Writing Mental Illness | Alison Bergblom Johnson

We're Moving!!!

2010-02-08T22:56:00.003-06:00

Moving, moving, moving to my main site. See you there.

Please note Writing Mental Illness has moved. Please visit us at our new home.

For more info on Writing Mental Illness the course please visit my class page.

Please signup for my email newsletter.

Staying with the Difficult

2010-02-05T12:32:00.000-06:00

At a reading by Thomas Larson, author of The Memoir and the Memoirist, this Fall in Minneapolis I asked a question about Lucy Grealy's book Autobiography of a Face. Larson said he thought Grealy had failed in an important way at the end of Autobiography of a Face in that she backed away from the struggle she experienced and delivered an happily-ever-after ending.

The novelist Ann Patchett, who went to college and graduate school with Lucy Grealy wrote a memoir about their friendship entitled Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. In Truth and Beauty, Patchett does not make the same mistake as Grealy. She ends the memoir at the saddest point of the book, in great grief.

Patchett reminds me that it's not necessary to gloss over the difficult in the end of a memoir. Patchett is no less a subject in her own memoir for being honest about the emotional pain she feels.

The Reader

2010-02-02T14:29:00.001-06:00

"This text is a pure pleasure to read as it confounds our understanding of autobiography, revealing the fundamental dependency of the one who might narrate his or her own life on the 'you' to whom he or she turns in order to become a narratable subject." - Judith Butler on Relating Narratives: Storytelling and selfhood by Adriana Cavarero

Butler is talking about the importance of the reader to the one who tells their story. Cavarero has a beautiful story in Relating Narratives on this premise; Emilia and Amalia are friends in an adult education course.

Amalia writes her own story, Emilia reads it and weeps. Emilia doesn't have the "gift of being able to express things well," and tells her story constantly but with no catharsis. Amalia says Emilia "needed to tell about her life...but she wasn't able to connect any of it up, and so she let herself go."

Ultimately Amalia writes Emilia's story and Emilia carries it everywhere with her. Cavarero says that "There is the weeping in the listening/reading of a story, and there is the same emotion in the recognition of one's own life-story narrated by another."

Let's discuss: Who are you writing for? Who is your audience? Are you more like Amalia or Emilia?

How to Suppress Any Writing

2010-01-29T11:54:00.001-06:00

"She didn't write it. But if it's clear she did the deed... She wrote it, but she shouldn't have. (It's political, sexual, masculine, feminist.) She wrote it but look what she wrote about. (The bedroom, the kitchen, her family. Other women.) She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it. ("Jane Eyre. Poor dear, that's all she ever...") She wrote it, but she isn't really an artist and it isn't really art. (It's a thriller, a romance, a children's book. It's sci fi!) She wrote it, but she had help. (Robert Browning. Branwell Bronte. Her own "masculine side.") She wrote it, but she's an anomaly. (Woolf. With Leonard's help...) She wrote it BUT..." - Joanna Russ

I'm going to let this quote stand mostly on its own but wanted to say I think all of these intellectual contortions apply to writing and art by people with disabilities.

Enter the contest to win free feedback on your writing.

5 Strategies to Begin to Write about Mental Illness

2010-01-28T10:55:00.001-06:00

I've expanded my thoughts about how to begin writing about mental illness into a $20 download. The download includes audio of me talking about ways to begin writing about mental illness and a pdf workbook to tie it together. This is a great resource if you're at the beginning stages of writing about mental illness or wish to brush up on the basics.

Imagining Your Reader

2010-01-27T11:48:00.001-06:00

Critique Giveaway

I'm giving away a free critique to a reader who comments on Monday's post.

On to Imagining Your Reader

The late, great Carol Bly wrote in Beyond the Writers' Workshop that one needed to write for an audience of 100,000. Not one million, but one hundred thousand. This is still a large number, but less overwhelming than writing for everyone and their sister.

Still it's helpful to imagine this audience of one hundred thousand into one. Think about this one person who is standing in for the rest of your audience. What are they like? Why have they picked up your writing? What attracts them about it? What about this person leaves you proud that they are your reader? What does your reader look like? What other books has your reader read later?

What do you think now that you've imagined your reader? How does writing feel more concrete?

Comforting Who?

2010-01-25T21:39:00.001-06:00

Win a Free Manuscript Consult!

Last week I gave away a free copy of The Bell Jar. This week I'm giving away a free manuscript consultation. Here are the rules.

I'll look at up to 25 pages of your writing.
I'll provide a written critique and a half hour conversation about your work via computer-to-computer Skype.
This will be a contest rather than a random giveaway.
Criteria entries will be judged on are:
- Does the work relate to writing about mental illness in some way?
- Is this writer someone I think I can be of assistance to? Remember I'm primarily a creative nonfiction writer.
To enter please leave a comment on this post stating why you would like a critique and why you think I may be helpful to you.
Please also leave your email address in your comment. Your address may be disguised like this jane.doe(at)company.(com) or in some other similar manner.
I will announce the winner next Monday February 1, 2010 at noon central time.

On to Comforting Who?

I've been thinking about this well-known quote:

It's the job of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

and thinking that many writers focus on afflicting the comfortable at the expense of work that comforts the afflicted. So, I'm a believer in figuring out how to write work that comforts the afflicted.

But then I went looking for the origins of the quotations and found out the context is very different than the comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable imperative our culture has taken it as.

Here's the original written by Finley Peter Dunne in context:

"Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th'ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward."

In context this quote does not place a sacred charge in writer's hands to go comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. In fact it seems to be implying something quite the opposite. Dr. Ink on Poynter Online seems to agree with this, saying:

In Doc's immodest opinion, journalists should never use the phrase again to justify their actions, unless they want old Mr. Dooley to roll over in his grave.

Please consider joining the Writing Mental Illness Facebook group or signing up for the newsletter. You may also follow me on Twitter. Also, I would be honored if you would be willing to fill out a survey about this blog.

Genius and History

2010-01-22T08:34:00.001-06:00

The Bell Jar giveaway goes until Monday January 25, 2010. To enter please leave a comment on the post Shaping the Mental Illness Story.

“[A] ny fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.” - Oscar Wilde

Please consider joining the Writing Mental Illness Facebook group or signing up for the newsletter. You may also follow me on Twitter. The course Writing Mental Illness is out; please consider learning more about it. Also, I would be honored if you would be willing to fill out a survey about this blog.

Daily Actions

2010-01-20T12:51:00.001-06:00

The Bell Jar giveaway goes until Monday January 25, 2010. To enter please leave a comment on the post Shaping the Mental Illness Story.

Julia Cameron recommends writing morning pages every day. Twyla Tharp recommends a daily ritual that signals it's time for the work to begin: for her it's flagging a cab. Natalie Goldberg recommends daily writing practice.

There's something to all this. I think we all need a daily practice that tells us it's time to work. A way of reassuring the creative self that we're taking the work seriously.

Personally I think this daily action should be as relaxed as possible. You find something that works and then you do it every day.

There's no point in worrying that your daily action isn't Julia Cameron's or Twyla Tharp's or Natalie Goldberg's. The point is that you need a daily action not that your daily action must be like someone else's.

Mine is leaving the apartment. I don't do creative work at home. I work in a variety of public places, but not at home. When I'm doing a residency I do ballet barre exercises to warm up. I like to remind myself that what we write is grounded in the physical and so m warmup is physical. You might reread an Emily Dickinson poem and then begin.

This is all to say that daily practice is as individual as one's height or the shape of one's nose. Yes, there are clues in our daily practice to our creative lineage. Who do you emulate? Who do you react against?

My barre exercises suggest I once danced, which I did. The fact that leaving the house is my daily action suggests I'm more closely aligned with Tharp than with Cameron or Goldberg. This is perhaps true.

So please let me know what your daily action is and why in the comments.

Shaping the Mental Illness Story

2010-01-18T18:16:00.005-06:00

Update:

I've selected a winner at random and she is Sharon C. Congratulations. Thank you to everyone who entered. I'll be announcing a chance for a writer to win one free critique on the blog later this afternoon. I'll link to that announcement from here as well.

Exciting Announcement: I'm giving away a copy of The Bell Jar to someone who comments on this post. I'll pick a random winner on Monday, January 25th 2010, at 6:00 PM central time. I'll mail The Bell Jar, which happens to be my favorite book mental illness features in, first class USPS to the winner. Please note: therefore only people in the US can win the book.

In previous posts I've written about how to begin to write about mental illness (part II here) and how to continue to write about mental illness. Those posts addressed how to go about the work of generating material. Today we're going to discuss shaping the work.

Also important here is what the late Carol Bly called The Long Middle Stage of writing. It is important to stay with the questions of the work while being open to the possibility that the central question of the work is not what you first thought it was.

Also important to shaping a short piece about mental illness is knowing whether all the pieces are present and accounted for.

Is there a beginning, middle and end?
Is there a story, an idea and something universal?
Did you include both facts and feeling?
Are the right people in the story?
Does everyone in the story have a reason for being there?
Is there anyone who is very important but does not appear?
In addition to the triggering subject is there a real subject?

Are these choices intentional? Do they work? I'll write more in a future post about how to know if your choices work, but for now rely on careful reading of your piece and your gut.

Nothing Can Equal ...

2010-01-15T13:31:00.002-06:00

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses. - Hannah Arendt

Usually when I post a quote I let it stand alone. However today I have decided to venture forth with some thoughts. I think this quote is related to Magritte's painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe" or in English "This is not a pipe."

Which is of course true: it is a painting, not a pipe. On the other hand as writers I believe we are trying to recreate the sensory world and create a world that is believable. Still, what we write is in Magritte's vocabulary "not a pipe." So while it is impossible to recreate what we "hear or touch" still we try over and over and over. I feel that it is within this context of failure that one creates literature.

Please consider joining the Writing Mental Illness Facebook group or signing up for the newsletter. The course Writing Mental Illness is out; please consider learning more about it.

Why Become an "Athlete of God?"

2010-01-13T16:58:00.003-06:00

In December I posted something the modern dance pioneer Martha Graham said about how one becomes an "athlete of God" through practice. This quote is excerpted from a longer piece NPR reran as part of their This I Believe series where Graham expands on this phrase.

An Interpretation of "An Athlete of God"

In the longer essay Graham says "It takes about 10 years to make a mature dancer." She talks about strengthening the body, but also the soul. She says: "Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it."

So there are two elements the dancer is building in these ten years, the body, the physical, the external and the soul. As writers our external elements are the physical ability to do the work and the intellectual muscle of knowing the craft. By physical ability I'm mostly referring to the ability to keep one's butt in one's chair and write.

This is harder than one thinks. The fact that keeping one's butt in one's chair is hard is why being an "athlete of God" is a sacred task. (See this post by Isabel Mori about writing as sacred practice.)

Graham defines practice by saying "it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit."

These "dedicated precise set of acts" are what we do every day with our butt in the chair time. Next week I'll write about what "dedicated precise set of acts" I do.

Please consider joining the Writing Mental Illness Facebook group or signing up for the newsletter. The course Writing Mental Illness is out; please consider learning more about it.

Ways to Continue Writing about Mental Illness

2010-01-11T15:28:00.001-06:00

I've written previously about Ways to Begin Writing about Mental Illness.

I wanted to talk today about ways to continue writing about mental illness.

A Regular Schedule. It might be a set word count or a set number of images every day or every other day. I'm not a complete fanatic about writing every day, but I think writing to a regular schedule and knowing what you'll write when is key.
A Creative Practice. This might be something similar to Julia Cameron's Morning Pages or it might be something unique to you. I'll have a post later this week about the barre exercises I do.
A Community. Finding people who understand your writing goals and are supportive is key. In the comments, I'd love to hear how you've found your community.
Good Treatment. Another key to being able to write well about mental illness is taking good care of yourself. For many this means a therapist or a psychiatrist or both.

These are just the first off the top of my head practices important to being able to continue to write about mental illness, but they are a good start.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this list, and any additions you might have. Also, I would love to hear how you've found a writing community or what your writing schedule is.

Please consider joining the Writing Mental Illness Facebook group or signing up for the newsletter. The online course Writing Mental Illness is out; please consider learning more about it.

What It Means

2010-01-08T13:03:00.001-06:00

"I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means; what I want and what I fear." - Joan Didion

Please consider joining the Writing Mental Illness Facebook group or signing up for the newsletter. The course Writing Mental Illness is out; please consider learning more about it.

When You Shouldn't Write

2010-01-06T15:00:00.001-06:00

My last post was on how to engage with difficult material and today I'm writing about when to take a break.

Sometimes I find I'm not writing and I just don't want to write. When I sit down to write all I feel is dread. This is when it's time for the "No Writing Rule." When I enact this rule I can't write anything creative for a period of time not less than a month.

The first time I used this rule was a few years ago, and I was struggling with work on the memoir. At the beginning of May I told myself no creative writing until Independence Day.

The coolest part was that by mid-June I was looking forward to when I could begin writing again. On July 4th I went to a noon party and when it was over I went to a coffee shop and hauled out my laptop and rewrote a chapter.

Writing felt entirely different after my break. I was looking forward to it. It felt like fun. Sure, sometimes it's reasonable to slog through and write when you don't want to, but there's nothing more powerful than an enforced break.

Please consider joining the Writing Mental Illness Facebook group or signing up for the newsletter. The course Writing Mental Illness is out; please consider learning more about it.

Engaging with Difficult Material

2009-12-23T13:32:00.001-06:00

Almost by definition writing about mental illness involves engaging with difficult material. So, how to face the difficult?

Slowly, carefully and with help. I'm the first one to say that it's important to have a therapist while writing about difficult subject matter such as mental illness.

How I Do It

When I'm having emotional difficulty with a piece one of the first things I do is write with others. I might write in a coffee shop by myself. Sometimes this works. Other times I will gather with a friend to write specifically. This is the biggest tool I use to be able to write what I write.

Writing guru Natalie Goldberg affirms this approach in her books Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life (and elsewhere) by arguing that writing with others is a beneficial way to develop a writing practice.

Please consider joining the Writing Mental Illness Facebook group or signing up for the newsletter. The course is out; please sign up if interested.

Does Being Depressed Make Writers Better?

2009-12-21T16:19:00.001-06:00

The Scientific American argued this year that depression has evolutionary advantages.

Maud Newton extends this, arguing that being depressed aids a writer. While she softened her argument by including some comments from psychiatrists and a Virginia Woolf expert I think it is harmful to focus on the benefits of mental illness.

I feel this way because it encourages therapists to believe random nonsense such as that being in therapy is incompatible with being able to write well.

I write despite a mental illness and not because of it. For me at least to say otherwise suggests an overly rosy or denial-laden view of mental illnesses. What do you think?

Please consider joining the Writing Mental Illness Facebook group or signing up for the newsletter. The course is out; please sign up if interested.

Practice for Writers

2009-12-18T14:38:00.001-06:00

We learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. One becomes in some area an athlete of God. - Martha Graham

On some Fridays I post a quote that is either directly or indirectly related to writing or disability.

Please consider joining the Writing Mental Illness Facebook group or signing up for the newsletter. The course is out; please sign up if interested.

The Disability Blog Carnival #61, Telling About Disability

2009-12-13T23:08:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Penny at the Disability Studies blog for agreeing to have me for this edition of the Disability Blog Carnival.

Telling About Disability

As a writer who helps others write about their experiences with mental illness I've thought long and hard about what it means to tell about disability. Because there are many facets (many ways to tell, many different things to tell, and the difference between visible and invisible disabilities among others) to telling disability these posts represent a multiplicity of interpretations of the theme.

Documenting Ugly Behavior

An important part of telling about disability is documenting what we as people with disabilities encounter in the world we live in, including the downright ugly.

The Frustration of Incremental Progress by Abby Jean at FWD/Forward.

It by Eva at The Deal with Disability.

Documenting Leaps Forward and Being Visible

Telling how we're achieving matters too. In this post a parent reflects on a disabled child beginning a path toward independent living. The second post is on the importance of people with disabilities being visible (making themselves visible) in the anti-domestic violence movement.

World Transforming Jamie News by Michael Bérubé at American Airspace.

The Disability Clothesline a piece on facing domestic violence as experienced by people with disabilities by Robyn at Low Visionary.

Telling about Disability History

This quote posted at FWD/Forward is the best justification I've ever seen for doing disability history. The second post is history about what it was like to be a dwarf or little person in Georgian London.

Quotation: Why We Do Disability History by Anna at FWD/Forward.

'If little things with little ones agree': Being a Dwarf in 18thC London by Lucy at Georgian London.

Coming Out

People with invisible disabilities, including myself, navigate the burden and privilege of whether and when to disclose a disability.

How to Break the Mental Health Taboo by Nicole at More is Better.

Telling about Disability to Intimate Partners

This is a wonderful piece about the importance of communicating with a potential intimate partner about disability (and other) needs.

Sex on the Brain by Cheryl at Finding My Way: Journey of an Uppity Intellectual Activist Crip.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to visit the Disability Studies blog where Penny will be setting up January's carnival.

Ways to Begin Writing About Mental Illness, Part II

2009-11-20T16:15:00.001-06:00

Now that you've already made a list of images, what comes next?

First choose one image from your list. You'll be able to come back to the others later, but for now focus all your attention on this one image. Because you've chosen images that have sensory details you should be able to start with those sensory details. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell?

What more can you say about this image? Is there a memory that connects with it? What happened immediately before it? What happened immediately after it? Does this image mean or imply anything to you? If anything what?

Congratulations. You have begun writing about mental illness. There's more to come about how writers engage with difficult material next week.

Please consider joining the Writing Mental Illness Facebook group or signing up for the newsletter. The course will be rolling out again at the end of the November 2009. Thanks for reading.

Ways to Begin Writing About Mental Illness, Part 1

2009-11-17T09:55:00.001-06:00

So, How to Start?

Writing about mental illness can be intimidating. We ask ourselves will it be too emotional? How can I put my arms around this experience? Where do I start?

Baby Steps

Would it be easier to start by making a list of what you want to write? This is not just any list but a list of images. An image is something you can touch, taste, smell, hear, or see.

So, if you chose a concrete discrete chunk of time such as a first hospital stay or when you first realized your family member had a mental illness, what sort of images come up? Just make a list.

Images that come to me are a fellow patient walking out of the smoking room saying I think I'm in trouble and later seeing the bandage on her arm where she had burned herself, the double locked doors that my boyfriend could not come through the night I was first admitted, and listening to the stork music play over the loudspeakers in between codes summoning staff to a particular unit.

So an image may contain one or moment or stand for a number of moments. Can you come up with ten images? Ready, set, go.

Later in the week I'll talk about what to do with your images. I also have to credit Patricia Weaver Francisco author of Telling for this exercise.

Please consider joining the Writing Mental Illness Facebook group or signing up for the newsletter. The course will be rolling out again at the end of the November 2009.

"How Difficult It Is"

2009-11-13T13:17:00.001-06:00

"The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person." - Czeslaw Milosz

I'll be performing a piece from my memoir at Patrick's Cabaret in Minneapolis on November 20th and 21st, 2009 at 8pm. I also have a piece in the current issue, #2, of Burly Bird. For more information about my writing, teaching or performance please visit my website.

When and How What We Write Shouldn't Be Political

2009-11-09T13:03:00.001-06:00

So I blog a lot about the political dimensions of writing about such a sensitive topic as mental illness. Today I'll talk about when and how our writing shouldn't be political.

In the First Draft
The first draft is a fragile thing. I don't mean that what you write in the first draft is consciously apolitical. No I mean that it is not consciously political. It is what it is.
When We Have an Axe to Grind
This is pretty obvious but writing that insists upon a point of view is not necessarily good writing. The old saw of no surprise for the writer no surprise for the reader is so true.

What is Testimony?

2009-11-06T13:23:00.001-06:00

"...the more we look closely at texts, the more they show us that, unwittingly, we do not even know what testimony is, and that, in any case, it is not simply what we thought we knew it was." -- Shoshana Felman

Questions for the day: What does it mean to testify to mental illness? What does it mean to testify to the successes and failures of the mental health system?

Putting Down the Flag (Temporarily)

2009-11-04T14:46:00.001-06:00

So, I wrote yesterday about the benefits to all people with psychiatric disabilities of coming out. Today I'm going to talk about when it's important to put down the flag, temporarily.

I'll argue stronger than anybody that everything we do as people with psychiatric diagnosis is not connected to that disorder. Bipolar is not so pervasive that it affects everything I do.

So, it's one facet of who I am. But sometimes in my writing I just want to put my feet up and operate as just a person. Is this passing? Or is it a rest? I ask because I'm not entirely certain.

And I do come from the point of view that people with disabilities are just people. Perhaps its reminding people of difference that gets exhausting. I notice that people who pass have to come out again and again.

People outside my community do have to be reminded that I have a mental illness. But often I choose not to remind them until it is directly relevant to the moment. For example, when I have to take my meds.

Being Out about Mental Illness

2009-11-03T10:25:00.001-06:00

This great coming out post by Paul at the Twitchhiker blog talks about people being treated differently because of a psychiatric diagnosis.

This is the danger about being out. I fear I will on my bad days only reinforce stereotypes about what it means to have a mental illness. I worry that given that I've succeeded in being labeled mentally ill all of my accomplishments will be viewed through this lens. The sad part is that if I hadn't succeeded at being so labeled I would have gotten no help.

I really believe that as a culture we are at the cusp of something new. More and better community, more and better treatment and more and better integration for all people. Part of this sea change is about the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Health Parity Act here in the United States. There is also the impending health care reform bill which will not be perfect but will be a vast improvement. See this post over at Psych Central on the proposed health reform plan.

Furthermore, the promise of Olmstead is becoming real. In New York, the state has to come up with a new means of housing people with mental illnesses currently living in large segregated group homes. The judge in the case referred to these group homes as even more "institutional" than the state hospitals they replaced. The housing remedy is expected to be a more integrated, community setting. For more info on this lawsuit please visit this New York Times editorial or the Bazelon Center's page on DAI v. Paterson.

So I'm tempted to quote Charles Dickens: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." but instead I see greater integration coming for people with psychiatric disabilities and coming soon.

What do you think is the current status of people with mental illness?

See also, this post from the archives on Harvey Milk and telling your story.

Call for Submissions Blog Carnival #61 Telling Disability

2009-10-27T11:49:00.006-05:00

Update: The Disability Blog Carnival #61 is now up.

Liz Henry has put together an excellent Disability Blog Carnival on Work and Disability.

FWD/Forward (Feminists with Disabilities moving Forward) will coordinate the Carnival for November on the topic of intersectionality.

I'll be coordinating December's edition on Telling Disability. Submissions are due the 4th and the carnival will be posted on the 13th. Please send submissions to me at alison (at) alisonbergblomjohnson (dot) com. Include your name, blog post title and link to the post.

(Thanks to Penny at the Temple University Disability Studies Blog for coordinating the Carnival.)

I'll be performing a piece from my memoir at Patrick's Cabaret in Minneapolis on November 20th and 21st, 2009 at 8pm. I also have a piece in the current issue, #2, of Burly Bird. For more information about my writing, teaching or performance please visit my website.

Stealing From Other Art Processes

2009-10-26T11:57:00.008-05:00

Other art areas approach creative problems through different processes and emphases than writing does. My post today scratches the surface of what can be learned from dance, theater, music and visual art and applied to the writing process.

Dance

The emphasis on the spatial can be applied to use of white space in our texts.

Theater

A key area of theater is dialog. The way dialog can hold clues to the whole work is incredible to me. That dialog can carry so much is challenge to writers to use it effectively in our own work.

Music

Rhythm and other poetic techniques are what I get from music.

Visual

The image is key here, I think of the image of the decaying sea otter on the beach in Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast, and the power of that image.

How do you mine other art areas?

I'll be performing a piece from my memoir at Patrick's Cabaret in Minneapolis on November 20th and 21st, 2009 at 8pm. I also have a piece in the current issue, #2, of Burly Bird. For more information about my writing, teaching or performance please visit my website.

Where Does Permission Come From?

2009-10-23T15:18:00.006-05:00

Where does permission to write come from?

Lots of writers struggle with this and this is why Julia Cameron's The Right to Write is more than a clever pun.

Does permission to write come from God? From our parents? From our friends or audience? Or does it come from a deep, still, authentic place inside ourselves?

We all have a right to write. No matter what our writing goals are.

I struggle with this, some of my students struggle with this. I try to think of it in terms of the importance of what I have to say. Is it important to talk about mental illness? Is it important for people to hear what I have to say? Or, is it important to me to hear this?

I'll be performing a piece from my memoir at Patrick's Cabaret in Minneapolis on November 20th and 21st, 2009 at 8pm. I also have a piece in the current issue, #2, of Burly Bird. For more information about my writing, teaching or performance please visit my website.

Revealing Meaning

2009-10-21T11:12:00.014-05:00

This quote by the philosopher Hannah Arendt that I've posted previously about storytelling floats around the Internet in this shortened form.

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

Today, however, I went and looked up the original in Arendt's Men in Dark Times from 1970. The quote is as follows:

"It is true that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are, and that we may even trust it to contain eventually by implication that last word which we expect from the "day of judgment." - Hannah Arendt

Wow. Heady stuff.

I'll be performing a piece from my memoir at Patrick's Cabaret in Minneapolis on November 20th and 21st, 2009 at 8pm. I also have a piece in the current issue, #2, of Burly Bird. For more information about my writing, teaching or performance please visit my website.

Anne Sexton: Patient or Poet?

2009-10-16T13:11:00.013-05:00

One of the coolest parts of being in the arts is that they are more open to people with psychiatric disabilities than other professions. While admitting experience with psychiatric treatment could kill the career of a young politician or engineer as a writer if you can write about it well then it's an asset.

One example of this dichotomy is the different attitudes towards Anne Sexton from the psychiatric and literary communities. First, Sexton won just about every major award a writer can win. She won a Pulitzer Prize, was nominated for a National Book Award, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the Ford Foundation.

Her poetry is phenomenal, although sometimes termed confessional. A few reviews did criticize her work as too personal and implied she placed unreasonable demands on her readers by being too "needy" or "emotional."

To me this criticism seems mild compared to such articles published in the Psychosomatic Medicine Journal as "Cognitive distortions in the poetry of Anne Sexton" that explore her work as pathology. This kind of dissection frightens me as a writer who writes primarily about mental illness.

The fact that Sexton did die of suicide seems to leave her at least partly in the province of psychologists. However, the part of her life that I choose to focus on is both the professionalism and rigor with which she approached her work. Furthermore, I think as writers it is much more profitable to focus on the accolades Sexton received from the literary community than the furor her work creates in the psychiatric one.

I'll leave you with links to a few of her poems: In Celebration of My Uterus, and Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward.

I'll be performing a piece from my memoir at Patrick's Cabaret in Minneapolis on November 20th and 21st, 2009 at 8pm. For more information about my writing, teaching or performance please visit my website.

Guest Post: How Writing Becomes Sacred

2009-10-13T08:50:00.003-05:00

This is a guest post by Isabella Mori, a therapist who blogs about psychology, creativity, spirituality and social justice at change therapy.

Some of my clients are members of Overeaters Anonymous, a group similar to Alcoholics Anonymous that helps people whose eating disorders – anything from binge eating to anorexia and bulimia – have gotten the better of them. Members of the OA program are encouraged to use eight “tools” on a regular, even daily basis to help them stay the course. one of those tools is writing. It has been very interesting to gain insight into that, and I think the way it is used can be helpful for anyone.

While this tool has many applications in OA (for example, writing an inventory of one’s good and challenging points in going through daily life; writing articles for OA newsletters; daily emails to a program buddy), I’d like to point out one in particular. OA uses two books as its central text, Alcoholics Anonymous’ “Big Book” (a “design for living” for people with serious alcohol problems), and the OA Twelve and Twelve, which outlines OA’s interpretation of the 12 steps and 12 traditions, the “spine” of the OA program.

OA members are encouraged to study the 12 steps and 12 traditions over and over again, in what I see as a sort of Lectio Divina. Lectio Divina is a practice of slowly, reverently and meditatively reading a spiritually significant text (all the “anonymous” programs are decidedly spiritual albeit not religious). But it doesn’t stop there; members are then encouraged to engage in writing about the text (a sort of Scriptio Divina?). And this is where the magic comes in.

When read with an open heart, an important text can reveal layers and layers and layers. The heart opens, and then the text opens. “I don’t remember ever reading this passage!” is something that I’ve often heard – from members who have read the book at least 10 times. And as the heart opens and the text opens, the pen opens. With the text as inspiration, words flow out from a place that is deep, honest, lively and life-giving; words of passion: of painful regret, delighted discovery, profound connection, all-embracing love, long-repressed hurt.

A deeply spiritual friend of mine, a radical-liberal Baptist who has spent many hours listening to the heart-rending stories of people living in Vancouver’s poverty and drug-riddled Downtown Eastside, calls these stories “living scripture.” I believe that all stories told with an open heart are living scripture – sacred text. There is a beautiful spiral then, from reading with an open heart, to writing with an open heart, to producing sacred text.

Experienced in this manner, everything becomes sacred. A children’s poem that is read, or a recipe, written down lovingly (as Kimberley Snow shows so beautifully in her book In Buddha’s Kitchen). And in its profound intimacy and privacy, this writing almost comes out the other end and becomes public. I don’t think it’s possible to truly connect with ourselves and with the divine (whatever you want to call it; from the traditional Christian God to the new age universe to the values held dear by atheists) without connecting with what’s going on in the rest of the world and engaging in some sort of social activism, however modest. That is one of the ways in which I see a direct connection between the personal writing that I’ve discussed here and the work in which Alison encourages us all to engage.

Perhaps this little poem (a small shard of Scriptio Divina?) shows a bit of that. I wrote it a few years ago; it shows my personal struggles but also, I believe, how they connect with the world (not being present to the world around me) and with throw-away culture specifically.

broken little plate
was so long in my home;
now it’s torn in half
and all i did was throw it away.
didn’t think twice.
just left it like it was,
with a bit of leftover food,
wrapped in saran wrap,
and threw it in the garbage.

now my heart breaks open,
an earthquake under it,
and i ask, with grief or guilt,
was that all i could do?
could i not have thanked that plate
for all its work and beauty over all these years?

broken little plate
i am sorry
you were the victim of my thoughtlessness,
another one,
a victim of
my weakness that leaves open, still too often,
the gates to floods of thoughts and feelings,
questions, riddles, nagging spiders in my brain,
that when it happened,
when your last hour came,
i was not present.

perhaps those gates
are wounds, gaping,
still, still not healed.

Alison here, thanks so much for the beautiful post Isabella. Also, I'll be performing a piece from my memoir at Patrick's Cabaret in Minneapolis on November 20th and 21st, 2009 at 8pm. For more information about my work please visit my website.

I Love the Rain Taxi Book Festival!

2009-10-10T16:20:00.008-05:00

The Rain Taxi Book Festival is the second Saturday in October in Minneapolis every year. This being the second Saturday, I have just spent a lovely day among writers and readers. The authors who read who really made an impression on me were Diane Ackerman, Robert Olen Butler and Lorrie Moore.

Diane Ackerman talked about the power of the dawn as a time of transition. Though she did say also that "it's how you look, not when you look." So, of course I have to quote a song by The Band that goes: "twilight is the loneliest time of day."

Lorrie Moore said something wonderful about how she doesn't think of say, Alice Munro, as having influences but of her body of work being a thing unto itself. I think what she means by this is that Munro has fertilized the soil with other writers, but what has grown up is a new thing. This is what we should all aspire to.

Robert Olen Butler complained about how many writers know everything about the second through tenth thing of being a writer and nothing about the first. According to Butler the first thing is is about the dream and the unconscious not about craft. Craft is important but it isn't the first thing. Also, in order for a writer to apply craft he or she must have absorbed it so thoroughly that the technique is used unconsciously.

Most of all, what I love about the festival is how inspired I feel at the end of it. They present writers of literature at the top of their game and it inspires a still small voice inside of me that says, "Listen up. Let's get back to work." So, what are you working on?

I'll be performing a piece from my memoir at Patrick's Cabaret in Minneapolis on November 20th and 21st at 8pm. For more information about my work please visit my website.

The Least Space

2009-10-09T15:25:00.003-05:00

“Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” – Orson Scott Card

I'll be performing a piece from my memoir at Patrick's Cabaret in Minneapolis on November 20th and 21st at 8pm. For more information about my work please visit my website.

The Big Picture

2009-09-29T01:24:00.014-05:00

So I'm often blogging about the craft of writing about mental illness. I also teach private students how to tell of their experiences in the mental health system using creative writing. Why do I do this work? Why does it matter?

It matters for the individuals who learn to write effectively about their experiences. They're on their way to becoming better writers and better artists.

This question posed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: How can we integrate people who experience mental illnesses more fully into society? in their Changemaker campaign reminds me further of why writing about mental illness is so important.

Writing about mental illness offers an opportunity for people who have experienced mental illness to fight stigma and discrimination by making their experiences more visible both to the general public and the mental health establishment.

Fighting stigma and discrimination is incredibly important. I'm really excited about the Changemaker campaign because of the opportunity for a public discussion of mental health policies. Please consider visiting the Rethinking Mental Health site and entering your own ideas or commenting on others.

Stages of Writing

2009-09-23T16:04:00.007-05:00

In the way I write and the way I teach writing there are three stages to writing. They are

Beginning
Long Middle
Revision

Beginning

How to begin? I'll write more about this next week, but this can be one of the most fraught stages of writing. We wish to write a masterpiece, and yet our words are not masterpiece. The key way to succeed at the beginning stage of writing is to be able to let go of the quality of what you are writing and focus instead on quantity. So instead of thinking I will write the best piece I've ever written instead I tell myself to write two pages, they may be an unfortunate two pages, but I will write two pages, and it is from these initial drafts that I weave together the piece.

Long Middle

All the credit for the Long Middle stage of writing goes to the late great Carol Bly. Bly talks about empathic questioning as key to this stage of writing. What did I mean by this? is a key question. The goal is not to interrogate the draft with an unsympathetic eye, but to be empathic, trying to help it say what it should. The role of a reader at this stage is to help ask empathic questions, not to critique grammar.

Revision

Revision is actually my favorite phase of writing. We know what we wish to say, and now it is time to make it pretty. This is when the nuances of grammar matter, this is when the piece is prepared to be shown to the world.

I'll write more about these stages, especially the Long Middle stage in upcoming posts.

The Unspoken

2009-09-21T12:29:00.000-05:00

So if the unspoken is that messy part of the human experience that resists language, what part of the mental illness experience is unspoken for you? I have my own answers to this question; for me, the interconnection between post traumatic stress and what is more commonly thought of as serious mental illness is a key area to be mined.

Commonly unspoken and unconsidered are the benefits of mental illness. How does mental illness enrich the world? What does it add, if anything? There are days when I'm not interested in entertaining this question. I am entirely disconnected from any positives of the mental illness experience. And then there are other days when I am intrigued by how a different perspective can enrich everyone.

One time when I was teaching people with Serious and Persistent Mental Illness about writing about that experience we were discussing metaphor. Specifically how metaphor involves a willing suspension of disbelief that something is something else. Shakespeare says the world is a stage, and for a moment we believe him. One of my students said to me, "So sometimes people without mental illness believe something is something else when it really isn't?" Yup.

Her point is that people with psychotic disorders in particular, especially believe something is something else all the time. The radio is really a listening device. The microwave not only cooks food it also distorts thoughts. For this woman it was a revelation that in literature, people without mental illness mimic this and are not considered psychotic, but literary.

"Wonder and Reverence"

2009-08-14T09:23:00.003-05:00

"Wonder and reverence, I want to say before I get started, are the twin dynamos that generate the art of writing." - Bret Lott

On Fridays I'm posting a quote about writing, mental illness, disability or recovery. Some weeks I'll react to it, other times I'll let it stand alone.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back today, August 14, 2009, in a new format. Go to my class page for more info. It'll be released around 1pm central time.

"Latin Roots Sui and Cidium"

2009-08-11T13:17:00.009-05:00

In Echolalia, a wonderful book of poems by Deborah Bernhardt there's a poem called "Latin Roots Sui and Cidium" - a poem exploring the roots of the word suicide.

I think sometimes we are so wed to narrative - to the this happened, then this, then this that we miss opportunities to explode language open as Bernhardt does.

It's a prose poem, and very short so I won't quote much. One of my favorite lines in the poem is "Thinking only of one's hand." She breaks apart the language about suicide. So, my challenge is that in addition to writing narrative we explore deeply what the language we use means and where it has come from.

On Tuesdays, I blog about reading literature for craft insight.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

Why Write About Mental Illness?

2009-08-10T13:10:00.007-05:00

I've written before about Why to Tell Your Story focusing on the political benefits of telling one's story and about how to keep going minute by minute, hour by hour on a writing project about mental illness.

On occasion I'm asked why bother to write about mental illness at all. The questioner often seems to be saying can't we just focus on the positive - maybe kittens and butterflies and forget talking about all this incredibly difficult stuff.

The reason I write about my experiences in the mental health system and help others to do so as well is because I want to see my experiences normalized. It is the fact that mental illness is not considered polite conversation that I'm trying to change.

Before I began writing about my experiences with mental illness I felt as if I was out of bounds, off the maps, beyond polite discussion. I had come back from the hospital and was trying to live with at least one foot in the ordinary world and I felt that I could not speak of the hospitals I had been in, of my experiences with the mental health system. This left me feeling like I had to pretend not to have experienced what I had experienced because it was not normative.

This is why I write of mental illness - to bring knowledge of mental illness to people who may have never experienced it and therefore to make my experiences less foreign.

On Mondays I react to something someone else has written, using it as a jumping off space to connect disparate issues to writing about mental illness.

This Monday I am bending the rules a bit by building off of - reacting to - previous posts on this blog.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

Every Move We Make...

2009-08-07T10:58:00.004-05:00

"...every narratological move we make, every technique we employ, carries with it philosophical and political consequences, whether or not we can at first articulate them, whether or not at first we are even aware of them." - Lance Olsen

Why Care About Common Ex?

2009-08-06T21:40:00.008-05:00

The late, great Common Ex stood for Common Experience and was one of the coolist parts of the Perpich Center for Arts Education's Arts High School when I was a student there in the late '90s.

All kinds of artists -- musicians, dancers, writers and performers came to Common Ex. All students or Arts High kids as we called outselves went to Common Ex. My favorite Common Ex was the one that featured Bill T Jones and his dance company because my dance teacher at Arts High, Mary Harding, had been in his company, and this was my creative lineage.

I've learned so much from artists in other areas of art that I've continued in the Common Ex tradition every Thursday. I go out to shows, perhaps I'll interview artists - I try to help the readers of this blog know why I am so militantly for an ecumenical approach to art. By this I mean that the idea that as writers we do not need to know anything of dance or of visual art is bunk. Part of this is intensely practical. As writers we also will be called upon to perform our work.

But it is also intensely impractical, not connected to an immediate takeaway. Despite this I believe there is so much to learn from other areas of art such as

Paul Shambroom who encourages all readings
Bill T. Jones and this gorgeous, inspiring quotation:
I told Anne [Bogart] that while I am flattered to be seen as a "revolutionary" it would be more accurate and less pompous if I said simply that I am a survivor working with every tool I have to make work, maintain an organization (will we always be a dance company?) and stay in touch with that impulse that lead me to this life in the first place.
from Bill's Blog

On Thursdays I blog about questions raised by other art forms to see what light they shed on writing.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

Sustaining a Writing Practice

2009-08-05T18:54:00.008-05:00

I've written previously about establishing a writing routine, today I'm talking about how to sustain that routine.

The Writing Time Card

Keeping track of when you write and when you don't is incredibly important. I love spreadsheets for this. Usually I'll track the number of words I write each day over a month. You can even set up a column to compute the average daily word count in. This helps me know whether I'm close to or above my goal and can skip a day, or if I need to really push hard.

The graphic for this post is a jpg of a chart I made to keep track of how much I was writing in May when I was on retreat. You can tell from the chart that I took days off. I also wrote almost 30,000 words that month. Compared to people who've done NaNoWriMo that's nothing, but it sure helped get me closer to a manuscript. The last column is the average.

Tips and Tricks

Prompt books such as Room to Write by Bonnie Goldberg are fabulous tools to keep a person writing everyday especially when you aren't in the midst of a big project.

On Wednesdays I write about a craft or process topic.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

The Queer, Sultry Summer

2009-08-04T09:10:00.015-05:00

"(I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I'd been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I'd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.)" - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

In the Foreword to the Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition Frances McCullough argues that as readers we are influenced in our readings of The Bell Jar by the fact that Sylvia Plath's life ended by suicide. McCullough points out that The Bell Jar "is a very funny book -- the intervening twenty-five years give us a good reason to delight in Plath's amazing humor, a quality she herself thought would make her career as a novelist."

Somehow I seem to have read The Bell Jar twice in my teens and never noticed anything but tragedy. This is a wonderful example of the need to create our own reading of a work instead of allowing ourselves to be overly influenced by a received reading.

One of the things Plath did so well in The Bell Jar was to show not just the mental health system and her encounters with it, but to illustrate her state of mind so that a reader who has never experienced mental illness can know what it is like. What are your favorite works that go beyond the mental health system and also show what it is like to have altered perceptions?

On Tuesdays, I blog about reading literature for craft insight.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

In Whose Voice?

2009-08-03T11:16:00.013-05:00

I began writing about mental illness because it was top of mind. It was there whenever I reached for a pen or pencil or keyboard. It was preventing me from writing of anything that was perfectly innocuous because whenever I sat down to write all I could think of was the hospital.

I didn't want to resurrect my voice in the arena of mental health because I felt it would only mark me as "crazy" or "strange." Perhaps I am not either of those things, but I am formed by my experiences. I can't imagine going forward and papering this part of my life over as if it never happened.

Isabella has two interesting posts up on digging for voice, and reflecting on her first post.

In the first post Isabella Mori writes: "i often feel weak, powerless and confused when i speak," and she also writes:

i believe this voice is not only undeveloped for private reasons but also because i feel my reality, like that of so many other women, has been negated in the context of a society that does not wish to give weight to women’s experiences.

I strongly believe that these statements apply not only to women but also to those who have been marginalized by being labeled as mentally ill.

By voice Mori is referring to the ways we are silenced and silence ourselves, and do not develop the capacity to speak the truth. For writers there is of course another element to voice. Here is a great definition of voice in the literary sense, some scrolling required.

I promise there'll be more to come on developing voice.

On Mondays I react to something someone else has written, using it as a jumping off space to connect disparate issues to writing about mental illness.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

"The Error of Defining It"

2009-07-31T23:11:00.008-05:00

Updated: An expanded version.

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” – Hannah Arendt

On Fridays I'm posting a quote about writing, mental illness, disability or recovery. Some weeks I'll react to it, other times I'll let it stand alone.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

Talking to The Boogie Man

2009-07-30T10:31:00.015-05:00

"I talk to the boogie man all the time and he talks to me." - Danny Gaydar

So, what are you afraid of? Do you talk back to it? I'm coming at this from a narrative therapy, externalize the problem point of view.

So, for example depression is the problem, not the person with depression. If depression is externalized it can be given a name and talked back to.

The late Danny Gaydar was an artist, and he also struggled. Craig Dunn, executive director of VSA Arts of Minnesota, says that Danny would call up just to talk when he had a hard time.

I love the statement Gaydar makes about the boogie man: "I talk to the boogie man all the time and he talks to me." This has me thinking about ways to talk to the externalized problem. To talk to depression instead of about it.

Gaydar's painting of a tree has a built up surface, and this also has me thinking of ways to build up a surface in writing. One way is to keep repeating certain words, contextualizing them in different ways.

The painting is in an exhibit called Changing Landscapes at the Center for Integration at the University of Minnesota in conjunction with VSA Arts of Minnesota. The international VSA Arts is an organization that works for and on behalf of artists with disabilities and also advocates for audiences with disabilities. Changing Landscapes is on view through September 30 during normal hours at Institute for Community Integration, 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM Monday through Friday. The exhibit is free and open to the public.

On Thursdays I blog about questions raised by other art forms to see what light they shed on writing.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

Refrains and Habitual Action

2009-07-29T20:35:00.006-05:00

So I wrote yesterday that refrains are great for illustrating habitual action. By habitual action I mean that which happens over and over and is about the same each time. Kaysen's use of the sound of checks as a refrain is a perfect example of this.

Habitual actions such as brushing teeth or eating breakfast are examples ripe for a refrain. There are so many habitual actions in mental health care. Nurses distributing meds, the outpatient twenty minute med check with a psychiatrist that takes 5-7 minutes.

Within the mental health system these are the coffee spoons our lives are measured out in. As writers it is our job to make our everyday reality as vivid and alive as possible.

On Wednesdays I write about a craft or process topic.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

Swish Click

2009-07-28T10:01:00.000-05:00

There's a section in Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted called "Checks." In case you've never experienced checks, this is the practice of a nurse or tech locating a patient every 15 minutes or 30 minutes or even every 5 and noting where they are and that they are safe.

Here's a brief excerpt from the section in Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted:

It never stopped, even at night, it was our lullaby. It was our metronome, our pulse. It was our lives measured out in doses slightly larger than those famous coffee spoons.

There's a refrain that runs through this section. It goes swish, click or click, swish. Click: the sound of the door opening; swish: the sound of the nurse moving into and out of the room.

Refrains can be a highly, highly effective way of making habitual action vivid. I've even had a student use a refrain to make the statements of her voices more vivid.

On the other hand, I've also had students find listening to the Kaysen excerpt is too intense. It's so aural, it's so intense that it turns them off. Bottom line, I'd say most refrains either are intense or heighten the tension.

So, using a refrain effectively. Go read Kaysen, it's pages 54-55 in the paperback of Girl, Interrupted. Two things to note about how Kaysen uses the refrain:

Variation.
Instead of repeating swish, click ad nauseum; Kaysen varies the order of the words.
Not using the obvious refrain.
Kaysen could have chosen the word checks as the refrain. Instead she chooses the less obvious swish, click - the sound of the action of checks.

Tomorrow we'll talk more about refrains and habitual actions.

On Tuesdays, I blog about reading literature for craft insight.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

Who will write about Mental Health on Campus?

2009-07-27T13:59:00.006-05:00

Interesting commentary over at Psychiatric Times on the scrutiny faced by college mental health services. I think writing about mental health and the college experience is desperately needed - both from students and parents. According to the article more students with mental disorders are seriously ill than ever before. This is causing a strain on mental health services on campuses and erupting in news stories as disparate as the Virginia Tech shootings or the suicide of a student at MIT.

My memoir-in-progress touches on this issue once or twice from my own experience at the turn of the millenium, but is more about the mental health system in general. I've written before about how I feel all writing about mental illness is by necessity political. Our writing reinforces current policy structures or orders them torn down. Some of our writing even does both at the same time.

As illustrated above it is no secret that mental health services on campus are at a minimum burdened and at a maximum strained to the breaking point. Who will be the Nellie Bly on this issue?

On Mondays I react to something someone else has written, using it as a jumping off space to connect disparate issues to writing about mental illness.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

Mask and Unveiling

2009-07-24T12:00:00.004-05:00

“Writing is both mask and unveiling.” – E.B. White

On Fridays I'm posting a quote about writing, mental illness, disability or recovery. Some weeks I'll react to it, other times I'll let it stand alone.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

Memory: A Thorny Subject

2009-07-23T13:43:00.011-05:00

What does it mean to write about the past if the public perception of memory is that it is highly fallible?

This is the issue I want to wrestle with today. I recently went to an interesting exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The show is called A Constant Line and features works by Cheryle Melander and Don Myhre.

Melander's work, which appears to the right is highly labor intensive and all her pieces focused on the line in different ways. Sometimes her work is sculptural, other times in 2-D such as the piece on clayboard, sometimes on a rice paper scroll. Her artist's statement connected her work to something she referred to as "instinctual memory."

Myhre's work, which appears in a detail below is all about cultural memory. An astronaut, Walt Disney's face, and a satellite dish are all used as jumping off points. He is a sculptor and his work is very much within the pop art tradition.

During the discussion (a trialogue between a critic, the artists and the audience) a number of points about the works similarities and differences were raised. Christina Schmid was the critic at this trialogue. I really appreciated her reading of the pieces, even though I did not entirely agree with her take on the fallibility of memory. I countered with this: That overemphasizing the fallibility of memory leads to a decrease in agency for some people. By this I was referring to the way what has happened to us becomes part of our identity and we choose to act out our identities as members of certain groups.

Perhaps that group is a people that has suffered a genocide, women or men who have experienced child abuse, or as connects to this blog as people who have been labeled as having a mental illness. I want to back away a bit from my claim that it limits agency and put forward a slightly different point: Individuals overemphasizing the fallibility of memory aid those who fight dirty.

What I mean by this is that most people who see memory as highly fallible but are not trying to cover up a genocide play directly into the hands of those who are.

I'm not a scientist. I'm not an expert in the science of memory. Though I'd be happy to point everyone towards the researcher Jennifer Freyd. (Although in fairness I will mention another researcher, specifically Elizabeth Loftus who has very different ideas on memory.)

Given the comments I heard during and after the trialogue at least this group believed very strongly in the fallibility of memory.

So as writers, particularly as writers of memoir, how exactly do we engage with a public highly skeptical of memory? As usual of late I promise to come back to this question.

On Thursdays I blog about questions raised by other art forms to see what light they shed on writing.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

Disruptive Narratives

2009-07-22T11:19:00.010-05:00

So, disruptive narratives. Today I want to talk about how mental illness resists story.

I've blogged recently about hearing Nicole Johns, author of Purge, read, and one thing she said about her book struck me, and that one thing was that she had wanted to challenge the common narrative in stories about eating disorders that eating disorders are cured easily, perhaps in one visit to a treatment center or alternatively that once cured they're cured forever.

Johns wanted to write about how the real work occurred after discharge, and how she still struggles with her eating disorder. Traditional narrative has a classic arc and a resolution. Something has changed. Mental illness often doesn't follow this pattern. It resists this form.

That means as writers of mental illness we often have to resist the conventional narrative arc as well.

So, how does one tell these stories? After all it isn't very helpful to say merely what not to do.

In abandoning the classic narrative arc, I like to look to the pattern of the illness itself for guidance in creating a new structure. Is it an episodic illness? Is it chronic? What pattern would it leave if you could draw it as it moves into and out of your life? Or as it intensifies and weakens?

There's always also the opportunity to look back towards the classic 5-act structure. For more info on this read Jon Franklin's book Writing for Story. His approach is almost mathematical, which can be too intense for some, but I think he raises some interesting points.

Also, it is well worth reading widely in your genre. There is much experimentation with structure going on right now.

I know I've only scratched the surface of this topic but I promise I'll return to it.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

Not the Same Family

2009-07-21T09:39:00.019-05:00

I've blogged previously about how I found and came to love Mikal Gilmore's memoir Shot in the Heart.

Gilmore writes:

"In any event, I grew up in a world so entirely different from that of my brothers, I may as well have grown up under another surname."

Gilmore's point here that "the family I grew up in was not the same family my brothers grew up in" has me thinking about whose story gets told and whether or not anyone grows up in the same family as their siblings. I'll explore this further later in the week on Thursday when I blog about a visual art show on memory, both cultural and instinctive.

By the time Mikal Gilmore came to write Shot in the Heart which was published in 1994 a great amount of ink had been spent on his brother Gary's story. No less a luminary than Norman Mailer had written about Gary - in The Executioner's Song. In case you aren't familiar with Gary Gilmore, he was a notorious murderer who became the first man to be executed in the US after a five year long hiatus on all executions.

So craft points from Mikal Gilmore's story.

Even though even Norman Mailer had written about Gary Gilmore, Mikal Gilmore was able to find an angle into the family's story that only he could tell. I'm not arguing that each of us run out to find our very own angle into whatever is in the news, but that there is a unique and interesting angle to everyone's life.

Also, I think Not the Same Family is a great take off line for generating material. How did you not grow up in the same family as your siblings? How have institutions you've been in or associated with changed over time and become not the same?

On Tuesdays, I blog about reading books for craft suggestions.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

On Muckraking Journalism

2009-07-20T12:33:00.006-05:00

Apparently proposed legislation here in the US advocating screening of expectant mothers for mental disorders has raised a firestorm of debate (at least in the blogosphere). All I have to contribute to this issue is to say that I agree with Liz over at The Trouble with Spikol.

However, this piece of news has me thinking about the power of stories about real people, their lives and conditions, to create social change. I'm thinking of the muckrakers in particular, especially Upton Sinclair and Nellie Bly. So this is a great opportunity to suggest everybody go read Ten Days in a Madhouse about conditions in the insane asylum on Blackwell's Island.

On Mondays I react to something someone else has written, using it as a jumping off space to connect disparate issues to writing about mental illness.

The course Writing Mental Illness is getting spiffed up and will be back on August 14, 2009 in a new format. Go to my class page for more info.

The Book You Really Want to Read

2009-07-17T11:21:00.005-05:00

“If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison

On Fridays I'm experimenting with posting a quote about writing, mental illness, disability or recovery. Some weeks I'll react to it, other times I'll let it stand alone.

In What Voice?

2009-07-16T09:53:00.012-05:00

I went to see Scott Muskin read last Sunday at Magers & Quinn here in Minneapolis. Nicole Johns, author of a new eating disorders memoir published by Seal Press, read also. Johns' portion of the reading got me thinking about what different writers are comfortable revealing when they read their work.

It amazed me how restrained Johns' voice was in the selections she read from. Then this morning I went over to Amazon and used the Look Inside This Book feature to read a short excerpt from the beginning of Purge. The selection was journal entries from before Johns went to treatment and it was evident how close to the surface the pain of the eating disorder was.

At one point she mentions how much more time she would have if she wasn't obsessing about food all the time. At another point Johns is more in the eating disorder and is only thinking about the 10 pounds she must drop. At both ends of the spectrum she doesn't sound restrained at all. She sounds passionate.

This rings more true to me than the restrained voice of the reading. I don't want to pick on Johns, who is clearly a gifted writer but I do want to think about the courage it takes to put one's experience on the page, to send it out into the world and allow readers to see it. And then the next step of choosing what to read.

The memoir I'm writing is decidedly edgy. However, I've both chosen not to read edgy pieces that are primarily about my own experience and chosen to read edgy pieces primarily about my own experience. Sometimes it feels too vulnerable, and I'm not willing to go there. It has felt easier to read pieces primarily about my great-great aunt Alma who was hospitalized the majority of her adult life. Still I tend to write in a voice that is certainly never dispassionate.

What voice do you write in and why?

On Not Telling It Away

2009-07-15T09:56:00.006-05:00

So I promised yesterday that I would write more today about how to write a story without saying what it is about. This is classic show don't tell stuff. While I think there is some truth behind the words show don't tell I also feel that there is also a condescension associated with them. At a minimum they've become cliche. Bottom line: I hate that phrase.

On the other hand this doesn't mean there isn't some truth behind "that phrase." I talked yesterday about the power in Scott Muskin's book The Annunciations of Hank Meyerson, Mama's Boy and Scholar and how successfully he hides obvious conclusions behind story. I like to be so engaged in the world of a story that I don't worry about meaning until I've finished reading it. Perhaps I'm unique as a reader in this but I don't think so.

To look at this another way when I was in middle school a classmate and I were discussing the song Waterfalls by TLC. The verses tell stories about people who have strayed from the "rivers and the lakes that you're used to." My classmate insisted that this song was "about AIDS" because it was alluded to in one of the verses. (This was in the days when AIDS was a death sentence.) I was certain AIDS was a sideline in the song, the song was really about what happens when one moves away from a place of safety and the verse alluding to AIDS was illustrating the point.

Also, I was pretty skeptical that one could make a song (or a poem) about AIDS. Sure you could reference it, tell it, speak of it, but the deeper story would always be about something beyond the phrase Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. AIDS was shorthand for something deeper such as love and loss or the disintegration of communities battered by an epidemic. I'm not arguing that AIDS (or mental illness) can't be part of a story but that it is perpetually a surface story.

So, how to tell a story so that meaning is tied to the story and is not stated outright?

I think the first most important way to get to a story that does this is to write without axes to grind. Yes there are a thousand injustices. And your readers will see them if you illustrate them instead of announcing them.
On Wednesdays I'm blogging about a craft topic.

Pardon the Mess

2009-07-15T09:52:00.004-05:00

I'm just doing a bit of renovating here on the blog template, and I'm not done yet. Still have to change a few font colors and probably won't get to it until tonight. Let me know what you think.

What Hank Never Said

2009-07-14T13:45:00.019-05:00

Despite everything I know about what it means to have a mental illness I had no idea mental illness was near the center of this book, Scott Muskin's first novel, until I was to the end of it. I have no recollection of the word depression appearing in the text.

Furthermore, I can say with complete confidence that there is no moment when Hank, the narrator of the novel says, "[Another character] has depression." I'm being a bit obscure because I don't want to spoil the ending if you haven't read the book yet. And this is a book to read.

While I was reading it I recall once or twice pondering the character's mental state. However it never occurred to me to add up the character's behavior on the page with a diagnosis from the DSM. This is what the best literature does. Muskin never says explicitly what the story is or is about. He simply wrote the story.

This also reminds me of Paul Shambroom's emphasis on encouraging all readings. As writers we are constantly told to show not tell until it becomes a cliche that means nothing. I see encouraging all readings as a result of showing and not telling.

More tomorrow on not telling it away from a craft perspective.

Integrating Academic Research into a Creative Writing Project

2009-07-13T13:58:00.015-05:00

I found an interesting post about a new research study on depression and academic performance among college students. To quote from the release about the study:

There are two core symptoms of depression—loss of interest and pleasure in activities, or depressed mood—but only loss of interest is associated with lower grade point averages.

The study also found that "students with both depression and anxiety had especially poor academic performance."

Great. Interesting study. Why am I talking about it on my writing blog?

I'm writing about it because this study reveals that the effect of anxiety and depression on my academic career were not unique. I promise you there are research studies and quotes from the scientific literature that will illuminate your experience.

So, how do you find these studies?

Search databases such as PubMed or Google Scholar. You may have access to additional databases that provide the complete text of the article through your local public library.

Get a copy. Sometimes this involves visiting your local university library or paying a fee to view the article online. Don't forget to check if you can get access through your public library card first.

Now what do you do with the study once you've found it?

I often use short quotes from the studies to start off a piece, especially if the quote provides context to what I'm writing about. I prefer not to quote from a scholarly article within creative writing; I think it should be set off from the text somehow. Also, please make sure you are within the bounds of fair use.

On Mondays I'm reacting to something written by someone else. My goal is to explain how whatever I'm linking to connects to writing about mental illness or disability.

What We Are Unable to Say

2009-07-10T14:20:00.003-05:00

“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” – Anaïs Nin

What do you think?

On Fridays I'm experimenting with posting a quote about writing, mental illness, disability or recovery. Some weeks I'll react to it, other times I'll let it stand alone.

Andre Dubus III and the Refrigerator

2009-07-09T10:20:00.005-05:00

I grew up around computers. I even took Natalie Goldberg's admission that she sometimes wrote on a mac with the keyboard in her lap as permission to write on the computer all the time. Granted I'll still sometimes work out a difficult scene in longhand but for the most part I draft and revise on the computer.

After an excellent reading at the Loft about a month ago Andre Dubus III, author of The House of Sand and Fog, was asked if he had ever lost any of his work to a computer problem. Frankly I was surprised that the question was even asked because pretty much every writer I know has at one time or another lost work into the digital ether.

We've all developed strategies to work around this. Some people keep print outs of everything they write. Some e-mail themselves a copy of whatever they are working on every day. I back up to a thumb drive a few times a week. Ideally this would happen every day, but it doesn't. My dream is to get an external hard drive with wifi support so that my backups could happen without me thinking about it while I sleep, but alas finances prohibit such a purchase. Does Dubus do any of these?

No, and he has never lost work. He writes in longhand. Once before he "made it" he was living in a trailer home and was worried about what would happen to his manuscript if there was a fire. He couldn't afford a fire safe, so he put the manuscript in the refrigerator because he figured it would be safe there in the event of a fire.

One day he came home, and the electricity was out. He checked the refrigerator. The freezer had defrosted and his manuscript was underwater. At first he despaired, but he was able to air dry the pages, and because he writes in pencil it didn't run. His work was safe. How do you protect your work?

To Write Requires a Reader

2009-07-08T10:20:00.007-05:00

So I promised yesterday that I would write today about strategies for taking on the powerful. I am unable to write about this topic without mentioning the late Carol Bly and her two books on writing, The Passionate Accurate Story and Beyond the Writer's Workshop.

As the title of the first book The Passionate Accurate Story suggests accuracy is key to taking on the powerful in one's writing. Of course this leads to the question of how to be accurate. Bly would say that to be accurate one must focus on the long middle stage of writing where one refines ideas coming closer and closer to the truth until one can come no closer.

So in other words, tell the truth. At first glance this seems laughably simple. But Bly argues this is more difficult than it seems. She argues that the truth can be harder to see than we think it is. That when we begin what we take for the truth may transform during the long middle stage of writing. My favorite questions for this stage are What did I mean by this? What did I mean when I said the psychiatrist did not understand me? How did the psychiatrist not understand me? Furthermore, how can I show this without saying the psychiatrist did not understand me.

So I promise I will write more on how to be accurate and more on how to take on the powerful.

Taking on the Powerful

2009-07-07T10:20:00.009-05:00

In one short chapter of Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted Kaysen takes on the psychiatrist who referred her to McLean. The chapter is entitled "Do You Believe Him or Me?" The psychiatrist claims to have spent 3 hours with Kaysen that morning and she claims he spent 20 minutes. Kaysen works backward from when she arrived at McLean, using various documents from her medical records.

As an insider I had never questioned the effectiveness of this section. I had known too many sources of official documents to be careless with the facts. For instance at one point in my parent's divorce decree the judge refers to their three children; the only children were my brother and me. So perhaps I was primed to believe Kaysen, and fascinated that she used one part of her medical record to refute another part.

However, I've met several people whose willingness to believe her turns against her on the basis of this chapter. I think the issue is one of audience. When writing for insiders less context is needed when attempting to refute the psychiatrist because as insiders we have our own experiences with psychiatrists as fallible humans. For outsiders however, significantly more context is required.

My other concern is that in boldly answering the question "Do you believe him or me?" Kaysen puts herself in an uncomfortable position if despite her evidence the reader answers him. There are other ways to sow doubt and gain belief besides asking the question. Kaysen's strategy is a high risk one. My post tomorrow will be about strategies for taking on the powerful.

What Language to Use?

2009-07-06T19:30:00.001-05:00

I ran across an interesting post recently at The Trouble with Spikol about the impact of how language is used to identify people with psychiatric disabilities.

I think it's pretty obvious from my "people who" construction where I fall on the spectrum, but let's go over some of the options first.

She's bipolar or schizophrenic or depressive.

She has bipolar disorder or has schizophrenia or has depression.

She has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder or has been diagnosed with schizophrenia or depression.

One consideration is that merely mentioning diagnosis instead of also communicating how symptoms affect a particular person is that what is communicated by saying she's a person with bipolar disorder is much less specific than saying she gets very impulsive and feels on top of the world and then crashes into a deep depression, which is still less specific than describing in detail what happens and what it feels like for this specific woman to be in a manic state and then in the following depression.

This is important beyond discussing diagnosis. For example I try to avoid words such as hospitalized. Sure it's used beyond the psychiatric disability community but it is at a minimum off-putting. Furthermore I'm really not wild about converting hospitalize into the noun hospitalization. It is language meant for a bureaucrat's report not for creative writing. I always use hospital stay instead unless I'm quoting someone or if I wrote fiction, writing dialog.

Another word I find off-putting is shortening social worker to worker as in "My worker says I shouldn't move there." Perhaps part of the problem is that nearly all if not all of people in mainstream culture do not have social workers, and therefore having a social worker is in itself a mark of stigma. Part of the issue is one of audience. If you are writing for insiders perhaps they can encounter the word and because they are familiar with the context they can begin to appreciate what you're getting at. Again I think the best course is to be specific about what it is like for this specific person to have this specific social worker while being true to voice you're writing in.

So while considering what language to use to describe how mental illness impacts people's lives is endlessly fascinating to me, at some point it becomes more useful to me to think about what such descriptions reveal and hide. What do you think?

Black or Nude Pantyhose Or The Costs of Being a Reliable Narrator

2009-06-02T20:19:00.005-05:00

I've been busy thinking about the costs of being a reliable narrator, and wondering if being a reliable narrator necessitates not being ourselves. In Alice Sebold's Lucky, a memoir of Sebold's rape and its aftermath, there are heartbreaking details about how carefully she must present herself to be believed.

Early in the memoir Sebold is not believed by a police officer, and as she engages the legal system and becomes a witness she makes very conscious choices about how to present herself. The telling detail here is the nylons Sebold chooses to wear to court. They are nude, not black, and borrowed from her college dorm's RA because she does not want to appear slutty. Certainly cultural or institutional sexism influences this choice. However, I'm merely going to acknowledge this and move on.

My question is: How does one narrate the mental illness experience truthfully and wholly, yet still believably?

I think the best answer to this question is that one portrays the struggle fully. Sebold does this well. She shows the artifice she adopted to be believed and is clear in her narrative as to why she's adopted it.

When the police officer does not believe her she does not sneak this rupture in belief past the reader, she explains it fully and truthfully. So, the take away then is to make the struggle visible.

For information on upcoming Writing Mental Illness classes please visit my class page.

What Telling Your Story Might Not Get You (Soon)

2009-05-18T11:25:00.004-05:00

I'm at the New York Mills Regional Cultural Center in Northern Minnesota for the month of May 2009 at their Arts Retreat on a fellowship from the Jerome Foundation. I'll be posting from a cache of posts I wrote in late April, and most likely won't be responding to comments until I return.

There are so many things that telling your story will achieve, for that see this previous post, Why Tell Your Story? However, there are many things that telling your story can't get you such as instant fame, love and appreciation, or a just world or restoration of your life before or without the mental illness.

I think pondering what writing won't get you is another way of asking the question Why do I write? So fame is not guaranteed, nor is love, nor is appreciation. Hmmmm. A just world would be a wonderful thing, but certainly not an immediate result. I've argued previously that to come out, to spark political change, to build community and to make something beautiful are certainly among the reasons why I tell my story.

These are all great reasons but they are long-term reasons. Also required is the ability to find immediate gratification by mucking about with words. I quote Isabella "letters are yummy, words are yummy, sentences are yummy, grammar is yummy, language is yummy." What I mean is that as inspired as I get by those longer-term reasons I need immediate gratification as well.

So what keeps you writing day-by-day, hour-by-hour?

I'll be teaching Writing Mental Illness again in June.

Establishing a Writing Routine

2009-05-12T13:39:00.008-05:00

Why You Should Have a Writing Routine?

This can be controversial, but I believe routine is one of the keys to a successful writing practice. Often people say they don't believe in a writing routine because they believe it will be too constricting. And some routines championed by writing gurus certainly would seem constricting to most people. I don't think the point is to come up with a constricting, rigid routine, but to make one your own.

I think the point of a routine is to get the writing done. I'm certain that if you write only when the mood strikes you that you will not develop a strong writing muscle, and may find your writing does not reflect the whole of you. This is because your writing mood will be the only part of your emotions your writing is imbued with.

So, how to develop a writing routine of your own?

When are You On?

What Time Do You Have?

So What to do with the Time You've Dedicated

A Timer

Sarah Tieck

I'll be teaching Writing Mental Illness again in June.

Towards Righting Trauma by Writing

2009-04-27T17:38:00.003-05:00

Not only can some (me) argue that a diagnosis of severe mental illness is a trauma in itself, studies have suggested that both PTSD and exposure to traumatic events are not uncommon (and are frequently underdiagnosed) among people with chronic mental illness.

I ran across this scholarly article on the web by Sophie Tamas called Writing and Righting Trauma: Troubling the Autoethnographic Voice. What I find most interesting about it is this:

If we are sitting in the gore and confusion of our own suffering, my sane, readable account of loss may reinforce the expectation that our trauma ought to make sense, and if it doesn't we must be somehow inadequate or failing. It implies that the order of the universe is, in fact, intact, and the traumatized who have lost faith in reason, language, and human decency are mistaken. I do not think realizing that we are utterly lost and broken necessarily causes despair. What breaks us is the impression that everyone else isn't. Clean and reasonable scholarship about messy, unreasonable experiences is an exercise in alienation.

Tamas doesn't offer any solutions in this piece. I believe that one can position oneself as a reliable narrator and still be and portray oneself as one who has "lost faith in reason, language and human decency." There are two reasons I believe this.

1) I have run across some of the writing I was doing when I had indeed lost faith in all three, and it is much better than I remembered it being.

2) To be judged a reliable narrator and be one who has lost faith in these things requires troubling what the word "sane" means. I strongly feel that troubling the words about us, about people with mental illness are key to change around attitudes towards mental illness. What do you think?

Writing Mental Illness is coming up in June 2009. Also, follow me on Twitter: @alison_bergblom.

The Edunia, or Why I Prefer Narrative over Science

2009-04-20T10:11:00.006-05:00

Eduardo Kac's current exhibit at the Weisman includes a genetically engineered petunia. The genetic engineering involved adding a snippet of human DNA, namely Kac's, to the petunia, thereby making it an Edunia. It was a pretty plant, or plantimal as Kac is supposed to refer to it. However, I'm not certain what else there is to say about the Edunia. Certainly it is pretty.

This lack of speech on encountering the Edunia probably suggests why I write narratives instead of say L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry.

How about you? What do you have nothing to say about and why?

Writing Mental Illness is next offered in June.

Powerful Language or The Metaphor in Action

2009-04-13T15:36:00.008-05:00

One of the most fun experiences I've had in teaching writing was when I first taught metaphor to people with chronic mental illness. When teaching I always define metaphor as something is something else. A metaphor: Healing from trauma is eating a raw onion.

For many of my students part of their mental illness is believing something is something else, as in a delusion such as a toaster is really a spy communication device or "I am really the lost princess daughter of a Beatle."

For some of these students the idea that people without mental illness also indulge in something is something else thinking, in metaphor, is a revelation.

The next online Writing Mental Illness is June 5-7, 2009.

Upcoming Writing Mental Illness Online Workshop

2009-04-06T20:50:00.005-05:00

Writing Mental Illness, a workshop that explores creative writing strategies to tell stories of personal experience of mental illness with credibility, coherence and power, will be offered early this June. For more details please visit the class page on my web site.

Class on Writing Mental Illness Offered in February

2009-01-26T20:51:00.004-06:00

I'm offering Writing Mental Illness again in February. This will be a repeat of last weekend's class. It will be February 13-15. 6pm central time on the 13th start time, and end on the 15th at 4pm, again central time. For more info, please visit my site.

I also am working on developing a seminar-style course for those who have previously taken Writing Mental Illness. Please let me know if you are interested or have any ideas for this class.

Disability as Cultural Identity: Implications for Writing

2009-01-16T19:41:00.019-06:00

I love art. I love talking about disability. Therefore it's no surprise that I'm blogging about a new exhibit at Davidson College that explores their intersection. Specifically the exhibit takes on disability as cultural identity. Re/Formations: Women, Disability and Sculpture inspires all sorts of heady questions about the nature of disability and of art; of the connection between femininity and disability.

However, I want to think about what this particular exhibit of sculpture has to teach us as writers. Here are a few of thoughts.

Let's Be Specific In order to tell the whole story we must begin in one narrow corner of it, and fill in as many details about that corner as necessary. Harriet Sanderson, the artist who made the piece pictured above, doesn't try to take on every corner of the disability experience. Instead she begins with the image of canes.
Let's Be Bold Being bold means the courage to say what you mean. Being able and willing to talk about what it's really like to live with a psychiatric disability and be judged for it.
Let's Be Craftful

So, go check out the other pieces in the show at Davidson College, and let me know what you think.

On Being a Reliable Narrator

2009-01-12T20:39:00.005-06:00

I've been told being a reliable narrator is crucial to effective memoir about mental illness. I don't for a moment dispute this, however this can be a challenge both because of symptoms of illness and because people with mental illness are often not taken seriously.

Leaving aside the reliable narrator, the definition of an unreliable narrator is:

"Whether due to age, mental disability or personal involvement, an unreliable narrator provides the reader with either incomplete or inaccurate information as a result of these conditions"

according to a wiki at Georgetown.

So, for me at first glance the most important words in that sentence are mental disability. However, after I thought about it I decided that incomplete or inaccurate information is where the focus should be. Bottom line, the semantics of that definition suggests that a narrator can be reliable despite age, mental disability or personal involvement as long as their information is complete and accurate.

However, I'm inclined to go even further than this and argue that a narrator remains reliable despite incomplete or inaccurate information if they acknowledge explicitly that their narrative may be incomplete or inaccurate.

I don't believe that it is either lack of a mental disability or omniscience that makes a narrator reliable; it is being straightforward and transparent about where one's information comes from and what its limitations might be.

Why Tell Your Story?

2009-01-10T17:52:00.001-06:00

I've been working on a post about the need to be perceived as a reliable narrator when writing about mental illness. This is a thorny issue because the definition of an unreliable narrator is

"Whether due to age, mental disability or personal involvement, an unreliable narrator provides the reader with either incomplete or inaccurate information as a result of these conditions"

according to a wiki at Georgetown. More on being a reliable narrator despite a "mental disability" in that post.

But for now, I've found some pretty good writing over at Storied Mind written by John D. I left him a comment stating that even though he seemed to be writing primarily for healing he was committing literature anyway. This has me thinking a lot about the "whys" of telling one's story besides healing.

To Come Out

Milk

To Build Community

To Spark Political Change

To Make Something Beautiful

These are my main reasons to write about mental illness besides for healing, and I've been thinking as I've been writing about why I am so opposed to writing for healing that doesn't attend to craft. Part of it is because that sort of writing turns inward away from the larger world and the political dimension is so important to me.

So, why do you write? For healing? For social change? For craft?

Also, I'll be teaching Writing Mental Illness online January 23rd to 25th, for more info click here.

Class, Writing Mental Illness, Offered Online

2008-12-26T16:16:00.004-06:00

I'll be teaching Writing Mental Illness online from January 23rd through January 25th.

Writing Mental Illness is an important course because of how difficult it is to speak of mental illness and be heard.

For more info, click here.

Alma was an Artist

2008-12-07T20:46:00.003-06:00

This is a picture my grandmother's aunt Alma painted. It was among those I shared at the reading last night.

Reading at Patrick's Cabaret: Dec 5th & 6th

2008-11-15T16:55:00.002-06:00

I'll be reading at Patrick's Cabaret in Minneapolis on December 5th & 6th from my memoir She's Going to Heal: Mental Illness in an American Family. The show is at 8pm.

Patrick's is located at Lake & Minnehaha.

Hope to see you there.

Teaching and Disability

2008-09-22T07:30:00.000-05:00

Because my disability is hidden, I'm faced with the privilege of deciding whether to come out as disabled. I remember once disclosing that I had a disability during a job interview. "But you don't look disabled," the interviewer said. She didn't mean I didn't walk with a cane. She meant I didn't look like the image of a special-needs person she had in her head.

I think the biggest issue we people with disabilities face is the image the general public keeps in their heads of what disability means. So if the whole point of coming out as gay was to show that GLBT people were ordinary people, then couldn't the same strategy work for people with disabilities? Interviewers and others with power will never know what really is possible despite or because of a disability unless we stand up and declare ourselves.

Nothing about us without us. This was(is) the rallying cry of the disability rights movement. It merely argues for our own participation in shaping our own destiny. This is great, but not enough. So many people with disabilities, myself included, spend way too long buying into the popular conception of disability. This popular conception means we are somehow less than those without a disability. Can accomplish less. Need to not stretch ourselves to our full abilities because the stress might make the disability worse.

So, I've been thinking a lot lately about how to use authority in the classroom. Because bullying writing teachers are notorious it can be tempting to abdicate authority and run a completely egalitarian classroom. Personally, I feel at least part of my work in the classroom is to be a role model.

That's why when I teach, I always disclose I have a disability because my class is about how to write about a disability - mental illness. I want my students to be able to expand their sense of what is possible despite a disability.

Techniques for Writing Mental Illness

2008-08-30T16:53:00.001-05:00

I taught Writing Mental Illness in June and July for Artability at Apollo. As I've been thinking about how those classes went I've been thinking about the best techniques to tell stories of mental illness from a place of agency.

These techniques are to

* use generic good writing skills. Use a small slice of time, search for the telling detail, earn the right to speak in generalities by speaking in specifics first, use metaphor to invite your reader to leave the given, every-day world with you.

* be aware that mental illness and interaction with the mental health system can be a traumatic experience and therefore in telling mental illness try to transform traumatic speech. According to Shoshana Felman in Education and Crisis or the Vicissitudes of Teaching in Trauma: Explorations and Memory traumatic speech is above all else the tendency to repeat and repeat the story with the same words yet not gain distance or mastery over it despite the telling.

* acknowledge the way time can run funny in experiences of the mental health system and when experiencing mental illness by experimenting with chronology. For more on how to skillfully play with chronology see Sven Birkert's The Art of Time in Memoir from Graywolf Press.

* remember James Pennebaker's work on the healing effects of writing which found that writing which incorporates both feeling and fact is the more healing than writing that only incorporates feelings or only incorporates fact. Bottom line, whether it is healing or not, good writing incorporates both feeling and fact. I think this is true even in fiction, especially when considering fact to be details such as "Mary rested in an old brown recliner gazing out on a blue sky."

I'd be curious to know what anyone has to add, and what y'all think of what is on the list.

MLK Jr, Barack Obama, and Exodus

2008-08-28T21:25:00.002-05:00

This was kicking around in my head all day long yesterday, and it was approached or implied more than once on NPR/MPR yesterday. (By the way, I'm treating political speech as literature at least for the purposes of this post.)

So, the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years before they entered the land of milk and honey. As a child this was always inexplicable to me, but my Sunday school teachers always explained it as that God wanted a new generation who had not known slavery in Egypt to enter the promised land because God did not want God's children to enter the promised land with the culture of slavery.

Then, despite it being the anniversary of the I Have a Dream speech, King's Mountain Top speech was running through my head. "I may not get there with you, but I have been to the mountain top and I have seen the promised land."

This may just be it folks. The promised land. Barack Obama, as Rep. John Lewis pointed out on Morning Edition was not raised in a segregationist country.

"He never saw the signs that said 'White Men,' 'Colored Men,' 'White Women,' 'Colored Women,' " Lewis adds. "He never tasted the fruits of segregation and racial discrimination, so he is a different human being. He should be free to liberate the rest of America, and maybe take a message to the rest of the world."

He didn't know it. He does not know the culture of slavery.

King is not there with us.

But this is how Obama can both champion a post-racial politics and be a continuation of the civil rights movement.

On flirtation with Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart

2008-02-14T08:40:00.002-06:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about how books work their way into my life. Of course as a reader I'm always reading something. But, why am I reading Joyce Carol Oates' Blonde instead of the Lee Smith novel I picked up a month ago, or Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City? My path to a book might be as simple as noticing it in the bookstore, buying it, and then reading it immediately. However, the path is often more circuitous. As a writer, this relationship is endlessly intriguing to me because I hope to someday have my own books out there on bookstore shelves hoping to win readers.

I came across Shot in the Heart as a result of reading Leigh Gilmore's The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, which I found in the literary theory section of Amazon Bookstore Cooperative in South Minneapolis in June 2001. I picked it up because I was trying to figure out how to testify to trauma. I had zero interest in writing autobiography or memoir at that point. I was a poet with a tendency toward narrative including the personal. But I was a poet primarily and intended to remain so..

One of the cases in The Limits of Autobiography was Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart. I was intrigued by this book and wanted to read it, but didn't get to it then.

Then several years later at the reception to a Mark Doty reading I heard him tell someone that he thought she should read Shot in the Heart as a model for her own memoir. I still wasn't a memoirist, but I loved Mark Doty, the poet, and therefore trusted any recommendation from him.

However, I still didn't read Shot in the Heart. I had a flirtation with this book before I picked it up and actually read it. Finally, in the Spring of 2006 I was starting to work on the essays that would become the project I'm currently working on She's Going to Heal. As an apprentice memoirist I went looking for models and remembered Shot in the Heart. I got a first edition hardcover from the library, and read and reread it several times over the next few weeks.

This is a book that grasped me and marked me. It told the truth as Mikal Gilmore understood it. I fell in love with memoir as a genre. If anyone wishes to share books which have grasped and marked them or comment on anything else please do so.

On Encouraging All Readings

2008-02-10T16:35:00.000-06:00

One of the things I loved about being a student at Arts High was that everyone had to go to Common Ex. Ex stood for experience. Everyone came to Common Ex. Photographers. Filmmakers. Musicians. Dancers. Visual Artists. Writers. There was an attitude that there was something any artist could learn about the practice of their specific art from the other disciplines.

So in this spirit I attended a dialogue between Paul Shambroom and Vince Leo at the Weisman Art Museum on "The Artist in a Democracy". Paul Shambroom's photographs are on view at the Weisman through April 20, 2008. The exhibit is called Picturing Power, and I came away from both the talk and the exhibition thinking about what can be applied to writing from these experiences.

Paul Shambroom said, "I encourage all readings." Readings that were discussed ranged from considering the photographs an expression of the greatness of democracy in the US to a more cynical view of them as a critique of the US. Shambroom discussed all of these readings in a very respectful way, but said these interpretations say more about the viewer than about the artist. In addition, he said he does not want to be told what to think and therefore he does not make art that tells people what to think.

Shambroom did note that many artists he knows may comment that a reviewer "didn't get it" or missed the point of an artwork. I know exactly how this feels. Once, at a poetry conference, a famous poet commented on a poem of mine, about a kindergarten kiss on the school bus and my observation of what different social worlds this boy I kissed and I came from. The famous poet told me that this poem was about (cue the violins) enduring romantic love, and how someone could meet their true love in kindergarten. I can't imagine stating calmly and with respect that this reading showed the famous poet's own views of love.

So, I have some distance to go before I can emulate Paul Shambroom, and "encourage all readings" even those that I find distasteful. However, I'm wondering if I might like to. To remember that in some sense my work is a Rorsch blot that the reader has reactions to and these show the personality of the reader. This is in some sense a relief because my writing gets referred to as gritty or edgy, and therefore includes much to react to.

Dona Schwartz, another photographer who teaches at the U, noted that encouraging all readings places responsibility on the viewer, similar to placing responsibility on citizens in a democracy. I LOVE this. Under this supposition, artists make art, presumeably we make fertile art that has something for an audience to react to. But, the audience is responsible for their own readings. Their responses to a piece are their own.

As a writer who writes personal, edgy pieces I have often been immobilized by other's reactions to my work. This way of thinking is a way for me to remain activated and writing.

The Dread Writer's Block

2008-02-05T20:06:00.000-06:00

For about the last month I've been not writing, not merely just not writing this blog. So I thought my first post back should be about the dread writer's block.

When I was at Arts High, everytime a guest came to our class, someone would ask whether they believed in writer's block or not.

This can be a more loaded question than it sounds. Because if someone doesn't believe in writer's block they believe you should write through feeling blocked. Even if such writing only consists of I am a terrible writer. I am blocked and writing is useless.

Perhaps this is a way to get through being blocked. But it doesn't work for me. What works for me is writing what is top of mind. Whatever it is that is on the tip of my tongue but I don't want to speak of. The stuff that I say I will never write about because I don't want anyone to ever see.

Sometimes, it is as if I say I won't write about say, an illness in the family, and my subconscious merely hears I won't write. So perhaps, the way to begin again, is to simply write I will write about what I said I won't write about. I don't believe this should be shared, unless you wish it to be.

What works when you are blocked?

Telling Details

2007-11-18T19:52:00.000-06:00

I've been busy working on my memoir, so I haven't posted much lately, but I'm going to try to post more often.

As I'm working on my memoir, one of the things I'm sifting around in my past for are telling details. And so I was thinking of my favorite telling detail in one of my favorite memoirs, Shot in the Heart. This book is one of the best family memoirs around. It was written by the brother of the murderer Gary Gilmore, exploring the mythology and history of violence in his family.

The telling detail I'm thinking of is a story the mother told Mikal Gilmore and his brothers growing up about being forced to witness an execution by hanging. She was extremely graphic in describing this scene. In doing research for his book Mikal couldn't find any reference to such an execution in the real world.

His mother had been telling all of them a horrifying, made-up story.

I feel that this one scene stands in as sort of a catch phrase for so much ground that Mikal explores in the book. Particularly, his mother's culpability for committing violence, and the lies of omission and commission told by both parents.

Why I Love this Telling Detail and not Another

Because I get chills when I read this scene. Because the writing is so finely honed that it evokes an emotional response. I believe this is why we write: to make someone feel something. It's the old afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted thing.

As I'm writing, because I'm maybe only a third of the way through the memoir, I can't yet see which detail will be the telling detail. I do have a few contenders, but I'm not ready to share them yet. As well, I doubt I would ever publicly proclaim what I thought the telling detail was.

I'd love to hear about anyone else's favorite telling detail and why.

Writing Mental Illness Workshop October 27, 2007

2007-10-06T15:56:00.000-05:00

Here are the details on a workshop I will be teaching on October 27, 2007 from 9am to 12pm at Intermedia Arts called Writing Mental Illness. The course description is over on Intermedia Arts' website. (You'll have to scroll down a little bit.)

We'll definately be reading Sylvia Plath, and from a Modern Library anthology about women and mental illness. There will be a few others. And we'll do some writing too.

I'm really excited, and hope to see you there.

To sign up, call Intermedia Arts at (612) 871-4444.

On Diversity and the Canon

2007-09-18T21:10:00.001-05:00

I was listening to this broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio a while back about summer reading lists. Part of the discussion revolved around whether lists should focus on classics or on books like Nancy Drew and Harry Potter. Someone called in and wanted to know essentially whose classics. The classic works of people of color, of women, etc, or is it the works of white men?

One of the guests, Peder Zane, said he did not want to think of Cervantes as merely another Dead White Man. This, incidentally, I agree with. Personally, I find it painful to think of Whitman as merely another dead white man. The guest said that he could understand why people of color or women would want to see themselves reflected in the books they read. However, he said, and I paraphrase, that classics are classics because they are universal.

That classics were by definitions books anyone could relate to. And to this I feel like adding noisily then what about the classic works of literature by men and women of color, by white women?

Furthermore, I would argue that a number of books considered classics, that are in the canon and were written by men do more than simply fail to reflect the lives of women and people of color. They offer significantly negative portraits of women and minorities. I must admit I am most sensitive to examples of this concerning women.

Exhibits

A Farewell to Arms

Tender is the Night

I'll do a follow-up post about why I find these books so painful.

Why Reading Matters

2007-08-21T05:55:00.000-05:00

I listened to this speech by Dana Goia, president of the National Endowment for the Arts at the Aspen Ideas Festival, on MidDay, Gary Eichten's show on Minnesota Public Radio.

Goia says that people who read have more civic engagement than people who don't. This is even true when income and education are controlled for.

I also stumbled across this blog post on how to encourage boys to read. I think it is problematic in that it is much longer than necessary, and published by a publisher of children's books. However, it does point out some things which should be obvious, but aren't always common knowledge such as the fact that boys are interested in different kinds of books than girls are, especially adventure, and history. Also, it mentions one of my favorite books when I was young, Gary Paulson's Hatchet.

Workshop: Writing Mental Illness

2007-08-14T05:58:00.000-05:00

I found out today I'll be teaching a workshop on Writing Mental Illness this fall here in Minneapolis at Intermedia Arts, the new home of SASE: The Write Place. I don't know the date yet, but will let y'all know that and any other pertinent info as soon as I know.

The Fourth Genre?

2007-08-12T08:17:00.000-05:00

Creative nonfiction is at once one of the most dynamic movements in contemporary letters, and a literary genre with its roots deep in the literature of the past. - Stonecoast MFA Program

As a writer who is working on a memoir, I've taken the stability of creative nonfiction, the fourth genre for granted. Of course there is a fourth genre. Of course that fourth genre is creative nonfiction. This is why there is a journal called The Fourth Genre that publishes creative nonfiction.

Imagine my surprise to realize creative nonfiction, is not universally considered a stable genre. Apparently according to Claire De Obaldia writing in a 1995 book, there are literary critics such as Peter Schon who do not believe there have been any essayists since Montaigne.

I was reading something Lee Gutkind wrote, and he was talking about having been involved in creative nonfiction since it was called New Journalism. The reality is that whatever you call the form, creative nonfiction or something else, there have been people working in this genre for years and there will be people who continue to, whether it is recognized as such or not, and in addition there will be an audience for this work.

Open Mic Thursday Night / Professional Jealousy

2007-08-04T10:58:00.000-05:00

Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts." - Albert Einstein

I was at ep atelier's spoken word open mic Thursday night. I read the prologue to the novel I just started. I refer to it as the new novel to distinguish it from the old novel, which is sitting in a drawer somewhere, abandoned but for the fact that I'm planning on coming back to it. With the exception of Dorothy Allison, who reads prose like it's a play, and is stunningly entertaining, I find it is difficult to really hold an audience's attention with prose, especially if everyone else is reading poetry. Anyway, I think this piece, this prologue, went over pretty well for being prose. I got some nice comments on the images in it.

Also, the Minnesota Slam Team was there. Their web site is a bit out of date, but I thought I'd share the link anyway. They have some good stuff. I liked some pieces better than others, All members of the team were great performers, and a few were great writers.

I noticed the whole jealousy thing come up for me while I was watching them perform. There's part of me that is furious I got sick, and that I am so far behind because of it. Everything I've accomplished becomes invisible to me when I feel jealous. So therefore, I'm trying to remember the above Einstein quote. Also, a friend of mine told me that jealousy suggests what one wants to accomplish. And I like that, using jealousy as a spur towards my dreams.

I also wanted to mention the I-35W bridge collapse. Being a Minneapolitan I know this hits my city and state hard. I cross the river everyday, and have taken bridges for granted until Wednesday. Also, my heart goes out to the dead and injured and their families and friends. Check out the Red Cross to learn more or donate.

Joan Didion | The Year of Magical Thinking

2007-07-31T07:36:00.001-05:00

First off, I won't be coy. I liked it. A lot.

I love how Joan Didion kept repeating certain phrases throughout The Year of Magical Thinking, such as cool customer, and life changes fast. That imbued the phrases with layers of meaning. Repetition is a technique I've used a lot in poetry and less frequently in prose, so I was thrilled to see a very effective example of it here.

An acquaintance (who is a writer - memoir - but I've never read her stuff) said she didn't like the book because she thought it read like journal entries. I feel like this opinion puts writers in a compromising position. Either write a very novelistic memoir such as Running with Scissors or it's just journal entries.

This is a problem because a very novelistic memoir is by necessity at least partly fictional. Characters become composites of real people, dialogue is recreated. The plot line is sometimes edited to fit classic story structure. And this is all fine if the writer spells out what they are doing. However, I feel most books that use all these strategies are fiction. If a book is a contract between a reader and writer, and the book is nonfiction, one of most reader's expectations is that the book is true.

The Year of Magical Thinking may not be written as a novelistic memoir, but I'm willing to argue that its accuracy and truthfulness will never be questioned.

So what is a writer of memoir to do? I don't want to write memoir that will be dismissed as journal entries. Is it possible to use techniques from fiction, such as dialogue and scenes, and still write a truthful memoir. I believe it is, and will explain why in another post.

Furthermore, The Year of Magical Thinking is in the literary essay tradition. It isn't meant to read like fiction, it's about exploring and deepening an idea. Look for a post exploring and deepening this idea soon.

Just What Am I Doing Here, Anyway?

2007-07-27T21:19:00.002-05:00

Writing Mental Illness, the blog, enables people who have experienced mental illness either personally or as a family member to create literature about psychiatric disability by examining successful writing on the issue such as Girl, Interrupted or The Bell Jar, taking on craft issues from a creative writing perspective and looking to other art areas for inspiration.

The point of all of this is to engage with the mental health system, to decrease the stigma of mental illness, and promote equality of those who have a psychiatric disability.

I also offer a course called Writing Mental Illness that gets deeper into these issues, provides an opportunity to do some writing and to get some feedback.

Follow this link for more about me.

Just Who Am I, Anyway?

2007-07-27T19:57:00.002-05:00

About ten years ago, my father told me I was a death poet, and I pretty much agreed. It was the truth as I understood it. When I wasn't writing about death; well, I was never not writing about death.

Now, I'm mostly writing about mental illness, but it isn't as catchy to call myself a mental illness poet.

And I'm not a poet anymore. Instead I have made my home in the genre Creative Nonfiction. I'm working on a memoir called She's Going to Heal: Mental Illness in an American Family. I was included in an anthology of sudden fiction by Minnesota writers by Spout Press called Blink. I've performed my work at the Walker Art Center, 7th Street Entry and Patrick's Cabaret.

I also teach the course Writing Mental Illness, about creating literature from psychiatric disability.

Writing Mental Illness | Alison Bergblom Johnson

We're Moving!!!

Staying with the Difficult

The Reader

How to Suppress Any Writing

5 Strategies to Begin to Write about Mental Illness

Imagining Your Reader

Critique Giveaway

On to Imagining Your Reader

Comforting Who?

Win a Free Manuscript Consult!

On to Comforting Who?

Genius and History

Daily Actions

Shaping the Mental Illness Story

Nothing Can Equal ...

Why Become an "Athlete of God?"

An Interpretation of "An Athlete of God"

Ways to Continue Writing about Mental Illness

What It Means

When You Shouldn't Write

Engaging with Difficult Material

How I Do It

Does Being Depressed Make Writers Better?

Practice for Writers

The Disability Blog Carnival #61, Telling About Disability

Telling About Disability

Documenting Ugly Behavior

Documenting Leaps Forward and Being Visible

Telling about Disability History

Coming Out

Telling about Disability to Intimate Partners

Ways to Begin Writing About Mental Illness, Part II

Ways to Begin Writing About Mental Illness, Part 1

So, How to Start?

Baby Steps

"How Difficult It Is"

When and How What We Write Shouldn't Be Political

In the First Draft

When We Have an Axe to Grind

What is Testimony?

Putting Down the Flag (Temporarily)

Being Out about Mental Illness

Call for Submissions Blog Carnival #61 Telling Disability

Stealing From Other Art Processes

Dance

Theater

Music

Visual

Where Does Permission Come From?

Revealing Meaning

Anne Sexton: Patient or Poet?

Guest Post: How Writing Becomes Sacred

I Love the Rain Taxi Book Festival!

The Least Space

The Big Picture

Stages of Writing

Beginning

Long Middle

Revision

The Unspoken

"Wonder and Reverence"

"Latin Roots Sui and Cidium"

Why Write About Mental Illness?

Every Move We Make...

Why Care About Common Ex?

Sustaining a Writing Practice

The Writing Time Card

Tips and Tricks

The Queer, Sultry Summer

In Whose Voice?

"The Error of Defining It"

Talking to The Boogie Man

Refrains and Habitual Action

Swish Click

Who will write about Mental Health on Campus?

Mask and Unveiling

Memory: A Thorny Subject

Disruptive Narratives

Not the Same Family