Kristine Kopperud: A Follow-Up to ‘Out of the Blue’ by Abigail Thomas & the September Forum

By Kristine Kopperud

Two weeks ago, I had the honor of facilitating the PAHS September forum, our fourth of six sessions this year exploring Radical Hope. I also had the embarrassment of having my Internet fritz out just as I began the close reading portion. 

Needless to say, my prepared, time-stamped agenda went out the window, along with a good swath of my focus. By the time I got back online (by bicycling down the street to join my neighbor, Teri, on her working Internet connection), I felt I might be skipping too quickly ahead and rushing the experience we intended for you. 

So, I’d like to set a few things right.

First, thank you to all who attended and especially to those who registered more on the insistence of my invitation (thanks, Mom!) than on your prior awareness of narrative health as a skill or practice. It gives me goosebumps to think that already a community exists — in each our own networks — to test these waters, pick up a new tool, to improve our experience of our own wellbeing and of our health system through clear and present communication.

I also want to thank this forum’s guest speaker, author and writing teacher Diane Zinna, who shared the waypoints of her own health narrative, from the untimely and medically complicated deaths of her parents to her own reckoning with cancer and degenerative genetic disorders. From these clear and present challenges, she has created both an award-winning novel, The All-Night Sun (2020), and a forthcoming craft book, Letting Grief Speak: Writing Portals for Life After Loss. She hosts Grief Writing Sundays, a free Zoom forum that has laid the groundwork for her book, and helps writers near and far put words to their experience as a teacher, editor, and writing coach. Please see more at dianezinna.com.

And finally, I want to thank you (for reading this far) and for sticking with this kind-of-hard-to-articulate practice of “narrative health.” If it’s still a little fuzzy, know that you’re not alone. The most important thing to know about the practice—close reading, followed by writing to a prompt—is that it’s designed to be accessible to everyone. Also, you are your own expert when it comes to what you see, feel, hear as we work together. There’s no wrong observation.

In close reading, for example, we just notice what is on the page. 

You don’t have to offer lofty academic ideas. In fact, the best way in is to notice that something is making you feel something, then explore what it might be. That’s why I picked the September selection, “Out of the Blue,” a short chapter from the memoir What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas:

Catherine tells me that long ago, she was lying on the Amagansett beach when suddenly, out of nowhere, a dark cloud swept across, there and gone in less than a minute. “Everything changed,” she tells me. “The color of the sea, the taste of the air, the air itself, the feel of the sand, the temperature, everything, and then it was gone and the day was hot and blue again, the ocean turned back into the right color.”

This is the kind of memory I have always thought needs to be remembered by someone else, after the original owner is gone. I’ll never forget it.

While I couldn’t put my finger directly on why this passage suited me and my understanding of narrative health,  I noticed first that there are no fancy words, either in the telling or the relating of the experience. For me that feels like an opening to be curious, to remain neutral and receptive—in fact, Catherine's telling is all what happened, not too precisely what it was. The lack of considered description (choosing a blue to characterize or ‘contain’ the color of water, for example), seems to allow the momentum of the telling and the unarmored honesty of an exchange that is unfolding aloud.  

And second, I appreciate (as a forum attendee mentioned in the Zoom) a feeling of intimacy, a shorthand in the storytelling that suggests a relationship between teller and listener and by extension the import of receiving the story. I feel it in the phrases “tells me,” “there and gone,” followed by “and then it was gone,” and “original owner” (which makes me think immediately of a used car, something everyday, intended all along to change hands in its useful lifetime!). By the time we get to “I’ll never forget it,” there’s a feeling that the thing not forgotten is both/could be either the story AND/OR the experience of hearing it. And we are right there, close-up and rapt, maybe our jaw a little slack with wonder.

What if, one day soon, our own medical charts could begin with, “[Your actual name] tells me that…”? What if, one day soon, we’ll have learned to notice the moment the taste of the air has shifted? What will happen when our simple words ferry safely to one another, whole and true?

Asheanna stepping in here! We would love to invite you all to Circle to further discuss the posing questions thar Kristine asked at the end of this post. 

(This blog post was written by Kristine Kopperud, but posted by Asheanna Lee.)