Meaning and mattering: an interview with whitney mcknight

by Lauren Korczakowski

Whitney McKnight is an acclaimed award-winning health sciences and mental health policy reporter, producer, and editor. Most recently, she was the Washington Psychiatric Society Journalist of the Year in 2017. She has been the editor of Psychiatric Annals, Pediatric Annals, and has hundreds of bylines in the medical trade and general media publications. She is the founder and producer of docu-mental — “an exploration of how to create herd immunity to depression and anxiety.” https://www.whitneymcknight.com/.

McKnight’s short story, “The Son”, is about a boy who accidently wanders away from his drought stricken town. It is beautifully written dystopian story touching on metaphors allegory about the subtle meanings in life. I had the opportunity to talk to McKnight about her career and “The Son”.

Why you were inspired to submit this work?

I wrote “The Son” about ten years ago and probably would never have thought to offer it to anyone at all had Melissa not asked me. It was never rejected, so much as I wrote it and forgot about it, although it was on my mind about a year ago when I was listening to the BBC (which I tend to do often when I am working from home).  There was some woman talking about a dystopian book she'd written about a boy and a wolf, and I thought...wait a minute. Didn't I already do that? LOL. I didn't catch the woman's name, but I would love to find her story one day.

Which is my way of getting to your question about what made me want to submit this and what's with the dystopian "flair" as you call it. The former is that I was invited and the latter is that I think most writers have some kind of dystopian ideas they want to exorcise at some point. Throw into the mix someone such as yourself who wants to explore the intricacies of mind, and dystopia is a natural path of exploration. Dystopia to me is about extremes. Mental illnesses are often experienced as an abject, extreme condition. So, for writers who tend toward depression and anxiety (which is most of them), what better avenue for exploration of feeling abject alienation than a world that has gone to an unrelatable extreme? What I wasn't willing to do was leave my little boy and doggies without hope. Not all dystopian fiction writers want to leave the reader with that, but I reject their cynicism.

All that being said, what I do recall wanting to do when I wrote the piece was less about clinical evaluation of depression, shame, and demoralization, which is what much of psychiatry focuses on anymore, and instead look at what might be the possible meanings behind people's pain. To do that, I think it's essential to use metaphor, because images that are not literal have the most room for interpretation as the individual sees fit, according to his or her personal experience with the world. As for the crying in the street...it was a healing, communal event where each person's individual pain was recognized, given some sort of meaning, which in turn lead to mattering, which is healing.

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How did you get involved with Grace and Gravity series? Were you published in previous volumes?

I’m not published in a previous volume. I got divorced ten years ago and when son graduated, I didn't want to live in that area anymore. I was empty nested in southern New Jersey. So I decided I was either going to go to New York or Washington. I was going to find a specific job with specific aspects, and wherever that was, that was where and that’s where I would go, and I was very specific about this. I found the job I was looking for in Washington being a clinical reporter/ editor.

I got here and they said, two of our West coast reporters quit. I said, “fantastic”, but it was exhausting. In the last five years, I’ve made 80 trips, most of them air travel, nearly all of them work-related.

I was tired, burned out, and had no social life. I was lonely. I was looking for people with similar interests. I needed friends. My colleagues and I didn't share much in common. A friend in Philly, a very prolific writer published in the New York Times, said “you should join this closed Facebook group called Binders”. You can find people to work on writing with you. This led me to find the D.C. Binders group. Throwing myself into every social activity, at a women’s writer’s lunch, I met D.C.-based poet, Sandra Beasley, who told me about some other women writer’s groups. Melissa came up to me during a meeting of one and asked “Do you have any fiction lying around?” She said send me your stuff, and if I like it, I’ll publish it. So I did, and she did, and so that was how it happened.

How has your career changed over the years? Is it different than what you expected originally?

Yes, much different. I am more along the lines of Sandra Beasley [who read her poem Vocation during the most recent docu-mental event https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/vocation ] —where I would be miserable going down the line of making a lot of money and being miserable, compared to doing something I have a passion for.  
Originally, I thought I would be a fiction writer, but I usually don't write fiction. Instead, I have ended up a journalist with hundreds of bylines.

When I was young, I thought I was going to be two things. I was going to be Jane Pauley. I love to put people together, asking them questions, and having them talk. I also envisioned my picture on the back flap of a hardcover book, so obviously, I thought I would be a published author. I did attend a noted fiction writing program in college because I was good at telling a story, but instead of in fiction, I have applied my ability to tell stories to how people can heal and used my talents to work with doctors and patients for thirty years.

Why did you start docu-mental? Is it your primary career now?

It would have been my primary focus—  it's not a vanity project —but I was writing a book, and in the middle of writing the book I was recruited to be an anti-trust reporter in the healthcare space because of my understanding of the healthcare supply chain. Is my career what I expected it to be? No, I did not think I would become an anti-trust reporter. (laughs!)

I started docu-mental because we are forgetting the world outside of data. As a creative writing major, I didn't come out learning how to read the abstract of a clinical study. Now I do it well and quickly. Data matters. But people do not live in the data. They live in their bodies and live in their experiences.

So, docu-mental. I call it docu- for documentary. Mental— the way the mind is being explored and feelings. There is more to the mind than what you can quantify and measure. I want to explore how people express mattering and meaning.

What are you working on currently? (What is your novel about?)

I’m ghost writing a memoir of a politician. I can’t tell you more than that. But being a reporter all these years in combination the ability to tell story has prepared me to be a memoirist and ghost writer. It's hard to tell someone else’s story. It’s hard, but it's rewarding. And it pays well.

What would you like readers to take with them after reading, “The Son?”

I think the ending is the most intriguing part, but the drought and heat can come back. With the lesson: be on guard to yourself and how you can lose yourself in your pain and you can forget how hard it was to heal. And you can forget how easy it is to accept healing. Love requires attention and if you slip, quit paying attention, you don't know where you'll end up. When you return to love, things become less painful.

Put another way, from my experience as a hospice volunteer, and as a person who has endured a lot of pain in her own life, people want the pain they experience in life to mean something. It's too awful to think of it as being random. Well, it is to me, anyway. The communal scenes were about acknowledging and witnessing as a group what they each had endured (the drought and the severe heat), and what that touched in them as individuals.

Contributor:

​Lauren Korczakowski is a recent graduate from American University with a BA in Psychology and a minor in Creative Writing. She has a passion for social justice and love writing, traveling, running, and meeting new people. You can check out her travel blog at http://laurkorhardkor.blogspot.com/.