Finding the Form with Paola Ferrante

The bones of “The Underside of a Wing” were always somewhat autobiographical, in that I was also a graduate student in clinical psychology who dropped out of my Master’s due to untreated anxiety and depression, however this piece started life as a very traditional realist narrative that wasn’t working at all. The central image of the albatross actually came to me when I was talking to a friend about how I was having trouble managing my current anxiety and depression, which is linked to climate grief. She used the phrase “like an albatross around your neck,” and all of a sudden I envisioned a way to personify what I was going through, and what I had been through. I realized that, just like poetry, oftentimes the best way to tell a hard truth is, like Emily Dickinson says, to “tell it slant.” Because I wanted to tell what ended up being a semi-autobiographical story, I always knew this had to be a piece of fiction, but I went about structuring it like I would a poem. When I dropped out of my Master’s, I remember it was like living underwater, but there were specific details, like watching endless DVDs instead of reading papers, and riding public transit and feeling overwhelming sadness when I looked at couples, that really encapsulated how alone and unable to talk to anyone I felt due to the sense of stigma of having a mental health disability in academia. When I started to write the draft that eventually became this piece, I made a list of these details, and wrote scenes around them.