About the Author
FACING DOWN THE INSULT
Floyd Skloot, author of "Gray Area: Thinking With a Damaged Brain"

"I believe that if I can write about living with brain damage well enough to communicate what it’s like, to discover what it means and how it plays out in a person’s life, then I will also be able to understand it well enough to live with it, make an honest life that incorporates it, and make it clear for others." Floyd Skloot’s essay, "Gray Area: Thinking with a Damaged Brain," makes very clear what he has lost and gained in the decade following a viral illness that forever changed his life by damaging his brain.

Skloot heard about Creative Nonfiction’s special issue on the brain while he was working on companion essays that explored how brain damage affects thinking and feeling. One of those essays turned out to be "Gray Area," winner of the Creative Nonfiction Award for Best Essay About the Brain.

"In taking on this subject, I was going right to the heart of my weakness. Plus there was the inherent problem: How to write cogently about thinking with a damaged brain when thinking cogently with a damaged brain is not possible." Skloot knew that he wanted to explore the abstract idea of how we think and how someone with brain damage thinks differently. His essay combines clinical fact with personal glimpses of how his brain misfires mid-sentence and mishandles simple household procedures. Skloot has had to construct a new approach to writing due to his fragile concentration skills. He explains in "Gray Matter" that he has become "a jotter of random thoughts ... a writer of bursts instead of steady work."

Skloot constructed the foundation of "Gray Matter" a paragraph at a time. Time and patience are key factors to his writing process. (The essay took approximately 10 months to complete.) Time, patience, and trust.

"I have learned to trust that when I am jotting down isolated thoughts or episodes during the period of time that I’m thinking about an essay, those pieces will eventually belong somewhere in that essay or one of the others I’m engaged with then, because they all tend to emerge from the same emotional state of mind or complex of feelings." Skloot wrote the scenes of buying a recorder for his wife and traveling in New York as separate jottings which he later recognized as pieces that belonged to the essay.

Some of the research involved in writing "Gray Area" began years ago. "One of my first and most powerful responses to being ill was to read as much as I could about neurology, cognitive science, virology, immunology, and related fields to build a deeper understanding of what was happening to me." Tangents that emerged during the writing of the essay required new research.

Skloot’s quirky use of language strengthens the essay. He describes his brain as "a scalded pudding, with fluky dark spots." He ends a paragraph describing his clinical dementia, usually an age-associated memory impairment, with the statement " ... overnight, I was geezered." When discussing his mix of traditional and colloquial language, Skloot chuckles. "I like keeping the reader off balance. Since I never know what’s going to pop out of my mouth next, why should the reader?"

Although he writes in many genres, Skloot identifies himself as a poet. "I didn’t write essays until I got sick, oddly enough, and have gradually, in the 11 years since getting sick, slowed and perhaps stopped writing fiction altogether." Skloot thinks that creative nonfiction is the perfect blend. "Creative nonfiction offers the engagement of good narrative fiction, with its emphasis on character, setting and story; the intimacy, compression and precision of poetry; information and fresh ideas as in good nonfiction; personal revelation as in memoirs; and the immediacy of journalism. It can be as tight or as baggy as the subject requires. It is a flexible, endlessly fresh form for the individual voice to explore."

But Skloot also sees the drawbacks of creative nonfiction. "It can be tempting to forget that an essay or creative nonfiction piece must have shape and density, must be well written rather than spewed, and must lead somewhere other than the mirror." He hesitates to give specific advice to student writers, but suggests cross-genre reading and reveling in research.

Writing about brain damage can be difficult at times for Skloot, but the urgency of it in his life makes it easier. "I would hope that readers would see and think freshly about a subject that they may have previously ignored or found disturbing." He also hopes that some readers might be cheered by his writing and that all readers would find his work "ultimately hopeful."

As he states in "Gray Matter," writing about brain damage is Floyd Skloot’s counter-attack. "I avenge myself on an insult that was meant, it feels, to silence me by compromising my word-finding capacity, my ability to concentrate and remember, to spell or conceptualize, to express myself, to think...Every time I finish an essay or poem or piece of fiction, it feels as though I have faced down the insult." Despite the limitations that brain damage has imposed on Floyd Skloot’s life, he maintains an inspiring perspective. "The weaknesses are in the moment—in the flow of life. Art gives me an opportunity to correct and revise."

Cassi Ney