NON-FICTION
THOUGHTS ON STORY, DIVERSITY,
AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
Hiromi Goto
S
tory is what has brought me here today. Story is what has brought you
here. We are alike and very unalike in many, many ways. Our bodies, our
genders, our sexuality, cultural and historical backgrounds, class, faith,
atheism, migration, immigration, colonization, have had us experiencing our lives
and our sense of place (if not home) in distinct and particular ways. These differences at times can divide us. These differences can be used against us to keep us
divided. But here we find ourselves. Look around you. The faces of friends and the
faces of strangers. We came here because of story. There is much power in story.
When I had my first nervous breakdown (I’ve only had the one, but having one
when I thought I never would has opened up the possibility that I may have more,
although let-the-spirits-see-me-through-the-rest-of-my-life-without-a-secondone!), I finally got into low-budget subsidized counselling after a year on the
wait-list. I have no true objective sense of what I’m like as a client. (Am I a client?
Not a customer… I wouldn’t call myself a patient. Impatient, maybe.) Probably I
was stiff and rather reserved. I spoke like Spock for several months. “Why do you
talk like that?” my counsellor once asked me. “Like what?” I said.
During one of our sessions I mentioned how I was very upset with someone
who had called me controlling. “I don’t have control issues,” I claimed. “No more
than anyone else,” I amended.
“I see a lot of artists,” my counsellor said. “Artists and writers have to control
their medium, don’t they?” she said.
Spock changed the subject.
Numerous years have passed since that exchange and I can now concede that
in writing stories I control what goes into them. At the same time, I’m informed by
the world around me, and my first readers and editors have significant influence
during the editing stage of the publishing process. Once the book is published I
have no control over how my stories are read. I can only hope that the content
and the techniques I used (a form of control) have rendered a story that is near
to what I had intended.
NON-FICTION
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