On Writing
Claire Lacey
I have been delaying this piece for
well over a year now (sorry rob!). What do I want to say about writing? For me,
it’s a fraught process, unlinear, and currently, physically painful. I have
arthritis (maybe it’s gout, I am waiting on blood results as I write this)
developing in my left hand, and ongoing issues working on screens from multiple
concussions. I often feel I am doing writing wrong: I don’t have a daily
practice, I have bursts of productivity and long slumps where I do nothing. I
publish inconsistently. I have so many projects in the wings. Sometimes
deadlines help me generate work, and sometimes they paralyze me. I feel lazy. I
joke that I am a professional crastinator. Sometimes I feel okay that I move at
my own speed, that this is just how I work and I am more a slow drip coffee
than an espresso. Yes, it’s time for another cup of coffee.
Writing is how I think. It is how I
work out problems. My first book was written as a kind of ethical dilemma, a
book that was by necessity problematic, as I, a white Canadian woman, a teacher
and scholar, tried to unpack the language politics of Papua New Guinea, a place
I had never been. That project was a response to the linguistic textbooks and
case studies I had been reading, which discussed the pidgin spoken in Papua New
Guinea in dismissive terms. At the time, I was also an English language teacher,
and I had trouble with the amount of authority I was often given by my
students, most of whom were older and more experienced than I was. I wanted to
work through the ethical problems I was encountering, and I wanted to show and
share that process. In some ways, I think of it as the same as showing the work
in mathematics. I do it so that errors can be found, argued, addressed. For me,
writing is not about being right, but rather, a way of thinking-through and
engaging with broader conversations around particular topics. What I write is
always interconnected with what I am reading, seeing, learning, doing and
feeling.
Recently, I wrote on Twitter about an
anti-abortion billboard. I had a kind of internal debate over whether I was
bringing additional publicity to something meant to shame women and skew the ongoing
debate about decriminalizing abortion in New Zealand—the billboard included a
misleading image showing a much later term pregnancy than the 20 weeks
currently under discussion. It coopted the language of Black Lives Matter.
Almost immediately after I had done this public writing, I had my email address
attached to a fake dating site profile and was flooded with notifications.
Fairly innocuous as doxing goes, but a reminder that it is important that I
continue to use my platforms to write. The complaints I lodged with the
Advertising Standards Association were dismissed, as the billboards apparently
are opinion and so the inaccuracies break no rules. How much more necessary,
then, to publicly rebut the shaming of people who have had or will have abortion
procedures.
My current project is about my
experience with brain injury. I am writing a creative/critical PhD where I use
poetry to represent that experience, and to explore the current scientific
knowledge around brain injury. I love using poetry to navigate the space
between medical literature, meant for medical practitioners, and first-person
narratives. What does brain injury feel like? How does sensory disturbance
alter a sense of selfhood? How does the way we represent brain injury influence
care paradigms? Again I use writing as a way of navigating a complex
interdisciplinary space, a space where public and personal collide. Sometimes I
think this is important work that could potentially help other people with
brain injury feel seen and understood. Sometimes I think it is a self-indulgent
practice. Probably it is both.
The hard part of writing is that it
can take time before there is a response. It can feel like shouting at the
ocean. The orca don’t really mind, but they aren’t interested either. Then out
of the blue, a reader gets in touch. Or perhaps another writer or translator
engages with your work. It lives. Whatever the response, the conversation has
happened. And that’s the real magic.
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