Cristy C. Road

A visceral look at the bizarre entanglement of destructive and creative forces, Live Through This is a collection of original stories, essays, artwork, and photography. It explores the use of art to survive abuse, incest, madness and depression, and the often deep-seated impulse toward self-destruction including cutting, eating disorders, and addiction. Here, some of our most compelling cartoonists, novelists, poets, dancers, playwrights, and burlesque performers traverse the pains and passions that can both motivate and destroy women artists, and mark a path for survival. Taken together, these artful reflections offer an honest and hopeful journey through a woman's silent rage, through the power inherent in struggles with destruction, and the ensuing possibilities of transforming that burning force into the external release of art. With contributions by Nan Goldin, bell hooks, Patricia Smith, Cristy C. Road, Carol Queen, Annie Sprinkle, Elizabeth Stephens, Carolyn Gage, Eileen Myles, Fly, Diane DiMassa, Bonfire Madigan Shive, Inga Muscio, Kate Bornstein, Toni Blackman, Nicole Blackman, Silas Howard, Daphne Gottleib, and Stephanie Howell.

In the first play, DUNELAWN, we are in an expensive retreat for the unhappily married, where the wheel-chaired director, Dr. Pepper, dispenses a definitely unique sort of marital guidance. His theory includes complete indulgence in such "bad habits" as smoking, drinking, and sexual promiscuity -- which seems to work wonders for his patients, whose wacky case histories are each examined in hilarious detail. In the second play, RAVENSWOOD, the approach is quite the opposite. Here the saintly Dr. Toynbee injects his straitjacketed charges with tranquilizing drugs to calm such urges -- but again the catalogue of aberrations revealed in his patients is subjected to close, and enormously funny, scrutiny.