In Hanson's essay, the reader is immediately pulled into the surreal world of a migraine headache sufferer. The vivid opening scene describes a hallucinatory experience even Timothy Leary would envy:  "We're driving through South Dakota when I see the tall grass on the side of the road turn liquid.  Then the plains come alive: They breathe and relax, breathe and relax.  We could be in a boat on a golden ocean for all the dipping and swaying.  After a while, the horizon flickers and sends up a filmy light.  The air itself is viscous, moved by wind, distorting the landscape."

Hanson's primary concern was to convey truth:  "Not just having a fidelity to facts, but truth in the sense that you take an experience and boil it down to an essence.  I tried to take that three-dimensional, bizarre feeling of getting a headache and put it down on lifeless paper so that someone else could experience it."

Above all, Hanson considers herself a fiction writer.  In fact, "The Lightning in My Eyes" was her first attempt at essay writing, a piece that began as an assignment in a writers' group she attends regularly. "I really believe that if you can write good fiction, you can write good creative nonfiction.  Good writing is good writing.  Each genre, however, comes with its own set of demands and challenges.  Fiction can be more difficult in the beginning; one must call upon their imagination, take the dust off their desk and turn it into people and places." In comparison, Hanson, a self-proclaimed "information junkie", found the initial work on this essay to be an easier task.  She read everything she could get her hands on about migraines. Afterwards though, she was faced with whittling down reams and reams of notes. During revision, the first several drafts were unwieldy.  "I had this huge temptation to put in everything."  With much difficulty and much heartbreak, Hanson pared down her findings, killing off her darlings, as Faulkner put it.

This first foray into creative nonfiction was a process of self-discovery for Hanson. "I'd been having a lot of migraines, and had been thinking about how they were affecting my consciousness and personality.  Joan Didion says, "I write to find out what I think." That's what writing this essay was like for me."

Hanson's interest in the art of language is evident in her prose:  "I press my index finger to my thumb, but my digits move through each other like gelatin, tingling."  Part of Hanson's technique for coming up with potent sentences ties into a Mantra that pervades her writing life: Write, write, write. Then cut, cut, cut.  "Why bother if it's just going to sit there on the page? "In undergraduate school, Hanson studied with Raymond Carter, who offered this advice about short stories:  "Get in, get out, don't linger," a maxim that's been immortalized above Hanson's computer.

Hanson a voracious reader, poses the question, "How can you write without reading?" Oftentimes, the voice of someone she's been reading crops up in her work.  "Through the process of revision, I get rid of any artifacts of someone else's voice. But I think it's good to absorb all that [other writing styles] and really turn it into your own voice."

During the interview I told Hanson, "Having read this essay, I really feel like I know what it's like to have a migraine."

"So, you could say I gave you a headache," she quipped.

Exactly.




Stephanie Susnjara