Using fiction to tell mad stories: a journey into historical imagination and empathy

ABSTRACT In this article, the author explores larger themes of empathy, imagination, and the historian’s craft through her process of writing a novella entitled The Red Chair. This historical fiction is about the psychiatric patients at the Brockville Asylum (Brockville, Ontario, Canada), and explores the daily lives of many inmates. It emerges from her Master’s Research Project, where the author sought to center emotions as a means of knowing. Reflecting on the process, she argues for a larger presence of historical fiction in academic scholarship to engage both with the past and the historian’s craft. The author argues that the expansion of disciplinary boundaries should include fictional conventions, which might assist in telling more difficult stories, and in her case, challenge the biomedical dominance of asylum histories.