First Person Second? A Writerly Self-Reckoning Where Confessional Meets Documentary

Plots, Chance, which came out from Milkweed Editions' neurodiversity-themed Multiverse series in 2024, I reckon with loneliness-the loneliness of grief, the loneliness of the Covid-19 pandemic, the loneliness of suffering from severe OCD, the loneliness of living on the autism spectrum.I also contextualize, interrogate, and transform narratives of my life imposed by others-in psychological evaluations, lab reports, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-while grappling with the complicated history of autism spectrum diagnosis and how that larger history has affected my life.I arrived at A Window that Can Neither Open nor Close through the door of my previous book, Descent, which came out from Tarpaulin Sky Press in 2020.That project began in 2013, when I acquired a copy of the diary of my great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a captain in the Confederate army.After the Civil War, he fathered children by three women he had formerly enslaved, including my great-great-grandmother, Peggy Guerry Hubert.Over the year it took me to transcribe the 225-page diary, I became interested in its omissions and decided to write into those gaps.Drawing on an archive including records, news clippings, oral histories, and photographs as well as secondary sources, I used multiple approaches, procedures, and forms to juxtapose my twenty-first-century perspective with the imagined voices of my ancestors, ultimately arriving at a "hybrid work of verse, prose, images, and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present."The entire project, from my receipt of the copy of Hubert's diaries to Descent's publication, took seven years.In that seven-year period, the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum, and Donald Trump became president.I lived in five apartments and made two interstate moves, and when the book came out in June 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown, I was about to relocate yet again.While a series of academic appointments has kept me moving from place to place, the book itself also took me places I might not have expected to go-the living rooms of relatives I did not previously know I had, the backwoods of East Texas, the National Archives reading room, and the hill my great-greatgrandfather was charging when he was captured at Gettysburg.What I did