I watched both seasons of Severance as one long domino, having been too sick when it first came out to watch TV or partake in cultural discourse. There is something to the timing: released in April 2022 after the COVID vaccine was proven effective only in reducing severity, not transmission, and public discourse shifted to the past tense of pandemic. As offices began return to work in earnest and white collar workers’ lives bifurcated again into fluorescence and incandescence, inner and outerwear. There is something to the popularity of a very different kind of dystopia than we live in, one filmed intentionally out of time and unplaceable geographically, in single-breasted suits and computers with trackball mice; about testing the severance walls of memory that let us compartmentalize perfectly. In 2025, as we all reckon with our intentional or unintentional roles in upholding the systems trying to break us, the series hits differently.
Many Long COVID patients mark the Spring of 2022 as the one when the world fully left them behind, conferences and festivals and schools returned fully to in-person convenings. My own memories of that year were snapped by a virus that breaks the blood brain barrier and the immunological tsunami of repeat vaccinations, but I have seen photos of the world, alive and well, festive and colourful, and filled in the gaps with my own speculative process — the life I might have lived with the people that could not bear to watch me come unrecognizably undone through illness, who bifurcated our lives in anticipatory grief.
Recently, Adèle Barclay invited me on a AWP panel on speculative creative nonfiction and I spent weeks leading up to it thinking about the art and science and function of speculation and the creative breaking point of facts. Among other speculative hobbies, I teach speculative writing workshops for civil servants and other public policy wonks. We use design fiction artefacts – realistic official documents like signs or certificates, altered to evoke a future scenario — and walk participants through fleshing out the scenario and recommended interventions.
The intent is to expand the policy imaginary, the realm of things that feel possible to change, to think beyond the bounds of what we were told were the rules, the constraints, or the priority issues. If you ask people who don’t consider themselves writers to write fiction, they panic. So in the workshops we give them a briefing note format they have written thousands of times in their career to brief senior management, in a structure that is designed to prompt a decision or an action.
In a session for environment and climate change experts, we imagined a future in which Lake Erie and all the flora and fauna it sustains dies and heritage plaques aren’t just for buildings, but for geography or ecology. The artefact is an altered photo of a heritage plaque that starts with the line “Lake Erie was once the 11th largest freshwater lake”. Every time I teach it, I go to the lake nearest my home and say the Hebrew prayer for seeing a large body of water, as a counter-curse for imagining its sibling’s death. It feels risky to use this skillset we have as writers to speak an unwanted future into reality, even if it’s plausible, even in service of unfreezing preventative action.
On the panel, I contended that most nonfiction writing, and especially most narration, is speculative. There is very little purely declarative, factual, data-driven documentation that does not involve some speculation or inference or will not later need to be revisited based on new discoveries, or told in a different way to a different audience. The entire realm of science and medicine builds on an existing body of evidence using new, more subtle, measurement devices and theoretical frameworks and also fundamentally rewriting previously widely accepted conclusions. Even economics is a perpetual re-twisting and re-graphing of numbers.
There are not a lot of truths I hold to be self-evident, and I am haunted by the believable stories told about me, by once lovers and loved ones and medical professionals, by the unintentional half-truths I told myself when I was missing critical data on my condition. I’ve written elsewhere about my refusal to set aside my professional skills as a patient, whether as patient-researcher, or self-advocate, to let the medical system sever me from what I know to be true. In an AWP panel on navigating the holes in our memories and histories, Alexander Chee said “everything I am most sure of turns out to be what I have to fact check the most….I was so convincing to myself that I ran with the invented difference.”
I make this declaration on speculation as a speculative writer trained as a journalist and a researcher, who writes a lot of monsters and ghouls. My first book of poems was accidentally body horror because it turns out that the medical quickly veers into the horrific and that a virus can haunt you just as much as a ghost.
Speculative nonfiction has become a useful tool for understanding my own medical record, which is perpetually rewritten over with new discoveries and interpretations. It is a tool for filling in memory gaps in the dead months when I sleeping beauty’d through hell and woke closer to middle age, the months when my lover’s eyes didn’t match her mouth. In another panel, on speculative memoir, Vanessa Angelica Villareal said: “ I refuse to accept this apocalyptic present…I have two choices: disappear or remember myself into existence…. If time travel is a refusal of an unliveable present, how can we as writers return to it and repair?”
As a writer, my most voluminous output, if you were to weight it in paper or count it in words, is policy writing: think tank research reports, and briefing notes, political speeches, and other documents that seek to influence policy through information and narration or are themselves policy. I’ve been working in and alongside government for the last dozen years or so, in buildings that look not unlike the sparse severed floor, with it’s rotating art and minimal colour palette. That work exists in the long and complicated history of speculative writers in psy-ops and military foresight exercises who used their skills just as much as military-affiliated behavioural psychologists like BF Skinner, who once trained a pigeon to peck a spot 10,000x in 45 minutes to try and remote guide a missile, who have had real political influence and caused overt harm. This project is itself an exercise in un-bifurcating my professional personas and skills.
In Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, Annalee Newitz writes “Battlefield subterfuge became an office job, and it’s practitioners normalized the process of threatening people in the name of democratic freedom. At the same time, psyops were associated with fantastical ideas like brainwashing and Scientology’s engrams, which meant Americans were never sure what to believe about the mind-control powers their government really had.” In an interview on the book, they say: “Stories have always been used to consolidate community, but they can also be used to paint our adversaries as more monstrous than they are.” Information is incredibly powerful and it does not need to be true, yet, to wield it.
In government, the act of writing something down is often what makes the writing true or realized. You manifest a policy change into reality by putting into the mouths of political actors who declare it through speech acts or you draft amendments to a law that becomes real through publication or tabling in congress or parliament. Every year, government budgets are built by bureaucrats writing what they would do with hypothetical funding and the meaningful change it will make for the population or the popularity of the political party in power.
I was still in writing school when the facade broke on James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and creative writing programs started teaching the book differently. As a baby journalist, I was terrified of how easy it was to write lies that were more believable and beautiful than the truth, particularly as the sector got squeezed and you were asked to produce more stories with less resources. As a baby bureaucrat this was empowering: write a convincing enough story and it may become reality.
As an essayist with a brain that broke and reconstituted itself it has been critical to my practice, to be able to write something true, even it is not entirely real or provable, and use the act of writing to find it. I use both real and metaphoric monsters to tell the stories I need to tell and a kind of methodological and genre sluttiness and messiness, a willingness to borrow craft from anywhere I can reach. In the same speculative memoir panel, Carman Maria Machado said: “It was only when I started thinking about my life as a gothic novel that I realized I could use these tools to tell this story.” Because who are you to tell me monsters are not both real and useful stories?
The Impairing Curse is a long-form, serialized experiment in personal essay, science journalism, policy analysis, and poetry. To start at the beginning and read it in order, go to the first essay or read about the aesthetics and labour of illness, the science of salt, and the failures of public health. To support this project, share it online or subscribe. The series is intentionally not behind a paywall, to ensure broad access to patients and timely circulation of information in our evolving public health crisis, but paid subscriptions are welcome.