Cutting Up the Mind

Writing as Rebellion and Creating as Healing

Few writers have shaped the 20th century as subtly and profoundly as William S. Burroughs.

His art—born from

addiction,

despair,

and a relentless pursuit of freedom—

transformed literature, pop culture, and the way we think about language itself.

But Burroughs wasn’t just a writer. He was a linguistic saboteur, an outlaw, a junkie, a con man, a crook, and a visionary. He was a force.

He saw words as weapons—not just tools of expression, but tools of control, wielded by governments, media, and institutions to keep us asleep. His mission? To wake us up. To teach us how to fight back. His radical methods—cut-ups, collage, fragmentation, literary sabotage—weren’t just artistic experiments. They were acts of liberation.

His art inspired Bowie, Patti Smith, Kurt Cobain, Anthony Bourdain and countless others—and I think you’ll find it inspirational too.

That’s what we got into in this week’s Creators Podcast—a deep dive into Burroughs’ world and the way he hacked language itself to rewrite reality.

We talked about:

🔹 Burroughs life and the pivotal events that shaped him.

🔹 His thoughts about how language is a virus, infecting our thoughts, shaping our perceptions before we even think for ourselves
🔹 The cut-up technique—a radical way of breaking conditioned thought by scrambling and reassembling words
🔹 Why Burroughs saw control not as oppression, but as repetition—the hypnotic loops of politics, media, and culture
🔹 How writing can be an act of rebellion, a way to unshackle ourselves from the scripts we’ve been given
🔹 How friendship and community become a sustainable feast—allowing us to live fully in the face of tragedy.

The full episode is live now—listen here

AND…

if you’re ready to go deeper, to not just talk about Burroughs but use his techniques to unleash your most creative and poetic self, I’m teaching a live class tomorrow—Sunday, January 19 at 10 AM PST (and by signing up for this class-you get the whole month—a TOTAL of 3 classes!!!)

This will be creativity as sabotage—a way of hacking reality, of breaking through the words that have been controlling you. This won’t be clean. It won’t be easy. It will be disjointed, raw, hallucinatory—and that’s exactly the point.

This class is all about taking our pain, our brokenness, and re-writing the story, flipping the script—and finding a way through for deep healing.

Burroughs knew that reality isn’t fixed—it’s written, edited, revised. And if someone else is writing it for you, you’re trapped in a story you didn’t choose.

So let’s cut it up.
Let’s find what’s hiding between the lines.
Let’s write our way out.

I hope to see YOU tomorrow!

Rainier