My Press Kit

 

BIO

Lanette Sweeney's debut collection, What I Should Have Said: A Poetry Memoir About Losing A Child to Addiction, was published by Finishing Line Press in August, 2021. Sweeney is grateful the book is allowing her to share two messages: first, medication-assisted treatment saves addicts’ lives and should not be stigmatized, and second, a life rich with joy and meaning is (eventually) possible after even the most devastating loss. 

Sweeney’s essays, articles, short stories and poems have appeared in daily newspapers, print and online literary magazines (including Rattle, Amethyst Review, Gyroscope, Tigershark, Blue Collar Review, Please See Me, Foliate Oak Review, and Misfit Magazine), as well as in anthologies (including Prima Materia, Silkworm, and the Center for New Americans annual review), and in textbooks, including several editions of the  popular college-level women’s studies textbook Women: Images and Reality published by McGraw Hill. Her essays, blog posts and book reviews can be seen on her website, https://www.lanettesweeney.com 

After working as a fundraiser, teacher, waitress, reporter, editor, and non-profit executive, Sweeney is grateful to now be a full-time writer thanks to her wife's support. She and her wife and their small-pet army (which consists of a dog, cat, kitten, and puppy) live in South Hadley, MA, in the house where their wedding was held 16 days before Sweeney's son overdosed. Sweeney has one surviving child, a daughter, 29, who is a teacher. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

What I Should Have Said: A Poetry Memoir about Losing a Child to Addiction recounts a mother's grief, guilt, sorrow, and search for meaning after her 26-year-old son's death by overdose. The book is divided into the stages of grief, with sections on denial and depression, anger, bargaining and, eventually, acceptance. Sweeney's son's poems appear throughout the collection, often in seeming conversation with his grieving mother's words. The author hopes the book demonstrates that even the most devastating grief can result in post-traumatic growth and that medication-assisted treatment saves lives and should not be stigmatized.  

Both poets and laypeople have given the book excellent reviews, calling the poems "beautifully crafted" and "poignant." Multiple reviewers noted that once they started the book, they couldn't put it down. The president of Bereaved Parents of the USA said "every grieving parent will relate" to the book and noted it helped her process her own grief about her son's death. The book can be ordered from local bookstores, Amazon, Bookshop.org or Goodreads.com. 

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
OCTOBER 10, 2021
CONTACT: Lanette Sweeney, (845) 527-6616, lanettesweeney@gmail.com

VIRTUAL READING SCHEDULED FOR NOV. 4TH:
AS OVERDOSES SKYROCKET, NEW BOOK OFFERS
COMFORT TO GRIEVERS, HOPE TO ADDICTS

South Hadley, MA, USA – Following the nation’s worst year ever for overdose deaths, a timely new poetry collection, What I Should Have Said: A Poetry Memoir about Losing a Child to Addiction, aims to bring comfort and encouragement to addicts and their families. The author, along with another mother and author who lost her child to addiction, will be reading from their books in a virtual event hosted by the Odyssey Bookshop on Thursday, Nov. 4th at 7 p.m. You can register for that reading here.

Lanette Sweeney’s debut collection describes the pain of watching her son suffer with addiction as well as her enormous grief and guilt following his overdose death in 2016. Fortunately, the book also offers hope to families suffering a similar loss or struggling with a child still in active addiction, as Sweeney lyrically recounts her journey toward post-traumatic growth and grief recovery, as well as what she’s learned can save addicts’ lives.

“I have two messages I’m eager to share with this book,” says Sweeney: “first, that most addicts need medicine to keep them alive, so taking medicines like Methadone and Suboxone should not be shameful; and second, that it is possible to restore peace and joy to your life after even the most devastating loss.”

What I Should Have Said was released last month by Kentucky-based publisher Finishing Line Press. The book is organized into sections on the stages of grief and includes 20 poems by Sweeney’s late son, Kyle Fisher-Hertz, showing his move from the innocence of childhood to the eventual despair of his addiction.

“My son wanted to get better,” Sweeney recalls. “He attended every recovery program he could get into. But then he turned 26, my insurance didn’t cover him anymore, and the Medicaid insurance he got as a replacement didn’t cover the monthly shot that had helped him stay clean.”

Sweeney’s son spent the week before his death pleading for help from the only recovery clinic in the state where he was then living, Nevada, but he was refused the drug he requested, Vivitrol, which is a monthly shot that blocks opioid receptors and reduces cravings. (A desperate addict’s quest to stay clean long enough to get the shot is depicted in the new film Four Good Days, starring Glenn Close and Mila Kunis.) At the time of Fisher-Hertz’s death nearly five years ago, Medicaid in 29 states didn’t cover that medicine, whose generic name is Naltrexone–and Fisher-Hertz, like many addicts, was reluctant to take Methadone or Suboxone, the maintenance drugs he was offered. Instead, he died of an overdose of street drugs three days later–less than three months after turning 26 and losing his mother’s private insurance.

“I foolishly didn’t think he should take maintenance drugs, either.” Sweeney says. “When he called me to say he was thinking about taking one because he didn’t know what else to do, I stayed silent, and he knew I didn’t approve. When he died three days later, I knew I had discouraged him from taking the one thing that might have saved his life, and my guilt was devastating. I wish I’d known when he was alive that he had a terminal disease that needed medicine to treat it.”

Poet Lesléa Newman, author or editor of more than 70 books, calls Sweeney’s poems “poignant” and “beautifully crafted.” She says she “read this collection straight through with [her] heart in [her] throat” and adds: “Reader, prepare yourself: once you start reading What I Should Have Said, you won’t want to stop.”

Praise for the book comes from outside the poetry world, as well. The president of the board of Bereaved Parents of the USA, Kathy Corrigan, lost two sons and says “Every grieving parent will relate” to the feelings expressed by Sweeney in this “deeply moving” and “honest” work. Reading the collection, Corrigan says, helped her process the grief she felt over losing her second son, who died two years ago from alcohol addiction. Corrigan said she appreciates that the collection “sheds light on the darkness and stigma attached to the disease of addiction and [reminds] us that our children were/are so much more than their addiction[s].”

The U.S. had been starting to turn the tide on overdose deaths in 2019, but then the pandemic arrived, causing isolation, 12-step meeting cancellations, the slashing of addiction treatment programs, new economic stresses, and fresh grief.  As a result, the monthly overdose death rate shot up 50 percent in the early months of the pandemic, to more than 9,000 deaths a month; prior to 2020, U.S. monthly overdose deaths had never risen above 6,300.  

The annual overdose death rate also rose to heartbreaking new heights last year; the CDC anticipates that when the final numbers are in, more than 90,000 individuals will have died of an overdose in 2020 (80 percent from opioid overdose) – up from about 70,000 the previous year.

Sweeney’s book can be ordered directly from the author or from local bookstores or Bookshop.org or Amazon or from the publisher at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/what-i-should-have-said. Sweeney is available to do readings from her book and take part in panels or Q&As via Zoom or other event platforms at schools, bookstores, libraries, recovery programs, harm-reduction centers, and any other venue interested in hearing her story and words of encouragement. For more information or a review copy of the book, contact Lanette Sweeney directly at lanettesweeney@gmail.com or on her website lanettesweeney.com. 

 * * *

Sources for Statistics:
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2021/spike-drug-overdose-deaths-during-covid-19-pandemic-and-policy-options-move-forward citing CDC statistics

https://www.overdoseday.com/facts-stats/ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

BOOK COVER

PRESS LINKS

https://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/life/2021/09/10/what-should-have-said-memoir-son-who-died-addiction/5576567001/

 

Straw Dog Writer's Guild featured Lanette Sweeney in an author interview on Sept. 13, 2021. 

Kenyon Review columnist Ruben Queseda did an interview with Sweeney for his Poetry Today column in late April, 2021. (Sweeney's is the second interview on this page.)

What I Should Have Said: A Poetry Memoir about Losing A Child to Addiction was featured in mid-September as a top choice on the weekly book-recommendation email sent by our local library, Wowbrary.

APPEARANCES

UPCOMING: 

On Thursday, Nov. 4, 2021, join the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA, at 7 p.m. as they host a virtual  reading with poet memoirists Lanette Sweeney and Miriam Greenspan, both mothers of children lost to addiction. Lanette will read from What I Should Have Said: A Poetry Memoir About Losing a Child to Addiction. Miriam will read from The Heroin Addict’s Mother: A Memoir in Poetry.

Both mothers' books were published in 2021. Greenspan, M.Ed., LMHC, is an internationally renowned psychotherapist and author. Her pioneering book, A New Approach to Women and Therapy, helped define the field of feminist therapy, and her Boston Globe best-seller Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear and Despair, won the 2004 gold Nautilus book award in the self-help/psychology category. 

PAST: 

On Sept. 18, 2021, Lanette Sweeney was a featured speaker at the Highland Public Library, the library where she took her children as she was raising them in the Hudson Valley in NY. She did a one-hour long reading and q&a session from her book.

On Sept. 13, 2021, Lanette Sweeney read a poem by her son, "Liquor Bottle Might As Well Be a Pistol," at a CAPE (Center for Addiction Prevention and Education) event at Shadows on the Hudson Valley; she gave that evening's proceeds from the sale of her book to CAPE, which arranged to have the Mid-Hudson bridge, seen behind the speakers, lit up in purple in honor of the event. 

Also on Sept. 18, Sweeney read one of her poems at a Keep it Moving walk/run event. Keep It Moving Zane is a non-profit that provides Narcan training and healthy activities for children in honor of the founder Lauren Mandel's late son, who died of an overdose one week after starting his first social work job at age 22. Sweeney read "To My Son on His 18th Birthday," and gave a portion of that day's proceeds to Keep It Moving. 

On Sept. 7th, Sweeney was the featured reader at the monthly Writer's Night Out/In sponsored by Straw Dog Writers' Guild. 

 

Honoring Kyle by Remembering His Worst Day

Monday, August 31st,  was International Overdose Awareness Day, and I marked the day with a short online event in honor of my son, Kyle David Fisher-Hertz, who died of an overdose when he was 26. This is an essay that captures much of what we covered in that event. 

Last year the pandemic was not kind to addicts. A record number of Americans, more than 90,000 sons and daughters, died of a drug overdose in 2020, more than in any previous year--and 20,000 more than the previous year, when it seemed we were finally turning the tide and beginning to stem the steady increase in overdose deaths that had plagued us for the previous decade. This graph shows how fatal overdoses steadily climbed, with the previous peak passing 60,000 in 2017. The numbers rose to more than 80,000 dead the next year but dropped back down to 70,000 in 2019 before surging last year, with a huge spike in the first months after we were all sent into lockdown. 

The United States represents just four percent of the world’s population, but we were 25 percent of the world’s fatal overdoses in 2020. As this graph from last year shows, North Americans are dying from taking too many drugs at a far higher rate than anyone anywhere else in the world.

 

There is a serious sickness in our society, and our overdoses are merely a symptom of that sickness, which I believe is rooted in our mindless consumerism and the resulting lack of purpose in our lives. My daughter argues "lack of purpose" is a privileged excuse for drug addiction, but we are a privileged people in North America, and more money gives us greater access to drugs, so it makes sense that feeling a lack of meaning in our lives while having the resources to ameliorate our emptiness by getting high would lead to greater use. But I digress. 

When I told my daughter I would be opening the event by saying a few words about the overdose epidemic, she wondered what new thing I could say when so much has already been said about this issue. But I believe that even though we are years into this epidemic, the two main messages I want to share in both my new book, What I Should Have Said: A Poetry Memoir about Losing a Child to Addiction, and in this essay, are still not familiar enough to most people.

The first message is that medication-assisted treatment saves lives. No one should be judged or stigmatized for taking Methadone or Suboxone or following any other medical plan to stay off street drugs. I wish I had known this myself when my son was alive. He and I wanted him to get Vivitrol, a monthly shot that blocks opioid receptors and cravings and doesn’t allow you to get high--but he had just turned 26, lost my insurance, and discovered that the state health insurance he had in Nevada didn’t cover that drug, which has the generic name Naltrexone. The clinic would only offer him Suboxone or Methadone. 

My son (shown here, sober at my wedding, 16 days before he died) called me the weekend before he died to say he thought if he couldn’t get the Vivitrol shot, maybe he would just take the Suboxone they were offering him. Tragically, I maintained a stony, judgmental silence, letting him know I would be disappointed in him if he went on maintenance drugs. I thought he was “better” than that. I thought he could just stop. I didn’t realize his disease was terminal until it killed him. 

Since then, I have had the opportunity to visit a methadone clinic, where I saw dozens of healthy young people run in, take their daily dose, and run back out to take their kids to daycare, to get to their jobs, to go on with their lives. If you love an addict, please know he or she has a deadly disease with an incredibly high relapse rate, as high as 97 percent without medically assisted treatment. I still think Naltrexone shots are a miracle; they now have shots that can block opioid receptors for up to six months at a time, and I hope more state insurance covers that medicine than when my son was trying to get that shot. But if the miracle shots are not an option, going on Suboxone or Methadone will provide the addicts we love and want to stay alive a bridge to wellness. We should be celebrating the people who go that route, choosing to live and giving themselves an opportunity to function again. I wish I had understood this in time to have not failed my son when he asked my advice. Instead, I believe my silence discouraged him from pursuing that solution, so instead of going back to the clinic, he got street drugs and took them until they killed him three days later.

My second message is for the millions of parents, siblings, friends, cousins and other loved ones who lost someone to an overdose in the past five years. Though early grief will shake you to your core and make you question whether you can go on, I am here to tell you you can survive and learn to carry your grief with grace if you just hang in there and practice self care like it’s your motherfucking job. You can have a life of peace and even joy after even the most profound and devastating loss. Post-traumatic growth is real. No one wants to be driven to their knees by loss and trauma, but all of us can, in time, with a lot of hard work on ourselves, allow our worst experiences to open our hearts and bring us closer to our true spiritual selves. 

And now I want to say a few words about what killed my amazing, brilliant son Kyle: He died not only because he was an addict but because he cared so much about what other people thought of him that he spent the last 10 years of his life always trying to one up himself and act crazier and more death defying than he had the day before. He started rehab “only” addicted to crack, but he probably thought he wasn’t as hardcore as the other addicts were until he was as addicted as everyone else to the most deadly drug of all, so he let the other guys in rehab teach him how to shoot heroin. I have an essay on my website about toxic masculinity--which is what Kyle was demonstrating when he kept risking his life to appear cool--and how it contributed to Kyle's death

But beyond that I want to say please, if you’re a young person who hasn’t done drugs yet, please don’t let yourself be swayed by your desire to impress anyone. If you’ve done some drugs, maybe dabbled in alcohol or marijuana, but haven’t yet done the deadly trifecta (crack, meth, and heroin), please don’t try to play it cool if someone offers you one of those. Please know you are loveable without laying your life on the line to look like what someone else wants you to be. No high is worth what you will be doing to your life if you take any of those drugs. And I am a person who has enjoyed drugs myself, so I am not saying this to discourage you from pleasure. I am saying this to save your life and protect your mother from tragedy.

At the end of our event, anyone who wanted to name and let us recognize someone they loved who

died of an overdose, was invited to do so, and we wound up talking about a dozen or so other people who had died by overdose. I especially wanted to remember two of Kyle's friends, one who died four months before Kyle did, Peter Parise (left), someone Kyle admired and felt a kinship with-- and whose death probably made Kyle feel more hopeless than he already did. Our sons' connection led to a friendship between me and Pete's mom after their deaths that has meant a great deal to me as I navigated these years of grief. And Samantha Owens, a beautiful young woman with whom Kyle lived in Las Vegas for a while, both of them and their third roommate all shooting heroin together. I had hoped in the intervening years maybe Sam (below) had gotten clean, but instead she died this year of an overdose. 

My son, just like Pete and Sam and all the other people we remembered that night, was more than his addiction, and even though we remembered Kyle on overdose awareness day, I want him to be remembered for more than his overdose. He was an incredible friend, a wonderful brother, grandson and son, a great skier, a lover of books, a comedian, a rock climber, a doting daddy for the few months he spent in his daughter's life, a poet and humor writer, a curious conversationalist and a fearless dancer. He lit up all of our lives, and since his light went out, we have all had to struggle our way out of the darkness.

I feel blessed I was able to include more than 20 original works by Kyle in my new poetry collection about him (which is available for purchase from me, local bookstores, Bookshop or Amazon). The poems of his that his friends read showcase his talent but also show how desperate he was to get well. The fact that Kyle will never write another word and isn’t here to read his own poems aloud to us is tragic, but I am so grateful that five of his good friends agreed to gather online with 50 more of us to read and listen to his poetry. We read five poems because on September 20th of this year, Kyle will have been gone five years.

The readers were (from top left) Evan, an old friend of his from Americorps in Seattle, who missed her time slot and was replaced by Ashley, an old friend who knew him when he was in recovery in California; Steph, Kyle's first love; Tommy, a songwriter who was in Kyle's last rehab with him and has stayed clean since shortly after Kyle died. Plus, right, George, his grandsponsor (sponsor of Kyle's sponsor); 
and, below, Dwight, a house manager here in Western Mass who had to call the cops on Kyle when he discovered him using heroin in the house. He drove them all crazy, but they all still loved him. They each said a little about Kyle, in words I found moving and inspiring. and then each read one of his poems. You can watch a  recording of the event here: https://youtu.be/AbXbzdwd3h0  

At the end of the event, Kyle's little sister, Jamie, read aloud from a text exchange she'd had with Kyle the year before he died. The words she shared (in the text displayed below) most vividly brought my son back to life and showed how smart and funny and wise he was, and why we all kept hoping he was going to be OK. I hope the event and this essay helps someone else say "Yes! That's a great idea," when their loved one talks about using medicine to help them stay clean -- because that's What I Should Have Said. 

YOU CAN ORDER MY BOOK NOW!

Hello, wonderful reader friends! I am so excited that my book is suddenly, magically available for pre-sales at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/what-i-should-have-said! 

So, question... is my website good enough for my new life as a world-famous author? Some friends who know about such things don't think so, but when I look at what I'd have to pay to have a good Word Press or Wix site, I just don't think it's worth it. Who is going to buy my book -- or not buy it -- just because of my website? Or am I thinking too small?  

My Book is Almost Here: I Need Your Address

 

Finishing Line Press tells me my debut poetry collection, is going into pre-sales at the end of this month. I am super excited to send everyone a postcard and/or an email with the ordering information as soon as it's available. If you want to know how to order the book early, which I pray you will all do as it helps determine how big a print run there will be, please send me an email at lanettesweeney@gmail.com with your mailing address and I will add you to my list! 

I had said a few weeks ago that I was going to post a blog twice a week, but then I posted a blog and nobody read it (really, it was so weird, after 100 + people read the one before, no one read the last one), so I thought, well, maybe twice a month is too often, so I've gone back to sporadically posting as the spirit moves me. 

Six poems from the collection have been picked up by literary journals in the past couple of months, including a poem by Kyle that he wrote for his sister Jamie. I'm thrilled that this book will also give my son a chance to have his poems out in the world, and it only just occurred to me I could be submitting his work for publication, too, so I will be working on that next. 

I hope I hear from many of you with your addresses. Don't be scared because it's poetry; I promise you will be able to understand the poems. Tell your friends who you think might benefit from a grief-recovery story, as well. And if you're in a book group, maybe you can all choose my book for one of your upcoming reads and invite me to your book group. I'd love that. I can feel Kyle smiling with me at that idea. 

Finally, I feel I have to add that it feels very strange to be excited about this book that came about only because my son is dead. Obviously, I would rather have my son than this book, but since I didn't get to choose, I'm proud to have been able to create this project from my grief, and I know the book is going to be a help and comfort to many people. Thank you all for your encouragement of me through this journey.

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