“Don’t worry Claire, you have my genes.” This said by my British astrophysicist father when I called to ask why he had failed to disclose my mother’s actual mental health diagnosis for several years. A man so reticent I didn’t even know he held the John D. MacArthur professorship at Caltech until I did a bit of sleuthing for my memoir, A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia. You can read the essay here.

“The night before picking up a copy of The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays , Esmé Weijun Wang’s essays on the subject of “the full psychotic spectrum” or what are called “the schizophrenias” (4), I anticipated its themes in a threatening dream related to my mother’s struggle with an illness that went undiagnosed for far too long.” You can read the essay here.

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.