Answer Addiction

Tag: creativity

  • Artists in Recovery Find Their Fix in "The Creative High"

    Artists in Recovery Find Their Fix in "The Creative High"

    Creativity — making art — is another way to find that aliveness and spiritual connection often sought through drugs and alcohol. The creative process can be transformative for people with addiction.

    Recovery that consists of meetings, step work, and an unfulfilling job makes for a very black-and-white life — at least for me it did. That wasn’t the recovery I wanted. I was bored. When I got involved in creative endeavors, however, it was like adding color back into my world. For some people, creative expression becomes a new high.

    As I started to explore creativity and art, I realized that I’d opened a door to a part of me that had been closed since I started using drugs. As a child, I loved painting and crafting. I reignited that passion and began expressing myself in new ways: blogging, writing and journaling; painting and drawing; making art and attending craft classes; and creating new recipes. My world feels so much more livable with art in it.

    I’m not alone, fellow creative Jules tells me: “Art is everything, really. I don’t care if you write, paint, dance, sculpt, make movies, or whatever. It’s a way to choose an expression to share who you were and who you’re becoming. We’re all messes of insecurity and works in progress. The key is to keep working.”

    A big stumbling block for many of us is that we don’t know where to start, and, like Jules says, we have insecurity about our work. That’s where artist Tammi Salas comes in. Over the past few years, Tammi has been sharing her creative journey in recovery. Through Instagram, the #RecoveryGalsArtExchange, her podcast The Unruffled, and other ventures, Tammi gives us a starting point and inspires us to play.

    “Art helped me fill the void alcohol once occupied. My entire recovery is centered around making and creating art,” she says. “Not a day goes by without me tapping into my creative groove and seeing what comes out. Art anchors me and helps me reframe old stories and visually create new ones.”

    San Francisco-based filmmaker, educator, and arts therapist Adriana Marchione finds her creative outlet in film. For the last 20 years, she has been dedicated to supporting people struggling with substance use disorder and other addictions. Recently, she directed a new a documentary feature-length film, The Creative High.

    The Creative High Footage Teaser, Spring 2018 from Adriana Marchione on Vimeo.

    The documentary shares the stories of working artists — including Wesley Geer of Rock to Recovery and Ralph Spight, a punk musician who plays with Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys — who have faced addiction. The film reveals their transformational paths to recovery, and the natural “high” of making art. The Creative High brings the viewer into the world of hip-hop, drag performance, punk music, dance, theater, and visual art, demonstrating “the tension that exists between the altered states of creativity and addictive behavior.”

    Andriana Marchione took some time out of her schedule to discuss her creative process with The Fix.

    The Fix: How has art and creativity influenced your own journey in recovery?

    Adriana: I came into recovery 25 years ago as a photographer/visual artist, and at that time I didn’t see a lot of creative role models in recovery. To be safe and away from triggers around my addiction that mainly stemmed from alcohol abuse and unhealthy relationships, I felt that I needed to move away from my creative life and artist connections. Life slowly became manageable. I started to heal, I found peace of mind, but I missed the excitement and vibrancy that my art making gave me. I found more internal ways to express myself (art journaling, poetry, small collages) versus making art to exhibit or be in environments where I mingled with other creatives and had to confront drinking and social life — galleries, parties, bars. This led me to study expressive arts therapy after several years into recovery, and then I made a career out of this. This has been incredibly rewarding to me, giving me a life of purpose, and also finding a focus where I specialize in working with addiction recovery, and artists who face addictions and eating disorders.

    Along the way, I have found new ways to express myself: improv performance, Argentine tango, being an art curator for many years, and coming back to my love of media through filmmaking over the last five years. It also took a while (and continues to challenge me) to find the balance with creating art and being public in art making, taking risks but still being grounded in recovery.

    What motivated you to create this film, and what does it represent to you?

    Being dedicated to a creative project of substance and collaborating with the film team has been one of my hopes and visions in recovery. For the last 25 years, I have focused on art therapy and supporting people one-on-one or in a teaching setting, but when I started making documentaries I felt a strong calling to tell stories and make a larger statement through my art. Films have the power to do that.

    My first documentary film, When the Fall Comes, was released in 2014 and was about my personal journey with grief and using the arts to heal. This film gave me the inspiration to do more films because I realized how many people a film can reach and what a rich experience it is to be involved in the making of a film. It is also a passion project since the topic of creativity and addiction is so close to my heart. This is something I have lived and watched others struggle with in my work — how to have a creative life successful in recovery. I wanted to tell the artist’s story from a new perspective, with many voices. I wanted to give hope to artists in recovery and artists who are still caught in addictive cycles, but I also wanted to show how the arts can be an important vehicle for healing in recovery.

    In what ways do you think the film will speak to both people in recovery and to those seeking it? 

    I hope this film will give people a window into the real challenges and successes that artists who have suffered from substance use disorders face. I also think it is important for people to speak publicly about their addictions, so the public can see that recovery happens and so that we can continue to combat stigma that comes along with the disease of addictions.

    Some of the artists in the film have had to go through a process with this, and I applaud their courage and willingness to reveal their stories with the public. I hope that people viewing the film will have a deeper sense of the highs and lows that accompany the creative process and take the risk to create. I also want to convey the fact that seeking an alternative “high” through making art gives another channel to find that aliveness and spiritual connection often sought through drugs and alcohol. Art can be the new medicine, one that is productive and meaningful rather than destructive and life-diminishing. 

    You chose nine working artists from diverse backgrounds to feature in the film, rather than choosing celebrities. What unique qualities do you think that will bring to the overall production?

    It felt very important to tell a different story than the celebrity story. So many films, TV shows, memoirs have been put out that tell the dramatic story of famous people struggling with addiction. Addiction affects us all in some way, and there are so many artists who live ordinary lives (and extraordinary as well) who are trying to be successful with their art without falling into addictive behaviors. Documenting a variety of stories, from musicians to dancers to visual artists, shows all different sides of life. We wanted to show many recovery perspectives and how each one is unique but they all experience the power of the arts practice. 

    Conceptualizing and producing a film is a huge task. What other challenges have you faced making a film that was funded through donations?

    Making a feature-length documentary is a huge feat that requires endless determination. We have been making The Creative High and are now in post-production, which is the most expensive part of making a film. We have pursued many avenues for funding including applying to grants, crowdfunding, reaching out to private foundations, and seeking investors, sponsors and executive producers. In general, funding is not easy to procure for independent films, and we have found that the most effective way to gather the funds has been through individuals making small donations that add up. We are very open at this completion stage to have sponsors and executive producers join us with larger donations to help us get to the finish line!

    Last, how can we support your fundraising?

    You can support our fundraising by making a donation here. The sooner we gather our remaining funding, the faster we can complete the film and get its message to the public. All donations are tax-deductible. 

    Find out more about director Adriana Marchione’s work: www.adrianamarchione.com

    How do you express yourself in recovery? Tell us below.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Language Sideways: The Poetry of Addiction

    Language Sideways: The Poetry of Addiction

    In what ways do current poems of addiction represent the minds of addicts in the throes of active disease as well as after the process of recovery’s begun?

    Something poet Sam Sax said in an interview for The Fix has me thinking about poetry and addiction. “Poetry for me,” he told writer Christian Arthur, “is the only medium I’ve found that can accurately mimic how the brain moves.”

    I’ve sensed this ever since I stumbled into poetry in my early 20s, and though I’ve written books of poems and have taught writing for years, Sax’s statement reminds me that poets use language in radically unexpected ways. Rather than communicating directly, poetry sidesteps logic in ways that may enervate or baffle. Because its language may seem sleight-of-hand (or even swindle), poetry is a medium well-suited to embody the multidimensional shifting and meandering that the mind enacts on a regular basis. But what may seem merely perplexing language that distorts reality may also be noted as presenting how the brain actually moves, with dizzying speed from present to past, reality to fantasy, hard fact to symbolic representation, all in a moment or, more likely, a split second.

    Got it, and now we’re good to go back to our double espresso lattes and the latest CNN infuriation, right? But not so fast, for my coffee-charged mind is cycling through thoughts faster than I can process them, and my news-cycle drenched brain—well, never mind the news. The brain on coffee gets us closer to poetry, at least in the sense that I wish to explore here in relation to Sax’s statement. How, I wonder, does poetry fare under the strain of the addictive mind? What are the ways that poems written by recovering addicts mimic the mental circuitry of addictive thinking, that snarled labyrinth of brain moves that torture every addict I’ve known, both before and after sobriety? In what ways do current poems of addiction represent the minds of addicts in the throes of active disease as well as after the process of recovery’s begun?

    * * *

    Since American poetry is presently enjoying what may well be its golden age, I push away a stack of books by familiar poets and take up three recent books by first-time authors. Though Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Charles Bukowski, Etheridge Knight, Jean Valentine, Gregory Pardlo, Cynthia Cruz, Nick Flynn, Maggie Anderson, and Joan Larkin—whose poems on alcoholism The Los Angeles Times described as “the finest ever written on the subject”—have much to tell us about how the addictive mind works, I wish to witness the mental machinations of those at the frontlines of sobriety.

    So I turn to the most recent debut poets issue of Poets & Writers magazine, where I find ten first books, at least three of which address the subject of addiction.

    To read Sam Sax’s Madness, William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind (both chosen for the National Poetry Series) and Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf is to enter danger zones in which the only direction we have comes not from GPS, but from eyeballing how close we drive to the edge of a cliff. In these poems, the mind is vertiginous, and in many cases its language sidesteps reductive meaning in order to reproduce, in the reader’s mind, states of mentality pertaining to the addictive impulse. In each of these books, non-linear, sideways-moving language introduces us to harrowing inner worlds. Words swoop down without warning to initiate us in the experience of drug-induced psychosis or to the grief in watching a brother overdose. Lines come at us from around blind corners to ambush us with the minutiae of what detox feels like, from the inside out. Meaning strips us bare then retreats, and words act not as locatable comfort, but as ventriloquized ephemera, cast-off detritus of the unspeakable degradations and mysteries of the addicted mind.

    In its 79 pages, Madness (Penguin 2017) reveals a mind reeling from institutionalization, addiction to alcohol and painkillers, and the initial stages of recovery. Its concision may appear, at first, as imprisonment until you find that Sax’s language is liberating, untethered, and—dare I say it?—downright playful. You read these poems as interior landscapes. Though statements such as “i can only half-blame alcohol for my overdose / the other half is my own hand / that poured the codeine” (“On Alcohol”) occur, by virtue of Sax’s skill with wordplay and cadence, we’re invited to participate in a mind surveying its experience of an addictive trajectory that spans active withdrawal to whispered reprieve.

    The heft of his subject matter—inpatient mental illness, queer identification and sex as painkiller, an uncle’s cancer, and, of course, drug use—may seem weighty enough to crumple the reader into one of Sax’s finely-wrought pages. Yet the writing style renders Sax’s project one of resuscitation and, for this gay reader, affirmation.

    I have to work for it, though, and Sax gives nothing away cheap. Starting with a prefatory block of clinical language from the DSM-1 (1952), words, in and of themselves, cannot be trusted. “[T]his must be the way of things,” Sax writes in one of the four poems titled “Psychotherapy,” “—all signs pointing toward unknowable destinations.” In the mental states of addiction, nothing clear-cut will do. Sax’s speaker opts for a more chaotic approach. “i’ve begun to grow distrustful of sense,” he says in “On Syphilis,” “let there be madness in the text.” Linear meaning oppresses the mind the way disease oppresses the body, until there’s nothing for language to do but to burst out of its skin. That means, in the mind moving in these poems, out and up, into the freedom of wordplay.

    Linguistic play sets the reader on notice as to the liberties this book takes with documenting a mind that refuses to move in acceptably linear ways. Words rub against each other, a form of auditory intrigue. “[A]ll our white blood / cells an oven,” Sax writes in “Fever Therapy, “a coven of bees blushing,” the off-rhyme (eye rhyme) of “oven” and “coven” creating a kind of linguistic harmony. Elsewhere Sax puts into motion a series of two- and three-word morphing patterns—“comets” / “comma” and “boarding” / “boring” and “sickle,” “silk,” “sick” (“Diagnosis”); “ward,” “warden,” “wars” (“Willowbrook”); “city,” “family,” “ancestry” (“On Syphilis”)—chains of sound that please the ear and, in one possible interpretation, mirror the circularity of the speaker’s addictive mind. Rationality is turned on its side, and we are driven over it, roughshod.

    As I read, Sax’s cadence catches my attention as language becomes a percussive instrument drumming out the mind’s anguish. Punctuation, or its lack, emphasizes these poems’ rhythms, as well as their barrage of mental buzz. In Sax’s hands, driving cadences refuse logic while simultaneously giving rise to a clashing sonic beauty that articulates feeling (drowning? enclosure?) better than most narrative can. Take these lines, for instance, from “Transorbital Lobotomy”:

    in the fifties there were tens of thousands performed in the states

    sour mess. sour mash. mash-up. macerate.

    cut a rug. jitterbug. wonder drug. gutter. tug. suture. lacerate.

    erasure. erase. raced. deadened. dead end.

    How can writing about lobotomy sound so, um, appealing? So mentally alive? There’s more than meets the eye: an outpouring of mind that moves toward implying the panic and dis-ease of circular thinking, while simultaneously (and subliminally) encoding that which is sonically recuperative. In one of the main ways that Sax’s poems encode mental activity, sound, in and of itself, simultaneously embodies the horrors of addiction and enacts recovery.

    Recovery’s brain moves happen in William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind (Milkweed 2017), but differently. New York magazine calls Brewer “America’s poet laureate of the opioid crisis,” but even those like myself who have never taken recreational opioids might find familiar ground here. Addiction is addiction, and in “Oxyana,” the place Brewer defines as “[a] nickname given to the town of Oceana, West Virginia, after becoming a capital of OxyContin abuse,” the addictive mind proliferates. But it’s also where I experience a degree of skepticism with regard to Brewer’s poetics, for this statement seems more explicit than what I’ve come to hope for in poetry. My misgiving only increased as I read further: “Following a successful crackdown on prescription painkillers, heroin has now flooded the state. West Virginia has the highest fatal overdose rate in America, nearly three times the national average.” How, I wonder, can this factual language reach a state of epiphany that poetry is primed to offer? Explanation, my thinking goes, kills the spell that lyricism attempts to cast.

    Which is what I expect to happen in I Know Your Kind. Brewer’s emphasis on Oxyana feels narrow, literally confining. And I sense a further problem in Brewer’s first poem, “Oxyana, West Virginia,” which opens with a panoramic view that winds through the Alleghenies and arrives at the town where the action is. Does the addictive mind think this way—in aerial shots panning down from the ethers to land us in an Oxyana? This seems too staged to be a useful representation of the addictive mind in action.

    But in the book’s second poem, “Icarus in Oxyana,” a striking image leads me to the discovery of another way poetry renders how the brain moves: “Someone on the porch / who’d lost both his arms / chain smokes.” This single image–bold, bewildering, painfully true–clarifies the addictive mind at work. It allows me to settle into this book, an eye out for other potent images.

    And I find them: “waking up in an alley with a busted face, // teeth red and penny-sweet, the rain / coming down clear as gin” (“To the Addict Who Mugged Me”); “have held the still hive of his head, / have placed my lips against the shadow // of his mouth, screamed air into his chest” (“The Messenger of Oxyana”). And these, from “Detox Psalm”:

    With the waves’ jade

    coaxing, I heaved my every organ

    through my mouth, then cut a mouth,

    at last, in my abdomen and prayed

    for there to be something more divine

    than the body, and still something

    more divine than that, for a torrent

    of white flies to fly out of me,

    anything, make me in the image

    of the bullet, I begged, release me

    from myself and I will end a life.

    Language moves sideways here by creating literal impossibilities—heaving internal organs through the mouth—that are metaphorically accurate. Detoxing does feel like the body throwing itself out of itself, the skin all wrong. The detoxing body is its own enemy, and glad we would be, at the worst of it, to be our own bullet that ends the body’s dangers. Such is the power of Brewer’s imagery to carry the reader through the stages of addiction, partial recovery, relapse, and finally sustained recovery. Brewer’s images depict the emotional and mental rot at the foundation of addiction, the skewed thinking at the heart of the disease.

    In the work 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning poet Frank Bidart calls “an intensely inventive and original debut,” Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017) is alive with images that render shifting mental states at dizzying speeds. Akbar’s poems shunt from one emotional state to another, giving a sense of mental motion more reminiscent of driving too fast on hairpin curves than of logical elucidation. We race to keep up with speakers who pay no heed to safety. In “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Withdrawal,” Akbar offers a description that veers from one image to another: “I can hardly picture any of it now / save the fox I thought / was in the grass but wasn’t // I remember him quiet / as a telescope / tiny as a Plutonian moon.” Dimension derails, and disproportion prevails as the poem’s narrator lurches from fox to telescope to a moon so far in space that we’re granted a sense of how distorted the mind is that’s lining up these improbable—and emotionally accurate—images of DTs. “It’s amazing what you can find / if you just dissect everything,” Akbar writes in another poem, followed by a tumble of images: “Once / I pulled a glowing crystal from my beard / and buried it in the earth. The next day / I went to the spot and dug up a silver trumpet.” These images aren’t locatable in a linear context. They lurch and undulate beneath the skin of sense, advancing a project that, as with both previous poets, incites a sense of skepticism in relation to the body. As such, Akbar’s images wobble, as if they’re about to topple headlong onto bloody pavement. It’s no wonder, given the sidewinder moves the mind in these poems makes, that Akbar admits, “When I wake, I ask God to slide into my head quickly before I do.”

    Because of Akbar’s linguistic bravura, it takes time for me to become aware of his use of topographical space representative of another way the mind moves. In the context of his poetry, empty space is not vacant; it connotes the unsaid, the impossible-to-say, the outer limits of implication. Every silence is an admission of not-knowing, a blow against hubris. Amid the linguistic swerves of Akbar’s poems, ample white space sometimes surrounds words, engulfs lines and whole stanzas in a silence that cordons off a kind of quiet amidst mental chaos. For showing brain moves in his poetry, silence is as meaningful as articulation.

    Akbar offers extra spaces between words (“my whole life I answered every cry for help with a pour   with a turning away” [“Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient)”], and he occasionally jettisons left-margin conventions in favor of lineage that moves across the page (“Portrait of the Alcoholic with Moths and River,” “The New World,” “Against Hell”). Though the silences of the intake interview embodied in “Drinkaware Self-Report” indicate physical and emotional distance between interviewer and interviewee, the majority of Akbar’s silences are indicative of commonalities. The space between the three-line stanzas that filter across the page of “Learning to Pray,” for instance, are silences of communion, of reaching toward something greater than the addicted self. The white space between the unrhymed couplets found in “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Relapse Fantasy” is tentative with an uncertainty suggesting a fragile state of mind.

    In Akbar’s best work, silence girds understatement, and what remains unsaid gives a sense that within the frantic place of the addictive mind lies a locus of calm. There, the mind doesn’t explain. It doesn’t offer delusion or false comfort. Yet it comforts, perhaps because open space is public space that has the potential to welcome us all. In its meaninglessness, it aspires to greater meaning, the way, say, our parks and canyons and monuments are open to everyone. Language can undercut commonality, but silent space knows no identity other than that of all. Silence is, in a word, collectivity. We is its pronoun, as in we are not alone. No matter how difficult may be the stages of overcoming addiction, Akbar’s silences imply, there are others with us. The silences I see in his poetry of addiction are perhaps the most hopeful of all the mental moves I’ve observed.

    * * *

    Poetry of the caliber of these three debut poets reminds me that the mind is not a linear muscle. How can it be that I so easily forget this? Wasn’t it just last week that a stain in my bathroom sink reminded me of the cigarette burn at the edge of my grandmother’s porcelain tub from forty-five years ago? Didn’t that image trail with it the smell of her Slavak cooking and her devotion, in absurdly equal proportion, to the L.A. Dodgers and As the World Turns? Standing in my apartment a few days ago, at the sight of a mar on my porcelain my mind catapulted back to four years before I took my first drink before ricocheting into a present that contains the seven years (this month) since I’ve had my last. It happened so suddenly that it shocked me.

    Which is frequently how our minds work. What sideways language does is enact this process, so that we can see it in action. It’s the conduit between our current and past selves, making us privy to states of being we might otherwise miss.

    Though the majority of Americans express intimidation and disinterest in poetry, I wonder if in doing so they aren’t inadvertently expressing a fear of language that moves the way the untethered mind does. Sideways language may nudge us to wonder if it’s not linear logic, rather than its sideways counterpart, that enacts distortion. Minds of addicts and non-addicts alike traverse multiple planes of experience simultaneously. Poetry, in enacting the mind in all its vicissitudes and pyrotechnics, its leaps and mental gymnastics, is an art that counters, not codifies, linear distortion. Shouldn’t we honor, rather than disparage, the depiction of mental states as we actually experience them, something that Sam Sax, William Brewer and Kaveh Akbar are teaching us to do?

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Eddie Pepitone: From Falling Down Drunk to Sober Stand Up

    Eddie Pepitone: From Falling Down Drunk to Sober Stand Up

    Comedy is totally addictive! It hits the part of the brain that drugs do. The love me love me I’m home I’m home part (that is when it goes well). You feel exhilarated because you are the center of attention.

    I was a few months out of my second rehab facility when a friend and fellow stand up comic handed me a DVD, a documentary about comedian Eddie Pepitone called The Bitter Buddha. I was riveted by the documentary – not only was this man talking about real things that matter on stage (while I was mostly doing sex humor) but he was sober! And had been for a very long time.

    I declared him my favorite comic and waited anxiously for his first Netflix special to come out, In Ruins. I actually planned to go to the taping in Brooklyn, but then I relapsed. And I came back. And I relapsed. And I came back.

    My first article for The Fix was about giving up marijuana. I left out the role Eddie played in that, but here we are. 

    Last February I planned to go to LA, where Eddie lived, for some shows. I also planned to get a medical marijuana card. I emailed Eddie that I was his self-appointed very biggest fan, and he agreed to meet. We made plans. This was it! I was going to meet my comedy idol! And he was sober! But surely, I thought, he probably smoked weed. Living in California and all, and how could anyone even do comedy without imbibing in something at least–at the very least–after the show. (As if I could ever wait that long.)

    I planned to meet Eddie at a vegan restaurant and then go to a play. But first, that day I took a girl I met at a meeting to Harry Potter world. And then when I dropped her off, I had to get super super stoned to make up for the few hours I couldn’t. And then I was on the phone with the sponsor I had at the time yelling about how I was going to be late. And then I just had to stop at a dispensary.

    I was late to dinner. So late, in fact, that the first thing Eddie ever said to me was, “I ordered you dinner. And I ate it all.”

    So we go to the venue and my car just stinks like weed, which Eddie noticed. He brought it up, and when I heard him say the word I got super excited. I knew it! He does smoke weed! This is all the validation I have ever needed!

    However, I was wrong. He was bringing up weed to tell me it was the last thing he quit; that after that was when his career really started; that marijuana dampens the dreaming mechanism. The hole in my gut raged, as I knew he was right. After that I kept in touch with him more. He has helped me so much, and I know he can also help you.

    I have relapsed since then, most often the same old story other chronically relapsing comics tell me: hanging out too late, too good a set, too bad a set. There are a ton of us out here, and I’m sure there are more in other industries, building it all up in the periods of sobriety, then – at best – coasting on those wins during periods of relapse, and starting all over again when we get scared enough. 

    Yet there are a number of comedians I know with sustained, continuous, joyous sobriety. Those are the ones I wanted to talk to, the ones whose secrets I desperately wanted to know, the ones who seem to hold all the horcruxes that I can’t find. 

    So I asked Eddie.

    The Fix: What is the hardest thing about being sober in the comedy industry?

    Eddie Pepitone: Feeling like you’re missing out on an exceptional post-show high. Comedy is all about the adrenaline rush, and booze and weed intensify it and make you feel like a god. Also, comedy is such an intense brain-centric art. I miss turning it off with pot. The brain relaxes with pot.

    What is the best thing about being sober in comedy?

    Feels so great to do it sober and kick ass. I actually remember everything and I did it without drugs! Also [I’m] much sharper when I’m not high. I create more sober and am surprisingly much [more] fearless. I see stoner comedians flounder sloppily a lot.

    How did you deal in the early days of sobriety?

    Early days I did (as I tend to do now) split right away after I perform and stay out of trouble. I can hang now if I want and not feel as needy but I usually get bored after a while.

    What do you think it is about comedy that attracts so many addicts? Or addicts that are attracted to comedy?

    Comedy is totally addictive! It hits the part of the brain that drugs do. The love me love me I’m home I’m home part (that is when it goes well). You feel exhilarated because you are the center of attention (what addict isn’t about me me me???). The pace of jokes, the racing mind, the intoxication of the good looking crowd. THE VALIDATION.

    What advice would you give to comedians who struggle with chronic relapse?

    Chronic relapse and being a comic is super hard, so preventative measures need to be taken. TAKE CARE OF THE MIND/BODY. Meditation practice (tough because comics thrive on chaos and have little discipline) but you have to try to slow down and get a good foundation during the day. Try to stabilize endless desires for sex and excitement by letting go of intense fantasy life. Yoga, 12-step meetings, a couple of sober or even-keeled friends (but I find all this hard as my habits are so ingrained). Gym and exercise helped me. 

    Any other advice you think is helpful?

    Build up sobriety slowly. Feel the good feelings of not being fucked up and achieving stuff. It’s so nice not to be hungover. When depressed, talk to a deep friend who gets you.

    That deep friend, for me, is the one and only Eddie Pepitone. Sometimes when I’m lonely and don’t want to bother him, I listen to his podcast, Pep Talks, in which he is exactly how he always is: brilliant and authentic and brazenly self-aware. 

    Thank you Eddie, for being a light that shines the way out of the dark. And to all my fellow chronic relapsers out there: all we have to do is stay sober ONE MORE TIME than we got drunk.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • So You Want to Write About Addicts

    So You Want to Write About Addicts

    At its best, addict lit satiates our quintessential human yearning for stories that may lead to salvation. We want warm fuzzies. We want sweet, sweet, redemption.

    We started each morning of residential treatment with burned muffins, a house meeting, and introductions.

    “My name is Tom and I’m a junkie here on vacation. My goal today is to lay in the sun and sample the delicious food in this all-inclusive resort.”

    Tom’s sarcasm made orange juice squirt out of my nose. Humor was an elixir for the boredom of early sobriety and monotony of the rehab center’s strict daily schedule.

    Our addiction counselor corrected Tom: “You need to take this more seriously. I need you to redo that and tell us your real goal for today.”

    The story that society tells about addiction is one of tragedy. When we talk about addicts, we talk about pain, drama, and heartbreak. Of course, addiction is all of these things, but it’s also a rich, multi-faceted story with humor and joy. When we let addiction define the entirety of a human being’s existence, we flatten people to one-dimensional caricatures.

    The story that society tells about my favorite tragic hero Kurt Cobain is a prime example; his sense of humor gets buried beneath his pain. The media glosses over parts of his personality, like how he wore pajamas on his wedding day and a puffy-sleeved, yellow dress to a heavy metal show on MTV. “The show is called Head Banger’s Ball, so I thought I’d wear a gown,” Cobain deadpanned. “But nobody got me a corsage.”

    Two weeks after Nirvana released Nevermind, they pranked the famous British show Top of the Pops. Wearing sunglasses and a smirk, Cobain infuriated producers and the audience when he dramatically sang “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” in a mopey style that evoked Morrissey from The Smiths.

    If you want to write about addiction, remember that two seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time. Addicts can be both funny and tragic. Another example: Cobain’s original name for In Utero was I Hate Myself and Want To Die, but the record company opposed the title, fearing that fans wouldn’t understand the dark humor.

    While I love satire, I also understand why we don’t want to minimize the seriousness of addiction. Addicts suffer. Addicts bleed. Addicts, like Cobain, die too young.

    *

    I know a thing or two about almost dying.

    I recently discovered an old home movie of my ex Sam* and me. In the video, we were strung out like Christmas lights. Watching it made me feel like a voyeur in my own life.

    Thick tongued, I slur, “Let’s jaaammmm,” to my musician boyfriend. He pushes a tuft of blonde hair out of my face. My unruly David Bowie mullet always gets in the way.

    Sam’s strumming his acoustic guitar and singing “Needle and The Hay” by Elliot Smith, a classic junkie song.

    I’m taking the cure/ So I can be quiet whenever I want.

    He hands me a bass guitar, but I can’t hold it. My limbs go limp. Thunk. The maple-neck, cherry wood bass crashes to the floor.

    So leave me alone/ You ought to be proud that I’m getting good marks.

    The bass doesn’t break, but I do. I try to pick it up, but my body slumps into a question mark. I look like a bobble head doll, with glassy blue-green eyes. Doll eyes blinking open and shut. Opiate eyes. Open and shut. Haunting thing.

    Sam stops singing. “Are you okay? Tessa, did you take Klonopin this morning?”

    Shut. When my eyes roll in the back of my head, he grabs my shoulders and commands, “Wake up! Wake up!”

    “I’m fiiiinnnneeee,” I mumble as my pale skin turns blue.

    I wouldn’t be fine for years.

    *

    When I heard there was going to be an opioid overdose memorial, I was skeptical. When I saw that Showtime was releasing a new docuseries about the epidemic called The Trade, I was skeptical. When Andrew Sullivan christened a non-addict “Poet Laurette of the opioid epidemic,” in a New York Magazine essay, I was skeptical. But not surprised. Never surprised.

    I’m skeptical because I’ve been devouring books, essays, documentaries, and movies about the opioid epidemic for years, charting their predictable rhetoric, cliché story arcs, and stigmatizing portrayal of addicts: addicts as cautionary tales, signal fires, propellers for drama. We’re afraid to color outside these lines, to show the ways in which addicts contain multitudes.

    I wear skepticism like a shell. It feels safer than being vulnerable. My skepticism asks questions like: who has the right to tell the addict’s story? How can a writer dip their plume into the well of an addict’s pain without having been there herself? How can we do justice to addicts and the addiction story?

    If you want to write about addicts, you first need to familiarize yourself with the formula and conventions of the “addict lit” genre. The territory has been well-charted in recent books like Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering.

    Human beings are intrigued by conflict and drama. We are all complicit. I am, too. Even though I’ve been clean for multiple years and know that I shouldn’t be gawking, I do. Even though I feel like they exploit people’s pain for entertainment, I still watch shows like Intervention and Celebrity Rehab with Doctor Drew. These shows jolt us out of the doldrums of our own lives or, if we are addicts ourselves, they reassure us that we are not alone.

    We watch from a safe distance, with the luxury of returning to the comfort of our own cocoons. At its best, addict lit satiates our quintessential human yearning for stories that may lead to salvation. We want warm fuzzies. We want sweet, sweet, redemption.

    *

    If you want to write a story about the opioid epidemic, you must imagine how addicts hunger for stories that represent us, encourage empathy, and feel believable. We long for stories to be our anchors and buoys to keep us afloat. Unfortunately, some stories sink. We must study those too, as a lesson of what not to do.

    The Prescribed to Death Memorial is a dehumanizing failure. It features a wall of 22,000 faces carved on pills to pay tribute to those who overdosed in 2017. If I died of an overdose, I wouldn’t want my face carved on a pill.

    I’ve spent my whole life being carved out. Instead, I’d like to know what it feels like to be whole.

    When I heard about the docuseries The Trade, I quickly signed up for a free trial of Showtime and checked its Metacritic score: 84.

    Steve Greene of Indie Wire praises the series. The Trade “doesn’t purport to be a corrective or some magic key to unlocking the problem. But as a means for empathy and a way to understanding the human cost at each step of an international heroin trade, it does far more than hollow words and shallow promises.”

    Each episode shifts between three main story arcs: a Mexican drug cartel, law enforcement, and addicts and their families. It is technically well-made, with sharp cinematography and juxtapositions like masked members of the cartel guarding poppy fields in Mexico as children play in the street; a grieving mother and father at a memorial rally in Ohio flying signs that say, “Hope Not Dope.”

    But the series was predictable and flat. The addict’s story arc of The Trade is a simple five-part dramatic structure. In the exposition, we see white middle-class young adults are prescribed painkillers for a sports injury or surgery. As their physical dependence grows, they need more and more to manage their pain. At the climax, they switch to heroin because it’s cheaper and sometimes easier to find than painkillers. They fall deep into the well of addiction.

    Then they go to rehab or they don’t. Cut. End scene.

    Paste film critic Amy Glynn says it was “dangerous from a watchability perspective…Junkies don’t make good television because they are really, really damned boring. They are painfully uninteresting, because heroin turns most people into zombie reptiles who are deeply depressed and deeply depressing.”

    At first, I was taken aback by this quote. But Glynn has a point. If you want to write about the opioid epidemic, you might want to do more than rely on pain porn. The poetry of a needle plunging into the crook of a junkie’s arm, crimson swirling into the plunger. Junkies drifting through public streets like zombies.

    Glynn redeems herself: “Someone needs to start telling the rest of the story. Like now.”

    *

    If you want to write a story about addicts, you need to realize that it’s still a stigmatized condition. My friend had to leave a grief group because other parents said her son’s overdose death was his fault and not as sad as a child who died of cancer. It’s as though grief was some sort of competition of suffering and pain. But an entire super bowl stadium could be filled with dead bodies like her son. There were 64,000 overdose deaths in the US in 2016.

    If you want to write a story about addicts, you need to know that life-saving medication-assisted-treatments like Suboxone and methadone are still expensive and difficult to access. Unfortunately, many treatment centers are “abstinence-only,” meaning they don’t allow their patients to take Suboxone or methadone. For a more in-depth plunge into the world of harm reduction, read Tracey Helton, Tessie Castillo, or Maia Szalavitz.

    *

    In addition to these dire facts, we have to deal with our stories being appropriated and exploited. Enter the poet William Brewer, who has never used opioids or struggled with addiction himself. Brewer inhabits the voice of addicts in his poetry book, I Know Your Kind. The title derives from a Cormac McCarthy quote, but it’s very clear to me that Brewer doesn’t “know my kind.”

    I don’t want to be harsh on Brewer. Being from the polite Midwest where we’re supposed to avoid confrontation, I almost deleted this part. But Brewer’s words feel like a chisel mining people’s pain. I also feel it’s my responsibility as a recovering addict and writer to call it like I see it.

    Brewer writes lines like: “Tom’s hand on the table looked like warm bread. I crushed it with a hammer, then walked him to the E.R. to score pills” and “Who can stand another night stealing fistfuls of pills from our cancer-sick neighbors?”

    In a world where artists and writers are constantly being called out for cultural appropriation, I was surprised that nobody called Brewer out for appropriating the addict’s story for his own artistic gain. Brewer’s sole connection to the epidemic is that he was born and raised in Virginia, the state with the highest overdose death rate in the nation. In an interview with Virginia Public Radio, Brewer said when he visited over the holidays, he inquired about whereabouts of former classmates. “People replied, ‘They’re on the pills. We don’t really see them anymore.’”

    If you want to write about an addict, you should avoid infantilizing and dehumanizing addicts, along with the trope that addicts are all “lost and forsaken.” Some of the strongest, most courageous people I know are addicts. Active drug users like The People’s Harm Reduction Alliance in Seattle established needle exchanges, distributed the overdose reversal drug, naloxone, and are fighting to open supervised safe injection sites.

    *

    If you want to write a story about addiction, realize that most addicts struggle with whether or not they should publicly share this part of their identity. For a long time, I didn’t think I’d ever write about my addictions to alcohol, opiates, and benzos. I didn’t have the courage. Here in the Midwest, we keep the laundry to ourselves. We don’t air it out. When I wrote about my first struggle with alcoholism in 2011, my family warned me that it could impact my future job opportunities and dating. I knew they were just looking out for my “best interests.” But I insisted: my privacy, my mistakes, my choice. I hoped that sharing my addiction and vulnerability might be therapeutic for me and maybe even help others.

    If you ‘re going to write a story about addiction, realize how it’s affected by different identities. For example, I’m extremely lucky, because I have supportive friends and family. When I was broke and had nothing, they offered me food, shelter, and support. Also related to my privilege as a white, middle-class woman is that I don’t have a criminal record. Yes, my hospital records bother me, but they are protected by confidentiality laws.

    In a way, writing about my addiction felt like making these private records a public matter. I was hesitant. Brewer was also reluctant to write about the opioid epidemic, for different reasons. He said, “West Virginia is very rarely looked at in a positive light. And so here again is a situation where something really quite terrible is going on, but it became so clear that this thing wasn’t going to go away and was starting to seep into my daily life.”

    *

    Heroin doesn’t seep into most people’s daily lives. Heroin is a tsunami. Heroin drowns.

    *

    There may be value in writing beyond our own experience, as Brewer did. Representation is important and if we all followed the advice to only “write what we know,” things could get bland and boring. Artistic expression would suffer. But it’s a tightrope. It’s a practice in tremendous empathy, wanting to diversify representation, while also being respectful and staying in your lane.

    *

    If you want to write about addicts, you’d benefit from also depicting the humor of early recovery, a story that often falls outside the margins. When I was digging through my own videos and journals, I was of course humiliated by some of my own narcissism and self pity. But I was also surprised and heartened by the unexpected joys like my friendship with Tom at my first rehab.

    On my first day, I noticed him in the smoking tent, wearing bright red Converse, a beret, and long sleeves to hide his track marks. I noticed the way his brown eyes brimmed with both kindness and sadness as he deadpanned in meetings.

    “You guys are like The Wonder Twins of rehab,” staff said. Despite our 20-year age difference, we were inseparable.

    Tom bummed me Parliament menthols and lent me one of his ear buds, so we could listen to The Replacements, The Pixies or The Velvet Underground together. On weekends, we went to record stores, ate pizza, and he read my shitty poetry. We made beaded lizards and built crooked birdhouses bedazzled with feathers and glitter.

    One day in group, we had to watch a 1987 film called, The Cat Who Drank and Used Too Much.

    “Was I just daydreaming, or did you just say we are watching a movie starring a cat?” Tom asked.

    “Yes, it’s made for kids. Lost and Found Ministries recommended it as a good way for parents to explain addiction to their kids.”

    “Drunken cats, who knew?” I said.

    I later learned that the film was praised as an “audience favorite about a beer drinking, drug addicted cat,” when it was screened at the Oddball Film Festival in San Francisco.

    Our story begins in any town USA, a sleepy suburban neighborhood lined with rosebushes and plush green lawns. Cue sappy flute and piano elevator music with too much treble.

    The film opens as Pat the Cat is getting into a red car for his morning commute. We see Pat drinking alcohol from a pitcher and beginning to experiment with other things. A cigarette here, some prescription pills, a bit of coke there (powdered sugar).

    “He’d try anything, it was never enough. Then it was too much.” Pat crashes his car and almost loses everything, but then decides to go to rehab!

    “I’m not trying to be catty, but Pat seems to be pretty well-off to me,” Tom said.

    At the end of the movie, Pat has a cupcake to celebrate his sobriety. Ah, it seemed like only a few weeks!

    “If only it were that easy!” I said.

    “Sure, his life isn’t purr-fect, but it’s pretty close!”

    *

    What I’m trying to say is: If you want to write a story about an addict, we might not be perfect, but we can do better. Starting now.

    If you want to read stories about heroin or the opioid epidemic, I recommend starting with nonfiction. There is power in reading about people’s lived experiences.

    Of course there are also excellent and illuminating fictional books about the opioid/ heroin addiction. Check out this list by Kevin Pickard.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Lineages of Addiction: Interview with torrin a. greathouse, a Trans Poet in Recovery

    Lineages of Addiction: Interview with torrin a. greathouse, a Trans Poet in Recovery

    “I always compare myself now to a night when I was drinking and I looked in the mirror. I saw a lie, wearing a suit and full beard, and…I tried to kill myself.”

    A point on a map is the product of two dimensions, the x and the y, or longitude and latitude. For example, a liquor store or your plug’s house is located at the intersection of two streets. For example, one street might trace back to your childhood home. Or maybe trace to a moonless night in a park, your peers starting to circle up. Maybe one of your streets crisscrosses the inertia of a fist. Or the colored lights in a club filling your eyes like cups. Etcetera. Etcetera.

    Everything, including us, our identities and our addictions, exist at the intersections of other things. The human landscape is a network, and this interview series has sought to delve into the complexities by dialoguing with poets who write from personal experience, and by giving purposeful attention to how substance misuse can overlap with marginalized lives and histories.

    This new installment welcomes torrin a. greathouse, a trans woman in recovery from both bipolar disorder and substances, and who self-describes as a cripple punk (more on that below).

    Despite only being 23 years old, she’s already well into a strong career, having landed publishing credits on Poets.org and Submittable’s journal, Frontier, and garnering a shoutout from poetry star Kaveh Akbar in The Paris Review. torrin’s forthcoming chapbook called boy/girl/ghost is a winner of The Atlas Review poetry contest, and this past year she published her debut Therǝ is a Case That I Ɐm on Damaged Goods Press.

    torrin has an inclination towards bravery in the way she does the work of transforming pain. It’s an exemplary case of someone using poetry to chew through toughness, to make sustenance out of issues that would otherwise choke us or rot and become pestilent. Even when her poems seem to conclude in a surrender, it feels like torrin achieves a type of mastery over the monster by at least naming it. Furthermore, displaying an energetic craft, she reaches for sophistication in form and concept, hewing down the opaqueness of personal uncertainties into sculptural elegance. Through processing her own story, she asks us to think about how the causes of addiction can be much deeper than the individual suffering.

    During the interview, we discuss how different lineages of addiction alternately rob and empower torrin, while we take a close look at some of her poems. We talk about soundtracks to gender transition. And more. Throughout our conversation she is candid about her struggles, and the violences that happened within her family while growing up in the Pacific Northwest. Before you read, it should be emphasized that the content traverses a number of sensitive topics, including suicidality, domestic abuse, and of course, substance misuse.

    The Fix: Can you tell me about some of your experiences, where transness intersected with addiction?

    torrin a. greathouse: Like many things that bring people into states of addiction, it became a method of coping. To be drunk or high allowed me to feel outside my body. And also, drugs allow you to disconnect not just from the physical body, but from life.

    An experience that is common among trans communities, is not necessarily being able to survive in the same ways as other people; having to turn to alternate forms of income creation like sex work. I was doing certain types of sex work that were not always conducive to my emotional wellness. I used alcoholism to cope with that as well.

    More often than not, conversation about coping focuses more on dealing with emotional or mental stressors, like trauma, for example. But there are also physicalities that people seek displacement from. Which makes me think about body dysphoria.

    You can’t feel dysphoric about your body if you can’t feel your body, was a point that I hit. I always compare myself now to a night when I was drinking and I looked in the mirror. I saw a lie, wearing a suit and full beard, and…I tried to kill myself. I think of myself now, in comparison to that moment.

    Wow. That’s so real. I know it’s such a tender subject and I value your sharing. A common characteristic of personal histories with addiction is that substance use “works” until it doesn’t. Sounds like you are describing one of those pivotal moments.

    I’m interested in recovery spaces, and I don’t know what your experience is with treatment or peer support, but I don’t hear as many stories from trans folk, or even queer folk.

    I wish going into rooms was easier. I’m lucky in a sense, that when I got sober, it was because of a DUI. I was in a collision, driving drunk, and went to jail, and then the court mandated I attend a peer support group. Had it not been court-mandated, I don’t think I could have managed to keep going, because those spaces are harder for folks that aren’t a specific subset of culture, primarily straight and middle-aged and male. Trying to get my pronouns used was pretty much impossible. Eventually I gave up and stopped presenting as trans.

    There are peer support groups meant for queer folks, but again, unfortunately, this ends up being cis-gay, middle-aged men. I’ve faced a lot of transphobia in those rooms as well. Luckily, there are new spaces opening up, like one in Long Beach, specifically for trans folk.

    My recovery consists of—and poet Kaveh Akbar also talks about this in the other interview—we can allow something else to subsume the addictive part of you. For both he and I, poetry has become that thing. We throw the same addictive energy at something healthier.

    Ok, now let’s talk poetry! Where are you at right now in terms of writing about addiction?

    Right now I’m in a double-headed mode in how I want to talk about the intersections of addiction. A big interest for me is the idea of alcoholism as lineage, as familiar bloodline and form of inheritance. My father was a drunk. My grandfather and grandmother on my mother’s side are drunks. My father’s father was a drunk. I’m thinking about how addiction ties into cyclical abuse; how leaning into it allows a lineage of violence to continue.

    And then the other direction I’m looking in is the ways in which queerness, transness, and addiction intersect with the prison industrial complex. Those violences. My father growing up was a prison guard, and so the familial abuses I faced were intrinsically linked to this other separate system of violence I wouldn’t experience personally until much later in my life.

    This is stuff you are tackling in an upcoming release? Like a collection?

    I’m working on a full-length manuscript. Also, a pet project tentatively titled Cell, meant to observe the different definitions of the word. Cell as a space, a physical confinement, a unit of memory, a telephone network, a part of the human body.

    I think of your poem, “Burning Haibun.” There’s the line about cells, how when alcohol is used to disinfect a cut, the scarring is worsened and made thicker, which you liken metaphorically to a blackout. It’s a brilliant poem, and I’d love to usher it into our conversation.

    Utilizing the form of the haibun, which is traditionally just a prose poem followed by a haiku, I began working from this moment when my mother accused me of throwing alcohol and gasoline on my emotions.

    The poem was a process of peeling off layers of trauma, the night of my DUI, and the night my father tried to kill himself by driving through a telephone pole. Then, I started writing about the ways addiction is not just a lineage I carry from my parents, but also a prevalent condition in queer communities because of the ways we are forced to survive.

    The first erasure narrows down to thinking about how I’ve been indicted by my father’s blood. I’m told being an addict makes me like him. “Once I just watched the wound accuse me of my blood. My father’s possessing the body. How each drink too is not mine, or I claim guilt.”

    But the bottom of the first two stanzas calls out my separate lineage. “My father hidden in an erasure of me. Each drink mine, my faggot blood.” So even if this is a lineage I carry from him, it is something my own, and it is something that belongs to another lineage, of queer addicts that have been a part of my life, some who have helped me in recovery.

    If I understand what you said correctly, by acknowledging the different threads of lineages that twist together, you deny your father from being the main contributor to your addiction. There is no single lineage.

    This poem allows me to access an identity as an addict and an addict in recovery that doesn’t make me like my father. My addiction doesn’t make me him.

    It’s interesting to think of lineage as biological, but also behavioral, which you are talking about, like the nurture from your parents, but more specifically, queer culture passed down between communities and generations.

    Tracing a lineage that is not genetic is inherent to queerness. Creating found family. Many queer and trans folks don’t have access to a genetic source of lineage, a family that supports and cares for them.

    I think this is a good time to talk about your poem “Inheritance.” What are some of the things happening inside that poem?

    This past year was the first time I was able to access mental healthcare, and I was diagnosed with a rapid cycling form of bipolar disorder. “Inheritance” is part of a series that, once again, recontextualizes experiences of lineage. Actions my mother and grandmother have taken. Actions I took. Because bipolar tends to be inherited from the mother’s side, she denied any family history. So this poem is responding, “Yes. Yes. There is a history of broken objects, shards, and of alcohol being a method of coping with the disorder.”

    Your opening lines are about your mother buying plates marketed as unbreakable. Within the poem, does the denial of breakability or the aspiration towards unbreakability become not only a symptom of mental illness, but also a path to it?

    No one seeks out something unbreakable unless they know they break the things around them. This poem is very much about my family’s denial of mental illness. In the poem I shattered one of these unbreakable plates by throwing it at my brother’s head while in a manic rage. I remember all the things my mother broke when I was a child, throwing them at my father. My grandmother smashing wine glasses. I tried to introduce this litany of evidence, but never put the reader inside the moment of breaking.

    That’s interesting, because I sensed this distance during my first read. I felt like I was looking at a pile of shattered memory, piecing together what happened. I felt removed. It’s almost paradoxical, but does your embracing of breakability and mental illness give you the best chance at being as unfractured as you can be?

    This poem ends, “My mother and I both know the slow ballet a glass shard makes beneath the skin.” Despite denial, all of this breaking is in our blood. For me, it’s interesting to be in a dual state of recovery, because recovery is also a term used in the treatment of bipolar disorder. Living with the disorder, when I’m manic, I feel invincible. Often times, also, addicts in the height of their addiction feel superhuman. So to turn away from these two modes of invincibility, you have to embrace or open yourself up to being broken.

    Wow, there are so many things I want to talk to you about haha. But let’s touch upon “wind-chime aria [for four hands].” I’m curious about the musical component, and about how the wind-chimes act as a vehicle. What is the music of this poem?

    I come from a pretty musical family, sharing music, singing songs together. It’s also as simple as the opening line, “My mother has always loved windchimes.” The house I grew up in, in Portland, was surrounded by windchimes. Music connects so much to memory in this poem, the spirit of Mozart, and the parental trauma in his experience.

    If this poem was a song, what would it be?

    Probably performed by Tori Amos. High energy, but creepy feeling. Maybe “Cornflake Girl.” I adore that song. This poem is from my forthcoming chapbook, called boy/girl/ghost, and written during a time when I was leaning into a feminine energy, after coming out as a trans woman, and needing to claim a softness that I hadn’t been previously allowed. Tori Amos was part of a soundtrack to that period of my life. There’s a line in my poem, “he became wind or light bulbs / began bursting on their own becoming a confetti of blades…” Even this violence is trying to find its own softness.

    The last thing I want to talk to you about…your bio includes the label cripple punk, and I know the term cripple holds political significance for the disability justice movement. Do you think mental health and substance use disorder have a place within this movement?

    I identify as a cripple punk specifically because I’m physically disabled. I have a spinal deformity. As a teenager, I hurt all the time and didn’t know why, and this began my abuse of painkillers. One of the hardest things about being clean and sober, I have no pain management anymore. Describing myself as a cripple punk is a sharpening of my identity, a fuck you to people who look at me and can’t imagine someone as both young and needing a cane.

    I’m only one individual and cannot speak for the entire community. As someone who is both mentally ill and physically disabled, I know both require a similar sort of activism and space. At the same time, many spaces where mental health is allowed to take on the same texture as physical disability, physical disability gets so erased. The conversation becomes dominated.

    So solely for the purpose of creating space for physical disability, I don’t personally like to see the picture overlap too much, but at the same time it becomes important to talk about the comorbidities, and intersectionality. So it’s a tough question. I think there needs to be room for both.

    Again, thank you so much for sharing about all the experiences and intersections that inform your writing. What’s on the horizon for you?

    My chapbook boy/girl/ghost is coming out through The Atlas Review chapbook series. Then also the chapbook Cell, which I plan on spending the upcoming month writing. Also just finishing up my undergraduate degree and surviving.

     

    This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

    More poems by torrin a. greathouse

    Erwin Schrödinger Speaks on Dead Fathers, The Rising Phoenix 

    Haunting with Alcoholic, Riverbed, and Handcuffed Magician, Nat.Brut

    Other interviews in this series about poetry, addiction, and intersectionality:

    Addiction and Queerness in Poet Sam Sax’s ‘madness’

    Kaveh Akbar Maps Unprecedented Experience in “Portrait of the Alcoholic”

    View the original article at thefix.com