Last fall, I wrote an essay entitled “25 Fragments.” In short, it’s 25 micro-essays that consolidated to a larger narrative, based on my tumultuous relationship with mental health and SSRI medications. Although this will sound impossible from the synopsis I just gave, I enjoyed writing it.
I got the idea for the essay after we read, and I presented on, 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso in Dr. Schmitt’s creative nonfiction workshop. To that point in my career I’d mostly read and written essays using a traditional time progression and form. However, after years of doing this, I was bored and I felt welcomed by the community of the classroom to try something new, to possibly fail, so I went for it. Specifically, I wrote the “fragments” in no particular order, printed them out, cut them up, and laid them flat on my floor. I spent hours, days, weeks—forever— positioning and repositioning them while my cats continually attempted to ruin the whole process by stepping and sleeping on them. The physicality of printing out and placing the piece gave me a deeper understanding of craft, why I write, and why I needed to write this essay. Specifically, seeing all of my bouts with mental health in fragments allowed me to push the narrative outward, to a greater meaning than just myself, something I said was my goal when starting the MFA. Because it was so different from anything I’d done, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go over, but in workshop Dr. Schmitt and my peers encouraged me to revise and submit. And, if anyone knows my writing better than me, it’s my workshop peers. So, I revised it a few more times and sent it out.
Months later, after the holidays and AWP and the start of pandemic and the completion of the spring semester, I felt stuck in everything and I was in the middle of a mid-day nap, waiting for the world to end or to get going again, when I got an email from The Southampton Review telling me the essay had won their annual nonfiction contest. I was surprised, because it had been rejected fourteen times before this. I immediately got up, emailed them back, and then started on the next essay in my collection.
Professor Bucak emailed me as soon as the award was announced. She suggested I use some of the money to buy something, an object, something responsible but tangible, she said, that could embody the accomplishment. I still haven’t gotten around to doing this, but I thought about it a few weeks ago when I was in a Zoom meeting with Dr. McKay and she asked about the paintings of two ravens behind my head. I told her that the art was my partners and that I didn’t know anything about it. However, what I didn’t tell her is that nothing in my home belongs to me, it’s all his, because the same mental health issues I wrote about in the essay have caused me to throw away all of my things too many times; that I have lived so many lives unrecognizable to this one; that I have been so many different people; that everything has felt like multiple fragments until this very moment.
As I wrote this, emails poured in from my undergraduate students, my thesis advisor, and seemingly everyone else. However, I can currently hear parrots chirping in the tree outside the window behind my laptop, and I can see lizards slinking around the branches, and can feel my anxiety rise over the amount of time I’ve spent on this instead of my thesis, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to use some of the contest money to buy something, anything, I can look at that will remind me of my time here. I’m not sure what I’ll do, or where I will go, but I know I want to carry some part of my experience at FAU forward.
Matthew Hawkins is a queer writer from West Virginia, Ohio, and Chicago. He is currently an MFA candidate at Florida Atlantic University and the Co-EIC of Alien Magazine. Recent work of his is featured or forthcoming in Fugue, The Normal School, and The Southampton Review. You can find him on Twitter: @catdad667.
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