"When I was in high school, it was cool to be depressed. Emo music had just hit the mainstream and suddenly it was a sign of artistic depth to have an eating disorder or to self harm. I, eager to be accepted, let myself dive into the depths of a nagging anxiety and self-destructive tendency I have had as long as I can remember. My friends initially gave me the attention that I was convinced would make me feel better, but eventually they began telling me that they couldn't be around me--that I was a force of chaos and destruction in their life. Anne Sexton told me why they came to hate me for what we all believed was cool. Depression is not glamorous. Suicide is not poetic. Mental illness is terrifying. It lurks in you, it hangs over you, it is omnipresent and deadly. Anne Sexton viscerally expresses her brushes with insanity, her hospitalization, her suicide attempts, and, in her bouts of wellness, her terror that they would not last. She was killed by her mental illness, and that knowledge was enough to scare me into seeking treatment. The horrifying beauty of her words, the dreadful finality of her death, they stand as a monument, reminding me what is at stake and why I must fight."
"My name is Seth Fowler and I chose Oliver Twist as the book that changed my life. I'm not so sure that it actual changed my life, but it did change the way I think. I spent some time traveling throughout India and Nepal over the past year. In that year I encountered many young children who faced child labor in some terrible factories and mills. It relates well with what Charles Dickens had to go through as a child, and what the character Oliver has to go through as well. This book seriously made me sit down and think about the problems with the social classes and gave me a drive to shed light on the many flaws amongst classes. Oliver Twist has given me a desire to pursue social work along with journalism as a career to get the stories out to the world about child labor and the other countless crimes committed towards children around the world."
My friend got me into comic books back in highschool. We read the usual fare: The X-Men, Spiderman, Batman...lots of spandex. Almost every week we'd go to the comic book store and check out what's new. After a while I started noticing this book called The Sandman. The covers drew me in; it was unlike the ones I normally see. It had paintings and photos mixed together. Great stuff! After a while I went ahead and got it. I really didn't care what the book was all about. For all I know it was just a loose adaptation of Robert Smith's fantasy life. For me, I thought the cover alone was worth the price of the book. The storytelling was at first hard to follow. I started with #57, "The Kindly Ones", which was close to the end of the entire series. The pace was slow, not a lot of things blowing up, clever one-liners, fighting (let alone The Cure references). There were gods, yes, and fairies, and monsters but most of the time they just talked and acted like regular people. I guess that made me want to find out more about the characters. They're jerks like any one of us. Cliche as this sounds, they were living. I was amazed at how much Gaiman mixed elements from horror, literature, religion, and created his own mythos on top of it. And how can I forget Dave McKean's art! It made such a big influence in how I see things. For me, it became a portal. Since then I wanted to read and learn more about all sorts of things--art, history, mythology--not just comic book characters; what ties them together, where the key light is.
