The art of "pamwagg," which she only just started doing since 2008, may be viewed at her blog:, along with current writing.īorn in Washington, Wagner lived most of her life in Connecticut but has recently moved to Vermont.Ī story of identical twins. Wagner is also a prolific self-taught artist. Her second book of poems, LEARNING TO SEE IN THREE DIMENSIONS (title tentative) by Cavankerry Press will be released sometime in 2017.
WE MAD CLIMB SHAKY LADDERS IS HER FIRST BOOK OF POETRY, about mental illness. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, LA Weekly and Tikkun among other places. In 2005, she co-authored, with her twin sister, a psychiatrist, Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and their Journey through Schizophrenia (St Martin’s Press, 2005), which won the national NAMI Outstanding Literature Award and was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. Despite having spent at least twelve years of her life in psychiatric units, she has won many awards, including a First Place in the 2001/2 International Poetry Competition sponsored by the BBC World Service. It is one of the most compelling histories of two such siblings in the canon of writing on mental illness.Ī writer and artist who lives with diagnoses of schizophrenia and narcolepsy, plus CNS Lyme disease, Pamela Spiro Wagner graduated magna cum laude from Brown University and attended medical school for one year. It is a true and unusually frank story of identical twins with very different identities and wildly different experiences of the world around them. Told in the alternating voices of the sisters, Divided Minds is a heartbreaking account of the far reaches of madness as well as the depths of ambivalence and love between twins. Carolyn continued to believe in the humanity of her sister, not merely in her illness, and Pamela responded. Exceeding everyone's expectations, Carolyn graduated from Harvard Medical School and forged a successful career in psychiatry.ĭespite Pamela's estrangement from the rest of her family, the sisters remained very close, "bonded with the twin glue," calling each other several times a week and visiting as frequently as possible. Pamela's illness allowed Carolyn to enter the spotlight that had for so long been focused on her sister. But as the twins approached adolescence, Pamela began to suffer the initial symptoms of schizophrenia, hearing disembodied voices that haunted her for years and culminated during her freshman year of college at Brown University where she had her first major breakdown and hospitalization. Growing up in the fifties, Carolyn Spiro was always in the shadow of her more intellectually dominant and socially outgoing twin, Pamela.
A riveting true story of sisters who were identical, until the voices began
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