Rebecca Renner's Blog - Posts Tagged "nonfiction"

Every family has a myth.

I know yours has one, a story passed down bedtime to bedtime, or on long car trips to get you to shut up. The more exciting they are, the more likely they're fake.

My family, for example, has been cobbled together from horse trainers and surfers, southern belles, cattle drivers, a Powhatan princess, half the Confederate Army, a pirate, a famous architect, and the man who mapped the brain.

You and I both know it doesn't matter if these stories are real. They're all part of our personal myths. They're the stories we tell ourselves about us, and even in their, shall we call them, less than true spots, they can feel more genuine to us than the lives we have actually lived.

Now imagine my surprise when I found out, despite some obvious embellishments, most of my personal myth was actually the Cliff Notes version of my family history. The real shocking stuff had all been left out.



In the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, some of the characters use a device called a Penfield Mood Organ. Just by entering a number, users can instantly alter their moods. Most people like Deckard, Dick's protagonist — you know, the one played by Harrison Ford in Blade Runner — use the mood organ to get rid of pesky emotions like longing and heartache. They live in the very definition of a crapsack world, after all. Their planet has become so artificial that anything natural, like a real sheep, is so astronomically priced that it's officially a luxury good — hence the dreaming of electric sheep.

I have always been confused about why Dick decided to associate this machine with Wilder Penfield, whose work never focused on emotion, as far as I know. Penfield and his colleagues mapped the brain. But he also devoted his time to studying more abstract topics, like the neural genesis of consciousness or if he could scientifically prove that humans have souls.

Without the Penfield Mood Organ, Dick's characters experience the existential pain of meaningless existence. There's the link between Penfield and the mood organ; albeit it's an accidental one: more than one of Penfield's colleagues died by suicide. One of them is my grandfather, Dr. Henry Lamar Roberts.

I have always felt a connection with him that is difficult to explain. For a long time, I was afraid I'd meet a similar fate. Sometimes that fear rises in me, but in those moments, I seldom think of him.

But because of that connection, I can instantly recognize him in photographs. What I can't seem to recognize is what was going through his thoughts.

Perhaps the poison lurked in his studies of the human mind. Probing the biological origins of consciousness is like looking through a glass darkly. How deep can you go without leaving something behind?

Up until very recently, I barely knew this about my grandfather. I only knew the stories my mother, his daughter, told. My mom has a history of mental illness herself. And, like me, she wouldn't so much tell stories as regale. So for the longest time, it was difficult to pick the truth out from the mythology.

All I knew was that he had died, and he'd passed along a set of genes that came with a love of language and a pre-packaged set of personal demons.

But for all I knew, ours was a tragedy on a small scale. I had no idea his story was the missing part of so many others.

Roberts (left) & Penfield (right)

 

Then I read Patient H.M., Luke Dittrich's book about the famous amnesiac patient Henry Molaison. The story takes a detour to the Montreal Neurological Institute, aka the Neuro, which was founded by Penfield. My grandfather, Penfield's protégé, did his residency and subsequent research at the Neuro.

The book went on to recount a story I had heard dozens of times before. Penfield is doing surgery on a woman. Her skull has been opened, and he has a probe in her brain. But the patient is awake. She's under local anesthesia. Penfield stimulates her brain tissue, trying to locate the source of her seizures.

"I smell burnt toast!" she calls out, and the doctors know they've found the right spot.

I had been walking my dog, listening to this audiobook. When I came to this story, I froze, rewound and listened again. Imagine hearing one of your grandmother's yarns told back to you in a book. I had no idea anyone else had ever heard it before. Turns out a lot of people have.

But there was a problem with Dittrich's version — my grandfather was missing. In fact, he was never mentioned, not once in the entire book.

So I assumed he wasn't important enough, and I put the story out of my thoughts for more than two years.



Then on January 26th, Google honored Wilder Penfield with a Google Doodle of a brain and burning toast. For a whole day, everyone was talking about him. They were also sharing the Canadian Heritage Minute that features the same story I'd grown up on:

https://youtu.be/pUOG2g4hj8s

Inspired by the brief Penfield fever, I started thinking about my grandfather again. He had published a book with Penfield. He even started the department of neurosurgery at the University of Florida. Why didn't anyone know who he was?

Determined to find some answers, I contacted Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University in Montreal. The librarians there sent me a few files, like photographs and memos that referenced him. But cataloging is imperfect. The best way to discover something in an archive is to dig through it yourself.

But the Osler librarians did discover something Penfield's desk after he died in 1976. Penfield had kept a portrait of my grandfather, who would take his own life two years later. His was the only portrait on Penfield's desk. He was important to Penfield.

Then where did his legacy go? Why did he disappear?

And why did he die?

I knew I would need to go to Montreal to find out...



So Rebecca, this was a long-ass blog post. What in the hell are you doing?

Well, me, I'm actually writing a book about this. The tentative title is This Is Your Brain on a Quest. It's about mental illness, the history of brain surgery, and the search for my grandfather's legacy. While I do the research, which will include gallivanting across North America to get doors slammed in my face, I'll be documenting part of my misadventures in this series of blog posts I dubbed "Herding Electric Sheep."

You can follow along by subscribing to this blog.

You can also help me out by contributing to my Patreon or buying me a Ko-Fi.

I'm a freelance writer, so that means I spend a lot of time writing other things. If I can get only a fraction of my followers to contribute just a dollar each to my Patreon, I can focus on finishing this book.

You can also connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Goodreads, and Instagram.

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Howdy friends,

You may not have realized it, but today is a major occasion. Or at least it feels that way to me. Today marks the first day of giveaways for my debut book, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades. As many of you already know, Gator Country has been years in the making.

I started out with nothing, an outsider to the literary world. While I was living in an apartment-sized house on the edge of the swamp, I watched as journalists and writers who the world judged more worthy of telling stories than me come to the place where I grew up in Florida, get nearly everything wrong, and then leave. I yearned for the day when I could finally tell my own story. Hell, I yearned for the day when someone would finally tell Florida stories right.

Determined to make my way as a writer while still having to make ends meet as a teacher, I strived through the dark of night and the wee hours of the morning, eking out as much time as I could to write. Through all this struggle, I thought of my dad, who had died a few years before then, but in his life, he always believed in me. I knew that if I couldn't succeed just for myself, I would succeed for him.

Gradually, I began to make friends with the Florida writers who were telling the story right. I started to get chances to publish my writing, too. My first "big break" was a story about hurricanes for the Washington Post. A hurricane had just blown through my town. No one had electricity. I finished that essay on my cell phone while hunkered in my car while the whole broken world around me was slowly putting itself back together. To say I was determined was an understatement. I am stubborn as the swamp.

In Gator Country, we don't vilify swamps. They are some of the most beautiful and fertile places on Earth. But if you cross them, you might not win. In the struggle of man versus swamp, the swamp seldom loses.

With that stubbornness in my heart, I quit my day job in 2018. I went on to write for places like The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and, of course, National Geographic.

In early 2020, I lived a dream I'd had for a long time: to write for Outside Magazine just like my idol Jon Krakauer. Outside sent me totag along with python hunters, and I realized just how wrong my preconceptions about them and the wilderness they were protecting really were.

A little later that year, I sold my first story to Nat Geo, another dream (ironically). You may have read it, because it went absurdly viral. That story was about weird pandemic dreams.

Through all of this, a story that I had failed to sell in my early years as a writer stuck with me. I had seen other writers from outside the state come poach the story and get things wrong. But for some reason, I couldn't let it go. I'm glad I didn't. Because about a year later, I sold the story as Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades.

I don't believe that everything happens for a reason. But looking back, I can say I'm glad I didn't sell the story to a magazine, because it never would have gotten the chance to become this amazing book. It's exciting, poignant, and suspenseful, if I do say so myself. It is my heart and soul.

Now, I'm excited to tell the world about Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades. Here's a very short description:

To catch a Florida Man, you have to become one, and that’s what Jeff Babauta does in my literary true crime debut GATOR COUNTRY. The tricky old wildlife officer faces off with the wiliest of poachers on his mission to save baby alligators and the Florida Everglades. Come with me as your narrator as I delve into the danger and adventure of the glades to find the truth of its unbelievable past. Along the way, I relearn to experience the awe of nature, and I discover that sometimes the tallest tales are the truest, and every person is more than meets the eye. Even Florida Man.



Click here to enter.

Enter for a chance to win one of 50 copies of Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades. The giveaway ends on August 8, so get your entry in now before the chance disappears.

While you're here, tell me about your big dream. I dreamed big against impossible odds, so you can, too. We all have too many naysayers already, so let me encourage you instead.

What is your big dream?

Hello reader friends,

If you haven't already bought a copy of my debut book Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades, now's your chance to snag one for a fraction of the price. Gator Country is on sale for $2.99, 80 percent off the typical cover price.

Amazon has Gator Country ranked as 65th bestselling nonfiction book on the site, right below books that are on the New York Times bestseller list. Can you help me join them?

Grab your copy of Gator Country here text while you can!

And don't forget to add it to your TBR pile!

Thanks for your support!

Rebecca