Jess Weitz: “I live in the woods of Vermont with my family of humans and animals. Art, writing, and nature have been my strongest allies in navigating the waves of depression. I come from a long line of people who have a beautiful, creative eccentricity and feel the deep pain and despair of life. We all have moments of being eaten up by our emotions and creating with an open heart to the world. Many of us are women, which adds an additional layer of absorbing cultural messages that we are mad when really we are just sensing all the sadness and paradox of our worlds.” (website)
Mark Lee Webb: “I have experienced mental illness from both sides of the window: as an intern in a state mental hospital while in college, and with my own personal bipolar episodes and depression as an adult. If nothing else, this gives me a lot of material for my poetry! When I am depressed nothing works; words lie flat on the page. When I’m on my bipolar ‘A’ game, my writing is fluid and in touch with the universe. Somewhere in the middle are my best poems.”
Martin Vest: “What an impossible bio to write. How has mental illness affected my poetry? The easier question for me to answer is, ‘How has poetry affected my mental illness?’ I’m still here.”
Jill M. Talbot: “I actually debated whether or not to submit here. There is no doubt about whether or not I have been diagnosed with mental illness—in fact, with several. Mood disorders, psychotic disorders, personality disorders, substance use disorders … I have altered between conforming and fighting against labels. I would rather be called mad than ill. I refuse to believe that my personality is sick—but I believe I am strange, am odd, am mad as a mad hatter. I can submit because I no longer fight labels. If anyone has a borderline personality, I do. But writing has taught me that my eccentricities are something to be valued. Because of the high correlation between creativity and mental illness, I believe it is a sign that we should start rethinking illness, as we have done with sexual identities. From illness to simply different—unique—equally valid. I just want to be valid. This desire is at the root of much of my writing—to just be valid like anyone else. Sometimes this is covered with a bunch of other shit, but at the root, always the desire to be valid—to undo some of the traumas of my past—to have an Axis II label of: okay. Maybe okay people don’t get hospitalized in psych wards, but maybe the world is mad, and some of us are more sensitive to it than others. Some of us need poetry more than others.” (web)
Padma Thornlyre: “My psychological constellations include a severe anxiety disorder, persistent depression, and occasional bouts with dissociation and fragmentation, as well as autism in the high-moderate range. In practical terms, this translates into a history of disastrous personal relationships, employment beneath my education, and a marginalized, on-the-brink life, economically, all fueled by low self-esteem and a sense of not belonging. Artistically, however, living with mental illness means I am open to perceptual possibilities that are unusual but rendered malleable by the trickery of language. For instance, having benefited from therapy with a brilliant depth psychologist, I honor dreams as providing much of my content-matter; and having experienced fragmentary states, I sometimes construct new poems from fragments of other works, like collage, creating new types of ‘wholeness.’”
Dana Stamps II: “Hearing voices is frightening, and I find it a challenge to cope every day. Fortunately, I do not hear them all the time. Writing poetry has given me self-esteem, and proves to me, and I hope everyone else, that mental illness does not equal a destroyed life. I do not advertise my condition to editors when I submit poems to their journals, because I want to be considered based on the merit of my poems. This submission to Rattle is an exception, and I think many of my readers will be surprised to find I have bipolar disorder. I hope this discloser will help reduce the stigma of mental illness.”
Sara Springer: “My mental illness has made it essential for me to work through emotions and problems in words. There are little messy conversations in my head, and there are clear ones on the paper. Poetry is a way to put order, clarity, and rhythm into a world that’s very up and down, at least inside my own head. Other people’s poetry excites me when it follows the ups and downs of the poet’s world; mine excites me when it can make some part of mine clear.”
