Writing Your Way to Recovery: How Stories Can Save Our Lives is an extraordinary collection of personal stories and creative writing exercises designed to help others achieve lasting sobriety. This book provides a vital roadmap to the artistic, personal and spiritual growth to all those battling addiction.
The authors of this unique approach to recovery should be dead. That they are not is a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit and the power of hope. Although they now share over three decades of sobriety, they spent even more years as alcoholics and addicts.
Hell on earth is real for those suffering from substance abuse, but the authors know that there is a way out of this hell. For they have lived it, and in these pages they offer the hope, strength and wisdom of the once seemingly damned.
JAMES BROWN is the author of the addiction memoirs, Apology to the Young Addict, The Los Angeles Diaries and This River. He has received the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. His writing has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Ploughshares. Brown is a Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at California State University, San Bernardino.
PATRICK O'NEIL is the author of the addiction memoir, Gun, Needle, Spoon. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles where he is an adjunct faculty member for their Continuing Education Program. He is a practicing Certified Drug and Alcohol Counselor and is on the Board of Directors for REDEEMED, a non-profit Criminal Record Clearing Project that brings lawyers and professional writers together to help others move beyond their past. In 2016, for his exemplary work in the recovery community, O'Neil received a Governor's Pardon by California Governor Jerry Brown.