and creative nonfiction in Hippocampus, HuffPost Personal, and Philadelphia Stories, and twice won Glimmer Train’s honorable mention. She holds a B.S. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from UC Berkeley. She’s working on a memoir, “Stories of an Uncouth Girl.” Find her on Instagram @KathrynSmithStories.
Reading by email? Hit Reply to comment!
Closing My Eyes Made Me a Better Writer and Teacher
February 11, 2026 § 7 Comments
By Candy Schulman
“There are stories all around you,” I tell my creative nonfiction students when they’re struggling with how to get ideas. “All you have to do is open your eyes and see them.”
And then suddenly, I had to close my eyes.
It began with a night in the ER, followed by a surgeon repairing my torn retina in less than ten minutes with a laser. This procedure had a 90% success rate. Left untreated, a torn retina can become completely detached, requiring more extensive surgery and the risk of vision loss. I was grateful for health insurance and the miracles of modern medicine.
Until the doctor told me I had to stare straight ahead—for ten days.
I fretted about cancelling my class the next day; I was a college professor in mid-semester teaching my workshop, Writing the Short Form.
“No reading. No writing. No professering,” he said. “Think of staring at this.” He pointed to a circular metal bolt on the wall. “Avoid everything that causes you to move your eyes from side to side. You must look forward until your eye repair gets ‘glued in.’”
“I have a wedding to attend this weekend,” I said, still in denial.
He shook his head. “I don’t even recommend holding onto your husband’s arm, walking to a diner, and eating with your eyes closed.”
In the taxi on the way home, I kept my eyes shut, afraid to move them from side to side and ruin my recovery. “What street are we on?” I asked my husband.
“East Fifty-third.”
I could hear horns honking, but I had to picture the mazes of cabs, cars, trucks, and buses, aggressively squeezing to merge into tiny openings like jigsaw puzzle pieces that didn’t fit. In my mind I recalled the buildings on this busy midtown street, I’d seen countless times, as if painting images on the back of my eyelids.
Without the use of peripheral vision, for the next ten days I began relying more keenly on all my senses. Often, I’ve told my students that we not only see stories. We must hear them through dialogue. Touch them with vivid description. Taste them through all layers of a gooey slice of pizza. Smell them like that intense waft of freshly baked bread when you enter a bakery.
Depending more acutely on my other four senses, I wondered if I was using them as powerfully as possible as a writer. I too “saw” my stories first. I “heard” them second with dialogue. I saved describing smells and tastes for later drafts, putting them off like an onerous chore as they came less easily to me.
The next morning I reached for my toothbrush, slowly feeling the intricacies of its handle and bristles. I tasted breakfast without looking down on my plate, yogurt dripping onto my placemat. Previously I’d blocked out sirens and other urban noise pollution; now I heard birds chirping more crisply, singing new tunes. Children’s squeals in the schoolyard across the street annoyed my neighbors, but how free and jubilant they sounded. I had tended to tune them out and not notice them.
Being told not to write, all I wanted to do was write. And so I recorded each day’s thoughts on my phone, including essay ideas to develop when I would be a fully sighted person again. In my apartment I paced laps of 36 steps down a narrow hallway and around a dark brown four-seat rectangular dining room table, clicking “record” every time I had a possible idea. I titled them “Day One,” “Day Two,” or “New Essay Idea.” My writing mentor had instilled his repeated mantra: “Write every day. Even on vacation.” Now I could add: even on voice memos when your eyes are out of commission.
Although I’d never taken to Audiobooks, now I listened to Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, admiring how she could vividly describe a character in one descriptive sentence: “Her mother appeared, singing and heavily perfumed, her face dry and bright with powder that was one shade too light.” New ways of creating description popped into my earbuds. Voice memo: share several short character descriptions as examples when I return to the classroom.
As dinner time neared, my husband, who’d been elevated into executive chef of the household, was making soup. As he stirred, I inhaled the potent smell of sizzling onions and the aromatic blast of minced garlic. I imagined lentils the color of turmeric simmering in a huge pot until they melted into the broth.
“Oh oh,” I heard my husband say. “I forgot to add two additional cups of water.”
I coached him on how to fix it as I lay on the living room couch, eyes shut.
After we ate, again he said, “Oh oh.” He’d neglected to add the fresh-squeezed lemon juice and chopped cilantro at the end, even though he’d prepped them.
His imperfect soup was a new source of a story.
My eye and I survived ten days of endless hours, restlessness, and worry whether I’d have a complete recovery. When the doctor gave me the go-ahead to ease into reading and computer work, I was thrilled to write again, amused that I’d always typed without looking. I heard the keyboard clicks like a metronome and felt the sensation of my fingers upon the notched letters. When I listened to my voice recordings, I had several new stories to write. This is the first one.
____
Candy Schulman is an award-winning essayist whose publications include The New York Times, The Writer, AARP Print Magazine and Newsletters. She has just completed a memoir about mother-daughter relationships as we age. She is a writing professor at The New School in Greenwich Village and a private writing coach.
Weaving Imagination with Fact: Using Research as Metaphor in Creative Writing
February 10, 2026 § 2 Comments
By Ethan Gilsdorf
A female octopus and a woman with an eating disorder.
Surely their experiences are too different, too divergent, to share anything at all. Water animal versus land animal. Mollusc versus Homo sapiens. Eight appendages versus four.
And yet in “How an Octopus Helps Me Think About My Mother’s Eating Disorder,” Sabrina Imbler asks the reader to make this unlikely connection. Her essay jumps directly from the true tale of a tenacious octopus guarding her brood of eggs in the ocean depths to the story of her own mother’s complicated struggle with body image:
After her eggs hatch, [the octopus] dies by her nest. So when she lays her eggs, she will never again see another place or vista, entertained only by the freer creatures that happen to pass through the icy waters. In the deep sea, these visitors are alien: fish with transparent faces and golden yellow eyes, ghost sharks, tongue-red worms.
My mother immigrated from Taiwan to Michigan in seventh grade, alone. For a year, she lived in the second snowiest city in America surrounded by tall, blonde Finns. Every day her classmates reminded her in words she could not yet understand that she was different. This was the first moment, but not the last, where my mother learned to wish beyond all belief to be as American as possible. All she wanted was to fit in, to have blonde hair like her classmates, to have their large eyes and blue overalls and long legs. She told me a few years ago that it felt like she was an alien on a cold new planet.
This juxtaposition of personal narrative and actual fact is one of the many ways in which research can be an unexpected force in our writing.
Whether you are a novelist, memoirist, journalist or poet, you likely use research, reporting and evidence from the factual record to make your fictional or factual stories feel more “true,” to deepen and to inform our writing and to prompt our unreliable memories. Verifying “truth”can give us permission or courage to recreate a moment or a scene, knowing that it’s at least partially girded by verifiable detail.
But sometimes our research can stretch the story or poem beyond the limits of the self, as Imbler’s deep dive into the natural world and the animal kingdom makes compelling juxtaposition and counterpoint. Research becomes a springboard for imagery and analogy.
In the passage above, Imbler doesn’t provide a transition between the octopus’s story and her mother’s. She simply and bravely sandwiches these two “facts” together, saying “my mother’s experience with her body is like the octopus’s experience with her body, and vice versa” without ever directly connecting that line. The reader is asked to do the work to understand the relationship, making meaning in the white space broken open by the collision of these two parts. “Fact,” write Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their craft book Tell It Slant, can also “function as metaphor, informing the essay both on its own terms—information about the physical world the reader may need or find interesting— and as a basis for comparison for a more intangible part of the piece.”
Anthony Doerr employs a similar strategy in “Thing with Feathers That Perches in the Soul.”In this braided meditation on hope and memory, Doerr places his own experience raising a family in Boise side by side with the history of a pioneer couple, John and Mary O’Farrell, who settled in Boise in 1863. Doerr compares his relatively luxurious life to their homesteading, raising adopted seven kids in a cabin of “200 square feet with no toilet paper or Netflix or Xanax,” no “SpongeBob reruns to put on when the kids get too loud. No pizzerias to call when she can’t think of something to cook.” Along the way, Doerr includes population statistics, weather reports, and quotes from Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers.”
Facts can always be found. But it is the intermingling—the historical couple with Doerr’s fatherhood, the octopus with Imbler’s mother— that amplifies and refracts a singular story to make new meaning.
Our writing can be enhanced by field work, interviews or archival spelunking to fact check, to contextualize and provide backstory. We lure our readers in by the real. “If I am going to set a novel in a real place, in a real time, I must get all the details right,” says novelist Helen Benedict. “This matters because it has to do with keeping faith with your readers. If you get something verifiable wrong, why should they believe you when you really are making things up?”
But sometimes, the effect of our facts is beyond the factual. We can use research the same way we use figurative language—to expand our narratives into the realm of the image, to make connections between unexpected parts, to tether the personal drama to a world beyond the self, to make our words resonate
When weaving imagination with fact, we find significance and empathy in the empty gaps between the threads—in those spaces the meanings begin to echo.
________
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, Wired, Salon, Huffington Post, Brevity, Electric Literature, Witness, Poetry, The Southern Review, among others, and named “Notable” by The Best American Essays. He teaches at GrubStreet in Boston, where he leads the Essay Incubator program, and is also on the faculty of the Solstice MFA Program at Lasell University.
Ready to explore the many ways research can inform your creative work? Join Ethan for a CRAFT TALKS webinar, Using Research in Creative Nonfiction and Fiction: How Facts Enhance Creative Work, February 12 at 3pm EST ($30) and learn how to enhance your narratives with research.
Finding Beauty Amidst the Publication Chaos
February 9, 2026 § 34 Comments
THREE MANTRAS
By Jocelyn Jane Cox, Anna Rollins and Melissa Fraterrigo
Books (once published) are relinquished to the world, out of an author’s hands and into the hands of others. This is an especially scary prospect for perfectionists who frequently “go it alone.” Despite one’s neuroticism, an author cannot control the landing, the handling, and the reception of one’s carefully crafted words.
The three of us – Jocelyn Jane Cox, Melissa Fraterrigo, and Anna Rollins – are recovering perfectionists who released memoirs this past season. The content of our work describes varying manifestations of perfectionism (in figure skating, body image, and motherhood, amongst other places). And, unsurprisingly, we have all approached the craft of writing with degrees of perfectionism, too. Sometimes this led to meticulous attention to craft or structure. And other times, this resulted in writer’s block. Perfectionism, after all, often leads to performance anxiety.
Though performance anxiety has the potential to be crippling, with the right mindset, it can be channeled into fuel to help writers put forth their best work on the page, energizing the writing and publishing process.
Together, we’ve found it helpful to revise our own self-talk in the publication process, to shift our internal monologue’s insistence on achieving higher and more to something more aligned with curiosity and self-compassion. Part of the way we’ve fostered this mindset shift is by expanding our notions of success through the use of mantras. Such mantras have helped us unpack underlying beliefs and care for ourselves in the vulnerable process of publishing memoir.
Here are three mantras we’ve used during our book release session to help us move from tight-fisted perfectionism to open-handed release in the publication process:
1. Lead with fun
Whether you’re trying to pull together your social media posts or you are planning your book tour, try to lead with FUN. The reality is that there is no one way to sell books and what works well for someone might not work well for someone else, so at the end of the day, do what feels right to you and bring a sense of fun and enjoyment to the endeavor. People are going to sense what you’re enjoying and what you aren’t. If something is filling you with a ton of anxiety? Skip it!
2. No one cares about you
This might sound negative – but internalizing this belief can bring great relief! No one thinks about you as much as you think about you. So, if you feel over-exposed or silly or ugly in the midst of book promotion, just remember: you’re the center of your own universe, and everyone else is the center of their own. People probably aren’t having nearly as many negative thoughts about you as you might imagine. They’re probably not thinking about you at all! They’re most likely thinking about themselves. This should give you a great deal of freedom moving forward.
3. You do you–but you don’t have to do it alone
It’s vital for writers to create support systems before and during the publishing process in order to learn how others are creating their own boundaries and to keep in mind how every writer’s limits and priorities differ. The three of us are all part of a group of female writers with books published during the same window. We meet monthly over Zoom to discuss our triumphs and pain points, and to share best practices. It has made the siloed element of publishing less lonely and allowed us to discover our strengths during the vulnerable process of publishing memoir.
Finding solace in community
Something all of us love about writing is how through our words we can engage with others, and the publishing process offered this as well. As we read each other’s books and discussed how to launch our books, we connected closely with each other’s different forms of perfectionism. As we wrote and revised our manuscripts, our understanding of our projects deepened–as did our understanding of ourselves, but ultimately, we didn’t know exactly how others would respond to our work–and so the book release, similar to the writing process, became one of discovery. Every day of a book release looks different, all kinds of unexpected things can occur, and you don’t know if anyone is going to show up to your in-person event or your panel. Joining forces with other writers engenders bravery.
For each of us, perfection helped us finish our manuscripts, revise them relentlessly, and find the stamina to pursue publication. But book launches, like life, contain endless opportunities for unexpected outcomes, both joyous and disappointing. As we birth our books into the world, we have relinquished some control. Though it hasn’t been easy, letting go a bit has been essential to managing the complex emotions and anxiety brought up by the process. We dare say, this approach has actually been pretty thrilling.
_____
Jocelyn Jane Cox lives with her son and husband in the Hudson Valley of New York. Her debut memoir is Motion Dazzle.
Anna Rollins’s debut memoir is Famished. She lives with in West Virginia with her husband and children.
Melissa Fraterrigo’s debut memoir is The Perils of Girlhood. She lives with her husband and twin daughters in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Reading by email? Hit Reply to comment!
When an Author Refuses to Tidy It All Up: A Close Reading of Hazlitt, Dillard, and Didion
February 6, 2026 § 20 Comments
By J.M. Birmingham
No tidy bow, no grand reveal, no circling back to the theme. No carefully placed takeaway to reward the reader for making it to the end. Just … the writing. Unresolved, standing on its own merit.
Tasked recently with a close reading of three personal essays by genre-defining authors, I decided on William Hazlitt’s On the Pleasure of Hating, Annie Dillard’s Seeing, and Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That. Each of the essays moves differently, but each carries the same torch: seeing something clearly for the first time, then seeking to understand, come to terms, and live with it sans neat bow.
Hazlitt’s On the Pleasure of Hating is an unfiltered emotional hemorrhage. One long, bitter screed. One could be forgiven for not realizing how raw his flourished prose is— Hazlitt’s tongue is so antiquated, the prose seems to carry an air of dignity, despite the toxicity he freely lets flow across the page.
Don’t get me wrong. I found myself agreeing with most– if not all– of what he had to say on hatred. Some rang so immediately true, I pictured specific individuals in the “slovenly” second-hand embarrassments recounted. He hit the nail on the head again, and again, in painstaking detail, which isn’t to say that he’s saying anything admirable. Just real. He sees how humans are, and calls us out unabashedly, including himself.
But what really stood out was his structure. He loops, contradicts, lashes out, and then circles back again like someone re-reading an old letter and getting mad all over. He reeks of a strangely composed compulsion. The pacing’s erratic, but the energy’s in full force. He makes no attempt to charm the reader. This is something not read for guidance, but to be caught in the blast radius.
It’s clear that while he is meticulous, providing examples and arguments, logic is not the driving force of this essay, nor betterment. Purely emotion. One specific emotion, sure, but driven by it, embracing, naming, and wallowing in it. No resolution. No peace. No real defined ending. It’s a bloodletting on the page; his, ours, and every acquaintance he could think to include. Which, as a writer, seems a freeing concept to play with.
Hazlitt shows that a feeling alone can be followed, still producing something incredibly raw and worthwhile.
Dillard, on the other hand, disappears into the page. Seeing is observational, but also deeply devotional. She moves from frogs to theology to childhood games with zero announcement that change is imminent.
I found myself needing to read through twice to fully appreciate what was happening.
There’s something trance-like in the way she stacks detail. The essay doesn’t build so much as accumulate. But it works. Her control is so subtle it’s easy to miss. She’s not pushing arguments. She’s creating a lens and holding it for the reader to look through.
Reading her made me rethink how I pace reflection in my own writing. How slow turns sometimes reveal more than thorough analysis or exposition. Do I have the same patience? To be determined.
Then there’s Didion.
Goodbye to All That felt like opening a window to her younger self. It unfolds like memory: fluid and tinted with regret, but not drowning in it. She doesn’t draw conclusions. She puts scenes on paper for us, and lets them carry their own weight: the peach on Lexington, the silk curtains, the air on her legs in spring.
Her structure is emotional rather than logical. The repetition of “I could,” “I still,” “I remember” does more framing than any thesis could have.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but reminisce about when I was young in the Bay Area. All of the things I didn’t do because time wasn’t real while I was there. All of the things that I did which passed by in the blink of an eye, which seemed to have no end in the moment.
In this essay, there are no sharp pivots, no arguments. Just the heavy ache of leaving something before you knew it was ending. Didion slowly builds weight, one feather after another, letting them settle like an elephant on the reader’s chest. Then, she stops when it feels right. Which felt appropriate to the piece. And life.
All three of these iconic essays reject a clean arc. There’s no “and here’s what I learned” moment. No final “aha!”. They don’t teach, but reveal.
In each, the refusal to resolve becomes form.
A piece doesn’t need crescendo or collapse. It doesn’t need a clear “and here’s how that applies to everything in this way” closing. Tone can be structure. Voice, honestly delivered and handled correctly, can carry the weight of any truth.
Even when left to the reader to infer.
Maybe especially then.
____
J.M. Birmingham is a father, husband, veteran, student, reader and emerging writer based in Little Rock, Arkansas. He most often writes on lessons learned during his time in the above roles, and is constantly battling his inner cynic while doing so. His other writings not currently trapped in publication purgatory can be found at https://substack.com/@jmbwrites
Reading by email? Hit Reply to comment!
