Perhaps you’ve seen the photos of meth addicts on billboards or public service announcements: sunken eyes, bad skin, missing teeth. They seem designed to make you turn away and say, “That’s not me. I could never be that, do that.”
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Sameshima |
But the portrait of one particular meth addict that emerges from 68 poems created by WSU education assistant professor Pauline Sameshima does the opposite. Based on transcripts of more than 10 hours of interviews with Gabriel, a Washington woman who was an addict for 10 years and had been in recovery for about six, the poems draw the reader in.
In high school we tried some stuff
but when I was married
and raising a family
I didn’t even drink beer
kinda bizarre to find myself in this position
selling drugs to make ends meet
– from Say NO to Drugs (transcript 2, lines 169-317)
Sameshima said she started off just reading the transcripts, and then began coding them to find patterns and themes. Without any preconception, or working hypothesis, Sameshima said she was simply trying to hear what Gabriel’s story could tell her about the experience of being a methamphetamine addict. Understanding the experience, she said, is critical to being able to write effective curriculum materials which is one of her goals.
Selling and using were different
I was selling so I could help the kids
I was using because it helped
with my depression
kept my weight down
and I was having all this pain
– from Using (transcript 1, lines 138-160)
Creating poems, Sameshima said, does two things: distills the experience to communicate the feelings and images in a powerful, immediate way and makes the experience more readily available to a larger audience.
The transcripts are from interviews conducted by Roxanne Vandermause, an assistant professor of nursing at WSU Spokane. She met Gabriel in 2006 and was inspired to conduct the interviews and create a multidisciplinary research team, mostly from the arts, that would take an hermeneutic approach to understanding methamphetamine addiction. That is, each scholar tried to understand Gabriel’s story from within his or her own particular social or cultural context, using his or her own expertise – in this case, in music, creative writing, drama or fine arts – as reference points.
Sameshima, a poet and artist, has long been interested in the power of poetry to render an experience more immediate.
“The scarcity of the text allows ambiguity,” she said, and that ambiguity allows people to read the universal in the specific. Gabriel’s story is not your story, but there’s a sense that it could be.
“She’s one woman, but she’s worried about the same things that all women worry about,” said Vandermause.
Indeed the poems read like memoir, even to Gabriel.
“She cried through the whole story,” Vandermause said, “She told us, ‘You’ve got my story. This is me.’ ” Gabriel has been in recovery for 10 years and Vandermause is the only member of the research group who has met her face-to-face.
If you took a cracker
and you took a little chunk off
it would still be a cracker
but eventually
after so many pieces fall off
it doesn’t look like a cracker
just a pile of crumbs
that’s kind of how it nips away
at your self-esteem
– from Cracker Crumbs (transcript 1, lines 275-317)
The poems, along with photographs of various places important to Gabriel’s addiction and recovery, are collected in, “Climbing the Ladder with Gabriel: Poetic Inquiry of a Methamphetamine Addict in Recovery.” The paperback begins with a discussion of poetic inquiry and arts-based research.
Sameshima said the research had two foci: experimenting with arts-based parallel praxis – gathering a group of scholars, many in the arts, to look at a particular experience from different perspectives to see if a truer picture emerges – and making their findings accessible to a wider audience.
And along the way, Sameshima and her colleagues discovered something unexpected: what if the methamphetamine isn’t the problem? What if it’s the solution?
As described in the transcripts, and reinterpreted in the poetry, when Gabriel’s addiction begins she is a divorced woman in her 40s with no job skills and no means of support. She is battling depression, suffering from undiagnosed fibromyalgia, estranged from her family and living in a 1989 Hyundai with her two teenage children.
Once she begins using meth, and then selling, she can pay the rent, the depression lifts, the pain recedes and she becomes part of a community of people she cares for and who care for her.
all of the sudden you find something that
makes you feel good for the first time
you can’t stop
it made me feel
the best I’ve felt in my whole life
– from A Fun Patch (transcript 2, lines 864-931)
While using meth, Sameshima said, Gabriel is the happiest she’s ever been. Which forced the researchers to consider another question: “How do you find the antidote to the antidote?” Sameshima asked.
The researchers have no answers, but their work is continuing, with plans for curriculum development that includes a web forum and follow-up curriculum assessment.
“There are still questions, but we are getting closer to the essential questions,” Vandermause said.
