James Gering: “Depression takes various forms in my poetry. I used to think writing came first, now I believe health is paramount—of body, mind, and emotion. When writers approach optimal health, they have a stable base for sustainable writing. The character in my poem reaches out to people, despite himself. He houses the wisdom, in a remote embryonic chamber, that ongoing solitude and its array of pitfalls are detrimental to his cause. When I am writing sustainably, my poems gradually take on life. Some of them have been gestating for over five years. I regularly visit the notebooks and files housing them and meander through, waiting for insight, waiting for a sublime line or metaphor to elevate the poem such that it gains weight, warmth, and shape while shedding all remnants of melodrama and sentimentality.” (website)
“What Gets Us Out of Bed in the Morning” by Rhonda GanzPosted by Rattle
Rhonda Ganz
WHAT GETS US OUT OF BED IN THE MORNING
I met a man Thursday whose brain once kept moving at high speed after his skull had come to an abrupt stop. When we met, he was pushing a shopping cart with empty soda cans and wine bottles, which he figured would get him six bucks at the depot. Seventy years old, he’d slipped on the ice three times already that morning because people on his route hadn’t cleared their sidewalks. He couldn’t decide between blueberry or cherry danish at Sally Café so I bought both, and we stepped into rare winter sunshine as he told the story of how he’d come to be where he was. When he got to the part about being in a coma for six weeks in Atlanta, a Southern drawl introduced itself. After the coma, he spent another 540 days in hospital. They were using him for drug experiments by then, wanted to dissect him for research. His sister, a lawyer in the fancy part of town, finally got him out of there and sued the state of Georgia for 5.6 million dollars. A cheque will be ready in February he said, signed by Obama before he leaves office; a cheque the new guy can’t take away from me. That’s great I said, February’s not very far away. Just around the corner, he said back. It’s just around the corner.
Rhonda Ganz: “When asked to identify my illness, I have trained myself to answer only with my name, rank, and prescription number. When I write about depression, obsession, compulsion or other mental health issues, I challenge myself to do it without using those words. Sometimes I say to people that poetry saved my life. Unless they’re a poet, they don’t know how to respond, but truly, it has been the combination of psychiatry, the right medication, and the community I’ve found with poets and poetry, that keeps me here.” (website)
Rachel Custer: “Mental illness (depression and anxiety) both inform and breathe life into my work, while simultaneously making it difficult to actually get work done. I write to escape fear, and to process trauma, and in a sometimes desperate attempt to purge the dank, poisonous landscape that is clinical depression. I write because I am compelled, and also because I love to write. Sometimes it’s hard to know if writing helps me stay sane or just adds to the negativity of my thoughts when I am in the grip of a depressive episode or panic attack.” (book)
Michelle Chen: “I’ve learned to write with greater empathy in my poetry because of my experiences with mental illness. Depression, obsessive compulsions, and social anxiety lent me more curiosity and sympathy for narrators who are on the fringes of society. However, both the thought and execution of empathy often falls short in my poems’ universes, and I utilize this theme as a reflection of the difficulties involved with emotional distress. The feeling of being disconnected is the main theme of all these pieces, involving narrators with several small differences or diverse situations that end up eating away at them. I hope that my work will give insight into the realities of mental struggle, if not mental illness, and bring to light the reality and importance of mental health. The lack of tolerance of mental illness has affected me personally—I’ve been personally advised to remove the subject entirely from multiple applications for school and work—and this institutionalized discrimination and delegitimization of those who struggle mentally just as with any other illness is important to discuss. I hope that my piece allows readers not to forgive, but to understand the distressing isolation of thinking and living differently.” (website)
Jackson Burgess: “In college, when I started taking writing seriously, I fell in with a crowd of writers, musicians, graffiti artists, dancers, and derelicts, all of whom loved art so hard it would crack your bones, and most of whom suffered from some sort of mental illness (myself included). It was the first time I’d been in such a community, where depression and medication and therapy were discussed so openly, and as someone with bipolar disorder, it taught me to value open dialogue about those painful topics, rather than to box them up and feel alone. I write to bear witness to experiences and feelings, always from a place of anxiety, and always with the goal of dispelling solipsism in some reader who may have felt the same.” (web)
Katie Bickham: “Eating disorder is the mental illness with the highest mortality rate, and I have been wrestling with it for over a decade now. Disordered eating is one of the strangest mental illnesses, because it’s one that the sufferer almost always wants to have on some level. I’ve often felt addicted to anorexia and bulimia, strangely happy with the havoc they wreak on my body, hesitant to lay them aside and ‘grow.’ The strangest part of it is that I’m a feminist and support a woman’s control over her body and reject male-driven beauty norms. But still, I fight to shrink, to disappear. Then one day, a new therapist who I went to see when there was nothing left to do but die told me something that seemed to throw everything into reverse. She said, ‘You deserve to take up space in the world.’ That same week, I started graduate school and work on my first book of poems. I have grown—in every sense—but the desire is always there waiting.” (website)
When the man sat down next to me at Starbucks, need coming off of him like a pheromone, I was quiet, having read, more than once, God save me from the well-meaning white woman, for he was a person of color—I wasn’t sure which color, but not a fucking white person like me—and maybe I was profiling him, maybe I was an asshole and had already offended the black woman who said I could share the table but packed up her things when I sat down, leaving me to chew my dry, multigrain bagel thoroughly like the stereotype it was and read an article about wildfires in Canada and how people watched their homes burn, at a comfortable distance, on cameras linked to their phones, until the man asked quietly, from his place to my side, if I could buy him a cup of coffee, his face open the way a wound is open, soft face about the age of my soft-faced son, and it was Mother’s Day, and I couldn’t escape the bounds of my whiteness, but I worried he was hungry, my son is always hungry, so I said I’d like to buy him something to eat, too, and asked was he okay, and he said he was, but life is strange right now, and I said, yes, isn’t that the truth, and I had an appointment to get to and handed him twenty dollars from the stack in my purse and heard him order coffee and his bagel with cream cheese, and the black woman came back and sat down just as I walked out, my tears overflowing like clichés.
Francesca Bell: “I’ve written quite a bit about different mental illnesses, my own and others, and I try to even over-share about it. I had this experience, when my relative was very sick with his bipolar disorder and OCD, I shared about it with a woman that I knew, and she came back to me years later and thanked me. Her daughter had developed OCD, and if it hadn’t been for me, she wouldn’t have known what it was, and she wouldn’t have known what to do. So that’s another thing that we really lose when we don’t talk about it. You can save other people a lot of time and suffering, just sharing your own experience.” (website)
