A Writing Tip by Michael Hardin
CHART YOUR OWN PATH

About forty years ago, the poet Cynthia McDonald told me I was a much better reader than writer. I think she meant it as a compliment, but it’s been one of those things I’ve tried to prove wrong. What I’ve learned in the interim helped me understand her judgment and how she may have been right—at the time—because she and I were both looking at my work from very limited perspectives.

In 2016, I read an article in the BBC about a newly discovered condition, aphantasia, in which one cannot create visual images. I was shocked: you mean, people can actually see things in their minds—that wasn’t just a metaphor? 

Over the past decade, I have learned more about how my brain and my mental processes are rather different from 97% of the population. I’m multi-sensory aphantasic—so I also cannot recreate sounds in my head or even emotions—combined with childhood trauma, OCD, and mild autism. 

I have realized that my expectations for writing were based on a frightening, neurotypical model. Linear, visual, conventional. None of that was me. 

About three years ago, something just clicked. I had thought of myself as a poet since the 1980s, and I had tried to write a memoir. Neither had been able to represent how I understood things. I had to create a new form. Initially, I thought of the pieces as prose poems, but editors rejected them, so I submitted them as creative nonfiction, and they were taken. No narrative. Fragments. Quotations. Disjointed. Autobiographical. 

So, what is the takeaway from this? 

Sometimes, even after an undergraduate concentration in Creative Writing, an M.A. in CNF, and an M.F.A. in Poetry, you have to throw all that instruction out if it doesn’t fit the way you experience the world. Sometimes, you have to chart your own path.

Michael Hardin, originally from Los Angeles, lives in Danville, Pennsylvania, with his wife and three Pekingese. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Born Again, from Moonstone Press (2019); has had poems and flash CNF published in Seneca Review, Wisconsin Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, Moon City Review, Lunch Ticket, among others; and has been nominated for a Pushcart. He teaches at Wilkes University.

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