The Unleash Work-in-Progress (WIP) Winner: ELIZABETH HIGGINS

Excerpt and interview

Notes 1. “Crazy over Husband's Suicide.” Morning Oregonian (1861-1937) [Portland], 12 May 1900, p. 4. Historic Oregon Newspapers, University of Oregon Libraries, oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn83025138/1900-05-12/ed-1/seq-4. Accessed 16 Apr. 2023.

2. “Missing: August Fischer, Farmer, Last Heard of Friday.” The Eugene City Guard (1870-1899), 30 Dec. 1899, p. 1. Historic Oregon Newspapers, University of Oregon Libraries, oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn84022653/1899-12-30/ed-1/seq-1/. Accessed 16 April 2023.

Acknowledgements The poems included in this excerpt previously appeared in Trace Fossils Review and are forthcoming in Footnote: A Literary Journal of History.

Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Elizabeth! Congratulations on winning our inaugural WIP Prize for your work-in-progress, Unfit to be at Large: Fragments from the life of Helen Fischer. Can you speak to the excerpt we included and explain a little about how you envision the project as a whole?

EH: Hi, Jen! Thank you so much. This is really an honor. The excerpt is the first four pages of the project. In those first pages, you can see two of the threads that run through the larger project: historical poems and historical source material. You’re introduced to Helen Fischer, kind of plunged into her grief through the poems, given information about the story the work dramatizes through a newspaper article and quote. The wider project follows Helen in multiple stages of her life, before and after the portion from the excerpt, continuing to incorporate archival materials. There’s a contemporary element as well that comes in a little bit later and is woven in throughout the project to contextualize and complicate it. It was important to me to show a diachronic perspective on conceptions of mental illness, to use the past to clarify the present and future. I wanted to show how unstable those conceptions have been across time, how unstable they continue to be. There are threads of my own family history in there, and the knowledge that I’m looking back at a time when settler-colonialism was very fresh in Oregon, and I only have to go back three generations to do that. So much is troubling, haunting about this story that it really pulled me in and demanded a lot more of me than I anticipated. There’s a lot to try to get right. I’ve spent a lot of time with newspaper archives, census records, probate records, commitment records, legislative reports. There’s still a lot of work to do. Mostly though, what I didn’t initially anticipate was how this project was going to demand that I write about myself, address my own neurodivergence, and sort of explain my motivations for co-opting Helen Fisher’s life in the way that I have. That became woven into the contemporary narrative. By the time I got there, I found that I’d created a foundation, an understanding within the story of the porousness of classification that allowed me to make myself legible in ways I couldn’t before.

JK: What motivates you to write?

EH: It’s just the medium that works for my brain. In real time, I can’t usually represent my ideas or myself in ways I find satisfying. There are too many factors to consider and too little time. When I write, I have all the time in the world to get the words right and I’m able to center myself in a way I otherwise can’t—I’m not immediately concerned with the demands of a particular situation, with other people’s expectations or comfort or reactions. When I interact with other people in real time, those concerns consume a lot of bandwidth. Interacting with people in real time is vital, but writing is restorative for me. In writing, also, my brain’s inclination to retread previous conclusions and conversations and go over the same thoughts a hundred times is an advantage, and because that’s a liability in other aspects of my life, writing is fulfilling and affirming in ways that I can’t replicate elsewhere.

JK: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines from a work that has inspired you and explain what strikes you about the passage.

EH: This is probably longer than what you had in mind, but it really stunned me in terms of how much I felt it resonated with this project, to the point that I now think of it as an epigraph. It’s from Lulu Miller’s book Why Fish Don’t Exist, and it’s referring to human attempts to classify the natural world taxonomically, and also, of course, to our attempts to classify difference within each other:

Consider the word “order” itself. It comes from the Latin ordinem, to describe a row of threads sitting neatly in a loom. In time, it was extended as a metaphor to describe the way that people sit neatly under the rule of a king, general, or president. It was only applied to nature in the 1700s under the assumption—a human fabrication, a superimposition, a guess—that there is an orderly set of ranks to find there. I have come to believe that it is our life’s work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath. That it is our life’s work to mistrust our measures.

It’s basically everything I’m trying to say with a whole manuscript in one paragraph.

JK: Why is creative work important in 2024, 2025, and beyond?

EH: I’m not sure that the importance of creative work changes across time. What changes is how much we value it, and the scale of the consequences of not valuing it. Having time, energy, resources for creative work—that’s a privilege in our culture, and even people who have access to that privilege are usually trained to see exercising it as vain and embarrassing. It’s not considered productive because it’s not financially valuable. A handful of people get famous and make lots of money off their art, but the reality is that this is the work, by and large, of people with day jobs. We might be told that creativity is important, but the realities of pursuing creative work show us the real story, which is that we’re not meant to prioritize it because capitalism has little use for it.

But it makes our lives more livable, more meaningful. It allows us to see each other more clearly, with more empathy. Creative work is a place where experiences can be reprocessed, where new meaning can surface, where it’s possible to escape the noise of daily life long enough to see what’s the matter with it, long enough to see other options. Certainly, right now, we need to see other options.

JK: What is literary or artistic success to you?

EH: I have mixed feelings about the word success. I’ve vacillated between viewing success as something that isn’t my goal, and trying to redefine success to mean something else, something more centered in showing up for myself. If I define success that way, at its most basic and most important, it's just having written, having found momentary meaning within my thoughts, a way to explain something that felt unexplainable before. Success is just doing this thing that makes me happier, this thing that can be hard to do because other people will not necessarily see value in it.

I’m not immune, though, to being excited by facets of the more traditional conceptions of success. Holding a book with my words in it and my name on it, putting it on my bookshelf next to books I’ve read and loved—that’s very appealing. But my goal is just doing my best at the work that compels me, because if I concern myself too much with what other people are going to think about it, it won’t be mine anymore. I don’t think it would be very interesting to other people anyway—a writer trying to get readers to like them. As a reader, I want to read work that cuts through posturing and really opens a window for me into something I haven’t seen before. I want something to be revealed to me. Success to me as a writer would be making work like that, whatever the outcome.

JK: How did you get started as a writer, and what advice do you have for new writers?

EH: I’m not sure there’s one single starting point, and it hasn't been a linear process. I’d probably point to a community college poetry class I took when I was sixteen as some kind of start. At that point I had been mostly out of school for two years; I didn’t have a GED yet; I was on probation for underage drinking—the world and my ability to navigate it felt bleak. That class was a little piece of evidence that there were places out there where I could do something I really enjoyed and be taken seriously. I took all the writing classes I could after that. Still, there were years after my undergrad where I didn’t do much writing, and I waited a long time to pursue the MFA. It wasn’t practical or financially sound—it’s not an easy thing to pursue in our culture, even if, like me, you’re privileged enough to make it work. It took me a long time to find the nerve.

In terms of advice, I would say find people who can give you advice that’s specific to you, your writing, your context, your goals. Find people who will be kind and constructive, who understand what you’re trying to do. Take classes, find peers, study the work of the writers you enjoy. Go to school for it or don’t—there are as many routes to writing as there are people. Find what works for you. Take risks. Learn to love revision. Learn to believe that your work has value. Learn that well enough that rejections won’t stop you.

JK: Is there anything I didn’t ask that you’d like to answer?

EH: No, but thank you so much for having me. I’m really grateful to you and the team at Unleash for the support. It means a lot.

Thanks, Elizabeth! We are a champion of your work and look forward to seeing more of Unfit to be at Large: Fragments from the life of Helen Fischer.

Elizabeth Higgins writes across genres and disciplines to consolidate information and experience, and through archival research as a way to confront the past and reframe the present. Elizabeth is an academic coach and former library cataloger with an MFA in creative writing from Oregon State University Cascades, whose work can be found or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Redivider, Trace Fossils Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Footnote: A Literary Journal of History. Elizabeth is a co-founding editor of the online journal Tethered Literary, which is set to release its first issue in winter 2025.