Catherine Hollis

I love reviewing memoirs for BookPage. I read them all: memoirs about surviving dysfunctional families, surviving addiction, surviving in the wilderness—as well as the odd celebrity tell-all (surviving fame?). So I was especially excited for Kevin Sessums' I Left It On the Mountain, the follow-up to his best-selling 2007 memoir Mississippi Sissy. Quirky and raw, Sessums’ new memoir has all my favorite survival themes, plus cameos from Hugh Jackman and Courtney Love. I adored I Left It On The Mountain and, after reviewing the book, I posed a few follow-up questions to Sessums, which he thoughtfully answered for BookPage.

Walking as a healing practice structures much of your book: from Jessica Lange’s thoughts on walking, to your own journeys up Mt. Kilimanjaro and along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Why is walking emotionally and spiritually healing, do you think? Do you continue to walk now?
I have come to believe in the power of walking meditation. I'm not sure why it works for me. I just know there comes a moment on any long walk when the landscape through which you're walking combines with some sort of interior one and you feel connected with the world and not of it at the same time. All truths are finally incongruous, aren't they? So it is in that moment when I feel more tethered to the earthly world in which we all live and at the same time freed of it. I often tell people that during that walk on the Camino that I have never felt such stillness while at the same time experiencing such forward motion. Life, let's face it, is so often a trudge. We might as well learn how to trust the trudge, I guess. 

"I have found in my recovery that all the impulses that led me to addiction are still there. The difference is that I no longer act on them."

I love the bits of spiritual revelation you get from celebrities like Hugh Jackman, Jessica Lange, Madonna and Courtney Love. Your interviews with them seem to go much deeper than ordinary celebrity journalism. Why do you think this is?
Maybe because I don't sit in judgment of the celebrities. Some people accuse me of writing puff pieces. I tend to think of them as impertinent ones though. I think the people you mention all like a bit of impertinence. Maybe that impertinence on my part opened them up. If I drove a car, this would be my bumper sticker: NEVER JUDGMENTAL, ALWAYS DISCERNING. So discernment plays a part in it as well. 

You talk about the comfort of the “nest” when an interview with a celebrity turns into a real conversation. How do you feel about being interviewed yourself?
I'm much more comfortable posing the questions than forming the answers. I sometimes try to be too pithy in my responses. Was mentioning pithiness too pithy?

One of the most moving images in the book is you as a child safe in bed on a snowy night with your father, mother and two dogs Coco and Chico. How have your dogs now—Archie and Teddy—changed your life?
Archie and Teddy have more than changed my life. They saved it. I love them unconditionally and they have proven to me that I can love another living creature in such a way. I often say I've become the cliché—an old gay man with two small dogs. But there is comfort in clichés. And just on a practical level, since they've entered my life and curl up next to me at night to sleep, I've never had to take another sleeping pill. Dogs have it figured out: All they want is for someone to love them, feed them and deal with their shit. Indeed, if someone from another planet happened here and saw the relationship between dogs and those who care for them they would think that dogs run the planet. Because they do. 

I was struck by your relationship with Brandon, the child you mentored through The Family Center. What has that relationship taught you? How is Brandon doing?
It has taught me some rough lessons about how hard it is too get kids out of generational poverty. But it has also taught me on a personal level the importance of intimacy that has nothing to do with sexuality. Brandon went through a rough patch—that's his story to tell—but we are still in each other's lives 13 years after I first met him when he was seven years old. I love the young man. He's got a beautiful, smart girlfriend and is trying really hard to make his way in the world. I wasn't really there for him during the darkest days of my addiction and I am so grateful that our relationship has remained intact now during my recovery and I can be there again for him when he needs me. He's no longer a child so it's a bit different. I can be a bit tougher in my advice now.

How does a Methodist make sense of the miracles you experienced on the Camino de Santiago? I’m especially thinking of your visitation by the “Jim Morrison” ghost.
The only way to make sense of them is to give up being a Methodist. That was one of the most surprising aspects of my experience on the Camino. I embarked on that most Catholic of spiritual paths as a Protestant and ended it not as an atheist but as a theist. I no longer call myself a Christian. That is a big step for me—as much a cultural one as a spiritual one. But I tend to live my life in that mysterious space between the "a" and the "t." And in that space there is enough room for a Jim Morrison ghost to appear. It is not about explanations, I've discovered, but acceptance and surrender. That is not only the way I have stayed sober, but the way I . . . well . . . trudge forth in my spiritual journey as well. 

The path to healing and forgiveness does not run smoothly for you. It seems like big visionary moments such as you experience on Kilimanjaro and the Camino de Santiago are followed up by descents into scarier and deeper webs of addiction. How do you understand the “one step forward, three steps back” pace of recovery?
I think I've tried to explain in the book—by quite pointedly giving the devil his due—that we are all combinations of light and dark and, instead of denying all those impulses, we must own them. We must find a way to harmonize them without doing harm. I have found in my recovery that all the impulses that led me to addiction are still there. The difference is that I no longer act on them. But they are still a part of me. Another journalist was asking me a few months ago to try to explain the impulse that makes one an addict. Was it the survivor guilt of being a gay man of a certain age who did not die of AIDS? Was it some sort of other midlife crisis or a manifestation of some sort of deep-seated shame? I tried to explain that I leave the explanations up to others. I simply came to a moment of grace when I didn't need explanations but acceptance and surrender. I am an addict. I don't really need to know why. The need to know why was lifted along with the need to use. 

You take the poet Keats’ letters and poems with you on the Camino and eventually make your own pilgrimage to his resting place in Rome. Why is Keats so resonant for you?
I've always found him a romantic figure, not just a Romantic one. His early death. His own soul searching. And the love his shared with his close friend Joseph Severn I find enticing and alluring.

The visions and hallucinations you experience in the latter phases of addiction are explicitly mystic, and introduce you to Hindu deities like Ganesha, the elephant-headed God, and his mother Parvati. You also experience more frightening, Luciferian visions. This is a question one could write books about, but how do you understand the relationship between mysticism and drug use? Can they be disentangled?
I know this part of the book will trouble some people. Other will perhaps be moved by it. It might be controversial. So be it. Honestly, I thought my editor would insist I cut these sections or tone them down but he allowed me to keep them all in. I hope I have written these sections with the clarity they deserve even without understanding all that happened to me and what I describe myself. I don't know if what I experienced is real, but it certainly is true.
I'll leave it to each reader to discern his or her own truth regarding it. Sorry to repeat myself but I hope they will not be judgmental about these passages but discerning. Some would describe what I went through as part of a drug psychosis. Others would say they were hallucinations. I tend to see them as manifestations. This memoir itself is, in its way, the final manifestation of it all.

Catherine Hollis is a teacher and writer in Oakland, California.

Photo by Matt Edge.

There were many surprises in store when you inherited your father’s desk and 1,800 pounds of his writing. Of the more than 400 novels he wrote, most were pulp porn. Were you aware of this as a child? What did you know about his writing career then?
Dad was a salesman who wrote at night and on weekends. He got a few stories in print, then, when I was 12, he published his first novel. My understanding was that he wrote only science fiction. He kept his porn activity very secret. This was mainly due to living in a very conservative area—the Bible Belt of Appalachia.

By the time I was 16, I realized he wrote some porn. But I believed it was supplemental income, a little bit here and there to make ends meet. It wasn’t until his death that I fully understood the scope of his output, and the primary focus on porn.

As the oldest child of four, you ended up taking care of your siblings while your mother defaulted to taking care of your father’s needs. Do your younger siblings view your father very differently from you?
I’m the oldest by a few years, and took care of them extensively. Dad was always in the house, so it wasn’t a case of a physically absent father. But he worked nonstop.

As a kid, I occupied both a parental role and a big brother role. Later, after we’d all left home, this influenced our relationships as adults. They gave me more authority than I wanted or deserved. Sometimes they wanted approval from me that they didn’t get from Dad. They could also be angry with me because it was safer than getting mad at Dad.

These days, we are all still trying to work through this—not Dad’s death so much, but who we are now. All I really want to be is the “big brother.” But that may not be possible, since I still have more responsibility—for my mother and for Dad’s literary estate.

Apparently your mother typed up your father’s manuscripts for him. Do you think she ever made any editorial changes while typing them?
Yes. She corrected any surface errors and deciphered his handwritten edits. Mom was a good typist, much better than Dad. He taught himself to type with three fingers and made many errors.

Due to the sheer volume and the pace that he worked, Mom worked on some books in a more collaborative role. They worked together very fast: Dad wrote a first draft in longhand, then began typing. He’d get 30 or so pages and pass it on to Mom for the final draft. As a result, she made some changes—for clarity, structure and details. Sometimes she did the final typing while he was still finishing the book!

Your father earned a decent living from writing pornography (at least enough to pay for orthodontia), and as you say in the book, “died in harness,” as a professional writer—he kept writing until his end. You yourself have found success both in literary fiction and as a screenwriter. What traits as a writer (if any) did you inherit from him?
It’s difficult to know what was inherited and what was modeled in terms of behavior. I certainly inherited his love of reading, which is crucial for a writer. I have his curiosity and energy. Perhaps most important, I learned the value of discipline—treating the act of writing like a job. Like Dad, I write every day. Unlike him, I revise very heavily. He was much more prolific.

His father, my grandfather, was a failed writer. So maybe there is some genetic component. I didn’t want to be a writer because it meant admitting I was like my father. But at a certain point in my early 20s, I really had no choice. I wrote all the time.

You were a passionate reader as a child, and Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy was a particular favorite. I’ve known many women writers to claim Harriet as a role model, but not male writers. What did you learn from Harriet?
Harriet’s gender didn’t matter as much as her circumstances and behavior. Her parents were busy and she was on her own most of the time. Harriet was a loner who walked around recording her observations in a notebook. She dressed like I did—jeans, long sleeves and sneakers. She often carried a flashlight and tools, as I did. Harriet had a strength and confidence that I admired. What I learned from the book was the value of recording thoughts on paper. I resolved always to carry paper and pen. I still do.

You speak of your deep affection for the land you grew up in—the wooded hills of Appalachia. Why do you think lonely, imaginative children attach so strongly to the natural world?
I can’t speak for other children, but in my case it was simple—the natural world was stunningly gorgeous and very safe. I never felt afraid or alone in the woods.

I believe that spending so much time alone in the woods sharpened my perceptions. You have to rely more on sound and smell, and careful observation, to not get lost or scared. Essentially, I learned to see in the woods—to see things as they are, not what I’d like them to be. The natural world doesn’t lie. There’s no hidden agenda or clever marketing. Nature is brutal and relentless and beautiful. Perhaps that’s why I don’t waste time on small talk.

My question is this: Why don’t more people form attachments to the natural world?

It’s hard to process the death of a difficult parent. You write of loving your father, but not liking him. Can you speak to the difference?
Babies are born with an impulse to love. They love whoever is around, especially their caretakers. It’s a natural drive that benefits humanity. Then kids grow and become adults. Some realize they don’t actually like their father or their mother or their siblings. But they still love them. Love doesn’t have an off-switch.

My father could be very funny and extremely charismatic. He was extremely likeable for short periods, but people had to interact with Dad on his terms or not at all. I loved him the way any boy loves his father. But Dad made himself very hard to like. He preferred not to be close with most people other than my mother. I believe it made him feel safe.

As with many people, he was easier to love at a distance than to like close up.

It was emotionally wrenching for you to organize and catalog your father’s literary output, so much so that your siblings suggested that you burn his papers instead. In the end, are you glad you completed the task?
Yes. I learned a lot about myself in the process of writing the book. I was also able to understand my father better. When I finished, I felt relieved. It was exhausting in every way—physically, mentally and emotionally. Two years went by, and my memory of that time is vague. I worked 12 hours a day. I read tens of thousands of pages of his work. I eventually cut 200 pages from the final manuscript. I’m not fully certain what is in the book and what is not. I don’t even know what it’s about. Dad, I guess.

Writing this book had short-term effects, some of which weren’t good. I’m very interested in learning the long-term effects a few years from now. What benefits will arise from having devoted myself to this book? At this point, I believe I’m a better person for having done so.

RELATED CONTENT:  Read our review of My Father, the Pornographer.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.