During the editing process for this issue, with the permission of the writers, we eliminated the original beginnings of three essays and started them a few paragraphs or pages in. Our goal was to make the beginnings more immediate, to eliminate some writerly throat-clearing, to help plunge readers into the heart of the story—the action, the theme, the substance—from the very beginning. Did these changes in fact make this story more effective? And what was lost in the process? See what the author had to say about the changes, and join the discussion below!

Crazy Talk
Laurie Rachkus Uttich

Author's Statement

I often tell my writer friends, “I’m not sure it starts in the right place.” This is a lie, usually. I am sure. It is often clear to me that the moment of truth—the heartbeat that hums throughout the work—begins much later.

I am not so sure in my own work. Perhaps it is because I love this opening scene, just as all the writers I advise love theirs. But, I protest, I can still see the Bughouse’s paved paths; my sister, sunburned and sure; the tiny Dixie cups; the oak trees too wide to wrap our arms around; the ghosts screaming behind stone walls. I can still feel the panic and prayer at the back of my throat, Please, don’t let me end up here. Please.

And yet, I trust editors and fellow writers. Others can often see what the memoirist cannot. And I recognize the essay works without it. If you don’t need it, don’t use it, I would tell someone else. Kill your darlings, William Faulkner supposedly said first. Yes. I get it. I know my need to remember it, to write it, to rub meaning from its memory does not mean the scene has earned a space here. It was a good editorial decision. But my eight-year-old self mourns its loss.

It is summer, and the sun is half-full when my sister and I climb off our bikes and sneak them through the bushes that guard the gates of the Illinois Central Hospital for the Insane. We have been here before—The Bughouse, as the kids at school call it—and we come back because we like the quiet, the twists and turns of the roads, the trees, which stretch their necks to the sky while their arms shade us. We like the buildings, large slabs of stone that leapfrog on top of each other. We like how we bounce over the secrets of the insane in the cracks of the sidewalk.

The buildings are old—the first patient was admitted in 1851—and their walls are crumbling in the corners. Many of them are empty, and as we pass one with broken windows and an open door, my sister tells me as she pedals, “See that one? Right there? That’s where they do electroshock therapy. Zap the brain. Scramble it up. Right there. In the basement.”

I am 8, and it is 1975, and this is Jacksonville, Ill., and I still believe that the world is a place where grownups know what they are doing, even as I imagine thick electrical cords connecting to metal bowls that sit on the head of a woman—always a woman—who screams and screams, her eyes shut tight, her throat as tight as my mother’s.

We circle around the courtyard where a group sits across the lawn in lines of folding chairs. They are too far away to catch us even if they see us on our silent 10-speeds. We watch a woman in a white coat pass out little cups as arms covered in robes and housecoats lift them to their lips.

“Drugs,” my sister whispers to me.

I think maybe it’s Kool-Aid and they are having a break from whatever it is they do inside. School, maybe, the kind that teaches you how to hide what’s in your head. I learned how to do that by myself in second grade. It’s not so hard. You just nod and say, “Yes, Sister.” You don’t ask questions unless you already know the answers.

“Let’s get out of here,” my sister says. “Mom might be looking for us.”

I nod and pedal faster. There are two busy roads on the way to The Bughouse, and we’re not allowed to cross either one of them. God knows, I walk into a door, nine times out of 10. My head’s in the clouds. We don’t need anybody getting killed. If anything happens to either one of us, you might as well put my mother in the ground, too.

At the gate, I get off my bike and look back at the building, the one with the basement where the woman sits strapped to a chair. I think if I look hard enough, I could see her through the walls. She is small with brown eyes, thin shoulders and light hair that curls at the ends. She asks too many questions, and sometimes she’s too quiet. She doesn’t know what people want to hear. She doesn’t know when to nod and when to look away. One time, she saw a ghost—an old man—who winked at her as he walked up the stairs. She didn’t know that you keep your ghosts to yourself. She didn’t know that if you don’t, people will think you’re a liar or crazy. She didn’t know it’s better to be a liar.

That night, I dream of the woman in the basement. I hear her screams, and I stand and watch her, and even as she beckons me closer, even as I see the cord attached to the wall and realize how easy it would be, a simple tug really, to end her pain, I shake my head—No, no, sorry, but no—and I shut my eyes.

Craziness runs in my family like a current under waters that swell and recede with the seasons. My sister and I have stood at its shore and watched some of the adults in our life get close enough to the edge to be swallowed whole. My uncle died alone, a pathological liar with a fake name and a fifth wife. My cousin killed herself. Another uncle wandered into other people’s homes, sat down in their living rooms and demanded, “Just who the hell are you?” But most of the craziness in our family goes by other names. He has a bad temper. She’s got the blues, could be menopause. He hasn’t been the same since Vietnam.

Maybe all families are like this. Maybe all young girls worry that their heads are a frightening place to be, their thoughts a medley of words they can’t translate, and even if they could, no one would understand them, no one would say, “Yes, I’ve felt that way, too. Yes, it’s fine, normal even. Maybe all of these girls grow older, find others who feel the way they do, but still believe madness lives just around the corner. It waits. And maybe all of these girls grow into women and find men who think of them as strong and sane—men who even use the word “amazing” when they describe them to friends, men who nod, bewildered, when these women demand one promise before they’ll marry them: “No matter what happens, no matter what you’re afraid of, no matter who tells you that it’s for the best, promise me, you’ll never commit me, that you’ll never let it happen. Because crazy is contagious and if I’m committed, if I’m living with completely crazy, no treatment, no doctor, no medication will ever help me find my way out.”

Interviewer: What happened when he got home from the war?

May McNeil: Well, we thought he was all right. The doctor and the nurse brought him to the door, and the doctor said, “Mrs. Carr, here is your son. You’ll have to watch him. He’s shell-shocked.” That’s what they called them if they lost their mind. So he was home two or three days, and Mom cooked some beef. She used to make it real brown, pound it up real good, you know, and make it tender. He liked it. She set it right down by his plate, and when he seen that, he jumped up, and he said, “Meat, meat, meat,” and a bad word and “blood,” and he says, “That’s all I saw over in France,” and from then on, he was just raving crazy.

Interviewer: He said that’s all he saw over in France?

May McNeil: Yes, and he jumped up, and he hit Dad in the mouth and split his lip. Dad said, “May, go down to the neighbors and call the law. He’s lost his mind.” That was the hardest job I ever done in my life. But we called the law, I did, and they come out and put him in jail. Dad sat up in the jail, outside the cell all night; he felt so bad, you know. And the next morning after Elmer slept, he was OK. He said, “Dad, you had better do something with me. I do that often, and I’m liable to kill some of you.” And he asked us to put him in Jacksonville.

Interviewer: What’s over in Jacksonville?

May McNeil: That used to be a place where they put insane people. Jacksonville State Hospital. He was there all his life from the time he was about, I guess, 19 or 20 until he was 80.

May McNeil was born in Beardstown, Ill., in 1898. Her brother was a patient of the Illinois Central Hospital for the Insane [aka Jacksonville State Hospital]. Interviewed by the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University, Springfield, Ill., Oct. 10, 1987.

When I was a child, my sister and I sneaked our bikes through the bushes guarding the gates of the Illinois Central Hospital for the Insane—the Bughouse, as the kids at school called it. Many of the buildings were old—the first patient was admitted in 1851—and the walls had crumbled in the corners. We liked the quiet, the twists and turns of the roads, the trees, which stretched their necks to the sky while their arms shaded us. We liked the buildings, large slabs of stone that leapfrogged on top of each other. We liked how we bounced over the secrets of the insane in the cracks of the sidewalk.

The hospital was nearly empty by then, with fewer than 600 patients in a facility that had once housed over 3,600. My sister and I often wondered where all the crazy people had gone. She believed they had escaped. They kicked through the sagging doors and stepped into the light. They were no longer patients, but nuns, maybe, or students at the Flamingo School of Beauty downtown. They fooled everybody but us.

Only the truly crazy people were left behind—or, perhaps, just the people who didn’t have the gumption to make a break for it. Not one of the patients left at The Bughouse was a person I knew, and yet every time I passed by, I expected to see someone I recognized, someone peering out the gate, someone I could rescue. Someone who would tell me that she wasn’t really crazy or, if she was, that she hadn’t always been. Someone who would understand all the chatter in my head, the characters who lived inside of me and the scribbled-in notebooks under my bed. Someone I could take home to my room, where the walls were covered in light lavender and “The Yellow Wallpaper” was something I only pretended not to understand.

Interviewer: Did you have a lot of younger patients?

Mamie Cole: That was another thing that bothered me. When we were in training,
they told us that dementia praecox was the insanity of the youth. That was true. They used to come in there sometimes 13, 14 years old, and I always felt sorry for them. I always felt that they were just doomed, that they’d never get out. Some of them did get out, but some of them stayed there an entire lifetime.

Mamie Cole was an attendant who joined the staff of Illinois Central Hospital for the Insane in 1911. She later became a nurse and night supervisor. Interviewed by the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University, Springfield, Ill., Oct. 13, 1972.

My aunt calls, sighs and hangs up, the phone rattling as it drops onto the receiver. She calls again two minutes later and whispers my name. “Is it you? Or is it that machine again?”

I tell her it’s me. I don’t tell her it was also me the first time she called. “What’s wrong, Aunt Audrey?”

She whispers, “I can’t really talk, not here. I think one of them is listening.”

I walk into the kitchen and look out into the back yard. My 5-year-old son stands in the Florida winter sun and holds a frog in the palm of his hand. He rubs its back with a dirty finger. His head is bent, and his eyes are dark and brown, the shape of almonds, just like my aunt’s—a coincidence, this likeness to a woman who married my mother’s brother. “Maybe you could go into the bathroom,” I tell my aunt. “I bet they aren’t in there.”

There is a rustling, a shuffle of steps, a muted click. “Well, I’ve closed the door the best I can, you know, with the cord,” my aunt says, her voice a bit louder.

“It’s probably OK,” I say and open the dishwasher and take the clean glasses out. “What’s going on?”

“Well, they started up again last night,” my aunt tells me, and I can picture her, this 80-year-old woman I love, with her red, red lipstick, her blue-black hair, her once-kind eyes now wild in the curved mirror. “It was the one the queen always sends, the loudest one. The lieutenant bee. He was in my ear all night long.”

My son walks through the door, heads to the refrigerator. I shake my head, point to the bathroom. “Wash your hands,” I mouth to him. “What did he want?” I ask my aunt.

My aunt laughs, but it’s a bitter, broken sound. “What they always want: to make me crazy. And, you know, I think I made it worse when I called the exterminator.”

“Really?” I say and start on the silverware. I wonder how she found an exterminator who would come to her house to search for bees in the middle of an Illinois winter. “Did he find any of them?”

My aunt sighs. “No. I tried to tell him that’s how the bees are. They hide. People don’t know how smart they really are.”

The first bee showed up in my aunt’s bedroom a few months ago. She couldn’t see it—she can never see them, they’re so fast, so sneaky, so ready for the light to be switched on—but he whispered in her ear, a buzz all night long, a hum, which she first thought was friendly. Since then, they’ve become organized. The queen has decided my aunt’s house must become her hive. They will drive my aunt out, or they will kill her. My aunt knows this because sometimes, at night, she can hear them talking.

“You know what, Aunt Audrey?” I say and check my son’s hands. I open the refrigerator, point to the grapes on the second shelf. “Maybe you should move. Mom was just telling me that the retirement home on Fifth Street—you know, the one with those huge white columns?—has a bus, and they’ll take you to Mass every day, out to dinner, whatever, and it’s not like a nursing home. You’d have your own apartment. The food’s even supposed to be good.”

My aunt is quiet for a moment. “You didn’t tell your mother about the bees, did you?”

“No,” I lie. “Of course not. It’s just—”

“Because I know she’ll think I’m crazy, and I’m not.” My aunt’s voice is hard. “I’m not.”

Before I circle The Bughouse on my bike; before I move a thousand miles away; before I stand in my kitchen and study my son and speak carefully to my aunt as she whispers in her small, pink bathroom with the chipped tile and pale green counter; before my aunt’s bones have been shattered by a car; before she has lost a breast; before she has held a phone in her hand and listened to a police officer say “your daughter” and “suicide” and “I’m sorry”; before she has woken up alone in her home, night after night, with her feet resting on an open recliner, a rosary in her lap, the black static of the TV blinking at her afghan-covered knees, a half-eaten Meals on Wheels dinner on the tray beside her—years before all of that, a lifetime of sorts, my aunt pulls on a navy blue dress, boards a bus and kneels beside my mother at an altar. My aunt promises to protect me, to guide me, to lead me through whatever valley of darkness I might find myself in. She has left a husband at home to take this oath. He is angry with her: He is often drunk and sometimes violent, and no one can later recall why he is too furious to come with her. Still, she holds me in my white baptismal gown, her eyes calm and steady, her gaze sure. She smiles like a woman who has never been awakened by a bee in her ear. She smiles like we all do, as if she never saw it coming.

Interviewer: Did you ever, in the time that you were working at Jacksonville, go to one of the funerals?

Mamie Cole: Oh, yes.

Interviewer: Could you describe them for me?

Mamie Cole: The state patients that didn’t have any relatives or anybody, they would bury them over in the potter’s field out there in Diamond Grove. Well, the minister always just preached a nice funeral like anyone; a few aides would go, maybe, and sing. I remember one time I went and Dr. Cointus was the minister. He talked about illnesses, and he tried to say that insanity was just the same as any other illness, and that was way back when. He said that you got sick in your body and sometimes you got sick in your mind, and I thought it was a nice sermon. They still do that for the ones that don’t have any relatives. I think they do.

Mamie Cole, previously referenced.

Years later—long after my summer bike rides have ended—I go back inside The Bughouse gates. By then, it is the Jacksonville Development Center, a day school. My friend Mark’s Special Ed little brother will spend his time there after he “graduates” from high school.

I am 16, and I am in the back seat of Mike’s car, and we are behind one of the empty buildings that I used to ride my bike around. He is telling me lies—he loves me, will always love me—but I don’t know that yet. He whispers into my neck, his hands everywhere my mother would say they absolutely should not be, and I see a shadow move across the window of the building beside me.

“Shit!” I say and struggle back into my shirt. “There’s somebody in there!”

Mike looks up, his eyes dark, unfocused. “I don’t see anything.” His lips find my ear.

I shake him off. “No, there! In that window. I saw someone.” I do not say I think it is a woman. I don’t even realize then that I am sure this shadow is the woman from my dreams, the woman with the tight throat, the closed eyes.

Mike sighs and then laughs. “Hey, let’s go in and look. I hear there are tunnels under there and all sorts of old equipment.” He is already opening the door when I tug on his arm.

“No! Are you crazy?”

He laughs again and tries to pull me out of the car. He is a little crazy, this first love of mine, this 17-year-old kid, his dad a former drunk who still slaps him around, his mom a woman who cleans the floor on her knees every day but Sunday.

“Come on, baby,” he says, and I know right then, even as I follow him up the cracked steps, that he is wrong for me, though it will take me another two years to realize I am wrong for him.

It will end on an interstate on a spring evening. We will be in the same car we are in right now. He will be speeding into the dusk, clutching my arm as I open the door, ready to jump if he won’t pull over—“I swear to God, I will. I’ll jump out of this car, you asshole, you lying, cheating, son of a bitch. I swear I will jump if you don’t stop the car right now!”—and finally, after I claw away his hands and open the door, he will swerve to the side, rocks spitting into the ditch, and he will grab the back of my shirt as I try to leap out while the tires skid and stop, and he will speak slowly and carefully to me as the car pants and I stand at the side of the road with his skin under my nails. “Please, just let me take you home. Please. I can’t leave you here.” And later, he will tell his best friend—the person I will date next, as soon as I can, even though the only interest I have in him is what it might mean to Mike—that I went crazy that night. “I told her about Jody, and she just flipped out. She just went nuts, man. I swear to God, she was like completely insane.”

But now, right now, I am only crazy in love, its own kind of 16-year-old insanity, and so I let him lead me to this place, this abandoned dark building, where the only thing I find is a locked door.

Interviewer: At that time then, around 1950, were the old dances and parties pretty much eliminated?

Oscar Gronseth: They had patient dances prior to my coming to this hospital. When the patients would go to the dance, they were escorted in large groups. Then, when the music started, they would come together like the coming together of the Red Sea (laughter). And as the last note would end on the dance set, they parted again, like the parting of the Red Sea. And woe to any of them who were caught even standing around talking to one another.

I think they felt that we would start having a lot of bad sexual incidents or something like that if we let the sexes mingle. I just couldn’t see it. I felt the mingling of the sexes would have so much more of a therapeutic and beneficial value because it was much more natural, as in someone you’d find outside a hospital.

Oscar Gronseth joined the staff of the Central Illinois Center for the Insane in 1951 as a supervising therapist. He later became the Activity Therapy Supervisor. Interviewed by the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University, Springfield, Ill., Oct. 12, 1972.

I am sitting in my bed, my back straight against the headboard, my knees under my chin. There are ghosts all around me, but I can’t see them. Not all of them are friendly. I am 5, and I don’t know yet that my mother needs me as much as I need her. Or maybe she doesn’t, not now, not this night. This is before her little white pill, the unopened book on her lap, the startled jumps and the long silences that stretch out and cover the walls of our house. This is before my father and I sip wine together as adults and ponder words like “anxiety” and “clinical depression” and “genetic tendency toward these conditions compacted by external factors.” This is before she closes her eyes when she remembers the years of my teens, her “decade of despondency.” This is now, a moonless night in an old, yellow house, and I am small and cold and without power to hurt or to heal, and she is solely my mother, my savior.

I want to flee to her, to wait by the side of her bed, to watch her breathe until her eyes open and she lifts the covers for me to slide under. But I can’t leave my bed. If my feet touch the floor, if one toe steps into the dark, the ghosts will turn into shapes. Anything could happen then.

I am not the kind of child who calls out in the middle of the night. It is dim and everything sleeps; even the statue of the Virgin Mary by my bed seems weary as her bare heel crushes the head of a snake. I cannot yell for my mother. I cannot split open the night with a scream. And so I say her name silently as if it is a prayer, as if she is my own God, one I can beckon to me without words. I call her again and again, until she stands in my doorway, her white nightgown a shadow of light. “Laurie Ann?”

“You often called me with your mind,” my mother tells me now, 35 years later. “That’s how close we were. You didn’t even have to speak. Do you remember?”

We are a family that believes in the unseen, the unknown, the unspoken words that startle us awake. We do not spend a lot of time worrying if others believe as we do. We befriend these doubters. We seek them out, marry them even, and all the while, we secretly think of them as a bit barbaric, so intent on surviving that they never scrape beneath the surface to find what throbs within them. And yet, perhaps, our own survival instincts pale next to these skeptics we keep close to us. They are the sort of people who guard the gates of The Bughouse. We are the sort who roam its halls.

Interviewer: It sounds as though you’ve gotten results that a lot of other people who supposedly know what they’re doing haven’t gotten. (laughter) Doesn’t this make you feel pretty good?

Eleanor DeLong: Yes. [One patient] says I cured him. He was having trouble with his mother and his mother-in-law. He had a wife and five children, and I said, “Move as damn far away from both of them as you can get.” He had a dealership from an implement company that was bugging him. I said, “Get rid of it; work for somebody else. Get out of this situation. Get away from your people; get away from hers. Stand on those two feet yourself.” And he did it. And he is doing well, really well.

Eleanor DeLong began working at the Illinois Central Hospital for the Insane in 1929 as a ward attendant. In 1953, she became manager of the hospital laundry, where she managed patient workers. Interviewed by the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University, Springfield, Ill., Oct. 11, 1972.

I hold my son in my arms, rest my chin on his damp head. He is 6 days old, and we are finally home from the hospital. There is a faint red circle around his neck where the umbilical cord became a noose. I study the flutter of his eyelids and wonder, as I have every moment since his birth, if there is brain damage, if he has lost something that he had been given, if those minutes without oxygen will mean a lifetime of loss. The doctors say we’ll have to wait and see.

I have a lot of time. I’m supposed to rest. There was a problem in the delivery, and I also carry battle wounds. The forceps squeezed my son’s soft head, wrenching him from inside of me, twisting him toward this life even as the cord that connected us held tight. I have “too many stitches to count,” a tear that makes me worry my sex life is over and an incision that must be kept as dry as possible. I do what my doctor says. I stay in my nightgown and lie on a towel without underwear, and when I shuffle to the bathroom, my husband walks with me, holding my arm. Later, he mops up the blood that leaves a trail on the tile behind me. He uses bleach. I make him open the window. The baby’s in here, too.

Days pass, and I sit and hold my son. I don’t want to see friends who stop by, even Kristin, who brought chicken salad. I shake my head when my mother calls. I don’t open the cards, the blue packages. I only pretend to listen when my husband reads me e-mails with “Congratulations!” in the subject line. I sit and hold my son. My husband needs to go to Safeway, just for a minute, just for a few things, like milk and more bleach. He asks me again and again, “Are you OK?” And then, “Are you sure?”

My husband puts the phone by our bed, kisses me as he leaves. I sit and hold my son. He looks right at me, his eyes dark blue, and studies me without a blink. He seems to know something that I don’t. He seems wise to me; there’s something beneath his stare. Perhaps he senses that my love for him is too big, too wide, and that my fear for him will swallow us both whole. He wants to tell me something—something that will change everything between us—but I don’t know what it is.

After a minute—or many minutes, maybe even an hour, I don’t know, I don’t count time anymore—I realize that my son is warning me. He will grow, and he will be bullied. Or become a bully. There will be drugs, maybe, and dark alleys and needles that haven’t been sterilized. He will drop out of school, or he will get some girl he can’t remember pregnant. He will join a gang. Or he will be shot by a gang member on his way to baseball practice. He will die in my arms. He will live to be a 100 and never call. He will become old and fat and bald, miserably pecking away inside a cubicle, never finding out what he could have become and blaming me because of it. Or he’ll end up at The Bughouse—which, of course, isn’t The Bughouse any longer. Now it’s the Jacksonville Development Center, and it’s for people whose brains didn’t get enough oxygen.

It occurs to me, as I sit and hold my baby, that none of it matters. Although my heart has been cracked out of my chest and is limping after my son, I cannot alter the outcome of his life. I can only witness it, and at this moment—when I am struggling to keep the cap of my pain meds closed, my breast milk clean—it seems too much to ask of me.

The phone rings, and, without thinking, I answer it. My friend who had a son six months ago asks me how I am. Before I can stop myself, I tell her, “I know something awful is going to happen to him, and I know I’m going to have to watch, and I can’t do it. I can’t.”
She is quiet for a moment and then asks, “What do you think is going to happen?”

“Anything can happen,” I tell her. “Anything.” And I talk about drugs and gangs and prison and sex and doesn’t she remember the time she mixed Ecstasy with mushrooms or was it cocaine? Didn’t she end up behind a dumpster in downtown Denver? And I’m not judging her—God, everybody knows I’m a virgin on all that stuff—and she’s great, she turned out just fine, really, but think about that: She was just this normal kid from the suburbs, two nice parents, good schools, the whole bit, and what if she had overdosed or died choking on her own vomit, and what if, I don’t know, she ended up with some man she didn’t know on top of her, and what if he liked to cut, or what if he had AIDS, or what if it’s one of our sons who’s on top of some drugged up little idiot, no offense, holding a knife between his teeth, or what if he’s the drugged up little idiot? Or both? I mean, really, what have we done?

My friend takes a long, deep breath. “Listen to me. This is crazy talk. Jake is— what? Ten days old? Listen to me. You need to put that baby down. You need to, I don’t know, get in the shower or something. You need to call your doctor if you can’t pull your shit together. I love you, but I’m telling you: This is crazy talk.”

I hang up the phone. I put my son in his bassinet for the first time. I walk to the bathroom and turn on the shower. I stand under cold water. I watch the blood fall from the empty space inside of me and circle the drain, around and around, until the water runs clean. I wait until my heart beats hard and then slows. I turn the water as hot as I can stand it, and when my skin shrinks and stings, I step out and stand before the mirror. I lift my chin and find the curve of my mother’s face, the arch of her throat. I study my eyes, brown and not the least bit wise, and I pray that the bees in my family’s hive of madness will rise off my shoulders like the steam around me. I study myself, the woman I am becoming, the mother I long to be, until the room turns cool and clear. I walk back to my bedroom where my son sleeps. A trail of blood follows me, but it is lighter now, its steps farther apart. I climb between my sheets. I close my eyes, and I don’t dream.

This is a truly magnificeny piece of writing. I would agree with those who say the edit makes it a more arresting start. How can you beat the sentence "Craziness runs in my family like a current under waters that swell and recede with the seasons". It is a very compelling piece, well paced and the voice is consistent, intimate, and believable. I would probably go along with the commenter who said that the piece might be slightly more effective without the interviews. And by the way, what a great idea CNF for doing this, and exhibiting the power, necessity even, of good editing.

— Tomaltach Tue, 12 Jan 2010

The beginning edit was like an incision, cutting the work to its heart and inserting us with a sense of immediacy appropriate to the anxiety level the author conveyed. This is an excellent piece of writing and I think the editing was purposeful. I will add my voice to those who felt interrupted by the interview segments. The effect was to downshift the intensity of the piece which temporarily reduced the power of intimacy by which I was captivated.

— Lynn Wed, 19 Aug 2009

The real lede absolutely provided a much better introduction to the piece. While the original intro was beautiful and powerful, even, as others have said, it did not follow the heartbeat of the piece. While the theme is obviously established in that first piece, and the chronology motif is established therein, its tone does not augment or even complement the theme of the rest of the piece because it reads so much like an introduction. Taking it out, then, was a wise choice. The inserted piece, however did not meet the needs of the essay, I believe; the original introduction should have just been whittled down, as suggested and been inserted somewhere in the piece. The original introduction did provide somewhat of a nostalgia that is carried through the rest of the piece (not in terms of tone, mind, but in terms of what the story was focused on) and that was not translated in the newly inserted piece. edit: actually, now reading it over again, it seems that the original lede began the story with a strong tie to the rest of the piece that the new lede does not accomplish. Nevertheless, I still contend that the new lede is a better choice for this piece than the old one, no matter how much it clashes with the tone of the rest of the paper, how much it seems sort of thrown into the mix, and how little the inserted piece matches the spirit of the original lede. But that's just my own opinion, crazy as it might seem.

— Obaid Sarvana Sun, 3 May 2009

I agree completely with the idea that scene can sometimes muddle a piece's intended direction, and I think the original introduction to this piece does just that. To me, it seems like a page break would have been needed if the original format was kept because the beginning opens too many avenues. As readers, we are unable to determine what direction the writer is leading us after reading the original beginning and being exposed to so many possibilities. But I find myself wishing that some of the things that were cut could somehow find their way back into the piece. For instance, when the narrator is with her boyfriend and mentions the woman from her dreams, the one with the tight throat, I wondered if the image was weakened because of its lack of explanation, or strengthened because of its mysteriousness. With the beginning truncated, I think the essay, while more focused, loses some of the eerie quality I found so entertaining.

— Adam Mann Sat, 2 May 2009

I find myself in agreement with Bob Katrin's statement [the first comment on the webpage]: "[T]he opening goes on for too long, but I also think leaving most of it out is a mistake." The intro could stand to be whittled down, but it serves two important purposes. Firstly, it sets up the theme and tone of the essay. The reader knows immediately that this will be an essay about the author's experience with mental illness. Secondly, the experience that Uttich writes about here is her first experience with mental illness, if not literally then symbolically. Formative experiences, of course, are often an effective way to begin an essay. I was ambivalent about the use of the quotes. Most of the quotes discuss the day-to-day lives of the patients, and while interesting, are not necessarily relevant to the author's own experience with mental illness--or her experience with the Bughouse. After all, the essay is not so much an exploration of the Bughouse patients as people as it is the author's realization (and trepidation) that she could be lumped in with these enigmatic “crazies” at any time. It is better for the narrative that those in the asylum remain anonymous, disquieting presences that stay in the back of the author’s head, putting into question her sanity even when she feels most adjusted. The quotes would work well in an expository essay about the Bughouse, but feel unnecessary in this particular essay.

— Sarah Lindenbaum Fri, 1 May 2009

I'm conflicted. In reading this piece as a whole, I can understand why she chose to omit the beginning. From a craft standpoint, it makes perfect sense. But I'm also struck with how this intro is full of some very compelling imagery as well as some interesting character development. I suppose that I'm ultimately struck with the fact that the author has found the perfect balance here in that she has not in fact omitted this portion of her essay while installing an awareness of its aesthetic weakness.

— caleb Thu, 30 Apr 2009

These are small but very important edits. The opening scene, I feel, tried to direct us, too much, too hard, in the obvious, wrong direction. It's a beautiful scene, immaculately worded, but I feel like the new beginning doesn't really suffer for its loss. The scene does not truly speak to the initiation or the purpose of the essay like the new introduction does. I do wish there could have been another scene as intricate, but the new opening still captures the reader and brings her or him into a more focused world. Some cannot understand the obsession with "length" with habitually shortening pieces and stripping them of their complexity. I cannot see the obsession with "scenes," which someone else claimed to be a great "virtue." Scenes, if well-constructed, can be as moving as dialogue, as a description, as an argument. No more or less valuable. The obsession with visual imagery, with locating in time and place, I feel, weakens this piece at its opening when it could have to strong introduction paragraph that, revised, it does.

— Matthew Demarco Wed, 29 Apr 2009

While I enjoyed reading the original opening, I do not think that it is necessary for the story to work. I like how the revised version begins with the word "craziness." This is almost like an immediate thesis for the entire story within the very first word. I do think that the revised paragraph that mentions the original opening could give a little more detail that the original contains. When we get that strong image of the institution in the beginning, it makes the reader cringe a little, which is a good thing, when the narrator returns there in other parts of her life (ie the scene with her and Mike in the car). The original opening also puts a little more emphasis on the drama in the very end with the effects "craziness" has on children.

— Jamie Leavitt Wed, 29 Apr 2009

I really liked this piece. I thought that the opening sequence that took place in the author's childhood had a nice circular feel to it when the author has her own child at the end of the story. I didn't quite see the necessity for the interview pieces and I found myself skipping over them towards the end so that I could focus more on the main narrative.

— Erin Sloan Wed, 29 Apr 2009

I really enjoyed this piece, especially the end. I had a hard time figuring out why there were the bits of interview add in, however. I actually skipped a couple of them because I was more concerned with the main action of the story. The narrative voice was one that I felt very sympathetic towards and I became very wrapped up in her plight for sanity. I liked how the story opened with the memories from her childhood, it made the story come full circle when she had her own child at the end. I think that this piece is something that most people can relate to.

I am weary of cutting down an author's work without notification. I know i would be horrified. I do think maybe the intro could have been cut down, but i feel it is up to the author to approve such changes. What does the author envision for the story? It should never be what we want it to be. FROM THE EDITORS: THIS WAS A COLLABORATIVE PROCESS; ALL CHANGES, WHILE MADE AT OUR SUGGESTION, WERE APPROVED (AND IN MANY CASES FINE-TUNED) BY THE WRITERS.

— Rasheena Foutnain Wed, 29 Apr 2009

I agree strongly with Matt, while as writers some of us will automatically be drawn to scenes well-constructed with imagery, but there must be a time to read like a writer, and a time to read like a reader. While the scene may be enjoyable, it stagnates the goals of the essay, which are just interesting, such as the first interview. It's debatable which is more interesting and we cannot say that just because one utilizes supposedly "better writing" doesn't mean it betters the work overall. I thought the green section as an addition also did not work well, where it seemed just as forced, and actually inserted. It is so brief and like a summary that I felt distracted. I feel that what decides whether we, as writers, can get away with imagery-dense scenes is really the intended length of the piece. The longer a piece is intended to be, the easier it is to get away with pastoral scenes such as the one edited out here.

— Chris Magiet Wed, 29 Apr 2009

I think there is a lot to be said for starting a piece with scene, as this one did originally. I agree that it went on too long, but I think that the original beginning should be retained to a certain extent. The description of two little girls on bikes, riding past a mental hospital where a woman "screams and screams, eyes shut tight" as she is shocked, is a very striking and memorable image. The exact dates and locations, however (the nitty gritty details so to speak) are not necessary to the reader's understanding, nor is the description of the two roads and the rules the sisters must obey. Though they establish the reality of the piece, my personal opinion is that the author does a good enough job just with style and tone that the reader does not doubt the sincerity and truth of the narration. I also can see the merits of starting with "craziness runs in my family," as that is very striking, but I do think the scene with the little girls should be somewhere in the beginning, as it adds to the work overall.

— Heather Smith Grattan Wed, 29 Apr 2009

The opening scene before the edit is rather lengthy. The opening craziness runs in my family is able to draw the readers attention but I feel like some of the material from the original opening is needed. Eliminating all those paragraphs wasn't the best solution. It should have just been shortened.

— Arnetta Randall Wed, 29 Apr 2009

I think that the edited opening does a much better job of grabbing the reader's attention. It adds an element of immediacy that the original lacks due to the increased narrative aspect. The edited version still incorporates the author's personal experience from the original piece, but in a more concise way so as to not lose the reader with an overabundance of long, drawn out details that don't add much to the essay.

— Michele Walters Wed, 29 Apr 2009

Although the beginning part of the narrative that was omitted is beautifully written and very captivating, the piece works better without it. The point in which the omitted part ends and the rest of the piece begins is very abrupt. If the author wished to keep it in it would have been necessary to make it flow more evenly to give the reader a smoother transition. I also like Bob Katrin's idea of splitting this part up and spreading it throughout the piece. However, I disagree with what he says about the interviews. I feel the interviews give the reader a great insight into the story surrounding the hospital and should be left where they are. I do not like how the beginning part was severely truncated and then added almost haphazardly into the middle of the narrative. Again, this is too abrupt, the piece should transition smoothly to this flashback.

— Joel Torres Wed, 29 Apr 2009

While I found the reality of the opening scene to be very interesting, I think the essay is fine without it. To me, the recollection is unnecessary, as the writer's understanding and realization of craziness through adulthood is what drives the piece. Childhood becomes insignificant. I was able to understand the narrator enough without having this little insight into her past. Plus, the flow of the opening scene doesn't really match up with the flow of the rest of the essay.

— Marisa Ttourman Tue, 28 Apr 2009

While I enjoyed the reality behind the opening scene, I think that the essay is fine without it. To me, the memory seems a little unnecessary to the details of the essay, as the focus on the writer's experience and realization of craziness through adulthood drives the piece. Childhood becomes insignificant. Plus, the flow of the opening doesn't really match up with the flow of the rest of the essay. I still felt as if I knew the narrator without knowing the detail of her childhood.

— Marisa Troutman Tue, 28 Apr 2009

The author's personal story, evident in the original opening of this essay, is integrated into the topic of 'craziness' more effectively in the edited version. An opening that focuses only on the past is not necessary as long as similar elements are introduced throughout the piece, which they are. Narrative helps generate interest from the reader's perspective, but it doesn't have to be lumped together at the start. I like the essay more without the original beginning. The essay still gives the sense of character, personality and narrative without having the memory in the first paragraph.

— Natalie Tue, 28 Apr 2009

I really enjoyed the the first beginning because it told a story and jumped right into the narrative. I kept reading because I wanted to know how the story from the narrator's childhood related to her life now. Although sometimes starting with a story from childhood can be a bit cliche, I appreciate the cliche because it develops a connection between reader and author that a hook cannot. Instead of cutting the original opening, I would cut some of the interviews because I thought they interrupted the flow and had little to no impact on the work as a whole.

— Lisa Malvin Mon, 27 Apr 2009

While I like the sharp edge the new beginning adds to the piece, I find that without this first scene some of the later scenes lose their significance. Specifically, it explains the ghosts she sees as a teenager, and the ending seems less vague. I appreciate the unexplained, but only when it is done on purpose. This was a good piece. Thanks for sharing both versions.

— Rebekah Thu, 23 Apr 2009

A great man once said . . . There is always a frame. I felt that the narrative opening, while too long, was a frame for this piece, and the ending, where the author does no dream, calls back to it. But maybe this circular closing is a little tired now? And the writing in the ending is much stronger, much more beautiful than in the original beginning. What a great thing to publish -- I'm going to send my students back to the site to check out all of these!

— Marjie Stewart Tue, 14 Apr 2009

I would like to know just where you began her revision. I agree that her beginning could have more of a punch.

— Albert Rothman Fri, 27 Mar 2009

I felt the original opening created a sense of action that the boiled down version did not. True, the edited first line, "Craziness runs in my family..." is very much a hook, but the paragraph that follows does not draw me in to a particular place and time like the original did. Furthermore, I don't think the story benefited in any way from being shorter. The idea that we can apply a rule (any rule, no matter how novel) to a craft and consistently improve it, is an odd one to me. The unique nature of each piece is part of the beauty of art. In University (90's for me) simple sentences were the craze in journalism. Naomi Klein, for one, overturns that sentiment, with great success. I feel the rules actually stop many writers from developing joy and intuition in writing; make it too complex an art to dance with. I think there is something to be said for allowing the artist as much creative freedom as possible. We could summarize any story in a few paragraphs. Reading it is not nearly as fun as reading the narrative. The impact is not nearly as great. I know we are talking shorts here, but why the obsession with length? And at what expense?

— NonieD Wed, 25 Mar 2009

I definitely prefer the edited version. The primary reason I read this essay before any of the others was because its first page was powerful and punchy. Excellent work.

— carol ann Mon, 23 Mar 2009

I prefer the original opening. It has an easy, natural voice and is a scene, a great virtue. The new lead has voice and imagery but is rather abrupt and expository. Perhaps the longer version is for a book rather than a more space-conscious journal.

— Richard Gilbert Fri, 20 Mar 2009

The new opening foists bald abstractions cloaked in clunky metaphor on the reader. Far from best foot forward, it presents us with what may be the author's two worst sentences. The original opening is dramatic and concrete and plunges us into story. With respect to opening paragraphs, I really see no argument here.

— Peter Selgin Fri, 13 Mar 2009

The original opening is stronger. The new opening foists a series of bald abstractions clothed in clunky metaphor on the reader. "Craziness runs in my family like a current under waters that swell and recede with the seasons. My sister and I have stood at its shore and watched some of the adults in our life get close enough to the edge to be swallowed whole." Both sentences beg trimming if not outright excision. The original opening is concrete and dramatic; it plunges the reader straight into story. With respect to opening paragraphs I see no argument here.

The original opening was much more effective because it was centered in a particular moment. In fact, I feel that the entire yellow section could stand as a short essay in itself, and it actually feels detached from the later sections in style and content. Perhaps this is why the editors made the changes they did. However, part of the reason to publish work is to open readers to new concepts, so if pieces are too policed, even in something that might seem as benign as style rather than content, won't everything eventually sound the same? For literary nonfiction, experiments should be praised; the writer intended the sections for a reason, and I applaud that the essay does not begin in a more traditional, narrative way. The original follows the adage we're all taught, showing rather than telling.

— Catherine Carson Fri, 13 Mar 2009

This generous illustration (on the part of CNF and the writers) is invaluable for a writer who has never worked with an editor. Beginning writers don't understand how totally collaborative the process is from beginning to end. Those who accept help will reap magical benefits. Thanks, CNF, for illuminating the behind-the-scenes work. Keep up the wonderful work.

— Neil White Mon, 9 Mar 2009

I can see the attractiveness of starting with "Craziness runs in my family" but the story doesn't flow out of that paragraph. The new lede feels like a "hook." I might have asked the author to shorten her original beginning, but maybe not. Everything that comes later seems to refer back to those powerful images. Without them, we are missing something that makes the ending more poignant. Good story, either way. (Good issue too)

— paul pekin Mon, 2 Mar 2009

The original opening was more intriguing to me. It immediately drew me into the story. It was somewhat long, and the personal conversation could have been omitted, or as one person suggested placed in other parts of the essay.

— Marsha Jones Sun, 1 Mar 2009

Had the opening been cut by half instead of eliminated, it would have allowed the reader to ease into what many feel is an uncomfortable subject without being smacked in the face. It had all of the hints of "craziness" running in the family while conveying the atmosphere and misconceptions of mental health treatment of the era. With the new opening, the reader does not start with the same relationship with the narrator, who saw it through the eyes of a child. The inserted text seems awkward in its new location because of the abrupt change in tone. The entire piece could benefit by being shorter, but cutting the entire opening would not be my preference.

— Marty Stofik Thu, 26 Feb 2009

I think the piece, as written, is compelling, in any case, with our without the edit. That must be said. Yes, maybe the opening was a bit long. But starting with the craziness bit didn't grab me either. I'd have started with "Drugs," my sister whispered. And perhaps not straight from there as is, edited a bit to shape it... and forward. Two more cents added.. thanks for the question.

— Maggie Thu, 26 Feb 2009

I love the edited version. Received my CNF#36 in the mail today and opened it and read Crazy Talk first and then came right here to see what had been done to it and I love it! Maybe because I'm more a fan of reflective writing than action--I know, I know, Lee, SCENE/narr/SCENE/narr/SCENE SCENE SCENE... I get that, but I also love a good personal essay, even with very few scenes. The inserted paragraph (in green)works for me, instead of going on and on with those actions for several paragraphs/pages. This is fun. Ready to read the next one!

— Susan Cushman Wed, 25 Feb 2009

"Start your story as close to the end as possible." Kurt Vonnegut.

— Gary McMahon Wed, 25 Feb 2009

I agree that the opening goes on for too long, but I also think leaving most of it out is a mistake. When it comes to essay writing, I've learned with the help of an editor, one of the major issues is reorganization. Where can elements of the essay be placed for best effect; it takes a lot of tinkering and revision. In this one, I think the opening paragraphs could have been spead out, perhaps placed strategically elsewhere in the essay. I'm not so sure the interviewing sections work all that well and maybe some of those could have been sacrificed to place some of the original beginning paragraphs. I'ts a matter of what works best and that's subjective. "I know what I like." I find editor's,usually,I think,are bent on leaving out rather than putting in. Often the motivation is to make the work shorter and that may be a publishing issue. Editing is a complicated issue and often does not do justice to a work, as well as having the potential to help the work immensely by pressuring an author to pare down an overblown production. I've read a lot those lately. Ultimately, editing is a complicated issue and ideally, I think the best you can do is have a close working relationship with an editor and fighting for the integrity of your work as you see it. Of course, kowtowing when its an issue of getting published is also a reality.

— Bob Katrin Wed, 25 Feb 2009

I loved the original opening. It allowed me to enter into this narrator's consciousness as a child and to more fully inhabit this essay. Cutting it off is like chopping of someone's head. You might still recognize the person's body, but something essential is missing.

— lily Iona MacKenzie Sat, 21 Feb 2009

I found myself empathizing both with Laurie Uttich's attachment to the beginning scene, and with the editorial decision. So many of my own essays start out this way, because the memory is the path through the woods. I always find myself latching onto my 8-year-old self (why does 8 leave us with such rich memories?) to see where she'll lead me. Inevitably, we are both entranced with the path itself, with the trees and flower growing alongside, and fallen logs and dead animals decaying variously. But in the end, the memory leads us to the real story, an opening or a meadow, or the path takes us back to the center of town where things are happening. Both places are valid -- the path and the endpoint -- but they can't both be the main theme of the same story. Thanks to the editors for doing this; seeing the editorial process practiced on an already fine piece of writing gives me new perspective on my own work.

— Antonia Sat, 21 Feb 2009

The changes made this essay much better. The original opening didn't grab me. It read somewhat like a travel guide. The opening line of the designated 1st paragraph immediately grabbed my attention. The one paragraph revision inserted as a replacement for the initial 13 paragraphs is a great example of boiling down a point to its essential requirement. Overall, in my opinion, great editing job.

— Edward Moore Fri, 20 Feb 2009

Wonderful magazine - simply designed, great to read - surprises in every issue. Very well edited. --Creative Nonfiction reader
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Home Subscribe Current Issue About CNF CNF Editor Lee Gutkind Events Back Issues Books Mentoring Program Educational Programs Newsletter Advertising with CNF Links Contact us		First Lede/Real Lead During the editing process for this issue, with the permission of the writers, we eliminated the original beginnings of three essays and started them a few paragraphs or pages in. Our goal was to make the beginnings more immediate, to eliminate some writerly throat-clearing, to help plunge readers into the heart of the story—the action, the theme, the substance—from the very beginning. Did these changes in fact make this story more effective? And what was lost in the process? See what the author had to say about the changes, and join the discussion below! Crazy Talk Reclamation: A Study Blood and Treasure Highlighted in yellow was edited outText highlighted in green was inserted Crazy Talk Laurie Rachkus Uttich Author's Statement I often tell my writer friends, “I’m not sure it starts in the right place.” This is a lie, usually. I am sure. It is often clear to me that the moment of truth—the heartbeat that hums throughout the work—begins much later. I am not so sure in my own work. Perhaps it is because I love this opening scene, just as all the writers I advise love theirs. But, I protest, I can still see the Bughouse’s paved paths; my sister, sunburned and sure; the tiny Dixie cups; the oak trees too wide to wrap our arms around; the ghosts screaming behind stone walls. I can still feel the panic and prayer at the back of my throat, Please, don’t let me end up here. Please. And yet, I trust editors and fellow writers. Others can often see what the memoirist cannot. And I recognize the essay works without it. If you don’t need it, don’t use it, I would tell someone else. Kill your darlings, William Faulkner supposedly said first. Yes. I get it. I know my need to remember it, to write it, to rub meaning from its memory does not mean the scene has earned a space here. It was a good editorial decision. But my eight-year-old self mourns its loss. It is summer, and the sun is half-full when my sister and I climb off our bikes and sneak them through the bushes that guard the gates of the Illinois Central Hospital for the Insane. We have been here before—The Bughouse, as the kids at school call it—and we come back because we like the quiet, the twists and turns of the roads, the trees, which stretch their necks to the sky while their arms shade us. We like the buildings, large slabs of stone that leapfrog on top of each other. We like how we bounce over the secrets of the insane in the cracks of the sidewalk. The buildings are old—the first patient was admitted in 1851—and their walls are crumbling in the corners. Many of them are empty, and as we pass one with broken windows and an open door, my sister tells me as she pedals, “See that one? Right there? That’s where they do electroshock therapy. Zap the brain. Scramble it up. Right there. In the basement.” I am 8, and it is 1975, and this is Jacksonville, Ill., and I still believe that the world is a place where grownups know what they are doing, even as I imagine thick electrical cords connecting to metal bowls that sit on the head of a woman—always a woman—who screams and screams, her eyes shut tight, her throat as tight as my mother’s. We circle around the courtyard where a group sits across the lawn in lines of folding chairs. They are too far away to catch us even if they see us on our silent 10-speeds. We watch a woman in a white coat pass out little cups as arms covered in robes and housecoats lift them to their lips. “Drugs,” my sister whispers to me. I think maybe it’s Kool-Aid and they are having a break from whatever it is they do inside. School, maybe, the kind that teaches you how to hide what’s in your head. I learned how to do that by myself in second grade. It’s not so hard. You just nod and say, “Yes, Sister.” You don’t ask questions unless you already know the answers. “Let’s get out of here,” my sister says. “Mom might be looking for us.” I nod and pedal faster. There are two busy roads on the way to The Bughouse, and we’re not allowed to cross either one of them. God knows, I walk into a door, nine times out of 10. My head’s in the clouds. We don’t need anybody getting killed. If anything happens to either one of us, you might as well put my mother in the ground, too. At the gate, I get off my bike and look back at the building, the one with the basement where the woman sits strapped to a chair. I think if I look hard enough, I could see her through the walls. She is small with brown eyes, thin shoulders and light hair that curls at the ends. She asks too many questions, and sometimes she’s too quiet. She doesn’t know what people want to hear. She doesn’t know when to nod and when to look away. One time, she saw a ghost—an old man—who winked at her as he walked up the stairs. She didn’t know that you keep your ghosts to yourself. She didn’t know that if you don’t, people will think you’re a liar or crazy. She didn’t know it’s better to be a liar. That night, I dream of the woman in the basement. I hear her screams, and I stand and watch her, and even as she beckons me closer, even as I see the cord attached to the wall and realize how easy it would be, a simple tug really, to end her pain, I shake my head—No, no, sorry, but no—and I shut my eyes. Craziness runs in my family like a current under waters that swell and recede with the seasons. My sister and I have stood at its shore and watched some of the adults in our life get close enough to the edge to be swallowed whole. My uncle died alone, a pathological liar with a fake name and a fifth wife. My cousin killed herself. Another uncle wandered into other people’s homes, sat down in their living rooms and demanded, “Just who the hell are you?” But most of the craziness in our family goes by other names. He has a bad temper. She’s got the blues, could be menopause. He hasn’t been the same since Vietnam. Maybe all families are like this. Maybe all young girls worry that their heads are a frightening place to be, their thoughts a medley of words they can’t translate, and even if they could, no one would understand them, no one would say, “Yes, I’ve felt that way, too. Yes, it’s fine, normal even. Maybe all of these girls grow older, find others who feel the way they do, but still believe madness lives just around the corner. It waits. And maybe all of these girls grow into women and find men who think of them as strong and sane—men who even use the word “amazing” when they describe them to friends, men who nod, bewildered, when these women demand one promise before they’ll marry them: “No matter what happens, no matter what you’re afraid of, no matter who tells you that it’s for the best, promise me, you’ll never commit me, that you’ll never let it happen. Because crazy is contagious and if I’m committed, if I’m living with completely crazy, no treatment, no doctor, no medication will ever help me find my way out.” Interviewer: What happened when he got home from the war? May McNeil: Well, we thought he was all right. The doctor and the nurse brought him to the door, and the doctor said, “Mrs. Carr, here is your son. You’ll have to watch him. He’s shell-shocked.” That’s what they called them if they lost their mind. So he was home two or three days, and Mom cooked some beef. She used to make it real brown, pound it up real good, you know, and make it tender. He liked it. She set it right down by his plate, and when he seen that, he jumped up, and he said, “Meat, meat, meat,” and a bad word and “blood,” and he says, “That’s all I saw over in France,” and from then on, he was just raving crazy. Interviewer: He said that’s all he saw over in France? May McNeil: Yes, and he jumped up, and he hit Dad in the mouth and split his lip. Dad said, “May, go down to the neighbors and call the law. He’s lost his mind.” That was the hardest job I ever done in my life. But we called the law, I did, and they come out and put him in jail. Dad sat up in the jail, outside the cell all night; he felt so bad, you know. And the next morning after Elmer slept, he was OK. He said, “Dad, you had better do something with me. I do that often, and I’m liable to kill some of you.” And he asked us to put him in Jacksonville. Interviewer: What’s over in Jacksonville? May McNeil: That used to be a place where they put insane people. Jacksonville State Hospital. He was there all his life from the time he was about, I guess, 19 or 20 until he was 80. May McNeil was born in Beardstown, Ill., in 1898. Her brother was a patient of the Illinois Central Hospital for the Insane [aka Jacksonville State Hospital]. Interviewed by the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University, Springfield, Ill., Oct. 10, 1987. When I was a child, my sister and I sneaked our bikes through the bushes guarding the gates of the Illinois Central Hospital for the Insane—the Bughouse, as the kids at school called it. Many of the buildings were old—the first patient was admitted in 1851—and the walls had crumbled in the corners. We liked the quiet, the twists and turns of the roads, the trees, which stretched their necks to the sky while their arms shaded us. We liked the buildings, large slabs of stone that leapfrogged on top of each other. We liked how we bounced over the secrets of the insane in the cracks of the sidewalk. The hospital was nearly empty by then, with fewer than 600 patients in a facility that had once housed over 3,600. My sister and I often wondered where all the crazy people had gone. She believed they had escaped. They kicked through the sagging doors and stepped into the light. They were no longer patients, but nuns, maybe, or students at the Flamingo School of Beauty downtown. They fooled everybody but us. Only the truly crazy people were left behind—or, perhaps, just the people who didn’t have the gumption to make a break for it. Not one of the patients left at The Bughouse was a person I knew, and yet every time I passed by, I expected to see someone I recognized, someone peering out the gate, someone I could rescue. Someone who would tell me that she wasn’t really crazy or, if she was, that she hadn’t always been. Someone who would understand all the chatter in my head, the characters who lived inside of me and the scribbled-in notebooks under my bed. Someone I could take home to my room, where the walls were covered in light lavender and “The Yellow Wallpaper” was something I only pretended not to understand. Interviewer: Did you have a lot of younger patients? Mamie Cole: That was another thing that bothered me. When we were in training, they told us that dementia praecox was the insanity of the youth. That was true. They used to come in there sometimes 13, 14 years old, and I always felt sorry for them. I always felt that they were just doomed, that they’d never get out. Some of them did get out, but some of them stayed there an entire lifetime. Mamie Cole was an attendant who joined the staff of Illinois Central Hospital for the Insane in 1911. She later became a nurse and night supervisor. Interviewed by the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University, Springfield, Ill., Oct. 13, 1972. My aunt calls, sighs and hangs up, the phone rattling as it drops onto the receiver. She calls again two minutes later and whispers my name. “Is it you? Or is it that machine again?” I tell her it’s me. I don’t tell her it was also me the first time she called. “What’s wrong, Aunt Audrey?” She whispers, “I can’t really talk, not here. I think one of them is listening.” I walk into the kitchen and look out into the back yard. My 5-year-old son stands in the Florida winter sun and holds a frog in the palm of his hand. He rubs its back with a dirty finger. His head is bent, and his eyes are dark and brown, the shape of almonds, just like my aunt’s—a coincidence, this likeness to a woman who married my mother’s brother. “Maybe you could go into the bathroom,” I tell my aunt. “I bet they aren’t in there.” There is a rustling, a shuffle of steps, a muted click. “Well, I’ve closed the door the best I can, you know, with the cord,” my aunt says, her voice a bit louder. “It’s probably OK,” I say and open the dishwasher and take the clean glasses out. “What’s going on?” “Well, they started up again last night,” my aunt tells me, and I can picture her, this 80-year-old woman I love, with her red, red lipstick, her blue-black hair, her once-kind eyes now wild in the curved mirror. “It was the one the queen always sends, the loudest one. The lieutenant bee. He was in my ear all night long.” My son walks through the door, heads to the refrigerator. I shake my head, point to the bathroom. “Wash your hands,” I mouth to him. “What did he want?” I ask my aunt. My aunt laughs, but it’s a bitter, broken sound. “What they always want: to make me crazy. And, you know, I think I made it worse when I called the exterminator.” “Really?” I say and start on the silverware. I wonder how she found an exterminator who would come to her house to search for bees in the middle of an Illinois winter. “Did he find any of them?” My aunt sighs. “No. I tried to tell him that’s how the bees are. They hide. People don’t know how smart they really are.” The first bee showed up in my aunt’s bedroom a few months ago. She couldn’t see it—she can never see them, they’re so fast, so sneaky, so ready for the light to be switched on—but he whispered in her ear, a buzz all night long, a hum, which she first thought was friendly. Since then, they’ve become organized. The queen has decided my aunt’s house must become her hive. They will drive my aunt out, or they will kill her. My aunt knows this because sometimes, at night, she can hear them talking. “You know what, Aunt Audrey?” I say and check my son’s hands. I open the refrigerator, point to the grapes on the second shelf. “Maybe you should move. Mom was just telling me that the retirement home on Fifth Street—you know, the one with those huge white columns?—has a bus, and they’ll take you to Mass every day, out to dinner, whatever, and it’s not like a nursing home. You’d have your own apartment. The food’s even supposed to be good.” My aunt is quiet for a moment. “You didn’t tell your mother about the bees, did you?” “No,” I lie. “Of course not. It’s just—” “Because I know she’ll think I’m crazy, and I’m not.” My aunt’s voice is hard. “I’m not.” Before I circle The Bughouse on my bike; before I move a thousand miles away; before I stand in my kitchen and study my son and speak carefully to my aunt as she whispers in her small, pink bathroom with the chipped tile and pale green counter; before my aunt’s bones have been shattered by a car; before she has lost a breast; before she has held a phone in her hand and listened to a police officer say “your daughter” and “suicide” and “I’m sorry”; before she has woken up alone in her home, night after night, with her feet resting on an open recliner, a rosary in her lap, the black static of the TV blinking at her afghan-covered knees, a half-eaten Meals on Wheels dinner on the tray beside her—years before all of that, a lifetime of sorts, my aunt pulls on a navy blue dress, boards a bus and kneels beside my mother at an altar. My aunt promises to protect me, to guide me, to lead me through whatever valley of darkness I might find myself in. She has left a husband at home to take this oath. He is angry with her: He is often drunk and sometimes violent, and no one can later recall why he is too furious to come with her. Still, she holds me in my white baptismal gown, her eyes calm and steady, her gaze sure. She smiles like a woman who has never been awakened by a bee in her ear. She smiles like we all do, as if she never saw it coming. Interviewer: Did you ever, in the time that you were working at Jacksonville, go to one of the funerals? Mamie Cole: Oh, yes. Interviewer: Could you describe them for me? Mamie Cole: The state patients that didn’t have any relatives or anybody, they would bury them over in the potter’s field out there in Diamond Grove. Well, the minister always just preached a nice funeral like anyone; a few aides would go, maybe, and sing. I remember one time I went and Dr. Cointus was the minister. He talked about illnesses, and he tried to say that insanity was just the same as any other illness, and that was way back when. He said that you got sick in your body and sometimes you got sick in your mind, and I thought it was a nice sermon. They still do that for the ones that don’t have any relatives. I think they do. Mamie Cole, previously referenced. Years later—long after my summer bike rides have ended—I go back inside The Bughouse gates. By then, it is the Jacksonville Development Center, a day school. My friend Mark’s Special Ed little brother will spend his time there after he “graduates” from high school. I am 16, and I am in the back seat of Mike’s car, and we are behind one of the empty buildings that I used to ride my bike around. He is telling me lies—he loves me, will always love me—but I don’t know that yet. He whispers into my neck, his hands everywhere my mother would say they absolutely should not be, and I see a shadow move across the window of the building beside me. “Shit!” I say and struggle back into my shirt. “There’s somebody in there!” Mike looks up, his eyes dark, unfocused. “I don’t see anything.” His lips find my ear. I shake him off. “No, there! In that window. I saw someone.” I do not say I think it is a woman. I don’t even realize then that I am sure this shadow is the woman from my dreams, the woman with the tight throat, the closed eyes. Mike sighs and then laughs. “Hey, let’s go in and look. I hear there are tunnels under there and all sorts of old equipment.” He is already opening the door when I tug on his arm. “No! Are you crazy?” He laughs again and tries to pull me out of the car. He is a little crazy, this first love of mine, this 17-year-old kid, his dad a former drunk who still slaps him around, his mom a woman who cleans the floor on her knees every day but Sunday. “Come on, baby,” he says, and I know right then, even as I follow him up the cracked steps, that he is wrong for me, though it will take me another two years to realize I am wrong for him. It will end on an interstate on a spring evening. We will be in the same car we are in right now. He will be speeding into the dusk, clutching my arm as I open the door, ready to jump if he won’t pull over—“I swear to God, I will. I’ll jump out of this car, you asshole, you lying, cheating, son of a bitch. I swear I will jump if you don’t stop the car right now!”—and finally, after I claw away his hands and open the door, he will swerve to the side, rocks spitting into the ditch, and he will grab the back of my shirt as I try to leap out while the tires skid and stop, and he will speak slowly and carefully to me as the car pants and I stand at the side of the road with his skin under my nails. “Please, just let me take you home. Please. I can’t leave you here.” And later, he will tell his best friend—the person I will date next, as soon as I can, even though the only interest I have in him is what it might mean to Mike—that I went crazy that night. “I told her about Jody, and she just flipped out. She just went nuts, man. I swear to God, she was like completely insane.” But now, right now, I am only crazy in love, its own kind of 16-year-old insanity, and so I let him lead me to this place, this abandoned dark building, where the only thing I find is a locked door. Interviewer: At that time then, around 1950, were the old dances and parties pretty much eliminated? Oscar Gronseth: They had patient dances prior to my coming to this hospital. When the patients would go to the dance, they were escorted in large groups. Then, when the music started, they would come together like the coming together of the Red Sea (laughter). And as the last note would end on the dance set, they parted again, like the parting of the Red Sea. And woe to any of them who were caught even standing around talking to one another. I think they felt that we would start having a lot of bad sexual incidents or something like that if we let the sexes mingle. I just couldn’t see it. I felt the mingling of the sexes would have so much more of a therapeutic and beneficial value because it was much more natural, as in someone you’d find outside a hospital. Oscar Gronseth joined the staff of the Central Illinois Center for the Insane in 1951 as a supervising therapist. He later became the Activity Therapy Supervisor. Interviewed by the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University, Springfield, Ill., Oct. 12, 1972. I am sitting in my bed, my back straight against the headboard, my knees under my chin. There are ghosts all around me, but I can’t see them. Not all of them are friendly. I am 5, and I don’t know yet that my mother needs me as much as I need her. Or maybe she doesn’t, not now, not this night. This is before her little white pill, the unopened book on her lap, the startled jumps and the long silences that stretch out and cover the walls of our house. This is before my father and I sip wine together as adults and ponder words like “anxiety” and “clinical depression” and “genetic tendency toward these conditions compacted by external factors.” This is before she closes her eyes when she remembers the years of my teens, her “decade of despondency.” This is now, a moonless night in an old, yellow house, and I am small and cold and without power to hurt or to heal, and she is solely my mother, my savior. I want to flee to her, to wait by the side of her bed, to watch her breathe until her eyes open and she lifts the covers for me to slide under. But I can’t leave my bed. If my feet touch the floor, if one toe steps into the dark, the ghosts will turn into shapes. Anything could happen then. I am not the kind of child who calls out in the middle of the night. It is dim and everything sleeps; even the statue of the Virgin Mary by my bed seems weary as her bare heel crushes the head of a snake. I cannot yell for my mother. I cannot split open the night with a scream. And so I say her name silently as if it is a prayer, as if she is my own God, one I can beckon to me without words. I call her again and again, until she stands in my doorway, her white nightgown a shadow of light. “Laurie Ann?” “You often called me with your mind,” my mother tells me now, 35 years later. “That’s how close we were. You didn’t even have to speak. Do you remember?” We are a family that believes in the unseen, the unknown, the unspoken words that startle us awake. We do not spend a lot of time worrying if others believe as we do. We befriend these doubters. We seek them out, marry them even, and all the while, we secretly think of them as a bit barbaric, so intent on surviving that they never scrape beneath the surface to find what throbs within them. And yet, perhaps, our own survival instincts pale next to these skeptics we keep close to us. They are the sort of people who guard the gates of The Bughouse. We are the sort who roam its halls. Interviewer: It sounds as though you’ve gotten results that a lot of other people who supposedly know what they’re doing haven’t gotten. (laughter) Doesn’t this make you feel pretty good? Eleanor DeLong: Yes. [One patient] says I cured him. He was having trouble with his mother and his mother-in-law. He had a wife and five children, and I said, “Move as damn far away from both of them as you can get.” He had a dealership from an implement company that was bugging him. I said, “Get rid of it; work for somebody else. Get out of this situation. Get away from your people; get away from hers. Stand on those two feet yourself.” And he did it. And he is doing well, really well. Eleanor DeLong began working at the Illinois Central Hospital for the Insane in 1929 as a ward attendant. In 1953, she became manager of the hospital laundry, where she managed patient workers. Interviewed by the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University, Springfield, Ill., Oct. 11, 1972. I hold my son in my arms, rest my chin on his damp head. He is 6 days old, and we are finally home from the hospital. There is a faint red circle around his neck where the umbilical cord became a noose. I study the flutter of his eyelids and wonder, as I have every moment since his birth, if there is brain damage, if he has lost something that he had been given, if those minutes without oxygen will mean a lifetime of loss. The doctors say we’ll have to wait and see. I have a lot of time. I’m supposed to rest. There was a problem in the delivery, and I also carry battle wounds. The forceps squeezed my son’s soft head, wrenching him from inside of me, twisting him toward this life even as the cord that connected us held tight. I have “too many stitches to count,” a tear that makes me worry my sex life is over and an incision that must be kept as dry as possible. I do what my doctor says. I stay in my nightgown and lie on a towel without underwear, and when I shuffle to the bathroom, my husband walks with me, holding my arm. Later, he mops up the blood that leaves a trail on the tile behind me. He uses bleach. I make him open the window. The baby’s in here, too. Days pass, and I sit and hold my son. I don’t want to see friends who stop by, even Kristin, who brought chicken salad. I shake my head when my mother calls. I don’t open the cards, the blue packages. I only pretend to listen when my husband reads me e-mails with “Congratulations!” in the subject line. I sit and hold my son. My husband needs to go to Safeway, just for a minute, just for a few things, like milk and more bleach. He asks me again and again, “Are you OK?” And then, “Are you sure?” My husband puts the phone by our bed, kisses me as he leaves. I sit and hold my son. He looks right at me, his eyes dark blue, and studies me without a blink. He seems to know something that I don’t. He seems wise to me; there’s something beneath his stare. Perhaps he senses that my love for him is too big, too wide, and that my fear for him will swallow us both whole. He wants to tell me something—something that will change everything between us—but I don’t know what it is. After a minute—or many minutes, maybe even an hour, I don’t know, I don’t count time anymore—I realize that my son is warning me. He will grow, and he will be bullied. Or become a bully. There will be drugs, maybe, and dark alleys and needles that haven’t been sterilized. He will drop out of school, or he will get some girl he can’t remember pregnant. He will join a gang. Or he will be shot by a gang member on his way to baseball practice. He will die in my arms. He will live to be a 100 and never call. He will become old and fat and bald, miserably pecking away inside a cubicle, never finding out what he could have become and blaming me because of it. Or he’ll end up at The Bughouse—which, of course, isn’t The Bughouse any longer. Now it’s the Jacksonville Development Center, and it’s for people whose brains didn’t get enough oxygen. It occurs to me, as I sit and hold my baby, that none of it matters. Although my heart has been cracked out of my chest and is limping after my son, I cannot alter the outcome of his life. I can only witness it, and at this moment—when I am struggling to keep the cap of my pain meds closed, my breast milk clean—it seems too much to ask of me. The phone rings, and, without thinking, I answer it. My friend who had a son six months ago asks me how I am. Before I can stop myself, I tell her, “I know something awful is going to happen to him, and I know I’m going to have to watch, and I can’t do it. I can’t.” She is quiet for a moment and then asks, “What do you think is going to happen?” “Anything can happen,” I tell her. “Anything.” And I talk about drugs and gangs and prison and sex and doesn’t she remember the time she mixed Ecstasy with mushrooms or was it cocaine? Didn’t she end up behind a dumpster in downtown Denver? And I’m not judging her—God, everybody knows I’m a virgin on all that stuff—and she’s great, she turned out just fine, really, but think about that: She was just this normal kid from the suburbs, two nice parents, good schools, the whole bit, and what if she had overdosed or died choking on her own vomit, and what if, I don’t know, she ended up with some man she didn’t know on top of her, and what if he liked to cut, or what if he had AIDS, or what if it’s one of our sons who’s on top of some drugged up little idiot, no offense, holding a knife between his teeth, or what if he’s the drugged up little idiot? Or both? I mean, really, what have we done? My friend takes a long, deep breath. “Listen to me. This is crazy talk. Jake is— what? Ten days old? Listen to me. You need to put that baby down. You need to, I don’t know, get in the shower or something. You need to call your doctor if you can’t pull your shit together. I love you, but I’m telling you: This is crazy talk.” I hang up the phone. I put my son in his bassinet for the first time. I walk to the bathroom and turn on the shower. I stand under cold water. I watch the blood fall from the empty space inside of me and circle the drain, around and around, until the water runs clean. I wait until my heart beats hard and then slows. I turn the water as hot as I can stand it, and when my skin shrinks and stings, I step out and stand before the mirror. I lift my chin and find the curve of my mother’s face, the arch of her throat. I study my eyes, brown and not the least bit wise, and I pray that the bees in my family’s hive of madness will rise off my shoulders like the steam around me. I study myself, the woman I am becoming, the mother I long to be, until the room turns cool and clear. I walk back to my bedroom where my son sleeps. A trail of blood follows me, but it is lighter now, its steps farther apart. I climb between my sheets. I close my eyes, and I don’t dream. 41 comments This is a truly magnificeny piece of writing. I would agree with those who say the edit makes it a more arresting start. How can you beat the sentence "Craziness runs in my family like a current under waters that swell and recede with the seasons". It is a very compelling piece, well paced and the voice is consistent, intimate, and believable. I would probably go along with the commenter who said that the piece might be slightly more effective without the interviews. And by the way, what a great idea CNF for doing this, and exhibiting the power, necessity even, of good editing. — Tomaltach Tue, 12 Jan 2010 The beginning edit was like an incision, cutting the work to its heart and inserting us with a sense of immediacy appropriate to the anxiety level the author conveyed. This is an excellent piece of writing and I think the editing was purposeful. I will add my voice to those who felt interrupted by the interview segments. The effect was to downshift the intensity of the piece which temporarily reduced the power of intimacy by which I was captivated. — Lynn Wed, 19 Aug 2009 The real lede absolutely provided a much better introduction to the piece. While the original intro was beautiful and powerful, even, as others have said, it did not follow the heartbeat of the piece. While the theme is obviously established in that first piece, and the chronology motif is established therein, its tone does not augment or even complement the theme of the rest of the piece because it reads so much like an introduction. Taking it out, then, was a wise choice. The inserted piece, however did not meet the needs of the essay, I believe; the original introduction should have just been whittled down, as suggested and been inserted somewhere in the piece. The original introduction did provide somewhat of a nostalgia that is carried through the rest of the piece (not in terms of tone, mind, but in terms of what the story was focused on) and that was not translated in the newly inserted piece. edit: actually, now reading it over again, it seems that the original lede began the story with a strong tie to the rest of the piece that the new lede does not accomplish. Nevertheless, I still contend that the new lede is a better choice for this piece than the old one, no matter how much it clashes with the tone of the rest of the paper, how much it seems sort of thrown into the mix, and how little the inserted piece matches the spirit of the original lede. But that's just my own opinion, crazy as it might seem. — Obaid Sarvana Sun, 3 May 2009 I agree completely with the idea that scene can sometimes muddle a piece's intended direction, and I think the original introduction to this piece does just that. To me, it seems like a page break would have been needed if the original format was kept because the beginning opens too many avenues. As readers, we are unable to determine what direction the writer is leading us after reading the original beginning and being exposed to so many possibilities. But I find myself wishing that some of the things that were cut could somehow find their way back into the piece. For instance, when the narrator is with her boyfriend and mentions the woman from her dreams, the one with the tight throat, I wondered if the image was weakened because of its lack of explanation, or strengthened because of its mysteriousness. With the beginning truncated, I think the essay, while more focused, loses some of the eerie quality I found so entertaining. — Adam Mann Sat, 2 May 2009 I find myself in agreement with Bob Katrin's statement [the first comment on the webpage]: "[T]he opening goes on for too long, but I also think leaving most of it out is a mistake." The intro could stand to be whittled down, but it serves two important purposes. Firstly, it sets up the theme and tone of the essay. The reader knows immediately that this will be an essay about the author's experience with mental illness. Secondly, the experience that Uttich writes about here is her first experience with mental illness, if not literally then symbolically. Formative experiences, of course, are often an effective way to begin an essay. I was ambivalent about the use of the quotes. Most of the quotes discuss the day-to-day lives of the patients, and while interesting, are not necessarily relevant to the author's own experience with mental illness--or her experience with the Bughouse. After all, the essay is not so much an exploration of the Bughouse patients as people as it is the author's realization (and trepidation) that she could be lumped in with these enigmatic “crazies” at any time. It is better for the narrative that those in the asylum remain anonymous, disquieting presences that stay in the back of the author’s head, putting into question her sanity even when she feels most adjusted. The quotes would work well in an expository essay about the Bughouse, but feel unnecessary in this particular essay. — Sarah Lindenbaum Fri, 1 May 2009 I'm conflicted. In reading this piece as a whole, I can understand why she chose to omit the beginning. From a craft standpoint, it makes perfect sense. But I'm also struck with how this intro is full of some very compelling imagery as well as some interesting character development. I suppose that I'm ultimately struck with the fact that the author has found the perfect balance here in that she has not in fact omitted this portion of her essay while installing an awareness of its aesthetic weakness. — caleb Thu, 30 Apr 2009 These are small but very important edits. The opening scene, I feel, tried to direct us, too much, too hard, in the obvious, wrong direction. It's a beautiful scene, immaculately worded, but I feel like the new beginning doesn't really suffer for its loss. The scene does not truly speak to the initiation or the purpose of the essay like the new introduction does. I do wish there could have been another scene as intricate, but the new opening still captures the reader and brings her or him into a more focused world. Some cannot understand the obsession with "length" with habitually shortening pieces and stripping them of their complexity. I cannot see the obsession with "scenes," which someone else claimed to be a great "virtue." Scenes, if well-constructed, can be as moving as dialogue, as a description, as an argument. No more or less valuable. The obsession with visual imagery, with locating in time and place, I feel, weakens this piece at its opening when it could have to strong introduction paragraph that, revised, it does. — Matthew Demarco Wed, 29 Apr 2009 While I enjoyed reading the original opening, I do not think that it is necessary for the story to work. I like how the revised version begins with the word "craziness." This is almost like an immediate thesis for the entire story within the very first word. I do think that the revised paragraph that mentions the original opening could give a little more detail that the original contains. When we get that strong image of the institution in the beginning, it makes the reader cringe a little, which is a good thing, when the narrator returns there in other parts of her life (ie the scene with her and Mike in the car). The original opening also puts a little more emphasis on the drama in the very end with the effects "craziness" has on children. — Jamie Leavitt Wed, 29 Apr 2009 I really liked this piece. I thought that the opening sequence that took place in the author's childhood had a nice circular feel to it when the author has her own child at the end of the story. I didn't quite see the necessity for the interview pieces and I found myself skipping over them towards the end so that I could focus more on the main narrative. — Erin Sloan Wed, 29 Apr 2009 I really enjoyed this piece, especially the end. I had a hard time figuring out why there were the bits of interview add in, however. I actually skipped a couple of them because I was more concerned with the main action of the story. The narrative voice was one that I felt very sympathetic towards and I became very wrapped up in her plight for sanity. I liked how the story opened with the memories from her childhood, it made the story come full circle when she had her own child at the end. I think that this piece is something that most people can relate to. — Erin Sloan Wed, 29 Apr 2009 I am weary of cutting down an author's work without notification. I know i would be horrified. I do think maybe the intro could have been cut down, but i feel it is up to the author to approve such changes. What does the author envision for the story? It should never be what we want it to be. FROM THE EDITORS: THIS WAS A COLLABORATIVE PROCESS; ALL CHANGES, WHILE MADE AT OUR SUGGESTION, WERE APPROVED (AND IN MANY CASES FINE-TUNED) BY THE WRITERS. — Rasheena Foutnain Wed, 29 Apr 2009 I agree strongly with Matt, while as writers some of us will automatically be drawn to scenes well-constructed with imagery, but there must be a time to read like a writer, and a time to read like a reader. While the scene may be enjoyable, it stagnates the goals of the essay, which are just interesting, such as the first interview. It's debatable which is more interesting and we cannot say that just because one utilizes supposedly "better writing" doesn't mean it betters the work overall. I thought the green section as an addition also did not work well, where it seemed just as forced, and actually inserted. It is so brief and like a summary that I felt distracted. I feel that what decides whether we, as writers, can get away with imagery-dense scenes is really the intended length of the piece. The longer a piece is intended to be, the easier it is to get away with pastoral scenes such as the one edited out here. — Chris Magiet Wed, 29 Apr 2009 I think there is a lot to be said for starting a piece with scene, as this one did originally. I agree that it went on too long, but I think that the original beginning should be retained to a certain extent. The description of two little girls on bikes, riding past a mental hospital where a woman "screams and screams, eyes shut tight" as she is shocked, is a very striking and memorable image. The exact dates and locations, however (the nitty gritty details so to speak) are not necessary to the reader's understanding, nor is the description of the two roads and the rules the sisters must obey. Though they establish the reality of the piece, my personal opinion is that the author does a good enough job just with style and tone that the reader does not doubt the sincerity and truth of the narration. I also can see the merits of starting with "craziness runs in my family," as that is very striking, but I do think the scene with the little girls should be somewhere in the beginning, as it adds to the work overall. — Heather Smith Grattan Wed, 29 Apr 2009 The opening scene before the edit is rather lengthy. The opening craziness runs in my family is able to draw the readers attention but I feel like some of the material from the original opening is needed. Eliminating all those paragraphs wasn't the best solution. It should have just been shortened. — Arnetta Randall Wed, 29 Apr 2009 These are small but very important edits. The opening scene, I feel, tried to direct us, too much, too hard, in the obvious, wrong direction. It's a beautiful scene, immaculately worded, but I feel like the new beginning doesn't really suffer for its loss. The scene does not truly speak to the initiation or the purpose of the essay like the new introduction does. I do wish there could have been another scene as intricate, but the new opening still captures the reader and brings her or him into a more focused world. Some cannot understand the obsession with "length" with habitually shortening pieces and stripping them of their complexity. I cannot see the obsession with "scenes," which someone else claimed to be a great "virtue." Scenes, if well-constructed, can be as moving as dialogue, as a description, as an argument. No more or less valuable. The obsession with visual imagery, with locating in time and place, I feel, weakens this piece at its opening when it could have to strong introduction paragraph that, revised, it does. — Matthew Demarco Wed, 29 Apr 2009 I think that the edited opening does a much better job of grabbing the reader's attention. It adds an element of immediacy that the original lacks due to the increased narrative aspect. The edited version still incorporates the author's personal experience from the original piece, but in a more concise way so as to not lose the reader with an overabundance of long, drawn out details that don't add much to the essay. — Michele Walters Wed, 29 Apr 2009 Although the beginning part of the narrative that was omitted is beautifully written and very captivating, the piece works better without it. The point in which the omitted part ends and the rest of the piece begins is very abrupt. If the author wished to keep it in it would have been necessary to make it flow more evenly to give the reader a smoother transition. I also like Bob Katrin's idea of splitting this part up and spreading it throughout the piece. However, I disagree with what he says about the interviews. I feel the interviews give the reader a great insight into the story surrounding the hospital and should be left where they are. I do not like how the beginning part was severely truncated and then added almost haphazardly into the middle of the narrative. Again, this is too abrupt, the piece should transition smoothly to this flashback. — Joel Torres Wed, 29 Apr 2009 While I found the reality of the opening scene to be very interesting, I think the essay is fine without it. To me, the recollection is unnecessary, as the writer's understanding and realization of craziness through adulthood is what drives the piece. Childhood becomes insignificant. I was able to understand the narrator enough without having this little insight into her past. Plus, the flow of the opening scene doesn't really match up with the flow of the rest of the essay. — Marisa Ttourman Tue, 28 Apr 2009 While I enjoyed the reality behind the opening scene, I think that the essay is fine without it. To me, the memory seems a little unnecessary to the details of the essay, as the focus on the writer's experience and realization of craziness through adulthood drives the piece. Childhood becomes insignificant. Plus, the flow of the opening doesn't really match up with the flow of the rest of the essay. I still felt as if I knew the narrator without knowing the detail of her childhood. — Marisa Troutman Tue, 28 Apr 2009 The author's personal story, evident in the original opening of this essay, is integrated into the topic of 'craziness' more effectively in the edited version. An opening that focuses only on the past is not necessary as long as similar elements are introduced throughout the piece, which they are. Narrative helps generate interest from the reader's perspective, but it doesn't have to be lumped together at the start. I like the essay more without the original beginning. The essay still gives the sense of character, personality and narrative without having the memory in the first paragraph. — Natalie Tue, 28 Apr 2009 I really enjoyed the the first beginning because it told a story and jumped right into the narrative. I kept reading because I wanted to know how the story from the narrator's childhood related to her life now. Although sometimes starting with a story from childhood can be a bit cliche, I appreciate the cliche because it develops a connection between reader and author that a hook cannot. Instead of cutting the original opening, I would cut some of the interviews because I thought they interrupted the flow and had little to no impact on the work as a whole. — Lisa Malvin Mon, 27 Apr 2009 While I like the sharp edge the new beginning adds to the piece, I find that without this first scene some of the later scenes lose their significance. Specifically, it explains the ghosts she sees as a teenager, and the ending seems less vague. I appreciate the unexplained, but only when it is done on purpose. This was a good piece. Thanks for sharing both versions. — Rebekah Thu, 23 Apr 2009 A great man once said . . . There is always a frame. I felt that the narrative opening, while too long, was a frame for this piece, and the ending, where the author does no dream, calls back to it. But maybe this circular closing is a little tired now? And the writing in the ending is much stronger, much more beautiful than in the original beginning. What a great thing to publish -- I'm going to send my students back to the site to check out all of these! — Marjie Stewart Tue, 14 Apr 2009 I would like to know just where you began her revision. I agree that her beginning could have more of a punch. — Albert Rothman Fri, 27 Mar 2009 I felt the original opening created a sense of action that the boiled down version did not. True, the edited first line, "Craziness runs in my family..." is very much a hook, but the paragraph that follows does not draw me in to a particular place and time like the original did. Furthermore, I don't think the story benefited in any way from being shorter. The idea that we can apply a rule (any rule, no matter how novel) to a craft and consistently improve it, is an odd one to me. The unique nature of each piece is part of the beauty of art. In University (90's for me) simple sentences were the craze in journalism. Naomi Klein, for one, overturns that sentiment, with great success. I feel the rules actually stop many writers from developing joy and intuition in writing; make it too complex an art to dance with. I think there is something to be said for allowing the artist as much creative freedom as possible. We could summarize any story in a few paragraphs. Reading it is not nearly as fun as reading the narrative. The impact is not nearly as great. I know we are talking shorts here, but why the obsession with length? And at what expense? — NonieD Wed, 25 Mar 2009 I definitely prefer the edited version. The primary reason I read this essay before any of the others was because its first page was powerful and punchy. Excellent work. — carol ann Mon, 23 Mar 2009 I prefer the original opening. It has an easy, natural voice and is a scene, a great virtue. The new lead has voice and imagery but is rather abrupt and expository. Perhaps the longer version is for a book rather than a more space-conscious journal. — Richard Gilbert Fri, 20 Mar 2009 The new opening foists bald abstractions cloaked in clunky metaphor on the reader. Far from best foot forward, it presents us with what may be the author's two worst sentences. The original opening is dramatic and concrete and plunges us into story. With respect to opening paragraphs, I really see no argument here. — Peter Selgin Fri, 13 Mar 2009 The original opening is stronger. The new opening foists a series of bald abstractions clothed in clunky metaphor on the reader. "Craziness runs in my family like a current under waters that swell and recede with the seasons. My sister and I have stood at its shore and watched some of the adults in our life get close enough to the edge to be swallowed whole." Both sentences beg trimming if not outright excision. The original opening is concrete and dramatic; it plunges the reader straight into story. With respect to opening paragraphs I see no argument here. — Peter Selgin Fri, 13 Mar 2009 The original opening was much more effective because it was centered in a particular moment. In fact, I feel that the entire yellow section could stand as a short essay in itself, and it actually feels detached from the later sections in style and content. Perhaps this is why the editors made the changes they did. However, part of the reason to publish work is to open readers to new concepts, so if pieces are too policed, even in something that might seem as benign as style rather than content, won't everything eventually sound the same? For literary nonfiction, experiments should be praised; the writer intended the sections for a reason, and I applaud that the essay does not begin in a more traditional, narrative way. The original follows the adage we're all taught, showing rather than telling. — Catherine Carson Fri, 13 Mar 2009 This generous illustration (on the part of CNF and the writers) is invaluable for a writer who has never worked with an editor. Beginning writers don't understand how totally collaborative the process is from beginning to end. Those who accept help will reap magical benefits. Thanks, CNF, for illuminating the behind-the-scenes work. Keep up the wonderful work. — Neil White Mon, 9 Mar 2009 I can see the attractiveness of starting with "Craziness runs in my family" but the story doesn't flow out of that paragraph. The new lede feels like a "hook." I might have asked the author to shorten her original beginning, but maybe not. Everything that comes later seems to refer back to those powerful images. Without them, we are missing something that makes the ending more poignant. Good story, either way. (Good issue too) — paul pekin Mon, 2 Mar 2009 The original opening was more intriguing to me. It immediately drew me into the story. It was somewhat long, and the personal conversation could have been omitted, or as one person suggested placed in other parts of the essay. — Marsha Jones Sun, 1 Mar 2009 Had the opening been cut by half instead of eliminated, it would have allowed the reader to ease into what many feel is an uncomfortable subject without being smacked in the face. It had all of the hints of "craziness" running in the family while conveying the atmosphere and misconceptions of mental health treatment of the era. With the new opening, the reader does not start with the same relationship with the narrator, who saw it through the eyes of a child. The inserted text seems awkward in its new location because of the abrupt change in tone. The entire piece could benefit by being shorter, but cutting the entire opening would not be my preference. — Marty Stofik Thu, 26 Feb 2009 I think the piece, as written, is compelling, in any case, with our without the edit. That must be said. Yes, maybe the opening was a bit long. But starting with the craziness bit didn't grab me either. I'd have started with "Drugs," my sister whispered. And perhaps not straight from there as is, edited a bit to shape it... and forward. Two more cents added.. thanks for the question. — Maggie Thu, 26 Feb 2009 I love the edited version. Received my CNF#36 in the mail today and opened it and read Crazy Talk first and then came right here to see what had been done to it and I love it! Maybe because I'm more a fan of reflective writing than action--I know, I know, Lee, SCENE/narr/SCENE/narr/SCENE SCENE SCENE... I get that, but I also love a good personal essay, even with very few scenes. The inserted paragraph (in green)works for me, instead of going on and on with those actions for several paragraphs/pages. This is fun. Ready to read the next one! — Susan Cushman Wed, 25 Feb 2009 "Start your story as close to the end as possible." Kurt Vonnegut. — Gary McMahon Wed, 25 Feb 2009 I agree that the opening goes on for too long, but I also think leaving most of it out is a mistake. When it comes to essay writing, I've learned with the help of an editor, one of the major issues is reorganization. Where can elements of the essay be placed for best effect; it takes a lot of tinkering and revision. In this one, I think the opening paragraphs could have been spead out, perhaps placed strategically elsewhere in the essay. I'm not so sure the interviewing sections work all that well and maybe some of those could have been sacrificed to place some of the original beginning paragraphs. I'ts a matter of what works best and that's subjective. "I know what I like." I find editor's,usually,I think,are bent on leaving out rather than putting in. Often the motivation is to make the work shorter and that may be a publishing issue. Editing is a complicated issue and often does not do justice to a work, as well as having the potential to help the work immensely by pressuring an author to pare down an overblown production. I've read a lot those lately. Ultimately, editing is a complicated issue and ideally, I think the best you can do is have a close working relationship with an editor and fighting for the integrity of your work as you see it. Of course, kowtowing when its an issue of getting published is also a reality. — Bob Katrin Wed, 25 Feb 2009 I loved the original opening. It allowed me to enter into this narrator's consciousness as a child and to more fully inhabit this essay. Cutting it off is like chopping of someone's head. You might still recognize the person's body, but something essential is missing. — lily Iona MacKenzie Sat, 21 Feb 2009 I found myself empathizing both with Laurie Uttich's attachment to the beginning scene, and with the editorial decision. So many of my own essays start out this way, because the memory is the path through the woods. I always find myself latching onto my 8-year-old self (why does 8 leave us with such rich memories?) to see where she'll lead me. Inevitably, we are both entranced with the path itself, with the trees and flower growing alongside, and fallen logs and dead animals decaying variously. But in the end, the memory leads us to the real story, an opening or a meadow, or the path takes us back to the center of town where things are happening. Both places are valid -- the path and the endpoint -- but they can't both be the main theme of the same story. Thanks to the editors for doing this; seeing the editorial process practiced on an already fine piece of writing gives me new perspective on my own work. — Antonia Sat, 21 Feb 2009 The changes made this essay much better. The original opening didn't grab me. It read somewhat like a travel guide. The opening line of the designated 1st paragraph immediately grabbed my attention. The one paragraph revision inserted as a replacement for the initial 13 paragraphs is a great example of boiling down a point to its essential requirement. Overall, in my opinion, great editing job. — Edward Moore Fri, 20 Feb 2009 POST COMMENTS BELOW name (required) email (will not be published) (required) website
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First Lede/Real Lead

Crazy Talk Laurie Rachkus Uttich

Crazy Talk
Laurie Rachkus Uttich