Powerful, honest, and poignant characterize Ruth Gila Berger's "Blur (The Interior of a Diagnosis)." Berger's is the kind of writing that makes readers wince and writers wonder if they will ever achieve such honest prose.

Berger originally wrote the essay for a class at Hamline University in Minneapolis where she is an MFA student in creative writing. This essay is her first published work.

Through the milky haze of depression, Berger unravels a complex narrator: a sexually abused child, a competent woman and wife, and a deeply psychotic individual where "voices loom over me sucking me into the mess of a long abandoned knitting-yarn basket." By intertwining clarity with confusion, and past with present, Berger takes the reader tripping into her subversive world, where "metallic bleats invade the next mush of days."

Berger does not share her writing with her family, though "it's all too likely that they will come across it sometime." Publishing the essay was a difficult choice, but she acknowledges that writing evolves from something deeply personal to something "that takes on its own life. It becomes about structure and word choice and by the time you send it out to be published it is no longer this deeply personal thing."

She describes her writing as image driven and tending toward narrative. She dislikes when people describe her writing as stream of consciousness. She intended this to be a more formal essay, and includes facts from her research on depression but still feels the essay came out more personal.

In a sense the essay is a response to therapists she has seen who think that her chronic and psychotic depression is not a big deal. "I really wanted to say 'OK so here are all the pretty words, and here is what it is like.'"

The first draft of the essay did not include the repetitive use of the voices that spin inside her head when she enters a depression: "Nothing stupid not real whore slut nothing ... "  But in order to create the experience for the reader, the words had to be there. Her original intent was to write solely about depression, not about abuse, but she realized, through feedback, that she needed to explain what the voices were all about and where they came from.

The bathroom scene is one she borrowed from another episode. "It is the one scene that wasn't necessarily in that story. But what it communicated was crucial. I couldn't leave it out." It conveys the experience, emotion and confusion that are in every episode. "There is always the bathroom floor."

Though she writes nonfiction from experience, she can envision some of her work being published as fiction. She is currently working on a collection of short stories that are nonfiction. Other topics of interest are her family legacy and the creative response to the imagination, though she says, "these are not necessarily topics but obsessions."

Berger feels that learning how to take feedback and then rewriting according to that feedback, even if you think it s wrong, is an invaluable skill. "If it turns out to be wrong then you really know." It is the best way to hone your own skills as an editor.

She says that the advice and practice she takes from school is to rewrite her work. "I'm not exactly sure how I learned that. I remember in college in a beginning playwriting class getting over the 'What? It's not perfect' mentality."

When she gets stuck on something, she'll give it to someone for help. "It doesn't matter necessarily what the feedback is, but it gets you going again."



Corinne Platt