On and Off the Learning Curve

The following is an excellent talk given by Mike Barnes at the University of Toronto back in March. I've a lot of other things tied to the Lily Pond to put up -- including video of another excellent talk he gave at the Cobourg festival, and will do so as soon as I get a few minutes.

On and Off the Learning Curve

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Mike Barnes Reading at the U of T Wedensday March 11th

Mike Barnes will be discussing The Lily Pond at the University of Toronto a week from Wednesday, at Hart House. If you've not yet attended one of his talks please do so, as they are among the best I've been part of. If you have, you know what I am talking about; but you should also know that each one is considerably different from those that precede it.

Here's an excerpt from his latest talk, in Waterloo last Thursday (which can be found on his blog):

About drugs I have only one thing to say. It is a very recent insight, but it offers a glimpse into a wealth of possibilities. It's not about drugs per se, but about dosage. Over the years, I've tried a huge spectrum of drugs–from phenothiazine tranquilizers to antidepressants to various mood stabilizers–but all of them, even the ones that seemed to help, had side effects I couldn't tolerate. So I've become very wary of drugs. My psychiatrist doesn't push them–"I'm here to advise; the decisions are yours," she says, which is one of the reasons I trust her–but she does sometimes suggest, especially when I get backed into a particularly bad corner, that there might be a drug that could help. Last fall, I got backed into such a corner and she suggested quetiapine (or Seroquel, its brand name). But when I tried it, at the lowest standard dosage of 25 mg, it zonked me out so thoroughly and for so long–the familiar "zombie" effect–that I realized I could not possibly function in any normal way on it. I cut the pills in half, then into quarters; though better, it still knocked me too far under. So I dropped the trial. But my doctor happened to mention that she knew a couple of people who were helped by extremely small doses of this drug. And then my wife's doctor said the same thing, that she'd heard of people who were aided by a mere "whiff," as she put it, of quetiapine. So my doctor wrote me a prescription for 1 mg–we would start from that baseline. The trouble came when I tried to fill the prescription at Shopper's, only to be told by the pharmacist, very insistently, that the lowest dose sold was the 25 mg tablet and it was unobtainable in 1 mg strength. "But that's the prescription my doctor wrote," I said, pointing at the slip. "You might try a compounding pharmacy," he muttered, then looked past me and said, "Next?" To make a long story short, in all of Toronto I found only two old-fashioned compounding pharmacies who could make up the prescription in the lower strength. I have been trying it for a few weeks now...it shows promise. But my point is (or rather, my two points are): 1) Cui bono? Who stands to gain if drugs are only sold in higher-strength amounts? You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that drug companies would not want it widely advertised that minute portions of their brands might help some people. Would any drug seller want it known that some buyers got by on a "whiff" of his product? Would he want to pay for the tests to discover such a possibility? 2) Which of my many failed drug trials over the years might have stood a chance of success at a dosage of one half, one quarter...one sixteenth...of the normal range? A "tincture of this, a tincture of that," as the old saying went.

A bit of this...a bit of that. Even tiny pieces can have an important place in the mosaic.

“Alle Ding sind Gift und nichts ohn Gift; alein die Dosis macht das ein Ding kein Gift ist” [all things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison]. Paracelsus's famous dictum usually receives a negative stress, i.e. Many things are poisonous except in small amounts. I have been reminded lately of its more positive face: Some things are beneficial precisely in small, even minuscule, amounts.

The Lily Pond: A Visual Presentation

Over a Mike Barnes's blog (www.graphomaniac.com), Mike has posted a couple of links to a combined talk / slide show which are definitely worth checking out. They can be found here.

In the Black Box of Bipolar Disorder

A review of the Lily Pond in the Guelph Mercury by Alex Good.

Mental illness has always been a difficult subject to relate to. The field is full of myths and common misunderstandings, making diagnosis and treatment both a bit of an art and a science. And so, if nothing else, a memoir of madness gives us a bit of insight into what may be going on.

In The Lily Pond, Toronto writer Mike Barnes offers a series of different perspectives on a life spent dealing with bipolar disorder. The book has four sections (Barnes calls them essays) that are arranged in roughly chronological order.

The first, which is also the shortest and most effective section, tells the story of the author's own early (mis) diagnoses, hospitalization, and search for a cure (including the usual laundry list of drugs and even electroconvulsive therapy). There is, however, no cure -- a point made at the end of the first section with a clever reversal of Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. Just as Achilles can never catch the tortoise from behind, neither can he escape him if ahead. You can't shake depression.

And so, the next three sections describe Barnes living with his condition, focusing on his relationships with his family, his psychiatrist, and his wife. The presentation here is less personal, more layered with myth and metaphor and concerned with how experience is turned into the stuff of story.

But it remains compelling. Barnes, the author of highly regarded novels and short story collections whose sales figures (disarmingly documented here) are cause for depression enough in themselves, is a graceful yet economical writer with a knack for imagery you can almost feel.

Seeing his wife becoming cobwebbed in pills, he writes, "the image that comes to mind is of someone (I have done it many times myself) trying to secure a package that contains objects of irregular shapes and sharp edges, winding the plastic tape around it in fierce spirals, around and around, swathing and swathing until it lumpily muffled, sometimes (paranoia and fatigue combining clumsily) passing the dispenser over the name and address accidentally."

This is well observed and rendered, with the sentence itself wrapping round and round those bracketed digressions while suggesting the "fierce spiral" of illness and treatment swallowing the patient's identity seemingly by accident.

But The Lily Pond isn't just a portrait in misery. This is mainly due to the separation Barnes maintains between the autobiographical subject and the autobiographer, "the necessary sliver of space between my skin and what it was I was stitching." In other words, in the best postmodern fashion, this is a book that is also about its own writing, construction and interpretation. A portrait of the middle-aged bipolar man as an artist.

If there is one problem with the book, it is the final essay. This appears to have been almost an afterthought, telling the late-breaking story of Barnes' wife Heather's mental illness. The details, however, are sketchy, the imagery and mythic elements seem more forced and the picture we end with isn't as hopeful as it is disturbing.

Instead of mutual support, one has the sense of an unhealthy, mutually reinforcing codependency on a prescription of "twenty-nine pills a day."

On that regimen, the tortoise might even begin to close ground with Achilles.

Despite such final misgivings, The Lily Pond is an insightful look inside the black box of bipolar disorder and an original artistic reinterpretation of the experience of living with mental illness.

Mike Barnes: The Danforth Review Interview

There is a fabulous interview with Mike Barnes over at the Danforth Review. The whole thing can be found here.

Here, however, is a taste:

Did you ever feel while writing this that the simple bare bones "non-fiction" element was too close to home? Did you fear it would trigger a negative outcome?

...Actually, it felt more like relief to concentrate on just my own story, understanding and telling it as well as I could, without the need to create characters and invent things for them to say and do.

At the same time, it felt, if anything, more deeply imagined (as opposed to invented) than fiction: there was a need to find the underlying patterns and structures that could link true events. But I guess you're asking more about personal risk. that was something I was not so aware of at the time–when I felt mostly exhilarated to be recovering the past–but have become very aware of since. More aware every day.

I think there have been, and will be, many negative outcomes for me from writing this book. They’re hard to name and harder to quantify, but I feel them, certainly. Writing names things, which can sound like taming them; but in another sense it gives them new substance and power: it bodies them forth. It’s daunting as well as strengthening to take the true dimensions of an enemy you've been battling...especially when there's no sign of an end to the battle.

At one point, when we were discussing the manuscript, my psychiatrist advised me to be cautious in dealing with what I had recalled. I quoted her (as best I remembered) for apiece I wrote about dealing with what I had written: "What you wrote may have unearthed a box. It may have been sealed for a reason...so you could keep functioning. Now it may be time to open it, or at least peek into it. Cautiously." This is the first time for me as a writer that the period after writing has proved far more difficult than the writing itself.

Achieving Self-Definition: a Review of Mike Barnes's Lily Pond

by Shane Neilson, from the Canadian Medical Association Journal

Memoirs of madness are now part of a tradition: There's Andrew Solomon's overrated The Noonday Demon; William Styron's excellent little squib Darkness Visible; and for a description of the utter nonsensical terrifying rhythms of psychosis nothing beats Mark Vonnegut's The Eden Express.

The best of these books (I have listed but a few) all grapple with similar themes: the urge to kill oneself; the conundrum of whether the illness is in fact an illness or if it is part of one's psychological makeup and whether the illness is wedded to creativity; the journey to diagnosing the illness; and the struggle to find the right drug, the right doctor, the right mate. What distinguishes the best of these books — all rather grim itemizations of what a serious mental illness can do to the body and soul — is the quality of the writing.

Barnes' prose is spare, lyrical: a very mirror to desolation, to erasure. It is as if you are having coffee with a stranger, and he is telling his tale without self-pity or gloom. The teller is compelling not because of his experience of survival (this is emphatically not a self-help, inspirational, or therapy book), but because of his assertion of the illness, his inhabitation of it and his portrayal of madness.

This illness is relentless and although Barnes does not do anything so obvious, it can be likened to an implacable force of nature, pressingly present, incrementally receding, then massing off the coast. This is assuredly a key factor in the value of this memoir: if there were resentment at the cost of illness, we'd have another whine book and the power of the tale would succumb to an undertow.

There is one, and thankfully not fatal, structural mistake. Barnes opens the book with the death scene. This really is the cliché of the genre. It is a kind of lazy shorthand to establish stakes that should be achieved by other means. Death is a subject that such books must be honest about and must mention, but not at the outset. And Barnes stretches it out over an entire long chapter. Things are not aided later by the cliché of all clichés: "Two images occur to me ...[a] candle dwindling down to its final stub. It will soon go out, but for now, the flame around the wick still flickers...." A conventional chapter about his childhood might have better served as an introduction. Instead, we immediately say hello-in-extremis to an eloquent Mr. Death, to a deworded Mr. Zapped (and to complete the unholy trinity, masturbation is also mentioned).

Outside of the first chapter, however, he is less self-absorbed; there are no flourishes, there is just purpose, and Barnes takes interest in all the characters of his life. Memoirs can sometimes lose themselves at the exact location of their navels, and Barnes' self-knowledge prevents that, despite the occasional tinkling piano key, like the too-pregnant set piece at the psychiatrist's office when Barnes is told he can recover: "It was a hard message to hear in some ways. The tears that started to my eyes felt like droplets of rain after a massive drought. Were they harbingers of the real downpour needed, or just a tantalizing sprinkle?"

And what of the outcome? Barnes is unsentimental about this when he reflects on the occasion of a birthday party: "Thirty-three years lay between this late afternoon, slowly dimming now, pooling its shadows toward dusk...[u]nvanquishable, he must have seemed — and apparently still does sometimes, uncannily, some core of myth intact despite the more than 3 decades of precipitous falls and long slow climbs, slides and wily scale-backs, according to some persistence of family memory and personal meaning...." It is this mixed feeling, this summation of both bipolar disorder as what he has and what he has lost, that is the mythic core of this book, the dualism, and hence its value.

Barnes is a star gazer, a wanderer of the imagination, and uncompromisingly honest with his own story. This is the real service he offers for those looking for more than self-help: he offers self-definition without romance or servile hope. Barnes considers himself both adaptive and maladaptive. And you root for him as he severs the self-image of illness, the switcheroo of the identity of illness. At some point in all of the madness memoirs, stock must be taken, house cleaned: The Lily Pond is that clearinghouse. One gets the double sense that Barnes, as he works out his own illness' feints and predilections, is free as he never will be free.

Mike Barnes: The St. Clement's Talk

On November 2nd, Mike Barnes was the guest speaker at the St. Clement's 40 Minute Forum, and all indications are that it was, like every other Barnes / Lily Pond event this fall, a moving, powerful, and thought provoking presentation. Mike has since taped his discussion, which can be found here, at archives.org, where you can download it and listen to it at your leisure.

We're looking to set up some additional speaking engagements for Mike, so if you like his talk and would like to set something up, please get in touch. I can be reached at biblioasis@gmail.com.

Author Tackles Highs and Lows

An article by Ted Shaw on Mike Barnes The Lily Pond appeared in this morning's Windsor Star. Mike will be reading Saturday (tomorrow) November 1st at 1 pm at the Art Gallery of Windsor. For any area Windsor bibliophiles, I do hope that you will try and make it down.

The article:

For years, Mike Barnes would burn the midnight oil in a furious, almost desparate pursuit of art.

A poet and fiction writer, he mistakenly believed that he produced his best work during those manic episodes.

But 15 years ago, when he was in late 30s, Barnes discovered his experiences were much more serious and clinical than the romantic image he had created in his mind.

Barnes, 53, suffers from bipolar disorder, or as it was once known, manic depression. He has chronicled his harrowing experiences, and his efforts to make peace with himself and his family, in The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis, published by Windsor's Biblioasis Press.

Barnes will read from The Lily Pond and discuss the book Saturday at 1 p.m. at the 2008 BookFest Windsor at the Art Gallery of Windsor.

"For many years I did think that I could only write in my manic upswings," he said. "The depressive periods, pardon the expression, were pretty much a write-off."

His diagnosis when he was 38 followed years in and out of mental institutions, undergoing shock treatments, medication and clinical analysis. All the while, Barnes was a successful author with six works of poetry and fiction.

"It has just been in the last three years or so, since I've been seeing a new doctor, that she has encouraged me to start to question when I have those moments of inspiration."

His doctor suggested he write at times when he didn't feel inspired.

"The results were shocking," said Barnes. "I ended up writing less than before, but not that much less. And the really shocking part was what I ended up writing was just as good as the other stuff."

That experience occupies a key section of The Lily Pond, where Barnes describes how his 2006 book of poetry, A Thaw Foretold, also published by Biblioasis, came about.

"I realized just how much time was wasted in my periods of manic energy," he said.

The impetus for The Lily Pond came when Barnes' wife, Heather, also suffered a breakdown, and how they managed to survive takes up the final section of the book.

"It has been a struggle to get the word out about the book because people tend to categorize it as a bipolar book or a book about recovery," said Barnes.

"But one of the first reactions I had from someone who doesn't suffer from mental illness is that the book raises many issues that were more existential than psychiatric.

"It can apply to personal relationships, life stories, (and) to the choices you make in your life."

Mike Barnes's Lily Pond: The Toronto Launch

Though we launched Mike Barnes's memoir The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis last Thursday in Hamilton, Ontario at St. Joseph's Hospital, the Toronto launch is this Wednesday, October 15th at Caversham Booksellers (7:00-8:30) {98 Harbord St.}. Though I will not be able to attend this one, I urge every single one of you who can to do so. I think that Mike's memoir is an important book: as I've said elsewhere, having a tendency to wallow in the dark waters from time to time, I've read a lot of these books, and I think this is among the best. Better than Styron, better than Jamison, both of which are defaced by the self-congratulatory notes of overcoming which mar so many of these tomes. In the Lily Pond one gets a sense of a life lived with mental illness: "the door swings both ways," Mike writes, and depending upon which side of the door one finds oneself, this can be either hopeful or horrifying, extremes captured with elegant restraint in this book.

Shane Neilson, doctor and poet, made the trek from Guelph for the Hamilton event, and reported on it thereafter on his blog. I'll paste it in below here in the hope that it will convince a few of you to make this reading. Mike was fabulous. It was, without a doubt, one of the best talks/readings I HAVE EVER BEEN TO, and he'll be giving a similar discussion at this one. Mike deserves an audience for this one, and I'm hoping that any of you Toronto area Biblioasis-o-philes who give a shit will make this one, if you don't make another until 2010. Please.

Here's Shane Neilson's take on Barnes's launch in Hamilton last Thursday. I'll post my own thoughts and photos, as promised, soon.

A lifelong project: mental illness, over thirty-five years of it. Mike Barnes, the author of The Lily Pond, read tonight at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton, a place he had been a resident of, long ago, and this was no mere reading. I detest readings, I would rather read the book in question myself to myself, I find that readers read their books wrong, but Barnes prepared an actual presentation: sure, he read from his book, but he also expanded upon the themes of his book as he simultaneously compressed the themes of his book through supplementary anecdote and musing.
It helped that he had what Heaney termed Lowell’s command: this is a survivor of mental illness, but not in the victimized sense; this is a man that has come through, but who questions what he has come through and what he is coming into; this is a writer who is perpetually writing precarious dispatches, but who is granted repose; this is a writer who steadfastly refuses the romanticism of madness, who attests to the dead zones of his life, who can refer to entire stretches as “pointless.” Barnes was eloquent, it was as if he had assembled all the outtakes of his book of memoir-essays and weaved them together for his audience that night. I say command: Barnes had the room, utterly. He possessed us for an hour. And then released us.

One became aware something remarkable was happening when, at the beginning of the evening, Barnes’ publisher actually wept when introducing the author; it was clear that the publisher had his allegiances, and they were for his writer, and he was protective of this writer, and respectful of this writer, but moreso simply moved by the power of this writer, and not by the mere power of Barnes’ example, which as the evening progressed was undeniable; no, the publisher believed in the actual writing, it was the harrowing lyricism and questing metaphors and difficult questions that provoked this response in the publisher, and I must confess it was the emotional template for the evening. I think of the usual glad-handling and puffery at such events. This was very different. Barnes' avowed honesty was contagious.

When Barnes spoke, I felt tumult; it was as if I were being confronted with the very fact of mental illness, its diminishments and levelling; at points I thought it was less like Barnes was speaking and the illness was speaking instead. This might have been more chilling if Barnes wasn’t so matter-of-fact; though the illness was stark, the insight and self-knowledge gained as a result tempered the extremity.

So much of memoir nowadays is about the author’s navel; in Barnes’ story, there are other people, Barnes has a fundamental curiosity about other people; I think this is, more than the myth and memory of the book’s subtitle, the real engine of his recovery. And reviewers are always attesting to the courageousness of the memoir writer when the writer is unflattering towards the subject, when the writer portrays themselves as bumbling or mistaken; I’m not sure Barnes could be called courageous or even resilient, because what choice did he have? He’s here; he has a story to tell; the story is compelling. But I imagine that in the room the illness was there, that it fretted about which seat to take before it decided to sit down next to the publisher, who seemed sympathetic, and it paid very close attention to Barnes. And that Barnes seemed to know it was there, and that this was normal, and that Barnes had done a lot of withstanding, and transcending, and the illness had done a lot of witnessing, too. Not exactly colleagues; not exactly at ease with one another; not enemies; but brought together in the same room, though a door that Barnes memorably describes in his book. I’ll leave that for you to open.

Barnes admitted that there was a conversation going on in Canada about mental illness, and that he wanted to be a part of it. The Lily Pond is a considered manic statement; and though I said I would not admit that Barnes is courageous, and I still think what matters is the writing, not the surviving, I will admit that returning to St. Joseph’s, a place where he was almost a nullity, a frail patient, has to represent some kind of courage.

The Lily Pond: An Introductory Interview with Mike Barnes

The title of your new memoir is The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis. I wonder if you could start by explaining this a bit, with perhaps particular emphasis paid to your rather interesting subtitle?

For a few months the manuscript had another title, and only three sections instead of four. I thought it was finished. When I was surprised by the events, and then the writing, of the last section, I realized that its title, "The Lily Pond", had to be the title of the whole book, since it encapsulates so many of the themes and images explored throughout. But a book just called "The Lily Pond" could be mistaken for a manual on aquatic gardening or a study of Monet--hence the subtitle. It came from me asking myself a simple question: What is the book about? What are its main and recurrent elements? It's about madness, an old-fashioned term which I usually prefer to the more modern "bipolar disorder". Madness covers a huge range of extreme states: from craziness/mental illness to fiery creative passion to overmastering love and obsession. I think this scope makes it a more humane term, but also a more accurate one. The book is also about memory. This might be considered redundant: isn't a memoir by definition about memory? No. All memoirs draw on memory, but this one actively explores how memory may be lost or damaged (through illness and its treatments), how and to what extent it may be recovered, and how a coherent life story may be maintained even in the absence of reliable memory. The book is also about myth(s). It draws on world mythologies to make some of its points, but in a broader sense, it questions the daily myths of illness and wellness by which we know ourselves and others. How do these myths damage, limit, nourish, reveal? Can they be changed? Lastly, it is a story of metamorphosis: of altered states wrought by illness and confusion, but also by recovery and understanding. It is about the paradox of accepting radical ongoing transformation as the foundation of life and sanity.

Plus, I like the alliteration of those five "M"s. They sound like murmuring.

I like your use of madness as well. It seems more fitting, human, less clinical. Madness' shape more diaphanous, perhaps, than bi-polar or schizophrenic, more human. More true to life. There's nothing contained about it. It also seems to me that this is a book, in some ways, you have been working toward for quite a while. Your other books -- some of your stories, your poetry, perhaps most especially your first novel, The Syllabus -- have grappled with the subjects of madness, of memory (and forgetting), of metamorphosis. Especially M., the hero of The Syllabus. You describe memory in The Lily Pond as a Turner fogscape. Can you briefly explain?

Well, that comparison comes specifically from "Two Rooms", the first section of the book, where the period I am trying to remember is the eighteen months I spent on and off (mostly on) a psychiatric ward...when accurate recall was swamped by a perfect storm of memory disruptors: multiple electroshock treatments, phenothiazines and other powerful drugs, and the confusions and distortions of psychosis itself. So the snippets that come back to me are often like those tantalizing gleams in Turner's veils of fog. Sometimes, if I concentrate, more details will come and the object or face, a scene, will solidify and make more sense. And this also happens looking at Turner's paintings. This doesn't mean, though, that the glimpses of things could be anything, are random. I have a sense--a memory trace, I assume--of what is really there, and it has weight, a "rightness" on those occasions when I find it. For example, a year ago, my sister told me of visiting me in the hospital at a time when I was catatonic, just lying on my bed unmoving day after day. And fleeting images of her then came back to me, bits of her face, hands, the hospital wall behind her...and I trusted these. Partly because they had that weight I'm speaking of, a mass that felt like more than fancy...pieces actually dredged up from something sunken...but also because they stayed as bits, fleeting fragments. I think a wish-fulfillment fantasy would have bloomed more completely. This was one of the worst times, memory-wise. Nearly obliterative for those years, but also very destructive of my life up till then, as if a retroactive fog had swallowed much of the past. And then the memory troubles continued forward too, with fog and "gap-outs", as I call them, especially during times of illness. In recent years I have felt much clearer and more certain about remembering my life. Relatively speaking; when I compare notes with other people, they express surprise at how places I've been, books I've read, etc. could vanish so completely. But I've learned a lot of tricks that help: checks and double-checks, ways of reinforcement, and also habits of concentration and reflection to lay down and maintain a stronger memory track. And I've learned to live with the holes. Turner's fog can be unsettling, disquieting...but it also has its gentle and allusive aspect, a richness of suggestion. Whereas easy-to-see could also mean easy-to-dismiss, which is another kind of forgetting. I'm sorry: you asked for "briefly" and this hasn't been. Memory is a raw nerve.

Can you say a few words about the writing of the book?

The story of the book's genesis is told in the book's third section, "Leavetaking", where, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, I follow, in an almost detective-like fashion, a number of mysterious clues and events that lead me to an answer which is also a course of action: telling my own story, this memoir, for the first time.

One of the key precipitating events, described in the book, was being asked to speak about my life as a writer for a university group. In preparing that talk, I realized that I had not told, even to myself, my own story—or this important aspect of it—in explicit and detailed terms. In my poems and fiction I had alluded to it constantly and tried to illuminate it from various angles. But I had never consciously tried to explore at length, in writing, the meaning for me of my decades of mental illness. This preliminary thinking led me into areas of exploration that were unusable for a short talk to a few strangers but which proved to be the beginnings of this manuscript.

After writing the first three-quarters of it, I sent it to five friends, less to get their judgement on its literary merits than to see if it spoke to them as a "human" story they could relate to. Their enthusiastic and encouraging responses led me to continue the project, eventually writing the last section about my wife's recently-diagnosed illness and, in slow steps, to consider and finally say yes to Dan Wells's offer to publish the book.

Review of Mike Barnes's Lily Pond

The current issue of Q&Q has a review of Mike Barnes's just released memoir of 30 years of bi-polar disorder, The Lily Pond. It's a thoughtful review by Mark Callanan, someone I'd expect no less of. I've not yet seen the new Q&Q yet, having let me subscription lapse, though a thoughtful person, knowing it would warm my heart, sent it along last eve. So I'll copy it below.

I think this book by Mike an important and brave one. Having a tendency to wallow in the dark waters a touch myself, I've read a lot of these memoirs, and I think it ranks up there with the best of them. This is more Styron than Jamieson, offering no pat solutions or self-congratulatory survivalisms; it is, as Callanan points out, as much as anything an act of recollection, reconstruction, remembering. It's a memoir about memory as much as anything else: despite appearances to the contrary, most are not. It is about the proverbial power of art, the narrative-life-line of mythology.

This spring, when we were putting the finishing editorial touches on The Lily Pond, we received word through our sales manager that if we changed the title to include a direct reference to bi-polar disorder we might be able to swing the all-important table placement at Indigo. I talked this over with mike, who, though leaving it to me, made a very strong case why we should not do so; he'd rather, he argued, stick to the more diaphanous concept of madness. It's a more human, less clinical term. Madness, with all of its varied associations, positive and negative, more closely and humanely captures a life lived with mental illness, with its consequences for the sufferer, the ones who care for him, and those he cares for.

So though The Lily Pond may not be facing you on a table when you enter the local Indigo, it will be on the bookshelves there, and on any other bookstore shelf worthy of the name. So, please, go search it out. In a season that seems swamped with memoirs and novels dealing with bi-polar disorder and mental illness, I think this will be one of the most affecting and important.

The Q&Q review:

Though "oblivion, and states approaching it" may, as Mike Barnes writes in the first of four lengthy essays that make up The Lily Pond, "slide away most determinedly from the very conscious act of writing," they can be apprehended by those diligent (or obsessive) enough to attempt to capture them. Barnes's own protracted state of near-oblivion–some 30 years of fighting bipolar affective disorder, originally misdiagnosed as schizophrenia–is the subject of this, his seventh book.

Barnes, a novelist and short story writer as well as a poet, is adept at moving between the purely narrative–the what and how of his own mental decline (which includes, among other low points, a particularly gruesome suicide attempt)–and the intense imagery of his prose, which is both poetically compelling and evocative of the physical world. The neuroleptic drug Mellaril, for instance, makes his arms swell up into "clubs. Bland bats: long, smooth, round, heavy." Pulling his jeans over swollen thighs means "pushing as if at cart wheels stuck in mud."

Famous artworks provide another means for Barnes to express the workings of his mind. A deeply depressive state is a Turner painting "with walls of solid-seeming whitish or grayish vapor shifting sluggishly, and only the vaguest hint here and there...of what might be a bridge, boat, sun." The "implacable" hunters of Brueghel's Hunters in the Snow embody the author's own figurative trek. Likewise, the numerous underworld narratives of Greek myth inform Barnes's struggle against oblivion–they are a powerful current that runs, like the river Styx, throughout this memoir.

Given Barnes's "general amnesia"–likely the cumulative effect of electroconvulsive therapy, years of debilitating drug courses, and mental illness–The Lily Pond is the ultimate act of recollection. Barnes has imposed continuity on the fragments of his life, and done so in a way that is neither over-determined nor self-satisfied. Perhaps his greatest feat of perception is in recognizing that his struggle is ongoing: he has not been plucked from the underworld river; he has simply discovered–by torturous process of trial and error–how to tread water.