Writing, Traveling, and Trauma Healing: A Last Ditch Effort to Be Heard, with David Deane Haskell
Main Topic: Writing, Traveling, and Trauma Healing: A Last Ditch Effort to Be Heard, with David Dean Haskell
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Just finished:Mosswood Apothecary (JP Rindfleisch IX)
Creative Act (Rick Rubin)
The Reliable Narrator (Grace Sammon)
Do Less by Kate Northrup
(Main Topic): David Deane Haskell, speculative fiction writer and author of Wounded Angels: A Memoir That Lights the Path to Your Own Inner Child Healing
His work explores that reckoning—through failure, obsession, and the slow reconstruction of the fractured self. Across speculative fiction, memoir-driven essays, and recovery-centered writing, he returns to outsiders, seekers, and wounded people trying to become whole without abandoning the parts of themselves that helped them survive.
Notes:
0. David, you reached out to me after the publication of The Solarian Deep (a speculative science fiction novel built around an alien ocean). You're mostly a sci/fi writer but you've also written memoir. I write both too, and I've always thought that fiction and truth are often -- if not always -- side by side in both novels and memoir. Can you speak to how a story (whether it is fiction or non) carries emotional truth without turning it into explaining/telling/info-dumping?
I am who I am. The inner-child is the past, present day travels essays, future. It's a continuum. What's going on the world in space, or in a novel. Deepens as I write it. There are no rules.
1. David, you wrote sci-fi for several years before writing your memoir (and I feel like I'm doing it in reverse order). What had you turn your attention inward when it's been in other realms for so long?
Writing came late (college). Kindle revolution. Went for it. Published first four books, five year writer's block. Got sober, spiritual and emotional healing. Floodgates open 2024. Fiction first, and then chronicled healing 6 weeks for every morning.
2. You've been traveling around Asia for a year, right? What lead you to that decision, and how do you (or did you) think it would affect your writing process? Has it been a distraction or have you settled into a traveling writing routine? (You brought up discipline in your email. What do you want to say about that?)(A lot of times I feel like I don't have any discipline, but there is plenty of evidence that states otherwise.)
Two years of traveling. Was supposed to be in the Philippines right now, but wanted to stay in Japan. Vertigo and got a concussion. Not leaving now.
Stay in places for a month or two in order to write. Every location is difference.
Discipline in the business side, but writing is more on and off (in the flow).
Using Voice to Text to write.
2.5. How has travel changed your writing?
Deepened the inner child work (healing work), travel gives me new triggers and stressors, deepened sense of self, experiences inform the fiction writing.
Thought about fictionalizing The Planner Boy part of him. Fun project.
2.75. You said on a previous interview that "writing is the healing." I know that journaling is a life-saver, and my goal in publishing memoir has mostly been a connection-based intention -- wanting to make a difference in someone's life and feeling that resonance of connecting with like-minded people. What do you think is a more powerful healing tool -- the journaling or the letting go of the work and releasing to whomever needs to find it?
Fiction is about sharing, nonfiction writing is the service. The inner work happens in seclusion. Publishing is for inspiring other to heal. Is of service.
3. I heard that you had a follow-up memoir coming this year. I'm also a multiple memoir writer. I thought I'd be writing more during the process of moving and getting settled into Costa Rica, but I'm seeing that both my previous memoirs had years and years of distance from the events to the time of writing, and now I'm worried that I'll have "nothing to write" (isn't that every writer's worst worry?) while I'm waiting for the current memoir to marinate. What is the second memoir about and did your writing process between the two memoirs change?
Kept writing after Wounded Angels, got divorced, Inner Child Unleashed's first line, "I got divorced today." Left Japan, started traveling. Book ended without my consent. "Oh. I wrote the last chapter."
4. How does the drumming fit in to it all? What influence has music had on your writing?
Professional drummer in DisneyLand for years. In The Blue Devils band. National Indonesian Marching Band.
Music informs the writing. Peer to peer friendships didn't work when a child/teen; but I could get on stage and drum and play piano; able to be heard. Drumming had fallen away because of the drugs and alcohol. And that was how I expressed. Writing became last desperate effort to be heard.
Find David on Substack and get free fiction on his website.
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