Intoxicating substances used to go hand in hand with creative writing. Is it time for a change?

A few weeks into my creative writing MFA, a bunch of us new writers were sitting around a cramped table at one of New York City’s staple “writerly” bars. It was never one of my favorites to be honest—the prices are high, the seating limited or nonexistent and the waitstaff generally hostile toward the writers who overrun the place, with the exception of our favorite bartender who knew every writer in the program by name after only a day and often snuck us drinks on the house. I’m sure for years our loyalty helped keep the place in business.

Still I never felt that magnetic attachment to the place others did; it invariably made me anxious, most conversations (on my part) beginning, “Man, this place is really not conducive to conversation, huh.” Mere “conversation” was rarely the point, though.

“So …” said one girl, breaking the ice. “Favorite drug. Ready, go!”

“Opium.” “Ecstasy.” “Probably … blow.”

They kept rattling them off with ease.

“That would be my vibrator,” said one self-professed “Sober Sally.”

A couple writers, myself most likely included, seemed to scoff into their beers.

It’s no shocking revelation that for a long time writing, drinking and taking drugs have gone hand in hand. Often the very culture around writing seems more defined by this lifestyle than anything else. On more than one occasion throughout my MFA, events were attended simply for the open bar, others abandoned in favor of the closest bar. “Writing meetings” quickly devolved into 4 a.m. drinking competitions, and some classes were “drinking classes,” the professor occasionally most intoxicated of all. I have to admit, I didn’t always mind.

Every year, the creative writing community nationwide descends on one major U.S. city for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference. While there is certainly valuable information to be gleaned at AWP and good networking to be done, there’s no denying that for many it’s an excuse to spend three days drunk in a hotel room with friends under the guise of literariness.

This year, however, with AWP rapidly approaching, something a little different is happening. This year there is Sober AWP, public, to my knowledge, for the very first time. “Anyone in recovery from anything is welcome,” notes the recurring, bare-bones event description on AWP’s events calendar.

As someone who has been enabled in the past, and done my fair share of enabling, I may have at some point laughed off Sober AWP (“that’s not the point!”) or at the very least overlooked it. Now, one year out of my MFA and much further along in life, I applaud it; I’m proud to see it exists.

More so, I’m impressed the event description does not play Sober AWP off as the “most amazing time ever.” It does not try to compete with all the other debauched festivities, but rather calls it what it is: daily meetings for sober writers.

The creative writing culture will never lose its emphasis on getting obliterated, and for many that’s just fine. While it can be extremely hard for sober people to merely coexist alongside those who are actively not sober, hopefully others in the national literary community will in some way follow suit in the future, and help carve out that place for sober writers that isn’t always behind closed doors.

Crime Really Doesn’t Pay
Three teenage boys were walking home from school from school last week when three other boys approached them and demanded their money and wallets. When the trio of would-be victims refused and kept walking down Broadway, the thieving threesome followed and managed to grab $2 from one of the boys. Now all three are wanted for robbery, with less than a buck each to show for their misdeeds.

Courtesy of Buzz Bishop

Old Spice Crook
A man was arrested at a local Duane Reade last week after attempting to abscond with a whopping 299 sticks of Old Spice deodorant. (Does anybody sweat that much?) The presumably odoriferous shoplifter also injured an employee who tried to stop him from leaving the store.

Depraved Assault on a Child
Police were alerted last week to the plight of an 8-year-old girl living in the Amsterdam Houses with suspicious injuries on her left hand. When they investigated, officers determined that the girl’s mother had allegedly burned her hand with a fork as punishment for “taking her sister’s tampons.” The mother told cops that her daughter burned herself accidentally while ironing clothes, but her story didn’t jive with the poor girl’s injury and she was arrested on felonious assault charges. The case has been referred to the Special Victims Unit.

Mucous-Free Shoplifter
Last Tuesday at 9:45 a.m., an unknown man waltzed into a local CVS pharmacy and sauntered out with 40 stolen packs of Mucinex, an over-the-counter med meant to combat mucous and coughs. The total haul is worth $1,150, so the thief most likely intends either to get some crystal-clear nasal passages or make a hefty profit reselling the drug on the street.

Bad Boyfriend
A 37-year-old woman called the police after her live-in boyfriend took his alcoholic rage out on her. The woman reported that her drunken mate got angry and attempted to strangle her, then slammed her against a wall and held her there so she couldn’t escape his grasp. He eventually let go and ran off, allowing the victim a chance to call for help.

False Phone Friends
When checking her most recent cell phone bill, a local woman noticed a few extraneous charges—namely that two iPhones had been purchased with her account and a stranger had been added as an “authorized user,” enabling him to change her plan to accommodate the two new phone lines.

Don’t Tempt Thieves
Most criminals can’t resist an easy target, as a local man discovered last week when he placed his wallet on the inside window ledge of his ground-floor apartment on West 78th Street. An unknown person spotted it, and snagged the wallet, attempting four credit card purchases with the stolen loot.

This columnist, who often warns about alcohol abuse, never claims it’s a character flaw or willpower. I write mostly about the enormous harm that can result from over-drinking, even just one episode. My great concern is that alcohol has been given a pass compared to tobacco smoking and obesity.

Some individuals can never drink “socially” due to something in their biological makeup. I believe others become addicted by the overuse of alcohol to reduce stress. I believe most people need help to stop drinking and often find it in 12-step programs, which do have a spiritual element.

As for responsible drinking, infinitely more needs to be said about its importance, should adults chose to imbibe. And relatively new medical guidelines show that more than one drink daily for women, and two for men, is excessive.

Now it’s spring break time, when shamefully little is said about the truly over-the-top alcohol consumption among students, often resulting in the most regrettable—even dangerous—behaviors. Attention must be paid!

And here’s to Archbishop Timothy Dolan speaking out against St. Patrick’s Day’s over-imbibing, as did the late Cardinal John O’Connor.

Bette Dewing
Columnist, Dewing Things Better

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Letters have been edited for clarity, style and brevity.

People often ask, “How do I know if I am an alcoholic?” There are many responses to this query. One being, if you have to ask, the answer is in the question. 2) Alcoholism is like having mice—if you think you have them, YOU DO! 3) What is your day like without booze? Miserable?

Alcoholics are great rationalizers about what we drink. We trot out the list of the “I onlies” and “I nevers,” i.e., “I only drink beer,” “I only drink wine,” “I only drink martinis because I like olives,” “I only drink a little sherry or a drop of port,” “I never drink before breakfast or when I am asleep,” “I never drink when I am sober” and “I am never too drunk to drive.”

Many of us will try counting drinks, but the fact is the first drink gets us drunk. Alcoholism is a family disease and it’s not curable, only manageable. The most loving parents are powerless when in the grip of this
malady. Abuse—physical, sexual and emotional—rampages triumphant in families with alcoholics, shaming children, humiliating spouses and battering marriages to pieces. There is an endless litany of unrelenting loss connected to this horrendous condition not known in any other disease. There is the loss of things material, like jobs, houses and income, and of health, rational thought, decent behavior, spiritual aspirations, truth, dignity, family and, above all, the dreadful loss of love. It’s a three-part physical-emotional-spiritual condition. Not all alkies are on Skid Row; the
others deny it, proclaiming, “I work hard, pay my taxes and just because I take a few drinks with my breakfast doesn’t mean I have a problem.”

Alcoholics usually contribute to their physical deterioration by smoking
cigarettes and marijuana, and ingesting other drugs. Consequently, the mind and brain take an uncontrolled journey into mad territory, wherein resides violence and mental imbalance. They are thus unable to be of any service to humanity.

The nature of alcoholism is totally diseased, totally evil, totally destructive. It is a slimy pit of stinking ooze composed of lies, deceit, revenge, righteousness, soul rot, rage, rape, selfishness and murder, and it will use any and all methods to gain a foothold in the family unit. If there is an alcoholic in your orbit, or if you are one, then it’s simple to take the first step to recovery. First, stop drinking now. And if it’s a bad situation, get to the hospital so you can sober up under medical supervision. Family should not allow any alcoholic home until sober—not next week or tomorrow, but sober now. Watch out for the lies and promises. It’s a day at a time. Good luck. 

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Check my website malachymccourt.com and read Malachy McCourt’s History of Ireland.

Alcoholics Anonymous members are warned to keep out of harm’s way—bars, drinking situations and friends—but what can members of Tiger’s group do in a society that has become so inordinately, unabashedly, ubiquitously and yes, iniquitously sexualized? And why are clergy so silent?

Author and feminist Francine du Plessix Gray’s 1978 commencement address at Barnard College warned graduates that “the massive eroticizing of society meant the slow death of friendship.” My then year-old column worried even more about the resulting death of familyship already weakened by the preoccupation with friends and “the couple.”

Infinitely more should be said about that, and by high-profile individuals like Tiger Woods. No matter the reason he “came out,” incredible good could come out of this most destructive obsession, from which Sigmund Freud may well have suffered. Erik Erikson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning psychoanalyst, stressed the need for social relationships, not sexual ones. His grandson, Christopher, a West Side Spirit editor, spoke of visiting his grandfather in a nursing home, where Erik was unfortunately unable to write about these end-of-life conditions, or his grandson’s rock band music, which was not much about familial and other platonic affections.

Music once was about those affections. Read The Rise of Selfishness in America (a turn-off title), by music historian and social critic James Lincoln Collier. Collier also wrote books for children, but all age groups should read this one, ideally aloud and together while playing Louis Armstrong’s “A Wonderful World.” Most wonderfully, this recording was used in a “welcome, new baby” musical greeting card, which I once sent to a new daddy, former Council Member Andrew Eristoff, and a few years later to a new mama, Council Member Jessica Lappin. It could be a wonderful world with more music and lyrics like that—and with a return to a feminist world, where women like Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug marched against pornography and gratuitous entertainment violence, which was once also assailed by First and Second Ladies Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore. Some women scrawled “Off Our Backs!” on “woman as sex object” Calvin Klein bus shelter ads. “Woman as sex object has got to go!” was a familiar chant. Well, most unfortunately it went in the wrong direction, evidenced even in the skating costumes at the Olympics.

Let’s hear more about Sexaholics Anonymous, which can be reached toll-free at 866-424-8777 or via email at
salco@sa.org. Compulsive Solutions
(other addictions included) is at 925-932-0201. Locally, Alcoholics Anonymous at 212-647-1680, where many in today’s news should go—like some high-profile people charged with domestic violence, and two of New York’s Bravest, who were busted in a Bay Ridge bar brawl.

If the mayor attended some open AA meetings, he’d not delay hiking the alcohol tax that the Health Department says would help reduce the alarming incidence of under-age drinking and deaths related to alcohol, car accidents and cirrhosis. Of course, it’s not only youth, car accidents or cirrhosis, which too many in power just don’t get. And, I dare to say it, we should tax high-speed private bikers in this high density city that has great, but financially strapped, public transit. Public transit is by far the safest way to go. Traffic tragedies cause great human suffering and are enormously costly to government coffers. Shouldn’t all the above be included in universal health care? It can be done if enough of us try. 

dewingbetter@aol.com