Tag Archives: I Was Once the Writer Kelly Davio

An Interview with Kelly Davio

30 Nov

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 Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

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How to Knock Your Characters Back to Square One

28 Nov

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.”

Here’s another maxim of workshop: Stories are built out of broken routines. It’s a true and useful piece of advice, but when taken too directly, it can lead to a thousand versions of “A funny thing happened on the way to the ____.” While many stories eventually reach a sentence that rephrases that line, what happens before they do can make or break what comes next.

A great example of building and breaking routine in an interesting way can be found in Kelly Davio’s essay “I Was Once the Writer Kelly Davio.” It was originally published at Change Seven Magazine and is included in her new book It’s Just Nerves: Notes on a Disability.

How the Essay Works

The essay begins with a straightforward presentation of a routine:

I’m pretty good at falling. Over the past few years of living with a progressive neuromuscular disease, I’ve learned how to come down on the flats of my hands without jamming my wrists, and even if my knees bruise, I can always wear something that covers the worst of the marks so I don’t look like the victim of some kind of alarming knee-related crime.

Soon, she adds to it:

Finally, I had to admit I needed a cane; there were times when I had no shoulder to hang from, and I needed a better strategy than hoping I’d magically stay upright every moment I was alone.

So, I did it: I ordered myself a green paisley cane. Fifteen bucks, two days, and some free Prime shipping later, and I was in business.

Between her practice at falling and her new cane, Davis is doing pretty well. But then she attends AWP, the big conference for writers. She’ll see people she knows, people who will be surprised at the cane and her appearance, and so a wrench is thrown into the gears of the routine:

Heaving myself out of the car with my cane, I felt like a grade school kid worrying about what the schoolyard bullies would say about her coke-bottle glasses—my new accessory was a necessity, but something that made me uncomfortably visible.

Things at the conference go well. She even gets quoted at a panel discussion she’s attending, a writer’s dream exceeded in pleasure only by seeing a stranger reading your book. She’s feeling good…and then the routine gets broken (or remade):

It was while shuffling through the corridors with my renewed sense of confidence that I felt the fist in my back. A man walking behind me had, for no reason I can imagine, punched me between the shoulder blades.

I flew forward. I came down, knees cracking hard on the concrete floor, trying to fall so that I wouldn’t injure myself, but failing in the brute surprise of it all.

The usual order of a routine break goes like this: routine, introduction of some new and disruptive element, no more routine. But Davio has done something that is at once more realistic and more interesting. She develops a routine and then adapts it to her surroundings and changes she cannot control. She rolls with the punches, so to speak, until one literally knocks her down. That punch also knocks her back to the conditions that existed before her routine began, when she was not yet “pretty good at falling.” The question for the reader becomes this: What will happen now that she’s back at square one?

The Writing Exercise

Let’s create, break, and remake a routine, using “I Was Once the Writer Kelly Davio” by Kelly Davio as a model:

  1. Find the conditions that force your character to create a routine. For Davio, it’s the physical condition that causes her to fall. Most of us know our own conditions. For me, I don’t buy chips or candy because I know that I’ll eat it all in one feeding. I have plenty of will power—except around those things. Other people avoid or seek out other items or experiences. This step goes hand-in-hand with the creation of the routine. What does your character (or, in the case of essay and memoir, you or your people) need to seek out or avoid? Why?
  2. Let the routine adapt to failure. Davio needs to avoid falling but cannot. So, she gets better at falling. What she avoids is not falling itself but the dangerous landing. If a routine removes your character from danger completely, it’s probably not a good routine—at least for story purposes. (In real life, it might be a great routine.) How can you make the conditions from the previous step unavoidable or impossible to embrace (if sought out)? In other words, how can you make the routine a matter of dealing with the conditions but not changing them completely?
  3. Continue to adapt. Davio eventually buys a cane. Falling well is no longer sufficient or possible. What happens when your character’s routine no longer works as well as it needs to? What does your character add, remove, or change?
  4. Introduce a moment of doubt. For Davio, this comes when she enters a new place: a conference as opposed to her home and usual surroundings. For your character, what change or shift in setting or situation makes the chronic conditions seem suddenly more intense or more dangerous?
  5. Let the character thrive—at least for a moment. For a while, Davio has a terrific conference experience. It’s a relief to her and also to her readers, who are dealt a reprieve from the dread of wondering what bad thing will occur. As a general rule, avoid ramping up your plot or complications in an orderly or predictable way. If things seem to be getting worse (or better), change up the trend.
  6. Knock your character back to life before the routine. For Davio, this happens literally. She started the essay by learning to fall well, but now she has fallen badly. The pivotal moment in her story, then, is both the introduction of something new and disruptive (the guy who punches her) and also a return to the original conditions as they existed before she adapted to them with her routine. What new element could return your character to square one?

The goal is to create a trend (problem, solution, fine-tuned solution) and then break it in a way that play toward and against the reader’s expectations.

Good luck.

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