While completing my Masters I was lucky enough to be introduced to Creative Non-fiction, a genre I hadn’t really heard of before but quickly discovered I absolutely loved. One of our assignments was to write a personal essay inspired by an object. I chose a human skull (of course), and started writing about donating your body to science, the Indian bone trade, and the human rituals around death. But personal essays are personal, you know, so I wasn’t only writing about that. It was also an essay on how to cope when your life falls apart, on what it feels like to be disassociated from a part of yourself, and the human rituals around the death of relationships.
For someone who usually hides behind spaceships and zombies, it was difficult at first to be so open about me. And now this highly personal personal essay has just been published in the latest issue of Island Magazine. I couldn’t be prouder, and I hope this is the first of many non-fiction projects. Because yeah, it was hard, but also deeply rewarding.
Prosection, a personal essay on ‘learning to be whole again,
after being taken apart’ is out now in issue #155 of Island Magazine.
