Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Mandi Fugate Sheffel’s new memoir, “The Nature of Pain: Roots, Recovery and Redemption amid the Opioid Crisis,” tells a story about growing up in rural Kentucky and Sheffel’s own journey through addiction and recovery. Sheffel is also the owner of the Read Spotted Newt bookstore in Hazard, Kentucky. Enjoy our conversation about the evolution of the opioid epidemic and the importance of place-based writing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Yonder: Several influential books have been written about the opioid crisis in Appalachia. Why was it important for you to share your story?
Mandi Fugate Sheffel: I really respect the literature that’s out there and it’s made me think of what happened to our region – as far as the opioid epidemic – in a different way, especially “Dopesick.” It opened my eyes to the other factors that were at play that I didn’t realize at the time like the role of big pharma in falsely marketing OxyContin to rural Appalachia. But I hadn’t read anything that was personal experience from somebody who had lived it. I knew I had that story to tell.
People have lost the ability to be empathetic to those that are battling this disease and to remember that this is a health crisis, not a moral failing. It has really touched every area of our lives [in Eastern Kentucky], from community, to workforce, to our carceral system, it’s all tied back to the opioid effect. It’s definitely not gone.
DY: You wrote about your family and how they played a part in both your addiction and your recovery. Can you talk a little bit about that?
MFS: Obviously, genetics played a role in this. It’s so hard with addiction and substance use disorder to separate out environment and genetics because they’re so intertwined. My parents were really young when they had me, and both had very active social lives. I always in a sense felt like I was left to my own devices. I think that played into feelings of isolation and loneliness, coupled with being amongst people who partied. My parents weren’t using drugs, but they both drank alcohol as a means of coping.
But on the flip side of that, my mother stopped drinking and she was a safe place for me to land once I came out of treatment. I lived with her for a year and did nothing but 12 step recovery meetings. She gave me the space and the time to focus on getting better. It was integral to my recovery.
DY: It can be really hard to recover successfully while staying in the same place where you were addicted. At the same time, many rural people don’t want to move away. How did that work out for you?
MFS: A year before I went into treatment, my mom moved to Hazard. I was from Knott County, which is only 20 or 30 miles away. But I didn’t use drugs in Hazard. I was in downtown and I was able to walk to three different NA meetings. I think about what it would have looked like had I had to go back to Knott County, stuck in that holler that I grew up in with no means of transportation. It would have been easier to fall back into old patterns and so although I wasn’t really far removed, it was enough to keep me focused on recovery.
But I stayed away from my dad’s side of the family, who I partied with a lot, for almost a year until I felt comfortable. You really do have to change all your people, places and things, and I had to make a lot of tough decisions in doing that.
DY: One of the things that struck me as I was reading was that when you were ready to enter treatment, you had to lie and exaggerate your usage in order to get help. How has that situation, and the epidemic in general, changed in the 20 years since you started recovery?
MFS: The whole landscape has changed as far as addiction treatment. When I got out of detox, I still had to wait two weeks to get into an inpatient facility. Treatment accessibility is definitely more prevalent now. I think when people finally get to the point where they’re ready to get help, that can be achieved within a matter of 24 to 48 hours.
I don’t want to downplay how dangerous OxyContin was because I did lose people to overdose, but nowadays it’s truly life or death. Fentanyl is so potent and it’s in everything, from vapes, to pot, to pills. There’s really just such little margin for error now as people can overdose on their first use. Harm reduction is a big push now. You see the prevalence of naloxone to keep people alive and syringe exchanges to keep communities healthy.
DY: What is the role of writing for you, both in your recovery and in weathering the grief of your cousin Eric’s death, that you also write about in the book. How did this book come out of that?
MFS: When I got into recovery, a huge part of the 12-step group was writing about a lot of hard things and then having to share that with somebody. The freedom that comes with getting those things down on paper was a part of my recovery. When Eric died, I just did not know where to go with the amount of gut-wrenching grief I had. I was really concerned that it was going to be detrimental to my recovery.
Part of my grieving process was this irrational fear that all the things we had done that lived in my head were going to disappear. I needed to get them on paper and that’s where this all started. I never sat down to write a book. When I went back through, there was a level of honesty in it because I was writing it just for me. And the more honest I could be, the more specific, the more relatable it would be for people.
DY: How is your book rural and Appalachian?
MFS: This book started with a conversation with Gurney Norman, a writing mentor for lots of people in this region. He’s the one that got me to the Appalachian Writers Workshop. That was really tough in the first year because I didn’t identify as a writer. But spending that week at Hindman, I understood how special and supportive that community was. It was just a whole group of people who really understood the value of story and voice and how important it is to the region to have all these different voices telling our story for ourselves. The literary tradition of Kentucky is just so rich and I don’t know that people really understand that. I felt at home immediately.
Being from the mountains and growing up here is a way of life that just makes you really fond of place. I talk about being on mountaintop removal sites and what that looked like or I talk about the way my grandpa felt about the holler that I grew up in, I didn’t know that that was unique to anybody else’s experience.
DY: You also own a really lovely bookstore, the Read Spotted Newt, in Hazard. Tell us how your involvement with the literary community led to its opening, and how it is part of a downtown revitalization in Hazard.
MFS: The City of Hazard had hired Bailey Richards, a downtown coordinator focused exclusively on revitalizing Main Street. There were a couple of businesses there already, and I thought, how cool would it be if Hazard had a bookstore. After getting into the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, I realized this was a necessity because all these extremely talented writers from this region didn’t have anybody to champion their work or places to have book launches.
I opened in January of 2020. What people don’t really understand is Covid brought a resurgence of bookstores. People were home, they were reading and working puzzles. I ran a drive-through out the front door, and I was delivering within the city limits of Hazard, and just doing whatever it took to stay afloat. It’s been five years and it’s become a third space – which weren’t really prevalent in eastern Kentucky. An independent bookstore experience is very unique to the community that it’s in.
When you go downtown in Hazard on a Saturday, there’ll be the farmer’s market and people are out getting coffee, they’re shopping. It’s a beautiful community of small business owners because there’s zero competition. Everybody understands that together we’re a lot more valuable.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post Mandi Fugate Sheffel’s Journey with Pain appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
