I attended AWP last weekend and sat on a panel about mental health in literature. The moderator Pam Laskin, the co-panelists Suzanne Weyn and Hiram Lorenzen, and I talked about representing characters with mental health challenges in young people’s literature. We also read from our work. For me, the panel really came alive when the audience questions began. One of the questions in the audience came from a woman who is living with a bipolar diagnosis. She’d written a memoir she’s shopping around and noted that the panelists themselves were not living with mental health challenges and she asked about representation and own voices.

At least one of the panelists was a bit defensive about it. The moderator and one other panelists had grown up with family members with severe mental health diagnoses. Their lives were shaped by these family members’ struggles, however, the audience member pointed out, they were writing from outside the mental health issue, not from inside.

It was definitely a thought I had as we were sitting down and starting the panel. I was a bit of an outsider on the panel. They had lost two panelists and needed a replacement. I deal with mental health in When the World Turned Upside Down so there as a clear connection to the panel topic. But I felt the depth and authority on mental health, didn’t go much further beyond what I had already recorded on the page.

All I could do in response to the audience member’s question was acknowledge her, acknowledge how it might feel to come to the panel in hopes of hearing from peer writers who are dealing with both the challenges of writing and of mental health issues, how disappointed I might be to find no one like me on the panel. It was just another reminder about the importance of being rigorous in how we refer to things (the name and intention of the panel), transparent about who we are and where we stand, and conscious of the world around us, the people in it, and the unspoken promise in our actions.

Will be musing on this for a while. What are the spaces in which I am representative and in which I am not. Am I transparent with the limits of my experiences and expertise? Am I vocal when representation is missing? Am I compassionate when I am involved in situations where representation is lacking? These are important questions when moving though the public spaces of life.

—K.