anarchy at the circle k

Anarchy At The Circle K is literally a punk tour-de-force. An in your face gut-wrenching, and at times humorous, tale of Patrick O’Neil’s stint as a roadie, road manager, and drug addict during punk’s heyday of the 1980’s. Crisscrossing the highways of America, on tour with such influential punk bands as Dead Kennedys, TSOL, Flipper, and Subhumans. O’Neil writes a brutally honest and no holds barred memoir depicting the sleepless nights behind the wheel, never-ending string of decrepit night clubs, a plethora of ruthless promoters, depressing dressing rooms, copious amounts of cheap beer, clandestine drug buys, riotous crowds, intense violence, inadvertent OD’s, and seedy motel one night stands. This book is an insider’s look at life on the road from back in the day and you’re along for the ride.

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Punk Hostage Press
ISBN-10: 1940213207
ISBN-13: 978-1940213200

Gun Needle Spoon

Before his life went totally off the rails, Patrick O’Neil was living the punk rock dream, working at San Francisco’s legendary Mabuhay Gardens, going on to become a roadie and then the road manager for such seminal bands as Dead Kennedys, Flipper, Subhumans, and T.S.O.L. But that was before his heroin addiction veered totally out of control. A junkie for eighteen years, O’Neil, the educated son of intellectuals, eventually turned to a life of crime, ending up the ring-leader of a group of armed bank robbers, all in an increasingly out-of-control attempt to keep himself and his girlfriend in drugs. Now, after a stint in prison and fourteen years clean off drugs, O’Neil takes a look back at the experiences—moving, calamitous, and at times both hilarious and terrifying—that led to his downfall and recovery. Told in sparse prose and graphic detail, GUN NEEDLE SPOON examines the long road to redemption, and the obstacles along the way, demystifying the “criminal life” so often depicted in film and fiction, but seldom written about from the first-hand point of view of those who have lived it.

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Dzanc Books ISBN-10: 1936873575 ISBN-13: 978-1936873579

Hold-Up

“Patrick was a roadie for Dead 
Kennedys and road manager for Flipper, one of the best 
best punk bands of the San Francisco Bay Area. He was a roadie, but mostly he was an addict. Fifteen years later, 
he’s robbing banks and supermarkets, surviving overdoses, and playing Sid & 
Nancy with his girlfriend Jenny… Patrick O’Neil recounts this long journey punctuated 
by lightning discharges of adrenaline. A nightmare-like 
creepy thriller: his life. Brutal!” –– ROLLING STONE (France)

13e Note Editions
Language: French
ISBN-10: 2363740300
ISBN-13: 978-2-36374-030-4

Books on Writing

The Sentences that create us:
Crafting a Writer's life in Prison

The Sentences That Create Us is a comprehensive resource writers can grow with, beginning with the foundations of creative writing. A roster of impressive contributors including Reginald Dwayne Betts (Felon: Poems), Mitchell S. Jackson (Survival Math), Wilbert Rideau (In the Place of Justice), Piper Kerman (Orange is the New Black), Luis J. Rodregez (Always Running), and Patrick O'Neil (Gun, Needle, Spoon), among many others, address working within and around the severe institutional, emotional, psychological and physical limitations of writing prison through compelling first-person narratives. The book’s authors offer pragmatic advice on editing techniques, pathways to publication, writing routines, launching incarcerated-run prison publications and writing groups, lesson plans from prison educators and next-step resources.

Haymarket Books
ISBN-13: 978-1642596540

Writing Your Way to Recovery:
How Stories Can Save Our Lives

Authors James Brown and Patrick O'Neil present an extraordinary collection of personal stories and creative writing exercises designed to help others achieve lasting sobriety. This book provides a vital roadmap to the artistic, personal and spiritual growth to all those battling addiction.

Independent Publisher
ISBN-10: 1736884700
ISBN-13: 978-1736884706

Anthologies

The Addiction Diaries

The Addiction Diaries: Stories of Darkness, Hope and All That Falls in Between is here to remedy that. By turns amusing and insightful, disturbing and illuminating, 18 writers from all socioeconomic levels, races and relationships with addiction share stories that will stay with you long after you read them.

Sensitive Skin Selected writings: 2016-2018

Sensitive Skin Books is proud to present our first writing anthology, Sensitive Skin Selected Writing: 2016-2018, Our (once print, now online only) magazine has been described as “The New Yorker on acid,” and “almost underground.” For almost 30 years, it has featured writing, art and music by artists famous, infamous, unknown and breaking, everybody from William S. Burroughs to Richard Hell to John Lurie to Alex Katz to Eileen Myles to Gary Indiana.

Lunch Ticket Special

2017 marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. We are commemorating this occasion with a special edition of our journal.

Darkness Before Light

12 Writers Share Their Experiences with Overcoming Addiction, Drug Dependency and Alcoholism Robbing banks to feed a heroin habit. Taking acid to get sober. Thinking you’re being asked to park cars while looking for a recovery meeting in India. Darkness Before Light: 12 Writers on Addiction, Sobriety and Recovery is the first volume in a series that will encompass all the shocking, earnest, hilarious and tender moments for people in and around addiction, sobriety and recovery.

How I Got Sober

10 Alcoholics and Addicts Tell Their Personal Stories, Petro and nine other contributors walk readers through the painful, stressful and occasionally hilarious ways they did it. Whether it started with a decision to go on the South Beach Diet (followed by a realization that quitting sugar might be okay but giving up alcohol was out of the question) or a botched bank robbery, the stories are as unique as the drug combinations some of the contributors came up with. Made up of essays culled from the leading addiction and recovery site AfterPartyMagazine

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