About

The author of We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders, a book of poems about living with schizophrenia (CavanKerry Press 2009) Pamela Spiro Wagner graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in 1975 and attended medical school for one year. Starting with a five month hospitalization her freshman year of college, she has spent at least ten years of her adult life in psychiatric units and hospitals. Despite her illness, she has won many awards for her writing, including First Place in the 2001/2 international poetry competition sponsored by the BBC World Service and two Connecticut State Mental Health Media awards “for professional journalists” for articles written for the Hartford Courant.. In 2005, she co-authored, with her twin sister, a psychiatrist, Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and their Journey through Schizophrenia (St Martin’s Press, 2005), a much acclaimed memoir about her years of illness, which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was featured in Readers Digest and People Magazine among other places. The book won the national NAMI Outstanding Literature Award and was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award.  Wagner’s writing has appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, LA Weekly and Tikkun among other places. She has written WAGblog for seven years, currently at http://wagblog.wordpress.com. Also an artist, her work can be seen at http://artid.com/turtleworks. Wagner was born in “in the army” in Tacoma, Washington but has since lived almost all of her life in Connecticut.

This blog, a continuation of the old Wagblog (6 years of writing, lost in a major crash that eliminated it) from the now defunct website www.schizophrenia.com, is intended to be about living with schizophrenia/bipolar illness and Lyme disease, as well as poetry and art. It may take tours through Vision Therapy and narcolepsy, Global Warming and just about anything else that interests me as well! Hope you will come along for the ride. Any and all comments are welcomed.Although given time constraints in my life I cannot always respond to them, know that I truly appreciate them and the implicit evidence that someone somewhere is actually reading this thing!

Note: 8/01/2009: my new book of poems about schizophrenia We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders: Poems should be available in bookstores or at least for ordering by now. OR you can order it yourself from the University Press of New England at www.upne.com or, of course, from Amazon. Any review would be much appreciated and anyone who reviews it is asked to send two tearsheets to the publisher, CavanKerry Press (see cavankerrypress.org) . I’m really hoping people will read the book and let me know what they think!

9/2010 added note:  My new book of poems, Learning to See in Three Dimensions, is seeking a publisher, though it will also be entered into various contests as well.