An Evening with Holly Thompson: "One Starts Telling and One Gets Told"

A diagnosis is a story. When you receive a neurodevelopmental diagnosis, your life history is reorganized under a new paradigm of clinical language. Maybe events that were once merely odd become clinically significant; maybe your very personality takes on meanings that it hadn’t before. Scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have examined how we take up these stories and their language in our everyday lives, sometimes reorganizing our very sense of self to accommodate them. But what discoveries do we make when we take control of that language? This talk explores the linguistic and rhetorical experiments of found poetry composed from a single psychiatric assessment. Can an assessment like that tell a life story? Can it tell a complete life story? Can it be made into something that feels like it’s your own? Drawing from scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition and my own poetic practice, I explore what it means to take up clinical language in our day-to-day lives and what can happen when we refashion that language into something of our own creation.