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Tim Hilligonds interviews Patrick O'Neil and James Brown on Writing Your Way to Recovery: How Stories Can Save Our Lives in The Rumpus, a literary journal.
This book is a collection of personal stories and creative writing exercises designed to help those in recovery, providing a vital roadmap to our artistic, personal and spiritual growth. It's available in paperback and as a Kindle e-book.
About the Authors:
JAMES BROWN is the author of the critically acclaimed memoirs Apology to the Young Addict, The Los Angeles Diaries and This River. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the Nelson Algren Literary Award in short fiction. Brown's work has appeared in GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Ploughshares, New England Review, and many other publications.
PATRICK O'NEIL is the author of the addition memoir, Gun, Needle, Spoon. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles where he is an adjunct faculty member for their Continuing Education Program. He is a practicing Certified Drug and Alcohol Counselor and is on the Board of Directors for REDEEMED, a non-profit Criminal Record Clearing Project that brings lawyers and professional writers together to help others move beyond their past. In 2016, for his exemplary work in the recovery community, O'Neil received a Governor's Pardon by California Governor Jerry Brown.
"James Brown's Apology to the Young Addict does not just breathe new life into addiction writing, it does so with enough grace, heart, and grab-you-by-the-throat style to transcend the genre and qualify as genuine literature. These beautiful essays will serve as balm for survivors of the opioid crisis, those still struggling to make it out, and pretty much anyone else trying to stay sane in these insane times. Prose-wise--with all due respect to his late namesake--James Brown has earned his title as the Godfather of Junkie Soul." --Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight