Luke (host)

Welcome to In conversation with writers, the podcast where we dive into the minds of authors to uncover the stories behind their stories. I’m your host and today we’re talking about how writers engage their readers in real life issues through a range of approaches and language features, especially when writing about mental health.

Our guest today is Jennifer Wong, a talented writer whose work has appeared in many places like ABC Everyday and The Guardian. She is also the presenter of the TV series Chopsticks or Fork? and has worked on many other exciting projects. Her latest story, ‘Swimming with Dolphins’, looks at depression in a very unique way, using humour and different writing styles. We’re excited to have her with us here today.

Welcome Jennifer.

Jennifer Wong

Thank you, Luke.

Luke

Jennnifer, thanks so much for joining us. To start, can you tell us what inspired you to become a writer, especially one who writes about such interesting and sometimes serious topics?

Jennifer

I have loved words and stories ever since I was very small. I grew up with a lot of kind of health issues, I guess, I lot of asthma and eczema which meant that I had to sit still for long periods of time and so instead of running around in the sunshine or whatever, I was often sitting with a book and that’s where my love of stories came from. So, when it came to wanting to find work to do as an adult, through many different ups and downs I’ve somehow found myself in the lovely position of being able to play with words and use words as a way to make a living. So that’s how I came to start being a writer.

Luke

Wonderful. Well, let’s specifically talk about your story ‘Swimming with Dolphins’. What drew you to write about mental health, specifically depression in your work and why do you think this was an important subject to explore?

Jennifer

Well, I’ll start with the last question. I think it’s an important subject to explore because 1 in 7 Australians will experience depression. But apart from that, if you think about the person experiencing depression, around them are all their friends, their family, their colleagues. So, at some point it’s pretty likely that we’ll have either a direct or indirect experience with depression.

And I speak and write as someone with a direct experience of depression. I’ve had it for about 20 years. I first started to have it when I was in my early twenties and for a long time it wasn’t treated very well, I didn’t know how to manage it.

And then in 2018, I went to hospital for depression and before that I’d been reading a lot, as someone who loves words, about depression and one of the things I read was a book, a booklet published by Beyond Blue who are a mental health organisation, an Australian mental health organisation, who basically went through all these different things that may or may not help with depression and they road test them and they tell you, does this work you know?

Does lavender work for depression, you know, does Tai Chi work for depression and one of the curious things was, does swimming with dolphins work for depression? And alarm bells went off, because to me, that is a very funny concept already. Because as someone who, I live in Sydney and I’m probably, you know 20 to 30 minutes away from the ocean but can you imagine if swimming with dolphins was the only way of treating depression and you lived very much inland, like in Wagga Wagga or something, what do you do then?

And to me it just sounded like a hilarious concept. And when you’re writing, I guess one of the challenges that I enjoy is something is already funny, and you can just show that to someone and say, hey, look at that in the way that we’d share a meme with a friend, right? Hey, this is funny. Look at that.

Luke

Yeah.

Jennifer

But the challenges – that’s really interesting as a writer is how do you take something that’s already funny and escalate it? And that for me is the thing that is really delicious. So, what I did in the piece is I took something that was already funny and then put myself into the story and then just made it extremely ridiculous and silly.

Luke

Okay. It’s starting to all fall into place now, I understand. You kind of touched on it already, but research is really important for any writer. What kind of research – you mentioned Beyond Blue? What sort of research did you do for ‘Swimming with Dolphins’? And how did you decide what information to include in your story?

Jennifer

Yeah, that’s a really great question. So, with the study, because these are all evidence-based things within the Beyond Blue booklet, I was able to use the internet to look up the actual academic study for the swimming with dolphins’ experiment. And there I read details that weren’t included in the booklet, such as that there were 2 groups.One was a control group and so one group got to go swimming with dolphins every day and the other group didn’t get to go swimming with dolphins every day. And I think even in the Beyond Blue booklet they include the beautiful line, something like, the group that didn’t get to go swimming with dolphins, their depression didn’t improve as much.But however that might be, quote, because they were disappointed that they didn’t get to go swimming with dolphins, right?

And so, I read the study. It wasn’t very long. It gave me details about, you know, where it had taken place. I think it was maybe an island in the Caribbean or something like that. But to be very honest, even though I had that information, the small amount of information that was already included in the booklet was something that I felt was enough to give the reader a sense of the premise. And in comedy, when we talk about the premise it’s the most basic situation, the foundation of the joke that you’re going to play with in order to make the punchline pay off later. And so it was unnecessary to say which island this has happened and to say how many people necessarily were involved, etcetera, etcetera.

Using the basics was enough to, you know, use as a springboard for all the other things in the piece. There’s a couple of references to things like cognitive behaviour therapy and to the idea that depression is a biological, psychological and social kind of condition, which means that you should consider treating it from a biological, psychological and social way. And those are things I’ve read over time.

You know, I’ve had experience using CBT as treatment over the years and biopsychological thing is something that I read on the World Health Organisation website about depression and is also the way that, when I was in hospital for depression, the way they managed it. So, to kind of say, there’s a couple of things going on. Let’s look at all of them. Let’s look at what’s happening in your body. Let’s look at what’s happening in your mind and let’s have a look at what’s happening with the people around you. So that’s were that information comes from.

Luke

Really interesting that you mention there that the line about the group that missed out on swimming with dolphins, that’s actual.

Jennifer

Yeah.

Luke

Because to me that’s one of the really funny parts of the story.

Jennifer

It’s real! It’s real, Luke.

Luke

It’s a real part. So, let’s talk about humour a little bit. Your story does use humour, as you talked about there, and sort of setting up the premise. What an interesting thing to use humour about such a serious topic. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit more about that and why you’ve included different writing styles like instant messaging and different formats in your writing? It’s not common to use these for a serious topic like depression. Can you explain why you chose these elements and what you hope to achieve by doing it that way?

Jennifer

Well, I guess I chose these elements because I was in the wonderful situation where I could do exactly what I wanted. No one had asked me to write a 600-word piece for ABC news, you know, in which case it would have to be very journalistic, not first person, you know. Here I was in was in a situation where I was writing for a poetry anthology and it could have been anything. And so, what a great opportunity to be really playful with all the different ways that, every day, you and I experience the written word.

Luke

Yes.

Jennifer

You know, we, I’m speaking for myself now, I am more likely to WhatsApp my mum than I am to sit down and write in a journal or an essay. For example, I’m messaging my friends and family all the time. So, this is a way that you know, I’m assuming that everyone else is quite familiar with this format. Yes, a message to your mum, a message to your friend or whatever and I thought you know, we all have a little bit of desire to, some more than others to enjoy a little bit of gossip and so reading someone else’s messages is quite delicious.

Luke

Yes.

Jennifer

And so, I thought that would be one way to kind of gently approach this by having something very accessible and something quite familiar in order to build the reader’s trust, gain their interest, because later on I’m going to be talking about cognitive behaviour therapy. Now if I open with that, you may not want to read on, but you might want to read on if my messages with my mother involve yoga and goldfish – that might be enough to breadcrumb you gently to a place where eventually we’re going to talk about some more serious things.

Luke

So, it’s a way of engaging the reader, bringing them on the journey?

Jennifer

Yeah.

Luke

And you think that the humour sort of lowers people’s guard a little bit as well? So, you can start to get into some of those more serious topics, because look, let’s talk about it. You know mental health can be a really difficult thing to discuss. Does that help to bridge them?

Jennifer

I think so, I think so. It’s no different to when you first meet someone and you might have a little bit of small talk, you know? I think if you can show that you’re approaching something with a sense of lightness that maybe the reader will feel that there’s going to be a gentleness in the way that this going to be treated as opposed to – for example, you’re right, when we talk about depression we can instantly go to some of the heavier aspects.

You know, we can talk about you know, a sense of dread, the sense of the heaviness that one feels when one has depression. You know, a sense of hopelessness, all those kinds of things, but if I start out gently and kind of let you know that I’m holding your hand and it’s going to be funny and it’s going to be ok. I’m not going to hurt your feelings over this, I’m not going to make you uncomfortable over this. I want you to feel that you’re in good hands, but the humour thing is also just a lovely way to communicate.

I love the sense of having a sense of lightness when you communicate with someone. You know, laughing feels good, smiling with another person, sharing a joke, an in-joke. Making someone, you know, the best laughs that we have are with friends and family over in-jokes that have gone for years and years and years, right? And in the brief time you have with a reader, to have that brief moment of, you know, I’ve prepared all these things for you and I hope they entertain you and amuse you, that is a really delightful way of trying to think of how to communicate, for me anyway.

Luke

I love the analogy you made there of like, small talk and starting a conversation with someone, you know, building that bit of trust and rapport so that you can then get on to the bigger things.

Jennifer

That’s right, yeah.

Luke

It’s an interesting way to think of it. I like it. Another question then is your story blends both real elements and some fictional parts – we talked about that a minute ago. Why did you choose to include fictional elements in your non-fiction story, and how do you balance the two?

Jennifer

It’s all about escalation.

Luke

Okay.

Jennifer

So, it’s all about making the stakes higher and higher to the point of ridiculousness for hopefully maximum laughs. So, in musical terms, I guess we’d say that’s a crescendo all the way. We’re staring soft and getting quite loud by the end, where it’s just like, hold on, what?

There’s a front-page news story about a depressed Chinese woman who’s been hit by a dolphin. What, like, is that real, is that? That’s not real, you know? By the time we get to the dolphins having a conversation with each other, you know, you’re really starting to question what’s going on.

But I think when we talk about fact and fiction, for me, it’s really obvious what is fictitious in this and what is factual but what I’ve created for the reader, I’m more interested in what feels emotionally truthful. So, despite it not being real, I have a feedback form from, I think, a 55-year-old man – despite that feedback form not actually existing in real life – it is very true what he says about the fact that I didn’t have to work, I got a paid vacation, I got a bit of sunshine, bit of a tan. I feel great. This is true.

Luke

Yeah.

Jennifer

If one were to go swimming with dolphins and enjoy a free holiday and a break from their regular life, they probably would feel much better.

Luke

I love that idea that you separate out emotionally truthful from factually truthful. And that’s a really interesting concept that we get to play around with in literature a lot, and that we can represent the real, but not necessarily have to have it factual. There’s still things that are absolutely true behind the story that resonate with the reader. That’s a really interesting way to talk about it – emotionally truthful. I love it.

Can you tell us a little bit about how your work includes your personal experiences along with the broader social issues – you’ve talked about that before – but how do you balance that personal voice with the larger context of the topics you write about because you’re taking on a big thing when you take on mental health? How do you balance those things?

Jennifer

So, I guess I want to first preface by saying that people write for many, many different reasons.

Luke

Okay.

Jennifer

You can write for whatever reason, you know? When I’m writing for publication as opposed to writing in my journal, for example or writing to friends there are a few criteria that I have for what I choose to write and how I choose to write about it. I personally am not interested in sharing every private detail about myself. That is a writing style for some people.

Luke

Yes.

Jennifer

That might be how some people play on social media, for example. I don’t feel like the world needs to know my private life, however, there are personal details of mine that I’m willing to share if I feel like they do a couple of things. If they entertain the reader. If they make the reader feel less alone. If they inform the reader. And those are pretty much the 3 things – they have to entertain, inform and make the reader feel less alone. And within entertain, I guess, amuse them, make them smile, make them laugh, make them feel good.

Part of that, I think, came from working on a website called ABC Life, which later became ABC Everyday – and that is very much a style of writing, which we call service journalism, which is where, instead of just covering what happened in a day, the news, you’re trying to help the reader do something that they couldn’t do before they read the article. So that could mean, like, how do you think about recovery when it comes to mental health?

You know, one of the pieces I wrote for them was 10 things I’m slowly learning while recovering from depression, you know. And so, in that situation, I am quite happy to reveal that I have had experience with depression because my hope, when I write that piece, is that through a first-person situation, the reader will have some kind of vocabulary to talk about mental health with their friends and family. They might come across some things that worked for me that they haven’t come across before that might work for them. Or they might get the title of a book that they’ll go off and look for and read for themselves, which will, you know, educate them further, so I think it’s very much about deciding what’s going to be helpful for someone.

Luke

Yes.

Jennifer

And helpful to me can be entertain, inform, make you feel less alone.

Luke

You know, I’m thinking about it again from a literature point of view, and some of the things that you talked about there was your purpose. Your purpose helps to dictate what you include, so you talked about, inform or entertain, and that that decision about your purpose guides so much of the choice, as it sounds like from there on it, and that last little part you talked about, was your authority to be able to use your own personal anecdotes to add authority to what you’re writing about because of course, without that authority, it’s very hard to bring the reader on that journey. Really interesting. Thank you. There’s some great responses there.

I think you’ve covered this, but what do you think are the responsibilities of writers when dealing with real events, experiences and issues like mental health and how do these responsibilities influence your writing process?

Jennifer

One of the things we were told in hospital, I was there for my depression, was not to discuss medication with one another. You know, fair to talk about how you’re feeling in your body or your mind or whatever, but don’t start talking about dosages and brands and you know, what you’re taking. And I think from that, what I take from that is, because none of us are qualified doctors, right? So, it’s not for us to say, you know what your dosage should be or what you should be taking or that kind of thing?

And having had that experience, I’m really careful about what I say, because I’m not a doctor, despite what my parents would hope for, I am not a doctor, and so I deal very much within my wheelhouse, which is starting from a first-person experience. I refer to a lot of things that I’ve read. People can then go and follow, you know, to read a book by Andrew Solomon about depression, you know, he has a beautiful quote about the opposite of depression is not happiness, its vitality, you know, so people can go over if that vibes with them they can go and read more about that.

But, yeah, I think the responsibility when it comes to mental health, especially now, there are very specific guidelines that various mental health commissioners from state to state have written, when it comes to like, are you writing a movie? Does it have suicide in it for example? How do you deal with that? Why is it that in your movie? Are you dealing with that in a responsible way?

So, to answer your question very specifically, there are literal guidelines for how one might want to go about this is in a particular way. For me personally, I’m always thinking am I helping the reader to feel better by the end of the piece, so I don’t want to leave a reader in a position where they feel worse and less hopeful by the end of the piece. This is specifically about mental health, right? I think when you’re writing about things outside of mental health, you can leave the reader on any note. You can leave them on a note of wonder, or of curiosity, or of complete resolution. But for mental health, especially, I’m always really careful to say several things that I probably repeat time and time again, that you know, recovery is possible. Recovery is not linear.

Luke

Yes.

Jennifer

You know, and so you can get better. But the ups and downs aren’t a straight line, like in a graph, because we’re not robots, so I say things like that because they’re true, but also I don’t want to give a false hope that things will get better by the end of the article. That’s not my job.

Luke

It’s really interesting that you know you separate that issue of mental health out and say again, coming back to that idea of purpose, when you have that purpose to talk about that, you have then a set of decisions about how you want to finish that story or that piece because it has to do a certain thing to meet that ethical responsibility. If you take people on that journey, you’ve got to take them somewhere meaningful.

Jennifer

Yeah, like the thing that comes to mind as you say, Luke, is a lot of the times when we’re talking about writing is a really common thing that people give as advice is, write what you know.

Luke

Yes.

Jennifer

And I think for me the way that I interpret write what you know, is I write in the way that I do because I know how sad and lonely you can feel when you have depression, or how sad and lonely you can feel as a kid sitting by themselves reading when everyone else is running around the playground and so because I know that, it doesn’t mean that all I write is about loneliness and sadness. With that knowledge, I use that to make it so that the reader feels the opposite of that because I know what that feels like and I hope that in the brief amount of time I spend with them, I can break that circuit for them, if what they’re feeling is sad or blue.

Luke

Yes.

Jennifer

That they can have a moment of respite to see a little bit of light that maybe they hadn’t seen that day. You know, I’ve seen people spring to life playing random games like Celebrity Heads or whatever in hospital. A minute ago, they were slumped in their chairs not making eye contact, but then the next minute they’ve been asked to, like, charade-style communicate what it would look like if your body was a seesaw and up they spring. They were a completely different person, and I think the power of humour to do that is something that I hope very much that I can use in order to make it so someone feels better at the end of reading something I write.

Luke

You know, one of the takeaways I had when I finished reading ‘Swimming with Dolphins’ – and I think you did it really well – is you didn’t tell me what to think, but you did tell me what to think about. And I like that very much. It wasn’t a heavy-handed approach of you know you have to think this or these are the steps you take next, but these are the things to go away and consider now and I think you did that really well, it had a real lightness of touch there.

Jennifer

Thanks Luke, that’s a lovely distinction. Thank you.

Luke

That’s what I always think it a great hallmark of good writing, that it’s not, to use the word didactic, it’s not trying to tell me anything. But it is telling me things to go and think about for myself and maybe giving me some tools to go away and think more about them, so I really enjoyed that about your story.

Jennifer, it’s been wonderful having you on the show. Your insights into using humour and different writing styles to discuss serious topics like depression have been really interesting. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences with us.

To our listeners, thank you for tuning in. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to ‘In Conversation with Writers’. Leave us a review and share the podcase with your friends. You can also follow us on social media for updates on future episodes. Until next time, keep exploring the worlds of words and ideas. This is your host signing off. See you in the next episode of In Conversation with Writers when we’ll be interviewing Deborah Ellis about how she represents the real in her novel, Parvana.

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