Prairie Lights

Acclaimed writer and professor of philosophy Clancy Martin will read from his intimate, insightful, at times even humorous memoir, How Not to Kill Yourself:A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind, based on his viral essay, “I’m Still Here.”  He will be joined in conversation by Iowa City therapist Tyler Fyotek.   Author David Shields calls the How Not to Kill Yourself, “The most honest, complicit, searing, and discomfiting book I’ve ever read about suicide (and I’ve read quite a few—out of purely scholarly interest, of course).” He adds, “All great narratives pose a battle between the force of life and the force of death; How Not To Kill Yourself does this as brilliantly and powerfully as any book I have encountered in quite some time. Thrilling and useful.”

Clancy Martin is the author of How to Sell as well as numerous books on philosophy, and has translated works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, and other philosophers. A Guggenheim Fellow, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Esquire, The New Republic, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Believer, and The Paris Review. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and Ashoka University in New Delhi. He is the survivor of more than ten suicide attempts and a recovering alcoholic.

Tyler Fyotek currently practices psychotherapy in Iowa City. In a previous life, he studied Classics at the University of Iowa and wrote a dissertation on death and ethics (deathics) in Homer’s epics.