Memoir Madness: driven to involuntary commitment

Friday, August 22, 2008

New Memoir Website--I, Driven: memoir of a teen's involuntary commitment

Prologue: Caged

[My ex-husband] may feel uncomfortable with my treatment of him, but this memoir isn’t about our life together but our life apart at a time when we wanted to be together.

--The Politics of Memoir

(February 19, 1969)

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I was driven to Cherokee.

A hazy memory of riding caged in the back of a police car.

Two shadows in the front seat, the county sheriff and a female escort, jabbering. I, cargo, to be delivered from the Woodbury County courthouse to the Cherokee Mental Institution.

Outside, the Iowa landscape bleak:

Cloudy and cold, condensation and frost riming the windows, piles of dirty snow dotting the countryside.

Inside, hot and steamy.

Still, I shivered, my teeth chattering. Please turn up the heat!

But cargo has no voice.

For all the importance of this drive–then and now–I remember little, except for one question:

Am I really crazy?

* * * * *

From I, Driven: memoir of a teens involuntary commitment ("Prologue")

© 2008, by Jennifer Semple Siegel

Excerpt may not be used or copied without author’s permission.

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About I, DRIVEN...

Christmas Eve, 1968: Apollo 8 orbits the moon. Apollo’s astronauts broadcast a Christmas message to earth, a passage from Genesis.
Eighteen-year-old Jennifer L. Semple embarks on a different kind of odyssey: tripping on LSD with her boyfriend Stoney, the teenager begins her remarkable journey at 2001 Ivar Street, in Hollywood, California, and ends with her fleeing Iowa, after her conditional release from the Cherokee Mental Health Institute in Cherokee, Iowa.
“I was driven to Cherokee,” the author says, referring to a northwest Iowa regionalism synonymous with being committed to a mental institution.
Her true story begins on the steamy streets of Hollywood, where heads, hippies, drug dealers, freaks, strippers, groupies, college students, Jesus Freaks, counterculture gurus, drag queens, rock stars and wannabe rocksters, svengalis, and con artists converge during one of the most volatile periods in our history.
The story continues with Jennifer’s involuntary commitment to Cherokee, where she is introduced to a world of archaic psychiatric treatments, doctors, psychologists, social workers, and hospital staff. She corresponds with Jeff Brown, a new boyfriend, and also interacts with other patients: Wolfie, a psychopath who preys on other patients; Penny, a 17-year-old unwed mother; Carrie, a teen cutter with strange obsessions about rats; Joyce, a young married mother enthralled with “10 ways of suicide”; and D.J., a 42-year-old mentally challenged man and 25 year resident of Cherokee, among others.
Finally, released from the institution, she flees Iowa, escaping to York, Pennsylvania, where Jeff awaits her.
As the teenager narrates her story, 53-year-old Jennifer, seeking another kind of release, returns to Cherokee, this time voluntarily and as a visitor.

Bio

JENNIFER SEMPLE SIEGEL has just completed her memoir DRIVEN TO CHEROKEE, a memoir of involuntary commitment, the subject of this blog.
ARE YOU EVER GOING TO BE THIN? (and other stories) was published in 2004.
Semple Siegel’s other fiction and non-fiction, including scholarly articles, have been published in various national and regional journals, magazines, and anthologies, including an article (print and online) on British writer Alan Sillitoe for THE DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY.
From 1993-1996, she edited ONION RIVER REVIEW, a literary journal.
She earned her M.F.A. (1994) in fiction from Goddard College (Plainfield, Vermont). Semple Siegel has lived in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Belgium. She and her husband Gerald Siegel returned to Macedonia for the 2004-2005 academic year.
Currently a moderator, posting as "Bugzita," at www.foety.com, she is aware that this volunteer work will not increase her standing in the literary community; however, she feels she must do the right thing by helping root out growing corruption, particularly in some university fee-based literary contests.
As an adjunct, she teaches literature at a medium-sized college and lives with her husband Jerry in a mid-sized U.S. city located in the east, slightly north of the Mason-Dixon Line. She has four grandchildren.
ARE YOU EVER GOING TO BE THIN? (and other stories), Trade Paperback, 249 pages, ISBN: 0-7414-2092-9, is available on http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0741420929/

Note about the blog version of DRIVEN TO CHEROKEE

Infinite Wisdom

If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would appear to man as it is: infinite. –William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

...The world as it appears to me is my creation, and for it I must assume responsibility. Given, as the bricks out of which I can build a universe, is a chaotic kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, sounds, moods, hopes, fears, joys, pains, ideas, movements... Out of this anarchy, I organize a world for myself. I subdue the disordered shapelessness into a world by choosing one out of an infinity of possible structures.
–Peter Koestenbaum, "Existentialism: Philosophical Anthropology"

To die before you’ve reached the sky is tragedy–the sky is always an inch away from our fingertips–no matter how high we may reach. –Jeff A. Brown

Jennifer's Publications

“The Re-feeding Program,” excerpt from “The Big Diet” (short story), The Non-Dieting Weblog. 26 February 2006. URL: http://www.lindamoran.net/blog_archives/2006/02/the_refeeding_p_1.html
“Copyright: Ethics Versus Education in Macedonia,” American Writer: Journal of the National Writers Union, UAW/AFL-CIO. Fall 2005. 12. Print and online (URL): http://www.nwu.org/nwu/index.php?cmd=showAsset&asset_id=50
“Persona Grata” (essay), Writer’s Digest Online. 28 April 2005. http://www.writersdigest.com/readercontribution_display.asp?id=498&secondarycategory=
Are You EVER Going to be Thin? (and other stories), Infinity Publishing, July 2004.
“You Said It: Worth the $$?” Reader’s Digest. January 2004. 15.
“Résumé” (short story). International Journal for Teachers of English Writing Skills (Special Literary Issue)10.2 (August 2003). 115-117.
“Alan Sillitoe.” Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography. GaleNet Online, 1999.
“Charlotte Perkins (Stetson) Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper: Fiction ‘With a Purpose’ and the Need to Know the Real Story.” CEA Critic 59.3 (Spring/Summer 1997): 44-57.
“Feet” (short story). Pennsylvania English 19.2 (1994): 53-63.
“Are You EVER Going to be Thin?”(short story). Sleeping with Dionysus: Women, Ecstasy and Addiction. Ed. Kay Marie Porterfield. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1994. 20-25.
“Alan Sillitoe.”British Short-Fiction Writers, 1945-1980. Ed. Dean Baldwin. The Dictionary of Literary Biography. 139. Detroit: Bruccoli Layman Clark, Gale Research Inc., 1994.
“Lady Chatterley’s Evolution from ‘Personality’ to ‘Blood’: The Role of Eight Wild Flowers and the ‘Blood-warmth’ Marriage Ritual.” Pennsylvania English 18.2 (1994): 12-27.
“Are You Thin Yet?” (essay). Eating Our Hearts Out: Personal Accounts of Women’s Relationship to Food. Ed. Lesléa Newman. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1993. 204-206.
“Rendezvous” (short story). Yugoslav English Language Teaching Review 12 (November 1989): 76-77.

Memoir Madness: driven to involuntary commitment

Memoir Madness

Friday, August 22, 2008

New Memoir Website--I, Driven: memoir of a teen's involuntary commitment

Jennifer L. Semple

Jennifer Semple Siegel

About I, DRIVEN...

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Jennifer Semple Siegel

Note about the blog version of DRIVEN TO CHEROKEE

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