Writing Through Madness with Claire Phillips & Bruce Bauman

Thrilled to have appeared on July 12th, 2021 with acclaimed author Bruce Bauman on Writing Through Madness — a workshop co-hosted by Write or Die Tribe and Writing Workshops Dallas. After a short reading of our latest works of fiction and non-fiction, we answered a slew of questions on the writing process pertaining to mental health — of our own and our characters who might also be members of our family or fictional creations.

"A Gift I Couldn't Offer My Mother," an Interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books

In April, I did a very special interview with Holly Rudolph at LA Review of Books who related to experiences detailed in my memoir, A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia. We speak candidly on some of the meat of the book, unpacking inter-generational mother-daughter/familial relationships, Medicare, anti-psychotic treatment, and representation of mentally ill characters in contemporary media like Shameless, Homeland, as well as YA novels like Made You Up by Francesca Zappia and Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman.

Read the interview here.

❉ Interview and Review by Amelia Kennedy at Write or Die Tribe ❉

So grateful to Amelia Kennedy at Write or Die Tribe for writing "How Can We Both Love and Survive Our Parents? - A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of my Mother and Schizophrenia by Claire Phillips": a thoughtful review of my memoir which you can find on their site here. She likens the book to writing by Sylvia Plath and describes how the prose invites readers to "bond over the journey throughout the memoir and constantly details without overexplaining the stigma surrounding mental illness and how it must be confronted."

It was also an honor to be additionally featured by her for the "In The Spotlight" interview series at Write or Die that focuses on "the work of unpublished and nontraditional writers, Self-Published and debut authors and independent presses."

You can read our interview where we touch on various contexts relevant to my memoir such as life in San Francisco, various generations of feminism, writing influences such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Maggie Nelson, and Phillip K Dick, and even the lipstick lesbians who raised me at this link.