by Gwendolyn Paradice
If someone were to ask me what speculative nonfiction is, I would say that instead of speculating about what is unknown, it makes what is known, to this neurodiverse mind, accessible to the reader.
When I was laboring over my master’s thesis, I wrote, In Vienna the bellhop shows me how to open the electric blinds in my room overlooking the Oper, and when I tell him I’m not impressed by technology, he asks me if I want to see where they keep the dead hummingbirds. He takes me to room 703, and the bathroom floor is littered with tiny jewels, overflowing the bathtub and sink. Each a jester’s miniature body: whole and full, mocking our confusion with their deaths. I ask him why they don’t rot, fall apart, and he says he doesn’t know. He says: Every so often when it rains the birds fall from the sky like hollow stones onto the roof, unbroken. That the hummingbirds are too beautiful to wrap in plastic and throw away, even if it’s done slowly and with wonder. He picks one up, palm cupping the small body, and unfolds its wings.
When I was finally in my defense, a committee member said, Hundreds of hummingbirds didn’t really fall from the sky, did they?
She was referring to only one essay, but she could have chosen any, or all, of what I’d written in Histories I do(not) Belong to, a collection of flash that rejected words like “perhaps” and “I imagined” in favor of declarations that were, apparently, too impossible to believe.
When I walked out of that office, trying not to cry until I got to my car, I blamed myself. Why couldn’t I defend what I’d written as nonfiction?
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Up until recently I’ve told people I write lyric essay, hermit crab essay, and genre-benders. I’ve dug deeply into these terms, researched how other writers define them and attempted to define them myself by constellating their ideas, movements, and content. I’ve been dwelling in modes of essaying, categories of essay, sub-genres of essay, because I’ve wanted so badly to be able to label my own writing—the essays that arise, poof!, when I am not thinking, but instead, following my instinct as a neurodiverse person.
While I understand what these forms or modes allow for, none of the terms have been able to adequately address Histories I do(not) Belong to, which included the flash essay about Vienna. That collection, the mode of writing I employ within, is inherently tied to my neurodiversity, and yet, “disability writing” doesn’t seem to capture what I want to convey.
So I’ve begun to ask: what happens when there is no label? When you need to invent a new term? Perhaps you are told you are doing good work, doing what academics and writers are supposed to do: make new spaces. But perhaps you are told what you are writing is not nonfiction, and you are told this because the education of nonfiction can also be an education in ableism.
When I reflect on my education now—the eleven years I’ve dedicated to creative writing in the academy—I look for holes. And it turns out that my history of education is full of holes: places where representation (and conversation about representation) has been crucially lacking. I’m speaking here of the times where it is necessary to talk about identity in conversation with writing about identity. I cannot subscribe to a formalist critique because to ignore an author, and to ignore the environment which produces writing, can be an act of erasure.
One of my holes—the gaps in knowledge—pertains to disability writing. In my first five years of formal creative writing education, I cannot recall being assigned, or encountering, a single nonfiction text authored by a disabled or impaired person (and with this, I acknowledge that to be known as disabled is not the same thing as being disabled), and I cannot recall any nonfiction texts about disability or impairment.
Now, this absence of disability writing in my courses flabbergasts me, because if we live long enough, all of us will experience or encounter impairment or disability with our family and friends. You too, reader, are likely to become, at some point in time, impaired or disabled.
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Histories I do(not) Belong to accumulated dust for five years. I wanted to turn it into a book—a memoir-in-essay—but I didn’t know how. I sat on it. Ignored it. Returned to it. Put it in a drawer, again. The master’s defense, combined with limited workshop attempts, told me the book was cryptic and too confusing; the crux of the issue was always what was real and what was not.
I didn’t understand until recently that the feedback I received had a subtext: when you are writing your neurodiverse mind, you need to explain it to your reader. When you are writing nonfiction, you cannot just claim you wandered into a store in Salzburg and discovered souls stored in wine bottles; you should discuss how your neurodiversity led you to this alternate reality. When you write about your ex-husband as a man who turns into a raven, you cannot claim a human truly became a bird; you must describe the circumstances—his yelling from the other room misheard as a bird’s shrieking and his emergence in the doorway the result of your invention: a mental overlay of flesh and wings.
The feedback I received said, you must contextualize this use of speculative fiction within nonfiction by owning your disability on the page, and to do this, you should tell us what your disability is.
The thing is, I do want to “own” my disability on the page. I am a disability writer, and I am a disabled writer, but I want to represent myself on my terms. I don’t want to be asked by my readers to write my disability in a way that misrepresents my experience by filtering it through explanatory language.
Consider how much of me is erased when instead of writing
I feel his flesh and the skin isn’t right. It’s a catfish skin, cutting my hand with an arm’s sharp fin, blood wash shining against a grey mottle body, blood tasting of metal pennies soaked in milk or like sweat on a chest made wet by the sun.
I write
I feel his flesh and the skin isn’t right. It’s LIKE a catfish skin, and I IMAGINE cutting my hand with an arm’s sharp fins….
When I write, I am always thinking about the dialogue between a text and its reader. I would like to write only for myself—and my instructors and friends have urged me to—but the truth is to be a writer in the academy, you have to publish, which means you have to think about reception, and part of reception, it seems, is being able to label and defend a product.
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In Laura Hershey’s essay “Getting Comfortable,” she writes, “For a long time, and still sometimes, I have hidden the part of my life that involved the services of another woman’s strong hands, arms, legs, back. I saw no literary potential in scenes like the one above. They were merely background music to my story, I thought, not the story itself… Readers, I feared, may not be able to read such a writer, may not relax enough to follow me on the paths I choose to chart. A reader must trust her writer…”
I think there’s always a vague, subjective question in writing of what an author needs to do, but this is also a two-part inquiry: what a writer must do for herself, and what a writer might do for the reader. The second part of that question is where disability enters.
I feel I’m a Janus coin of Hershey: here, in this essay, she contemplates the what-ifs of writing her disability. I am contemplating how to express mine, without stating it.
So here is a question about process, about what, as a disability writer, I must compromise in writing nonfiction: how much of my neurodiversity do I erase from the page? What do I sacrifice when I utilize certain forms? What is lost—to myself, and to representation—when I acknowledge what some readers want? Or more specifically, what some neurotypical readers want?
When, and how much of myself do I sacrifice? At what point do these sacrifices turn me into something unrecognizable to myself?
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We know, as nonfiction writers, that there is a difference between factual truth and the truth of experience. Truth is, perhaps, the first concept we learn: what is lying and what is misrepresenting. We learn about metaphor, about the forgiveness of metaphor, but still, we learn how important that writer-reader contract is: I am telling you the truth.
THE truth, a capitalized definite article, because somehow, there is only one. We do not say a truth because to do so would open too many doors. It is frightening to consider the rules of our reality as being so malleable, and this is where THE truth and disability gets tricky: when others are involved and they dictate what truth is acceptable.
But if it is frightening for the rules of our reality to be fluid, it is equally as frightening—especially to a neurodiverse writer of nonfiction—to be told you have to conform to others’ conceptions of truth. To be told, through our social construction of disability, that what you write is not nonfiction. To be told in workshop—borrowing from the medical model which says disability can be “fixed”—that you need to make changes to your work so it can call tell THE truth.
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I realize now that I’ve been building towards this essay for years, touching and fleeing on my way towards manifesto. When I wrote “Beyond Perhapsing: ‘Split-Toning’ Techniques for Speculation in Nonfiction,” I was seeking possibility for representation, quietly trying to argue a way I could justify my speculative nonfiction writing. When I wrote “Sudden and Marvelous Invention: Hearing Impairment & Fabulist (non)Fiction,” I was approaching arrival, beginning to whisper, look, I am here, and I am writing about my disability, why and how speculative fiction calls to me. And now I can say, I write speculative nonfiction, and I’m demanding a space be created for my neurodiverse mind.
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If someone were to ask me what speculative nonfiction is, I would say it is a home, a safe space for my disability writing. I would say I’ve always been drawn to speculative fiction because it is a space where we must suspend disbelief—to consider the impossible alongside the “real.” A place where things we don’t allow to happen do happen, and in fantastical context. I would say that speculative nonfiction could be this: a liminality wherein a writer is not concerned with binaries of truth and un-truth, writing that eschews “perhapsing” in favor of drawing on the speculative aspect of speculative fiction, which for me, produces nonfiction more representative of who I am as a disabled person.
If someone were to ask me what speculative nonfiction is, I would say that instead of speculating about what is unknown, it makes what is known, to this neurodiverse mind, accessible to the reader.
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If I could do it over again, I would not have taken my speculative nonfiction into workshop. I would not have submitted that almost-book for my defense. Because if I’ve learned anything, it’s that many writers I know have not proactively (or productively) engaged work authored by neurodiverse people. Creative writing in the academy at times preferences craft over representation. There is not yet a space for speculative nonfiction, not in the way I think of it, because the history of disability, especially invisible disability, is a history of not being believed. It is a history, still in-process, that debates truth.
I have seen this in my own friends, women who have gone to doctors and whose pains and concerns have been dismissed with phrases like “you have to work through it” or “it gets better” or worse, “there’s nothing wrong.”
I know women who have sought accommodations and found responses like “but have you considered” or “what about” or “you’re imagining”—phrases that turn conversations about an individual’s need into conversations about alternatives. These become conversations that also say, I don’t want to be inconvenienced by your disability.
You have seen this, too, and there is a chance, that you, like me, have participated in acts of erasure. Acts of dismissal. Acts of refocusing.
So if someone would ask me what speculative nonfiction is, I would say, it is a mode of writing that allows my disabilities to be represented.
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Another member of my committee pointed to the passage on page 91:
There’s an exhibition at the Tower of London, five hundred years of armor and arms; today, a war horse in plate shed its paint and plaster, smashed through a life-size vinyl poster, and kicked a man’s skull in. There was one half-moon hoof print of blood on the cement walkway below the broken window, and cameras clicked, apertures yawning for light and the rounded patterns of crushed gravel.
An example, I was told, that my work wasn’t nonfiction.
What I think she meant to say was, this imagining is too great for nonfiction, by which she meant, I have ideas about what constitutes the truth, by which she meant, I am more concerned with my reception of your work than your work being a reflection of your disability.
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You can make up your own nonfiction genre. That’s what my professor said when we were reading Victor Hernández Cruz’s “The Low Writings.” We can do what he did; we can invent new scaffolding and ways of telling ourselves, our cultures, and our minds. Nonfiction invites rebellion, he said with a smile.
It took thirty-three years of life for me to have a teacher that talked about disability in creative nonfiction writing. A teacher who was vulnerable and open about his own neurodiversity. And so, when I took his nonfiction course, and we widely explored the essay—reading Bob Kaufman’s “Does the Secret Mind Whisper,” Cruz’s “Old San Juan,” and Carolyn Gage’s “Hidden Disability: A Coming out Story”—for the first time in my education of writing, I felt I could write a part of me that had been suppressed. Repressed. A trauma of that thesis defense breaking open into productive exploration.
It’s kind of funny, in a sad way, that I didn’t think I could do this—make up my own genre—until a professor I admired gave me license to.
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I recently had a breakthrough on that almost-book, the one that contains Histories I do(not) Belong to. I’ve had enough of a breakthrough to be able to claim it as my dissertation, and that breakthrough occurred because I was fed up. I hit a wall. I was so tired of being challenged that I said, fuck it. And then the almost-book started becoming a book.
When I began to say to myself, I write speculative nonfiction, it was cathartic: a term that allowed me to be me. And when I decided to claim this space as my own—pages that don’t write in an adherence to “real” and “imagined”—I was finally being true to myself.
I also found myself writing a preface. An author’s note. One small paragraph on the first page that explains how my book is disability writing.
It is a paradox: the preface both freeing and disheartening. One part of me overjoyed at the declaration of being a disability writer, the other frustrated that I still feel the need to contextualize my work. And in addition to this, an understanding that by contextualizing my work I may be doing someone, somewhere, a service. I suppose it’s a choice I have to make: how to (or if I should) acknowledge my disability for my reader. Because we always have to do this. Sometimes for ourselves. But sometimes for others.
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If I were to also say that speculative nonfiction could be a practice, what I would mean is that speculative nonfiction is both a mode of writing and a method of reception. It is seeking a space for representation and ensuring that space by asking ourselves, as readers, what others must sacrifice for us.
When I brought Histories I do(not) Belong to to my defense, I didn’t have the words to say that the slip into the fantastical was a reflection of my experiencing the world. Even if I knew it, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to say it, because my education was not one about expanding nonfiction, but one about defining it. And it was not an education that ever asked me to think about the form as a lens of representation—though thankfully, that did come later. My initial education was one devoted to critique and analysis, but never an investigation into how critique can be a lens for reflecting on the bias of readers. Not a way to think of the work we read, but a way to question how we read.
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After my defense, I kept thinking I had done something wrong.
I knew my writing was not wrong—that was not open to debate. I knew my signaling was not wrong—the title of the piece in question, Histories I do(not) Belong To, should have done the work of saying, Look, I’m playing with something here. Questioning something here. Trying to define what I’m doing. I wish I could have said, what I’m doing with this title is recognizing how I feel there is no space for me in essaying.
Now, I keep wondering if my defense was my professors trying to get me to explain my writing decisions in a way that showed I understood the conventions and history of the genre.
Now, I keep wondering if the defense, was instead, a kind of passive, unintentional, discrimination.
And today, I am still wondering which of the two it was.
Or maybe I am still asking the wrong question, trying to find a binary where there is not one.
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If I could do it over again, if I could return to that room where I defended, poorly, my thesis, I would say, this is speculative nonfiction. And then, when asked to elaborate, because of course, with this term—its newness, its uncertainty, the myriad of ways we can theorize it—I would be asked to explain. I would say, speculative nonfiction is a mode of writing and reception. And then when asked how this prioritization is any different than any other mode, or sub-genre, or form, I would say, it is a mode that prioritizes disability writing and the lived experience of being disabled.
I would go on to explain that sometimes, using words that “cue” a reader into imagination, can be ableist. I would say, you asked if hummingbirds really fell from the sky, but what you meant to say is ‘this did not happen’ and you are saying that because you experience a different reality than I do. When you ask me to write “I imagined” you are asking me to erase my disability.
I would say, what do you think essay should do? Should it meditate? Should it narrate? Should it be accessible, and if so, for whom? Look, I’m not asking the reader to participate in determining what’s real and what’s not—I’ve already termed this nonfiction. I am asking the reader to think about the possibilities of expression for those marginalized by nonfiction.
I would say, this is what speculative nonfiction does for me: it allows me to be neurodiverse in a space, that because of others’ conceptions of truth, tends to look at my work as untruth. I would say, I am desperate to find a space where I can be me.
I would say, I am willing to continue, if instead of challenging, you accept. Because my whole life has been about being pushed to the margins, and I am tired, so tired of this.
It is time for you to listen. No, stop talking, and listen, because in having this conversation, I am doing a tremendous amount of emotional labor. When this book goes out into the world, instead of asking if the words are true, assume they are, and then ask yourself, ‘why did I even doubt?’
I think you’ll find the answer more instructive than you thought.
Gwendolyn Paradice is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, identifies as two-spirited, and is hearing impaired. Gwen's first collection of short stories, More Enduring for Having Been Broken, Black Lawrence Press’ 2019 Hudson winner, will be published in January 2021. The chapbook she authored with poet Kara Dorris, Carnival Bound (or, Please Unwrap Me), is one of The Cupboard Pamphlet's 2019 editors' choices and is forthcoming late 2020. She is a Graduate Teaching Instructor and Ridgel Fellow PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at the University of Missouri, where she specializes in genre-bending, blending, and disability writing.