It’s Time to Read (and Write) Like You Give a Damn!

“It’s time to read like you give a damn!” is the tagline admonishment to the University of Washington Health Sciences Common Book series, of which my book, Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling Through the Safety Net, was this last academic year’s Common Book. I have added “write like you give a damn!” to remind me of why I write, why I read, and why I do the work that I do. It is the moral imperative of working towards a socially just world. As George Orwell stated so eloquently in his essay “Why I Write,” there are four great reasons to write:

1. Sheer egoism
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm
3. Historical impulse
4. Political purpose—”and political purpose in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive for.”

Catching Homelessness was published a year ago today. I am grateful for what the years of researching, writing—and living—the book have taught and continue to teach me. I think about the wise words of Sherman Alexie (as quoted by the wise woman author and teacher Pam Houston—whose 1992 book Cowboys Are My Weakness is partially responsible for my cross-county move to Seattle in 1994). This is from a reading Alexie gave in July at the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Rez program:

“How are you going to tell your story, so that people who don’t know anything about your story get something from it. And you are not in charge of what they get. Sure, you are vulnerable, but you are still a storyteller.”

Sherman Alexie was speaking about his new memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017), which is mainly the story of his complicated grief for his mother, Lillian Alexie, who died several years ago. And about the health effects of intergenerational trauma that he has experienced. In his memoir, Alexie writes about his childhood growing up in poverty on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State—about his serious health issues and childhood sexual abuse—about his mother’s rape and discovering that she is the product of a rape. I am dismayed at the insensitive (and as I read it, racist and misogynistic—questioning, for instance, the veracity of his mother’s rape) June 13, 2017 NYT review by Dwight Garner “Sherman Alexie’s Complicated Grief for his Mother.”

Alexie, in a recently published open letter, writes eloquently about the re-traumatizing and triggering effects on him that having his memoir out in the world has had. He states that he needs to “take a big step back and do most of my grieving in private.” While his memoir remains in the public domain, he has canceled the rest of his promotional tour events for the rest of the year in order to take care of his mental health—to tend to the ghosts of his mother and ancestors.

I applaud his letter and his honesty. I also understand what he means when he writes of ghosts and hauntings. Part of my motivation for writing Catching Homelessness was to deal with the presence of ghosts in my childhood and my life, which were and are marked by intergenerational trauma. One of the most frequent questions I have been asked by readers of my book is something along the lines of, “But tell me, did you really see the ghosts you write about?” As if a memoir, a book of non-fiction, cannot include something as unverifiable—as poetic— as a ghost? As if an educated, scientifically-grounded person cannot believe in, much less write about believing in, ghosts?  I imagine that the person asking me this question has had a fairly easy life. I’d like to think that they realize—at least at some level—their privilege in that regard and are genuinely attempting to reach for some level of empathy and understanding for what it is like to be haunted.  That is what “reading like you give a damn!” is all about: at the very least it is stepping outside your own comfort zone, finding the capacity for empathy leading to action.

And here I share the thought-provoking outreach packet for Catching Homelessness, put together by my social-justice-in-action colleagues at the University of Washington. 2016-2017 Outreach Packet copy