Month: May 2018
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Insanity: Look Up the Facts Then Face Them
These are some of the books I’ve read to understand better what happens in my bipolar brain. They help me live with the disease, work with it, manage it as best as possible. Again, books, books, books—how do people go through life without them? The information in these tomes isn’t pretty. Here are some tidbits…
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Psychiatrists are Crappy Poets
Don’t get me wrong, I love psychiatry. It has given me the language to understand what happens in my mind when I am sick. Diagnosis is a wonderful, wonderful thing, because, once you diagnose something, you can focus on strategies to confront it. That’s what you get from studying the disease you suffer. But psychiatrists…
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Checkup at the Asylum
It’s been five months. The break from reality began the second week of December. Insomnia kicked in first. Then came the tremors. As the winters days turned darker, the moods thickened. A mention of Christmas, the black hole in my existence, put me in a rage. I could howl the roof off the house. Then…
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Poet Alexandra Regalado: Life Seen Through the Bulletproof Glass
When I attended the Associated Writing Programs conference in Tampa, Florida in March, I sought out Latinos, because the last time I went to the conference, about ten years ago, AWP truly deserved the nickname that people of color gave it: “All White People.” It’s still a majority white, but I found the Latina/o/x writers…
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Rejection Letters
This is one of the most painful aspects of a writer’s life. If you can work through this one, you’ve crossed a great desert of pain. And, with enough visceral fortitude, you’ll cross it, again, and again, and again. . . When it comes to rejection letters, I always think about one of my favorite…