Today we’d like to introduce you to Alexander Manzoni

Hi Alexander, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?

Born in January 1986 during the Super Bowl, I grew up in Newfield, New Jersey, a tiny borough of mostly Italian-American farmers situated between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Our town was mostly known for being a speed trap for unwitting tourists. My mother was a painter. My father, a behavioral therapist with the state. They separated in 1990, when I was only four. I grew up never seeing my parents ever have affection for each other. And it warped me.

From an early age, I had an affinity for reading and art. My mother read to me often and vigorously encouraged creative outlets. My father and his family bankrolled our trips to New York, Baltimore, DC, where Mom would take us to art and history museums. She made sure that we were “cultured,” as she always felt sort of threatened by the farming community culture where we lived. On too often this, she signed my brother and I up for any program she could find for this end. But, by the time I reached the age of 11, my familial bipolar disorder began to make its appearance. I couldn’t understand why I felt that way. My paternal uncle hung himself in 1995. And my grandmother did everything she could to act like it never happened. His own obituary was kept out of the newspapers. And we were not to mention his name under any circumstance. I was an A student right up until 7th grade. The amount of extracurricular activities: sports (soccer, basketball), (clubs: chess), plays, music lessons— it all got to be too much. And I started forgetting to do homework. I missed a really important religion project. And when confronted, I lied and said some lame excuse to my mother…all the way to the parent teacher meeting. I believe it is from this that I developed a reputation as a liar with my mother. It was a childish mistake that dogged me for the rest of her life. When I was thirteen, a friend of the family’s son came for an overnight visit. And he brought with him a small amount of cannabis. I didn’t get high the first time. But I thought it made me cool. So when my birthday party rolled around, I wanted to smoke it with my friends. Too many “goodie goodies” attended my party. So I left the dime in my wallet. Only to be discovered the next day when my mother did the laundry. That was the day I truly sealed my reputation as not only “Alex the Liar” but also “Alex the Druggie.” My mother called everyone’s parents, accusing them of being my dealer. And that ruined my life for many years to come. The only kids that would hang out with me after that were townies and creepy outsiders. But, at one point, I found an outlet— an outlet that would follow me for the rest of my life: and that was writing. Initially, my 7th grade class participated in a youth anthology writing contest. Out of about twenty-five students, I and one other student from my class were chosen. It was my first poem. And the first one to ever get published in print. I still have that book to this day.

But, poetry also gave me an outlet to express my darkest thoughts. And as I grew further into puberty, those thoughts got a lot darker. My suicide poetry got me in trouble eventually a year or so later. The nun running the class, she and the principal decided to search my locker. Columbine had happened fairly recently and from reading my poems, they thought their school might be next. I never got my book back. And it was off to the mental hospital with me again. I did homeschooling for the rest of the year. Failed the entrance exams for the hoity toity private school I’d wanted to attend. It didn’t matter that I’d landed a partial scholarship to another, slightly less prestigious catholic high school. That loss and disgrace, it was one that I never got over. It didn’t help that I performed miserably at school the following year. I missed the first week because I was staying at the hospital once more. And the popular kids, they smelled blood in the water. So I never wanted to go back in the first place. I was taunted, threatened. To the point where I eventually begged my mom to let me leave that school. Enter the dark period. I was signed up for ECT electroconvulsive therapy out of Friends Hospital in Philadelphia. It was a series of highly traumatic events. I went every other week for what seemed like many months. I only barely scraped by on my home studies. The medication, the treatments, it made it difficult to think and function. All I wanted to do was sleep. It was around that time when my mom got cervical spine surgery and was bed ridden for a very long time. She needed my brother and I’s help more than ever. And I wasn’t emotionally prepared to do so. My father announced his engagement to another woman. The realization that my parents would never get back together made it especially difficult.

My great Aunt’s house burned down in either 2002-2003. I was the first one to notice the flames (the house was next door). I ran over in the snow to try and save her. But the flames were too much to bear. She died that night. For a long while, I blamed myself while my mom blamed my father.

About a year later my grandfather died from complications stemming from an infection he caught at a physical rehab center after cancer surgery. We thought he’d beat it. My mother was devastated. Her drug and alcohol use escalated. And so did mine.

2001-2006 marked the party years. The years before things got too dark. I started hanging out at my buddy Dan and his brother Ian’s parent’s basement. It was where the cool kids from our town congregated to smoke weed, drink and partake of psychedelics. It was all in good fun until my first real girlfriend introduced me to coke in 2004. Then that was all I wanted. She eventually ripped me off for drug money and left with one of my acquaintances. It gave me some real trust issues. During this period, I met Barnes. He became one of my best friends and hype men. He always encouraged my writing and said we were destined for better things. But first we had to escape Newfield…

During a dry spell of coke, I first tried heroin at my brother’s eighteenth birthday party in October 2006. I bought an E pill and a bag off one of his friends from private school. And that sealed my fate. After trying it. It was pretty much all I wanted to think about. I started buying it from the guy on a regular basis. My buddy Barnes tried to get me to cool down. But I didn’t listen. Though it took about a year for it to escalate. One day, I was running out. And up to that point, I was only sniffing it. I decided to shoot it. And that was my biggest mistake.

In late 2006, I took a sound engineering course with my mom’s then-boyfriend: Mike Tarsia, who worked on Patty LaBabelle’s Grammy-winning “Burnin’” album (amongst many other notable projects). He taught me everything I needed to know about recording and rock and roll. As a result, I became a little too infatuated with the lifestyle. We thought the man Mike was bulletproof. He had a loud and proud Keith Richards lifestyle. But Mike died a few years ago from a fentanyl overdose. The painting my mom made of him still hangs in my studio to this day.

In October 2007 my mother found a burnt spoon in my room. She called the police and had me arrested. I kicked heroin for the first time over the week I spent in jail. Then, right out of jail, she sent me to my first rehab. After that I spent the next nine months at a series of recovery houses in PA.

In November 2008 I crashed my dad’s Jeep Commander SUV into a telephone pole on the way home from a drug deal. I threw the briefcase in which I was carrying it into the brush. But when I came back the next day, someone called the cops on me and I was arrested for felony possession of heroin and cocaine. Back to jail for a week or so, then back to rehab.

In 2009 I ran off with my girlfriend to go live in Trenton. I stayed there until October 2009 when her mother found my heroin. I had relapsed only the week prior because of a chronically abscessed tooth and not being able to get an appointment to pull it for months. Annabel, enraged, attacked me. She beat me with books, hit me; she even bit my shoulder. I came home with nothing to show for the past nine months of my life except scars and mental trauma. I never got back with Annabel (not that I didn’t try). She died a couple years later from a sudden seizure. Our last kiss still haunts me.

2009-2014 were some of the most grueling years. My mother was going to lose the house. So she put it up for sale. I hoped that I could finish a novel and use the sales to save us. But it didn’t happen. We kept losing our electric. I would go out in all sorts of weather on my bike to the gas station, to fill up the can for the generator. I tried messing with the box, that worked for a while until the power company caught on and put a lock on it. I would go next door to my father’s, to warm up and seek food and a little sanity. But dad’s fiance would constantly berate me for being smelly, disorganized, spoiled, a loser and a drug addict, while also selling me oxy IRs and weed on the side. She thought she could break me down if she did it for long enough. But I didn’t let her. And somehow I never told her off in a drunken manic fit, either. My dad, he always tried to be there for me. But he had his own demons to fight. It was very painful when I finally had to leave. I still haven’t seen him since. Though we do talk almost daily now. And he does whatever he can to help out my baby boy.

In May 2014 the house sold. My mother packed up and left to move in with my brother. He had moved to Spokane, Washington the year prior. I was left to live at my dad’s until I finished my probation. That summer was a rough one, indeed. My alcoholism got worse. I checked myself into what was to be my last psych hospital. I wanted rehab but they didn’t have any beds. So I simply told them how I was feeling (suicidal) and they checked me right in. Two weeks of DT hell followed. Hallucinations. The whole bit. But when I came out the other end, I was clean. And that helped immensely when I arrived at court later that month. My probation officer and judge felt sorry for me. They ended my probation (six years on a three year sentence) and let me leave the state.

My mother bought me a train ticket. I packed a few bags. And then I was off. It took almost a week with only 15$ in my pocket to make it to Spokane. When I arrived, I learned that I wasn’t going to be allowed to stay at my brother’s. It was off to the homeless shelter for me.

I wrote whenever I could during those days. By the river, in the parks, the library, the day room, at the doctor’s office. It was during this period I wrote “Mr. West’s Nightmare,” a poem inspired by Poe that went on to become a crowd favorite. It was later published in the anthology “Evermore 2” by Raven’s Quoth Press (available on Amazon).

In November, after three months of a waking nightmare, I got hooked up with the Salvation Army. They had a program that paid for an apartment for me. It was a 400$ a month hole in the wall full of flies and duck poop (seriously). But once I got settled in, I started writing what was to be my first novel: The Spokane Story. It was very loosely based on my experiences on the streets and with hardcore drug culture. It took two years to write the first draft. During that time, I began attending open mics and arts events. I started my Youtube page, where I read excerpts from the novel and my other stories and poems. It was slow going for a long while.

February 2015, my last hit of heroin. I bought some off the street. It was expensive and mediocre. The next time I went to buy, I found myself stalking the streets for hours in the frigid weather, asking for drugs. I finally found some. I got home. And it was bunk: fake drugs. It was then that I decided that I was not going to do it again.

In September 2015, I met my girlfriend, Sophia. We really hit it off. And I made a decision to not bring home anymore crusty looking street people. I stuck to that decision. Even after my mom unexpectedly moved in with our family pit bull, Noodlez, one night. My brother threw her out after a domestic dispute. That was also the same time a bunch of tweakers moved into my neighbors and turned the place into a twenty four hour party. The three months that ensued were pure hell. But somehow, I survived.

Once the tweakers were evicted, we made the decision to move again. By this time, I was finishing the sequel to The Spokane Story. Mom moved across the neighborhood to her own apartment. Things were good. I started going to more open mics and doing more features. One of my poems was published in an anthology by the local library. I did my first book signing. It was at Auntie’s Bookstore, downtown, where I did my first open mic. It truly went full circle.

In 2017, I volunteered at the Individual World Poetry Slam. There, I got to meet a slew of fantastic national competing poets. And saw performances from such figures as Rudy Francisco. I learned a lot from that experience, and took that into account into my writing and performing.

Then, in the late 2010’s until 2022, my mom got ill, repeatedly, and became a driving and draining focus of my life. First it was breast cancer, then two separate wrist surgeries, then she got COVID and her doctor said she had six months to live from end-stage COPD. She lived for two years after that. I did what I could to make her more comfortable. I stopped going to as many events. Though still remained open for the occasional feature. I landed a poem in “I Sing the Salmon Home,” an anthology put together by the state poet laureate, Rena Priest. And when the traveling tour came around, I featured and did another book signing. That year, I also had several radio appearances, reading a slew of poems for Spokane Public Radio.

On Halloween 2016, I decided to try my hand at the National Novel Writing Month challenge. Except that I knew I couldn’t write 50k words in a month. So instead I challenged myself to simply write every day for a month. It has been over eight years, and I have not missed a day since. It isn’t a matter of quantity. I simply make it a point to write something each day. Once it became part of my routine, the thought of missing a day began to cause a great deal of anxiety inside of me.

In 2022 I was invited to read a poem at City Hall for the “In the Neighborhood” poetry project. The performance was uploaded to archive.org for anyone to see.

In 2024, my novel The Spokane Story was released. Less than a month later, my first baby, Xander, was born. My mother was able to see him a few times before she died in July. Everything happening at once— it was quite overwhelming. And as a result, I was unable to market my book as well as I should have, instead relying on my own online following of about thirteen thousand, and one radio interview that I did for KYRS.FM.

I had another book coming out several months later. But that got delayed when the publisher went out of business. I kept shopping around. And eventually I hooked back up with the guy who ran the previous publisher, and got signed to his new business: The Horror Connection. My new book, The Program, is due out in December. It is very loosely based on my experiences at the recovery houses (except if it were run by a serial killer).

In October 2024, I read my poem from the Spokane Writes Anthology at City Hall. And also did a poetry feature for Foray for the Arts.

Since then I have been taking care of my son Xander and working on my new novel: a humorous genre-bending story about an elf and a pixie tasked to save Santa and Christmas, while Santa is out on a quest to find Mrs. Claus, who has gotten caught up with the Mob and a raging pixie dust addiction.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?

Definitely not. Drugs, family problems, dropping out of college. There were many deaths of loved ones and acquaintances alike. The fire at my great aunt’s had me traumatized for years. Each bout of ECT shock therapy was in itself terrifying. The burning feeling at the site, the confusion of slipping away from the injection while the muscle paralytic took effect. I’d go black whilst hearing the incessant beat of the heart monitor.

My health has been more of a problem in recent years. On top of my bipolar disorder, I was diagnosed with Grave’s Disease in the 2010’s. I had never even heard of it. But it has affected my body and vision and caused an intolerance of hot and cold that makes attending events difficult. I also have early-onset arthritis. Which doesn’t make typing much fun. But I still get it done, regardless.

The law was a huge speedbump for years. Six years on a three year sentence made me paranoid and distrustful of authorities and others.

Then finally, my own mother’s progressing illness. It took up much of my time these past couple of years.

There is also the isolation of trying to make a name for myself in the social media sphere and locally. So many of my friends have died that it is difficult for me to meet new people and make friends outside of my work life. I find myself in this strange space between anonymity and being a known figure. The universe of the writer is in itself an insular one. I knew that when I was getting into this.

I never let anything stop me. Though it was often up to Sophia, my mom, father and friends like Barnes to keep me going when I lost faith. Which seems to be happening more and more as time
goes on. Whatever happens— I will always be grateful.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?

I am an author and poet: a novelist, social media microinfluencer and performer. As a result of my sound engineering training, my work and performances have a musicality that sets it apart from others.

My writing and poetry is inspired by a life that existed in both plenty and poverty. I lived on a farm and hung out with outsiders and Italian rednecks. Yet I was taught the importance of the classics, of fine art.

I was able to pull myself out of the gutter, get off heroin and have a storied career in writing without the benefit of a degree.

My work possesses a sardonic humor. I find it even in the darkest recesses of humanity. I’m able to take subjects that shouldn’t be funny by any means (addiction, mental illness, homelessness and horror) and inject laugh out loud levity. It was one of my primary coping mechanisms when I was in the thick of it. Like when I was sleeping under the bridge. Or when I was in a “suicide cell” at jail, nude, except for a quilted smock they called a “turtle shell,” with only two bunks for five guys. I slept on the floor surrounded by white supremacists and the ants that infested the cell. Or when I was being led to court, chained to a bunch of criminals, and one really scary guy challenged me to draw something while my hands were chained up. I was usually able to find a laugh somewhere.

I am most proud of my son, my girlfriend my first novel and the over one thousand pages of poetry that has resulted.

I suppose I am most proud of my life. And, with tons of therapy, how I was able to turn it around.

The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?

I learned how fragile life can be. My mother, who was in a very vulnerable state, caught COVID and we attribute it to her final decline. Right up until her death, my poor mom lamented how people should have been more careful about disease transmission and basic hygiene. If only…

I also learned how to extensively build my social media accounts. My Tiktok page went from a hundred or so follows to over six thousand during this period. But I also learned not to get too political, as the China-based Tiktok suspended me for speaking out against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I opted to leave my views to my writing, itself. A “shadow ban” prevented me from reaching others on that platform for a time.

I learned how vital local events and performances were. Once we were allowed back into the public sphere, I did as many shows as I could with Atomic Threads before the demands of approaching parenthood and The Spokane Story diverted my focus elsewhere.

Pricing:

• The Spokane Story 20.00$ plus shipping via Venmo (@PayingManzoni) or Paypal

Contact Info:

• Website: https://spokanearts.org/artists/alexander-antonio-manzoni/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writingmanzoni/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WritingManzoni
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/writingmanzoni
• Twitter: https://x.com/writingmanzoni
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@writingmanzoni
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@writingmanzoni