Editorial Assistant Caitlyn Sinclair's Interview with 2025 Creative Nonfiction Contest winner Shelley Pacholok whose story "How Not to Say Good-Bye to Your Professor" was published in Issue 305 (Autumn 2025)
Caitlyn Sinclair: One of the elements that I was struck by while reading is the way that the form matches the abruptness of the injury; each numbered segment is a sudden switch from one point to the next. Can you speak more to why you chose this form?
Shelley Pacholok: Choosing numbered segments felt like the best way to convey to readers both the suddenness of the personal disaster, as well as the sensation of having a brain injury, a malady that is often invisible and difficult to understand.
Short, numbered segments are usually read in quick succession. Similarly, brain injury feels like the world is coming at you very fast—there’s a deluge of scrambled stimuli, and your cognition is significantly slowed and unable to process the onslaught.
Also, with numbered segments, there is generally no segue from one point to the next, no foreshadowing of what is to come. I wanted readers to have a sense of what it feels like, cognitively, to not know what is coming next, because brain injury very much feels that way—the symptoms are not only extremely foreign, but very unpredictable. And, in a broader sense, there is no way to know for certain to what extent you will recover, what your future life will look like, what lies ahead.
CS: The title poses an interesting contrast to the rest of the piece. The injury is sudden and there’s no chance to properly say goodbye to the professor self in that moment or later when forced to retire. Can you elaborate on the title and why you chose to frame the piece in this way?
SP: Right, there was no chance to properly say goodbye to my professor self. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I didn’t realize she had died and struggled for so long trying to revive her.
But ego, denial, stubbornness and professional pride were also in the mix. Applying principles of disaster research to this personal disaster clouded my outlook in a way that obscured the cold, hard truth—I was no longer the professor I was before the accident, that person was gone.
If I had realized this much sooner, I would have saved myself a lot of grief. Hence the title, "How Not to Say Good-Bye to Your Professor."
CS: I found the tone of this piece rather clinical, a purposeful choice considering the life-changing, emotional topic. I read this as a deliberate way of using language to show distance from or denial of the injury. What was your reasoning for the tone? Can you speak more to why and how you decided to use language in this way?
SP: The tone of ‘what to do’ disaster documents is, I think, deliberately clinical, it’s a voice that conveys authority. Disaster preparedness instructions aim to keep people calm and rational and feeling like they have some control at a scary time.
I wrote this piece for a time when I was experiencing a lot of fear and anxiety. I loathed my depleted and vulnerable brain-injured self and was trying desperately to resuscitate my professor identity. I needed some distance from that dysfunctional self and my instinct was to tell her what to do, to be an instructor, to use my disaster training, like the identity I was clinging to. And in and through that clinical voice, that instruction, I felt some power over the narrative, I felt like a professor.
I also wanted the narrator to use a clinical tone because it conveys her social science training and her disaster expertise, both of which address problems in a planned, methodical way. But brain injury is a malady that cannot be planned for and is one with a lot of variables that those afflicted have no control over. So, unfortunately, the narrator, in her zeal to perform professor, was giving brain-injured Shelley instructions that were sometimes harmful.
In the end, being a disaster expert was both counterproductive and helpful.
CS: Another thing I was struck by is the struggle against constraints and imposed limitations and how that resistance is reflected in the piece’s shift away from the numbered form at the end. Can you say more about this decision to move out of the orderly, numbered segments at the end of the piece?
SP: The change in format at the end is meant to show, through form, the narrator’s agency, pushing back against all of the new controls on her everyday life. It represents the narrator’s resistance to what felt like overly restrictive to do’s and not to do’s imposed by the rehabilitation team, caregivers and others. This pushing back was her way of moving from a bird-in-a-cage life to finding her wings again.
CS: I’m interested in the way wildfires work in this piece. You at once set up contrast and parallels between wildfires and a sudden traumatic injury. How do you see these elements working together in this piece?
SP: Climate-caused disasters, like wildfires, are very different from a traumatic brain injury in many ways and because the narrator couldn’t see that it caused her a lot of heartache. On the other hand, approaching her brain injury with a disaster lens saved her in some ways, because it gave her a sense of efficacy, agency, and control at a time when she needed it badly.
Ultimately, I think the disaster angle was a gift, because, later, when I was cognizant enough to reflect back on my research, I remembered that I had studied how disasters inevitably and forever change landscapes and lives. And I’d found, despite the chaos and trauma, loss and suffering, those changes can create possibilities for new growth. So, where once I believed that “healing” from brain injury was defined by full recovery and a return to my former life, I was able to accept that Professor-me died when her skull hit the road.
Thanks for the great questions and for the space and time to reflect on and discuss my piece! Gratitude also to the contest judge, Nicole Breit, for honouring my entry with first place, and for The Fiddlehead magazine for the opportunity to publish it.
Shelley Pacholok’s current manuscript narrates a personal journey of brain injury. Her autoethnographic writing appears in Prairie Fire and the brain-injury anthology Impact. She was longlisted for the 2024 Upstart & Crow writer’s residency and was the second-place winner in the PRISM International Creative Non-Fiction Contest.
Read "How Not to Say Good-Bye to Your Professor" by Shelley Pacholok in Issue 305 (Autumn 2025). Order the issue now:
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