This post was written by NQC administrator & facilitator, KR Moorhead
I have been an avid writer for as long as I can remember. But I have never kept a diary or journal. I never felt compelled to record the day-to-day events of my life, or my feelings about them. Instead I wrote stories. When I was very young, the stories were usually about a kid - slightly weird, maybe an outsider - encountering some kind of magic or monster. As a teen I dabbled in angsty poetry about my crushes, and started to attempt ‘gritty, literary fiction’. After graduating high school, I moved to New York to study English at NYU because I had decided I was going to be A Writer. I started carrying around a black leather Moleskine sketchbook within which I would scribble bits of overheard conversation, interesting graffiti, & lines of descriptive prose. For a while I also carried an old Polaroid camera and would take blurry snaps of my friends that I’d then glue into the pages. And yes, sometimes I’d vent the boiling overflow of dysregulated emotions I seemed to always be experiencing. But then I would channel that into a bit of a story, a scene between two people who were not me and my lover, or me and my mother, or me and anyone, but also were. I told everyone I was ‘writing a novel’ although I had no idea what that meant or what it might actually be about. I just kept collecting words - images - feelings.
After being out of university for a year, my mother convinced me to apply for a Master’s degree in writing fiction. But I didn’t really have a portfolio. I hadn’t finished a short story since high school; I had no novel chapters, no publications. Just a couple of scribbled in sketchbooks. So, I did what I always did; I wrote about myself as if I was someone else. I cobbled together two ‘chapters’ that were really just a fictional exploration of a whirlwind romance I’d experienced during my year studying abroad. Although I was accepted onto the programme, that particular ‘book’ never materialised. For my first workshop, I stayed up the night before my submission was due and banged out a short story about a teenage runaway and a middle-aged, escaped convict having a brief interaction at a remote bus stop. It was littered with inconsistencies, heavy with adjectives and adverbs, and didn’t really go anywhere. I had no idea what it was like to be a teenage runaway or an escaped convict - I didn’t know what it was meant to be about, so neither did anyone else. It was ripped to shreds in my workshop, and I ended up in tears in my supervisor’s office, convinced I was not meant to be there alongside this group of ‘serious’ writers. Most of my course mates were ten or more years older than me, and had full drafts of novels completed, or a bunch of short stories published already. Luckily for me, my supervisor was able to convince me that I had the same potential as everyone else. I decided to start taking the course and my writing more seriously, but at the time I thought this meant that I needed to write about ‘serious’ things. I started working on a Big Literary Novel that would be both a biblical allegory and contemporary political manifesto, and while it did draw details from my real life, it was not based in my actual lived experience. Pretty much right away, I knew the writing wasn’t any good. I don’t even remember the workshops I had for those chapters, but I know they didn’t go well. Every word was a slog, every character a stereotype, every line fell flat - but I was determined to power through. That I just wasn’t a good enough writer yet.
I didn’t go home over the winter holiday, but I took a little break from my so-called ‘book’ - mostly to cover other people’s shifts in the pub I worked in so they could have party over the holidays, but also to so I could get pretty fucked up myself (to be fair, I was only 23 at the time). And when I eventually came back to the writing, something shifted. I remember it vividly (which is rare for me). I was trying to work on a chapter, but a new voice was imposing itself on the text - and it didn’t fit what I was trying to write. I told myself that I would set a timer for ten minutes and use a page in my notebook to just get this ‘voice’ out of my system, so I could go back to my Serious Novel. That ten minutes turned into hours. Those hours became days and weeks and months. And almost three years later, that first page of scribbling, almost unchanged, would be the opening page of my published (autofictional) novel.
In that spring semester, my workshop feedback only confirmed what I already knew. The ease and speed with which I was churning out pages double confirmed it. Something was working. Something had clicked. What I didn’t quite realise until later was that this ‘new voice’ that had invaded my writing and taken on its own life and story - was my voice. What I was writing was the closest I had ever come to crafting my own inner voice on the page - in all its cynical, angsty, embarrassing, early 20s honesty. I wrote it as if no one would read it, not holding back the things that felt uncomfortable to share. I envisioned the character as a version of me - she was the embodiment of all my worst traits, and she existed at a time in my life when I was the most depressed and self-hating. I gifted her very few, if any, of my more positive traits, and I let her run loose in my life. She made even worse decisions than I had, and suffered more brutal consequences. She was all me - but I was much more than her.
Have a million people read my book? No. Did I make any money from publishing it? Not really. But I did once get an email from a stranger who said she picked it up randomly in a bookstore and found herself unable to put it down. She bought it and brought it home and read it until she finished it, even while brushing her teeth, and just wanted me to know she’d never felt so seen.
In her essay, ‘In Praise of Navel Gazing’*, Melissa Febos describes a similar experience to mine. She was in an MFA programme, working on her Big Important Novel. She wrote a piece of personal writing for a non fiction class and was encouraged by the instructor to ditch the fiction and write a memoir. At first, she cringes - she can’t help but feel that memoir and personal writing is somehow ‘lesser than’ Big Important Novels. But also that no one would be interested in her experiences - that it would be presumptuous of her to assume they would be. She goes on to explore how she realised that writing our own stories, in our own voices, is an act of liberation and rebellion. We have been taught to equate stories of the self, family, relationships, the home, with ‘women’s writing’ - and we have been taught that what women have to share is limited and less important than the ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’ created by white men. Febos notes that this is deliberate. By subjugating life-writing and memoir to ‘higher’ forms like fiction and drama, the dominant systems of power can cultivate grand social narratives that work to keep the status quo, while the true voices and stories of indigenous, queer, disabled, racialised and all marginalised people, are silenced, ignored and relegated to ‘niche’ interests.
What I now know - as a late diagnosed AuDHD person - is that I was using writing, I was fictionalising myself and my own experience, in order to make sense of it all: myself, the world, my place in society. I was ‘playing dolls’ by writing through scenes and interactions - unpicking what made people tick, what made me tick. Like a biology student dissecting a fetal pig and labelling all its parts, I needed to separate the experience from my internal self and dissect it on the page in order to understand it and my feelings about it.
Like Febos, I am now embracing the memoir form - writing about my relationship with my mother and her early death. And now that I know why I write what I write, I can do it with purpose. I am approaching the project like a scientific inquiry into my own feelings - and my distance from them.
My step-daughter is also AuDHD. She also writes stories. Stories about weird kids, usually outsiders, who encounter some kind of magic or monster. I can see her lived experience in every one. I can see her working through her insecurities, trying to understand why she’s often excluded, shamed... why she feels ‘other’.
Humans are compelled to share their stories and experiences. It is how we relate to each other, build connections and shared histories and understandings. Somewhere along the way, most of us get told that our story doesn’t matter - our voice is not needed - our experience invalid. That no one wants to read about our little lives. And that is why embracing the nature of our own voices and the honesty of our lived experiences, will always be an act against the state, against the status quo, against our own oppression and the oppression of others.
If you would like to spend some time exploring your lived experience through writing, in ways that bend, break and actively contradict the dominant ‘rules’ of storytelling, that ‘subvert, defy, disrupt, liberate’ us from oppressive systems of power, I would love to have you join me for Writing the Neuroqueer Self.
*I highly recommend you read this essay!
KR Moorhead is an AuDHD and gender non-compliant writer and educator who has been teaching creative writing for over 15 years. From 2009 to 2023, they lectured in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where they earned an MA in Creative Writing: Prose Fiction in 2007. KR also has a Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education Practice and a Post Graduate Diploma in Education Practice and Research.
They have facilitated for Writers in Bloom, Beyond Form Creative Writing, Devotion Workshop, Norwich School of Creative Writing, and Oxbridge Academic Courses, and currently teach a variety of courses for City Lit, and on The University of Hull’s online, part-time Creative Writing MA. KR’s novella, The First Law of Motion, was published in the US by St. Martin’s Press in 2009. Originally from Philadelphia, KR now lives in Norwich, UK with their partner, step-kid, and four cats. KR is the initiator and administrator of NQC and also facilitates Neuroqueer Novel Writing and co-facilitates Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice alongside Marta Rose and Meg Max.
You can join KR for Writing the Neuroqueer Self starting Wednesday, Jan 28th, from 12-2pm GMT via Zoom, and running for 10 Wednesdays. Tickets are available at three price tiers (£120/£240/£300), all with monthly payment plan options - as well as a Pay What You Can option. Asynchronous only tickets are available for £99. If you require a free place in order to attend this course, please reach out directly at kr@neuroqueercreative.com.
If you have questions, need further info, or have issues booking your place, please don’t hesitate to contact info@neuroqueercreative.com
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