<![CDATA[KATHLEEN SPADA

Stories—especially true ones—rarely begin where we think they do.

The edges blur. They gather in fragments. They loop backward. They disappear for years and return altered. What we eventually call the beginning often reveals itself only in retrospect, after we have already been moving through it for far longer than we realized.

Sometimes decades.
Even then, I'm not convinced we ever know for certain.

Knowing and feeling are different. We might feel a sudden shift: A fragment surfaces. A contradiction returns. A detail once overlooked begins exerting pressure against the imagination. Something long silent refuses silence. That pressure has always interested me. The strange insistence of it. The way meaning gathers like a storm before language arrives to contain it.

I often think about beginnings because I have spend much of my life circling them—through writing, certainly, but also through research. Through interviews and archives and landscapes and conversations. Through notebooks half-filled with observations I recorded because they felt urgent even when I could not yet explain why.

Write This Down

That impulse has shaped more of my work than any outline ever has. Not because I understand what I was seeing, but because I didn't. Because something in the encounter felt unfinished. Charged. Because a phrase would surface and remain with me for longer than reason could justify. Because a passing detail would begin returning in subtle variations until ignoring it no longer felt possible.

This, I think, is one of the ways the gothic has taught me how to research. Not the gothic as costume or trope, not simply dark hallways and storms gathering over rooftops, but the gothic as movement—its tendency to circle rather than proceed cleanly forward, its refusal to let unresolved things remain buried, its unsettling way of bringing what has been pushed aside back into view. The gothic does not immediately restore order. It turns toward the thing that doesn't quite make sense. The thing half-hidden. The detail everyone else dismisses. It remains there longer than is comfortable and asks: Why this? Why now? Why does this keep happening?

And there is no answer. Not yet. Only a felt pressure. A disturbance. A sense that something is asking to be followed.

A felt sense to:
Write this down.

Because the phrase matters. Because intuition alone feels too easy, too polished. This is rougher than intuition. More embodied. More unresolved. A pause that catches unexpectedly in the chest. A tightening. A phrase overheard and immediately written down because something in the body recognized significance before the mind understood why. Language arrives later, slower, when trying to make sense of what had already been registered somewhere deeper than conscious thought.

The Detail that Refuses Silence

What really made Winchester sit upright as though electrified?

It was the ill-logic of what he read. A murderer confined to an asylum becoming one of the most prolific contributors to the principal historical dictionary of the English language. The contradiction feels gothic in its very construction: something impossible and yet factual, unsettling precisely because it refuses easy resolution. What stayed with me was not simply the discovery. It was recognition. That immediate shift when something ordinary ceased being ordinary. This detail lifting from the page carried disproportionate weight. A passing mention refused to remain peripheral.

As a result, research became imminent.

Narrative nonfiction is often discussed in terms of facts, chronology, reporting, and verification. And all of that matters. Deeply. But increasingly what interests me is what happens before those visible structures form. Before scenes settle. Before chronology clarifies. Before the shape of a narrative reveals itself fully enough to name.

There is an atmospheric threshold there.
A pressure gathering. A space where language has not yet quite caught up with what the story is doing.

Why do certain stories remain inert while others seem almost alive on the page?
Why do some accounts merely inform while others haunt?

The gothic gave me a language for that threshold—not as genre, but as method. A way of approaching what unsettles. A willingness to move toward discomfort rather than around it. Toward contradiction. Toward what feels uncanny, unresolved, emotionally disproportionate. Toward what seems slightly misaligned.

And within this context, silence lands harder than explanation.
Because you feel something active beneath the surface.

But nonfiction had taught me to be objective so, when Winchester spoke at length about the importance of physically visiting places you write about, traveling for research, I understood this as inherent to place-based research. "Go there if you can," he advised. "See and do real reporting." I heard the part about verifying factual details to evoke them fully for the reader but missed the deeper implications. But that phrase--real reporting—stayed with me because it gestured toward something more than factual accuracy alone. Place changes narrative understanding. Landscapes carry rhetorical force. Atmosphere alters perception. A story encountered abstractly on paper is not the same story encountered standing beneath ancient oaks while humidity gathers against your skin and Spanish moss shifts overhead like something breathing.

It was when I reflected on something else Winchester said that I felt implicated. Convicted even. He was discussing his intent to move fluidly between history, geography, science, language, and memoir when he described what he called his "signature" practice of deliberately inserting himself into narrative nonfiction. He spoke about beginning a recent book on land ownership with memories of running cross country as a schoolboy near the village of Radipole in Dorset. Some critics, he acknowledged, might see such moments as compressing academic rigor, but he dismissed the concern rather easily. He was not trying to write detached scholarship. He was trying to write accessible nonfiction animated by lived presence.

I pushed back, not even realizing that I was aligning with the critics, and he reminded me: "Narrative nonfiction does not emerge from nowhere. A consciousness moves through the material. Someone chooses the details. Someone decides where the story begins."

The question is not whether the writer is present.
The question is whether the writer is trustworthy.

He wasn't referring to authorial presence in the ordinary sense, not the writer stepping visibly into frame, but something more reciprocal than that. More relational. A shared experience.

Presence as Invocation

The strange work of narrative nonfiction is that the writer and reader enter together. One writes toward an encounter. The other receives and responds. Both affect and are affected. Both move toward and away from moments of connection in what relational theorists call mutual regulation—or at least they should. The page becomes a site of shared presence where distance narrows just enough for something human and unstable and true to emerge between them.

Trust begins there.

Not because the writer claims authority, but because the reader feels accompanied.
Because someone remains with them inside the material rather than delivering it from a safe remove.

Story, when invoked fully, creates that kind of mutuality. A rhythm of nearness and uncertainty. Presence and withdrawal. Knowing and not knowing. The reader leans in. The writer remains there. A reciprocal tension builds. And through that shared movement something else becomes possible: empathy. Not sympathy. Not agreement. But the deeper and riskier act of being with another consciousness inside complexity long enough to feel something of its texture without rushing to simplify it.

I wasn't always comfortable doing that.

For years I though restraint required distance. That nonfiction became more trustworthy the further the writer stepped back. That authorial presence risked contaminating truth. But at a writer's conference years ago, someone who had read my chapter joined the conversation and said I hurt her.

She was hurt.
Harmed by my draft.
The one called stylistic and lyrical.

"This is traumatizing," she said, precisely because it was written to invoke. "Where are you? I need you alongside me as I read." The comment stayed with me because she was right. I had been trying so carefully not to intrude that I had nearly disappeared. The scenes were there. The facts where there. The emotional weight was certainly there. But the consciousness moving through the story—the person asking questions, choosing what mattered, feeling the pressure of the material—had receded too far.

Absence is never neutral.

I wrote that down.

It was a difficult lesson, but an important one.
In order to enter the story, I had to become present to the research itself.
It revealed uncertainty as its own form of ill-logic.
It's own rhetorical force.

By rhetorical force, I mean the effect language creates through relationship: how choices shape what a reader feels, where they pause, what they trust, what lingers. Rhetoric is not only persuasion. It is arrangement and rhythm and emphasis and silence. It is emotional architecture. It is the shaping of experience on the page. A pause can persuade. Even absence does rhetorical work. The writer may tell herself she is stepping aside, but the page still carries the effect of that choice. Language and silence alike move readers somewhere, and often discomfort is where the work begins.

I returned to the work of it, to my research notes, looking for myself.
I listened, and wrote what I was compelled to write down.

A transcript revisited years later suddenly sounded different. The same sentences carried undertones I had not yet been capable of hearing but had felt. It was there in the marginalia. A silence between stories now grew louder than the stories themselves. A photograph once filed away as peripheral began pressing against the imagination. A note scribbled in a hurry returned, years later, with urgency.

That, too, is part of narrative nonfiction.

Not merely recovering facts, but paying attention to what slips to the margins of collective memory. There is a delicate tension involved in reconstructing scenes from the past, imagining events vividly but fairly, warning readers subtly when imagination enters the frame without pushing invention so far that nonfiction collapses into distortion—into the penumbra of fiction.

It's often atmospheric.
But some nonfiction writers seem afraid of atmosphere, as though sensory detail itself threatens truth.
I would remind, however, as my friend reminded me, that memory does not arrive clinically. History is lived bodily. Trauma is spatial. Place retains emotional residue long after official documentation fails. To write nonfiction stripped entirely of atmosphere, to write what is deeply emotional with emotional distance, does not make it more truthful. It is simply less alive.

It is simply less.

The Gothic understands this intuitively. Perhaps that's why the Gothic has always relied heavily on metaphor because metaphor allows writers to articulate forms of knowledge that exceed straightforward exposition. Haunting, after all, is rarely about ghosts alone. More often it names recurrence, unresolved trauma, inherited silence, submerged violence, repetitions unfolding across generations. Certain characters—certain people—feel haunted because their stories remain unfinished, unwritten.

What Returns

Repetition.
Write it down.

What returns matters.
The rhetorical mattering of the gothic loop has taught me that.
Not repetition in the simple sense, but recurrence carrying affect. The same detail appearing differently. A story retold months later but weighted elsewhere. An image resurfacing in another context. A place remembered by multiple voices with overlapping and contradictory edges. The loop rarely resolves. It intensifies. It gathers. It circles back and with each return to alter what came before. The effect feels physical. A shift in pressure. A tightening. A feeling that the story itself has moved closer.

It is easy to dismiss felt experience in research because it appears imprecise, but I've learned that even though felt sense does not replace rigor, it often initiates it. The body registers significance and that's where the work begins. Then comes verification. Then questions. Then returning. Then writing. The felt sense is not the answer, it is the opening.

The invitation to remain.
To witness.

Getting Lost On Purpose

Maybe this i why I remain drawn to wandering as part of the process. Walking without fully knowing where I'm headed. Letting landscapes complicate certainty. Following what lingers and writing things down before they make sense. Getting lost has taught me more than planning ever has. Not because uncertainty is romantic. It isn't. It can be frustrating and inconvenient and exhausting, but there are also exhilarating moments. Sometimes "Aha!" but, more often, "Holy crap!" Because getting lost interrupts performance. It strips away illusion. It asks for responsiveness rather than control.

Sometimes we look so hard for what we expect that we miss what is quietly waiting nearby.
Sometimes only after expectation collapses do we begin seeing clearly.

And then again, that shift.
A pause. The sense that orientation itself has changed.

Write it down.

And so, I attuned to the fragment entered quickly in a notebook. The seemingly random sentence scribbled on a post-it. The detail without immediate context tucked between pages in a diary. Because, just maybe, it might return years later carrying exactly the weight the story required. This happened when I was writing and rewriting and rewriting WARD too often to count. A phrase once peripheral became connective tissue and the pages began assembling relationships the conscious mind had not yet recognized.

I teach my students that research and writing are not separate.
That writing itself often becomes inquiry.
Do I believe what I teach?
I have to experience it for myself.

I wrote that down a long time ago.

Now, I teach that meaning gathers through arrangement. Through juxtaposition. Through placing one fragment beside another long enough for tension to build. A photograph beside a legal document. A remembered sentence beside a silence. A landscape beside a voice recorded years earlier so that the air between details might becoming charged. What is exposed in the process is how rhetorical structures themselves participate in the haunting. Juxtaposition is often discussed merely as a stylistic device, but it functions analytically as well. Meaning frequently emerges not through direct explanation but through the friction that emerges when placed beside one another—when a diary entry gives context to a signature on a document.

Writers must trust readers enough to feel those resonances without overexplaining them. Winchester's work operates in a similar way. During our conversation, he described delighting in narrative tangents others might consider irrelevant. He referred to his books as "plum puddings," filled with historical asides, digressions, and seemingly peripheral details readers may either savor or resist. Though it manifests differently in my own work, I understand what he meant. Research rarely unfolds linearly. The deeper you move into archives and landscapes and interviews, the more associative the process becomes. A river leads to a boat. The boat leads to forced migration. Migration leads to land. Land leads to maps. Maps lead to borders.

Narrative expands relationally.

Writing as Inquiry

There are moments in research where the material suddenly coheres, where patterns emerge through the process of writing it down, through associative returns. Certain ideas cannot be fully understood until they are given space on a page, and only when it starts to come together, it can be arranged as narrative.

Winchester described a moment that illustrates this idea:
"I discovered extraordinary details buried within massive medical archives while researching W.C. Minor. One handwritten note I must have seen many times finally revealed the horrifying act of self-mutilation that seemed to explain Minor's sudden silence and declining contributions to the dictionary." It was thrilling to find such a detail—not because it was sensational, but because it suddenly illuminated the narrative structure surrounding it. Such experiences can feel less like solving a puzzle and more like the ground beneath the story trembling just enough to reveal what others have missed.

In the composition classroom, we often emphasize thesis, structure, argument, clarity—all important tools. But narrative inquiry benefits from getting lost first, even if just a little. Sometimes you must follow what lingers before you understand why it matters. Thrilling moments rarely arrive through mastery.
More often, they arrive through sustained attention.
Through attunement.

That's worth writing down.

Because sometimes the most important sentence in a research journal isn't a sentence at all, but rather a word that initially appeared meaningless were it not for its urgency to be recorded:
Watching.

I wrote that word down while wandering beneath live oaks in Louisiana. I couldn't explain the compulsion, but it wouldn't let go until it was done. Years later the word resurfaced organically within the book itself: "Wards are watchers." I have learned to trust moments like that—not uncritically (not always, anyway), but rhetorically. Certain details carry pressure before they carry meaning. Perhaps that is what narrative nonfiction ultimately asks of us. Not certainty, but sustained awareness, at least long enough for deeper patterns to emerge.

A common note of advice from the workshops I've attended and literary agents I've spoken to is that when beginning a narrative, the opening anecdote, the scene, must connect directly to the story's through-line rather than merely to one of its peripheral threads. I think the same could be said for research itself. The details that endure are rarely random. They connect, however obliquely, to the deeper emotional architecture of the narrative. The images that continue resurfacing do so because they belong to the story beneath the story.

Like a birdhouse disappearing into bark;
A word written down before it fully reveals itself.

And suddenly something that had remained indistinct becomes visible enough to follow further.
There is release there, but it is only temporary. The pressure remains. Builds.
The something that has moved closer remains unresolved.
But more present. Visible at the edges. Breathing.

Which brings me back to beginnings. Perhaps they are never singular after all. Perhaps they are accumulative. A sequence of returns that builds like a storm, quietly at first. And then one day you realize that you've actually been inside the story, beginning again and again, for a very long time—a felt sense asking to be followed.

Write that down.