Elliot Gavin Keenan is an author of creative nonfiction.
My writing creates personal meaning through my idiosynctatic, deeply autistic interpretation of objectively random events. I explore the boundaries of psychology, creativity, and identity. Memories and metaphors are swept into a whirlwind of mosaic thought, moving with poetic logic from present to past to future. I want my reader to experience the world as I experience it.
Essays
Everything Else (Gravel)
In gravel magazine (no longer available)
Copy on BipolarCoaster blog
She’s a doctoral student in the psychology department. But she told me that she used to write as if seized by a certain fervor for it, for the language, for poetry. I imagined Van Gogh and his passion for painting, his insatiable hunger. I thought I wanted to kiss those lips stained with yellow paint. Yellow, the color of the edges of a street, the boundaries of a self crossed like two neurons, the actualization of a synesthetic dream. To imbibe it is to take all of that in, the passion, life thrust under your tongue. I wanted that.
Notes to Self (Lunch Ticket)
They say she loved you more than anyone else in the world. You have never considered yourself a delusional person, and so you do not believe in ghosts or guardian angels. But some people believe that the night, about two weeks after she died, the night you hemorrhaged—and almost died yourself—but, for some unknown reason, you woke up, covered in blood, red everywhere, your pillows were permanently stained—they believe that was her spirit, protecting you. They believe she protects you still.
Books
On Being Insane
After being diagnosed with Asperger’s Disorder at age seven, Elliot becomes fascinated with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the Bible of American psychiatry) and its enumeration, categorization, and systematization of innate human differences. This specialized knowledge of the DSM’s rules and codes comes in handy as Elliot struggles through multiple psychiatric hospitalizations for severe bipolar depression, but his dreams of being a clinical psychologist seem ever further out of reach until a kindly professor and autism scientist termed herein as Dr. Pinball takes notice of his abilities. This is a story of one young man’s searching: for sanity, for stability, and for the people who understand. They may be found in unlikely places. Please leave a review if you read this book!
Luminous Mind
Upcoming 2022? Looking for agent!
I’m sitting alone in a white-walled hospital room. My forearm (decorated with the greenish-yellow smudge of bruises from implanted IVs) dangles limply over the edge of the hospital bed, as if grasping there for some invisible human touch. I want to become a fossil, I think, as I observe my hands. Blood occupies the space beneath my fingernails, the idiosyncratic curvature of my fingerprints traced in crimson red. Nobody asks me about this. I should write, but I can’t. The wound is still tender and characterized by a hollow aching, like an echo.
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