Oppression for the Heaven of It

Oppression for the Heaven of It is a dialogue-driven novel about a son and a mother. The novel is drawn from the author's experience as the mother of a painter who lived his adult life with paranoid schizophrenia and died in 2015. Proceeds from the book are donated to the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care.

The protagonist is Moonway, an orphan in conversation with the mother who is also the novel's named writer. The structure is the conversation itself: the book runs as sustained exchange, the form of two people trying to reach each other across an exile that neither has agreed to.

The 2013 Patchen judge, Harold Jaffe, named first what is rarest about the book: that it addresses schizophrenia from the subject position, not the observer's, and addresses it frankly. Oppression for the Heaven of It won the 2013 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, recognized for the rarity of that subject-position address and for the frankness with which the conversation form holds it.