The writing is a lightning strike that illuminates everything

I will always write like an incest survivor

In 2016 I read The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch in one sitting on a bus ride back to Toronto from Montreal. When I stepped off the bus, I had changed, and I knew that I would do whatever it took to make writing my “real job.”

The first thing I did, because it seemed like what people do, is I applied to several creative writing programs. I was rejected at every school I applied to. So I said fuck it. I moved to Montreal where the rent was cheaper, and I decided that I would be a writer as I am.

I was already a writer. I have always been a writer. Before I could write I was always telling stories. I have been publishing my writing since I was 13. By the time I decided to “take the plunge” and become a writer “full time,” I already had an international audience of readers, because I had already been writing and publishing for close to two decades.

I haunt the edges of the literary world and no one knows exactly what to do with me. No one makes zines for a living — that’s absurd. But I do. I staple and ship tens of thousands of zines all over the world. I write and my readers pay me for my writing. I have a whole writing career with huge reach that has paid all my bills for more than six years. I get stopped on the street by fans in most cities I visit. People have tattooed my words on their body multiple times.

And yet — I am scoffed at, ridiculed, and excluded. For being cancelled yes, but also just for being the kind of writer that I am. An independent writer. An outsider writer. An underground writer. However you want to say it.

There are always typos in my work. My writing flows out of me like a living thing. I do not domesticate my writing. I do not have a schedule where I force myself to write. I don’t force myself to do anything. I have to write, and my job is to create the conditions under which my writing can come. It will come. It always does.

My writing practice is unusual and not the way writers are “supposed” to write. All the aspiring writers ask me about my writing practice and are surprised to find out I treat writing more like ecstatic ritual, psychedelic experience, communing with the gods, or being spoken through by underworld spirits, than a job. Everyone wants to be a “real” writer and they assume real writers are consistent and diligent. Showing up to the page and clocking in like any other job. The thought of this makes my skin crawl.

I write in a frenzy. Many times I am openly sobbing when I’m writing. It’s especially weird when I do this in a cafe. I write before the dissociation can come and take away my words. I write with the urgency of an INCEST SURVIVOR. Yes I’m going to bring it up, again and again and again. I write like my very voice was taken from me. I write like the silence is thick and strong and coming for me. I write like if I don’t say it now I never will — because yeah, maybe I never will.

My personhood is literally fractured into pieces by incest. I act like different people because I am different people and that’s just a little too crazy sounding for a lot of people to relate to. But other people know exactly what I am talking about. Dissociation is a soft oblivion. It will take things from you and you won’t even know that they are gone. The writing is a lightning strike that illuminates everything. I have to say it quickly before the darkness returns and it is gone.