Steph Kesey‘s piece in the 2017 Jack Straw Writers Anthology is an excerpt from a book-length memoir in progress about her father’s battle with mental illness. She talks with curator Jourdan Imani Keith about this experience, how she began as a sculptor and became a writer, and how she finds form by putting the brutal and the beautiful next to each other. “I think . . . mental illness hitting a family . . .  you have people at their most vulnerable, and the love that’s required to overcome something like that is the glue of families in those moments.”

Music by the Steve Griggs Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.