Think Piece Signs Shannon Cuthrell for Poetry Book ‘The Great Repression’

It’s our great joy to announce that this year we will be publishing The Great Repression, a collection of poems and illustrations by Shannon Cuthrell, a marvelous writer who attends Appalachian State University in North Carolina. It details five months in Shannon’s life when she was experiencing mental health challenges caused by bipolar depression. Today, she’s recovered and doing well, thanks in part to a change in environment. (The mountains help.) And remarkably, she made the choice not to avoid the  memories of this time, but to own and document them. As she explains in the introduction, “If I hadn’t written this book, that time would be repressed and split into tiny pieces. That’s why I decided to call the collection The Great Repression. Some may say the title is a terrible pun (and I don’t deny that it is), but it motivates me. I didn’t want the experience to fall into the abyss.” We’re so glad she did. Her work is elliptical, surreal, vivid, and often funny, filled with cocktail-party demons, Pink Floyd lyrics, boys with espresso eyes, and more. God we love it. Plus we dig her YouTube video  “What I Don’t Tell the Internet.” We just can’t wait to share her work with you, very soon, with part of the proceeds going to the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance.