from “On notwriting”

after Anne Boyer

The notwriting printed between words facilitates legibility. A silence to make meaning. A space to recognize a body’s boundary.

I treasure the archives of stories shared in subtle gestures of notwriting.

The energy expended in notwriting fatigues muscles and can exacerbate the underlying condition.

Notwriting strikes many as passivity, as giving up, or as self-pity.

Notwriting is neither visual, nor aural.

Notwriting labours towards its own impossible absence.

When overwhelmed by notwriting try naming five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste.

What is poetry if not the repetition of notwriting?

In my memory, notwriting becomes a hazy outline of an image.

I rush home again to check on notwriting, to ensure no disaster has struck everything I care for.

The label notwriting often elicits revulsion in many.

Notwriting plays fast and loose with the facts, indulges in recursive logic to bolster an emotive exaltation.

Notwriting quickly becomes my new favourite person. I’m obsessed.

Notwriting maddeningly undermines stability.

The only thing worse than notwriting is writing.

If you have been diagnosed with notwriting, don’t get discouraged. Many people with this disorder can learn to live satisfying lives.

If you are notwriting, you are not a writer.

Notwriting spends days at a time in bed.

When notwriting, I refuse a coherent and consistent style.

The literary history of notwriting fills libraries with dense texts of critical analysis written in a language printed in gasps of pain and lung-constricting hyperventilation.

I am notwriting an essay.

Notwriting is a chronic disorder that causes fatigue and trouble sleeping.

Some have commented that my notwriting strikes them as cold and unemotional.

I can recite pages and pages of notwriting by heart.

The only thing worse than writing is notwriting.

The literature of disability is largely a literature of notwriting.

I cook whole meals of notwriting for loved ones, gently place down steaming plates and walk away.

I don’t know if you’ll believe me, but I’m notwriting this to elicit pity.

Notwriting becomes pathological when it interferes with daily life and causes significant distress.

Notwriting might sometimes serve as a language of care and compassion.

This essay demonstrates an attempt to exhaust notwriting.

I stuff boxes and canvas bags full of notwriting, pack it away in closets and under beds so that visitors might not become burdened with the knowledge of my growing collection of notwriting.

This sentence begins and ends in notwriting.

Notwriting is seasonally affected anew each season.

Expressing notwriting publicly might be seen to be deviant, and even dangerous, to the social organism.

Writing represents only a small interruption in the continuous flow of notwriting.

In notwriting, I am beside myself.

Notwriting is typically subordinated to serving as the bubble-wrap to safely deliver writing.

I’ve only communicated in notwriting since I left the psych ward.

Notwriting often leaves less residue of regret.

Some writers have been accused of faking their notwriting to garner sympathy and attention.

Like white noise, notwriting is a presence that indicates an absence.

There’s something queer about notwriting.

At times, notwriting asks for firm and constant pressure applied to the torso.

The failure of notwriting rests in its explication.

Not writing orients westward at sunrise, more interested in the outlined slide of shadows than the warmth on its face.

Notwriting takes the easy way out.

Scientists seek a genetic explanation for the preponderance of notwriting in the body.

NOTE:

“On Notwriting” is an ongoing series that I think of as a poetic essay, from a wider book project on mental disability’s effect, in my life for about four years, of making writing something I’m unable to do. My inability to write would periodically become an object of obsessional and repetitive focus. So, I made this inability itself a focus of study. I see both the inability to write and obsessive repetition as ways of having difficulty moving “forward” in a sense; though of course I want to also trouble the idea of what temporal progress looks like in an ableist society.

This poetic essay draws upon and reflects my thinking on my experience through the work of poet Anne Boyer’s piece titled “What is ‘Not Writing’?” in the book Garments Against Women. Boyer writes, “There is illness and injury which has produced a great deal of not writing.” Boyer writes of the absence of writing as a specifically ill and disabled state, but also one worthy of attention as it makes visible the gaps and losses resulting from systemic ableism and other forms of intersectional marginalization. I draw upon Boyer’s essay as a generative fellow traveler in writing’s absence.

In “On Notwriting,” I want to think of this absence, in relation to my lived experience, as a symptom, a diagnosis, a textual form, a present-absence, a generative, though socially disabled, site, and one that I repetitively come back to in order to articulate it. My “notwriting” is not consistent, logical, extended, or even, maybe, original. Rather, it is conversational with Boyer, and repeats an inability to ever fully articulate the site of textual absence in text. The form of eight lines repeating a refrain of attempts to define and situate “notwriting” derives from my obsessive-compulsive experience of counting eights to prevent harm, which is, itself, a mode of repetitive, though stultifying, inquiry.