Writing It Real contributor Philip Kenney is on a roll, publishing books of poetry, novels, and essays. For our June article, he is sharing his introduction to a new collection of essays, So Many Surprises: Essays 2013 — 2023. Many will identify with the surprising way writing surfaces in our lives, how it forces us to notice what is around us and inside us, and how recording these observations changes us. Thank you, Philip Kenney, for sharing your journey from not writing to the floodgates opening.

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Perhaps we are all unlikely writers. Who can say with any certainty how, where, or why they
have been visited by the creative impulse? What we know is that it arrived, largely unbidden,
and having infiltrated our psyche, we were transformed. This was my experience, although,
unlike most of the writers I know who were busy making up stories when they were old enough
to pick up a crayon, my creative life did not begin until my forty-fifth year. And that beginning
was as surprising and profound as what was to follow.

The year was 1993, and the country and the psychiatric field had fallen in love with a new little
pill by the name of Prozac. I had been practicing psychotherapy for fifteen years and was as
curious as the next person about this new wonder drug and the dramatic stories circulating about
its effectiveness in treating chronic depression. Being the descendant of a long line of depressive
men, I decided to experiment, allegedly to find out for myself what my patients were
experiencing, but secretly hoping for a miracle that would remove the lingering cloud of
melancholy shadowing my life. My primary care doc complied and handed me a few samples
like he was giving out candy.

After eight weeks on the magic pill, I decided I’d prefer the old-fashioned version of the blues to
the flatline, no-libido version of utopia offered by the Prozac revolution. So I quit. Cold turkey.
Bad idea. Always stop gradually, friends—these are powerful chemicals, and your brain is as
sensitive an organ as there is. The days and weeks that followed were some of the worst of my
life. The Prozac-induced flatline state that replaced my chronic low-level depression morphed
into a severe case of abject despair. And still no libido.

Three weeks into withdrawal, a strange thing happened. I went to sleep feeling utterly hopeless
and woke on a sunny Saturday morning to a terrible anxiety attack rampaging through my body.
Bye-bye depression, hello high anxiety. Great. What next? Well, I’ll tell you; tagged to that
anxiety was, of all things, a poem! Yes, a fully composed twenty-line poem. Truly. Mind you,
even as an English major, I’d never written a poem, never understood most poetry, and to be
truthful, found much of what I read either pretentious or impossible to understand. What was
happening?

Fortunately, I didn’t linger over that question; instead, I wrote the poem down in a notebook. It
was terrible. However, I noticed that not only was the anxiety gone, but I was excited. I didn’t
know it at the time, but a fire was lit that morning. Shortly thereafter, in a blessed twist of fate,
the work of the poet William Stafford found me. Two bits of his advice on the craft made all the
difference. He suggested writing a poem every day, and I did, for ten years. Most were as bad as
the first, but oh, those moments when the music flowed! The second was to look for threads and
gently coax them out. This came naturally to me, having been trained as a psychotherapist to
believe in free association and welcoming subtle clues from the unconscious.

In ten years, I wrote four books of poetry. Turning sixty, I made a list of things I thought I could
not do. First on the list was playing the piano. I was right; my neurology is barely connected to
the left hand. The second was writing a novel. I was wrong; in six months, I found myself writing
“The End” on the final page of a 93,000-word first draft. That experience transformed me into a
writer. It was completely enlivening. I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and sit down at the
computer to discover the next unexpected turn. I felt initiated into a mysterious conversation
with the unconscious. In the morning, I listened and wrote what emerged mostly unbidden. At
work, between patients, I hastily wrote down ideas on scraps of paper before they could disappear.
And at night, I was awakened in the early hours with answers to the morning’s writing
problems, entire sentences and paragraphs streaming through my head.

What I loved about a writing practice from the beginning was that it asked me to be awake. It
asked that I be attentive to the particulars of the world, both inner and outer, regardless of the
circumstances. Soon, I began to notice my way of engaging with life had altered considerably. I
was less preoccupied with everyday problems and my insecurities. That opened me to my
experience of the moment and the enchantments of the world and its people. In short, the
depressive tendency I’d known my whole life began to recede, and the world became illuminated
like never before.

In time, I came to realize what a profound impact this was having on the way I live. Writing was
not simply a matter of sitting down at the computer every morning and turning out a thousand
words; it had permeated my entire self and become a way of being. And that is what makes
writing sacred to me. Without actively trying to make it happen, becoming a writer had altered
my state of consciousness in a radical way. Not only because it reduced my depressive moods to
a fraction of what they had been, but because it slowly integrated important but somewhat
disparate parts of my life. Writing and a creative life became the missing link to uniting my love
of psychology and years of meditation practice and spiritual exploration. What could be better?

In some ways, writing still feels like a dream. What happens in the moment of inspiration does
not feel entirely mine. That is, I feel my normal self disappear, replaced by a field of
consciousness that is me and not me: a transformation I think of as spiritual, almost mystical in
that it connects my mind with a vital and creative dimension of life.

To this day, it is refreshing and enlivening and feels as essential to living as drawing a breath of
fresh air. I’m seventy-four now, and what emerges on paper is often as surprising as the first
unexpected poem that showed up nearly thirty years ago. Being an author continues to feel like a
miracle, and yet I no longer think of myself as an unlikely writer, but rather a fortunate one
whose world has been greatly expanded by this surprising gift.

The essays that follow are my way of giving back. My thanks to Joey and Geo, to you, the
reader, and to that mysterious force that asks me to take my seat at the writing desk every
morning. My hope is that you find this book enjoyable reading. If you find within these pages a
few surprises that enrich your life, well, I shall be overjoyed.

Thank you.