DownWrite Mad with Mike Panasitti

Today I am excited to introduce you to author Mike Panasitti. Mike was a student in my life writing course that I delivered for ISPS-US (International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis) where he was working on short pieces of autobiographically informed work. Born in East Los Angeles in 1969, he is a graduate of UC Berkeley and a former patient of California's Department of State Hospitals.  From 2015 to 2018 he was a prisoner at New Folsom, a maximum security prison near Sacramento.  Mike is now an exhibiting artist, as well as a poet and prose writer whose publishing credits include poems in Matter, creative non-fiction in WALL Literary Journal, and over 40 short stories posted on Reedsy Prompts.  He currently lives in the city of Santa Ana and is enrolled as a student of creative writing at Saddleback College.   A slightly longer episode, this interview is about everything from sonnets, magical realism, music, art and how it is possible to go on living after spending almost a third of one's life detained.