This was a disease that in epidemic form began in the United States it was largely a disease of the West in the twentieth century. Some of it obviously has to do with the fact that the President of the United States had it, and that makes for a whole different ball game, but there was something uniquely American about this crusade. I was trying to figure out in the book exactly how that occurs. What was really extraordinary to me was that this was a disease that, in terms of numbers, had far fewer victims than childhood cancer, even accidents, and yet it became a sort of national disease.
BLP MODEL WHAT IS A BLIND WRITE SERIES
I was trying to show a series of narratives both on the personal level and on the national level that pushed this so-called polio crusade forward. The difference is that when you are writing about an epidemic that comes back year after year, there is a kind of national bewilderment there is a fear, an anxiety. I knew it had to do with electricity, so I just started posing rhetorical questions to myself as my character: What it would be like to be struck by lightning? Then I would build up the character’s experience from there.ĭO: In Polio, I was writing about illness, but I was also writing about an epidemic. Here I am, the poet: make up some words, don’t pay too close attention you get the spirit not the letter. The only thing I knew was that it was a kind of electrical disorder-neuroelectrics. It’s always the character’s own account of having his experience, of having this disorder it is experiential rather than objective. It would never be a subject in and of itself it would always be a predicate of the character who suffered from it. So the way that I ended up dealing with writing about epilepsy is I decided that I would not write about it objectively or in a clinical manner. I was worried about making the story of my characters vulnerable to misinterpretation because readers would bring to the text popular prejudice or popular ideas about epilepsy and seizure disorders.
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I felt like I couldn’t not write about the epilepsy.Īlthough, on the other hand, if it had been negotiable I never would have written about it precisely because one of the difficulties I wanted to avoid was thinking about how illness, and particularly an illness like epilepsy, has a number of popular narratives that surround it. So that abandonment resonated through the subsequent generations of my family-I think of it as the Book of Genesis or the Book of Exodus of our family’s personal mythology. As a consequence, he found out about those plans and abandoned the family. Apparently, in the ’20s in Maine if you had epilepsy you would be a candidate for being taken to such a place. He found out about his wife’s plans to have him sent to a place called the Maine Insane Hospital because they were so poor and she didn’t know what to do with him. The load-bearing dramatic premises of Tinkers are factual and one of these given facts of my family’s history is that my great-grandfather had epilepsy.
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Paul Harding: One of the interesting things about writing Tinkers was using old family stories, my maternal grandfather’s family stories, about growing up impoverished in northern rural Maine in the earlier part of the twentieth century. I think those were the two major responsibilities. What I was trying to do was show the arrogance on the one hand of medical science, which had basically closed the door on this particular field, and on the other hand an anti-vaccine movement that does not have the historical sense of what we had gone through years ago. I mean, there’s no reason to write another book on polio unless you think you have something new to say.
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Hopefully, you add new material to a story. The responsibility of the illness narrative writerĭavid Oshinsky: You want to tell a narrative that has the power to reach beyond your colleagues and go to the general public-to reach well beyond the academic world into the larger world of the intelligent reader-and really connect the two. This conversation was supported by the Pulitzer Prize Campfire Initiative, hosted by the NYU Center for the Humanities, and is part of the BLP Conversations series from Bellevue Literary Press, featuring dialogues that explore the creative territory at the intersection of the arts and sciences.
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In honor of the Pulitzer Prize centennial celebrations, Paul Harding, author of Tinkers (2010 winner for Fiction), and David Oshinsky, author of Polio: An American Story (2006 winner for History), sat down to discuss the responsibility of the writer in treating questions of medical science, and the power of authorial imagination to evoke the lived experience of illness in fiction and nonfiction.