Kelly Davio is the author of the new essay collection It’s Just Nerves: Notes on a Disability.
Kelly Davio is a poet, essayist, and editor. She’s the author of essay collection, It’s Just Nerves and the poetry collections, Burn This House and The Book of the Unreal Woman, forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2019. She also writes the sometimes-column “The Waiting Room” for Change Seven Magazine, and her work has been published in a number of other journals including Poetry Northwest, The Normal School, Vinyl, The Toast, Women’s Review of Books, and others. She is one of the founding editors of the Tahoma Literary Review.
To read an exercise about creating story by making and breaking routine, inspired by Davio’s essay “I Was Once the Writer Kelly Davio,” click here.
In this interview, Davio discusses writing with audience reaction in mind, figuring out essay length, and ordering essays within a collection.
Michael Noll
Perhaps my favorite part of the essay “I Was Once the Writer Kelly Davio” is the moment at the end you begin with “This is the part of the story when I am supposed to…” How much of that “supposed to” comes from previous essays that you’ve read and stories you’ve heard and how much of it comes from just anticipating what the reader’s reaction to your story might be?
Kelly Davio
Part of that response comes from the way that friends reacted when I told them about the incident that the essay circles around. People were upset on my behalf and were well meaning, but they mostly told me “I hope you punched the guy,” or “I would’ve called security and gotten him thrown out of the building,” or even “I wouldn’t let someone get away with that.” It became clear to me pretty quickly that, somehow, people thought I did something wrong in how I handled myself, and that if they were in my place, they’d know how to perform my role in a way that had a more satisfactory ending. As a person with feelings, that frustrated me. As a writer, it was an interesting human behavior that I wanted to investigate a little further.
Another part of the “supposed to” comes from the really simplistic ways that we treat disability in pop culture; when I think about films or books that have characters who use mobility aids of any kind, I can’t think of a single one in which that medical device isn’t turned into a prop that the character has to “overcome” in order to have a breakthrough of some kind. I wanted to subtly underscore the fact that that cinematic expectation has bled over into how we think people in very real circumstances should be expected to act.
Michael Noll
The incident that you write about in the essay is pretty awful, yet it doesn’t actually arrive on the page until over half of the way through. Did you ever try putting it at the front–that’s what young writers are told, right? To get the reader’s attention? Did you always think of the incident as part of a series of falls?
Kelly Davio
Kelly Davio’s essay collection It’s Just Nerves: Notes on a Disability led Sheila Black to write, “If you want to know what it feels like to be a person with a disability in the 21st century, read this book.”
You know, I never did try the essay in any other order, even though many of my essays do start in the middle and then circle back to the circumstances that brought the action about. In this particular essay, I liked starting where I did because it gave me a chance to win the reader over a bit. I felt that, if I could get the audience onboard with the voice and the humanity of the person telling this story, maybe they’d care what happened to that person later.
I didn’t really think about the punch as being a fall in a literal sense, but it did seem to me like a type of fall—a falling of expectations that I had of others in my community of writers, or maybe even a fall from grace in being a “good” sick person who takes crummy treatment without complaint.
Michael Noll
I wonder if you could talk a bit about essay form and your approach to it. Most of your essays are a few pages long and were published originally (like most essays written today) in online journals. How much of their length, scope, and structure has been dictated by how they’re read and where they’re published (online versus in print)? On the other hand, “Our NHS” is quite long. What prompted the change in length and form?
Kelly Davio
Most of these essays did appear online first, as you say, and I wrote them with specific word counts in mind for the venues that were publishing them. When I was writing for The Butter, for example, 500 words per piece was about right for the format and the audience. It was also about right for the pace at which I was writing the essays; my column appeared every two weeks, so I needed to write shorter material if I was going to have enough time to get each piece into publishable shape on deadline.
That’s a pretty tight word count, though, and when I was putting the entire collection together, I didn’t want the whole book to read as a series of snappy takes, as though I was the Dave Barry of disability. That’s why I wrote some longer-form pieces, like “Our NHS,” that didn’t appear anywhere else before they came out in the book; I wanted to give the reader a chance to settle in a little bit, as though they were driving on a nice, open highway after a lot of stop-and-go traffic.
It was also enjoyable for me to write some longer, researched pieces, because that challenged me as a writer in different ways than short pieces did; brief essays don’t really have as many structural options to work with, but an extended essay can be put together in any number of different ways, and I found it really pleasurable to puzzle out how I wanted them to gel and how I wanted them to connect the shorter pieces in the book.
Michael Noll
What was your approach to ordering the essays in this collection?
Kelly Davio
I didn’t intend for these essays to be ordered chronologically, but as I shuffled the table of contents around, it made more and more sense that some of the first essays I wrote would open the book, and that I’d move toward the most recent.
There are some exceptions, but in general, I wrote these essays about topics that were immediate to me; in many cases, the pieces in the collection were written within a few days or weeks of the incidents that they describe, so ordering the book in a chronological way allowed me to present a coherent narrative set in a mostly contained time interval.
You pointed out earlier that I break with advice that’s often given to writers (about getting right into action). I’m also a big fan of ignoring advice about letting situations cool off so that you can gain perspective before writing about them. Some of the pieces that I’m happiest with are ones that I started working on right in the thick of the events that they revolve around. Those essays needed a lot of revision, of course, but there’s a kind of immediacy and unvarnished openness that (for me, anyway) comes with writing in the moment, and that’s something I want to give the reader. I don’t want to duck behind cleverness or distance—I want to be brave enough to be earnest.
November 2017
Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.
Read to Write Stories 
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