Linda Vigen Phillips: Growing up with a bi-polar mom

Phillips

If you're waking at 4 each morning compelled to put words on paper, you've likely got a story worth telling. That happened to Linda Vigen Phillips of Charlotte several  years ago. The story is fictional, but it's based on growing up with a mother with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Phillips' words rushed out in the form of poetry -- very accessible poetry -- and she wrote for months. She thought maybe she'd publish what she had as a small book of poetry. But a good friend encouraged her to keep writing. "This is a novel," Carol Baldwin kept insisting.

Those 4 a.m. writing jags have turned into a just-released Junior Library Guild Selection called "Crazy" (Eerdmans Books, $9.995).

I'd say it's an indispensable novel for anyone, young or old, who lives with a mentally ill relative.

Phillips' life growing up was unpredictable, but she says she wasn't always miserable. She had  her art, as did her mother, and she had a great gang of friends. But she never talked about what went on at home, and because it was the 60s, she never saw a therapist or even told a teacher about her home life.

It also turns out that Phillips' mother wasn't schizophrenic. While she was writing "Crazy," Phillips wrote  to her hometown in Oregon for her mother's medical records. She took those records to a psychiatrist in Charlotte, who said her mother was much more likely bi-polar or manic-depressive.

Phillips will be reading from "Crazy" at 2 p.m. on Saturday at Park Road Books. I think you'll be surprised how the verse reads as naturally as prose.
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Queens Instructor Cathy Smith Bowers Wins Award for Poetry Collection

Cathy Smith Bowers

"The Collected Poems of Cathy Smith Bowers" (Press 53) has been named the SIBA winner in poetry for 2014. Selected by a jury of Southern independent booksellers, the award is presented each year to the best book in its category.

Bowers, a native of Lancaster, S.C., and a former N.C. poet laureate, lives in Tryon.
Fred Chappell of Greensboro, another former N.C. poet laureate, says of Bowers's poems:  "Hardship, cruelty, heartbreak, bleak sorrow -- these sad themes are plentiful in the pages of Cathy Smith Bowers. But in its smoldering heart, her poetry holds, like the pinata in 'The Party,' 'a sweet, dark center.' "

Bowers is an instructor in Queens University's low-residency MFA program. She is at work on a novel.

Others winners are Sarah Dessen of Chapel Hill in the young adult category for "The Moon and More" (Viking). Self-described as an "author, mother, worrier," Dessen is the author of ten young adult novels, among them the bestselling "What Happened to Goodbye."

In the novel category, the winner is "Whistling Past the Graveyard" (Simon & Schuster), by Susan Crandall of Indiana. A coming-of-age novel, set in Mississippi in the early 1960s, "Whistling" is Crandall's ninth novel.

John Currence's "Pickles, Pigs & Whiskey: Recipes from my Three Favorite Food Groups and Then Some" (Andrews McMeel) is the winner in the cooking category. Currence owns City Grocery Restaurant Group in Oxford, Miss., and the new book is also up for a James Beard Award.

In non-fiction, the winner is "Five Days At Memorial: Life and Death in Storm-Ravaged Hospital" (Crown) by Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter Sheri Fink. Fink is a physician who reconstructs the five days after Hurricane Katrina struck, when the floodwaters rose, the power failed and the heat climbed.

"The Girl from Felony Bay" (Walden Pond Books) by J.E. Thompson of Charleston, is the children's book winner. Thompson grew up reading the Hardy Boys books and worked for 25 years as an investment banker before turning to writing. (He says his daughter is his best critic.) "The Girl" is a fast-paced mystery for middle-schoolers, set on the coast of South Carolina.