 Here are a bunch of people, what do we want to learn about? Someone said, oh, addiction is really an important subject, and it's everywhere. And I know that we're hearing a lot of data and facts and figures about addiction, but I had, coincidentally, just in Springfield doing some work, heard of a group called Writers for Recovery, which focuses not so much on facts and figures and data, but on individual stories and storytelling as a way of recovering. And I found Gary Miller, who is the co-founder and artistic director, creative director of Writers for Recovery, who also happens to be a neighbor practically next door, and that is also coincidental. Gary graduated from the Burma College of Fine Arts with his MFA in writing and does what many of us have only dreamed of, makes a living as a writer, doing advertising, marketing, and all kinds of other things. And there's anything else about him I'd like to let him tell you. So, welcome. Thank you. I apologize, I know it's Halloween, and I probably should have worn something appropriate, but I didn't, so anyway. Thanks so much, I really appreciate you all showing up. I think you'll agree that it's a really, that the addiction and recovery are a really important topic for Vermont and for the whole country right now. We're in a crisis. And so anyone who shows up to find out more about that makes me feel really good. So I appreciate your showing, and I appreciate the invitation from Osher and from the Montpelier Senior Activity Center to come and talk to you folks. So, as Lawrence mentioned, I've been the, I was a co-founder of Writers for Recovery, and I'm the Creative Director. And if you don't know about us, first of all, before I forget, you can find out a lot about us by going to our website, WritersforRecovery.org, online. But what we mostly do is we go around, all around Vermont to community centers and recovery centers and correctional facilities, and we give free writing workshops for people in recovery from addiction. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later, but it's been an incredible experience reaching out and engaging with people from all walks of life all over Vermont and trying to just teach them how to use writing to aid in their recovery to kind of process the things that they've been through to try to figure out what their path is and where they need to go, you know. And it's all works through writing, and it's been really amazing. It's been an incredible time, and I feel very grateful for that. I myself have been in recovery from drugs and alcohol for 22 years, and I did not do it through AA or any of the other traditional means. I just did it on my own. And so I was kind of an outsider to the recovery community, and there wasn't a lot that I really knew about addiction and recovery other than I had a problem with drugs and alcohol, and I managed to stop that and put it behind me. But I've learned a lot in the last four years, and so I thought I would share some of that with you all. I got started through The Hungry Heart, which is great. Has anyone seen The Hungry Heart? If you haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend it. It's a fantastic film done by the filmmaker Bess O'Brien about prescription opiate addiction, mostly up in the Northeast Kingdom. At the end of producing that film, Bess wanted to give back some thanks to the community of people who'd agreed to, you know, take the risk of going public and saying I'm a recovering addict and I'm still in addiction, and be in her film and she wanted to give something back. So she held a six-week arts workshop in St. Albans at the Turning Point Recovery Center, and we did writing, radio production, black-and-white film photography and theater for six weeks, and I was lucky enough to be one of the writing teachers. It was fantastic. It was mind-blowing. I had no idea what to expect, and all of a sudden these people are one of the most incredible pieces of work, you know, just... it goes straight to your heart and really, they really had something to say. But we thought it would be just a one-time thing. We had, you know, we closed up at the end of six weeks. First time I'd really worked with Bess. It was great. And then a year later, I got a call from Bess and she said, Burlington Labs, which does all the drug testing for people in Vermont, who are both recovering addicts and very supportive of the recovery community, they want to know if you... they heard that writing part of it was pretty fun. Would you like to do a writing workshop in Burlington? We'll fund it. And Bess called me up, said, you want to be the workshop leader? I said, yeah. Since then, we have done workshops from St. Albans, Newport, all the way up, all the way down to Brattleboro, all over the state. We did one last fall in Mohawk Territory in Quebec. I'm headed off this weekend to do one over in Cerenac Lake in the Adirondacks. I've done one at McLean Hospital in Boston, psychiatric facility in Boston. So we've really grown a lot. And it's been a great experience. So that's a little background on how I got started. When I started, I had, when I first saw the Hungry Heart, I had no idea there was an opiate epidemic in Vermont. I mean, for one thing, I have nothing really to do with drugs anymore. And I was quite surprised, as I'm sure many of you were, to find out that in Vermont, there are a lot of people suffering from opiate addiction. And in the Hungry Heart, I learned a little bit about that. One of the first things I learned about the epidemic was how big it was. I don't know if you have any idea how many people in Vermont are addicted to drugs and opiates. And I wouldn't know either other than the Department of Health has created this really handy chart. I may have to step out a little bit. Can I take this with me? Yes. So I don't know if you can read all this. 17,844 people misused a pain reliever in 2015. So that means people who are quote-unquote abusing opiates, that's about 3% of the Vermont population by my math now. I will say that I'm not a good math person, so maybe a little off plus or minus. 8600 opioid dependent people treated, that's about 1.5% of Vermonters. But when you look at that figure, I think you also need to be mindful of the fact that a lot of people who didn't seek treatment, they're not going to be treated. So I'm going to go back to that figure. 403 community naloxone reversals and 204 emergency department discharges. 1375 EMS overdose calls. Those numbers have gone up since then, but that's just 2015. So that gives you just a little bit of an idea of the numbers that we're talking about. But it's also important to remember that that's only one type of addiction. In Writers for Recovery, we don't ask you to tell us what your addiction is at the door or to prove that you're addicted to something. We just ask that you show up and write for us. There's no, you don't have to share any information about yourself if you don't want to, but I will tell you that in the course of the four years I've been in there, I've dealt with people addicted to meth, cocaine, marijuana. And I know people say there's controversy about marijuana addiction, but I can tell you that there are people who are addicted to it. It may not be as addictive as some other drugs, but it's definite because I've worked with these people and I know and they suffer because of their marijuana addiction. Alcohol, of course, is probably the biggest one. But we also deal with people with food addictions, with sex addiction, with gambling addiction. All of these people have made their way into Writers for Recovery. Now you start thinking about those numbers getting a little bigger, right? 1.3% opiates. And you start to realize that there's a lot of people about one in ten Americans according to the National Institutes of Health are addicted to a substance. So do the math. Oh, before we do the math. In elders, the addiction, it's often underrepresented or misdiagnosed, but it's huge. I read a figure that the highest percentage of addiction to alcohol is widowers above the age of 75. Percentage-wise is demographic. 6% of hospital admissions for elders are for substance abuse. 14% of ER visits and 20% of psychiatric admissions are for substance abuse. So the population that you live in and you're demographic, you, your friends, your relatives, your age, it's not... And I think a lot of time, people don't really think about that. They think, oh, drug addicts are young. And I learned about that in all sorts of different ways. For instance, heroin addicts tend to be a little older than you might think. You know? So this is the demographic of concern to people here at this center, but also it should be to everybody. About 63,000 Vermonters are addicted or suffer from addiction. That's based on 10% of 630,000. That's a lot of people. I don't know what you think. The population in Montpelier is about 8,000. So think of it in those terms. And you start realizing that you're talking about a real number of people who have a substance abuse problem. And we know who they are, right? Do we? We know who they are. Because we see them on the street. They're out there. They're sleeping in the street. They're asking us for money. They're breaking into our cars, right? That's who it is. Or do we? And so the second thing I learned in Writers for Recovery is the amazing diversity of people who suffer from addiction. And it is just those people who fit the stereotype. They're part of it, right? It's not to say they're not, but other people are less visible. And so in Writers for Recovery we've had everyone from that person who comes in off the street who's living in a tent, who's addicted to heroin, to a college professor, an educator, a professional engineer. All these people have made their way. And age groups, we probably range in age. We've started recently working with kids, but we mostly work with adults. And so literally the people we've served range in age from 18 to 80. And Vermont doesn't have a lot of cultural diversity as far as race, but we have racial diversity too, although like the rest of Vermont, most of the people in our groups are white. And so you see that it's not just that stereotypical person. So that's one thing to recognize, right? But another thing to recognize is when you think of someone who's an addict a lot of times, you might think of them as not having a lot to offer to the world or maybe not having their I guess their act together, you know, and what I've learned over the last four years is that people in addiction can really, really surprise you. So as I said I had been in recovery for almost 20 years. I hadn't had a lot of contact with people in recovery, but I met people in recovery right away. And I was terrified, by the way, because I had no idea what was going to happen when I interacted with these people because I'm not a social worker. I'm not a trained recovery. I don't have a recovery certification to be a recovery coach. It's one of my goals for this year and I hope I'll have it done by the end of the year. But I'm not trained in that. I'm just a guy who wanted to go in and, you know, my primary skill is writing and, you know, and reading. And I just I was a little nervous going in. One of the first people I met was a guy named Stan Worfley. He came to our very first Burlington group and it's by the way I want to let you know, we do have a confidentiality policy in our meetings like anything that's said in the room stays in the room and identities are kept confidential and less permission is given and I want to be clear that Stan has given me his permission to talk about him. He's in fact become a great friend of mine and he's been a great spokesperson for Writers for Recovery. So Stan came in to the first group I was in. He had crippling post traumatic stress disorder. He had crippling shyness in addition to that. Stan was raised in Gloucester Mass, an efficient community in Massachusetts to both of his parents were drug addicts. He was a high school dropout. He was very, very angry. He had a hard time you know any kind of social interaction. He was terrified of. He self-medicated with all sorts of drugs and he was living in I believe it was the Burlington area but I could be wrong about that and he had a roommate who also liked to drink and take a lot of drugs and one day his roommate got a big old bottle of vodka and said let's take a ride in the car. So Stan went along with him and about halfway through the ride it became clear that what was happening was that the roommate was going to murder was on his way to murder his estranged girlfriend and he had a gun and Stan immediately started to panic but he couldn't jump out of the car so they pulled into a parking space. His roommate got out with the gun, went around the corner Stan heard gunshots ran around the corner and his roommate had been shot dead by the police in the middle of the street. Stan had very, very severe PTSD from this situation because it was involved, for instance when I met him because it had involved a telephone he couldn't talk on the phone he couldn't use a phone for probably three years not even for texting because it was so associated because his roommate I think had called him on the phone and invited him along or something so that was Stan when I met him keep in mind all those things that he's not an educated person that he's really struggling that he's having a hard time, that he's got PTSD that he's got crippling shyness. The first night Stan showed up he kind of mumbled his name and sat with his head down pretty much the whole time. The second time he didn't write at all he didn't read anything he wrote because he didn't write anything. The second time he came he wrote a poem and I gave them I gave out the prompt I am from which is a common prompt that's given to school children to talk about family and around in history and I'd just like to share with you now I want you to keep in mind try to develop a picture in your head of who this person is what he might look like I'll tell you he was very sullen and angry and closed off and tight and this is the first poem he wrote and I'll read it to you too I think I will will I? okay we have a technical difficulty here we go I am from I am from the small towns of New England where everyone knows what you had for dinner where the sea was once a way of life in a badge of pride and the resting place of lost loved ones I am from the back country roads we drove with no destination in mind where the leaves on a cool fall day danced to the sounds of small block v8 thundering by and the rubber left at stop signs was the only proof we were there I am from the place where memories both good and bad where I bowed as a peasant and stood as a king where the greatest of hardship showed what would become the greatest of strengths I know where I am from but if you ask I do not know where I'm going are you surprised by that? I was extremely surprised and delighted by that and that taught me a really valuable lesson that I hope if nothing else you'll carry away with you today and that is people in recovery just aren't who we think they are you know I'll talk a little bit more about that Stan I think two weeks after that wrote a poem a long poem about the incident that led to his PTSD with his friend shooting you know getting killed and read it out loud in the group he never told that story even to his therapist over two years he'd been with for over two years he'd never told the story to anyone he read it out loud in the group like a week after that he agreed to have it published in the Burlington Free Press and probably four or five weeks following that he went with me on live television to talk about Readers for Recovery and how much it had changed his life so these are the kind of things that I've been experiencing you see why I'm excited about this program and why it's really been great but the main lesson from Stan I only wish he were here and you guys all could get to know him he just moved to Maryland to kind of start a new life he's doing really well he's now been in recovery about six or seven years since I first met him I wish you could meet him but I just want you to keep that in your mind you know here's this guy who's uneducated addicts and I just kind of held on to that for my whole time to say even people who have slipped down really really low can make an incredible comeback and that's the lesson to me of Stan so this is what I learned here from Stan addicts aren't someone else they're us okay they're all of us one in ten means technically probably someone in this room has has had in the past an issue with drugs and alcohol yeah someone just raise your hand me too and don't feel pressured to say that but it's true it's your brother it's your employer it's your employee it's your best friend it's your niece it's your nephew it's your daughter it's your son and if it isn't it's somebody else's daughter son niece nephew and all these people are as smart as we are they all are they all have that potential in their minds I've worked with people who can barely spell can barely read and yet they write the most amazing sometimes we even have to spell for them and yet they have really profound insightful and interesting things to say and so that's a huge lesson for me that I learned don't underestimate them there is talented and resourceful too I've met people in writers for recovery who are amazing artists stands an incredible mechanic you can do anything on earth with a car make it fly practically computer programmers and comic book artists and musicians and all sorts of people with just remarkable talents and resources because when your recovery addiction can bring you down so low that you need remarkable personal resources to come out of that and so anyone who's made it into recovery you know even for a little bit it takes an incredible amount of fortitude and courage to face up to whatever that issue is and try to do something about it and there is flawed as we are too okay and nobody's perfect in this world I'm not a perfect person no one's a perfect person nobody has their flaws everyone has the parts of their past and maybe their present that are really painful that contribute to kind of things like addiction and so they're not really different from us they are us and one thing is the decisions they made cost them more than they ever could have imagined they would no one imagines when they take a first drink or smoke a joint or even snort heroin for the first time where they might end up and I think that's critical to remember that you know we'll talk more about that does anybody have any questions by the way yeah I don't know maybe he reads books maybe he watches movies I don't know but yeah it was pretty impressive maybe unschooled maybe unschooled yeah he's a very interesting guy in a whole lot of ways yeah absolutely absolutely it is it's clear yeah I apologize for that I'm just trying to make a distinction that we think that we're not part of that but we are that we're not all this population so I hope that answers your concern this one okay so I just I just want to talk a little bit about the nature of addiction and I want to make clear that I'm not an expert in this department I'm learning and I'd encourage you to try to learn too if you're interested it is a critical subject and the more people who understand it that we can get the better so can you just click that pat again what is addiction we say we use that word a lot right oh I'm so addicted to chocolate or I'm so addicted to candy crusher I'm so addicted to Facebook or I'm so addicted or boy that stuff sure is addictive and I think you know by and large we understand that there's a difference between a statement like that and real you know actual addiction and the way it's been explained to me is that the difference is addiction is kind of the compulsive there's a compulsive nature to it and you keep doing doing it despite the fact that it's causing damage obvious damage to your life and that was certainly the case with me I you know drugs and alcohol had a big negative impact on my life and yet I just wanted to keep doing it and I would you know the hangovers the you know the scenes that I caused the breakdowns with friends who were telling me you know hey you're not in good shape right now and I thought yeah my response to that was oh you don't know what you're talking about you still understand I'm having a great time and you're you should be having one just like me and so I think that's a clear distinction and that's a way that it's been explained to me why do people get addicted in the past I think especially there was this idea that if someone had an addiction issue it was a moral failing on their part you know he's a drunk she's just a drunk he's an addict you know and there's still a lot of that too there's still a lot of negative kind of attitudes about people with addiction and you know I think it's great that we're coming around as a culture to recognizing that it's not a moral failure to be addicted to something it's not so why is it that drugs are so addicting that's the idea that you'll hear about a lot of things you know heroin heroin is no you know you'll hear like heroin is 20 times more addicting than alcohol or cigarettes or the most addicting I mean I'm sure have you all heard things like that is it genetic you know you've heard there's a genetic predisposition could be part of it my father was an alcoholic chances are that made me you know studies show that that made it more likely that I would be maybe they don't understand how and why that works certainly there is a genetic component that you've probably heard about it or is it something more complicated you can probably guess what the answer is it's wait ah hold on you gotta go back a few here keep going okay you didn't see that number flashed up there did you okay so let's just take an example here we all hear that heroin is extremely addictive you've ever heard like try heroin once and you're hooked you know I tried heroin once and for some people that is most certainly the case but how many of you and I've taken prescription opiates anyone want to share that they've taken prescription opiates and I'm guessing that most of the people here who've taken them are not opiate addicts and maybe someone is but you know you go to the hospital you get a course of opiates sometimes you know it could be for a long time I mean if you have a severe hip fracture or something you know you're going to be in the hospital for a while with a lot of opiates going through your system and yet they're going to stop doing that when you go home probably or taper you off and you're going to be able to deal with that and not become an addict and I just also want to put a little quiz in here how many opiate prescriptions were written in Vermont in 2015 anyone who didn't see that number up there when we accidentally flipped through hazard a guess 76,000 76,000 that's a pretty big number that's a lot of prescriptions that's like a what's 76 it's almost one in ten that's over one in ten one prescription for every ten people in Vermont that's a boatload of prescriptions how about 600 1,506 prescriptions for opiates in Vermont in one year that's a lot of prescriptions what were those opiates what were they they were probably oxycodone percadone what percocet just pain meds for people who have wisdom tooth taken out or have a surgery of some type or break their arm surgery quite a bit fentanyl yeah fentanyl right so one would think that if 601,000 to me the math is if you look at the math 601 that's almost a one prescription for every person in Vermont and yet only about 1.3% 5% of Vermonters are seeking treatment for opiate addiction so something's going on like clearly a lot of people are are taking opiates but not a lot of them are becoming addicted so why yep rat park that's why rat park rat park is a science experiment um way back in during the time of the Vietnam war a doctor was working with returning Vietnam vets and he observed that a lot of these vets had taken heroin in Vietnam uses coping mechanism whatever um it was pretty prevalent among GIs um and yet when they came back home the vast majority of them did not continue to use heroin he didn't understand that because he knew about a famous experiment you probably know about it too where they would take a rat and put it in a cage and they'd give it two bottles of liquid one would be pure water and one would be water with heroin in it and that rat would drink the heroin water until it died effectively and that's all it would do would just drink heroin water um and so this guy designed a different experiment rat park he built a big big enclosure um not just for one rat which was the case in the um in the first experiment but for lots of rats and he put in climbers and toys for them to play with and lots of snacks and food and all the rats could run around they could be social they could play games they could have sex they could you know do all these amazing things that rats naturally do and put a bottle of water in there and a bottle of heroin water in there and guess what happened they didn't drink the heroin water at all okay and he theorized from that that um there's a huge huge environmental component to addiction okay um and I think based on just my work with people you know and hearing all the stories of the people that I work with um in their backgrounds and the environment they grew up in particularly the guys in prison you know um I fully support the idea that there's something to this um that it's that it's you know an environment in which there's so much pain um and inescapable pain that you need something to take to medicate you for that um I know I grew I grew up in not the most stable house it was kind of stable in ways um but I also grew up with a really low sense of self-esteem and I really struggled as a kid and boy I still remember the first time I took that big slug of beer and it was like tada tada everything is great right now because I've got this my system and people describe that again and again you know and so some people I've worked with a kid um actually in prison he was a he was a um a lacrosse player at emerson college in boston and he hurt his shoulder and he had to keep playing to give in order to keep his scholarship where he'd have to leave school so they jacked him full of oxycodone that was it for him instant instant love with that and he ended up a heroin addict in prison very promising very bright young journalist um and similarly I keep doing this but it's not working um yeah does anyone know about In the Realm of the Hungry Ghost a book by Gabor McTae anybody know about that book um he just he he ran a clinic in van hoover he predicted people for decades and this book is considered one of the um the best books about addiction and he describes um addiction as this hungry ghost that's inside you that can't be filled by anything but the drug there's something that you need to have in your life that you don't have and that drug fills the hole if it incidentally it's a fantastic book if you're interested in finding out a lot about addiction a lot and hearing some great stories that's a great book he also focuses on the idea that a pain most often developed during childhood um is at the root of a lot of addiction so um so what does addiction do it stops it stops development if you are 13 years old when you start using drugs and you use you're an addict and you stop at 25 emotionally and as far as coping with the world you're still 13 um and so that's a problem um addiction alters the brain um it actually physically changes the way the brain works it severs your human connections and creates an isolation and those are all very damaging and um isolation in families is also a big sign of addiction you know people are isolating that's um a good way to tell if there might be something up so these are kind of the negative no one wants to be an addict people say oh they did it they did it to themselves it's all their fault no one starts out and takes heroin and says you know what I really want to be in my life I want to be on the street looking into cars for money to get money for heroin so I won't get sick nobody dreams of that that's no one's dream and for good reason and the best thing I learned from this whole thing is that recovery is possible recovery is possible there's a great um graphic novel and it's called larceny in my blood a memoir of heroin handcuffs and higher education and it's about a guy who was raised by a mother who was a drug dealer an absent father started selling and using heroin at age 16 was in prison for most of his life until he was about 50 and then decided he was going to get sober went to Columbia University got an MFA in journalism and wrote a beautiful graphic novel about his heroin addiction he's an incredible artist and now teaches in a university in Arizona just think of all that time a life where he was down so low and he can come back and that's a huge lesson I've learned again and again with the people and writers for recovery is that recovery is possible and I've seen it again and again in Vermont we're a model like you guys know this we're a model for the entire nation for dealing with heroin an opiate addiction all states are looking at what we're doing we're doing it right we're having an impact we've got a goal of treatment on demand that in many cases is actually being met prior to Governor Shumlin's initiative of a few years ago that was not the case there were incredible waiting periods for people who even wanted to get clean and they just couldn't do it there were no resources now we have this great hub and spoke system where we have nine intensive detox facilities state they're the hubs and then smaller places doctors offices and things where people can go and get medical assisted treatment it's called MAT you'll hear that a lot with buprenorphine methadone or naloxone I'm not sure if we're using naloxone as a treatment we're using naloxone as the drug that revives people from an overdose but it also can be used in smaller levels to prevent heroin from activating in the body so if you're on naloxone and you shoot heroin it won't have any effect and then support groups like AA and Writers for Recovery and all sorts of other ones and you know this makes me so hopeful because years ago and believe me every six months you see an article about how AA doesn't work it's a waste of time it's this ridiculous obsession with God and all this stuff I don't like to hear that because AA I know so many people who've been helped by 12 step programs and indeed had their lives saved by them and B because like back when that was probably the only thing you could do but now there's all sorts of options AA doesn't work for anyone everyone but that's okay because for the people it works for it really works but some people prefer Writers for Recovery some people have you know sober book groups and sober hiking groups and sober you know whatever other things some people live in sober houses you know there are all these new kind of approaches to sobriety that we didn't have before and they're really critical and they're you know they're a way of getting ahead of this a little bit and they're doing it in Vermont in particular some places aren't New Hampshire's terrible right now they have a real mess over there and they're not part of it is they're just not putting enough resources toward it they're just not interested in doing that and they don't I think it's a shame because they're paying on the back end with people dying with tremendous costs for emergency care and all sorts of things like that so you should be glad you're part of Vermont where we're really looking forward to setting an example but recovery is a difficult process and relapse is common it's very common we used to think like oh he went to recovery and he got sober and that was fine and if he didn't if he fell off the wagon or she did that was a that was it that was a failure they didn't do it now we understand that it's a process you know and good analogy is like quitting smoking like who quit smoking who quit smoking on the first try hardly anybody it's really hard you know and we don't we tend to applaud people oh try again try again and recovery from any other drug is very much a try again kind of scenario you know someone will come to a writers for recovery then I won't see him for three weeks then they'll come back well what was going on well I went out for going out I went out you know I went out and I used for a while and now I'm back ok great I'm glad you're back that should always be the response this idea of judging people as failing and you know because they don't they don't get it right on the first time but it's a really really hard thing and a lot of people have you know lost so many of the resources lost so many of the people who could help them like they're really rebuilding from the ground up and that's not easy for anyone it's particularly hard when you're at the same time trying to fight against the lure of addiction and wanting to use again when you don't have the financial resources that you need if you come out of prison and you can't get a job because you have a record like all these things are really weighing against you so how can we help people in addiction to recover how can we we all of us help people by practicing the opposite of addiction and this is the big finish so get ready but to me the one thing that I've learned over this entire four years is that the opposite of addiction is not necessarily recovery the opposite of addiction is community and community is the solution to addiction when people in with addiction are welcomed into a community who loves them who supports them who cares about them who's willing to help them in their recovery to accept them to forgive them the mistakes they've made that is what we need as a society the condemning the belittling of people with addiction the marking them as moral failures that's not going to work people in prison is never going to work it's not it only makes people feel worse has anyone seen Bessel Bryan's new movie yeah so if you have you know what I'm talking about it's called Coming Home it's about the COSA program which welcomes people back from prison and supports them volunteers meet with them once a week to help them find housing get a job deal with their problems go see this movie if you don't cry at the end I don't know what because I cried twice I saw it twice and I cried both times it's an incredible movie because it's about what it takes to heal this problem right people and if you are involved another great thing that's happened to me and this whole thing is that I'm now within a part of the recovery community and you've never met a more amazing group of people in your lives you know how much they care for each other how much they love each other how much they support each other how non-judgmental and compassionate they are toward people with addiction is just remarkable to me it's just remarkable and I have to say you know I've made so many I've met so many amazing people and made so many amazing friends in the recovery community and to me that's you know like I didn't go in this trying to get something for myself but I ended up getting something incredible which is to be part of this incredible community so I would just encourage you if there's any way that you think you can contribute to creating a welcoming supportive community for people with addiction and people in recovery I'd encourage you to do any little thing you know whether it's write a letter to the local paper or call a representative and say can we get more funding for more treatment beds can we get a particular problem housing for people coming out of prison it's hard for them to get out of addiction when they don't have a place to live can we do something about that any the smallest tiniest thing you can do because if we all work together as a community everybody doesn't need to spend 40 hours a week doing it it's all by little pieces I think that's it can we I forgot yeah that's it pretty much anyway and I know there's probably some other questions you might have about addiction and again I'm not an expert but I will try my best to answer any questions you can ask yeah shopping addiction shopping addiction addiction yeah what a worker right yeah and I think also eating disorders possibly could be classified as you're addicted to the idea of losing weight or maintaining a perfect body and that's a very addictive thing too I think there are probably some I found some writing programs online just searching for them but nobody's doing it there's to my knowledge there's not a dedicated organization I mean we are a we're a non-profit we're funded mostly through Department of Corrections and through the Rona Jaffee Fund which is a New York City literary foundation and through and we get private donations from you know everyday people I'd encourage you if you want to donate to us we promise to use the money wisely to do some goodness area so as far as I know we're not the only one but we are looking to expand you know at least into the rest of New England and that's a it's kind of a chicken and egg thing like we need to raise more money but we really want to do it yeah sure it's that that's yeah that's absolutely yeah absolutely a number of people who have been in and are in Writers for Recovery have co-occurring mental health issues and that's a big that's a big driver and a kind of yeah co-occurring condition with addiction certainly so yeah yeah yeah oh great I'll do that so basically it's really it's really simple we get together once a week for an hour and a half and we usually do a 10 week session so we do 10 weeks of one and a half hours each week anyone who's in recovery or has a family member in recovery or is has you know other issues of recovery affecting their life is welcome to come and join we use short writing prompts and let me give you an example I will say to them to a workshop here's your prompt finally I understood the truth and you have seven you have seven minutes to write it go the only rule is there's no way to do it wrong we don't care if it's a poem or a song or fiction or nonfiction we don't care if it's spelled right we don't care if the grammar is right we don't care if the punctuation is right we don't care about any of that right for seven minutes no way to do it wrong then people write for seven minutes at the end of that I'll say who would like to share but you don't have to share you can keep to yourself whatever you wrote because sometimes people write deeply personal things they don't want to share people most often share sometimes they don't that's okay sometimes they don't even write and that's okay we told people you don't even have to write just show up and spend some time welcome to come hang out and listen to other people when someone reads their work then we talk about it and there's only one rule two rules for that first rule I've already mentioned nothing leaves this room okay unless the writer gives permission so or the or the people get permission so they go what that's right that's right I mean we're not we're not strictly twelve-step but we do abide by that and of course I should say we have a great blog where we publish people publish a lot of the things they write and writers for recovery and we also publish an anthology I'm going to leave a couple copies of this you get a copy for being the closest guesser on the on the number anyway so that's the first rule is you know everything stays in confidence unless a person says hey will you publish my poem on the blog that's okay and people can publish incidentally anonymously if they want or they can use their own name or they can use a pseudonym so we try to make it easy and then the other rule is all comments need to be positive and supportive so this isn't a traditional writer's workshop where you read someone's work and you go your descriptions are terrible your dialogue sucks and you have no future as a writer so you might as well quit now we're not about that you know we're not about that because we're not really a workshop designed to teach people how to write we're a workshop designed to support people in their recoveries by telling their stories on paper and out loud that's a significant difference although I will say that when I compliment you know you or you on something that you've written I say oh you wrote a great description hey everybody can learn from that try it she wrote a great description try it she wrote great dialogue try it he wrote a hilarious story how did he make it funny give it a try write a funny story yourself so people become better writers as a side effect but it's not really about that so we do that for 10 weeks and then we if the people in the group enough people in the group are willing for an 11th week we do a public reading of our work so people sign up they each read for about 3 or 3 to 5 minutes and invite family friends community members it's open give a reading I usually bake a couple cakes and then we have cake and everyone goes off and goes home and then once a year we publish the samphology we also we had a podcast with VT Digger last fall and we're actually we will be having a podcast on Vermont Public Radio starting I believe in January I'm actually going to record an episode and some interviews for that tomorrow up in Newport and it's going to be really great so keep your ears open for registered recovery on VPR anybody else yeah it depends honestly it's mostly me we do about 15 to 17 workshops a year so I'm really busy a lot I mean literally I'm doing like 4 a week sometimes Bess O'Brien does a couple and then we have we've had like 3 other 4 other teachers do workshops when I wasn't able to schedule them in so you know like half a dozen probably yeah yeah I'm sure I'm sure it has been one of our goal one of our kind of dream goals is to get someone from a university you know addiction treatment department or psychology department to come and do a study on us to see because I have incredible amounts of anecdotal evidence mostly people saying you know this is better than therapy this really worked for me this helped me a lot but we would love to get some real data on how effective it is I mean there's data already that shows that if you write in a journal every day you tend to be mentally healthier than if you don't but there's a lot of room for more study yeah oh yeah sure we have them all over the state right now there are no groups active at this point but we'll be rolling out some more in probably in January and if you go to writersforrecovery.org you can find a list of workshops unsure of where we're planning them for January I should talk to her I've seen her name and so it's a recovery based workshop it's just a writing workshop yeah you know I used to think the only way to teach people to write was to kind of yell at them and tell them what they did wrong but I'm flipping the coin on that one yeah the workshops are free yeah oh yeah almost everyone who's in a writersforrecovery workshop is doing some other kind of thing to aid in their addiction the vast majority do do 12 step a lot a lot of people therapy some medication assisted treatment some you know meditation or you know mindfulness all sorts of different approaches yeah we're not a we're not a when we never would pretend to be a place where you know you come and write with us and your addiction is done yeah no we don't that's only happened once in the entire time that we've we've done it people have generally been really good about that but we did have a gentleman in Burlington who showed up and was obviously heavily under the influence and someone just said you know you look like you could use a little rest why don't you just go home and maybe come back next week and he said okay we try to be channel about it I mean but yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah say hi I'm a hi sir hi hi yeah there's all sorts of ways um and you know we're so it was amazing I went to so I lived in Boston for 16 years I used to take the T the train to work every day people would read books people would have conversations you know whatever on the train friends would be sitting talking to each other and I haven't I've been down there much and I went back recently and rode the train everybody everybody everybody just like that and I I mean I recognized it even when we first had the cassette tape Walkmans and everyone would have their own music I thought that kind of sucked because music is something you share with people it's not something you isolate over and so our society has just become so atomized by technology there's no you can you know in theory be in contact from to the whole world from your living room so why do you need to leave and and then when you're out in public you're too busy you know looking at your phone and I'm just believe me you'll see me walking through my failure I'm as guilty as the next guy maybe guiltier but yeah so it's you know it's tough to get community yeah they say hello I like the people on the subway in Beijing that was even before the cell phones there is something open about the community that Maria House is talking about and how I contact it yeah enough thought about that too you know when I lived in a bigger city you know you're surrounded by people all the time and it's really hard to get a little private time to yourself so I understand why people just want to go boop shut the world off not say hi to their neighbor I totally get it you know but it because I tend to be not sometimes not very social but there's there's detrimental in ways and yeah I'm telling that's a great point thank you I should probably should have talked about that but you know when someone comes into a writer's recovery group and they've got all this baggage and they're really struggling in their recovery and then at the end of 10 weeks they can stand up in front of a crowd and read their work it's unbelievable what it does for them it's just unreal to stand up and say this is my story I'm owning this story I'm not ashamed of it this is who I am and I'm trying to be a better person I'm trying to get my act together I'm trying to move up in my recovery we had a guy who had such crippling anxiety that he couldn't walk down Church Street in Burlington he couldn't he was a recovering heroin addict early in recovery he'd have to go around you know to get to our meeting which was off Church Street because he just couldn't stand it his anxiety it was so bad being around people after like 10 weeks he stood up in front of 60 people and read you know three of his poems it's like wow you know and how did he feel after that he felt fantastic you know and I should point out too that like we're not saying recovery is for everybody it's just like any other thing it works for who it works for some people come and they try it out and they don't really like it and they go and that's totally fine I don't I don't have I'm not insulted by that I'm not you know I'm not ready to defend writing as a great you know even though I'm a writer it's not it's not a be all end all be all whatever it's just another another way to get at the problem who else what I think we're making progress a little bit with opiates but I've heard late and you know you should it's hard because we don't have that we only have the data from you know two years ago whatever I think we're making a little progress against opiates but then I've heard about a resurgence of math and I don't know and that's one of the problems is you know fighting the addiction will get you so far but fighting the roots of the addiction is really the way to get at it and stop it and I'm honestly I'm really really worried because we have a generation of little kids right now who've had their parents taken away from their parents have had their lives disrupted by heroin addiction who've been you know put in foster homes of very in quality who've been disconnected from their families whose fathers and mothers are in prison and you know you couldn't create a better recipe for building another generation of addicts and like what are we going to do to make sure that doesn't happen do we have the will as a society to do it do we have the resources to do it I don't know but I'm worried about it yeah yeah that must be hard did you see the article day before yesterday I want to say that in Silicon Valley where all the tech people live they're now like they're hiring all their nannies and they're saying my children absolutely not allowed to use any technology what does it tell you that the guys who invented the stuff are keeping it away from their children we should heed that message I'm horrified by the fact that you know school high school whatever kids are allowed to have their cell phones to me that's nonsense they don't need them they need to call someone they can go to the office and call somebody and it's an incredible distractor to learning and to learning socialization which is a huge part of becoming a responsible adult yeah alright well thank you very much really appreciate it