The Wrong Door to the Right Room | Michael Clune

Michael Clune was born in Dublin and raised outside Chicago. When his parents divorced at twelve, what gave way was not just the household. It was his sense of what was real. Alcohol and weed came at fourteen, ecstasy at nineteen, heroin at twenty one. He describes that first time plainly. "Every problem I've ever had has now been solved. That was the feeling."

He got into Johns Hopkins, held it together for a while, and then did not. He was arrested for felony possession and locked up in a jail he had painted himself, working summers as a teenager.

What he understood in recovery is the part most addiction stories leave out. Heroin was never simply pleasure. It was a counterfeit of something real, delivered once and then dangled for years. Saying no was never going to be enough. He needed another route to the same place, and found it in Zen meditation and in a discipline he learned from people in recovery, something he says most people learn at five.

He and Brett go well past addiction. What everyone chases when they are not chasing a drug. Whether an ordinary life can hold a spiritual one. And what it takes to keep writing through the resistance.

More than two decades sober, Michael is a professor at the Chase Center at Ohio State, the author of three scholarly books and three works of creative writing, most recently the novel Pan.