Kit Andis, author of ‘Halfway House’, on recovery and poetry
When Kit Andis got sober, he looked around for memoirs that echoed his experience with alcoholism and recovery and found — James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces notwithstanding — that there were none available. Frey’s bestselling “memoir,” which was discovered to be a literary forgery shortly after publication in 2003, certainly had the kind of drama that publishers were looking for. (The narrative starts out with a man, an alcoholic and drug abuser, waking up on a flight to Chicago with injuries, who can’t recall how he got there.)
Andis wanted something that was truthful and practical. Since he couldn’t find such a book, he decided to write it. The result was HALFWAY HOUSE: A Story. It has just been released in a second edition. Unlike the previous, this edition is under his own name, not a pseudonym.
Before Halfway House, Andis has written multiple volumes of poetry, and two semi-autobiographical novels. The experiences of his life, from his enlistment as a Navy sailor to his working as a clerk for Borders Books, figure heavily in his prose and poetry.
He is 21 years and 6 months sober.
Our interview was recorded on the afternoon of May 14, 2022 at his home in Northside Indianapolis where he lives with his wife and family.
DAN GROSSMAN: Okay, great talking with you. Let's start by asking when did you decide you wanted to write a memoir of your experience with alcoholism and recovery?
KIT ANDIS: In my early days in recovery — I'm a reader so I like to take in information from books — I was searching all over and couldn't find any book that actually talked about the kind of experience I had, which was I didn't go to a gold plated recovery treatment place, equine therapy and all that kind of thing. So, I ended up in [an Indianapolis-area] halfway house for homeless means and people with no means.
I looked around for other books about that. I didn't find any and I thought well, that's what I wanted to read when I got sober, someone who shared my experience. And so I started looking around at various publishers who published that kind of thing and sent proposals out to the few and one place really seemed to want it and once they've made the decision, it was like, We got to have it, like really quick. Most of it was written in a three-day spurt.
I messed around with it for a few months, the beginning, the opening and trying to figure out how I wanted to structure it and that kind of thing. And you know what Churchill said: nothing concentrates the mind so wonderfully is a date with the executioner. And so I had a date, a deadline. So that's how it happened quickly.
GROSSMAN: And that edition, you decided to publish anonymously. Was that right?
ANDIS: Yeah.
GROSSMAN: And when was that?
ANDIS: That was in 2014.
GROSSMAN: That also titled Halfway House.
ANDIS: Exactly the same book, just the same cover everything. [With a pseudonym].
GROSSMAN: Is that original book still in print or?
ANDIS: It's been taken out.
GROSSMAN: And so this is your second edition, the second edition.
ANDIS: The second edition allowed me to put my name on it, and secondly, because I found out that it was really difficult to market a book if you're marketing it under a pseudonym, it makes it almost impossible. Secondly, there was a lot that had happened between when I got sober and now in terms of the landscape. The recovery landscape and treatment landscape has changed a lot due to the opioid crisis and now fentanyl, which is killing people right and left. So the approach to how you deal with it has got to change and so I wanted to put a preface in that.
GROSSMAN: Oh, so you wanted to acknowledge how things have changed. So I mean, the meat of the memoir really didn't change at all because that was pre-fentanyl.
ANDIS: Yeah.
GROSSMAN: You end Halfway House in the present moment where now you are in the role of a sponsor, rather than an alcoholic walking into a halfway house for the first time. Being a sponsor is still what you're doing. Can you talk a little bit about that?
ANDIS: Sure. My recovery is based on the 12 Step Recovery model, and the last step of which is having had a spiritual awakening. You know, we determine that we're going to help other alcoholics. I mean, that's part of the deal. In order to keep it you’ve got to give it away.
So early in my sobriety, my sponsor made me start working with other people. So that was like six months into my sobriety or something. And so, since that time, I've never not had people I was sponsoring.
GROSSMAN: It's a lifelong commitment.
ANDIS: Yeah. I’ve got five people I'm working with now.
GROSSMAN: And that kind of commitment extends ... You also work as a paid counselor for a health service here in Indianapolis as well.
ANDIS: Yeah. It's somewhat different half and unfortunately, sometimes people get the two confused. But I'm pretty clear on the difference between my job and what I do in my personal life; good boundaries around that.
GROSSMAN: And I guess the big difference, if I understand it correctly, is that one group really wants help, the other maybe maybe not.
ANDIS: The clients I tend to work with are generally pretty ambivalent … outside AA. Within AA the people I mentor, right in the beginning, they may be ambivalent, but they don't stick around. There's nothing forcing them to do this. So if they don't want their help, that's okay. I wish him well and call me back if you change your mind sometime.
GROSSMAN: And in the beginning I remember, with Halfway House, the sponsor that you had: He had some control over the people that he took as how do you say it. Well, he was a [sponsor], but he didn't necessarily have to take you. He had to agree to take you and see that you had made a commitment.
ANDIS: In fact, I called him on the phone because his name was on a sponsor list. I called him on the phone and I'd called two or three other people. They didn't answer and I finally got a hold of him. And in the book I call him Frank. And Frank said, “I don't know” because he recognized me. And he said, “How'd you end up calling me anyway?” And I said, “You put your name on the damn list.” He's the only sponsor I've ever had. I've had him for 22 years.
GROSSMAN: So this was around this whole experience that happened to you around 2000.
ANDIS: Right.
GROSSMAN: And you talk in Halfway House about how literary ambition and alcoholism meet and interact. Can you talk a little bit about that?
ANDIS: Sure.
GROSSMAN: Because you are a poet and you continue to write poetry. You know, creative types do have a tendency to abuse substances.
ANDIS: Yeah. I can't make any grand generalizations, but I know for me, alcohol was a release and coming down from the intensity it takes the emotional and intellectual intensity it takes to read or write. I don't know what it's like for other people, but I would get so focused. Drinking helped me relax, and get away from that. And if you ever attend the recovery meetings, you'll find all kinds of different stories that happen. The ways people get to realize that they have a problem and all that. The fact is, I drank for many years with showing no symptoms of addiction.I crossed this invisible line and I couldn't get back: I couldn't stop drinking, even though drinking was destroying my life.
GROSSMAN: And you would black out.
ANDIS: Oh, yeah. Sometimes for days at a time.
GROSSMAN: I think you mentioned that in the book.
ANDIS: Yeah.
GROSSMAN: So yeah, you haven't had a drink in about 20 years.
ANDIS: 21 years … 21 years and just six months or something. So I got to the end, I sat down, sitting in a closet with a gun in my mouth. And that's where it took me. Thank God I didn't because my life today is pretty wonderful. Another reason that I wrote the book is to give people hope. I was 49 years old. And bankrupt and every sense of that word when I got sober.
GROSSMAN: When this happened to you, you were working in a bookstore, and it's a bookstore that I [knew] well. We both worked at Borders for a long time, but we worked at the same store only for about six months or so. When we met Borders, which went bankrupt and was dissolved in 2011, was still a book lovers bookstore.
ANDIS: Let's just say, still a family-owned company.
GROSSMAN: And then it took a turn for the worse around the turn of the century. The economy had changed.
ANDIS: Right. Models for selling books had changed with Amazon and online sales.
GROSSMAN: Well, that was an experience you record very well with, well, not with a memoir, but an actual novel called Bookstore, which is a very funny, oftentimes hilarious, novel where we meet your alter ego, maybe. Norm Slider.
ANDIS: Yeah.
GROSSMAN: And I heartily recommend that book. And it is still available.
ANDIS: Right. As a Kindle book, although I'm going to get it reissued because I have a sequel coming.
GROSSMAN: Oh, that's awesome.
ANDIS: I’m 3/4 of the way through the sequel. And Norm, you’ll never guess, gets sober.
GROSSMAN Of course, that might vary more than a little bit from your actual experience but I enjoyed this book quite a bit and I also enjoy your poetry. And one of the collections I was looking through before we had this interview was your chapbook Like Paradise… Only Different, [published in 1998]. And that's a great collection. You open that collection with a poem about Etheridge Knight — “John Berryman is Dead” — about your encounter with or your friendship with [the poet].
ANDIS: For several — many — years.
GROSSMAN: Can you describe that friendship?
ANDIS: I was in college in the 70s, probably around ‘74 or something like that, that this happened and a friend of mine — I was in a writing class and this was at IUPUI — a classmate of mine said you should go down to the Hummingbird Cafe and there's a guy down there named Etheridge, I think would interest you and so I went down and I sat there on Tuesday night and they had an open mic thing going on. And occasionally they had somebody come in and have something important to read. And I was sitting there looking around thinking who could this Etheridge Knight guy be? And there's this one guy who finally got up and started saying some poems and he looked like a bum. And he was being critical of other writers who were getting up to talk and so forth and so on. Anyway, I ended up meeting him and he was Etheridge Knight. We kind of clicked ... Our personalities kind of clicked. And I got to know him and I've heard all kinds of stories from people, especially after he died about who he was. I don't know about that. All I know is my experience with him. He was a good friend to me. He was very generous with me, got me readings and that kind of thing and helped me learn how to say my poems in public, in an efficient way, in a productive way.
GROSSMAN: I think a lot of poets have a problem communicating. They think the poem is enough to carry on through reading and it's not is it?
ANDIS: It wasn’t for me. The first time I gave a featured reading — of course, I had no idea how to do this really, other than seeing him do it — but I got up and something funny came out of my mouth. The audience laughed. [Speaking ironically] That's a good start. And so I tried to stick with that. Not over-prepared. Just get up and read the audience and interact with them before the poems. Another friend Robert Creeley used to really interact: Half his readings were just talking to the audience.
GROSSMAN: Robert Creeley visited Indianapolis?
ANDIS: A couple times.
GROSSMAN: You mentioned... Is he one of the Black Mountain poets?
ANDIS: Yes.
GROSSMAN: Also, I'm blanking on the other name… it's actually the title of the poem where you're talking about Etheridge Knight.
ANDIS: "John Berryman is Dead." He was not of the Black Mountain Poets.
GROSSMAN: I’m getting my Black Mountain poets confused, sorry…
ANDIS: More academic, a real sad drunk.
GROSSMAN: I guess poetry and alcoholism... Does it come with the territory of being a poet with.. ?.
ANDIS: I don't think so. It doesn't have to... Look at Gary Snyder. A sane, sober person. Although, certainly, I think addiction has to do with a partly genetic and partly disposition to extremes. Poets often have an inclination toward extremes but many of them don't have genetic components to trip that wire.
GROSSMAN: So it doesn't necessarily come with the territory, which is a good thing. Let's talk about pLopLop a little bit because, I mean, because that's been a big part of your publication history right?
ANDIS: Yeah.
GROSSMAN: When did you and John Clark, publisher of pLopLop, meet?
ANDIS: Wow. It would have probably been in 1989.
GROSSMAN: It was a good bit of time before John Clark actually started pLopLop.
ANDIS: Well, he started with broadsides. I was working at Borders. And he brought some broadsides in and I was in charge of local stuff that we do. And he brought me these broadsides. I thought it was funny, and it was innovative and all that, but I just didn't see anybody purchasing it. They had paintings like [of] Richard Brautigan or Bukowski or someone and he had some text.
GROSSMAN: I see. And this and we're talking you're at the Borders that was at Castleton Corner, right? And you were in charge of the local. So putting two and two together here, but maybe he saw that the broadsides wouldn't sell and …
ANDIS: Oh, no! They sold! much to my amazement.
GROSSMAN: Wow.
ANDIS: Much to my amazement. They sold and then he brought this little stapled together magazine, 5”X”7 at that time… the first two… And, and I looked at them, and they were pretty good. And so I put them up and featured them and they sold pretty well. And then I think he started working there about that time. So we started doing readings, from poets and writers who had participated in pLopLop and he sort of let me start doing some editing work with him.That was my real education in terms of editing. I got to help curate, because I knew a lot of writers from The Hummingbird.
GROSSMAN: My experience with pLopLop was, and I talked about this with John in Indy Correspondent, was that I had entered some kind of contest that was jointly sponsored by the Writers Center of Indiana and NUVO and then I got hired by the bookstore in 1994. And I had to withdraw my poems because I was now staff and on the day after the 1994 election that brought the Republicans to power, Newt Gingrich to power in Congress, I walk in and you're at the information desk and information desk and you said “Hey, John wants to publish that piece you had submitted in pLopLop and I said, What's pLopLop? So? Yeah, that's how I discovered what pLopLop was by having something published. And that was pLopLop #6.
ANDIS: John is the perfect guy. You know, he just has a really nice way about letting people be who they are. And not being judgmental.
GROSSMAN: And he likes a particular kind of poem, accessible …
ANDIS: Yeah.
GROSSMAN: …and playful. Accessibility and playfulness.
ANDIS: That would be, it seems to me, to a tee. I don't want to badmouth groups of poets, but people like the Language poets sometimes. I like some of them but a lot of times I was like, “who gives a shit about what you're saying. I can't understand what you're trying to say here. I can't relate... My human experience doesn't relate to this.”
GROSSMAN: There was a New York School of poetry or New York School; people like John Ashbery or who are very difficult to understand, who didn't necessarily try to make themselves understood. And I think there's some value in that if you have your detective hat on, if you're into language for the sake of language, but if you want to investigate poetry as a means of communication and community, maybe people like John Ashbery aren't the poets to start with, right?
ANDIS: Right. It's definitely an acquired taste, especially for the general public, I think. It amazes me that people my father's age — my father was born in 1914 — and was very used to reading poems in the newspaper. And when he was in the Army during World War II, he wrote poems, sent them home, because that was an accepted way of communicating. That's not so much anymore. I think the only thing less popular than poetry is opera. I read that somewhere. I don't know if that's true.
GROSSMAN: Well, I mean, I guess the opera has migrated to the radio. I mean, in a way, I guess. There's dramatic rock and roll. And then there's, well there's poetry in rap. I mean, so you find a lot of poetry these days... it's on the radio.
ANDIS: It's interesting. I would have thought with the emergence of Twitter and the alleged reduction of attention and concentration that poetry would be an absolute winner. But it's not.
GROSSMAN: It's not. I guess social media in particular kind of privileges the visual image. Maybe, maybe that's part of it. I don't know.
ANDIS: Yeah. And people can't seem to concentrate enough to see that there are visual images, they're just done with words, with punctuation.
GROSSMAN: Yeah. And you do need an attention span to enjoy poetry. I think just as with any kind of writing. And social media kind of chops, chops up an attention span very quickly. I noticed that myself, because I think I have some kind of social media addiction. I can't stop zombie scrolling. So I'm gonna have to delete some apps.
ANDIS: I was actually thinking about that myself, deleting apps from my phone. Yeah, keeping them on my laptop. But just so that I'm not automatically …
GROSSMAN: Yeah, yeah, I know. I think that's very harmful to your sense of well being.
ANDIS: It's certainly a waste of time.
GROSSMAN: Yeah. But I think that relates back to pLopLop, because John Clark after 2000 … He didn't do so much work on pLopLop anymore. He went much more into the direction of visual arts. And it's not to say it's completely disappeared, but it hasn't become an internet phenomenon [although there is a Facebook page]. It hasn't migrated to the internet, along with just about everything else in society. I mean, he had a small webpage for a while, but that's definitely not his thing.
ANDIS: No. And there were no longer bookstores, where you can sell them. That made it very difficult.
GROSSMAN: That's right. Because that was a very nice thing about the Castleton Borders Book Shop is that they could take local, locally published items and sell them there, but it's not really you can't really do that anymore. anywhere.
ANDIS: Yeah, there's no place to do that. pLopLops were really objets d'art. You know each cover was hand painted.
GROSSMAN: That's right. They're very beautiful. It’s very much in the Surrealist, Dada tradition, like something that you might have seen in Paris in the 1920s.
ANDIS: Yup.
GROSSMAN: Very much acknowledging that tradition as well, I think in pLopLop #3, there was a critical piece about the poet Apollinaire, the French poet who was doing very much the kind of poetry you see in pLopLop, the kind of playful stuff that you see in the magazine.
ANDIS: We would have published it.
GROSSMAN: You would have published it. The ultimate compliment. And as a note to people listening to this John is accepting submissions for the new issue of pLopLop.
ANDIS: pLopLop# 14.
pLopLop #14 and I think it's being produced in association with Big Car Collaborative
ANDIS: Yeah.
GROSSMAN: Which is a good thing I think, but as far as I can tell or at least for now and probably this is the case that the submissions have to be 100 words or less.
ANDIS: That's the killer.
GROSSMAN: It's difficult to write that short.
ANDIS: I've got three pieces I'm gonna send them.
GROSSMAN: Cool.
ANDIS: And I had to really cut one I bet quite a bit
GROSSMAN: One of the great things that pop up did was publish your novel in its entirety The Summer Ho Chi Minh Died.
ANDIS: I was amazed.
GROSSMAN: In segments, of course.
ANDIS: pLopLop editions #4, #5, #6, and #7.
GROSSMAN: So when did you get it in your mind to write your first novel?
ANDIS: I think I was 18 when I first began to tinker with it, and I went into the service in the Navy, so that I wouldn't get drafted and sent to Nam in 1969, thinking, well, I can write while I'm there, you know. And so I had my typewriter sent to me, and I found I couldn't write. I'd written about 50 pages before I went into the Navy. And I had to wait until I was completely out. And at that time, we were still working on the World War II GI Bill and all that. And they guaranteed you 52 weeks of unemployment insurance, while you looked for a job.
GROSSMAN: Uh huh.
ANDIS: And they didn't bug me too much about looking for a job. So I took that opportunity to finish that novel. And when I finished it, it was just dreadful. So I threw it in a drawer, and it existed in various closets and drawers for a number of years. Periodically, I would take it out and try to figure out how to rewrite it and I would do some work on it. So it ended up taking me about 30 years to complete to my satisfaction.
A guy at Crown wanted to see it. And he kept it for two years and then didn't publish it. And at that point, John decided he would serialize it then now it's come out in paperback. Yeah, it was my impression. It had a lot to say about America, you know, always at war. And the damage that does to the peace, quote, unquote, that we have here at home. It's a pretty grim book.
GROSSMAN: So you're continuing to write poems. You're working on a new novel right now?
ANDIS: Working on a new novel, and I'm also working on a collection. I'm not sure what you would call it. But it's a mosaic of memoirs, journals, stories and poems.
GROSSMAN: Okay, so sort of like a short story. Hybrid collection... and poetry.
ANDIS: About three or four years ago, Chatter House Press brought out a sort of collected poems called Days for an Occasion, this new book is called More Days Nights.
GROSSMAN: I see. Okay, and when can we expect those?
ANDIS: Well, that's mostly done. I'm still fitting pieces in and taking pieces out. Sharpening and tightening those. I'm hoping within the next year or two. I'm getting old. I would like to have all the stuff published in a relatively short period of time.
GROSSMAN: I see. Well, I think we've covered a lot of territory. Is there anything I didn't ask you?
ANDIS: Something I want to add to this, you're talking about how alcohol affects the creative arts and so I remember when I first got sober, I called Fielding Dawson who had become a pretty good friend of mine in New York. He had written me a couple of letters, which I hadn't responded to. And I was changing my address. I was getting ready to move into the halfway house. So I called Fielding in New York to tell him my address and he said, "Oh my God, you're not gonna get born again. Are you?” And I said, "I certainly hope so."
I didn't have a religious context. It just meant that I have to find another way to do this. And what I found once I got sober, I couldn't write for a number of years. For a couple of years, three years I just couldn't write. And part of that was I'd lost the voice that I wrote from which was embittered, dark comedy and all that kind of thing and I wanted to find a new voice to write with. I had to. And I think I've found that. I've been working with it.
I don't shy away from anything I wrote in the past. It’s just that I'm not that person anymore.
GROSSMAN: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
ANDIS: And that was the trickiest thing of all was reclaiming myself in a way that's healthy and not self-destructive, destructive to others. You know, I live at home. My wife has long long term sobriety and our kids have always been involved in recovery, getting taken to meetings when they were little kids and that kind of stuff. That is my life now. It beats the alternative, going back to that closet with that gun.
GROSSMAN: Absolutely.
ANDIS: Because alcohol had stopped working for me and I didn't know how to fix my life. I was fortunate to find some people who were willing to help me and show me how to live sober. And part of my living is being creative and writing. That's who I've always been, I can't leave that.
I just had to find a new way to do it. So that's what my life has been in the last 20 years is trying to figure out how to do that in a way that's healthy for me and my family.
GROSSMAN: I think that's good. Thank you so much.
ANDIS: Well, thanks, Dan. Good to see you.
GROSSMAN: Good to see you.
