[Tonight you are seated at the base of a tree in the desert…]

JeFF Stumpo:

In 2022, after a five-year semi-forced break from writing, I wrote what eventually totaled around 120 prose poems that began as a therapeutic exercise: externalizing my nightmares (I have schizophrenia and PTSD). As the process went on, I began adding epiphanies to some of the episodes, a method of digging myself out of the horrors, then either recalling or inventing more positive dreams. Eventually, I began collecting hopes and fears from people around me and turning them into dreamlike experiences. This poem represents one of the fulcrum pieces, a kernel of an actual nightmare I had but wrestling with it to find something other than the terror I experienced in the moment. Shortly before the whole manuscript was accepted for publication, I read from it and led a workshop at Slam Free or Die that was less about creating a coherent poem in 50 minutes and more about having the discussion within ourselves about therapy vs. catharsis and what a poem about our traumas, shared with an audience, owes that audience.