“I’ve often idly wondered why people make some of the smallest decisions: Does it matter which cookie I pick up from the plate or which stall I choose in a public bathroom? Will my choice change the course of my life?
“On November 27, 2003, at 3:30 p.m., I make one of those random choices. I work at my desk until about 2:00 p.m. At around 2:45, I run a brush through my hair and swish a dollop of toothpaste around my mouth. By 3:00, I’m picking up my younger daughter from her elementary school. At 3:15, we’re rushing into her big sister’s high school, unaware that by 4:30 I’ll be signing in at the emergency department of the local hospital….
“The door opens at precisely 3:30. The teacher says goodbye to the previous parents and hello to me. I follow her across the room, where she seats herself on one side of a table and motions to two chairs on the other side.
“I choose the nearest, and that choice changes my life.”
All too often, this is exactly the way a brain injury starts—not specifically with a parent-teacher meeting or a chair, but with a random action at a random time. Contrary to common belief, most concussions—the lay term for mild traumatic brain injury—do not happen to professional athletes or occur in motor vehicle accidents. Most mTBIs happen to random people doing random things at random moments in their lives.
I can’t review my own book, but I can give you a sample of what you’ll learn if you read it:
In Canada, 400,000 people aged twelve and older sustained at least one mTBI in 2019.
While 70–85% of mTBI sufferers recover within days or weeks, at least 15% and as many as 50% have symptoms for months or years.
It is not necessary to lose consciousness or have amnesia to have had an mTBI. In fact, only about 10% of mTBIs include loss of consciousness.
It is not necessary to have taken a hit to the head to have had a concussion. The problem is not what happens externally, but what happens when the brain is bounced around inside the skull, and that can easily happen during any rapid acceleration-deceleration (whiplash-type) event.
Despite facts like these, people who suffer so-called mild traumatic brain injury are often treated dismissively, even by their own physicians.
Facts like these—and many more—gave rise to my book’s title. As concussion experts who are far more learned than I have noted, there’s no such thing as a “mild” traumatic brain injury. I support this contention with research on mTBI that I updated roughly annually and on the challenges of taking such an injury through a personal injury lawsuit, which are even greater now than they were when I was doing so.
No Such Thing is a must-read for anyone who might one day make a random choice in the middle of an unremarkable meeting. Which is to say all of us.
Stephen Kimber
I believe my book is well written and compelling, but rather than taking my word for it, read these words from Stephen Kimber, the award-winning journalist and author who co-founded and formerly directed the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing at University of King’s College in Halifax, from which I graduated in 2015:
“One day in the middle of an ordinary life, Lynne Melcombe went to what should have been an unremarkable meeting and made a random choice. No Such Thing: A True Story of “Mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery is her account of what followed that random choice—from the gaslighting, indifference, and ignorance of healthcare professionals to the gotcha tactics of shareholder-driven insurance company lawyers. No Such Thing is a painfully personal but powerful memoir of Melcombe’s struggle to heal from a so-called “mild” brain injury, but it is also a well-researched indictment of medical, legal, and political failure. It’s a must-read for anyone who might one day make a random choice in the middle of an unremarkable meeting. Which is to say all of us.”
Grief is not defined in the DSM V as a mental health issue, but I’m including it in my thematic series on mental health for two reasons: First, during several episodes of profound grief in my life, I was never quite in my right mind; and second, surviving grief calls on deep mental health reserves, without which one is at risk of diving into the bottomless pit of mental illness.
Lesley Buxton has been visited by more grief than most—enough to know that to survive and continue finding joy in life, she must have deep reserves of mental wellness. Buxton’s book, One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, tells the story of watching her only child die, over the course of years, of a rare neurological illness. Yet even amid her grief, she finds joy.
One Strong Girl is a deeply personal and moving memoir of living with loss. It’s no wonder this heartbreaking yet inspiring book won the inaugural Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction.
Mary Jane Grant is another person who has survived more episodes of grief than most. But when her husband suddenly left her after decades of marriage, something inside her demanded more attention. So, she went off to Europe and, in a tea shop one day, when taking in the fragrances of various blends, she started on the path that led to her book, A Cure for Heartache.
This slim volume recounts how she worked through her grief by teaching herself to experience “life’s simple pleasures, one moment at a time.” After my marriage ended, given that I was the one who ended it, I was surprised at the depths of my grief. A big part of my path out of it was learning the practice of mindfulness through, among other things, a course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which teaches a secular approach to meditation whose effectiveness in mental and physical health is supported by decades of properly executive research.
While Grant doesn’t write about attending any mindfulness programs or even use the word “mindfulness,” that is indeed what she describes. It is amazing to me that she learned to do this almost instinctively. That is mental health, and during Mental HEALTH Awareness Month, we need to be as mindful of using mental health to prevent mental illness as we are of specific mental illnesses like those discussed in last week’s post.
Laura Pratt’s Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition is another study in surviving the loss of a partner. After a passionate, six-year affair ends suddenly and without explanation, the author crawls through the rocky emotional terrain of her grief. What differentiates Heartbroken from many other books about grieving is the way the author has, in lyric prose, braided together the story of the love affair and her profound grief after it ends with psychological research and artistic depictions of love and loss.
This is one of the most poetic grief memoirs I’ve ever read. It amazes me that Pratt didn’t win a bucket or two of awards for it.
Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care, by Susan MacLeod, is less about the grief of losing a mother than of trudging day by day through the process of watching a mother die, slowly, while trying to find a safe and loving place for her to spend her final days. I remember this part of my mother’s life so well—her decline, searching for a nursing home, pushing emotions away until a more appropriate time.
After she died, it was as if each of those losses caught up with us one at a time; every time we thought we were finally adjusting to the permanence of her absence, another tidal wave of grief would wash over us. It was as if we were finally grieving each smaller loss in sequence over the year or two after her death. This is what I found myself reflecting on as I read MacLeod’s moving memoir, depicted in drawings that blended whimsical thoughts and self-deprecation with the pain of loss.
Walking the Camino: On Earth As ItIs, by Maryanna Gabriel, is another story of losing a mother, about as different from the previous one as it could possibly be. The back cover reads: “For Maryanna Gabriel, the unexpected death of her artistic mother would change everything in her life. More than just overcoming this loss, she felt that she needed answer, not from other, but from within herself …. At times meditative yet punctuated with humour, the story takes place in a compelling European tableau where legends of saints and miracles abide.”
Walking the Camino is not the first book I’ve read about this pilgrimage taken by thousands of people from across the globe every year. More than a decade ago, I edited a manuscript about an author’s years of long-distance hiking with his wife, part of which was completing the Camino walk in three stages over three consecutive years. I was compelled to want to do the same; I still haven’t done that, but Gabriel’s book is a welcome reminder that there are many ways to integrate life’s losses and move forward.
Many of us have sibling relationships that waver between love and tolerance (or worse) over the years. Most of us don’t have to face the tragic loss of a sibling far too young. Thompson’s memoir is a moving study in mental illness (her sister’s addiction) and mental wellness (integrating the loss of the same sister to cancer into her life).
I remember all too well my mother’s dying process. My father predeceased her by almost 20 years. Five years after he died, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She went 15 years later, outlasting her doctor’s predictions by five years.
By the mid-1980s it had become apparent that she’d no longer be able to live on her own. It was her choice to move into long-term care; she didn’t want to be a burden and nothing my sister or I said could change her mind. And, it would have been difficult. I had two young children with chronic illnesses; my sister was working full-time and working on her bachelor’s degree. So, at our mother’s insistence, we began investigating nursing homes.
We were going on tours of different facilities for four to six months before she found the one she’d move into. It was a newer facility in a lovely part of Vancouver, and the residents had private rooms. The staff were kind and competent and obviously cared about her. If she ever felt unhappy with the choice she’d made, she didn’t share it with us.
As I read Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care (Conundrum Press, 2021) by Susan MacLeod (class of 2021) in a single sitting, I was reminded that not every older person receives the loving care our mother did. Not all families are attentive or involved, as we were, and not all facilities take particularly good care of their residents.
Perhaps because it’s written as a graphic memoir, MacLeod is able to draw an unapologetically stark picture of the problems not only with long-term care but with the ageism that seems endemic to our culture. (Chapter 1 is called “I’ve Always Disliked Old People” and Chapter 2 is “I’ve Always Disliked Death.) She’s also unflinchingly honest about the flaws in her family of origin, including her own merciless bullying of her younger brother when they were children and her realization that just because she’s ready to be forgiven doesn’t mean he’s ready to forgive her.
Yet Mac Leod periodically lightens the tone of what could be an unrelentingly depressing topic with self-deprecating humour. For example, about once per chapter, we see a motif of a banner framing a cartoon tile that says, “Susan Seeks an Expert” or “Solution Susan Strikes.” My personal favourite: SYSTEMS THAT MAKE HUMANS INHUMANE. This comes up several times in the book and reminds me very much of the problems my sister and I have had with the care home our older brother is now living in.
With such a visual medium, it’s impossible to insert an excerpt of text and make it make sense, so instead I’ve included some of MacLeod’s full-page drawings to give a sense of her story and her skills as an artist/author.
Dying for Attention is such an easy read yet at the same time such honest and compelling reading that I think it should be available to anyone who’s considering a nursing home for an older loved one. At the very least, it should be required reading in programs for care aides.
March 8 was International Women’s Day, and the month of March is International Women’s Month. With a nod to both, with this post I acknowledge several books from the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program that further the cause of justice and equality for women.
It’s hard to pick just a few books. The program is dominated by women, all of whom I’d describe as feminist, and many of their stories are about women’s lives, whether their own or others. But if I’m going to stick strictly to books with a decidedly feminist theme, I’d choose these five:
Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America by Sheima Benembarek. This book was eye-opening for me. It honestly never occurred to me that a blue-haired, niqab-wearing, orthodox Muslim woman might be polyamorous. It doesn’t surprise me that a child from a Muslim family might be just as likely as a child from any other family to be transgender. But I have to admit some surprise—the good kind—in reading about a same-sex couple, both comedians, one a Palestinian-born Muslim the other a Jew from Montreal who perform individually and as a pair who starred in a Crave comedy special called Marriage of Convenience. The title of the book, Halal Sex, comes from a term for sex practiced within a heterosexual Muslim marriage. But Benembarek put a decidedly feminist twist on it by redefining it as “all consensual sex between adults.”
Every Boy I Ever Kissed: A Memoir by Nellwyn Lampert. I started calling myself a feminist at the age of 13. I was in way too much of a hurry to lose my virginity, which I did at 14. I had no idea of the connection between the two. But there is a connection, a pretty important one. And that connection is a major part of what Lampert wrestles with in this coming-of-age memoir. As the cover blurb says, “for Nellwyn Lampert, losing her virginity would turn out to be anything but simple. Her chosen partners struggled with porn-induced erectile dysfunction and other crises of masculinity. And in the bedroom, nothing went according to plan.” So, in that regard, our experiences were entirely different. But in terms of “the realities of sexual liberation, female empowerment, and masculinity,” the issues are not that different at all than the ones I was too young to realize I was doing with more than 50 years ago that sexual freedom and gender freedom are two very different concepts.
Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid. It’s a grim fact that Indigenous women make up only about 4% of the female population in Canada but accounted for 16% of all female homicides between 1980 and 2012. And a disturbing number of those women are abducted, raped, and murdered along a strip of highway in northern BC called the Highway of Tears. From the back cover: “Journalist Jessica McDiarmid investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate where Indigenous women and girls are over-policed, yet under-protected.” As difficult as this book was to read, it was just as difficult to put down. I can’t imagine a better lens through which to examine the intersection of racism and misogyny than through the horrific impacts of colonization by patriarchal white, European culture on Indigenous women and girls.
F Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism by Lauren McKeon. It’s always surprised me that when I say I’ve been calling myself a feminist since I was 13 but I haven’t always felt that feminism welcomed me, what many people seem to hear is that I don’t think feminism is necessary or relevant. In fact, I’m saying exactly the opposite—that feminism remains as relevant today as ever and that’s why it’s so important to ensure that ALL sorts of women feel a sense of belonging within the movement. That was my read on McKeon’s book. She recognizes that too many women have moved in the wrong direction instead of understanding that feminism is for every woman—that, indeed, until we are all free, none of us are free. Why has this happened? That, as McKeon points out, is a question for feminists to answer. And as women’s rights are being eroded daily, it’s becoming increasingly urgent that we answer it and ensure that all women feel that the arms of feminism welcome them.
Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening by Renée Pellerin. No woman in the western world isn’t familiar with the unique joy (she said sarcastically) of having her breasts pulled and twisted and squished between cold metal plates for their regular mammogram. In this book, Pellerin, an award-winning producer with the CBC, does a deep dive into the evidence supporting and opposing regular mammography screening. And her conclusion is that the evidence weighs strongly in favour of less screening. It’s supported by vested interests, false positives can lead to invasive overtreatment, false negatives can give women a false sense of security, its effectiveness differs significantly for different age groups, and regular exposure to radiation can, in a small number of cases, increase risk of cancer. It’s an eye-opening book that every woman should read and consider carefully before assuming that doctor’s orders should never be questioned.
Happy International Women’s Month and enjoy the reading!
I’ve been mostly absent for a couple of months, first because I was on a much-needed vacation, and since then because I’ve been devoting my time to a book project of my own.
I undertook the MFA program so I could learn to write, not just any book, but this book.
This book recounts my experience of and research related to a “mild” TBI (concussion) that I had over 20 years ago and from which I’ve never fully recovered.
My experience taught me that there is “no such thing” as a “mild” traumatic brain injury. That’s why I’ve called my book No Such Thing: A True Story of “mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery.
Most people recover from concussions in a few days—weeks at most.
But up to 30% of people don’t. Some go on having symptoms for months, even years.
I’ve never fully recovered from my injury. I felt a need to write a book about it for a few reasons.
Brain injury is very isolating. The injury itself—pain, brain fog, memory loss—can make it hard to communicate.
Many people—doctors, lawyers, co-workers, friends, family—don’t believe you. That makes the pain and isolation worse.
The stigma against people who pursue legal measures based on ongoing misperceptions about brain injury add stress and emotional trauma that complicate a person’s ability to recover.
There wasn’t much to support people going through this experience twenty years ago. Anyone going through it now deserves better.
At the time of my injury, I often felt like I was going crazy.
Doctors kept telling me I should be better. Lawyers put my life under a microscope. Family, friends, and coworkers acted—and sometimes said—I was just looking for attention and I needed to get over it.
But as years went by and social media exploded, I began hearing other people’s stories of not-so-mild traumatic brain injury. I began keeping abreast of current research that supported what they were going through.
Gradually, I stopped questioning my own perceptions.
When I wrote my book, I was writing the book I needed at the time.
I wrote it for the people who need it now, for those who love them, and for those who want to better understand this underestimated injury.
I finished my book a couple of years ago and, full of hope, I started looking for a publisher.
Every one of them responded the same way: timely topic, great story, well written, but I lacked enough of an audience to justify their investment in publishing it.
One of the things I learned in the MFA program was the necessity of building an audience while writing my book.
But while I was writing, I was coping with a divorce, navigating health issues, and rebuilding a freelance writing and editing business.
I was also managing the symptoms of my injury every day.
I lacked the ability to do it all.
At first, when I realized that no “real” publishers wanted my book, I felt like I’d failed.
But I also realized that if I gave up and left my book sitting in a virtual drawer, that would feel like failure too.
A hybrid publisher retains the quality controls conventional publishers rely on but with a requirement that authors cover production costs, as they would in self-publishing.
Iguana takes hybrid publishing a step further by asking their authors to crowdfund production costs. This ensures costs are covered and allows authors to test the market and build an audience for their book.
Iguana recommended Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform designed specifically for creators.
As I started building my Kickstarter campaign, an interesting thing happened.
I stopped feeling like I’d failed.
I realized that no matter how I publish my book, it will succeed based on same things as any other book—my research, my writing, and my promotional efforts.
That realization has renewed my confidence in my abilities, injected my efforts with energy, and restored my faith in the book I’ve written.
That’s where you come in.
I need your support to raise the $9,000 required to fund the production process—copy editing, layout, distribution. And I’m asking you to pledge whatever you can to help me get there.
Please go to my Kickstarter campaign page and learn more about why I feel my book is timely, important, and necessary.
Then consider backing my project with a pledge in any amount you can manage.
What’s in it for you?
If you pledge $10 or more, you’ll receive a reward tailored to the size of your contribution—an e-book, a signed paperback with No Such Thing bookmarks, or a book club special for buying in bulk.
If you pledge less than $10—even only $1—I’ll give you a shout-out on social media and add your name to the acknowledgements in my book.
If I don’t reach my $9,000 goal by March 15, my campaign will end and Kickstarter won’t collect any pledges.
You have nothing to lose.
What should you do next?
Well, you can click away to another page, if you want.
Or you can go to my campaign page, read more about my book, and consider making a pledge.
If you think my project is worth backing, click the button for a reminder when my campaign goes live on February 16. Then, if you still feel so inclined, pledge whatever you feel is right.
If you change your mind before my campaign ends, you can change or withdraw your pledge. No questions, no obligations.
I’ve never met a woman who doesn’t hate having her biennial mammogram. And why would any woman not hate it? It feels like the technician is trying to pull your breast right out of your chest and squash it as flat as a pancake between two very cold metal slabs.
Regardless, every two years, I receive a reminder letter that I’m due for my mammogram and I dutifully make my next appointment and get it done. It’s become such a regular part of women’s health care regimes once they’re past 40 that almost no one questions it.
Enter Reneé Pellerin (class of 2016), who questions it deeply in Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth about Breast Cancer Screening (Goose Lane Editions, 2018). Pellerin points out that, at best, research doesn’t clearly support screening programs, and at worst, it suggests they may cause harm.
In a cover blurb written by Dr. Brian Goldman, host of CBC’s White Coat, Black Art, the veteran ER physician writes, “Pellerin knows the science better than many of the doctors in whose hands women have placed their trust.” On that note, I’ll let Pellerin speak for herself. The following passages are taken from the beginning and the end of the introduction:
Based on the knowledge of the day and her own decade of experience, [Maureen] Roberts [the clinical director of the Edinburgh Breast Screening Project] expressed serious misgivings about the nationwide breast screening program launched in the United Kingdom the year before she died. She acknowledged … research that showed mammography screening reduced deaths from breast cancer by 30 percent. But she urged her readers to also consider other research that did not find benefit….
Then she asked, “If screening does little or no good could it possibly be doing any harm? We are all reluctant to face this…. There is also an air of evangelism, few people questioning what is actually being done,” she wrote. “Are we brainwashing ourselves into thinking that we are making a dramatic impact on a serious disease before we brainwash the public?” …
Toward the end of the introduction, Pellerin concludes:
The story of mammography screening is a story about science and medicine. It’s a story about hundreds of thousands of women who were participants in screening studies around the world. It’s a story about honest differences and sincere efforts to do good. It is also a story about vested interests, money, and greed….mammography is a multi-billion dollar industry that provides employment to radiologists, creates markets for the latest in imaging equipment built by multinational companies, and perpetuates the bureaucracy and infrastructure of government-run screening programs. Pink ribbon charities that benefit financially from our fear of breast cancer take advantage of paternalistic messaging around early detection. The desire to believe in early detection is intuitive and compelling with the result that women and their doctors become complicit in the conspiracy, if unwittingly.
It’s not unusual for scientists to disagree, and controversy in medicine is not surprising…. But nothing in medicine has ever generated as much controversy or conflict as mammography screening. The mammogram story is about much more than argument. Sadly, it is often about backstabbing, bullying, and deliberate suppression of information. These are the by-products of fear and hope.
If you’re a woman, or if you’ve ever loved a woman—partner, mother, daughter, sister—read this book. You may still go for your regular mammograms—I do—but with just a little more doubt in my mind than I ever used to have. And that’s not a bad thing.
I live with depression and anxiety. I do All The Things to reduce the extent to which they affect my daily life but, regardless, they are my companions. So, I know, on a personal level, what it is to look for a community where I feel accepted and understood as I am.
Jason Schreurs (class of 2022) wrote Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey Through Mental Health (Flex Your Head Press, 2023) to reach out to his community. Schreurs lives with bipolar disorder. Depression and anxiety are not fun, but the roller coaster ride of bipolar disorder? As my mother used to say, “Thank the lord for small mercies.”
Scream Therapy is what Schreurs promises to be: a message to people who, at some point in their lives stumbled into punk music, often by way of skateboarding, and found their community. Punk concerts are always screaming loud, the mosh pits are nothing I could ever trust, and sometimes the live performances are improv’d by musicians who assembled just that evening, for that evening only.
I’m the first to admit I don’t like hard core music. The heaviest metal bands I’ve ever enjoyed are the likes of Steppenwolf, Rush, and the Doors—easy listening compared with punk. But the thesis of Scream Therapy is not that everyone should like punk. The thesis is that an inordinate number of punk rockers feel strongly, as Schreurs does, that punk music saved their lives. Without the community they found in punk—a community that gave them a sense of belonging for the first time … well, ever—they would have ended their own lives.
Consider this passage about a man named Brian, now a middle-aged husband and dad with a day job that wouldn’t suggest anything about him as a person, much less how deeply he relies on punk music and the punk community for his mental health:
For Brian, leaving his parents’ house for a more stable environment allowed him to focus on turning his pain into positivity. Brian poured all he had into screaming in bands and organizing shows. At age 16, he booked a West Coast tour for Ashes, his first serious band. At 17, he went to Europe with Battery, the straight edge hardcore band his name became synonymous with for the next eight years. Between tours, Brian moved to Boston when he was 18 and set up one of the most popular recording studios of the ‘90s and ‘00s….
But depression creeped back into his life after opening the studio. He buried his internal turmoil and poured everything into the music, surrounding himself with a support network of bands like Gainesville, Florida’s Hot Water Music—unwavering rays of positivity with members that would do anything for him. It was the most amazing time of his life, but he kept his struggles hidden, stifling his inner doubt and emotional pain. “I was one of the most sought-after record producers for bands all over the world, and I felt like a failure.” Brian digs deep for the right words to make sense of that time. “The thing about depression is it’s not fucking reasonable. It doesn’t make sense.”
(Boy, do I understand that sentiment.)
Years later, Brian’s nervous system refused to hold back his depression any longer.… “I remember my wife saying to me, ‘You need to be doing music. You need to be writing.’ I had to force myself to think about my issues and acknowledge them and not let them grow and become corrosive.” One evening, Brian picked up a guitar in his basement. Less than 10 minutes later, he had the first song he’d written in 20 years. I picture his song as a battering ram, bashing the pain trapped inside. “I can’t express to you the weight that came off my shoulders.” Brian sighs and tells me singing and songwriting for his new melodic hardcore band Be Well is his daily therapy….
“I don’t know that I’ve ever felt such gratitude as I feel toward punk and hardcore,” he says. “It gave me a family and an avenue to find myself at multiple times in my life when I needed a community to hear me, and see me, and appreciate not only my strengths but my weaknesses.” Brian chokes up and pretends to clear his throat. I do the same. His words could be mine.
Not every type of music, or any art form, is for everyone. (I look at Jackson Pollock’s paintings and think What?) But there is a body of research on the importance of community to mental health, some of which Schreurs cites in Scream Therapy. It doesn’t matter what bring people together around as long as the community they create provides its members with a feeling of belonging, a feeling they have people to turn to as much to celebrate their victories as to seek support and reassurance when life sucks.
I don’t imagine I’ll ever care for punk music. But if Schreurs and his peers find in the punk community what they need to get through life, more power to them. And more power to Jason Schreurs for reaching out to whomever he can reach through his book as well as his podcast, also called Scream Therapy, and letting them know there are people out there that they, too, can turn to for support, laughter, joy, reassurance—or maybe just to have a really satisfying scream.
October 10 is World Mental Health Day. Here are some other books by MFA grads relating to mental health and the role of community in maintaining it:
This week’s post is not about a book—well it is, sort of; and it’s not about a UKing’s grad, although it is about someone who attended the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program.
Julia Nunes, who has cowritten two books on mental health with Scott Simmie, was in the class of 2016. We hit it off while we were in New York for the publishing residency. My book (which will be released in the spring) is about a concussion I suffered over twenty years ago now. She, too, was writing about concussion, focusing on her son, who was at that time lying in bed with, if memory serves, his second hockey concussion—crushing headaches, severe photophobia, disorienting dizziness, ongoing vomiting, the whole nine yards.
The first night we were in New York, I was out to dinner with Deirdre Macdonald (a peer in the class of 2015 who’s just released her MFA book project, Her Hat in the Ring: Toronto Milliner El Jamon and Her Circle). As we got up to leave, I slipped on a piece of tomato on the floor and fell backward, striking the back of my head on the corner of a table in almost exactly the same spot I had struck in 2003, when I sustained the concussion I was writing about.
I went by ambulance to the hospital (with Deirdre, bless her) and yes, I had another concussion. It nearly ruined my time in New York—headaches, dizziness, thankfully not vomiting—so I only attended a few of the lectures (couldn’t focus for long) and none of the social events (way too loud). By the last day, I was feeling a bit better, so Julia and I explored The Highline and walked around Strand Books.
I finished my degree that year; Julia didn’t get to finish the year because a short while later she fell and had a severe concussion. It took her months to recover. I think she’d hoped to return the following year, but then she suffered another concussion, and another (having one concussion increases the risk of having another).
So, she never finished her degree (or, as far as I know, the book about the inadequate way children’s sports teams were dealing with concussion in players). However, I recently read an excellent book called Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, edited by ED Morin and Jane Cawthorne (University of Alberta Press, 2021). Toward the end of this wonderful and vindicating anthology of essays is an essay by Julia Nunes called “The Next Hit.”
This excerpt hit home for me:
I attended a speech recently by a woman who lived first with post-concussion syndrome (PCS) and then with breast cancer. She shared a PowerPoint graph called “Sympathy by Casserole.” The comparison was stark: friends and family delivered more than sixty meals as she underwent chemotherapy versus zero meals post-concussion. Yet breast cancer, she said, was a breeze compared to PCS. The pain was less intense and the brain fog of chemotherapy had nothing on the confused, muddy state of the concussed mind.
I had something like this happen to me not long after my concussion. A friend who no longer lives on the Pacific Coast came into town with her husband for three months. In all that time, she found forty-five minutes for me but visited a friend who was dealing with breast cancer numerous times. When I expressed my hurt, she responded with something like, “Lynne, she has cancer. You bumped your head.”
No one really understands concussion until and unless they live through it; no one understands that while seventy to eighty-five percent of concussions heal within days, weeks, or months, the other fifteen to thirty percent can continue causing symptoms for years, even lifetimes.
Sadly, I know Julia understands—sadly because as much I’d like people to understand better, I wouldn’t wish a single concussion on anyone, much less multiple concussions.
If you’ve never had a concussion and would like to understand it better, read Impact, starting with Julia Nunes’ excellent essay, “The Next Hit.”
And if you’ve had a concussion and would like to see your experiences reflected accurately on a page, read Impact, starting with Julia Nunes’ excellent essay, “The Next Hit.”
Here are other books from the prolific graduating class of 2016:
Sit Still and Prosper: How a Former Money Manager Discovered the Path to Investing with Greater Clarity, Calmness, and Confidence, by Stephanie Griffiths. Review coming soon.
A Distorted Revolution: How Eric’s Trip Changed Music, Moncton and Me, by Jason Murray. Review coming soon.
So many new authors on this list! (For comparison, see the first list here.) Congratulations to all the newly published authors (at least since the first list), to all the authors who were published long before I reviewed your books, I’m reading as fast as I can, and to all the authors who’ve been published that I still haven’t got to … I’m reading as fast as I can! And to anyone reading this, if I’ve missed anything, gotten any details wrong, or in some cases don’t know the year you graduated, please let me know. And the winners are:
(Edited to add: Apparently I missed quite a few books that should go on this list. I’ve added them at the top of the list so you won’t miss them. There have been several more deals but the books aren’t out yet and I’m unable to find complete information about them.)
Barone, Rina (class of 20??) Art Always Wins:The Chaotic World of Avant-garde Pioneer Al Hansen, (press and year?)
Reid, Dylan, ed. (class of 2021) with Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, and John Lorinc, Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, Coach House Books, 2025. Review coming in 2026.
Gina’s extensive skill and training show in every word. From page 1, I’m hooked. It’s a rainy Wednesday evening—September 2, 1998—when the phone on Dr. John Butt’s bedside table rings. Swissair Flight 111 has gone down, killing all 229 souls aboard. Butt, Nova Scotia’s Chief Medical Examiner, takes a moment to absorb the news.
“The information doesn’t go straight to the action center in his brain,” Gina writes. “His plausibility muscle bats away the news so his mind has a minute to rev the mental engines.” In a classic example of writing so well the reader forgets they’re reading, her use of metaphor is so smooth that, after forty years as a writer and editor, I barely notice it. And when I do, I’m impressed.
Within the first chapter, she’s laid down an immense amount of exposition without ever slipping into information dumping. In a scant seven pages, she introduces nine characters, including just enough about each to make them memorable. Throughout the book, she most often refers to the multitude of people she interviewed by their first names, no doubt a deliberate choice to create intimacy in a story that might more easily be kept at arm’s length.
She uses verb tense to set mood: present tense when she writes about the disaster, conveying anguished immediacy, switching to past tense to for her present-day relationship with Butt. When done without thought, tense-switching can be jarring; I’ve critiqued dozens of editing clients for doing it unconsciously. In Gina’s hands, it’s as smooth as glass.
Focusing on Gina’s facility with the small choices a writer makes is not intended to minimize the skill with which she tackles larger issues. I remember her talking in class about a unique problem this story presented. Invited by the central character to write this book, he requested that it tell not only about the disaster that ended the lives of 229 people, forever changing life for countless bereaved friends and family and leaving an indelible imprint on everyone involved in recovering and identifying 15,000 bits of bodies instantly torn apart on impact with the cold, dark Atlantic. He also wanted to share his own story, that of a sensitive but difficult man, raised in an oppressive environment, who repeatedly alienated friends, family, and colleagues until coming to terms, late in life, with his homosexuality.
I recall wondering how she’d reconciled these two stories as I began reading. But I quickly forgot about it as I devoured the book, barely noticing the two disparate stories unfolding.
To say Gina’s writing is seamless, visually rich, alive with detail doesn’t do it justice. I wish I could find one passage, short enough to include in a blog post, that would show everything that impresses me about it. The following is just a taste:
A Sea King helicopter transports John from the morgue-in-construction at Shearwater to the Preserver. Above the scene of destruction, he gets the first glimpse of debris. Small boats dot the surface with larger boats stationed at the edges of the scene. The entire area, a portion of the sea that many fishermen call their workplace, is closed to all but those working on the recovery operation.
The ship’s doctor shows John to the bridge where Commander Town is waiting. During the night, it was Commander Town who managed the fishermen, military personnel, and other helpers on the water. Rick Town was the beacon in the dark. After a night receiving one horror after another from the small vessels on the scene, Town might need a guiding light of his own. From the Preserver’s bridge, John gets a closer look at the water. To the untrained eye, it’s a largely unidentifiable mass of scattered debris, but John sees the human remains for what they are. Floating viscera mingles with hunks of caramel-coloured foam from the seat cushions, clothing, teddy bears, and luggage. Now he understands why they don’t know how to deal with the situation. It’s not as easy as putting bodies in bags and counting them off in whole numbers.
In lesser hands, this could have been an impossible story to tell. Instead, it’s a deeply personal, profoundly compassionate, extensively researched, and intimately told tale of one of the worst air disasters in Canadian history, and the enigmatic man who had the grizzly task of sifting through the eponymous 15,000 pieces of humanity. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
