Sharing “Our Stories” (II)
It’s been a few weeks since I began rolling out my “Sharing Our Stories” editing and coaching initiative for LGBTQ+ and crip/disabled storytellers. I shared then a little about how my partner’s experiences of aging and age-related disability are part of what has led me to this work. As a follow-up, this week I want to share a little more about how my particular background and training have proven valuable to my partner’s storytelling needs.
As you might imagine, 15 years in academia teaches one A LOT. During that time, I worked hard to be as inter- and multi-disciplinary as I could be, reading widely within and among fields, presenting original research and writing at conferences adjacent to my disciplines, and intentionally taking on topics which placed me squarely outside my training. All those years in the academy allowed me to develop expertise in queer literature and cultural production, histories of gender and sexuality, and a range of critical theory traditions.
This expertise uniquely positions me to work with LGBTQ+ storytellers as they frame, contextualize, and more deeply engage many of the same themes that not only animate the pages of LGBTQ+ storytelling but, as many of us know all too well, our lives.
The challenges of coming out, confronting medical and psychiatric discourses, the threat of violence, sexual confusion, social isolation, and second-class citizenship often go hand-in-hand with the exhilaration of taboo desires, the comfort and safety of chosen family, the fun and satisfaction of sexual exploration, and the self-realization.
When I talk about “Collecting Our Stories,” I refer to a need to approach our memories and imaginations in a methodical way. This helps us decide exactly what story we want to tell, to pursue that story without distraction, and to begin to organize our ideas around a suitable and interesting narrative structure.
In my partner’s case, my training as an historian of sexuality, for instance, means I can help him construct and adhere to a temporal scaffolding for his personal experiences while maintaining a high level of historical objectivity for socio-political context. In the process, we can work together to build a loose-but-compelling narrative arc peopled with the most important figures for the stories he wants to highlight.
“Telling Our Stories” brings another, slightly more technical dimension to the process. LGBTQ+ storytelling is a rich and diverse body of writing. My background in queer literature means I understand the genre’s conventions, languages, references, political meanings, and socio-cultural worth, allowing me to approach an in-process manuscript with a trained critical eye. My background as a critical theorist also allows me to provide a range of analytic lenses through which to view one’s story and thoughtfully add body and depth.
This has helped my partner in many ways, from suggestions on which characters or experiences are worth further development, and which might read like literary tropes we want to avoid, to providing useful and pertinent critical tools from academic fields like queer theory and masculinity studies. This can be intimate and vulnerable work, and I’m able to act as a safe, compassionate interlocutor while simultaneously encouraging him to push himself to dwell on a given scene that is particularly difficult for him to relive.
Finally, when we’re ready to “Present Our Stories” in a clean, readable format, I’m trained in the mechanics of putting it all together into a cohesive, coherent form. This happens at the level of grammar and punctuation, but also one level higher, at that of clarity and flow.
For my partner, this has meant more time writing and less time worrying about technical errors, an excitement and eagerness to share his writing with friends and family, and a sense of accomplishment he wouldn’t have been able to achieve on his own.
While my partner has been kind enough to let me use him as an example, my approach can help all kinds of LGBTQ+ storytellers. He and I have worked together using his memories as source material, but that needn’t necessarily be the case. “Sharing Our Stories” is an approach that strives to span genre and, instead, root itself in a feeling, an experience, and an ethos of connection, community, and commonality as a means of getting at the nuance, the differences, and the uniqueness that each of our individual stories add to the panoply that is LGBTQ+ experience.
