Brian Trapp teaches creative writing and disability studies at the University of Oregon, where he directs the Kidd Creative Writing Workshops. His fiction and essays have been published in the Gettysburg Review, Narrative, Ninth Letter, Black Warrior Review, and Brevity, among other places. His nonfiction has been selected as Notable in Best American Essays 2013 and has won an Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship. He is at work on a novel and a memoir, both of which are based on growing up with his twin brother, Danny. His essay “Twelve Words” can be found here. It appears in the Sept/Oct 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Twelve Words”?
The obvious answer is that my twin brother died, and I wanted to turn his death, which was an indescribable darkness, into something else. I was in deep mourning and needed to preserve him in some way so he wouldn’t be completely dead. It was writing as therapy. But in subsequent drafts, the essay became less about his death and much more about his life and legacy, his last joke and his special way of communicating. People often felt sorry for my brother because he couldn’t “talk,” but, in fact, they did not know how to listen. Danny had a rich and dynamic language that depended more on tone, silence, and body language, that required his conversation partner to project and complete his meaning, and I wanted to dramatize that in this essay.
I also wanted to tell a stranger, funnier, and more complex story about my brother’s passing rather than the usual sentimental and tragic stories that simplify disabled people and their families. I often think of this Djuna Barnes quote from her novel Nightwood: “There is more in sickness than the name of that sickness.” I wanted to show my readers that “more.”
You’ve shared an audio clip along with this piece, which we were excited to include in KR Out Loud. Can you tell us a little more about it?
I recorded it right before I moved away from Cleveland for grad school. It’s classic Danny. We’re lying side-by-side in his bed and he’s gloating that he’ll have our mother all to himself now, and is even willing to give me his social security check to go away forever. That’s how he joked: I would ask him questions to set him up but he’d deliver the punchline with an “eh” or “eh-eh” or “yeah” or “Momma” or just drown me out with one of his epic “ahhhhhs.” We’re also close enough for him to smack me in the face (it’s the part where I say “oww.”). He loved to give me a hard time, and we often fought over who was our mother’s favorite. I have two other siblings, and my mother still won’t say who her favorite child is, but I think we all know it is and was Danny. She took care of him for twenty-eight years and they shared an intimacy that is difficult for me, even as his twin, to fathom. So he wins.
Your brother’s sense of humor shines through this piece. Did his jokes translate easily to the page?
My brother lived in the shadow of sickness, under constant threat of pressure sores and surgeries and seizures, but most of all, my brother was funny. So no, it wasn’t difficult to translate his humor to the page. He was playful and teasing in most situations, even on his deathbed. In written narrative, I can serve as an interpreter for my brother, completing his meaning for the reader. So “Momma” becomes “Momma, you jerk.” Or his squirrel teeth becomes his “patent look of displeasure.” If you saw him on video, you might think: He wants his mom. He’s making a face. But you wouldn’t know what those things mean.
However, part of my brother’s humor was lost, too. In the audio clip, you can hear his particular moans, his giggle that gets away from him, the pauses and silences that build up tension, punctured by his percussive “eh-eh,” his explosive “Yeah!” his blasted “Ahhhhhh!” The audio clip completes the essay in a way that I couldn’t.
Was it difficult to know what to leave out, or when to finally let go of a story that must have felt close to you?
It was incredibly difficult. The first draft ballooned to almost 11,000 words. I probably wrote 20,000 words of material. There was so much happening during the time period when the essay takes place. My dog and I were attacked by a pit bull a month before Danny died, and then my first marriage fell apart. I felt like I’d pissed off an old-testament God. It was difficult to know how much of those other tragedies to include without overwhelming my brother’s story.
It was also important to tell the reader not just about his death but about his life, and it took work to select the right scenes. Not all of those sections were lost. One section about me showering Danny was lifted whole-cloth and published in Brevity, and I hope to include more in a full-length memoir.
I started the essay in 2012 and but didn’t find the proper ending until I started to tell my daughter about Danny in 2016. I began counting how many words she could say and watched for when she’d overtake my brother’s twelve. I wanted one of her first words to be his name and then there was my ending. Still, it was incredibly difficult to finish the essay. I had such a need to get it right—to have it match how much I loved and missed him. My partner, who is my trusted guide in most things, eventually just made me press “submit.”
Someone recently asked me for family stories. Are there nonfiction writers who especially inspired you to write this piece, or who have written family stories that stick with you?
I actually started the essay as part of a nonfiction workshop with poet and essayist Danielle Cadena Deulen. I had read her essay “Aperture,” from her wonderful book The Riots, in which she writes about her fraught relationship with her brother, who has autism, and how he gave her a startling moment of grace. I was interested in dramatizing a similarly honest and complex relationship with my own brother.
I love nonfiction that finds the humor in experiences that are supposed to be tragic. In Mike Scalise’s A Brand New Catastrophe, he writes about getting diagnosed with a brain tumor, which throws him into a competition of suffering with his mother, who has a heart condition. It is both a sad and hilarious meditation on what it means to be a vulnerable human being.
There is also, if you can believe it, a genre of memoir by authors who are twins. I recently read Her by Christa Parravani, which explores the death of her identical twin and her subsequent confusion of identity as she takes on her twin’s self-destructive behavior. Her sister was also a writer, so in certain sections she resurrects her sister’s prose, blurring authorship—a true twin book. I just finished Clay Byars’s Will and I, which tells of Byars’s physical and existential separation from his “normal” twin after his own traumatic brain injury. In quiet and meditative prose, Byars plumbs the depth of the self and his altered embodiment. In both memoirs, the “we” of twinship is irreparably severed, and I find that incredibly interesting for obvious reasons.
How has your writing changed since you started out?
I was torn in college between medicine and writing, and I ultimately made the choice to become a writer. I wanted to make people like Danny legible in our literature. But I don’t come from a literary family, so I had a lot to learn. As one of my early writing teachers, Elly Williams, later told me, “You didn’t know anything.” I was also obsessed with comedy writing. At best, I would write bad absurdist imitations of George Saunders. I wrote a personal essay about my brother as part of my senior thesis, and one of my friends said he could see it being published in Reader’s Digest, which I found deeply insulting. But he was right: the work was overly earnest and superficial (sorry, Reader’s Digest). I had not yet found a language and tone to write about life with my brother.
Later, I studied creative writing at University of Cincinnati, which has some fantastic comic writers on faculty (Michael Griffith, Leah Stewart, Chris Bachelder, Brock Clarke). I did my MA and PhD there. I learned to stop trying so hard to be funny and let the humor emerge from the scene. I became interested in tonal complexity—how a scene could be both funny and sad and joyous and terrifying, all at the same time. I discovered how to write in a tone that accurately depicted the pleasures and anxieties of caregiving. I also read widely in Disability Studies and learned conceptual tools for thinking about my experience. I became interested in the complex dynamics of interdependency and the problematics of representing disabled interiority, and discovered formal innovations to help me dramatize those things in my own work. Ultimately, I hope I know at least some things now.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
Undoubtedly my teaching. The University of Oregon, where I teach, just established a minor in Disability Studies, and I teach Introduction to Disability Studies, where we read writers who approach disability in innovative and creative ways: Molly McCully Brown, Stanley Elkin, William Faulkner, Roxane Gay, Tobin Siebers, Paul Longmore, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. I get inspired to explore similar themes in my own story with Danny.
I teach about the social and medical models of disability and the oppressive history of the asylum and the telethon, which remind me of the models and history I’m grabbling with in my own work. But I also get to share my brother with my students and ground theory in my own lived experience with Danny. This inevitably leads my students to share their own experiences with their disabled family members or their own mind-body variations. In a disability studies class, theory is rarely abstract: it so quickly becomes personal as we share our own stories, as our class becomes a community. As I hear my students’ stories, I am reminded of the need for stories like my brother’s in the world, and it forces me back to the writing desk.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
I was having trouble with a section of a story, and one of my teachers, Patrick O’Keeffe, a fantastic Irish writer, said in his brogue: “Stare at it a little longer.” In our distracted world of immediate reward, it’s difficult to have the patience that good writing requires. But sometimes you just have to sit with a story and wait for the right word, scene, character, or ending to arrive. Sometimes, as with “Twelve Words,” you have to wait for your child to be born. I hope my other essays find their endings in less dramatic ways or my life will become ridiculous.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I’m working on a memoir about growing up with Danny, which will include an expanded version of “Twelve Words.” I want to explore more of my brother’s life: his augmentative communication device, our camp experience, his transition to living in a group home, and the pleasures and anxieties of caregiving. The tone in my household was one of pervasive humor in the shadow of surgeries and sickness. I hope to depict this particular comic spirit while being honest about the challenges my brother and family faced.
I am also revising a novel, Michael and Sal, which follows (surprise!) a set of twins much like my brother and me. The novel is based on a real event that happened almost twenty years ago. When I was a counselor at a camp for people with disabilities, one of my campers escaped from a pool party in his power wheelchair and drove onto a highway. He wasn’t hurt, but he could’ve been. Did he escape as a prank, as an epic f-you to the camp or his family, or was he making an attempt on his own life? He reminded me so much of Danny that I wondered whether my own twin brother would want to do something like that. The episode has haunted me ever since. I’ve spent the last ten years trying to write about it, blending my own brother with this boy until he became “Sal.”
To truly reflect the bond I had with my brother, I found I had to trespass the borders of realism. The “normal” twin, Michael, is convinced he can understand his brother’s thoughts, but as they grow up their communication becomes increasingly difficult. The novel asks some of the same questions I take up in the essay. While my novel’s constant question is “What is Sal thinking?” I am more interested in the limits of truly knowing that answer. I’ve been working on it for the last ten years but am, I hope, approaching the finish line. As my daughter recently told a gas station attendant: “My dad is really tired of working on his book.”