Extreme Closeup

In 11th grade, I was subjected to one of my least-favorite teachers of all time.  I had just transferred from a school where I had cracked my English teacher's requirements for getting straight As to Mrs. E's World Literature class.  She consistently gave me C's, with the occasional rare gift of B+.  She flunked me on my term paper after claiming that I was showing a lack of judgment by choosing to write about All Quiet On the Western Front, a book that she assigned.  At the end of the year, I applied to take the honors-level course in American Literature and when I found out that Mrs. E had just been assigned to take over the class, I was sure that she would deny my application.  After all, she had told me that my papers were pretentious and trying too hard to sound intellectual.

The trick was, I was in senior-level English as a junior and all of my classmates spent the last six weeks of the year in internships.  As the lone junior, I was stuck with one-on-one classes with the person who I might have described as my personal Umbridge if Harry Potter had been on my bookshelf at the time.  On our first day together, she announced that she had accepted my application for Honors American Literature and would be spending the next six weeks teaching me how to get an A in her class.

The problem, I discovered, wasn't the vocabulary that she thought was self-important.  It wasn't the fact that I had been taught to write papers based on an overarching metaphor instead of a three-point thesis.  No, her problem was that my papers lacked focus.  She handed me a VHS of an Italian film and told me to go home and watch it twice.  Then I was to watch it a third time and choose a single scene.  Once I had done that, I was to write her a ten-page term paper on that scene and that scene alone.

The film was Cinema Paradiso and about halfway through that movie was a scene in which a lovestruck teenager sneaks into a confessional to profess his love for the banker's daughter.  I didn't even write my paper on the couple.  I wrote it on the screen that divided the two halves of the confessional and the metaphor of class division.  I got an A on that paper and every one after it.

Since that time, I have written many scenes in the style of Mrs. E's instruction.  I once wrote 10 pages surrounding sixteen lines of dialogue in a court case for a work of fiction.  I excelled at what my BYU writing professor called the process story--giving an extremely detailed account of a single event.  My best-respected process story involved my viola repairman replacing a cracked peg on my instrument.
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To give you a break from the moral of this story, let me introduce myself.  I'm Kathryn Olsen, though I publish under the family nickname of Kaki Olsen.  I was born in Texas and spent most of my formative years in a suburb of Boston.  I studied English at BYU and served a mission in the California San Fernando Mission, Spanish-speaking.

I became a writer the weird way around, though I'm not sure what the normal way would be.  I started telling myself stories at night when I was about six or seven and wrote a book that is thankfully lost now when I was 12.  In my high school notebooks, you can see notes for my Greek class in the margins of my stories.  Given that and my eventual major, you might think that I always wanted to be a writer.

That is not the case, however.  When I was three, my parents allowed me to take violin lessons like my older sister.  I played with VIP Strings in Portland during the few years that I lived in Oregon and it was also in Oregon that I won a year of free piano lessons in a raffle.  In 10th grade, my orchestra conductor offered to teach any interested person enough viola skills to audition for the next orchestra up at New England Conservatory's youth division.  I picked up a viola for the first time in April and auditioned with the Bach Double Violin Concerto and the Telemann G Major Viola Concerto for the Youth Repertory Orchestra.  I chose viola.  I sang not only in the ward choir, but the Lexington Christian Academy Chorale and Youth Pro Musica.  I participated in musical theater as often as time allowed.  I was the only student in AP Music Theory at my school and got a 5 on the exam.  I was the recipient of the Senior Music Award.  When comparing colleges, I met with the heads of the music departments and attended theory classes and choir rehearsals.

How did I decide to become a writer with that background?  In another moment of extreme close-up, I'll explain.  For the Christmas concert my senior year, the Chorale sang Vivaldi's Gloria.  In the middle of the second movement, my conductor stopped the rehearsal, turned to me and asked me to explain the chord and rhythm progression and how it related to a principle we'd been studying earlier that week in AP Music Theory.  Because I was very good at the subject, I identified the unusual rhythm pattern on the third page and explained a few different ways that Vivaldi could have finished that phrase.  He beamed like a proud uncle and resumed the rehearsal, but before I had finished the analysis of the music, a voice sounded in my head saying, "I hate thinking of music this way."  It was a rebellious thought, but it wouldn't go away.  It eventually led me to realize that if I became a professional musician or even made it my major in college, I would despise music.

So I decided to look at what else I loved as passionately as music.  The only things that compared at all were reading and writing.  I never found myself hating the process of world-building or story-telling.
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I am, first and foremost, a fiction writer, but I got my start in personal essay.  In 2000, a site called iEmily was looking for nonfiction about teen issues and I accepted the assignment to talk about my self-injury habit that had run its course during 9th grade.  They sent me $20 and with that check, I bought my brother Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  A few weeks later, they published another of my essays on being a religious minority.  Just before I went on my mission, a feminist magazine contacted me about publishing an essay I had written on the day that I became concertmistress of my middle school orchestra.

I am absolutely a fiction writer, but I can't escape my non-fiction.  This point was brought home to me recently with the process of publishing my first novel.  Swan and Shadow is about a fictional set of twins, one of which is a swan by day and a human by night.  In the original ending, she realized that she was in a loveless relationship and chose voluntarily to leave, knowing that she might never again find someone who loved her and would be able to break her curse.  My editor loved the book and said the ending made no sense.  We compromised and found a story resolution where things were still uncertain, but less pessimistic.

She was never told that writing my character into the darkened room where her depression dwelt in that original ending was an act of autobiography.  I based it on 18 years of clinical depression and 7 years of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.  I claimed that my character's supreme act of bravery was risking a life without true love because in 2005, I fibbed to my husband that I'd be back from visiting my sister in time for Valentine's Day.  While visiting my sister, I got a divorce attorney.  I have never been an attractive person and I left realizing that I was abandoning the person who claimed to love me most.  The problem was that the person who swore all time and eternity to me punched me in the face when he got a bad grade.  He tried to strangle me to death when I asked him to stop screaming at me at 3 a.m.  He broke my wrist on Christmas and my rib on January 28.

That's an extreme close-up for another time and place, but the process of changing my ending actually led me to my current project.  One of the hallmarks of mental illness is cognitive distortion.  It is a form of extreme close-up in which things are blown out of proportion and it's very difficult to distinguish reality from anxiety.  To give you an example, it's why I would listen to my mother calmly discussing my GPA and yell that she had to stop screaming at me.  More recently, my boss told me on a Friday that she wanted me to talk to her on Monday about a problem Id had with a client.  After a full weekend in which I had a series of panic attacks about my imminent termination and envisioned how I would beg on my knees to keep my job, she blithely told me that she wanted me to know that she didn't blame me for the client's dissatisfaction.

I know from my life-long attendance at church what mercy and repentance are.  I know I am a beloved daughter of a Heavenly Father.  I know that my Savior loves me.  But I can't hear those words when my mind is screaming at me for my catastrophic life choices.  I decided to write down common cognitive distortions and write individual responses to each of them based on the gospel.  Once I'm done, I'll have talked back to some of those angry voices in my head and I hope to share it with other people.

Because it feels like a description of every step I've taken along the way, the book is called When I Walk Imperfectly.