Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s Clean (Upswell 2022) and Alan Fyfe’s T (Transit Lounge 2022) are books with a deep relation. A poetry collection and a novel respectively, Clean and T were released within less than a year of each other and attracted multiple award listings; and both deal with methamphetamine use in Western Australia, a state which consumes the drug at almost twice the national average. The authors share a longstanding friendship. Here, they discuss the highs and lows of writing about meth use from a basis of lived experience. This conversation was conducted over email in January.

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Alan Fyfe: I woke up at ten past five from a bad dream. It wasn’t a nightmare as such, but it left a sour taste and I couldn’t get back to sleep. It was about being on meth. It was a long, story-like dream and Paul Giamatti was in it as my meth buddy. He was in a dusty suit doing his world-weary hypertension shtick. I can’t seem to even have a bad dream without a comedy element.

The feeling the dream left was that feeling of desperation. Like I was younger yet the same age I am now. I felt washed out. But the mental state of that age was there. I was thinner, hungrier for self-destruction, feeling like there was no future and no reason to look for one. Obviously the feeling is always there to access in my subconscious, even though I got out a whole novel about meth use and homelessness after the fact, the feeling still haunts the edges.

Did you have any dreams?

Scott-Patrick Mitchell: I had to Google Paul Giamatti … and then laughed. I could totally see you two hanging out. Some of the characters he’s played on screen actually remind me of you.

Yes, I dreamt. Although I’m still unsure whether to call these kind of dreams, “dreams”. They verge on nightmares at times. Mine was also about the past, the craving. That insidious hunger so inherent to meth addiction. It feels like being stuck in a haunted house, one that is being devoured by the ground beneath and you can’t escape. I have dreams about the past often. No comic relief for me, unfortunately. Just a litany of ex-friends who I look at and say “I left you for a reason. Why are you back here?”. These dreams feel like emptying a Junk Folder that keeps refilling.

That said, I’m grateful for dreams. No matter how uncomfortable they make me. And I have been having more and more happy dreams — just these ones sneak in and awaken that deep impression of addiction from the psyche. But considering that when I was using, I never really dreamt, I am glad to be able to remember these ones.

I have a whole unwritten manuscript about my drug use where the penultimate scene takes place inside a dream. It sounds a little twee, writing that out, but for those who have never used meth heavily, when you sleep between binges, it’s like being encased inside obsidian. Yes, dreams happen, but they are muffled through the thick density of the oh-so-necessary sleep. The only dreams you have are those when you’re awake, and they’re dreams of hunger, of feeding, of needing.

AF: Yeah, mate, Paul Giamatti totally stole my act.

Ah, the unpublished novel! We talked about this and there’s a strange cross point (chiasm, lol) in our attempts to get these experiences into literature. When we were both struggling with the manuscripts that would become T and Clean, you first tried to do it as a novel and I first tried to do it as an epic poem; and the end result is you with a poetry collection and me with a novel. These things happened before we even started hanging out around five years ago, when we were both off the gear and, I suppose, pretty lonely for someone to talk to about our experiences; which weren’t that common in the lit scene we occupy — not just the meth but the class experience too.

Dreams were quite central to what I tried to do in T — there are three major dream sequences in it. One of the publishers I worked with (there were three) wanted the dream sequences taken out. I suppose that was a matter of house style or preferences. It seems an odd way to go about offering edits for a book on a subject an editor isn’t familiar with though. Heightened access to the subconscious is elemental to the experience of a drug that can stop you sleeping for several days. Sometimes this access is even involuntary. It’s true that the drug can dull real dreams severely, but that dream logic tends to pop up during the waking experience.

That was a point of familiarity I encountered in The Sleep Deprivation Diaries, my favourite piece in Clean, which is a cycle of poetry about a full-blown binge. There are so many points of recognition in that work. There’s the punding[1], the microeconomics of the meth scene, the power dynamics. It’s hard to reduce The Sleep Deprivation Diaries to a few elements because of the fluid interaction between its parts — play across gender, attraction, myth, and pop culture. But that subconscious access is there. As opposed to the last section of Clean where we enter the world of sobriety and recovery, material things like the words of therapists and making up with family, in The Sleep Deprivation Diaries old movie songs become solid objects in a punding pile[2] and the structural myths referenced in those songs are just at the edge of a peripheral glance too.

SPM: I’m glad those dream sequences were kept in. They rang so true and added to the reading experience. The dreamscape — or lack thereof — really is a central motif to the meth experience. Especially when it creeps into the waking world after day 2 and makes itself known either in playful, synchronic ways, or takes on a more foreboding experience like Shadow People.[3]

It’s interesting you bring up that juxtaposition between the final and middle section of Clean.  In the final section, there are a number of poems which were written as a direct result of having uncomfortable recovery dreams. I wrote them the next day as a way to process that dream, further anchor myself in the real, the concrete, the recovery.

The Sleep Deprivation Diaries, on the other hand, is what I would consider a largely non-fiction poem, even though it doesn’t read like one.  For context, I have been keeping poetry journals since 1998. These are probably my most difficult yet prized possessions. When I was using meth, I doubled-down on the journal keeping, recording fragments, thoughts, random experiences, terrible noisy poems. These journals anchored me to the real world, At times I wonder if I was trying to write myself back home, but I think I knew there was some value to the chaos and abuse I was inflicting on myself.

When I got clean, I went back through these journals and worked on poems as a way to heal the addict that I was. When the book began emerging, I realised I wanted a middle section that took the reader and poem’s protagonist right into the maelstrom of meth addiction. I wanted a baptism by fire, a roadmap of how drug psychosis manifests. These poems are taken from a three week stint where I crashed at a dealer’s house. On reflection, not the wisest choice for in-depth research, but “recovery me” didn’t want to waste this reckless experience. So I forged a seven day sequence together that unbuckles and becomes unhinged.

The poems capture this in a coded manner, with wordplay gesturing to the unravelling. I reduced everybody involved to just their chromosomes, for legal reasons. I also cross out the truth, or facts, because the protagonist doesn’t want to have to admit them. I wrote this section from a place of sheer play — it was the only way I could see fit to protect my recovery and still honour the weirdness of encroaching psychosis.

Day 5 is the section people love the most, largely because of its cinematic overtones. I also totally rewrote this poem just before the book went to print. Originally, this was just a catalogue of objects I found in the winding maze of tarp-covered shelves that my dealer had in their backyard.  My publisher —   Terri-ann White at Upswell Publishing — pointed out that Day 5 lacked the energy of the rest of the sequence. So I remembered that, when you go to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show (which was a comfort movie during my addiction), you’d take props while screaming out lines along with the actors. I replaced all the backyard objects with those props and the poem sparked into a new shape.

But the poem is meant to unsettle. It’s a haunted poem. Literally. The original text has lines that appear in white font, so there’s an extra dimension of unseen criminality happening beneath the text. Ghosts if you like…. something I know features wonderfully in your book, T.

AF: That’s true, the idea of being haunted is very important in T. It’s a figurative thing, trying to portray a feeling that there’s some malevolent force in the atmosphere, but a literal thing in the world of the novel too. The protagonist ends up being haunted by the ghost of his dealer, who has died by suicide.

Maybe it’s important to understand, that connection between the strong visualization of one’s own death and the creative forces behind T. It’s not something many people are comfortable talking about, but the image of a man falling out of the sky comes from the time I lived in South Yunderup (where T is set in part) and I used to drive past a traffic bridge on Yunderup drive. I would have involuntary visions of throwing myself off that bridge. Ideation is an extraordinary thing for someone with a strong imagination and I can’t help thinking it’s two sides of the same coin: the horror and the transcendence of a reflexive creativity.

I like a little magic in art, so falling from a high place attached itself to the myth of Icarus’ careening into destruction as a result of a single mistake, much in the same way your verse on sleeplessness attaches itself to images of Morpheus — meshing with those Rocky Horror lyrics. So, in T, ideation turns into failed levitation, a shadow person turns into an articulate ghost. We’re trying to make sense of these things in our texts, aren’t we? A sort of poetic sense when the base material truth seems so hard to reach in any standard way. When the world uses the figure of an addict as a dumb, patronized trope, it felt like the right way to give the subjects I wrote about complex inner lives and reasons why they ended up where they did.

Those were some things that solidified for me in our conversations before our books were published. I’ve had people say T must have been cathartic to write. It wasn’t really cathartic for me; it was confronting to come out and be so highly visible as an ex-meth user. When the novel was initially shortlisted for a manuscript award, I lied in my first radio interview and said I hadn’t used drugs. But we figured out, between us, that while a previous generation got to write about heroin in the various incarnations of grunge literature, the testimony from the inside of the meth generation hadn’t hit yet. And that was the crux of coming forward, not just posing as an interested observer. Maybe it’s okay for people to use drugs and addiction as an imaginary plot device, but the voices of experience are genuinely vital to the ongoing conversation in literature. This authenticity is a counterpoint to a lot of harmful myths that form, that make humans suffering real tragedies into movie monsters.

The work should stand for something, more than just ourselves. Though, to be realistic too, not many readers would get fifteen pages into T and not think I’d been on the business end of a meth pipe.

Which brings me back to the desperation dreams that started this conversation. I remember in those early conversations when you said “look at us two old princesses going nowhere.” It was hilarious at the time, but also indicative of the time actually spent going nowhere, with no money and no hope and, for me, sometimes no place to live. Clearly the sense of desperation is still a grace note in the tune of my life, though I don’t feel that I’m going nowhere anymore. My writing career is a lot healthier, and my existence is more stable. But, if that background of desperation is a centre to the art I make, it’s also a catalyst for all the things that flow from it. Art is a game of contrasts and oppositions, so the contrast to ugly desperation must be something beautiful. And, if I’m confronted by the salacious questioning into my past, I’m not made ashamed by it. I’m not ashamed of my life at all, nor very regretful. I think I did something worthy with my experience, and in another life I might not have been asked.

SPM: To give voice to the unseen is one of the greatest gifts of literature. Our works humanise the headlines, open up new spaces. And they give hope: they show that yeah, you can make some terrible decisions, but there’s a way through. a way to make art from the tragedy and pain.

Hopefully we’ll see more stories like this. Perhaps this is the beginning of a new renaissance of grunge lit.

AF: Might be, we did okay with the critics. I don’t know how much two books can change the public’s point of view. As you say, though, perhaps they’re a catalyst. Change is the work of many hands.

[1] “Punding is thought to be related to dopamine use and has been observed in (meth)amphetamine and cocaine users, as well as in some patients with Parkinson disease, gambling addictions, and hypersexuality.” From — Bostwick, J. Michael and Ashlskog, Eric. ‘Drug Induced Compulsive Behaviours: exceptions to the rule’, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 84.9 (September 2009): 1119–1127.

[2] The type of punding we are talking about here involves hoarding and searching through an array of objects, which can be common among serious methamphetamine users. See previous footnote.

[3] “I mean I, I’ve truly gotten over, the only time I get paranoid schizophrenia is when I’m on meth, you know, I, it definitely, I truly believe that it excels our system, our biological system, and you are able to hear things that you don’t normally pay attention to, you see things shadows that, shadow chasers and shadow people that, you see that all the time, you just don’t make aware of it, and with the meth you see everything, you know?” From — McKenna, Stacey A. ‘“We’re Supposed to Be Asleep?” Vigilance, Paranoia, and the Alert Methamphetamine User’, Anthropology of Consciousness, 24.2 (2013): 172-190

Image: Nathan Winter