Is a book ever done?
Trying to reach the "finish line" of publication + sharing an excerpt along the way
Please note— this is a longer one today so might be better to tap through to the post rather than reading in your email.
Oh dear, it’s been such a long time since I’ve felt like I’ve had any writing I can share here, in such a public space. Ever since Rose and I witnessed a double homicide outside the house we were renting in the summer of 2024, my writing has felt as if behind a one-way pane of glass. I’m writing as a kind of survival tool but I can’t quite share it yet. And I, myself, am not yet out from beyond this latest traumatic experience— there are some (wildly re-traumatizing) legal tendrils lingering which makes it unsafe for me to share.
And so I’ve been trying to turn (return) to a book draft I wrote between 2010 and 2017, trying to push (or coax) it to the finish line. Titled “Assaults + Rituals”, in it I endeavor to give voice and shape to the body of a queer survivor of developmental, emotional, sexual, and physical abuse and violence, challenging dominant narratives of healing. Through a hypnotic blend of words and threads, it maps the intricate landscape of trauma, delving into the nonlinear journey of healing, resilience, and the return to aliveness. The heart of the book writes towards the theme of the marked, or traumatized, body as a site of knowledge and insight, offering a meditation at the intersection of somatic healing, psychedelics and expanded states of consciousness, and what becomes possible by staying in and writing from the wound. Through deconstructing the binary of embodiment and disembodiment, it’s a narrative exploring the realms in between. Drawing from diverse academic disciplines and my own critical and creative perspectives, it rejects the medicalization of trauma, inviting readers to reimagine their understanding of healing and agency through other realms.
This book also explores relationships, being wounded– and wounding– through connection, working with the metaphor of poison medicine. How does one build relationships, both to human and more than human life, when relationship is where the trauma(s) took place? Can a relationship be both poison and medicine simultaneously? (And do know— the book is far more poetic than it is academic but there is certainly a little of both.)
I wrote it all through graduate school (and a few years before and a year after). I’ve hired editors, for a minute had an agent or two interested (until they understood it wasn’t a formulaic self-help/ how-to book and so not in their wheelhouse). No shade— I’ve written one of these too but this book is something else.
I’ve sat with the draft in front of me, staring at the screen more times than I can count. Every Friday I have a note to “work on the book” and many Fridays I do not. Recently I began the cover letter and proposal again— sent the cover letter to a dear writer friend— a flash of determination that has since disappeared again but I hope will return this winter so I can begin contacting agents with experience representing creative nonfiction hybrid work. I’ve never had an agent before and to be honest, I’ve not really wanted one though I imagine finding the “right” one could make all the difference. And so I’m trying to decide— do I push this book forward on my own, yet again— go directly to publishers as I did with my first book? Or do I try to find someone who can hold the heart of it with me?
For me, the finish line is publication and while this book has yet to be in the world, a number of excerpts have and simultaneously, I’ve edited and/ or written two other books that have made it beyond my computer and into bookstores.
But this book, this book, it is so hard to get to the finish line. If you, too, are a writer, you might know that books can take years, decades to “finish”, to publish. So today I am sharing an excerpt again— I am gently pushing myself to return to it again this winter to ready it for spring.
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I have written the rib piece before, Looking for where the rib, if he were an evening. [i] I will write of it again. How they split, hairlines, many breaks, all of them small, so minuscule I sometimes wonder did they really break? Did I really break? And I’m not sure why it matters except that it feels like all of me dispersed and then reconfigured in those moments of fracture. It was the second time a lover chose to riptide through my body, as if it were a fatty bacon rind, as if it were a boneless chicken breast. As if taking a beating, with words or hands, was what it was good for.
I mean if you want chicken piccata, if you know you really, really want it, you go to the grocery, you check the expiration date (Is there enough time left?), you find the meatiest breast with the best date, you buy and you pound away, right?
Maybe a mallet, maybe a mason jar, something sturdy and rounded, maybe a fist. It matters little.
Maybe it will get thin enough, maybe you’ll be able to see through it, maybe your hands will shake each time knuckles connect with animal.
We so rarely ask if there are other ways to quench our desire, our ravenous hunger, our bone-splitting need, our deep-rooted grief. We reach for what’s right in front of us, what’s right next to us. We drown out the pain, the searching, in another’s body.
I mean a body is a sack of meat and we haul around the rotten parts until an elder witch hands you a chef’s knife and says cut slice discard be rid of their hands on your body, all the hands on your body. But until then we find ways to do the job, we search for tenderness, for new, in hopes of righting the wrongs. We find hands that are not tender. There is a long line of not tender, almost like looking into a field of wheat, or oats, or sunflowers.
Those sunflowers, the sheer number of them, standing motionless, faces to the sky. A reunion of cheery, golden faces looking to the sky until a heavy rain barrels down their backs, bends them forward. We look for them.
I’d like to imagine I’m milky oat tops, all lush and bursting, all milk and season change. All ripe for the picking. But many days I am a cracked hull, a shell, splinter turned full fracture, full rupture.
Sometimes I know I am still here, in this room, hands outstretched, inviting. I remember your hands on my body, other hands on my body and I can’t find a time before hands all up on me, in me, pressing palms upon palms upon me.
Nobody knows what to do with a broken heart. Nobody knows how to figure out this thing called continuous living. Nobody knows and yet it’s all anyone wants us to do. All any of us are doing.
Don’t die.
Stay here.
We ask each other to live beyond the unlivable, intolerable. We ask ourselves the same.
What is living but a free fall, no ground.
I’d like to be a milky oat top. All restoration, all plump and carefree.
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I’m thinking about survivors’ bodies as weapons turned back on ourselves. They have been used against us, used to harm us, have been split right down the middle, turned inside out.
Often we don’t die. Sometimes we do. I remember hearing at some point that rape is particularly difficult to get over because it is one of the few “violent crimes” that people live through. We are forced to stare right into the face of potentially dying; our body knows this and responds accordingly; we are left with having to do the work of reminding our bodies that not everything is a deserving of a crisis response as we turn our bodies into something we can trust again.
Survivors know, full body knowing, our bodies bloom right into collapse, grow into a host of health issues, most of them chronic.
How do we find our bodies outside of the violence, when they’ve been manipulated on a cellular level? When they’ve been made toxic?
Our bodies were not made to bear the weight of someone else’s fists without remembering the shape. Our bodies don’t know how to take hold and then release; violence slips into our bones. It stays with us. Our bodies keep track, hold on to it.
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People are always surprised to learn that I had insomnia at seven years old. That I had kidney stones that needed surgical removal, at seventeen years old. That I would faint in church, on the lacrosse field, while lifeguarding. The digestion issues. The chronic exhaustion and tiredness. Tearing my hair out right at the roots, strand by stand.
There is something in me that builds to a critical mass, until it shuts my body down, blocks my ureter, takes anxiety to epic peaks, risks full collapse in a desperate search for release. There are the days I can’t stay awake. There are the nights I can’t sleep.
On alert, stay awake, don’t sleep, don’t slow down. Definitely don’t listen, tune into the communication.
Trauma put down roots in the body, refused to release until it finally does; in the meantime, I’m losing days and weeks and hours, the promise of a connected life.
A pain without end.
Survivors of sexual and other forms of bodily violence know what kind of toxicity bodies can hold. I welcome other people are holding all the hard stuff, hold space, help them remember that they can put some of it down, release a bit, even just for a moment. My body knows it to be true.
I am indebted to the people who have done this for me. To have a lover hold you while you’re naked, wrap their arms around you and cradle you like you’re theirs, tell you it’s finally time to put some of the weight down. In that moment they promise safety. And you can believe it enough to try.
This is noble work. This is radical presence. Both the offering and the receiving. This is being open to connection after the world, as you knew it, tried to cut you off from it.
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An endless stream of questions. Even when I’m in the present I am writing in the past.
What is the physicality of a wound?
What does it mean to have deep wounds that are almost beyond language?
Beyond words?
What does it mean to always try to find words anyway?
How can we move into this writing the unwritable,
this way of knowing that is in the deep well of the body?
Can we dive into the wound, the loss:
excavate and unearth it and then move back out of it?
How much can language contain?
How much can the text hold?
Does it hold lines and shapes, like skin,
do they turn into bruises, like skin,
do deepest purples give way to a subtle yellow?
What kind of life settles into our bones if we don’t take the time to grieve?
Can there be a return to a body that was lost?
Or is there no return, and only a creation of a new in the present?
When will I be saturated?
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If not grieved, loss has a way of living on in the body. But grieving often means moving into the hard parts of ourselves and making a home in it, settling into the shadows. Or as Arianne Zwartjes says in her sweeping epic poem of an essay on the body and trauma and loss: Trauma is a shear in ordinary blacktop. A fissure in the everyday fabric. Like flannel being ripped. The shredding of each fiber in a mostly straight line. The frayed edges that result. The way the cloth loses its flat plane, becomes irregularly stretched and taut, gapping and baggy… Blooming wound on this terrain of skin.[ii]
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Even if I think I’ve left my body, in fact I am always in it, always using it, creating with it. In this sense, using my body (fingers and hands) to write about my body and my sometimes feelings of disconnection can bring me back to it. It places me right in it. It allows me to push into something I often pull myself out of; it allows me to settle into the wandering question that haunts my soul and hacks and saws at my body [iii] It allows my body to be both the question and the answer.
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We are made and unmade by each other’s touch. Touch a type of witness.
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I can never quite figure out the appropriate tense when I write. How then is always now and now is some kind of future I can’t always find words for.
I write in sentence fragments sometimes. [T]he bliss of a disorienting text…[iv] They feel right to me, they sound right when I read them back to myself. Fractures, stops and starts. Like speaking, like thinking, like lines of a poem collapsed into themselves.
Can form be writing in repetition, writing in fragments, writing without a care for linearity, writing to simply write that which is unwritable (until it’s written, that is), writing with no concern for clarity—writing the way memory and traumatic experience live in a body, writing the way memory and traumatic memory get stuck in the throat.
Bhanu Kapil writes of the fragment as “rough”— where the edge of it is, like glass or fur or light, so that it adheres to other fragments, not through historical or phatic means: but through the force of attraction. I place the fragments in a chrysalis: to recombine.[v]
To write with a focus on the body, to navigate that terrain, to come up to the edges, cliffs, to settle into the valley of dangerous emotions and feeling.
But this writing is also bigger than me, bigger than my body.
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The failure, over and over, of trying to find words for feelings in the body. The limits of language.
How is one to communicate a sentence whose subject wants more than grammar allows? And what might this want sound like?[vi]
Long ago I internalized the message I needed to be able to talk about my experiences with violence in a logical, factual, linear way. And write that way too.
I struggled and struggle to do so; no room for linearity in the spectrum of violence.
Words as a language that are never quite enough but always are. Words as a suture to lace up the rupture, the wound. In an effort to heal, to bring together the before and after, dig into the new space.
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Where do bodies go that were cast off along the way? How many am I still dragging around, afraid to cut loose? What about the bodies that can never be dead because they were never seen as an alive human to start with?
Sometimes I imagine you, reader, already know the stories I am about to tell you and now if I tell you, really spell it out, won’t this just be repetition? Same old shit? I try to keep things short. I try to stay small, a tiny ball. I try to take up less room.
How afraid I am of repetition but really, what is life if not repetition. A spiral, they say. Moving forward, one stitch at a time, sometimes circling back, making a mistake, cutting out the knot, tying one off, starting over, new stitches going through gaping holes.
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I start searching for answers to the questions. The plants arrive. The line between poison and medicine blur. I begin to feel held by something bigger than me.
[i] francine j. harris, play dead
[ii] Arianne Zwartjes, Detailing Trauma: A Poetic Anatomy
[iii] Helene Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays
[iv] Kazim Ali, Genre-Queer: Notes Against Generic Binaries in Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction
[v] Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieu
[vi] Rob Halpern’s writing in the introduction for Melissa Buzzeo’s book For Want and Sound