Author with Disability Not Running from New Challenges
By Amy Halloran
Twenty-one years ago, Floyd Skloot was afflicted with a
virus that damaged his brain. He is an award-winning author of 15 books, three
of them memoirs that touch on, among other topics, the subject of disability.
Independence Today recently talked to Skloot, a
resident of Portland, Oregon, about his career and his life with his wife,
Beverly. 
Q: I’m curious about how you had a career in public
policy and you were a poet. Tell me about those diverging impulses.
A: I had discovered poetry when I was about 20 years old
and recognized that it was something I would be doing for the rest of my life,
writing poetry. I completed my undergraduate work and was interested in
studying with a poet that I admired. I ended up studying for almost two years
with the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella and, during that time, it became clear to
me that I was not necessarily interested in pursuing an academic life. I began
to interview in 1972 with potential employers who didn’t rule you out if
you had a master's degree in English. I ended up signing up for an interview
with the Illinois Bureau of the Budget, and I got that job. The career path in
public policy was in some respects complete serendipity, and it became a way
for 17 years for me to use writing, a different kind of writing, for earning a
living while doing my creative writing on the side.
Q: You were going to a conference on public policy when
you got sick. Has that career ever come back into your life?
A: I’m totally disabled, I don’t have a career.
I can’t work outside the home. It’s one of those cases of be careful
what you look for. I used to think, since I was working full time and raising
my child and running as a competitive long-distance runner, 'Gee, I wish I
didn’t have to work, because then I’d have more time to write.' Then
I got sick and I’m unable to work, but I actually have less time than I
had before because of the ups and downs of my health. The best way of
conducting myself is to be able to write for those few hours a week when I am
capable of writing.
Q: Tell me about your latest memoir.
A: There’s a sequence of three memoirs, the first
being "In the Shadow of Memory." There’s a sequel called "A World of
Light." If "In the Shadow of Memory" is about putting myself together and at
the same time my mother is falling apart, "A World of Light" is her falling
apart, the end, and moves my consideration from instead of trying to put myself
back together (to) trying to find a way out into the world, in some fashion, as
a disabled person. The third memoir is "The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of
a Writer’s Life." It’s about the forces that I believe made me a
writer from childhood on, and about halfway through the book, at the point
where I think I’ve begun to understand the forces that made me the sort of
person who can only cope with what happens to him by writing about it, the
emphasis changes toward how the writing gives shape to the life. So it starts
out by being the forces that shape a writer and leads to talk about the way a
writer shapes his life.
Q: You lived in the woods for 13 years. Do you miss it now
that you are back in Portland?
A: It was a wonderful experience for us. I mean I’m a
boy from Brooklyn, New York, for gosh sakes. It was a wonderful experience and
exactly what I needed. We moved back three years ago. I’m now 62. It was
beginning to be a lot of work for both of us, for Beverly and for me, to
sustain our life on such remote and demanding terms. I miss the tranquility and
isolation, the quiet, but I feel like we were done out there. An interesting
thing is we live in Portland like we lived there. I don’t go anywhere,
other than an occasional grocery errand.
Q: So you haven’t had much trouble reintegrating into
society?
A: I’ve tended to keep society still at bay because I
don’t think it's good for my health, from an immunological standpoint, a
neurological standpoint, from a focus and concentration standpoint, from a
writing standpoint. It’s just not good for me to have too much going on.
Q: Were you a very involved person before the illness?
A: I had a rich social life; my life was very busy. I was
at the tail end of raising my daughter, who was 16 when I got sick. We did some
entertaining. I was very engaged as a runner. That was taking up hours every
day, training and competing. I was on various civic boards and commissions as
part of the work life that I had, so, yeah, I was pretty engaged and trying to
sustain my life as a writer amidst all that. So it is a bit of change. I feel
it suits me as a person. I am by nature I think more reclusive than I was
allowing myself to be and less interested in spreading myself as thin as I used
to spread myself. Being ill forced me to evaluate what is good for me, what is
right for me as a person and particularly as the person I’ve become.
Q: Before you were disabled, did you ever have an
appreciation of people being disabled?
A: In some senses I guess I would say I did. My father --
when I was 11 -- was critically injured in a car accident. Both of his legs
were completely shattered. He was hospitalized for the better part of a year,
and when he came home, we had physical therapists come to the house, we had
parallel bars in the bedroom. He eventually got to where he could get out of
bed and get in a wheelchair, and with a built-up shoe, finally stand. So I
witnessed that sort of a recovery when I was a boy, which culminated two years
later in his death from a sudden heart attack, ironically enough. I never
thought of my father as disabled so much as having busted legs and having to
learn to walk again, but of course he was disabled, and I guess that gave me an
early window into what you do when something like that happens. You do the work
you have to do to get back.
Q: Do you miss running?
A: Oh, yes, very much. I would do the training on these
trails throughout Portland, so I found ways to compensate for that, like living
in the woods, but this sense of myself as being integrated in this body that
worked beautifully … well, I had to relearn my relationship to my body and
accept and be comfortable with a body that didn’t work the way it did
before. I miss running; I miss the physical capacity that I always felt filled
with. I can’t really do aerobic exercise, but I try to walk 20 minutes to
40 minutes a day. Nothing aerobic, really, but I can go up hills. Beverly and I
tend to walk together every day, and it’s a really nice experience for us
to have together.
Q: Is she still painting?
A: She’s painting, she’s weaving, she’s
making baskets. She’s taught herself the violin, the piano and now the
guitar, which is quite a neurological challenge as you get older. She’s
remarkable.
Q: Sounds like she was an inspiration for you to challenge
yourself as you recovered.
A: We’re together all day every day, pretty much. We
get on very well. She was so supportive from the start. We weren’t
together when I got sick. We knew each other, but we weren’t together.
That didn’t happen until four years after I got sick. So she knew what she
was getting into.
Amy Halloran, a writer, lives in upstate New York with
her sons and husband. |
