NON-FICTION WRITING COMPETITION
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Dear Readers and Writers,
One of the great pleasures of running this Substack page is hearing from you in the comments section.
Many of you have written to me with deeply personal testimonies of your trials with your own bodies and those of your loved ones.
In my time of crisis, your stories have absolutely kept me going, and showed me what life can be like after a traumatic injury.
They are also wonderfully written, well-observed and funny.
So, I’ve decided to host a non-fiction writing competition on the topic of Injury, in the broadest sense of the term.
You have until the 8th of May to get your writing in.
Please post your stories on this thread.
They should be no more than 750 words.
The most compelling stories will be posted on my Substack with my thoughts.
The Kureishi Chronicles has over 14,000 subscribers, and so it’s a good opportunity for any writer to have they work seen by a gracious community of readers.
This competition is for paid subscribers only. I will be running a flash sale this Easter weekend. The cost will be just £5 a month or £50 a year. After that, prices will return to their usual rate of £8 a week or £80 a year.
So subscribe now to lock in your price at £50/year — less than a pound a week.
Your loving writer,
Hanif xx
NON-FICTION WRITING COMPETITION
Hanif - I started following your writings when I read about your injury in the NYT. I’ll admit my interest was in your recovery process and the incredible insights you were sharing because I am a physical therapist. I didn’t expect the gift you gave to me - you’ve opened a world of writing and literature to me. I’ve even started journaling - it’s cathartic. Thank you. I continue to care deeply about your recovery and wish you the best care and the will to work hard - I know we therapists can be awfully pushy.
Here’s my little story. All true.
A few years ago, I received a book in the mail from my best friend. It was entitled Recovering From Trauma - Stories from Victims. Cathee was really excited because her story had been included in one of the chapters. Indeed her story was pretty compelling. In August of 1967 her family drove from Kenosha, Wisconsin to the central plains of Kansas. Her mom had grown up on a small farm outside of Beloit, Kansas and it was a tradition for the family to come together and help with harvest. After a long 12-hour drive with 3 girls and a dog in the back of the Rambler they arrived on the farm Saturday evening. Her uncle was eager to show them the wheat fields and the new combine. Traditionally they would take one cut around the perimeter of the field to see if it was dry enough to harvest the next day. It was also a tradition to let the kids ride in the back of the bin. It was considered a privilege to sit upon the pile of cut grain and feel the flow of wheat pour into the back. Cathee and her little sister were lifted and placed in the bin. Her dad hung onto the ladder by the front seat and talked to their uncle as they made the lap around the field. Her uncle steered the combine over to the silo to unload the wheat. But lost in conversation, he forgot about his two nieces in the wheat bin and he flipped the auger switch on. Cathee was tall enough to grab onto the edge of the bin and she hung on with all her strength as she watched her six year old sister helplessly circle around with the wheat as it was sucked down towards the auger at the bottom of the bin. Her dad immediately screamed at her uncle to turn the auger off but it was too late – her sister’s foot was already sliced to ribbons. Her dad reached down and grabbed her sister as her uncle whipped off his shirt to stop the blood flow. They ran to the car but in the rush to save her sister, my friend was left hanging onto the wheat bin, terrified she might be sucked down next. She felt overwhelmed, frightened and alone. She states this trauma affected her for the rest of her life. And it was very cathartic for her to see her story published and her trauma validated.
But my reaction after reading her story was one of anger. Because you see my best friend is my sister and I was the little girl whose foot was cut off. I felt that if anyone was traumatized it was me not her. I was the one with a lifetime of strapping on my prosthesis every morning to make it to the bathroom. I was the one with endless appointments to doctors to manage my pain or replace the leg after it had broken. Surely my trauma was bigger, longer lasting and more painful than hers. Why would she still be holding on to that moment, that in comparison to my experience, wasn’t that big of a deal?
But in truth - I was the one who was pulled out of that bin and was supported from that day forward. My father hoisted me onto his shoulders whenever I was tired of walking. My mom took me to endless doctor and prosthetist appointments. My family encouraged me through swimming lessons and gymnastics. I married a big strong man and backpacked around the world with him. He carried the heavier load and kept me safe. I had friends and a wonderful profession in health care and a supportive family surrounding me my whole life. I cannot claim to be traumatized.
And yet I never took the time to understand that Cathee did. She still felt abandoned and forgotten. She has spent her adult life trying to understand the deeper mysteries of life. She channels spirits, she wanders off into the mountains, and luckily she’s found a good man with whom to share her itinerant life. But she always chooses solitude over friendships. And in her quietness she had been struggling with a trauma I had not recognized or even discussed.
I guess being a part of a traumatic experience isn’t the issue. What’s more important is what happens afterwards – the feeling of being pulled to safety.
Cathee chose to disappear 2 years ago and only recently reached out to us. I hope it’s not too late to pull her home
Dar Hanif,
Here is my submission to your non-fiction writing competition. I hope you enjoy it. It's called 'Three Kinds of Injury'.
Best Wishes,
Eleanor
Three Kinds of Injury
A bunch of White kids from England off to teach a bunch of Black kids in a school in Zimbabwe. What could possibly go wrong? In preparation I’d bought a long, tan skirt, a paraffin stove, malaria pills, a pen that could write upside down and a water purification kit. There was a White priest who governed us public-school leavers, who sent us to our villages and kept an eye on us, who kept his eye on me in particular. During the week I stood before thirty primary school children and failed to teach them anything. In the evening, once the day was done and the magnificent African sun sent slanting rays across the grass, the White priest would roll into the village in his pick-up truck, arrange folding chairs on the concrete slab outside my room, open a bottle of champagne and pour two glasses, one for him and one for me. Months passed in which I learnt nothing and taught less. The White priest with his folding chairs and champagne glasses came and went. My boots leaked and I caught bilharzia. The pills didn’t work and I caught malaria. Milk warmed on the stove gave me brucellosis. The long skirt which swished so pleasingly through the grass picked up ticks and I caught a fever. And one morning while readying to walk from my hut to the low school buildings across the way a pain in my abdomen knocked me to the concrete floor. I remember someone running for the man who owned a car and being driven to the town where the White priest lived. The priest said he knew a surgeon, a mass of wild Scottish hair who was drunk from midday to morning but catch him between hangover and beginning again and he could do all right under bright lights. In a hospital he removed my burst appendix. I woke in the priest’s house, my left arm black with ants that had found me sleeping, a scar above my right hip, a bottle of whisky on the table beside me. My mum, who has a fear of flying, who at this very moment is lying in a hospital bed in the end game of life, did something reckless and caring and got on a plane and landed in Harare and found me at the priest’s house up to my neck in pain and sleeping pills and whisky. The priest, who was large and fat and liked to make out his pillarness in the community, had a wife who was small and kind with bobbed-hair and freckles but who turned a blind eye, she must have, how else could she stay with his wrongness, his plying young girls with champagne when they were upright and pills and whisky when they couldn’t get out of bed. I told my mum that he wasn’t the nice guy he said he was but she didn’t believe me, which was more to type than jumping on a plane, and the three of us, leaving his wife behind, went off to his farmhouse in the countryside. He crept into my room that night, carrying his bible, and lay on top of me while my mum slept in the room next door. The next day, we drove back to town. She sat in the garden having dinner with him, I sat in the kitchen, watching. We hired a car, my mum and I, and went on a tour of Zimbabwe getting stuck on roads pitted with elephant tracks, getting soaked on the bridge at Victoria Falls and then she delivered me back to the priest and flew home. She lies in a hospital bed now, forgetful of all these things and if she remembered them, would remember them differently anyway. She is seeing snakes curl the curtain runners above her head, she is seeing rats running across the ceiling which draw pictures with their eyes.