we are talking today with sabrina chap sabrina chap is a playwright spoken word artist singer songwriter and editor originally from the suburbs of chicago she is founder of the all woman songwriter series kick and the editor of the zine clutter church or eighteen interviews with women writers her c d s include bedroom sessions and we are the parade and she is here to talk about her book live through this on creativity and self destruction sabrina thank you very much for spending time with us today thanks so much for having me i'm really excited to be here so start out tell us what was the motivation in putting together live through this you know it's strange because i'm mostly a musician and like performer i never really meant to put a book together and sort of the long answer is that when i was performing in lady fest in san francisco i started like there was a great performance and i was performing alongside all these amazing female artists and trans artists and i was like i should someone should document this so then i did the scene and the scene ended up i thought would take me a month that took me a year and it ended up being the size of a book and i was just trying to get some rights from different publishers to reprint little sections of people's work in it and one of the publishers was like well let's see it and they immediately wanted to publish it and all of a sudden then i was talking to press people and i was like what like you know i'm a performer and then one press was like well we're not going to take this but we like how you think you have any other ideas for books and at that point i was like god dammit i just want to do my music you know but i had a press ask me for a book idea like i'm not going to not say something so i said well yeah i mean you know you always hear about women that artistic kill themselves but you never hear about the ones that don't and i would like to write a you know i have a book where people have considered suicide but haven't done it initially was a lot harder to talk about because any time i mention the word suicide anyone that i talked to had such a massive peacock reaction to it like there for you know fan would go up and be like what are going to say about it and i was just like oh ok you know it's a very tender thing for everyone rightly so so i and i wanted to include different forms of self destruction not just suicide because cutting alcoholism all of those things are things that i think i wanted to talk about the people don't talk about enough so finally i sort of group did all understood self destruction which there's actually not a lot of books that group all of those things you know you know barnes and noble or whatever you'll get like here's the cutter section  and here's your the book on alcoholism and here's the book on but those are just different ways of self destruction and you know it's like all the at the cafeteria the believe mix will talk to alcoholics and oh you know basically we're all dealing with this form of taking away our own power so i wanted to sort of have that medium understood and bring them all under self destruction as a whole and also focus on a positive thing through it live through this on creativity and self destruction what does it take what is that balance of creating yourself through destruction and so that was sort of like the sort of actual physical reason the book and how it came to but for the most part when i was in college i was dealing with a lot of the stuff myself and like most people that are in college and that are discovering themselves i had no idea that anyone had dealt with this beforehand and all of my heroes had killed themselves at the at the time i was really taking myself in seriously as a playwright and sarah kane was this amazing british playwright twenty seven years old incredible and she was the first playwright there was a female that i felt an identity with that was doing some really powerful role work and then she ended up killing herself a twenty seven and she was my hope you know she was my kurt cobain you know and i was like that's what i'm going to be like and as soon as i you know sooner she killed herself i really had to stop and think and be like well if creating is going to make me kill myself do i want to burn out fast and die like i'm like i can be brilliant but if i continue down the self destructive path basically i'm not going to make it long or am i going to just stop creating art and i actually did for a while because i was so nervous about just going crazy so you know at that time i didn't have anyone to talk to about these things i was terrified of it and i sort of hit it for about ten years i didn't really talk to people about better i got a control over myself and when the book idea came i started talking about these things and all of my friends were like why are you talking about self destruction because they didn't know and i realized that even myself had shamed myself so much that i'd not ever continue the dialogue but i sort of wanted to create a book that basically was a cast of the most amazing artists renegade artist saying i dealt with this but i lived through it to sort of give people that feel like they're alone sort of this group this rockstar group that is like you can make it you can make it this is normal this will happen because all of the stories that we mostly hear about this and in suicide and depression that's when we hear it in the news you never hear like i went through something hellish but then i came through it that's not honestly glorified and for the most part also people don't talk about destruction in a real way what they do is they're always like i had a problem with believe me i like how we bury had an eating disorder but then she got better you know that's how it's covered it's not actually talking about how  seductive self destruction is and how powerful you can feel when you're doing that and how it twins with creating things so this this entire book is an exploration both of the self destructive behaviors but artists that deal with it in their own creative capabilities so that's the super long answer sorry so do you feel like self when one is participating in self destruction the in a way they're actually taking control that they don't have normally or don't feel normal yeah i do it's really interesting control and shame are big especially nicole blackman's essay nickelback was awesome she's so great great spoken word artist she used to actually recorded with like came after the golden palominos and all these people and she wrote this poem called holy from the viewpoint of an anorexic and it just talks about the control like so severely about and that's one thing people don't understand is that like when you're anorexic there is such a sense of control you have to control every single bite you have to do you know i'm sorry i'm a little tired so hard to talk about this stuff but i started realizing that and i've never really gone super on the record talking about this stuff but people that don't feel they have a sense of control of anything in their life especially young women who feel like constantly this environment is for boys like you know this is not my space all i have is myself that is all i can actually own because i don't want to hurt anything else you know what i'm going to take control of myself i'm going to do this to myself because they can't touch this you know i might not own the world i might not on my bedroom i might you know might not have a place that is mine but my body is mine so that i am going to dictate what happens to and there is a sense of power in that and nicole talks about this very well in her poem and talks about control and shame and how that plays with self destruction but for the most part a lot of times and this is the point that a lot of young women don't understand are young trans people anyone going through these things people come to self destruction because there's a part of themself they don't like and they want to alter it in some way you know and it is a powerful thing and that's why it's exciting a lot of times it's a first time they've taken control of the their own bodies they're like i'm going to do this i don't want this you know so but it's when you don't it's it's when you continue that cycle of self destruction without outlaws you know for the most part you want to kill off parts of yourself but you want to create new ones and so that sense of hurting yourself if it is against your body  sometimes is a way of gaining control and then alternatively there's a way of losing control with you feel like you have too much going on in your life there's like to met many responsibilities you have you know those people i sort of noticed off in their self destructive behaviors make them lose control alcoholism drugs you know that type of thing so there's there's no alternative there's that balance if you feel you have nothing then you're going to try and gain control over your body or have something if you feel like you have too much responsibility you know maybe i'll just be like screw it i'm just going to let myself out in the world but it is about control in a lot of ways and asserting control over yourself so that point of self destruction i think is a very fine and smart point that when doctors talk about it they completely ignore they're like stop cutting yourself that's bad stop starving yourself that's bad and i mean yes and no but it might be the first time you've actually asserted yourself that might be at that point the only thing you own so why take that away of course they're going to lie to the doctors and say no i know i'm not cutting myself nicole blackman with her piece she because she wrote from the viewpoint of an anorexic all of these anorexic women thought she was anorexic she wasn't and the poem it's incredible basically it's let me see if i can start it out because even the first sentences are fantastic but the poem that it's going to take me a second people have to get the book to find it i think that's how it's going to go just found it wholly i eat only sleep in air and everyone thinks i'm dumb but i'm smart because i figured it out i am slimmer than you are and i am burning my skin off little by little until i reach bone and self until i get to where i'm essential until i get to where i am food doesn't tempt me anymore because i'm so full of energy and sense i can even pass by water now because i am living off the parts of me that i don't need anymore i could feel the slow drip of pain before swirling inside where my lungs should have been now i'm clean inside i threw out hundreds of things i didn't need anymore all my dresses and bras stupid things like jeans and socks most days i float through the house naked so i can see myself in the mirrors i have hundreds of them everywhere and they talk back to me all the time they keep me true and pure they make sure i'm still here when i knew what i had to do i took all my notebooks all my manuscripts and ate them page by page so i could take my words with me i can finally control my life and even death and i will die slowly like steam escaping from a pipe i mean that's it's incredible this poem so all of these i mean yeah it's so good and you know all of these people mostly women we're like she understands she gets the strength of anorexia she gets it they started writing her and being like my therapist doesn't get it but you do he thinks that i'm fine but i'm going to show you exactly how i cut myself so they can't find it i'm going to show you all my secrets because they were so excited her poem inadvertently this was when the internet was really gathering steam started being quoted on all the print pro anorexia web sites as the patron saint of how to be anorexic so all of a sudden all these anorexics and self destructive women started writing her and being like you get it you get the glory of self destruction and she was receiving these emails like oh my god so her entire essay is sort of about her journey dealing with this onslaught of self destructive young girls proud of it and how for her it was very obvious that they were losing control of their life and trying to gain it through that through self destruction you know so i forget exactly what point i was making through there but i mean it it is really tied together and you know the beginning of her of her essay after  everything comes down to control the desire to have it the desire to lose it the desire to exerted over someone or something you know it's it's it's a fantastic essay i really love nicole blackman's one  interview with you where you're talking about how destroying parts of yourself to rebuild who you really are that seems to be that seems to fit in yeah well yeah that's that's a really big point and i  did sort of begin to remember the end of the point i was going to make earlier which is you know therapist and doctors they're like stop it don't do it they take away that power for young girls that are hurting themselves that might be the first power they feel you know so why take that away you have to take that and be like this is special let's see if we can convert it now to something and that's the thing is that for some people you do need to break down the walls of who you thought you were so you can create something new and that is another part of self destruction that people don't understand i don't want to glorify it in any way but i do want to talk about it in a way that isn't shameful and i really think that's what makes people miss understand it all the time and think that the only way out is hurting yourself so far that it becomes you you know there is in some ways a necessity of having those self destructive periods or can break everything down and then build anew and you can't build on old things you know if you need to deal with something deep and dark those self destructive times are going to happen in the museo actually is a wonderful essay in here where you know she was dealing with the grief of the sudden death of her brother and you know car accident died and all of a sudden she i mean it just blitzed her she was like young nineteen twenty one when this happened something like that in college and she wrote day after day she and then i wrote about it and i feel better that was sort of my clean understanding of it i also simply wanted to know that other people dealt with this into those said i would read writing and writing writing about the grief it didn't help what helped is that all of a sudden i discovered cutting myself you know and she was like i was shocked i was shocked that i could see pain that i could feel it that i could watch it heal and she has this beautiful line she said in for a while my body became a sacred garden of grief where she would basically cut herself so she could control the pain she could feel something then watch herself feel again that sense of control like i can't control all the pain i'm feeling but i control can control this pain i created it i saw it until she became a cutter and burned herself for a while and then at one point in her life she just realized i'm done with that now you know and then just sort of magically stopped as soon as she started but for her you know writing didn't help that she needed to actually go through that and she's like well i guess i could have like edged a thousand cranes or tattoos on my body you know she could have tattooed herself she's like but that's what worked for me and i needed that i mean kate bornstein talks a lot about the importance of self destruction and she's actually like do i advocate self destructive behavior yeah yeah i do yes i can get out of hand but any ritual can get out of hand ok this is all about it's called art is prayer and it talks about the ritual of self destruction and how sort of went through a variety of religions to try and understand  conflicting emotions of trying wanting to become a woman when she was younger born man transitioned to female in the now escape ornstein it was everything is fantastic and for her she wanted to go through religions you know what to understand these feelings and you know ended up in the church of scientology for ten years because the church of scientology it was all about being your body or not your body it was very much about the body so you know she was and she writes about that pretty beautifully and then in the church of scientology started drawing these pictures sort of illustrating these sort of tenants of scientology and realizing more and more what she wanted but it was that ritual of drawing and you know that made her understand it like sort of except more and more like this is where i'm going with this like look this is what i drew this is what i want and sort of gave her words for things that maybe she was unable to say but yeah her essay is fantastic talking about the ritual of self destruction the importance of it and in comparison with the ritual of art so you know there's just so much in this book i'm sorry i'm just rambling no it's great do you see is there a connection then between creativity and self destruction you know it it's a hard thing because yeah i'll say yes to that i hesitate because you know artists have this sort of prototype understanding stereotype of being crazy and like there's drug writers and blah blah blah like there is this image of an artist so much especially geniuses right there were crazy you know i mean it's you know male writers it's funny i talk about i when i do workshops on this i do i'm doing the workshop at the center of sex positive culture basically i talk about the differences with this type of stuff and these images of self destructive artists and i say that if i see like a young male that's dressed all in black at a diner with drinking black coffee and writing in his journal and has a book on him i know that book is because ski i just know it you know and they're all like i'm going to drink as much as i can and self destruct as much as i can so i can write like you know and there's this image that you have to be crazy to be an artist and so i think that understanding of self destructive artists that gets fed into you in a lot of unproductive ways sometimes people feel that they need to be crazy they need to hurt themselves to have something to write about which in itself it's like well if you're crazy enough to think that then maybe maybe you do you know but i think as a whole you need to in some ways consider life you know and you don't really need to philosophically consider emotions and really you know go through the emotional terrain so much as an architect or as an engineer that's you know this this excavating your own mind and emotions as an artist that sort of what you need to do so that type of stuff comes up quite a bit  so i would say it's more it's more usual that artists deal with these things because they're constantly sort of probing their emotions and having stuff come up but at the same time i might switch my answer because i was a crazy artist until i saw a documentary with chuck close who is this incredible painter if you don't know he's just amazing and he's just so brilliant and he paints these incredible brilliant life at that point it was like you know his early work was photorealism paintings and then you know he was he got hit by a car or something and was in a terrible accident and suddenly we had to be in a wheelchair and then could only paint you know with his like arm propped up and these are massive paintings and in the documentary he was sort of like yeah so now i just sort of have to because i can't really raise my arm anymore i have to like get the paintings on you know you know ab to have the movie for me and stuff so i paint differently now but you know i was shocked i was like just go and do something so traumatic you can't walk anymore he asked a prop his own hand up and he's still doing it and he still being brilliant and i was shocked at how not crazy he was because his paintings are genius and seeing some guy just approach it like a day to day thing made me be like maybe you don't have to be crazy to be an artist maybe i could actually be saying maybe i can just approach this day by day truthfully and honestly and have it be brilliant and so he was the first one that made me have hope that i could be sane and create and not you know be a terrible artist so there there are people that do that but i think i don't know maybe i'm going back and forth on it i think artists tend to deal with these things quite a bit more but i don't think it's necessary like i don't think it's the only thing but i also do think that you need to have a good sense of yourself to build something and if you have shame if you have things in your life the don't allow you to be your true self sometimes breaking down those things i was the only necessary way to begin again to create your true self i'm not sure if that makes sense right a lot of this sounds like it applies to those of us that don't you know i yeah absolutely well that's a thing is that right now a couple things about this collection so live through this on creativity and self destruction i came to it being like i want to hear women talk about self  trans essays in here which is fantastic and i didn't really touch on male self destruction you know per se it's also a very american collection but i think having that sort of focus because you need to have some sort of focus allows all of these universal concepts to be understood it's all about the same thing control shame power all of those things and it's not specifically necessary for artists you know i mean i feel like artists always good to talk about this stuff but i mean let's talk about wall street like those guys are crazy you know and there's that culture of self destruction there you got to you know do so much coke to say up up up it's not glorified in other professions as much you don't get lego because no one wants to hear oh you've got the crazy genius doctor or surgeon no you don't want to hear that everyone else like he's a genius with a scalpel no you don't want to hear that everyone else is supposed to pretend that they're normal but they're self destructing just as much because you know no matter what oftentimes there's a pressure to be the finest and whenever there is pressure you're going to have a breaking point of some some way or another you know artist begin to talk about it more because we talk a lot anyways and we're not afraid about talking about emotions because we actually have to put our emotions on display for everyone that's why we get this rap of we're the self destructive crazy people but i mean looking at every single other profession there everyone has the possibility of self destructing and in fact everyone does and that's something that i think i i also want to talk about just a bit it's just that you know in my introduction i say like everyone there's a time where like everyone smokes too much everyone drinks too much you know you eat too much you drive sobbing in the rain you know these things happen to people it's not every single day for everyone but there are periods of life i will i will be shocked if there's not one person that hasn't gone through some sort of traumatic thing and found themselves either depressed or doing something that they know they shouldn't that is always self destructive in some way it's when those patterns become spiraled and out of control that it becomes a problem but for the most part we're all dealing with taming our own desires in order to move forward in life and yeah it's everyone deals with these things but talking about it with this construction of you know artists and creativity i think allows for these things to be talked about in a way that's useful for everyone and also one thing with the book that i was sort of shocked about a lot of people that are dealing with these issues i know they found it really powerful i didn't expect anyone that wasn't self destructive to read it and one of the more powerful responses i got from it was someone that read it after of someone very close to them killed themselves and they said you know i'd really been struggling with you know this person suicide and reading your book made me understand a bit more what they were dealing with and i think that's a very important thing people that don't deal with self destructive behaviors they're in the dark they don't know actually what we're dealing with and they just sort of back away they're like ok and they're scared of it and i really like this book as a way for people to understand get an entry to what depression means to people what it feels like what people are actually dealing with because that's the problem is everyone that is self destructive we understand it the people that aren't there sort of scared about talking about it you know so but we need those people to not be crazy to have a reason to come back so i like i like having this book as something to hand to people that are like oh i'm totally normal i'm totally saying why are you so sad it's like well this is sort of what my world's like you know and it's a you know it's a good starting point for anyone that doesn't understand what self destructive or depressive people are going through as well so it was like it should be required reading for those people who are counseling others absolutely absolutely because that's the thing too is you know with the whole therapy thing a lot of if there are you know psychiatry lists it comes from this position of power of i'm right you're wrong let's fix you you know and that's inherently like mean you know it's should be yours because i think self destructive behavior is some of the most powerful actions you can take to honestly look at yourself and be like i going to hurt myself that's a powerful act you know i mean cutting yourself putting your hand out taking a razor and being like boom i'm doing this how can you not see the power in that act how can you demean that act and say that's wrong how can you say i am not going to have myself eat for this many days that is such willpower that is such strength and control how can people damn those actions and say you are weak because that is the last thing that these people are it's the last thing they're very strong they're just trying to figure out a way to deal with the strength and i think that when psychiatry distant they're up a say oh you're self destructing that's a bad thing i think that's not a really helpful way to approach dealing with these behaviors yeah all right well we were lucky to be able to catch you thank you so much we're very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning let's begin if you could briefly tell us about your two organizations witness for peace and the martin luther king jr center and have and well wishes for peace is international social justice organization that started started off in the early eighty's in nicaragua to bear witness on how our u s policies were playing out in central america india nicaragua conflict in the early eighty's and so well we did was organized groups of concerned individuals to travel to the region and quickly saw that when there was an international presence sensually the bullets stopped flying and that created a precedent for what we do today and  we organize groups of delegations to come down and see how u s policies are playing out in the latin american region currently we have offices in mexico in nicaragua in colombia and in cuba very critical or standpoint but also very offering very a lot of proposals all right so does it tell us about the conditions currently in know and i think this is happening not only because of the fall of the socialist blocks and the soviet union but also because of the enforcement of the economic embargo you know make not only in the challenges around purchasing clothing and shoes but also around the challenges of acquiring met medication  them and and i always say that our government in cuba tries to offer the best standard of health care not just in terms of equipment but also in terms of treatment and we always like to refer to the embargo as a blockade because the embargo refers to something bilateral whereas a blockade involves third countries so this prevents us from cheating any act nomic income any income through this channel cuba has a biotech industry that contributes to the economy americans there are very very novel medications for example in cuba we have this one medication that comes from the venom of a scorpion that is used to help to treat and prevent cancers that  so even so we can't have these commercial ties with the u s to help solve these medications but we can with other countries another contribution to our economy in terms of hard currency are those that countries that pay for our medical services we have medical brigade's that we send to other countries and those countries then pay for us for those services  confronting the economic crisis of the ninety's so have as the u s blockade changed at all in the last fifty years in many many bureaucratic hurdles one has been that per each for each medication that we acquire we need a certain license for it you get what that means that in the terms of the food products that are being sold there are some again meats and so corn and wheat products however these products have to be paid for in cash cuba has no credit with the world goner and i think under the bush administration the the measures had changed remains is where tightened travel was restricted cuban americans can no longer travel freely back to their homeland and north americans and it also allowed for our north americans to travel to cuba under a specific license and of course this limits exchange this limits the amount of awareness or the travel that americans can have to cuba to see what really is happening on the island what has been the united nations stance on the blockade but monica looking and it's been a surprising and overwhelming amount of support to end the blockade there vulnerable and three or four countries that have continued to support it a slowly but nevertheless this hasn't changed anything the web of laws within the embargo continue and continue to affect our lives but many think that that essentially that that country's been the united states there are no nuclear nuclear missiles or weapons in cuba the soviet union removed what there was and this was because of the negotiations between the soviet union and the united states and the soviet union then removed these missiles without any consultation with cuba and obviously these missiles w good pace and so another reason for conditions that for the embargo was that cuba was having relations with latin america and the condition set was for them to have to cease all relationships with groups throughout latin america statement a program that i have shown and i think it is a bit they took no thanks a thing today there are no relationships between cuban guerrilla groups in latin america by and large latin american countries resolve their leadership issues via elections and human rights always it's not a reason for adding more conditions on to cuba you know so i believe we are at the point we're having the fifty year anniversary of the cuban missile crisis  fifty years ago and yet the u s is still got this fifty year in archaic embargo on cuba anyway first i think that people should simply read up on the issue and try to understand cuba more than they do now and be closer to the island not just from the outside but also tried it try to get in from the inside quite often the main media outlets don't tell the truth about what's happening inside the country and they lin's who leave the country we see that there isn't always a matter of truth they seem to exaggerate what is happening inside cuba and in many seems impossible that a small group in florida dictate policies over cuba and ignore the overwhelming amount of support on behalf of the rest of the country then they  recommend people turn to for information organizing under our professional professional license to come visit we have one coming down in december for professional organizers one next april as well for up fashionables involved in agriculture so we encourage you to visit our