165: A Psychiatric Hospital Nearly Ruined My Life

Allison Langer  0:15  
I'm Allison Langer.

Andrea Askowitz  0:17  
I'm Andrea Askowitz, and this is Writing Class Radio. You'll hear true personal stories and learn how to write your own stories. Together, we produce this podcast, which is equal parts heart and artists. By heart we mean the truth in a story. By art, we mean the craft of writing, no matter what's going on in our lives, writing classes where we tell the truth. It's where we work out our shift. That's happening like there's no place in the world like writing class, and we want to bring you in. Today on our show, we bring you a story by Banning Lyon. Banning Lyon is the author of the Chair and the Valley, which will be available June 2024. On the open field, which is an imprint of Penguin Random House. His writing has been featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post. He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and works as a backpacking guide and Yosemite National Park. This episode is about so many things. But I want to say it's really about how to write a near perfect essay. The essay you're about to hear was originally published in The Washington Post.

Allison Langer  1:27  
Also, on this podcast, you're going to be able to hear an interview with Banning Lyon about his process, the good the bad, everything and how he ended up landing an agent. So really good stuff, so stay tuned to the end. Back with banning story after the break. 

We're back. This is Alison Langer, and you're listening to writing class radio. Up next is Banning Lyon reading his story "When I was 15, a psychiatric hospital nearly ruined my life."

Banning Lyon  2:06  
I've worked as a backpacking guide yes to many national park and Point Reyes National Seashore for over a decade. On an average workday, I'll patch a client's blister feet in the rain. She way bears and make daiquiris for folks using rum Kool Aid and snow. But the truth is that I've spent most of my adult life avoiding people because before I became a guide, I've been a victim of one of the largest mental health care fraud scams in the history of the United States. When I was 15, and 1987, my school counselor called My estranged parents and told them I was suicidal after I'd given away my skateboard. She said it was a call for help. I told him it wasn't true. I bought another board. I said, my friend broke his I gave him mine. I wanted a different one. It didn't matter. The next day, they signed me into a psychiatric hospital owned by a company that would eventually plead guilty to paying kickbacks and bribes for patient referrals, leading to the largest settlement ever between the federal government and a health care provider at the time. I spent 11 months sitting in a chair facing the pastel colored wall of my room, sometimes for up to 12 hours a day. The staff called a chair therapy. They said I was supposed to think about my problems. Most days I was forced to eat alone in my room. With the tray of food resting on my lap and I started the wall I wasn't allowed to go outside, touch anyone or speak privately with my parents or other patients. I eventually grew so sensory deprived, I could smell rain or sweat on the incoming staffs clothing, even from a distance. By the time I left the hospital, I was the scattered wreckage of a teenager. The chaos and noise of the world filled me with a superheated rage. I spent most of high school fantasizing about probably hanging my soul from the rafters of the gym. But the one thing that brought me genuine happiness that quieted my flashbacks and intrusive thoughts was being outside after nearly a year of living in the equivalent of solitary confinement. Even the sight of a few finches splashing in a rainy puddle brought tears to my eyes. Every detail of the natural world seems surreal. Now, before I began working as a guide, I had long believed that other people were better or more normal than me. Only a handful of my friends knew details of my past that I'd watched the hospital staff strapped kids to beds, sometimes for weeks and months at a time. One of my closest friends from the unit had been tied to his bed with leather Posey restraints for nearly a year. angry red bed sores surrounded his wrists and ankles when he was finally released. He needed physical rehabilitation before you could walk again. It wasn't until I began spending days in the back country with clients that I realized I wasn't different from them. They weren't better or more normal than me. They were alcoholics or cutters or parents who had alienated their kids. They'd lost siblings and spouses to cancer and suicide. Once early in my first season, a freckled woman from Boston with the accent to prove it broke down in tears while we are carrying water back to camp. My dad died last year she said, you won't be there to walk me down the aisle. He'll never be a grandfather to my kids. Her partner was on the trip with her. He had proposed the day before, at the foot of Yosemite is bridal veil fall, hours before meeting us. I stood there dumbfounded, listening to her grieve the loss of her father. She was sitting on a log in front of an enormous ponderosa pine. Its graceful branches hovering over her, as if her father were trying to comfort her again. I knew at that moment that I had found my place in the world, and that I needed to come to terms with my past. But I never would have found the courage without the serenity of nature and the help of my clients. Week after week, trip after trip, we explored different portions of the park, always coming to rest in some beautiful campsite at the foot of when he was somebody's towering granite peaks. Together, we build a fire and then cook dinner and talk about our lives. Slowly. Over those first few weeks, I began sharing portions of my past only to discover that no one thought any differently of me. They didn't scream and run away. They didn't stare at me in silence. Instead, they hugged me and wept with me. Some of them even understood what it was like to witness abuse and suffering, and to be helpless to stop it. By the end of that first season, it wasn't only nature that seemed surreal, but also the kindness of people. Today, after guiding hundreds of clients, I'm still wounded. I've learned there is no finish line for healing. But my wounds have meaning now. And for that, and for the people who have made it possible. I will be forever grateful. years ago, just weeks after I'd been hired, my boss invited me to go on a backpacking trip with her and two of her closest friends. Think of it as your orientation, she said, tossing her pack on her back at the trailhead. It turns out one of the men on the trip was her mentor, a seven year old retired biology teacher who looked like a gold miner who had gotten lost in the mountains. On the last morning of our trip, or we are sitting by a small lake in the shade of some older trees. I asked him for a bit of guiding wisdom.

What he gave me was hope. Just keep all your folks on the trail he said they'll show you the way

Andrea Askowitz  8:11  
Can I Start? I want to start There's so much I want to say about this essay and hearing it right now. Like I'm I have tears like I'm so moved. The read was so gorgeous. The whole story is so hopeful, even though fucking shit what he went through. And there's these two moments that, that I noticed this time that we're like all about hope. I'm going backwards. But it's the last two lines. So he lands the story so perfectly. What he gave me was hope this was the advice that he got from the older man. Just keep all your folks on the trail. He said they'll show you the way. And then the other part where he was talking, if it's just three paragraphs up, where he's talking about how he wants, he started sharing what happened to him. How other people were just, they didn't scream, they didn't run away. And it wasn't only nature, that seems surreal, but also the kindness of people. I mean, this narrator has every reason to fucking hate humanity. But he doesn't. And this story just shows us why

Allison Langer  9:30  
I feel like it really says a says a lot about him. What will we talk about when we receive stories and when we talk about stories on the podcast is mostly about how much we learn about a narrator. And in this story, we really get an A sense of who this guy is as far as his strength, his mindset. We really don't hear many details about what it was like for him in that place. Just a very few couple of details. And that's not what we need. Because that was many years ago. We're really interested in how it's impacted him now. And this narrator does that really, really well.

Andrea Askowitz  10:10  
I mean, I am interested in what it was like for him at that at that hospital. And I am interested in, in his backstory, and he did write a whole memoir. Oh, yeah. So yay, because I can't wait to read it. But for this essay, you're right. He didn't need to go into all the details about that, that nearly a year that he spent there, he gave us just enough. Sometimes I like it before, like what was life like before. And this narrator gave us really one word or two words to show us the before. And that was my school counselor called My Estranged Parents. So we know that his his parents are estranged. That's all we know. But I so believed him based on what then happened. They believe this counselor, his parents, and they took him to a psychiatric hospital that nearly ruined his life. Now I'm seeing the title in a new way. When I was 15, a psychiatric hospital nearly ruined my life. This advice saved me. And I, I love the title now because of that word nearly. Because it could have so destroyed him. But it didn't

Allison Langer  11:31  
100% The other thing I really love and we talk about this, too, is even if this situation didn't happen to us specifically, we've all been in a place where our past something in our past kind of haunts us? And how do we keep going. And this narrator really draws that home and his writing in a very succinct way, mostly about first of all, sharing his information and realizing that people were drawn to him. And also that his friends, you know, if you can keep people close, they will guide you. And we as people sometimes shut people out when we're hurting or in pain. And I've realized that I know you have that the more vulnerable I have been, the more people have drawn to me. And I see that in his story. So I completely relate it a lot. And I loved it because of that.

Andrea Askowitz  12:26  
Yeah, I know. I agree. I don't

Allison Langer  12:30  
think this guy was a writer going in was here. He's been writing for years.

Andrea Askowitz  12:36  
No, this is his first project. This book, I think that he learned to write so that he could write the story about what happened to him. And we're gonna get him on the line, which I'm so excited about because he is the loveliest man. And I spoke to him very briefly, and I can't wait to ask him some questions for our radio listeners. But yeah, he'd learned to write so that he could write this story. But there's a few other things about this essay that I wanted to mention. I mean, his details, I think his details are spot on the part where he's talking about how sensory deprived he was that he could smell rain on someone, just like the specifics of that, or sweat on an incoming staffs clothing, God, another place where his details just like really struck me where a few finches splashing in a rainy puddle. Okay, so he's amazing with details. He also, this is something that I just noticed. He knows trauma and post traumatic stress disorder, but he did not use those tired words. And I don't mean to diss anybody who's been through a traumatic event, because, you know, so many personal essays are made of like, are made, because that people are making art out of their bad situations. But God, how many of the submissions that we read, where people use words like trauma and PTSD, like they just throw them out? And they've come to kind of lose meaning for me, but banning Lyon talked about? I can't remember how he put it. Oh, he did outdoors quieted his flashbacks and intrusive thoughts. I just thought that was so well said. Basically, we understand. He just said it exactly the way a person would tell another person who isn't steeped in lingo and jargon. And I really appreciated that.

Allison Langer  14:44  
And in one paragraph, he's fantasizing about hanging himself in the rafters to the amazement of the finches in the puddle and then realizing, you know, like he thought that other people were better than him or more normal and you know, That's, that's pretty cool how in just a very succinct short paragraph we learn where this narrator's mindset was that for so long, this narrator was thinking he was not normal, and that he was the only one who had suffered. And then one by one, he starts hearing about other people. And it wasn't a comparative thing like sometimes people do. Because there really is no comparison, when you're talking about trauma, what's trauma for one person in any sort of shape, or form, it's trauma for another person in another shape or form. So I just thought that was it was really interesting that he didn't, he didn't compare. But he's just saying that once he realized that, he started to feel like he was normal, and he fit in to the world. So I thought that was really cool.

Andrea Askowitz  15:39  
One other thing that I loved, love, love so much about this essay. And that is like an essay needs to bring in evidence to prove a point. And so this narrator is telling us that he realized he wasn't different from anyone else, or from the other people that were around him. And then here's this scene. So here's the evidence that proves what he's saying. He's listening to this woman talk about her father who died, and he wasn't going to be able to walk her down the aisle. I stood there dumbfounded, listening to her grieve the loss of her father, she was sitting on a log in front of enormous ponderosa pine, its graceful branches hovering over her as if her father were trying to comfort her again. I'm like, I got chills. There's the evidence. There's this moment. It's a scene. It's, it's gorgeous. It's everything a personal essay needs to be. And now I'm distracted, because the beautiful Banning Lyon is sitting in front of us on our zoom.

Banning Lyon, thank you so much for joining us. First thing I want to ask you, I mean, I'm overwhelmed with wanting to ask you like 20 questions at once. But what I first want to ask you is about the so we know that you wrote a full memoir, actually, even before you wrote this essay. So will you talk for like a minute or two about the process of writing that memoir,

Banning Lyon  17:20  
I could talk for hours about the process of writing a memoir.

Andrea Askowitz  17:23  
That's why I said minute or two.

Banning Lyon  17:26  
When I began writing my book, I was about 45-46. I had a book deal and a movie deal shortly after the lawsuit that I was involved in, after the hospital. But I turned it down. I didn't want to be famous for being a psychiatric patient. And so it just wasn't anything I was interested in. But I had an event take place, I became a backpacking guide, and Yosemite National Park, I still backpack and guide. They're an outdoor educator in the Bay Area, I also teach outdoor skills. And that was sort of my way to reconnect to people. Because I grew up in the outdoors, it's always been my happy place. And I was disconnected from the hospital. So I had an event take place on a class. And I can't discuss the details of that, because it really is sort of crucial to my story. But when I had that event take place, I knew that I was sort of, I had a moral obligation to write a book, in many ways. And I think a lot of what powered my writing was survivor guilt, because a lot of my friends from the hospital are dead. And I felt sort of compelled to do what I could with the rest of my life, because I feel like the rest of my life is very much a gift compared to theirs.

Andrea Askowitz  18:37  
So 30 years later, you started to write your book 30 years later, yeah,

Banning Lyon  18:42  
I've always been kind of a writer, I dabbled with it and mess with it. But I didn't really learn the actual trade or craft of writing until I took this book very seriously. So much so that I took a year off from writing the book and actually to basically put myself through a kind of a college level, style and grammar course in order to understand to like, embrace my voice, because my voice isn't what I wanted it to be. I wanted to be a very certain type of writer and then discovered my voice wanted me to very be a very different kind of writer. And so I had to learn to embrace that voice, which I came to love, and I'm very good at, but it wasn't initially how I wanted to sound.

Andrea Askowitz  19:19  
How would you describe how you wanted to sound and how do you how would you describe how you do sound?

Banning Lyon  19:23  
I wanted to be very sort of writerly when I first started wanting to write I wanted to embellish everything and really get into details and and I think there's a time and a place for that and writing but I found out that actually write very economically I write like, basically like a journalist and that I think in many ways lended itself to my story because a it's very long and I needed to keep it brief.

Andrea Askowitz  19:48  
I just want to interrupt for a second to say to anyone listening. Sometimes it's really important to get out of our own writerly Minds, Like Writer Lee in quotes and just tell the story And I think that you are a great example of someone who had learned to do that. I know it based on your essay, your essay is just a great, well told, not pretentious, not Writer Lee, perfectly told story. So how long did it take you to write the full memoir and tell me a little bit about like, you told me this the other day on the phone, but like, what was your process like what you put yourself through?

Banning Lyon  20:24  
Yeah, writing my memoir took me in total, a good six years. And it included probably three full rewrites, my initial first draft was entirely too long. And so I cut my manuscript nearly in half, by the time I'd finished. And I'm not one of those writers who just for the sake of writing is going to write every day. But if I have a project I write every day period, no exceptions seven days a week. And when I was writing my book, I wrote often, no fewer than 10 hours a day, and probably as many is 16. And I often did not eat, I wouldn't take breaks, I wouldn't stand up for hours and hours and hours at a time, which to me is totally normal. Because when I lived in the hospital, that was my life. And so it's a familiar place for me to just sort of go into my head and live there for many hours and not eat or drink or do anything and then sort of come to it.

Andrea Askowitz  21:25  
Was it comforting when you were writing your book? Or was it a sort of a form of self torture?

Banning Lyon  21:29  
Both, I think in many ways, revisiting my past was both horrifically traumatizing, and comforting, because there are people from my past who are no longer here, who I could only really spend time with in the book. And so my book, in many ways is a love story is like a love letter to those people. And I won't say it was like masochistic. But it many times, I felt as if I was doing harm to myself by writing because it was so incredibly painful. I'd spend hours crying while I was writing, knowing that it was really good writing, but I just simply couldn't stop because I was in the right place. Emotionally, in order to get into what I needed to get into in order to get the words on paper. It was a very, very, very brutal process that took me many years. And I often wonder, sometimes looking back now, if I had known what this entire journey to publishing would be like, you know, would I have done it? And I would, ultimately, I know that in my heart of hearts, because it's also been very cathartic and therapeutic for me to have undergone this process. But I think ultimately, it's been a net gain. And goodness,

Andrea Askowitz  22:44  
when you were finished with the chair in the valley, what did you do? How did you get your agent because I know that you got your agent and your publisher in a very unusual and your testament to the brilliance of your writing, you got an agent, that way,

Banning Lyon  22:58  
you have very few shots to get your memoir in front of an agent, you basically can do it once. And then when you're turned away, you don't have another chance to really top your book to that agent or agency. And so have really good high quality agents, you have maybe 100 to 200 in the United States, or in the world, it really essentially. And so I knew my book had to be very, very, very good. And so I worked on really tightening up, I worked on writing a really tight query letter, which a good friend of mine, who's also a writer helped me with, I wrote ultimately about 4040 query letters. And I got, I think, out of those maybe eight full requests, which is about par for the course, I think for most writers, the few rejections I got were very kind. They were often like, we're not the right agency for you, or I'm not the right agent, I think you'll find a home for it. So from the very beginning, really my top pick, was an agent named Nick Thompson. I just sort of had this gut feeling that I Meg and I would resonate. I'm not sure why exactly. And then I read an interview with her and Curtis, they asked her what's your least favorite genre to get queried, and she said memoir? And she said, because it's often just derivative or some story that's being retold and that she really loves memoirs, but they're just good ones are so rare. And so I don't know what inspired me. In those words. I was like, That's aged like that. I just knew and so I queried mag. And I've basically written her off because as most writers who are acquiring understand now silence really is the common rejection. Getting a rejection letter is actually kind of a rare treat. But one

Andrea Askowitz  24:35  
thing that you told me is that you queried Meg Thompson, cold, you didn't know anyone that knew her. And the game lately is you really need to say so and so suggested I query you, but you didn't have that you didn't have a step into the door.

Banning Lyon  24:52  
I had no sort of referral at all. I called curator and I did that really for every agent except one. And so I didn't hear about back from her for nearly three months through what's called query manager. And then one day, I heard back from egg and she said, I read your query with interest. I'd like to read the full manuscript that's like, wow, that's cool. By then I gotten, you know, I think, like I said, about seven full manuscript requests. So I was like, Don't get too excited. You know, it'll probably just be a rejection, but still, you know, and so I sent her the full manuscript and kind of put it out of my mind. Two weeks passed, and then I heard back, I sent her a proposal says, like, Okay, I'll just sit here, twiddling my thumbs. And so, two, three weeks passed. And I just was like, Okay, I guess she didn't like my proposal. And I was a little heartbroken because Meg was my number one pick. And then one day, I was actually in kind of a sour mood. I was really sad and kind of mulling over this defeat that I had been looking so forward to. I was very deflated that day. I came home and I was cutting watermelon for my daughter. And my email alert went off. And I just grabbed my phone just offhandedly and looked at it, and it said offer representation from Thomson literary agency, you know, I broke down into tears. I mean, I sat on the floor and just started crying. It was a huge, huge moment for me.

Andrea Askowitz  26:10  
But the way that you did it was seriously like 0.1% of anybody who gets an agent gets an agent out of the slush pile. And so it is so amazing and fantastic.

Banning Lyon  26:25  
Yeah, as most writers know, it's like winning the Powerball lottery, it was really a huge, huge, huge, huge thing for me. But then, you know, then you have to publisher and so that was a whole nother part of the journey. So

Andrea Askowitz  26:37  
tell us just quickly who your publisher is. And what's the release date.

Banning Lyon  26:41  
I'm being published on an imprint called the open field, which is Maria Shriver has personally curated imprint on Penguin Random House. And my book is slated to be released in June of 24.

Andrea Askowitz  26:54  
One last thing I want to say is that most writers, they try to get the attention of an agent through a splashy story, like the one that we just heard in the Washington Post. But you got the agent and then you wrote this story in the Washington Post. So your story just stand on its own. Your story is beyond beautiful and tragic. And you bring meaning to it in a way. That's amazing.

Banning Lyon  27:15  
Thank you. So it was quite easy to write. It only took me like 45 minutes to write the essay. By then I was very practiced writer.

Andrea Askowitz  27:23  
Don't tell us bad bad.

Banning Lyon  27:26  
So let me elaborate quickly because while the essay took me 45 minutes to write the last paragraph took me two days to tweak. So the day I got it, I was like, Okay, this is done. I just knew it.

Andrea Askowitz  27:37  
Well, it really took six years of writing the book and a lifetime of experience. And then 45 minutes plus two days, so well, on petting lion.

Allison Langer  27:50  
I think for us, like just being able to share your words with our listeners is so amazing. So thank you so much for taking the time and doing that with us. Really?

Banning Lyon  27:59  
You're all very well. Yeah, thank you.

Andrea Askowitz  28:01  
It's goofy to say you're an inspiration, but I'm inspired.

Banning Lyon  28:05  
Thanks for your interest means a lot to me.

Allison Langer  28:07  
So thank you for listening and thank you Banning for sharing your story with us. Writing class radio is hosted by me, Alison Langer. And Andrea asked what's audio production is by Matt Cundill Evans Surminski, Chloe Emond-Lane and Aidan Glassey at the Sound Off Media Company. Theme music is by Justina Shandler. There's more writing class on our website including stories we studied editing resources, video classes, writing retreats, and live online classes. Join our writing community by following us on Patreon. You want to write every week with us you can join our first draft weekly writers group, you have the option to join me on Tuesdays 12 to 1 Eastern Time and or Thursdays with Eduardo wink 8 to 9pm Eastern time. Your right to prompt and share what you wrote. If you're a business owner, community activist group that needs healing entrepreneur and you want to help your whole team write better check out all the classes we offer on our website, writing class radio.com. Join the community that comes together for instruction and excuse to write and the support from other writers. To learn more, go to patreon.com/writing class radio for sign up first draft on our website. A new episode will drop every other Wednesday.

Andrea Askowitz  29:32  
There was no better way to understand ourselves and each other than by writing and sharing our stories. Everyone has a story. What's yours?

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  29:45  
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