Month: July 2019

Fiction Points: Jamie Beth Cohen

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jamiebethcohenJamie Beth Cohen is the author of Wasted Pretty (Black Rose Writing 2019), a YA coming-of-age novel that explores growing up as a girl in a pre-#metoo era. Cohen earned a BFA in English from George Mason University and a master’s degree in higher education administration from City University of New York. Her work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post, at Teen Vogue, in the anthology Crossing Limits: African Americans and American Jews, and elsewhere. She lives in Lancaster County, PA.  

Two nuns and a penguin approach you at a bar, and you tell them you’re a writer. When they ask you what you write about, how do you answer?

I’d probably quote my own bio and say, “I write about difficult things, but my friends think I’m funny!” Seems like a punchline to a joke, right? Hopefully they’d laugh, and if they let me expand, I’d explain that because I’m both a fiction writer and a non-fiction writer, I get to write about a wide range of topics I find interesting. My published non-fiction includes essays on parenting, feminism, Judaism, politics, end of life issues, and more. My published fiction generally centers on teens and twenty-somethings going through growing pains. My debut novel, Wasted Pretty, published by Black Rose Writing in April 2019, is the story of a sixteen-year-old girl who is noticed for her appearance for the first time and all the things that are exciting, annoying and, in her case, dangerous about that moment.

Points is a blog primarily for drug and alcohol historians. What do you think this audience would find most interesting about your work?

Alice, the main character in Wasted Pretty, is not a big drinker, but her best friend Meredith is. Meredith experiments with diet pills and recreational drugs as well. But Chris Thompson, the college guy Alice has a crush on is sober. He crashed and burned during his freshman year, largely due to excessive drinking, so he’s working hard to put himself back together. The more time Alice spends with Chris the more her friend’s substance use bothers her.

Also, Alice’s dad is a gambling addict in the throes of his addiction. There are interesting parallels and counterpoints between what Chris went through as a teenage alcoholic and how he’s handling it and what Alice’s dad is going through as an adult who does not have a handle on his addiction.

Additionally, in one scene, Alice wants to make a “bad” choice. She knows it’s wrong, but she’s determined to do it anyway, so she gets drunk, as if to have some plausible deniability after the fact. However, she’s not prepared for the reality that her bad decision has unintended and far-reaching consequences.

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Chipping Away: Opioids, Autowork, and the UAW Yesterday and Today

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from one of our newest contributing editors, Dr. Jeremy Milloy. Milloy is the W. P. Bell Postdoctoral Fellow at Mount Allison University. A scholar of work, capitalism, addiction/substance use disorder, and violence, he began studying substance use and the workplace while researching his first book, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960-80, published in 2017 by the University of Illinois Press. His current book project investigates the historical relationship between work, capitalism, substance use, and recovery in Canada and the United States, considering how wage labor has influenced substance use, anti-addiction efforts focused on work, the creation of employee assistance programs, workaholism, drug testing, and methadone programs. You can reach Jeremy on Twitter (@jeremymilloy) or by email (jmilloy@mta.ca). And you can look forward to reading more of his work on Points!

Among the historian’s most valuable contributions is the knowledge that many current phenomena that seem new have actually been around for quite awhile. So it is with the current opioid crisis, which many have pointed out is a continuation of, not a departure from, longstanding trends in substance use and dependence in North American life. 

The automotive industry is a good example. Today, both the major North American automakers and the UAW have identified opioid-related harms as a significant threat to their workforce, membership, and communities. As journalist Jackie Charniga has shown, the U.S. areas dealing with the most severe opioid-related harms overlap with the areas of the Big Three’s major American manufacturing facilities. Ford and the UAW in 2017 started the Campaign of Hope, which aims to educate and inspire workers to avoid the misuse of drugs. The UAW is bargaining with the Big Three to make more help available for workers and make it easier to access that help while keeping their jobs. Unionists and Ford are even working together to pilot a medical device that could possibly relieve some of the agony of withdrawal. 

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Fiction Points: Sophia Shalmiyev

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Sophia Shalmiyev’s first book, Mother Winter (Simon & Schuster 2019), is a memoir of immigration and motherhood. She holds an MFA from Portland State University and a second master’s degree in creative arts therapy from the School of Visual Arts. Shalmiyev was born in the Soviet Union; emigrated from Leningrad to New York in 1990; and …

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Points Interview: David Courtwright

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Editor’s note: Points author interviews begin with a set question: Describe your book in terms your bartender could understand. David Courtwright said he preferred conversations with bartenders. He talked to his about The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (Belknap Press, 2019). 

Screenshot 2019-07-16 08.40.48Bartender: I hear you have a new book.

Courtwright: Just came out in May. I’ll have the draft IPA.

What’s the book about?

How addictions multiplied throughout human history. Even before civilization people discovered pleasurable drugs and pastimes like alcohol and gambling. They went on finding new ones. They traded, refined, manufactured, and digitized them to the point that we live in an age of addiction. Think about it. When you heard the word “addiction” forty years ago, what came to mind? 

Drugs. Heroin. Junkies. Juicers, only back then we called them alcoholics. 

Google the word now and you’ll find addiction to sugar, video poker, computer games, social media, internet porn, shopping, tanning, you name it.

Could be hype.

Some of it is. And some of it is science. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, promotes food-addiction studies.  

What’s food got to do with drugs?  

Our brains—well, some brains—react to food packed with sugar, salt, and fat like it was booze. People can lose control over eating the way they lose control over drinking. They join groups like Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous. 

They’re like AA? 

Right down to the lingo. And it goes beyond eating.  When I told friends I was writing a history of addictions, they all said, “You’ve got to include kids glued to their phones.” So I did. Behavioral addictions have become social facts.

What’s history got to do with social facts?

Historians explain their origins and how they changed over time. In The Age of Addiction, it’s a long time.

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Points Bookshelf: “The Age of Addiction” by David Courtwright

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Editor’s Note: It’s David Courtwright week on Points! Today we feature a review by contributing editor Brooks Hudson, a PhD student in history at Southern Illinois University, of Courtwright’s most recent book, The Age of Addiction (Harvard University Press, 2019). We’ll follow Hudson’s review with an interview with Courtwright on Thursday. Enjoy! In Age of Addiction, the …

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Fiction Points: Karen Hugg

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huggKaren Hugg writes literary mysteries and thrillers inspired by plants. Her first novel, The Forgetting Flower (Magnolia Press, April 2019) is the first in her Botanique Noir trilogy and centers on a fictional amnesia drug sold out of a plant shop in Paris. Hugg formerly worked as an editor and now specializes in ornamental horticultural and is a master pruner. She earned her MFA from Goddard College and has had work published in the anthology Rooted: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle. 

 

Two nuns and a penguin approach you at a bar, and you tell them you’re a writer. When they ask you what you write about, how do you answer?

Ha! I actually went to Catholic school for many years so I’ve interacted with plenty of nuns in my life (not so much penguins). At any rate, I’d say I write literary mysteries and thrillers inspired by plants. I’ve been a writer since I was a child and became a professional gardener as an adult. Several years ago, plants started slipping into my stories. I realized the best way to spread my passion for plants was to write about them in exciting ways that embodied the fascination I felt for them. That led to start speculating about plants that didn’t exist but could. And that was the seed (no pun intended) for The Forgetting Flower.

But I don’t just write about plants. I write about human beings too. The people who care for the plants, the dilemmas they face, their flaws and conflicts. People are interesting because they’re complex and I try to bring that to the page too.

Points is a blog primarily for drug and alcohol historians. What do you think this audience would find most interesting about your work?

That The Forgetting Flower is, in part, about the addiction and trade of a flower. It’s somewhat similar to marijuana or heroin made from poppies in that it has a natural origin. But the story really isn’t about the plant but rather what’s done with it. For instance, the plant in the book, Violet Smoke, produces flowers that give whoever inhales its scent amnesia. People forget the last thing they were thinking of. This, as addiction experts would know, could be very handy. People might want to forget certain traumatic or inconvenient events in their life. And my characters do just that in this novel within the dark framework that sometimes accompanies drug addiction: the monetary costs, the desperation to obtain it, the deterioration of a livelihood, the black market on which it’s sold.

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Conference Report – ADHS Shanghai, 12-15 June 2019

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Dr. David A. Guba, Jr., of Bard Early College in Baltimore. He presents his conference report from the biennial ADHS conference, held last month in Shanghai. It was the meeting’s first gathering in Asia.

From the 13th through the 15th of June, nearly 100 scholars from 14 countries gathered at Shanghai University in China for the biennial conference of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society, beefily titled “Changing Minds: Societies, States, the Sciences and Psychoactive Substances in History.” Jointly sponsored by the Sir Henry Welcome Trust, the David F. Musto Center for Drug Policy Studies at Shanghai University, and the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at the University of Strathclyde, the conference marked the first meeting of the ADHS in Asia and an important next step in the organization’s ongoing efforts to globalize drugs and alcohol history. I trust I speak for all in attendance in extending sincerest gratitude to the organizers and sponsors, the staff of the New Lehu Hotel and Conference Center, and the many graduate student volunteers for putting on a great four days of stimulating conversations, fascinating presentations, and productive networking. 

Screenshot 2019-07-11 at 5.38.48 AM

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Fiction Points: Kristi Coulter

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Kristi Coulter is the author of Nothing Good Can Come from This (MCD Books x FSG Originals 2018), a memoir in essays centered on her struggle to quit drinking alcohol. Coulter has published in New York Magazine/The Cut, Paris Review, Longreads, and elsewhere, including a forthcoming Amazon Original, “Yes, And,” on love, monogamy, and secrets. She is a former Ragdale Foundation …

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