Annita Sawyer

Artist Statement

I became a writer to pass on essential understandings I gained from re-living childhood trauma triggered when as a fifty-eight year old practicing clinical psychologist I read my adolescent psych hospital records. Watching myself regress and slowly recover while I treated others struggling with their own trauma recovery proved profoundly humbling and enlightening. I attended my first writers conference in 2003. Outstanding writers conferences, a skilled local writers’ group, and generous fellows at impressive residencies provided my literary education. I developed skill to write a prize-winning memoir. I’m working on a collection of narrative essays that center on pivotal moments of insight on my life’s journey toward becoming whole. I’m also working on a collection of short stories centered on a family in family therapy. These stories reflect diverse points of view as they follow the participants, including the therapist, into relationships beyond the therapy room, illuminating how psychotherapy heals.

Annita Sawyer_cover: Smoking Cigarettes, Eating Glass_2015

Bio

Annita Sawyer is a clinical psychologist with a BA and a PhD from Yale, recently retired after more than forty years in practice. For much of her adult life, Sawyer hid her adolescence spent in psychiatric hospitals and her missing childhood memories due to massive shock treatment. In 2001, after twenty years in successful practice, she read her hospital records, triggering a dramatic return of devastating early symptoms. Once she knew she’d recover, she vowed to share what she learned. She became a writer. Her work has appeared in both professional and literary journals, in three anthologies and a Psychology Today blog. Essays have won prizes, a Pushcart nomination, and Notable listings in Best American Essays. Her memoir, Smoking Cigarettes, Eating Glass, won the 2013 Santa Fe Writers Project Nonfiction Grand Prize, published by SFWP in 2015. A Chinese edition was published in 2019. Sawyer’s talks, essays, and stories speak to lifetime consequences of childhood trauma, harmful effects of fads in psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, the enduring impact of stigma and shame, and the power of human connection to heal.

www.smokingcigaretteseatingglass.com