Suicide: An Anthology
Release Reading
The Red Room
East Village, NYC
Dec. 17, 2023
(Note: If you or a loved one are struggling with thoughts of suicide, please call 988 in the US. If international, visit www.stopsuicide.com.)
When I arrived, the Red Room at KGB Bar in the East Village was, by all appearances, how I have come to expect it to be: jam packed and buzzing, a modest who’s who of the downtown NYC literary scene. Last night, however, there was a thin seriousness in the air, a hush to the conversations, and roses laid crossed on the tabletops. It makes sense given this evening’s event. We’d all gathered here for the release reading of one of the most earnest projects to come out of the meme-ridden, shit-post smeared independent literature scene: Jon Lindsey’s Suicide: An Anthology.
Suicide is often romanticized in the abstract as a problem of sovereignty, of one’s “right to life,” of the primacy of will above fate — further even, as a poetic act. In the world as it is lived, here among all those the act leaves in its wake, arguments concerning free will and individual choice hardly hold a blown-out candle toward the illumination of grief’s dimensions. The loss of life is never unfelt and no one goes unmissed.
Attendees of the reading/release party for Jon Lindsey and Cory Bennet’s Suicide: An Anthology bore witness to a literary vivisection. No element of our subject was left unexplored, no corner unlit. Readers verbally peeled the skin from bodies missing and discovered, elbow deep in memory and grief, and through all black and settled regret, pulled forth, if not the glorious light of a lived-life, then a the very least the element central to its shining while it shined. The various causes and reasonings, aftermath and mourning, the audience was brought through it all, shown the act from every side of itself. The pages from which the readers read were heavy — the performers’ hands shaking, not with the nervous energy often found at readings, but in an effort to hold steady against the magnitude of their subject.
I asked Lindsey, the principal editor of the volume to be released, how much of what was compiled was fiction versus non-fiction.
He replied: “It’s all non-fiction. There’s one poem, but everything else is non-fiction.”
“How many pieces?”
“Twenty-four.”
All sourced through an open call on Twitter posted by Lindsey and Bennet. Lindsey thought to put a volume of this sort together after finding solace in what he refers to as the “saddest Room in the World,” a survivors of suicide group he regularly attended in LA after his mother took her own life. “I wanted to put that space into a book. I want everyone to who needs it to have access to it. I just hope it helps people.”
The open call launched, and every corner of the internet poured in. Though it feels vulgar to speak about a project like this in aesthetic terms, if must be said that Lindsey and Bennet certainly have an eye for excellence. What follows are brief selections from the volume itself as performed by the readers present at the reading.
From Evan Cerniglia’s On Sainthood, Debts, and Roast Beef:
You have to understand that, at thirteen, I didn’t think my father’s suicide was shameful. In my English classes, we studied Ernest Hemingway and his myth-making whims. He who brawled, drunk, fucked; who wrote and committed himself to fate by his own hand. It was beautiful to read his prayer-like sentences…
[…] Saint Francis was forced to consider whether the world was ultimately just; and if — at the end of his consideration — he realized it wasn’t, then what should he do? Go on living? Certainly not the way he’d been doing it before! But what else?…
[…] “Francis is only a saint because he decided to live.”
From Felcia Urso’s What I’d Ask If You Weren’t Dead:
Was it an accident? A miscalculated relapse? I’d seen you when you were bloated but sober, trying to complete the NA steps. You apologized for “hurting” me while I was on my thirty-minute lunch break from the sex store. What were you referring to? You didn’t elaborate. Where is it you think you hurt me? Point to it.
[…] You never left, just pushed a stone across the tomb in my heart and made a bed inside it. I like to imagine you sleeping there now. Are you?
From Sam Berman’s When You Jump Off the Brooklyn Bridge:
Was it like that? Are you scared when you let go and the dark rushes darker? Does is hurt? Did it hurt you? Does the water feel like concrete? Is it as they say?
[…] Was it your mind? Your body? Spirit? How’d you survive all this? […] Tell me what water feels like when it’s being destroyed.
The final reader of the evening was queen of the new literary it-girls, and Jon Lindsey’s wife, Allie Rowbottom. She read not from her own piece featured in the collection, but instead from that of her husband’s:
My mom’s suicide was not a natural disaster. Not an act of God. It was human-made, years in the making. Yet I want to believe her death was predestined. A certainty. That, in the end, I had no control over her choice…
[…] although I say I need to feel like I had no control, I also need to feel like I had some control.
Here, in her reading a piece not of her own authorship, is a final solidification of Jon Lindsey’s mission, that none are alone enough to leave, that in each other and for each other life is what there is to live, and it’s worth it.
This central and abiding thesis is made all the clearer by not only the means in which the anthology was compiled, but also by its journey into publication. This is the first book published by Fence fiction editor Harris Lahti’s new press Cash 4 Gold Books, and was helped along by Brian Alan Ellis of House of Vlad Press — a beautiful, soft break in the publisher’s image as the ‘damp dish rag hanging over the edge of the indie lit scene.’ A group effort toward a less lonely world.
All proceeds from this volume go toward The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Purchase here.
