Dear Imagined Agent
...plus a painted bird
Dear Imagined Agent,
Your invitation says you welcome first-person stories that offer intimate takes on unusual personal experiences, pursuits and passions. It also says you focus on fresh and underrepresented voices. I have been too fresh at times, but never too represented. “Under” is my niche.
Eighteen years ago, I was hit by a drunk with a truck which caused in me the type of brain damage former representative Gabrielle Giffords suffered when she was shot in the head. That’s why I can’t read well, and don’t remember stuff for longer than 2.3 seconds. That makes me diverse, neuro-diverse, and brain-damaged, too. A trifecta.
And perhaps not quite the client you thought you were looking for.
I am writing a book called either: We Used to Be Me, An Amnesic Memoir or Losing My Mind and Getting a New One, or I Feel Like I Was Hit by a Truck. Or something else. In my spare time, I have learned to walk, talk and build homes for birds. The book is built with salvaged words. The homes are built with salvaged wood.
Pre-truck, I was freelance writer, ghosting on the side. My life intersected (not in this order) with Big Bird, Martha, Oprah, Elmo, Time, Vogue and Rolling Stone. Plus a few icons I can’t name since that’s what contracts stipulate. Then I started painting birds.
Though the trajectory of head writer to head injured to painting birds is likely unique, the larger story is universal. We each get hit by a truck, albeit metaphorical. The disease, the diagnosis, the divorce, the death. We all lose people we love, and some of us lose the people we were. But back to my book. It is not about injury. It’s about building back.
Fyi, I was recently nominated both for 2024 Best American Essay and for the 2024 Pushcart Prize. If you are an agent, I hope you can muster one-zillionth of the faith in me that I have in you. If so, please let me send you an excerpt from the book.
Thank you.
All my best,
Judith Hannah Weiss
Thank you. Xoxo
J, you are a national treasure! You have so many people rooting for you, for your story of disaster, struggle, and recovery touch the human heart in us all. Also, your clear, supple prose is truly a thing of real beauty!