Author Archive for liz

Walking the Edge of Insanity:
Navigating the World of Mental Health with Open Eyes and Important Questions.
An Evening with The Icarus Project
Thursday April 8th 8PM
 
As folks who generally feel alienated by mainstream culture and question conventional ideas of sanity, what does it mean to be struggling with traditional labels such as ?clinical depression,? ?bipolar disorder,? or ?schizophrenia?? How helpful is the modern medical view of mental disorders that revolves around drugs and psychiatry and how much of it is influenced by powerful pharmaceutical corporations, public funding cuts, and a society that equates economic productivity with health?
 
Come join an exciting discussion that is starting all over the country and is being orchestrated by Sascha Scatter and Ashley McNamara, the directors of The Icarus Project ? a group of people diagnosed with bipolar disorder who are finding new language for all the different experiences that get labeled ?mental illness.?
Come celebrate the release of our little book, Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness: a Reader and Roadmap of Bipolar Worlds, which is a compilation of stories and lessons from brave and misunderstood folks who rarely have the chance to speak and whose insights are going to end up changing the world.
 
Ashley McNamara is an artist, writer, farmer, dreamer, traveler, teacher and mental health activist diagnosed with bipolar disorder who has been roaming around the country putting together zines and editing a book for The Icarus Project. These days her most accurate address is the license plate of her truck, but before taking off for the great wide open with a horde of art supplies and lots of good food she was known to live in the San Francisco Bay Area and grow exceptional lettuce.
 
Sascha Altman DuBrul (aka Sascha Scatter) is a writer and activist who grew up in the New York City squatter subculture and spent years playing in punk bands, riding freight trains, working on farms, and writing political adventure stories about his travels from the forests blockades of the Pacific Northwest to the jungles of Southern Mexico. Sascha has been locked up in psych wards involuntarily three times for losing his mind and is diagnosed classic ?Bipolar I with psychotic tendencies,? which in his mind doesn?t quite capture the essence of the dilemma, but he?s working on creating new and better language to talk about it.
 
for more info check out www.theicarusproject.net

The 2nd Hand celebrates the release of issue #13
Live at Quimby?s
 
The following is a direct transmission for the editors of The 2nd Hand:
 
For Apes, By Apes
 
Between adopting new exercise routines and trying to ignore the empty vessel on television, we have managed the 13. You know you want it. Join The 2nd Hand (www.the2ndhand.com) at Quimby?s on Thursday, March 18 at 7:30 pm to celebrate the release of The 2nd Hand broadside number 13, featuring: new fiction (I hadn’t slept like a normal human being for months.) by John L. Sheppard (from our 27th state); our co-conspirator Mickey Hess (Late at night where there used to be static, and I said two-for-one on wheels and rims and we’ll throw in mudflaps too) from Louisville-a town we will always cherish for giving the world Slint; and Chicago’s Erika Mikkalo (Someone outside the circle shouted, “I can play taps on a tuba!”).
 
Helping us celebrate are: resident 2nd Hand weather poet Susannah Felts; Gretchen Kalwinski, who seems to understand much about the nature of waiting; and your dear 2nd Hand editors, Todd Dills (author of For Weeks Above the Umbrella) and Jeb Gleason-Allured (author of his own despair).
 
BYOB. You heard us.

The Danny’s Reading Series welcomes
Poets Matthew Zapruder, Matt Rohrer and Joshua Beckman to Quimby’s for a night of poetry
Friday April 16th 8PM
 
Matthew Zapruder is the author of American Linden, winner of the 2001 Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize. Matt Rohrer is the author of Hummock in the Malookas (winner National Poetry Series, published by Norton), Satellite (Verse Press) and the forthcoming A Green Light (Verse Press); he is the poetry editor of Fence. Joshua Beckman is the author of Things Are Happening (winner of the APR Honickman Award, published by Copper Canyon), Something I Expected to be Different (Verse Press) and the forthcoming Your Time Has Come (Verse Press). Rohrer and Beckman are also the authors of a collaborative book of poems, Nice Hat: Thanks (Verse Press), as well as an accompanying compact disk, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (Verse Press).
 
This reading is part of the midwest tour to support the new books from Matt Roher and Joshua Beckman. They will also sign copies of their books.
 
More info is at:www.versepress.orgwww.tupelopress.org