Iowa City author Nina Lohman turned to writing to help live with chronic pain

Iowa City author and publisher Nina Lohman knew she had a story to tell. But she had to find the right way to tell it.

Lohman has lived with chronic pain for more than 15 years, and after experiencing a few “rather traumatic medical experiences” Lohman started writing as catharsis.

“I kept trying to write an essay,” she said. “I kept trying to create these stories that would fit inside of an essay and I kept jamming them in there and they would not go.”

So she turned to a literary form called hybrid writing, where the author combines multiple elements, voices, and modalities to tell a specific story.

“It became very clear to me early on in the process of writing all of this that it was going to be necessary to write this book in a way that reading the book felt like the experience of someone who lives inside of chronic pain. And it needed all of these different voices, and it needed to repeat itself, and it needed to have a lot of empty space inside of it,” she said.

Her debut book, “The Body Alone,” explores her personal experience living with chronic pain through a carefully woven tapestry of memoir, research, theology and medicine. The book is available from the University of Iowa Press.

Her story

Lohman has been living in “the land in-between” health and illness for many years.

“Everything started for me when I was in graduate school. Out of the blue I got this headache and it didn’t go away. And it really hasn’t gone away in 16, 17 years,” she said. “I have something called chronic daily headaches (CDH), and I have gotten the response that doctors don’t really know what it is or what makes it start or what keeps it persisting all this time.”

“It’s kind of a strange place to occupy,” Lohman said. “Because on the one hand I am very healthy and I am capable and able to live my life and do a lot of things that would be considered very normal. On the other hand, I have this part of my life that is always with me.”

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“I think of pain kind of like waves — you never quite know when it’s going to be there. It might be close, it might be far away, but it never really goes away,” she said.

As she started writing down her experiences, she shared drafts with her trusted writer’s group, who provided Lohman with support and encouragement.

“They helped to step in and say ‘tell us more about this, I think you have more room here.’ The more I started to stretch the story out, the more space it occupied.”

“It took a long time to write this book and it’s had several different forms along the way,” Lohman said. “What has remained consistent, though, is the fact that there are these multiple postures or perspectives, or voices even.”

Structure

Lohman was familiar with hybrid writing thanks to her work as the founder and publisher of Brink, an Iowa City-based literary journal dedicated to hybrid and cross-genre writing.

“The more that we have worked with writers and artists through Brink, the more it has become clear that the hybrid form really does provide space for people to unravel these complicated narratives,” Lohman said.

“I think it feels really true to how life is. It’s just not linear ….,” she said. “We have so many different inputs, we’re on screens, we’re reading books, we have so many different ways for information to come to us that … there need to be so many different ways for it to come out as well.”

When Lohman was reviewing a complete draft of her book, this hybrid structure provided her with a strong blueprint for revision.

The book was finished and included a variety of sections such as memoir, vocabulary, and others. Lohman printed out the manuscript and organized it by different sections, even through they are not linear in how she tells the story.

“I deconstructed everything I had,” she explained. “”I knew that it was important for there to be an arch … inside of each of those sections.”

“When I did that I was really able to break it apart and look at it and see ‘I’m missing this here’ or ‘Gosh, I need three more sections here to make it really feel like it’s rounded out.’ And after I did that — I understood how each of those chunks worked individually — it made a lot more sense to weave them back in together.”

More than her own story

When Lohman began her journey with chronic daily headaches and chronic pain, many physicians told her they had never seen anything like what she was experiencing. “I really internalized — I’m an anomaly,” she said.

“And over the course of writing this book for so many years, doing my research, reading all these other books, talking with other people — it became very clear to me that I am NOT an anomaly …. This happens to a lot of people.”

This realization was a turning point for Lohman. “This (book) is about a larger institution. This is a much bigger story. And it’s political and it is affecting a lot of people. That changed things for me.”

As Lohman begins her book tour, she is looking forward to talking about the hybrid nature of the book and how writing in a hybrid style can work really well “for people who have broken bodies or really tangled stories that they need to unravel.”

“And I’m really excited to also get out and talk about the medical side of this. And (about) being someone who’s lived in pain this long and what that experience has been like from various angles — what I’ve heard, what I’ve been told, what I’ve felt, what I’ve been afraid of.”

“I think there will be a lot of community, a lot of people who have similar experiences either for themselves or have other people in their lives who have experienced that as well,” Lohman said.