Navigating Vulnerabilities in Life Writing with Paige Maylott, Christine McNair, and Maurice Vellekoop
Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to be a part of The & Festival at Sheridan College as the moderator for the Navigating Vulnerabilities in Life Writing with Paige Maylott (My Body is Distant, ECW Press), Christine McNair (Toxemia, Book*hug Press), and Maurice Vellekoop (I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together, Penguin Random House). Our conversation was wonderful, and I walked about feeling energized and dazzled, but I also walked away with a handful of questions we didn’t have time to address.
So, I did what I often do: I imposed. I implored the trio to answer the questions over email with an aim of featuring the answers here, on my website. The Q & A below is the result of their graciousness.
Thank you to Paige, Christine, and Maurice for being so generous with your time and talent.
Keep reading to learn more about the challenges and delights of bringing raw and real moments of our lives to the page.
Navigating Vulnerabilities in Life Writing with Paige Maylott, Christine McNair, and Maurice Vellekoop
1. All three of these books are deeply and inextricably rooted in the physical. What considerations did you have in talking with such openness about your bodies?
Paige Maylott (PM): In My Body is Distant, my primary consideration was maintaining authenticity and honesty. While I freely acknowledge that my truth differs from others', I thought it important to dig down to why I felt compelled to stand behind the actions I related in my book. Whether we like it or not, we are tied to our bodies, and any reality we experience must first pass through the lens of the flesh.
The circumstances and mindset I was in while experiencing these moments were crucial to recreate accurately in the book. Sometimes this meant sitting with an uncomfortable or regrettable moment in my life much longer than I would have liked to, but I thought it was an exercise worth practicing if I were to relate that authentic moment to readers.
My Body is Distant by Paige Maylott
Christine McNair (CM): It was an adjustment for me — an uncomfortable one. There are still things I held back for myself. But I wanted to look at things directly in Toxemia and that demanded a rooting down into the real here/now of having a physical body rather than abstracting myself into my feelings or intellectual dissection of those feelings. I've been quite cruel to my body over the course of my lifetime so it felt like I owed it honesty.
Maurice Vellekoop (MV): I feel like in many ways the form of memoir dictates the answer to this question—you sort of have to confront your body. As an awkward kid who did not play sports, I did not have a great connection to my body. Later on I wanted sex and love desperately, but could not allow myself to pursue it, and my sex life took place largely in my imagination. My book is in part about eventually coming to terms with the physical aspect of being. I decided I would show my body in all of its non-gym-going glory, stopping short of showing my, or anyone else’s penis in the nude and sex scenes. That “part” of it all I decided to draw a curtain of privacy over.
2. How did you decide how much to share about your families?
PM: My family's role in my book was often adjacent to the narrative and theme I was interested in relating. To maintain focus and clarity, I tried to keep comments on family brief and strictly focused on their peripheral role in the stories I told. For example, there was no need to include my father's, mother's, or sister's names in the book, so I didn't (I think). Many other family members, who mean a great deal to me and were certainly part of my life during the events of MBID, weren't mentioned at all. Though I should mention I do have another memoir in the works, and they won't escape quite so easily this time.
CM: I tried to find a balance between being forthright and keeping things back that were private or unnecessary or that didn't belong to me. I tried to share more of my own things than those of my family. In many ways, Toxemia is my own personal reckoning with mortality, pain, love, disability, ephemerality, and self-destructiveness,. There are truly difficult things in the book for me to think about both in terms of my own small family that includes my kids/spouse and my larger family. But the main threadline was turning over my own experiences and memories. If there was something particularly sensitive shared (like the mention of my mother's miscarriage) than I asked her permission first to share that. I write too about how all stories and memories are incomplete and that my/our memories are always incomplete in terms of the whole picture.
Toxemia by Christine McNair.
MV: The central conflict in my book concerns me and my mother, a devout Christian lady who could not accept her son’s homosexuality. My father was a complicated, volatile figure, who was much more confrontational than my more passive mother. Lots of drama, so they are in the book quite a lot. My siblings and I have always gotten along quite well, so there is not a lot of tension there. They more or less fade out of the story after the childhood section.
3. I want to talk about the different forms these books take: a graphic novel, a memoir in essay, and hybrid lyric essays. The books feel like they couldn't have existed in any other form, but I have to wonder, did you consider telling the story some other way, at some point?
PM: My Body is Distant started as a master's thesis in 2017 during my time as a student at McMaster University. While McMaster didn't offer a Creative Writing track for graduate studies at the time, I knew I had this story I wanted to tell. I convinced my graduate advisors and their board to allow me to create a memoir-style thesis, with the caveat that it had to be informed by critical theory like a traditional English thesis, all within a 1-year timeframe. The challenge of telling an authentic story while simultaneously deep reading into my own experiences with popular theorists simply became too overwhelming—so much so that I ended up leaving my master's program and entering the workforce.
Afterward, I experimented with different storytelling formats: video game narratives using Twine, individual short stories examining key moments that would later become chapters of the memoir, and others. The breakthrough came when I considered my thesis supervisor's suggestion that I didn't have to tell my story linearly. This realization of structural freedom sparked inspiration within me, and I couldn't stop writing until I finished the draft some three months later.
CM: I thought about making it more straightforward interrogation of preeclampsia alone -- interlacing historic case studies, more definitions, and more linear essays. I thought about making it a poetry book that made use of those kinds of testimonies and records. Some of my early work on the book was done in the British Library reading room looking at 16th century midwifery textbooks. But the shape of Toxemia only ultimately made sense for me in the end as a hybrid memoir. It was too personal and visceral for me to detach from using form or content as a shield. The end shape of the book leans much more to nonfiction than poetry but the hybridity is what made most sense for me/this book. I like looking at the in-between and grey spaces of things. I've noticed during the readings that I've been doing that I'm still seen as 'poet' but the book itself is very much not entirely that. There are some things that play with prose poetry and I do play a bit in the margins but it's just that the prose isn't always linear. That doesn't necessarily mean that it is poetry. The word choices are strange. But maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm just strange. I like things to be compound and alchemical.
MV: For most of my career I have been an illustrator who drew short comics on the side as a more personal artistic outlet. When I got the idea to create this memoir, there was never a question of it being anything other than a graphic work. Having said that, I spent a lot of time pondering what makes it a story better told graphically. Was it going to be strictly realistic, or could there be an aspect of fantasy or surrealism to give it a twist? From this, I got to the idea of drawing the warring sides in my head as personified figures who float around my head as they debate and bicker.
I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together by Maurice Vellekoop
4. The element of fantasy and fairytale and the fabled threads all your stories. I wonder about how calling on these fantastical spaces might make the stories easier to tell, or if not easier, about how they open a portal into a different way of telling our stories and understanding ourselves. Please share your thoughts.
PM: I wouldn't say I deliberately aimed to tell my story using fairytale or fable, but I can see why you might detect those influences. For context, in MBID I write through two different perspectives: my own subjectivity, and through the eyes of various avatars within virtual spaces—mostly video games and virtual chat rooms, though there is one instance within a Role-Playing Game. Within virtual spaces, I was free of my body and able to concentrate solely on the emotional experience of interacting with others. In this state, even simple events, like visiting a diner, could become magical events if you are with the right person.
CM: I think connecting to fairytale and fable does make the stories easier to tell by universalizing it but it also connects our own personal stories (miserable, mythical, fantastical, unbelievable, bad luck) into the community rhythms of storytelling. Stories connect us and I found with this book in particular that folks that have heard me read or that have read the book have come to me to tell me their own difficult experiences with birth, preeclampsia, depression, chronic illness, mothering in tough times, etc. Something about connecting ourselves to the wires associated with fairytales links us to each other and allows the reader to look at a Big Bad Experience within the larger tapestry of Things That Happen to Us. I think ultimately everyone has their own milk white patterns laced accross their life to reckon with and if we connect those threads to fairytale or mythic elements then it helps us integrate them into a whole picture.
MV: As a framing device for my book I used the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty to represent a lifelong love of fantasy and escape, a big theme in my life and in the memoir. The story has a couple of elements that roughly mirror experiences in my life. For example, Beauty is cursed at birth: on her 17th birthday she will prick her finger on a poisoned spindle and die. Despite her parents’ best efforts to protect her, the curse comes true, but, because of a fairy’s intervention, she does not die but falls asleep for 100 years. Some scholars have seen this plot as an expression of parental anxiety about puberty, and by extension, sex and love. In my case, my mother was adamant that I suppress my sexuality for the sake of being a good Christian. When, against her wishes, I came out in the early 1980s, I had a couple of bad experiences with sex and love, right at the dawn of the AIDS era. As a result, I shut down emotionally and sexually for a long period of celibacy, kind of like Beauty’s hundred year sleep. I call this section The Sleep in the book. The Disney film, and the National Ballet’s production of Tchaikovsky’s ballet of the story also feature largely in my narrative. (And, spoiler alert, at the book’s ending I meet a wonderful man, like Beauty’s Prince, with whom I at last find happiness!)