Kaitrin McMullan
When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I had the good fortune, as a storyteller and dabbler in the arts, to be able to give up poorly-paid work and move into a kind of early retirement … albeit with an elderly dependent. Swapping poverty for poverty, not too hard! The rational was that we (my partner and I) would move in and care for Mum while her brain still lived at the same address as her body, in order to make the most of these precious years, much as some people decide to devote time to their children’s early years, only in reverse. Luckily Mum’s disease has progressed very slowly and in a benign way, and we now find ourselves in a four-generation “compound” with family living next door and a rainbow gate connecting the two houses.
British documentary film maker Katinka Blackford Newman’s 2016 book, 
I nearly give up. Twice. The first time I am sitting by the window at home, hand over my ear which still has a strange thudding lack of unlocated feeling that the doctor couldn’t find with her little hammer light thing and I can’t find the words for. Dull? Numb? Dumb. I feel so dumb. Stupid, stupid me.
Hauntology is a concept coined by philospher Jacques Derrida, in his 1993 book Specters of Marx, to describe the way that we all construct the world differently, out of what most haunts each of us from the past.
Atlas is a literary medical journal, published in print and sold in bookstores around New Zealand, that offers an alternative to the usual scientific discourse that surrounds our bodies. It hopes to shift medical conversations away from the rigid and prescriptive to a literary form that accommodates our human complexities.
