An Interview on The Authors Show
I’m delighted to have had an interview with the folk at The Authors Show – a publishing industry podcaster based in the US.
They are very active in obtaining and making available author interviews, and have a significant audience and very high ratings.
Casting my eye over their list of upcoming and archived interviews, I see very little poetry featured, so I feel even a little more privileged than I might otherwise.
The Authors Show – Interview with Frank Prem
My Interview – The New Asylum
My interview is broadly about The New Asylum collection.
New visitors here may not be aware, but this collection is a memoir of my lifetime of interaction with the public psychiatry system over here in Victoria (Australia).
The collection extends from my childhood days as a visitor to the old Beechworth Mental Asylum where both my parents worked, and follows my experiences as a student psychiatric nurse, nursing in acute settings, management of acute wards and back to some character studies and experiences in a long stay residential hostel.
Where does The New Asylum collection sit?
Prompted by the interview, I’ve had a chance to reflect on where I see this collection situated in the broader scheme of literary things. I’ve been a little surprised to realise that I haven’t encountered much of this sort – an insider view – since the days of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which I encountered – book and movie – while I was a student nurse. A very long time ago.
Cuckoo’s Nest had the ability to take me, as a reader/viewer inside the system of psychiatry. It exposed the machinery, so to speak, and having seen it, I kept seeing it, right through my career.
A very profound experience, but I haven’ seen the like, since.
I wonder if anyone else has comparable literature on and about psychiatry that comes to mind? I’m aware that in recent years I’ve stopped reading such material and may have missed some relevant contributions.
Please share if you know of any significant work of this kind.
The Authors Show Interview Details
The interview will be ‘live’ in a few days time on May 18th 2020. On that day, visit The Authors Show and simply click on my book title/name in the broadcast schedule to hear the interview.
I’ll put up another post on the day as a reminder.
The New Asylum – get the book.
In the meantime, if you’d like a copy of the book, it is available in both paperback (everywhere) and e-book formats at Amazon. Here is where:
https://books2read.com/u/meBL5A
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