Risky Stories: A Conversation with Alysia Sawchyn
Long before I met her, I read Alysia Sawchyn’s essays in Catapult, Brevity, Diagram, and elsewhere. I admired her ability to write with such confidence, sharing parts of herself that other essayists often shied away from or tiptoed around. I wanted to write like that too. I imagined a larger-than-life writer, bold and forceful.
When I finally met Alysia in real life, her gentle kindness stunned me. Her new collection of essays A Fish Growing Lungs hit me the same way—her honest, unwavering focus on the uncomfortable meshing with a grace she extends to herself and others. Her writing is generous, both in how she shares hard, vulnerable parts of herself and how she views life.
Sawchyn’s essays in Fish explore her experience being misdiagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, and the path she took through and past that. But the book is so much more than an exploration of mental illness or labels. Fish is about story-telling, relationships, and self-discovery.
I was thrilled to interview Alysia about her new collection, writing about the self, and the role of personal change on and off the page.
Hannah Grieco: As someone who struggles with mental illness and who often writes about the topic, I found your essays fascinating on so many levels. The idea of what mental illness even is—both diagnostically and in terms of the roles medication, therapy, etc., play—all of it becomes this whirlwind of searching and learning about yourself. I finished your book with more questions than answers, like I had work of my own to do. What do you hope readers will feel upon finishing?
Alysia Sawchyn: I mean, honestly, I’m still figuring stuff out. A teacher of mine told me early into my drafting process that one of the hardest things about writing the self or personal experience is that if you take too long, you may change your mind! I think it’s the questioning and the seeking that’s really important. Every few years I look back and I cringe at one thing or another from my life, and at this point it seems like my choice is to be forever cringing, indicating, hopefully, some sort of growth, or to remain an ass. I guess my hope for the reader then is to just be open to the idea of change. I think as humans, we or at least I am so resistant to change but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. And we’re always changing! Why not learn to get comfy with it to some extent?
HG: In “Indie Night at the Goth Club,” a music-drenched essay that on the surface looks at past friendships and behavior during your Thursday night club outings, you wonder if you will “always feel needlessly pitted against the world.” This idea comes up again and again in this collection, this grasping at identity. From what mental illness is (and isn’t) to drugs/medications, to what you wear, who you love, what you read and write—you circle this notion of self. And in the end, you have recovered from many things but are still in limbo. In terms of your process: did you write this collection with the intention of it being a book, or did you find your essays were all linked by this similar theme of identity and misdiagnosis?
AS: I always knew I wanted Fish to be a book, though some of the essays weren’t written with the book in mind. Most notably: “Gutted” and “Notes from the Cliff Face.” The first was submitted to a fiction workshop with a very understanding professor (sorry, John!), and the latter was originally mashed up with a bunch of Doors lyrics and more about the actual hike up Old Rag itself. As the collection was coming together, though, it seemed clear that they both actually belonged within it, and so I edited them accordingly.
HG: Did any of the essays lead to pieces that you hadn’t considered or planned to write?
AS: Since I knew I wanted it to be a book from the beginning, I’d planned out most of the pieces in advance. My guiding structural metaphor was a kaleidoscope, and so each essay looked at the misdiagnosis from a different perspective—food, cutting, cocaine, etc. So while there was definitely discovery that happened in the writing process within each essay, I don’t think any of them sparked an entirely new offshoot. One that I hadn’t initially planned was “Wellness Alphabet”; I wrote that essay later in the collection-drafting process because I wanted a piece that tied together all the themes of the book.
HG: Were there any essays you considered not including? Any that you left out?
AS: I initially had an essay in my manuscript that spent a lot of time unpacking what exactly a bipolar diagnosis meant in terms of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and how that had changed over the years. This was back during my MFA years. The piece was very quote-heavy and very exposition-heavy, and one of my thesis readers suggested I cut it. I was, of course, just dying inside when I heard that, and then I waited some months and revisited the draft and he was totally right. I took some of the better paragraphs and put them into “Wellness Alphabet,” but on the whole that essay really existed as an exhibit of my research process. Writing it helped me articulate and understand the larger arcs and emotional changes that underlay the collection and make sense of it for myself, but the reader didn’t need to see all that.
HG: “Withdrawal” is a tough read that explores both withdrawal from prescribed medications and withdrawal from the identity related to a long-accepted diagnosis. That whole period of years distilled into one short, distanced series of doctor’s notes. And underneath, this bubbling of huge feelings. So subtle and yet I finished the essay stunned, had to re-read it and think on it for days. What was the process involved in that particular essay? How did you decide on that form and why?
AS: “Withdrawal” was one of the last pieces I wrote in the collection. In general, I wrote the more “recent” essays, those in the last third of the book, last. It was such an ungainly baby. Like “Wellness Alphabet.” I was writing it because I felt like it needed to be in there. Where “Wellness Alphabet” was a question of wanting to tie together the book’s themes, “Withdrawal” was more about needing to explain what the more medical ramifications of a misdiagnosis were for me and how they came about. Without it, I feel like the reader would have been left asking, “Okay, so you were misdiagnosed, but how did you find out about that?” It was hard to write about for two reasons: 1) the span of time was very, very long with bursts of “nothing” happening for several years and 2) I was/am still salty about the withdrawal process and how awful it was, and I find that active resentment doesn’t usually make for my best writing.
Part of the research process for this collection was getting copies of my former psychiatrists’ notes, so I think that aspect of the essay was lurking in my subconscious. From a craft perspective, adopting this omniscient-ish voice allowed me to have control over the tone of “Withdrawal” which I think would have been more difficult to navigate were it written from the traditional first-person point of view. The timeline bit, which I think came first, was an Aha! moment I had on campus. If I remember correctly, I literally ran down the hall into my thesis director’s office and half-shouted, “WHAT IF I MAKE THIS ESSAY A TIMELINE?”
He is a very patient human.
HG: As an essayist, I’m always walking this line of what is and isn’t okay, in terms of others’ stories. In this collection, you stay very focused on your experience as the people you love orbit you. How do you, as a writer and writing teacher, decide on what is and isn’t “allowed” or fair to write about, when your stories intersect with those of others?
AS: I’ve got two different answers to this question. As a teacher, I tell students that they have to make their own decisions. I haven’t yet been confronted with a piece of student writing that has prompted me to ask this question directly of anyone, but it is something we broadly talk about. True stories are risky—I think that’s part of why we read them! The TL;DR version of my teaching statement is this: there’s a huge range of approaches to this, from Anne Lamott’s “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better” to an editor I once heard say that she gives edit/veto power to every person who appears in her writing. And then I tell them about my personal practice, which is always slowly evolving, but goes something like this: I try to be as hard on myself as I am on others, and I try not to write about other people’s trauma in an identifiable way if it hasn’t directly affected me.
Getting into the nitty-gritty of writing Fish, I gave my parents a copy of the manuscript once it was accepted for publication, but they didn’t read it until it came out. I think my dad is still not finished with the book, actually. I interviewed one of the people in “Three Men” for the writing of it, and he got to read and give feedback on the essay, and then I sent Alice a copy of “Go Ask Alice” before it was first published in Catapult (pre-book). And then the friend trio in “Indie Night,” Arizona, Felicity, and Mark, got to see a draft before it was published. Arizona saw an earlier draft where she was described as a flamingo instead of a sandhill crane, which is now a running joke between us that she will never forgive me.
HG: Who is the intended audience for your collection? Who do you wish would read it?
AS: In reality I am still stunned that my little orange baby exists in the world and that people are actually reading it. I’m grateful that anyone would read my writing. Obviously, people struggling with mental health or people who have a loved one struggling with it. And then, as I start to dream: like, I hope Esme Wang reads it one day.
HG: If you could curate a bookshelf for A Fish Growing Lungs to sit on, what other books would surround it?
AS: One of my dear friends recently sent me a photo of my book on her bookshelf and it made me feel so warm and cozy, like my baby was being snuggled by all these other babies. I haven’t been in a bookstore since… I can’t remember now, and as vain as it sounds, I’d love to physically see Fish in a store, just nestled into a community of other books. To actually answer your question though—half of these titles are thematically related to Fish and others were my craft inspirations, especially in terms of structure and rendering myself as a character among characters: The Mockingbird Years by Emily Fox Gordon, Notes From No Man’s Land by Eula Biss, A Bestiary by Lily Hoang, My Body is a Book of Rules by Elissa Washuta, Lying by Lauren Slater, and Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward.
Alysia Sawchyn is a Features Editor at The Rumpus. Her essay collection about misdiagnosed mental illness, A Fish Growing Lungs, was published by Burrow Press in June 2020. You can find her on Twitter @happiestwerther.
Hannah Grieco is a writer and advocate in Arlington, VA. She is the CNF editor at JMWW, the fiction editor at Porcupine Lit, and the founder and organizer of the monthly reading series “Readings on the Pike.” Find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on Twitter @writesloud.