Chaos, Creativity, Completion: New Approaches to Writing and ADHD

Fifteen essays that offer inspiration, encouragement, and advice from accomplished writers with ADHD.

A rising number of ADHD diagnoses, particularly among adults, is not only confirmed by medical studies and mainstream reporting but also borne out across social media and elsewhere among people who’d been privately coping with persistent, often inexpressible challenges. Many of the contributors to this collection can attest to how a later-in-life diagnosis radically demystified the patterns, impulses, and impasses that had affected their lives and their writing. The essays in Chaos, Creativity, Completion reflect the ways poets, novelists, memoirists, filmmakers, and others have come to understand and engage the relationship between their ADHD and their creative tool kits.

These essays consider how writers can embrace rather than mask their neurodifference, offering multiple ways of finding writing practices that work for ADHD brains—including techniques that often look quite different from traditional writing instruction. Some essays are analytical, some are reflective, and some are delightfully weird, employing humor, research, personal narrative, deep description, close reading, and experimental approaches to genre and form. Each essay also concludes with a writing prompt, providing readers with opportunities to expand their own creative toolkits. Finally, the book includes an interview with David Kessler, a licensed therapist and nationally recognized ADHD advocate, and an appendix with a glossary of helpful terms and a list of recommended resources, from books and organizations to apps and gadgets.

Just as the experience of ADHD varies from person to person, so, too, do the ways those experiences can be expressed. Chaos, Creativity, Completion is a kaleidoscopic, adventurous series of takes on what writing looks like today.

Chloe Martinez is a poet, a translator, and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the poetry collections Ten Thousand Selves and Corner Shrine and translator of Blue Like My Beloved: Poems of Mirabai. She works at Claremont McKenna College, where she is Associate Director for Programming at the Center for Writing and Public Discourse.

Lisa Van Orman Hadley is the author of Irreversible Things, an autobiographical novel-in-stories. Her stories have most recently appeared in New England Review, The Collagist, and Epoch and have been shortlisted in Ploughshares and Glimmer Train. She lives in Salt Lake City and works as a freelance editor.

Rebecca Makkai is the author of five books of fiction and a 2002 Guggenheim Fellow. Her novel The Great Believers, one of the New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, among other honors.