I am entirely fascinated and enamored with the world of poetry. I must dive deeper. My teeth and tongue have just begun to taste the surface, but I must crunch bone. Many poets may say they love to write, but are afraid to address the true question: must I write until the day I die? My answer is yes. I would love the honor of consideration for your low-residency, long-distance mentorship Master of Fine Arts in Poetry with a Narrative Medicine track. I hope you enjoy the poetry that I am submitting.
Thank you so very much for your time and consideration and all the best,
Abby Peyton Laporte (APL)
FOLLOW UP STATEMENT:
Fuck poetry. I've learned to write with clarity and rigor; I prioritize being honest about exact who I am, or the precise narrative of a fiction prose piece that I need to write. I don't care much about poetry anymore. Over the course of my graduate education in creative writing, specifically of Narrative Medicine (so yes, I got in,) I realized that I could write with greater coherence in increasingly difficult genres as my brain healed from my hospitalizations. I incurred brain damage when I was 19 years old, by way of an extreme and unpredicted psychiatric crisis (more so medical crisis). I wrote beautiful prose before this neurological event, but then as I recovered, I could only write poetry. In the year or two after the catatonia, which caused the majority of the brain injury, specifically through brain swelling from psychosis, I couldn't even read at all.
I think that when I initially applied to my MFA program, I was so haunted by this injury and incapacitation, or really the sense of accompanying grief, that I couldn't admit my interest in any other genres. I felt that prose, weather memoir or fiction, was simply too difficult, or inaccessible in some way. I now understand that I am lucky enough, in many various ways, to have a brain that has healed sufficiently to write in whatever genre calls to me. Free verse poetry is exceptionally powerful and stunning, artful and important, but also not my only seed of interest. Many writers may be grateful, excited, and happy to write brilliant poetry. First of all, my poetry wasn't quite brilliant. Secondly, each poem I wrote seemed to have an echo of my incapacitation. Finding a program with a narrative medicine emphasis, however, was a soothing and ultimately crucial choice.
Throughout the course of my MFA, I grieved and processed the lost of my mental capacities, specifically around lucid writing. My two and a half years of raw writing, crying, screaming, reading, and listening were a full catharsis (a highly privileged yet also highly perseverant gift to get). I entered into a state of transformation, a state of elevated bliss of anguish, which sounds about as douchey as the French Philosophy aesthetics that I so willing borrow to describe a strange state of affairs. I ended up reconnecting with my affinity for the easy demise and genius of Virginia Woolf, a woman with money and whiteness who still died by her own hand from what was then called manic-depressive. Yes, even Woolf didn't have the level of damage, quite literally and neurologically, that I had nearly endured.
I wrote through poetry in my first semester or two during a pandemic and a full time grocery store job that I eventually failed (again, neurological deficiencies, this time in the form of passing out from the overhead lights). After a year of that work, I found standup comedy. By the time I found standup, I had already re-engaged with the world of prose. When I was young, from about age 7 up until 18 years old and before the psychosis, I wrote quite beautifully, with a normal writerly learning trajectory. In my final graduate thesis, I include one vignette that I wrote the beginning of that ill fated freshman year at Bard College, in upstate New York. It is ingenious, and significantly better quality writer, with a stronger voice than I have well into current day. When you have survived significant brain damage and also recovered, slowly but surely, capacities that you thought were probably gone forever (in my case, sanity, lucidity, and then even reading and writing,) you don't really care about the quality of the qualities regained. Even as a lifelong writer, more or less, I'm just still really fucking excited to still be alive. At 31 years old, the benefit and thrilling surprised of finding anew my capacity to be understood is totally mind blowing. Mind un-blowing? Un-explosive -- but a massive, happy, and totally unexpected relief.
Fiction is my newest medicine. Comedy is my newest love. I don't want to or have time to write the rest of this update because I love myself now to trust myself now to understand that I know my capacity for contribution as a human being, as a writer, and as a survivor of SMI (a small subcategorization of mostly disorders with lifelong bouts of psychosis from the DSM).
I love you!
Abby
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