How can I best provide workshop feedback to a brain injury survivor?
She joined a (paid for) class and has submitted a memoir excerpt. She said she’s writing to give people hope. She’s a serial self-publisher and from what I can tell, doesn’t usually use proofreader/ editor and prints stacks of these memoirs and gives them away to homeless shelters and hospices altruistically. She was originally going to provide an excerpt from one she has published previously, but we asked that it be an unpublished piece as it’s a writing workshop.
Anyhoo. It’s a memoir in a series of narrative poems and I’m really struggling. She sees them as a series of essays in hope and different helpful tips in how to get through different difficult situations.
Reading it as an insight into the workings of the mind of a traumatic brain injury survivor, it’s brilliant. (It’s rhyming narrative, with the rhyming words chosen from repeated cliches. I’m choosing to see this as intentional, and it leads to some really provoking and challenging juxtapositions.) But there is no context.
It’s impossible to tell what has happened to her, or even what is happening during this series of presumably memoir vignettes. There is nothing to hold onto. No event or time or anything concrete. Just interlocking words. Not even stream of consciousness, where you could follow a path of thought.
If this is the point, it’s genius. And it just needs context and I can absolutely provide some feedback on this basis.
There is a lot of gospel-train imagery. Iron bells, crew members. It’s as though the phrase ‘gospel train’ popped into your head and you conjured it literally as the congregation offering hallelujahs and egg sandwiches. (My words, not hers. There are neither hallelujahs nor egg sandwiches.)
There’s a river and a lot of dust and dirt, in another ‘essay’ which I could happily link to baptism.
Heeeeeelp me.
Part of me wants to give feedback as though this is an intentional and deliberately written piece to disconcert and challenge the genre - what does memoir look like if you lose the function of memory? But this only works if the author has that understanding. And.... I just don’t know. She hasn’t been able to articulate anything in session except that she had a brain injury and spent years in hospital. Possibly also then again institutionalised for mental health for a long period.
She talks in terms of recovering and wanting to use her writing as inspirational. (My translation). She’s not able to join in workshopping other pieces. Her voice is echolalic and she struggles with understanding the more basic elements of group administration. Despite the fact we’re meeting on zoom, I can see the other group members get exaspirated. There’s head shaking and lip-pursing and eye-rolling. I want to be kind but I’m finding it really hard to know how to frame constructive feedback. She doesn’t really do feedback - she writes and publishes and stacks the books in her basement and gives them away. Every session she tells us that she has published x books. And another one is in print.
God, sorry for the essay. This probably makes as much literal sense as the memoir does.