"When Things Got Crazy (Dingue)" by David Collins

 – Not what we expected

Hell-bound for a summer of adventure in France, we didn’t care.

David Collins holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and taught English/Creative Writing for forty years.  His work has appeared in numerous journals, reviews, magazines, and newspapers. His first full-length book, Accidental Activists: Mark Phariss, Vic Holmes, and Their Fight for Marriage Equality in Texas, won the Mayborn Award for Excellence in Nonfiction in 2016, published in 2017 by the University of North Texas Press.  

David is the immediate-past president of Charlotte Writers Club and makes his home in Pineville, North Carolina, with his wife, Jean, and their rambunctious Labrador retriever pup.

Author’s Talk

David Collins

When I sit down to write nonfiction, tiny switches inside my head start opening and closing. Before my fingers descend on the keyboard, I have to decide which of the several writers who have taken up residence inside my head is going to manage the project at hand. 

If the story I’m writing is a recent one, it’s the journalist in me who comes to the fore. Separate fact from fiction, arrange events in a coherent order, provide context. Most important, stand back and be impartial. Writing as a journalist, I keep reminding myself that “It’s all about conveying information.” 

Truth to tell, I’m much more at home writing creative nonfiction. Trouble is, I find it hard, almost impossible, to write creative nonfiction about recent events. It takes a while—often years—before the meaning of the story I want to tell becomes clear to me. Think of water percolating through the earth where layers of soil, sand, and rock strip away larger impurities, where smaller contaminants are removed by chemical and biological processes. 

At the end of the process, pure water. Or pure story. 

Inevitably, as the impurities fall away and the human truths show themselves for the first time, I begin not so much to understand as to feel. Think of it as the difference between comprehension and apprehension. Beyond the story itself, what I want to bring to readers is the burst of light that comes with the leap from rationality to something more. 

Everything begins, of course, with words. Some are magical and carry an emotional loading beyond their literal meaning. I think of the half-dozen French words and phrases in “When Things Got Crazy” that way. They lift us out of the ordinary world where we live most days, force us to cross the thresholds that separate us from other worlds and transformed versions of our selves. 

But words alone aren’t enough. We’re talking here about gossamer, about feelings and apprehensions beyond the reach of words. I want readers to feel what I felt as the story behind the story revealed itself.  

And the best vehicle for that is rhythms that speak to the reader’s unconscious mind. Long sentences that ease the reader into agreement; patterned sentences that almost but not quite repeat themselves; quick reversals, often in sentence fragments; repeated elements that give structure. 

A little mystical? Maybe, but that’s where I live.