Today
I’d like to welcome author Jeffery Lee Hatcher Ph.D. to the blog. Tell us about
yourself.
In my youth, I was captivated by nature and quickly developed a sense of horror at the way we take Earth for granted. As a consequence, I pursued an education in science to study wildlife ecology. After completing a masters degree en route to a PhD, I was knocked over exceptionally hard by epilepsy. Though it took a long time, I eventually completed the PhD degree, however the time required to do so served as a scarlet letter. I had a track record of working in rural Africa and extensive laboratory experience in genetics, but nothing was ever enough to overcome the stigma from the inordinate time I took getting the degree. I eventually quit the science scene and took up writing.
Writing
sounds much more fun to me anyway. Science was not my best subject. What
motivated your writing?
In living with epilepsy, I
discovered that the disease has myriad cognitive effects that impact every
facet of one's life. Unfortunately the
American medical community's approach to treatment consists almost entirely of
controlling seizures. I wanted some
psychiatric counseling, especially concerning the mental consequences of brain
surgery. I never was given any such counseling.
So I have tried to bridge a gap, using my research skills on one hand
and my life experience on the other, in order to layout the textbook knowledge
of epilepsy psychology against an engaging fictional story. I particularly want to inspire college and
medical students to take an interest in epilepsy's psychological challenges.
I love learning when I don’t realize that I
am. I think that’s one reason I enjoy historical fiction. I think learning
through stories are a great way acquire more knowledge in a fun way. Your book
sounds right up my alley. What has been the most difficult thing you have
struggled with since you began a career in writing?
In the social sense, being taken
seriously by my intended audience. One
hallmark of my kind of epilepsy is hypergraphia – the tendency to write a lot!
As a consequence, if you say that you've been writing about your
disease, people in the medical field tune you out immediately. Even having a doctoral degree in a biological
field does not get them to take you seriously.
One of the ironies to this behavior
is the fact that many books written by professionals for a lay audience go to
great lengths to say how many talented authors have had the disease. However, they keep citing the same authors
which is self – contradictory. It's hard
to overstate how tiresome it is to be told that Dostoevsky had epilepsy.
From a composition sense, because my
epilepsy gives me memory difficulties, I find myself rereading my work to an
almost obscene degree. As a result, I
work incredibly slowly.
Can
you tell us about your main characters?
Tacking on the Styx has one
main character. He's modeled after
myself to some degree. He is
introspective out of necessity (he has amnesia). He's in graduate school, works in Africa, is highly
frustrated, and develops exceptionally bad relations with his faculty
adviser. Their relationship deteriorates
in no small part because neither one of them knows what can fairly be expected
of his graduate work due to a lack of behavioral counseling.
The second most important character
lies mostly behind the scenes. She would
be his adviser. She has little ability
to empathize with his issues in part because she is mildly narcissistic and,
like many people, her knowledge of epilepsy begins and ends with a patient
having seizures.
Most of the other characters are
quite supportive. They include his sister, his parents, and fellow students.
Which do
you find more challenging inventing the hero or the villain? Why?
Honestly, neither. In Tacking, I had real life models for both.
I believe it was Stephen King who advised writers to avoid the use of
adjectives. Let actions, adverbs, and
plot lines describe the work for you. In
light of this, merely writing a story that was based on life experience did the
character development for me. The heroes
and villains fleshed themselves out along the way.
Watching your characters develop on their own
terms is a fun part of writing. About
2/3 of the way through my book, I lost control of my characters. They were at the helm. I wasn't.
I am not a father, but I suppose the experience could be likened to
raising teenagers, only without staying awake until 1:00 AM listening for the
car to pull into the driveway. It was
actually quite enjoyable.
It’s
amazing the different directions a story can take you on even when it wasn’t your
initial plan. What was your favorite scene to write?
The main character, Tom, is walking through an
African forest with a friend when he has an epileptic episode. His friend has gone ahead of him and, thus,
is unaware of his immediate condition.
Tom doesn't lose consciousness or even self awareness. However, he starts having difficulty
completing whole sentences within his train of thought. He becomes light-headed and confused about
where he is. Because he recognizes that
he could lose consciousness in this forest and die for lack of treatment, he
gets overwhelmed by terror.
Earlier in the scene they pass by some fresh
and steaming elephant turd, so they know that somewhere off of the trail, they
have company. He retains a bit of
imagery of being trampled to death by a startled pachyderm. Finally, he pops a tranquilizer. His friend also doubles back to find him
sitting on the trail. They finish their
trip, but Tom continually develops a distaste for doing ecology research in
part because of this sort of psychological experience. Again, epilepsy has a lot of mental
challenges which people fail to understand.
This scene laid some of them out in an exotic and white – knuckled
manner.
It sounds
intense. I feel like I am learning so much more about epilepsy just from doing
this interview. I too was one of those people who just thought the disease was
about getting seisures. Will you share a short excerpt from your novel?
In this scene (my favorite above), two characters are
walking in a Kenyan rain forest several kilometers from the nearest road. Nobody is nearby and the main character, Tom,
has just stopped to relieve himself.
When walking through an isolated forest, no man steps more than a foot
off trail simply to unzip. However, Tom
is starting to get loopy and unwittingly hacks three meters into the brush with
a machete just to stand and relieve himself.
That finished, he starts getting confused about which direction is out!
I then follow up the fiction with some philosophical commentary about how
spatial memory failure compares to other forms of failure. I've edited some of the text out for brevity.
A moment before he finished urinating, he felt a gentle
warmth passing through his head. His
thoughts started to break up. Upon
finishing, he hastily zipped up and began to scan around for where he had come
from. He had to make himself findable,
yet even in this scant distance, his sense of direction completely vanished. He kept the presence of logic to step through
his slash marks in the draco palms back onto the trail only eight feet away.
The trail had no features where he’d left it, running
straight and flat in both directions. When
he re-entered it, which way he had come from, only ninety seconds ago, slipped
beneath his consciousness. By chance, he
continued further in the right direction, but the river looped back close to
the trail where its increasing noise confused him. He forgot that he’d come a long ways from
where they had earlier crossed it, hence its renewed noise must be coming from
a second, altogether different location on it.
That simple calculation didn’t materialize for him.
Now he reversed course and backtracked a hundred feet in the
wrong direction. His thoughts continued
failing to fully complete themselves. He
sat down on the trail, fished his tranquilizers out of his bag and placed one
under his tongue. He continued sitting
and began to feel panicked.
Suddenly a small, sharp pinching sensation arose from his
left calf muscle followed by another, and a third higher on his thigh. Looking at the ground, he saw a thin
reconnaissance stream of safari ants running alongside of his foot and only
some seven ants wide. Like their
Amazonian cousins, the army ants, the safari ants spread out in thin columns,
attempting to eat anything that moved while sending news back to the main mass
of the nomadic colony.
He quickly shifted his leg to the side, stood up, and strode
forward six paces, all the while struggling to think articulated thoughts as
well as keep his balance. Seeing no more
ants beneath him, he stood still and tried to remove his pants without first
removing his shoes. He fell over onto
his knees. Then he sat back onto the
ground and removed both shoes and pants in proper order. He brushed six ants off of his calf. He pulled off two which had clamped onto his
upper thigh and one off of the right leg band of his briefs. Pulling the waistband away from his body, he
looked in and saw only his own belongings.
They could have belonged to somebody else for as connected as he felt to
his entire body now.
While still struggling to complete a thought, he inspected
his pants with shaking hands. After
killing five more marauders, he lay his pants over his knees and sat still for
what felt like several minutes breathing alternately deeply and weakly. What would the renowned wildlife spokesman,
Marlin Perkins, think of a man sitting alone on the damp forest ground,
trembling in his underwear, pants in his lap, shoes to the side, and feeling
beyond incoherent in an African woodland?
His eyes watered, and he barely suppressed the sudden urge to cry.
Remembering Marlin Perkins was a benchmark of returning
normality in his brain - a break in the mutism.
The tranquilizer had begun pushing his thoughts back together.
“Safari ants?” the man who was Geoff asked now standing over
him. He had finally backtracked,
confused by Tom’s failure to catch up.
“Yeah,” Tom mumbled with a sniff, just now finding his
speech.
“I did the strip search routine yesterday when you weren’t
around. I can’t stand those damn
things,” Geoff replied.
--------------------
As they hiked together again, Tom’s exhausted mind played
with fragments of a letter. Patched
together, its coherent and proper form would go something like this:
Dear Mom,
Today I tried
to commit suicide by seizure three times, but each time I failed. I fail a lot, it seems. I thought I’d start by trying to pass out in
the middle of a small river and drowning.
It was shallow enough to kneel in but too deep to seize in. When that didn’t work, I figured I’d pass out
in front of an elephant, but getting trampled to death never happened either. Finally, it occurred to me that keeling over
on a swarm of flesh-eating ants and having my eyelids, lips and genitals chewed
off of my unconscious body would make a really awesome story for any grandsons
that Eileen gives you. Geoff could post
a picture of my blood-drained corpse saying ‘Hi’ without any eyelids or lips
onto your Facebook wall. Alas, none of
that came to pass. I just cannot time
the seizures that precisely. Life is
just a string of missed opportunities.
Love, Tom
P.S. I don’t care.
*******
Memory can be categorized in multiple ways. Two prominent categories of conscious memory (not
to be confused with the memory of how to ride a bike or sing C-flat which is
called procedural memory) are our episodic and semantic memories. Our memory of events that can be affixed to a
timeline is our episodic memory (I purchased bus tickets this morning and saw
that the price has gone up this month).
The compendium of knowledge we have for which time is less important or
irrelevant is called semantic memory (it’s a fact that bus ticket costs vary
with the price of gasoline).
In some ways, the loss of semantic memory can be the scarier
and more awkward of the two. Rapid
episodic memory loss is a normal and life-long process to which everybody can
relate. Few people would want to recall
a detailed synopsis of Thursday, three weeks ago - what route you took to walk
the dog, when you did the dishes, etc. Most
of this information is not going to affect our performance in the here and now.
Unlike loss of episodic memory, rapid loss of semantic
memory, however, has nothing obvious to recommend it. We all have semantic memory loss throughout
our lives, but such loss is not liberating such as forgetting unhappy events
can be. Episodic memory loss can cleanse
the mental palate, as in ‘forgive and forget’.
In contrast, you don’t leave your personal baggage behind in semantic
memory loss. Semantic loss is about
forgetting the phone numbers previously burned into your mind. Forgetting birthdays, anniversaries, verbal
contracts, and that your daughter is allergic to chocolate. It is about ruining a lab project because you
left a single step out of an otherwise long - memorized procedure. Difficulties with semantic memory impact job
performance and can cost you your job more readily than can difficulties with
episodic memory. Semantic memory
intrudes on your future as well as your past to a greater degree than episodic
memory does.
However, the most disconcerting form of memory loss to
experience in a very sudden manner is spatial memory loss. In the most extreme sense - when you suddenly
cannot picture an intimately familiar space in your mind - it takes over you
and induces terror. There is something
about the fear best described as primordial.
Perhaps its centrality to warfare and conflict explains this emotional
intensity. Lack of familiarity with the
landscape of hiding places and minefields will imperil a soldier much faster
than a lack of detailed recall for a prior day’s activities.
How many
times do you think you read your book before going to print?
Fewer than 100 times. Seriously, I am a special case because of my
memory difficulties. In order to avoid
circumstantial errors I do a ton of rereading.
By circumstantial errors, I mean naming a minor character 'Liza' in chapter 1 and
referring to her again as 'Lisa' when she next appears in chapter 7. Maintaining internal consistency requires a
lot of work and also a generous amount of proof reading by a friend.
You’re
not the only one who does that, if that makes you feel any better. My beta
readers have caught me doing that on occasion. Where do you see yourself in
five years?
I am delving into fiction exclusively. At the moment, I have a science fiction piece
in the works. Eventually, I would like
to do some general literature.
What
kind of research do you do before you start a new story?
For Tacking, I did a huge amount of
wading through medical journals. The
book is about 40% nonfiction written in a textbook style. Researching the neurobiology of epilepsy used
up perhaps 50% of my work time.
For my current science fiction writing,
research mainly consists of keeping abreast of what other authors are
writing. I make an occasional visit to
Wikipedia to put an historical reference into an accurate time frame.
What has
been the best compliment you have received?
The European Association for Counseling
reviewed Tacking on the Styx on their website, calling it “particularly
well written.” But the highest
compliment is not their choice of words but rather, the fact that they reviewed
it given the huge amount of literature in their field.
People who have reviewed it on social media
like my composite of non-fiction and fiction quite a lot. This two-for-one structure sets it apart from
similar works. I have a college friend
who lost his father to the disease shortly before he read my manuscript. He said he was glad to have learned many of
the finer details of the psychological impact even after his father's
passing. That appreciation is what I
value most.
I
think that’s amazing, that you are helping others through your writing. How do
you promote your books? Any tips you can share?
Before thinking about promoting, I think people
should consider pricing. If you go
self-pub, describe your book size and whether or not it is illustrated. If the publisher refuses to give you a
straight forward estimate, then head for the exits.
My book is a difficult market for being a niche
book with a widely dispersed audience.
It is not the sort of work that draws a crowd to a book reading such as
a mystery novel could do. Epilepsy is
very common, but it's thinly spread across a nation. I do a bit of word of mouth promotion with
people such as yourself and readers on Goodreads, but generally speaking, my
time is better spent looking for a conventional publisher or working on my next
book.
How do
you handle criticism when it comes to your writing?
This sounds incredibly conceited, but I haven't
really gotten any yet. My critical
reviews have been great. The
psychological challenge comes from getting noticed or read in the first place. I feel down in so far as I haven't found a
traditional publisher or agent. However,
there is no criticism in that; they simply do not reply to your inquiries at
all. Of course, the lack of reply is
somehow quite a bit worse.
Is there
something you learned from writing your first book?
Do not put a lot of trust in vanity press. Ask a lot of hard questions. Think of them as you would think about a used
car salesman.
Also, if you do not have an agent, make sure
you have someone to serve as a reader.
Offer to mow their lawn for five years if that's what it takes. However, always encourage them to be
ruthless. People feel uncomfortable
telling you that something requires a lot of work. The reader who will say so is
invaluable.
That’s
great advice. It is harder than one might think to find someone who will give
you an honest opinion of your book. I ask my beta readers to tear it apart.
Better before publishing than after. Who designed the artwork for your
cover? Or did you design it yourself?
I came up with the general design. Given the title, it was easy – a solitary
figure sailing (tacking) a river between a placid and green landscape on one
side and a harsh, lifeless, rocky terrain on the other. Hopefully the symbolic connection to epilepsy
is an easy one to make.
My sister has a background in art and
commercial media. She did the actual
picture. We then handed it to the
publisher.
Incidentally, I use artwork extensively to
discuss the nature of cognition and its epileptic experience. I discuss Surrealism for understanding automatisms
and Impressionism for understanding cognitive modeling. Dali's Persistence of Memory lies
front and center for his keen insights which most people likely
under-appreciate.
Any last
words you’d like to share with us today?
Regarding my own work, I would caution readers
that I wrote Tacking on the Styx for adults and very mature young adults
who do not have the disease. Because the
book makes a plea for better psychological care, I do not make it uplifting
(though a Goodreads reviewer has called it such). It could be depressing for a young adult with
the disease to no good end. On the other
hand, it would greatly benefit a mature teen who has a friend or a sibling with
the disease. I promote empathy above
all, but I do so at an adult level.
Sections of the fiction are sexually explicit
because sexuality can be a major social, emotional and physiological issue. The
book opens with Tom in a hospital discovering the pains of an epileptic
priapism. It's part of the humiliation of the disease, but don't expect a
doctor to mention such a matter. I also
review the clinical topic at length in the non-fiction. The graphic nature makes it age –
sensitive.
Books on mental illness written by patients
fill a gaping hole that even the most motivated doctor can never fill. Planning a coping strategy for living with a
loved one's illness requires help in developing empathy and gaining facts which
cannot be found in a clinical environment.
I have done my best to contribute to filling that hole. Hopefully, my readership will also include a
few college - age adults who are looking for ways to make a future professional
difference.
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