Writers On The Edge offers a range of essays, memoirs and poetry written by major contemporary authors who bring fresh insight into the dark world of addiction, from drugs and alcohol, to sex, gambling and food. Editors Diana Raab and James Brown have assembled an array of talented and courageous writers who share their stories with heartbreaking honesty as they share their obsessions as well as the awe-inspiring power of hope and redemption. 'Open to any piece in this collection, and the scalding, unflinching, overwhelming truths within will shine light on places most people never look. Anyone who reads this book, be they users or used, will put it down changed. And when they raise their eyes from the very last page, the world they see may be redeemed, as well.' --Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight 'Writers On The Edge is a thoughtful compendium of first-person narratives by writers who have managed to use their despair to create beauty. A must-read for anyone in the recovery field.' -- Leonard Buschel Founder, Writers in Treatment CONTRIBUTORS: John Amen, Frederick& Steven Barthelme, Kera Bolonik, Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Maud Casey, Anna David, Denise Duhamel, B.H. Fairchild, Ruth Fowler, David Huddle Perie Longo, Gregory Orr, Victoria Patterson, Molly Peacock, Scott Russell Sanders, Stephen Jay Schwartz, Linda Gray Sexton, Sue William Silverman, Chase Twichell, Rachel YoderAbout the Editors Diana M. Raab, an award-winning memoirist and poet, is author of six books includingHealing With Words andRegina's Closet. She's an advocate of the healing power of writing and teaches nation-wide workshops and in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. James Brown, a recovering alcoholic and addict, is the author of the memoirs, The Los Angeles Diaries andThis River. He is Professor of English in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at California State University, San Bernardino. From the Reflections of America Series Self-Help: Substance Abuse and Addictions--General
Apoem is a portrait of consciousness. It’s a recording of the motions of a mind in time, a mind communicating to others the experience of its own consciousness. When I read or write a poem, I’m trying to open a window between my mind and the minds of others. Poetry is written for others. But it’s also a study of the self, which is a private kind of work.
Already I’ve had to use the troublesome words ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’, and ‘self,’ which are approximate and overlapping in their definitions because the thing they describe is a slippery animal. Buddhism has a useful all-purpose name for what I am: a sentient being, but even this label doesn’t account for the persistent evidence suggesting that I am a unique and identifiable individual and can move as such through time. I want to explore this nexus of words–this atom of consciousness, mind, and self–by thinking about depression, from which I’ve suffered all my life, and its relation to poetry. For fifteen years I’ve lived with psychoactive drugs in my brain, among them Ambien, Celexa, Desyrel, Effexor, Elavil, Pamelor, Paxil, Serzone, Triavil, Valium, Wellbutrin, and Xanax, my Knights of the Round Table. I’ve studied the properties of each drug in the laboratories of my mind and body, and have made some unsettling but ultimately consoling discoveries concerning the nature of the self and its language. One is that the animal is slippery because it’s mutable. It travels light, moving from drug to drug as if from country to country. The traveler learns that in all those foreign places the same language is spoken, precise and unadorned but also playful. It’s the language I want for my poems because it’s the language of my consciousness, my little piece of the flux, which happens to be something I fine-tune with psycho-pharmaceuticals.
In one of my earliest memories, I’m standing looking down into a storm drain, in which my younger sister is crouching. We’re playing zoo, and she’s the animal. I’m watching the elder sister, me, shove the heavy grate back over the opening. I’m slightly behind myself, like a shadow, a sensation I used to call “the eyes behind the eyes.” In another memory, I’m about eight, reading in bed when my mother comes in to tell me that my dog, hit by a car the day before, has died at the vet’s. I put my face in my hands, a self-conscious and exaggerated expression of sorrow. My first impulse is to act the part of a grieving child. Iam a grieving child, of course, but the real grief is inaccessible to me at that moment. In its place is a calm, numb kind of consciousness, out of which I can fake the expected responses. I’m also playing my mother’s words over and over in my head—she’s said the dog’s name, adding ay so that Centime (French poodle, French name) ends upCentimey, something my mother has never called her before.Centimey died last night. Thaty tells me a thousand things, among them that I am not completely inside myself the way I’m supposed to be.
The theme of third grade was Ancient Egypt. The teacher describe
