Publishing for a Change, LLC presents Gail Dickert, author of #RecoveryInRealTime as she shares her trauma-informed rants about how ecological identity and trauma/grief work can transform our planet… one fictional character at a time.
My favorite people are the people I imagine others to be… even after they fail me, I write narratives of our reconciliations.
What I’ve learned about myself, after years of showing up in whatever art-in-progress form that I am, is that my favorite heartaches come after the stories I made up about myself… even after I don’t measure up to what others needed, I write narratives of requited respect or affection.
Fiction has always been my pleasure.
Poetry is my language of surrender.
It’s what I did in my head, during years of being abused, by bullies, by my neighbor, by the church..
Fiction is the hope I gave myself, anytime I believed my neighbor might actually stop molesting me.
Poetry is what I spoke to my soul, to encourage it to stay alive.
Fiction is the hope I gave myself, after each break-up with lovers who could not walk my messy path with me.
Poetry is how I absorbed the forest’s messages of regeneration.
Fiction is the hope I gave myself. Poetry, the language of surrender.
In real life, there are so few answers as to why people part ways and cannot find grace for one another.
In real life, anxiety straps me down to a chair charged with examples of things I’ve only seen on TV.
So in that, I notice the power of fiction.
And I am converted to writing it, because it saved me my whole life.
By being my pleasure.
It gives me pleasure to write happier endings than what I saw with friends who couldn’t forgive me.
It gives me pleasure to write firmer boundaries for my inner child.
It gives me pleasure to write social justice into systems that are designed to serve cis, white, heterosexual men.
It gives me pleasure…
And so I’ve taken a new path as a writer and as an advocate.
I can’t beat the system with my truth - I’ve told it over and over again, publicly and privately. But the same brain that found respite in her own head as a child is now the woman who remembers that hope is always fiction at first.
The same woman who became a mother with her internal narrative as her only guide…
Is the woman here now, choosing fiction over reality.
My characters are in search of the light of day. I’ve been querying agents who represent LGBTQ+ speculative fiction for 3 months and I do it with a whole new reverence for the power of fiction…
It saved my life for decades and I never gave it the credit it deserves.
The stories we tell ourselves have the power to heal.
If I can’t get all the closure I deserve in real life, at least my characters will.
And that is the magick of fiction.
The pleasure… after the pain.
Follow my blog as I channel the most ironic creative surge of my life - from survivor to storyteller.
I’m done telling the truth as I experienced it.
I’m going to tell the truth as I believe it in my head.
And let the characters guide.
This is my #RecoveryInRealTime.
