Spectrum News

The camera is smaller than he expects.

He is sitting in a chair in a studio space in Worcester on July 28, 2021, and the reporter across from him — Valerie Bell, firm handshake, specific efficiency — is reviewing her notes. He is not nervous. He reminds himself of this. He has been in harder rooms than this camera. He has been in rooms where the stakes were his body and his stability and his ability to get through the next hour. A camera is not that.

He sits up straight.

The lights in the studio are different than he expected too — warmer, more like a living room and less like an interrogation room, though he has seen enough television to know that the warmth is calculated. He does not mind this. Everything in public presentation is calculated. He calculates too. He calculates which poems to read at which events, which lines to pull for social media, which parts of his story to tell in

which contexts. Calculation is not dishonesty. Calculation is craft.

Valerie asks him to talk about his writing. He talks about his writing. He talks about what PTSD does to a person and what writing does alongside PTSD and why the third person was the only grammatical distance that allowed him to see himself clearly enough to describe what he was seeing. The third person was not evasion. The third person was the key that opened the room.

She asks: Why publish? Why not keep it private?

He has thought about this question for years. He has a clear answer.

Because private doesn’t reach anyone else, he says. I filled notebooks in private for years before I published anything. The notebooks helped me. But the books — when I put them out there — I started hearing from people. They said: this is me, exactly. I thought I was the only one. And that changes everything. That’s the only justification for putting something this real in front of strangers.

She nods. She is writing something.

The work is not about me, he continues. I’m the material. But it’s for the person at 3 AM who needed to know they’re not alone in it.

He looks into the camera. He means every word. He has always meant every word. This is one of the things that has made him difficult in personal relationships and indispensable in the work: he does not say things he does not mean. He has never learned how.

* * *

The segment airs the same day. July 28th.

He watches it in the apartment on State Street. Ghost beside him. Omen on the shelf in his professional-attention posture.

He watches himself talk about survival and it is strange in the way that all self-observation is strange — the gap between the person on the screen and the person watching it, the specific dissonance of hearing your own voice through speakers instead of through the resonance of your own skull. He sounds, he thinks, like someone who has considered carefully what he is saying. He sounds like a person who has earned the right to say it.

His phone goes off for three hours.

He reads every message.

Three from people who say his words described exactly what they have been living through for years without a name. Two from people who say they showed the segment to their families, who finally understand. One, which he reads four times, from a woman who says: my son has PTSD and he won’t talk about it but he watched this with me and afterward he said “that’s what it feels like” and then he went to his room and I could hear him crying and it was the first time he had cried about it in three years and I don’t know how to thank you.

He puts the phone down.

He sits very still.

He goes to the desk.

He writes for two hours. He does not keep any of what he writes. He just needs to write it.

This is also part of the practice. Not all of it goes in the archive. Some of it just needs to come out.

* * *

A Personal Note: The PTSD Talks hits number seven on Amazon Best Sellers in July 2023, two years after the Spectrum News segment. He is at his desk. The notification arrives at 9 AM on a Wednesday.

He sits with it for a long time.

He thinks about Valerie Bell writing something in her notepad across from him in the Worcester studio. He thinks about the woman with the son who cried. He thinks about the 465 Facebook likes and the comment sections and the 29,800 website requests and the organic distribution that has no explanation except that the work is finding its people.

He writes: He has waited a long time for something to feel like this. Not perfect. Not without its weight. But real. And real is what he was told he would never find.

He means the work. He means the connection. He means the specific reality of having built something with words in small rooms over eleven years and having that something reach people who needed it.

He is not done.

He is so far from done.

The pen comes up.

* * *

He watches the Spectrum News segment again on the second anniversary.

He rarely does this — he is not a person who revisits his public appearances, who watches

himself back and evaluates. The dissonance between the person on the screen and the person watching the screen is uncomfortable in a way that he finds unproductive. But the second anniversary arrives — July 28, 2023 — and he finds himself in the apartment with the laptop open and the segment pulled up.

He watches himself say: The book is not about me. I’m the material. But it’s for the person at 3 AM who needed to know they’re not alone.

He watches Valerie Bell nod.

He watches himself look directly at the camera.

He thinks: I meant that. I still mean it. I will mean it in every interview for the rest of my career and it will never be a line I have learned to say, it will always be the truest thing I know how to say about why I do this.

He closes the laptop.

The notebook opens.

He writes for an hour about what it means to mean something. About the difference between the true thing and the performance of the true thing, which is often indistinguishable from the outside but completely distinguishable from the

inside. He has always been able to feel the difference. He has always refused to perform.

He keeps writing.

He always keeps writing.

* * *

There is a coffee shop in Northampton that he drives to three or four times a year.

He does not know why specifically this coffee shop, in this city, when there are coffee shops in Springfield that are just as good and do not require a forty-minute drive. He thinks it might be the drive itself. The forty minutes on I-91, which is long enough to be in motion without being long enough to feel like travel. He uses the drives to think — not consciously, not with a specific agenda, but with the open availability of a mind that has been freed from the desk for an hour.

He gets on the highway and the thinking starts and he arrives in Northampton with thoughts he did not have in Springfield, shaped by the motion and the highway and the specific quality of the Connecticut River valley in whatever season it is.

He parks. He goes to the coffee shop. He takes the same table he always takes, which is

not a deliberate habit but which he always ends up at. He orders the same coffee. He turns to a new page.

He writes for two hours.

What he writes in Northampton is consistently different from what he writes in Springfield. Not better — different. Springfield writing has the texture of his daily life in it, the specific grain of the city he lives in. Northampton writing has a slight distance, a slightly wider angle, as if the drive has given him perspective that the apartment does not.

He drives back to Springfield with four pages of notes he would not have written otherwise.

He feeds the cats.

He sits at the desk.

He finds the notebook.

He writes more.

He does not understand the mechanism. He has stopped trying to understand the mechanism. He accepts that the drive to Northampton is part of the practice, that the practice has components he cannot fully explain, that the things that work do not always need to be understood in order to keep working.

He drives to Northampton.

He stays with it.

He drives back.

He writes more.

This is the practice.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. The cost is time. Writing time given over to distribution, to logistics, to the machinery of getting the work out. He resents this imperfectly. He does it anyway. Because the work has to reach people or it is only half itself.

He reaches for the pen.

He stays at the desk.

He takes in what is there.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. He reads it back. Is it right? Is it true? He does not know yet. The light is different. The day has moved on.

His body is tired. Ghost is asleep. Vincent looks at the notebook. The work outlasts the pain. He picks up the pen. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

He lifts the pen.

The next line comes.

There is always another line.