Profile: Mindy Lewis

Mindy Lewis has been a practicing painter all her life, but only recently claimed dual citizenship as visual artist and writer. Her recent memoir, Life Inside* (Atria Books, Simon & Schuster), about surviving her adolescent years spent confined to a psychiatric ward, delves deeply into the relationship between craziness and creativity, power and powerlessness, and explores the psychiatric definitions of normalcy and appropriateness, in a harrowing and healing coming of age story. A self-employed graphic designer, Mindy lives and works in her Upper West Side apartment, which she cohabits with her faithful feline, Henry. Her essays have been published in Lilith magazine and in two anthologies: Women’s Encounters with the Psychiatric Establishment: Escaping the Yellow Wallpaper (Haworth Press, Elayne Clift, editor), and Voices from the Couch (AmErica House). She was a finalist in the 1999 New Voice Non-Fiction Award competition of the Writer’s Voice and won honorable mention in the 1999 Writer’s Workshop Isak Dinesen Creative Nonfiction Competition.
* Life Inside began its journey to publication three years ago when the author met her agent at an IWWG Meet the Agents session.
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I was born in the fifties, but became conscious in the sixties. Within this fact, and within myself, lies an inherent dichotomy that’s marked my life: the young girl wanting safety and security, the teenager rampantly burning bridges, the adult seeking resolution through art and learning.

As a teenager I related to the existentialists because I thought they, like myself, were asking the biggest of the big questions: Why? Why follow the rules? Why play the game? Why fight the battle, Arjuna asks in the Hindu epic poem, the Mahabharata. At fourteen I raked through the text, thirsty for answers. It was the sixties, and everyone was asking “Why?” Why the war in Vietnam? Why corruption, hypocrisy, bigotry, violence? Why? asked the evening news, Dylan’s songs, the Village Voice. Why was everywhere: a raised fist, a burning draft card, a flower in the barrel of a rifle.

I didn’t know it then, but the question I was really asking was “How?” How to live my life? How to rise above the ordinary, how to make meaning from the mundane. How to become my own person. And the place I looked for answers to all the big questions (Is life worth living? Is it really possible to love? How to keep the soul alive? Who am I and who will I become?) was literature: poetry and prose. Sometimes I found embedded in the magic code of letters and words, if not answers, then more and better questions that resonated with my own—questions I didn’t yet know I had, so skillfully articulated that I was reassured that wisdom and answers must exist somewhere, if not in the world, then in the human heart or some vast omniscient mind.

For as long as I can remember, reading has been a refuge, an extension of my inner life, of the little voice inside that whispered stories and poems to my dolls and stuffed animals, that played pretend (mostly when I was alone, rarely in the company of others)—the voice of imagination, dreams, yearning, emotion. Reading, my unformed consciousness met with a shock of recognition: my own emotions in characters on the page, and their emotions in me.

All children are creative. They make up songs and sing them unabashedly. They scribble fantastic images in offhandedly inventive colors, keep them for a day, then forget about them, leaving the adults to cherish the discarded husks of creativity while their young have already moved on to the next creative moment, and the next. Creativity in children is primal. In the tribal village of childhood, creation permeates everywhere. In our contemporary adult society, art is in museums, writers are published and exalted, and creativity is relegated to the celebrated few, while the rest drudge and drone at jobs. “I’m not creative,” adults announce, almost fearfully. “I can’t even draw a straight line. I don’t know how to write.” How many times have I heard this pronouncement —something rarely heard from small children, who haven’t yet learned this concept. Their creative energy flows from moment to moment. It is the magic fluid that lubricates their daily work of learning.

Somewhere in the sixties, I vowed never to grow up. In the seventies, remembering my promise, I wept every time I watched Peter Pan. I vowed to keep my inner self alive, never to “wear a tie” or put away my imagination. But how could I do this and grow up to become a whole person, an adult woman, a mother, a wife? How did people live? From childhood, into adolescence, and into adulthood, when I read, I was looking for answers to my most pressing, private questions—the questions that would determine who I would become. It’s no wonder that I am most moved by nonfiction accounts of real lives—although, from an early age, I resonated to the thoughts and feelings of fictional characters. I felt the thrill of danger solving mysteries with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, fell in love and wept over Little Women, and became the girl, Francie (both of us pining after absentee fathers, even though I was Jewish and lived in Manhattan, while she was Irish, from Brooklyn), immersed in my mother’s own copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Another miracle, to know my mother once read these same words, experienced the same secret thoughts and feelings that filled me as I read—a first taste of the power of the written word to create an invisible community of readers as it’s passed from hand to hand, connecting us all to the lives of people in cultures and eras different from our own.

At a book fair in elementary school, I found a hardcover volume of Lives of Great American Women, and became totally engrossed in the story of Sacajawea, the heroic Shoshone princess. The thing that made her story so amazing was that it was real—and just as thrilling, just as powerful as fiction. A new dimension sprang into being, almost as remarkably natural as learning to read.

In the beginning there was simply the amazed pleasure of recognizing the letters, and connecting them to sounds and the words to pictures in the illustrated Dick and Jane storybooks, which now seem like rather dimwitted propaganda of white middle-class life in the 1950s, when Mom baked cookies in her white apron, and Dad came home from the office to fix the truck—but back then, I delighted in the achievement of mastering new words and watching the story unfold, intoxicated by the feel, the smell of the printed word. After the witty, absurdist fun of Dr. Seuss, I discovered fairy tales. Filled with fear and anxiety, I experienced, over and over again, the dire consequences of human failings in Grimm’s and Andersen’s tales. But it wasn’t just the extreme moral instruction of “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf to Keep Her Shoes Clean” or the religious invective of “The Snow Queen” that entranced and terrified me, it was the odd characters, dwarves and giants, hook-nosed witches, and hairy, bulbous-limbed demons, who crawled up from the underworld to torment human children, tricking them into the lower depths of the non-human realm. This was the hook, and the lesson. To remain human, safe, good, and loved, we needed to know how to think and act—or at any moment it could be too late. Even the animals—the wise fox, the busy birds—already knew these lessons, and came to the aid of their not-so-swift human friends. For us to learn anything, we first needed to get lost in the forest.

The magic lived not just in the pictures drawn by words, but in the illustrations: clever pen and ink drawings scattered throughout the text, and on the inner covers of my treasured hardcover volumes of Grimm’s and Andersen’s tales, vivid, full-color illustrations. There I could search for and find my favorite characters—and villains. The time spent poring over these illustrations, I believe, was the germ that turned me into an artist.

In third grade, I was in an accelerated class taught by a creative woman with her own unique ideas about curriculum. Under her tutelage, we formed a ukulele orchestra, put on a musical play of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince,” and studied Origami, basic Japanese language (we were only allowed a drink of water or trip to the bathroom if we asked in Japanese), and Myths and Legends. As I leafed through my mythology book, my eye was caught by a black and white drawing of Prometheus chained to his rock, an eagle swooping down above him. It would be many years until I understood my personal connection to the Prometheus myth, but somewhere in my eight-year-old mind, I was hooked. I decided to write about Prometheus for my report, and was so taken with the illustration that I spent hours copying it and included it as my report’s cover. Thus my career as graphic artist began.

In junior high, I was placed in honors English, and also took my first art classes. Confidence was not my strong point. I was shy, self-critical, and though I couldn’t name it, fearful of failure. Though I did well in class, it was mostly on my own that my creativity flourished. I wrote poems, drew and painted, and tried my hand at sculpture. In 8th grade, my mother said yes to my request to attend a Saturday afternoon art class, uptown in the Hotel Ansonia on West 72nd Street and Broadway: a two-bus commute from our Stuyvesant Town apartment. Going to art class was my first real autonomous experience of the world: the long bus commute, buying lunch at the corner luncheonette, then immersing myself in the rich world of charcoal, pastel, watercolor and oil, inhaling the delicious smells of linseed oil, turpentine and fixative. The hours flew. Whether I worked on still lives, drawings of plaster casts, landscapes from imagination or copying reproductions of paintings, my absorbed satisfaction was unparalleled by anything I’d ever experienced.

All the while, I kept on reading. Pearl S. Buck and Steinbeck, Salinger and Frost. These we learned in school, each keenly stimulating my emotions and my senses, creating tactile, visible, audible worlds. I felt the same pleasure and anticipation in the library as I did under the covers with a flashlight after lights out, or on lazy weekend mornings in bed with a book. Habits that would last all my life: the hunt in bookshops and street vendors and libraries, the late night or early morning or mid afternoon feast of words.

As I discovered new artists and new authors, it was inevitable that I would illustrate the things I read. During my Dürer phase I made intricate pen and ink drawings of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” and Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” Then came Beardsley and my drawings became trippy renditions of Hesse’s Steppenwolf, my take on Lagerkvist’s image of the cave of Barrabas, and Plath’s dead planet in “The Moon and the Yew Tree.” But many of my paintings were wordless poems: rainy streets at dusk, street lamps glowing mournfully, or the various moods of the East River, stormy and serene, observed from my perch on the dilapidated pier I shared only with the seagulls. Solitude and art were already my inseparable companions. I compensated for my painful shyness by spending time reading and painting—or just dreaming. A latchkey kid, I had plenty of time in the afternoons before my mother came home from work to retreat into myself—another habit that was to take up permanent residence in adulthood.

It was an honor to be accepted into the High School of Music and Art, chosen from among many New York City kids competing to get in. On the first day of classes I climbed the 128 stone steps up the hill in Harlem, alongside the other aspiring student artists and musicians, shivering with a sense of pride and possibility. Finally I was among peers, like-minded spirits. Except of course it was high school, filled with social currents and eddies, and I couldn’t transcend my shyness, in spite of my attempts to hide it. I created a persona tougher than I really was: a cigarette-smoking, LSD-dropping, mini-skirted, self-made bohemian with the thudding heart of the chronically self-conscious. No matter how many drugs I took, there was no way I could change who I was. After a year of tortured days and insomniac nights, I did the easy thing: I got off the subway at Columbus Circle and spent my school days in Central Park, where I wandered the tree-lined paths, painted, read, and took drugs with other spaced out truants. There begins another story, which I tell in my memoir, Life Inside, published this October by Atria Books. To make it short: When I was fifteen I was made a ward of the state and sent to a psychiatric hospital, where I would remain until I turned eighteen—a seminal experience from which I emerged into adulthood marked as an outsider.

Although I continued writing poetry, serious prose writing was an unexpected and unprecedented turn in the road. In college I was so fearful of written expression that I refused to take Expository Writing, the prerequisite for all the other English classes, and had to take the literature classes I loved through the foreign language departments, in translation. I adulated writers and placed them on a pedestal, considering them superior beings. Screw-ups like myself could paint their unruly emotions, or pour them drunkenly into poems but the lucidity of a writer was in the higher, rarer realms. Real writing was unattainable for someone like me.

At some point, after dropping out of college with only a year to go, after relationships that didn’t last, after nearly passing out on my thirtieth birthday and gritting my teeth through my fortieth, after a zillion secretarial and waitress jobs, after studying art therapy, art restoration, academic painting, and trying my hand as street portrait artist, after the fine art and illustration careers that never took off, after slowly building my own graphic design business…it was an unprecedented surprise to suddenly become deeply engaged in writing in my mid-forties. The initial catalyst was a cyber romance that grew from a torrent of emails to a novel-in-progress. I worked on the novel for three years before abandoning it the day after seeing “You’ve Got Mail.” But working on my novel, and the short stories and essays it spawned, I learned enough of the craft of writing that when my true subject appeared—the story of my adolescence, the most painful experience of my life, and the thing I felt most ashamed of—I was prepared (with the support and encouragement of my writing mentor) to sit down and write.

I had seen an ad in Poets & Writers calling for submissions to an anthology about women’s experiences with the psychiatric establishment. I locked myself in and two weeks later emerged with a 28-page essay entitled “Life Inside” — the seed for my book. A few weeks after I mailed it, the anthology’s editor, Elayne Clift, phoned to tell me how moved she was by my essay, and urged me to continue to expand it, and to join the IWWG. At a Meet the Agents session, I introduced myself to Anna Ghosh, who was to become my agent. Anna guided me through the proposal process, and slowly, the book began to take form. One year after our meeting, the book was sold, and I locked myself in to finish writing it—and do serious battle with my fears and inner censors, and the other gnomes and witches who came out to frighten me when I sat down to work.

Though it was initially daunting to re-enter that painful time in my life, the writing process was liberating. All that private stuff locked in my head, all my thoughts, observations, feelings, experiences, memories—all grist for the mill. My private joke was: I used to think I was crazy, until I discovered…I’m a writer.
The real point of this essay is this: Creativity, and its consort, Solitude—are simultaneously the elements that nearly destroyed and most definitively saved, and shaped, my life. I took a hard road before coming to recognize them as muses to be honored, cherished, nurtured and preserved at all cost. In spite of the fact that they sometimes masquerade as evil genii, liberated from confinement, they have absolute power to transform.