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Bye, Bacchus: Sobriety and the Creative Spirit [Artistic and Professional Stewardship]Sobriety as a lifestyle choice can be as scary as it is empowering, perhaps in particular ways for the creative mind. Via prepared remarks, before/during/after samples of creative work, and audience questions, five diverse writers share their experiences around the choice to become sober, addressing such subjects as the creative process, writing with integrity about substance use and past selves, finding new language to describe oneself, and fostering creative community in sober contexts.People Joey Trimble practices yoga, meditates, and fails as a gardener in Conway, Arkansas, where he teaches writing at the University of Central Arkansas. He is a past Lily Peter Fellow and has poetry published or forthcoming in Measure, Blue Earth Review, Cave Region Review, Toad Suck Review, and others. Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and works in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books, Reading Berryman to the Dog, Discount Fireworks, The Mercy of Traffic, and most recently, On the Way to the Promised Land Zoo, as well as five chapbooks. She also appears in the recent anthologies Plein Air, Untold Arkansas, 50/50, Fiolet & Wing, and Pocket Poems.Megan Blankenship (organizer and moderator) is an Ozark poet whose work appears most recently in Poetry Northwest and Tar River Poetry. As the 2018 Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, she spent six months living off-grid in a remote cabin in southern Oregon. Her honors include an Arkansas Arts Council grant. Brody Parrish Craig is a queer southern writer. Their interests include TGNC southern literature, TLGBQ histories, community organizing, poetics & advocating for new representations within regional & academic spaces. Jane V. Blunschi holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Arkansas. She is the author of a collection of Stories, Understand Me, Sugar, and her fiction and creative nonfiction focuses on themes of queerness, spirituality, addiction, sobriety, and fertility. I. Welcome, Opening Remarks, and Housekeeping AnnouncementsII. Participant IntroductionsIII. Participant Remarks [SUBJECT TO CHANGE, Y’ALL]JoeyThis talk will begin with a very brief personal history of this now-dry writer's journey through alcoholism. Most of the talk, however, will focus on certain poems written during these stages) that represent particular subjects of interest to this writer: The intrapersonal relationship of the self ("Booze Face Considers the Blooze, Finds Trimbling") and the relationship between childhood trauma and substance abuse ("Questions I Know Answers To, or We Don't Talk About").WendyBooze & the Muse I don't write much about booze and my muse because my writing was not improved by adding chemicals to the angry soup that was my brain chemistry. But, in this talk, I’ve chosen to weave stories of our poetry foremothers and fathers, how they saw alcohol (or cocaine) as a creative demiurge and what the results were, and also about some contemporaries who share and shared my problem.(I'll note somewhere here, Jean Rhys, Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Lowell etc.—who never found a way out of the pit.)My story is generally ordinary. I began to drink in high school, and drank sporadically, until I? didn’t. But not until grad school at Arkansas did my affair with booze and drugs take off with a splash and a sniff.Here's the actual point: if AA is a cult, I have drunk the Kool-Aid. I tried but I found no other way of moving forward from an alcoholic stupor than in the sm, who were not always two separate groups.(I'll note here Mary Karr, Leslie Jamison, David Foster Wallace, Berryman, Cheever, etc.—folk who had more-or-less experience with the muse-of-the-rooms.)By the mid-ninties, I'd begun to write poetry again (perfect for a short attention span), and, after a fifteen year hiatus, I started to go to workshops and, finally, an MFA program at Vermont (class of 2003). Today, I'm 20-some years into what might be called a "career," if I had one, four books, 5 chapbooks, poems in a dozen anthologies & many, many journals. (I'll look here at Carver, Jamison, Karr, maybe David Foster Wallace)--success and quasi-success stories)This January, I will have 32 years sober and that's as many years as I was drunk (and high, let's not forget high, I never did.) I don't take any pride in this. As they say in the rooms,? "How do you get to be an old timer? Don’t drink and don't die."I'm convinced there's a long country lope between self-interest and self-awareness and when I drank, I was on the wrong end of that ride. If I have earned poetry, it is because I am sober enough to see the Muse when she floats by or to hear her farting behind the drapes. Sober, I learned discipline and focus. In my experience, discipline and focus beat genius every time.I'm pretty content with how it all turned out.MeganGood MaterialQuitting drinking signifies a loss.Poetry was the thing that was the very most mine. How it was: exciting, hot, terrifying, religious.I’m just a normal person who drank too much.After quitting, a broad space begins to open up.I exhort you to find out how little you matter.Now, reverence is quiet, sober and quiet. Will I write again? Maybe not. But I’m free. Brody"THE PATIENT IS AN UNRELIABLE HISTORIAN": Addiction, Recovery, & PraxisThere are binders on my dresser full of confidential information.In a first of many intakes, during summer of 2009, a clinician writes a fitting & poetic line: the patient is an unreliable historian. I will enter recovery much later. I will quit using & keep using& quit using & keep using. I will, for today, stay quit becauseI decided to try to live again in the early months of 2015.It’s no coincidence that I gave up my use of substances & came out as trans within months of each other.It’s no coincidence that many poems I tried to write drunklater revealed their truths to me when I came back to themwithout the numb, newly clear-headed, without the influence of drugs.It’s no coincidence that my drive to write stems froma drive for community, belonging, & visibility consideringmy history of isolation, self-denial, & hidden truths.It’s no coincidence that the first time I changed my name on FBI was so drunk that I didn’t remember until I logged in the next morning& the policies wouldn’t permit me changing my name again for ninety days.It’s no coincidence that later, around ninety days substance free, I quit living separate lives & came to the page with a radical vulnerability that’d been held hostage by drugs & booze for years prior in my writing. What started as an attempt in childhood toward survival & self-expression again became the only means to survive.& this time, it was different.I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. I couldn’t lie to the page.I came back to my writing with intention, vulnerability, & a purpose.I came back into the world radically open, true, & terrifyingly free.JaneWhat it was like:?There was no “before” for me. My creative life was completely dormant while I was in my addiction, which lasted for fourteen years (age 14-almost 28). I did still have an imagination, though, and daydream and fantasy were a huge part of my life during that time. I thought I needed drugs and alcohol to have a rich and vivid inner life and to be inspired by music and to have the ability to have deep, vulnerable conversations with people.?This was all bullshit. When I got sober, I realized that my imagination had been in some sort of holding pattern, and that the substances I was abusing were making it impossible to act on any really creative urge I experienced.??I remember feeling terribly frustrated by my inability to express myself creatively, or express myself at all, really. It was like my ideas were behind a brick wall and a steel door and also across an ocean and I just could not imagine a way to reach it.?My sober mind has so much more sparkle and bounce. Imagination, fantasy, and daydream now figure heavily into my writing practice – I can use those parts of my mind in a practical way now.?What happened:?Even though I wasn't able to be creative in any sort of concrete, productive way when I was drinking and using, I knew, somehow, that I was going to be writing one day. That process unfolded for me slowly in those 10.5 years of initial sobriety, and began with me re-reading a bunch of books and re-seeing a lot of movies and re-listening to a ton of music that I had consumed while using, plus listening to as much new music and reading as many new or undiscovered books as I could. When the time was right, I started writing stories and taking myself seriously as a writer. I was 35 and I needed every minute of those 35 years to begin making creative work to put in the world (or try to, at least!).One surprising thing that has happened is that I have been compelled to include some of my lived experience with addiction in my work. Of course, I fictionalize it, and I am still figuring out ways to preserve anonymity and check my motivations for writing a piece or including certain details in a story or essay. Anonymity is something that I do believe is vital to recovery, and I definitely don’t ever use anything I’ve heard in the context of a 12-step program in my work. I want to get my stories out, but I do wonder if breaching my own anonymity, even to share my experience through my work (directly or indirectly) will ultimately threaten my sobriety.?I can't stand stories or any other literary work about alcoholic/addicted folks who are portrayed as "the loser.” I care about capturing the nuance of life as an addicted person in recovery, and there is absolutely no magic for me in a sensational story about addiction.?I don't feel obligated in any way to make people see the light or teach anyone anything about addicts or the recovery process, but when I think of the work of Michelle Tea, Eileen Myles, and Mary Karr, I can see their influence on my life as a sober writer.?What it’s like now:?I’m still not quite done with writing about the influence of sobriety on my life, because it has shaped so much of it. The life that I get to live is a direct result of my sobriety. I have shifted into exploring queer spirituality in my fiction and essay, and I can see that my relationship to spirit and my willingness to explore it comes from the tools I’ve learned in a 12 step program. I’m still ambivalent about that model of recovery, but it is the only thing that has ever worked for me.?IV. Q & A SessionDRUNK (THINK) TANK: INFLUENTIAL IDEAS & MEDIABOOKSAlcoholics Anonymous by AnonymousBlackout by Sarah Hepola?Blood, Bone and Marrow: a Biography of Harry Crews by Ted GeltnerCalling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh AkbarDaily Reflections by Anonymous MembersDorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This? by Marion MeadeElizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan MarshallElizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It by Brett C. MillierGetting Naked with Harry Crews: Interviews edited by Erik BledsoeI Must be Living Twice by Eileen MylesInferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen MylesJournal by Henry David ThoreauLit: a Memoir by Mary Karr The Artist’s Way by Julia CameronThe Recovering by Leslie Jamison The Trip to Echo Springs by Olivia Laing Traveling Mercies by Anne LamottValencia by Michelle TeaARTICLES & WEBSITES“How To Create Change By Rejecting Intoxication Culture” by Princess Harmony“Mental Maps of Substance Use” by Clementine Morrigan“Hip Sobriety Manifesto” by Holly Whitaker“The prodigal: Elizabeth Bishop and Alcohol” by Brett C. Millier“Alcohol and Charles Bukowski” by Kristin Bialik“Why Do Writers Drink So Much?” by Lawrence Samuels Temper playlist: here, queer, & in recovery by Jason IsbellTwin Solitude by Leif Vollebekk?OTHER STUFFSoberRabbit (Instagram comic)“UNHhh” (web series with Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova) Sober PodcastOn Being with Krista TippettSeek Treatment with Cat & PatThe Unruffled Podcast ................
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