Memoir Madness: driven to involuntary commitment: Memoir Madness: Finished and Published!

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Memoir Madness: Finished and Published!

Title: Memoir Madness: Driven to Involuntary Commitment.

The excerpts in this blog are rough drafts of the memoir, which chronicles my 1969 involuntary commitment to The Cherokee Mental Health Institute in Cherokee, Iowa, pictured in this post (I snapped this photo in 2004).

The finished product is much more polished and available on Amazon.

The institution is still in business, but has added a new twist to its business: incarcerating sex offenders.

My new website:

www.MemoirMadness.com

Best,

Jennifer

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About MEMOIR MADNESS...

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.

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

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Memoir Madness: Finished and Published!

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Jennifer L. Semple

Jennifer Semple Siegel

About MEMOIR MADNESS...

Jennifer Semple Siegel

Note about the blog version of DRIVEN TO CHEROKEE

Jennifer & Olive Semple

Jennifer at Grauman's

Cherokee

Infinite Wisdom

Jeff A. Brown

Harley & Olive Semple

Jennifer's Publications

Jennifer's Book on Amazon

Amazon Search

Jennifer's Cherokee Nightmare...

Cherokee Spire, Avant garde version

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