Contributor Interview
What have you been up to these last couple of months?
I’ve been writing and reading voraciously. Anything to minimize the clanging alarm bells brought on by this election and current Administration. I have a piece forthcoming in Okay Donkey this Spring. I’m also an upcoming guest on the Poems and Whiskey podcast by Michael C. The rest is waiting, waiting, waiting for submissions that are in progress.
What are your long-term creative plans? Are you working on something big and secret or taking it day by day?
I have a few large projects I’m working on! I have a flash/short story collection in the works and I am just wrapping up my full poetry collection. I’ll likely spend the next few months oscillating between doubt and hysterics on both of those endeavors.
What’s the status of your mental health these days? It’s in all ways prosaic to say that we live in trying times. How is the zeitgeist responsible? What are some actionable ways in which you’re taking steps to quiet the void, if any? (If it’s a glass of wine and an episode of Mad Men at the day’s end, that counts, please know that).
My mental health is middling. I’m working on slipping in daily doses of joy, as cheesy as that sounds. Every day is a new opportunity to steal pleasure. It could be writing a bonkers micro, eating a damn cookie, daydreaming, playing The Sims, or spying on the chipmunks and birds. Sometimes I sing to my cat. Whatever works.
What is something you’d like readers to take away from your work in regards to mental health advocacy, discussion, or criticism?
I think a takeaway might be that there are no heroes or villains—only people moving through pain, survival, and the messy in-between of being human. Mental health is not a battle with a clear winner, nor is it a morality play with defined roles. It is a landscape, shifting and unpredictable, where people make choices with the tools they have, often in the absence of a map. If we strip away the narratives of heroism and villainy, we might begin to see each other more clearly—not as archetypes, but as individuals carrying histories, wounds, and hopes that deserve understanding rather than judgment.
Why do you create, still, despite the climate and political current and pervasive doubt we’re made slaves to?
Because to stop would be to concede that the world is only what it appears to be—cruel, transactional, indifferent. But creation is an act of defiance, a refusal to accept that the narrative is already written. I write because the world is unfinished, because language can carve out space where none existed, because even in collapse, there is the possibility of reimagining. Doubt may be the currency of the age, but so is connection. So is witness. To create is to insist that something else is possible, even if only for the length of a sentence, a poem, a breath.
When was the last time you told your psychiatrist or therapist something you were afraid to disclose? In your own words, how do you feel about going up against the stigma?
This is a difficult question. My therapist of 10 years passed away two years ago from Covid, so it’s been hard. Losing that connection—her knowing my history, my patterns, the shorthand we built over a decade—feels like being dropped halfway up Everest with no map, no oxygen, and some guy named Chad insisting I just "think positive." A good therapist is part sherpa, part shaman, guiding you through the blizzards of your own mind, but also just a human who occasionally forgot where she put her glasses while they were on her head. It feels impossible to start over, to hand someone else the tangled ball of yarn and chewing gum that is my psyche and say, “Here, have fun.” But I know that’s false. Stigma will always be there, but so will the need to be known, to be understood. Therapy isn’t just about the person listening; it’s about the courage to keep speaking, even when the audience changes.
Anything else you’d like to share?
A deep thank you to Mary and Libre for these interviews, which carve out space for the kind of conversations that remind us we’re not just yelling into the abyss. The abyss, on occasion, yells back, and sometimes, with something useful. These dialogues matter because they challenge the silence, the stigma, and the strange, persistent idea that we have to figure it all out alone.
As for anything else to share? Just this: Keep going. Keep creating, even when it feels absurd. Keep speaking. The world is already full of noise; what it needs is more meaning, more honesty, more people willing to say, This is what it feels like to be human. Does anyone else feel this way too? Someone does. And that’s enough reason to keep trying.
Chrissy Stegman is a poet/writer from Baltimore, Maryland. Recent work has appeared in/forthcoming: Rejection Letters, Gone Lawn, Gargoyle Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Stone Circle Review, Fictive Dream, Inkfish, The Voidspace, The Madrigal, 5 Minutes, Ucity Review, and BULL. She is a BOTN nominee.IG | X | BLUESKY