Donna Birdwell

When a reviewer recently described my latest novel as "visceral," I think they nailed it. My imagination is exactly that--a whole-body experiential feeling. I've always had a sketchy memory. Details of events and experiences fade quickly, but the feeling it produced lingers. I'm not talking about emotions. Emotions are a different quality of feeling. When I was in grad school, a friend and I were experimenting with ESP (okay, and mushrooms) and she was looking at cards, trying to communicate the figure depicted on a card to me. I apologized, indicating that I was seeing nothing. And then she noticed that I was moving my hands in patterns that replicated the images on the cards. So...what do you think all this has to do with aphantasia?