Questions for Werewolves recounts your experiences with bipolar disorder and severe depression while exploring the powerful influence of dreams, memories, mythology, and spiritual imagery. What inspired you to write your memoir, and how did you decide that your experiences with bipolar depression could become the foundation of a book?

I didn’t set out to write a memoir about bipolar disorder. In many ways, the book began as an attempt to make sense of experiences that had shattered my previous understanding of myself and the world.

During periods of depression, psychosis, grief, romantic disillusion, and spiritual emergency, I encountered dreams, images, and memories that refused to leave me. Some were terrifying, others beautiful, but all seemed to be asking something of me. Writing became a way of staying in conversation with those questions rather than simply dismissing them as symptoms or trying to forget them.

I think I knew the material had become a book when I realized that the questions I was wrestling with were not mine alone. Many people, whether they have experienced mental illness or not, know what it means to descend into darkness, lose their bearings, and search for meaning.

Ultimately, Questions for Werewolves is less a book about bipolar disorder than a book about what happened when my familiar world fell apart, and how dreams, myths, and spiritual imagination helped me find my way through the ruins.

What do you hope readers understand about the lived experience of bipolar depression that might not be conveyed through clinical descriptions alone?

As a person with lived experience, I’ve come to reclaim the term madness in the spirit of the Mad Studies movement. That word feels honest to my experience. While medical explanations have their place, I’ve never felt that what happened to me could be fully explained by brain chemistry or disordered cognitive thinking alone.

There are profound dimensions of soul, spirit, and mysticism involved. In my own case, recovery began when I learned to listen to and honor the voices and images that emerged from the depths, rather than trying to suppress or ignore them. Once I gave them a meaningful place in my life, and in my dream diaries, they no longer invaded me. Instead, as I worked with them, they helped me engage with difficult realities such as family trauma, grief, romantic disillusionment, and the violent legacies of my father’s war.

At the same time, I want to acknowledge that psychiatric interventions can play a role in medium-term stabilization and support. However, from a patient rights perspective, I believe medical treatment should always respect a person’s dignity, moral autonomy, and right to informed consent, rather than being imposed through coercion. I also believe patients should have the right to calibrate, over time, the extent to which medical interventions remain central to their care.

How did your encounters with different spiritual traditions, including Christianity, Haitian Vodou, and Eastern philosophy, influence your understanding of the experiences you describe?

My mother, in her youth, converted from Buddhism to Catholicism. So already, as a child, I was immersed in the background of my mother’s Taiwanese Buddhism, which embodies philosophical, animist, and shamanic aspects. My mother also had what Westerners might consider a superstitious side, and accorded great weight to images in dreams.

What is an image? What makes an image true? When do creative images become something more than personal expression, fantasy, allegory or myth?

Encounters with different traditions helped me make sense of my experiences. Rather than seeing my imagery as purely private, I began to recognize transpersonal aspects of them in collective visions of the sacred, especially those associated with the Divine Feminine. I found resonances across Hispanic Christianity, Islamic Sufism, Taiwanese Buddhism, and many other traditions, even where their orthodox doctrines differ.

Some of the most important influences for me, however, were Indigenous and diasporic traditions such as Native American spirituality and Haitian Vodou. They offered ways of relating to dreams, spirits, land, and voices that are often marginalized within modern Western worldviews.

I should add there is a danger in identifying too quickly with the luminous aspects of spiritual experience while bypassing its darker dimensions, which are not necessarily evil. A central theme of my writing is therefore descent rather than ascent: the idea of katabasis, a journey into the underworld where one is stripped of certainties, undone, and ultimately remade.

In that descent, conventional identities, boundaries, and orthodoxies can no longer be relied upon. This is why the Greek myths of the underworld and sacred wildness, especially the mysteries associated with Persephone, Dionysos, and Artemis, have been so important to me. They offer powerful images of transformation through surrender to the unknown, rather than transcendence through escape from it.

What have you learned about the relationship between creativity and psychological suffering, and how do you avoid romanticizing the very real difficulties of mental illness?

In a paradoxical way, madness forces psychological suffering into the open, creating a terrain of intense and often dangerous encounter. I would never romanticize that experience or the very real suffering and self-harm it can involve.

Earlier this year, I spoke at the Too Mad to Be True conference in Belgium about how “the ways we name the black can kill us.” That idea emerges directly from my own life. When we have no imaginal language for what we are experiencing, despair can begin to feel like the whole truth.

For me, that is the real antagonist in the book. Not madness itself, but the loss of relationship to the darkness. The inability to imagine our way through it.

I don’t believe madness itself is inherently creative. But it can disrupt our habitual assumptions and show powerful images of loss, transformation, and renewal. The creative task is not to glorify the suffering, but to engage those images and voices more wisely, drawing on them as resources for healing and growth.

As I write near the end of the book: “The soul blooms in winter. It blooms red upon the pages of a divine mystery, as in a black light we cannot see.” For me, that image speaks not to the value of suffering itself, but to the possibility of meaning, transformation, and, dare I say, resurrection emerging from our darkest seasons.

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