Sam Twyford-Moore is the author of The Rapids: Ways of Looking at Mania (NewSouth 18, and University of Toronto Press 20). A new book is due 2022. You can email him sam dot twyfordmoore @ gmail dot com
Praise for The Rapids.
Sam
Twyford-Moore’s The Rapids is a harrowing and thoughtful
exploration of all the crap that makes us human.
Michael Sala, author of The Restorer
Bright, warm and charmingly discursive, Sam examines his own mania by
the bright lights of pop culture. He's witty and honest but judiciously wary of
our culture of confession.
Martin McKenzie
Murray
The
Rapids is beautifully written: brimming with humour, empathy,
pathos and heart.
This book is an earnest, generous, and important contribution to ongoing
global dialogue around mental health.Maxine Beneba
Clarke, author of The Hate Race
The
Rapids is a remarkable book – intelligent, empathic and ethical. It offers a
complex and astute account of mania and depression both as a cultural
phenomenon and a personal experience, and is unafraid of looking at difficult
and dark emotions and events. It is by turns heart-breaking and hilarious,
cerebral and cheeky, and an incredibly important work.
Fiona Wright,
author of Small Acts of Disappearance
The
Rapids is the story of a writer making sense of mania, the world, and mania
within the world. It is innovative, intelligent and sensitive; an important
work of criticism, and a critical work of importance.
Kylie
Maslen, author of Show Me Where It Hurts
The Rapids takes the reader
by the hand and lays out the realities of mania, up close and personal – what
it's like to wrestle with and how the brain navigates its swiftly tilting
universe.
Anna Mehler Paperny, author of Hello I Want to Die Please Fix
Me: Depression in the First Person
As with all great first-person works on mental health,
Twyford-Moore’s The Rapids generously weaves his experience of
mania through his critical scholarship without purporting to offer any sort of
final, clinical clarity. Twyford-Moore’s work – at once critical, personal, and
historical – thrusts our misconceptions of mania against the rocks, casting
both light and shadow: revealing shapes where there was once mystery, and
placing mystery back where shapes once stood.
John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of Vanishing Monuments and Junebat
An important work, The Rapids is about what it means to
write and represent madness across media, such as film and literary critique,
and how we come to know ourselves through these media, and how they in turn
come to inform our understandings of our own experiences of madness, both in
constrictive and constructive ways.
Jijian Voronka, School of Social Work, University of Windsor
The Rapids is a beautiful
narration of the beauty and heartache inherent in madness. A humorous and
considerate self-reflection on the way our private worlds are inextricably
informed and vulnerable to culture, art and music. A personal account and
generous contribution to the expanding experiential and scholarly work of Mad
studies.
Lucy Costa, Deputy Executive Director of The Empowerment Council, an
independent service user rights-based organization in Toronto, Canada, and
co-editor of Madness, Violence, and Power: A Critical Collection
Sam
Twyford-Moore’s The Rapids is a harrowing and thoughtful
exploration of all the crap that makes us human.
Michael Sala, author of The Restorer
Bright, warm and charmingly discursive, Sam examines his own mania by
the bright lights of pop culture. He's witty and honest but judiciously wary of
our culture of confession.
Martin McKenzie Murray
The Rapids is beautifully written: brimming with humour, empathy, pathos and heart.This book is an earnest, generous, and important contribution to ongoing global dialogue around mental health.
Maxine Beneba
Clarke, author of The Hate Race
The
Rapids is a remarkable book – intelligent, empathic and ethical. It offers a
complex and astute account of mania and depression both as a cultural
phenomenon and a personal experience, and is unafraid of looking at difficult
and dark emotions and events. It is by turns heart-breaking and hilarious,
cerebral and cheeky, and an incredibly important work.
Fiona Wright,
author of Small Acts of Disappearance
The
Rapids is the story of a writer making sense of mania, the world, and mania
within the world. It is innovative, intelligent and sensitive; an important
work of criticism, and a critical work of importance.
Kylie
Maslen, author of Show Me Where It Hurts
The Rapids takes the reader
by the hand and lays out the realities of mania, up close and personal – what
it's like to wrestle with and how the brain navigates its swiftly tilting
universe.
Anna Mehler Paperny, author of Hello I Want to Die Please Fix
Me: Depression in the First Person
As with all great first-person works on mental health,
Twyford-Moore’s The Rapids generously weaves his experience of
mania through his critical scholarship without purporting to offer any sort of
final, clinical clarity. Twyford-Moore’s work – at once critical, personal, and
historical – thrusts our misconceptions of mania against the rocks, casting
both light and shadow: revealing shapes where there was once mystery, and
placing mystery back where shapes once stood.
John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of Vanishing Monuments and Junebat
An important work, The Rapids is about what it means to
write and represent madness across media, such as film and literary critique,
and how we come to know ourselves through these media, and how they in turn
come to inform our understandings of our own experiences of madness, both in
constrictive and constructive ways.
Jijian Voronka, School of Social Work, University of Windsor
The Rapids is a beautiful
narration of the beauty and heartache inherent in madness. A humorous and
considerate self-reflection on the way our private worlds are inextricably
informed and vulnerable to culture, art and music. A personal account and
generous contribution to the expanding experiential and scholarly work of Mad
studies.
Lucy Costa, Deputy Executive Director of The Empowerment Council, an
independent service user rights-based organization in Toronto, Canada, and
co-editor of Madness, Violence, and Power: A Critical Collection