Lindsay Kent: Who Owns Your Mind?

Please join us on Friday, June 19th at 6:30pm for an evening with Lindsay Kent...

Who Owns Your Mind?
Psychedelics, Power, and the Stories That Shape Reality

Who controls the story of the psychedelic experience—and why does that matter now? In this immersive talk, reading, and film presentation, award-winning filmmaker and novelist Lindsay Kent traces the strange American lineage connecting CIA experimentation, Bay Area counterculture, moral panic, and today’s rapidly institutionalizing psychedelic renaissance. Featuring a film excerpt from Going Furthur alongside readings from My Twin the Murderer—Kent's debut psychological thriller exploring fractured identity, paranoia, and manipulated perception—the event moves through the hidden history of Ken Kesey’s MKUltra involvement, the Acid Tests, and the backlash that followed LSD’s criminalization.

Blending literary suspense, underground history, and contemporary cultural criticism, Kent examines how narratives around psychedelics have been shaped, constrained, and repackaged across generations. At stake is a larger question: who gets to define consciousness itself? In an era of cognitive enhancement, algorithmic persuasion, and corporate psychedelic medicine, this event asks whether the forces once associated with mind control ever truly disappeared—or simply evolved into subtler forms. Part lecture, part live reading, part cultural excavation, this is not a nostalgia trip for the psychedelic past, but an inquiry into who will shape the future of the human mind.

ABOUT THE BOOK 

Neuroscientist Evelyn Malcolm is this close to curing Alzheimer’s when she’s arrested—alongside her twin, Vivian, a troubled writer and addict—for the murder of Ben O’Neill, Evelyn’s secret lover and Vivian’s former mark. Their DNA ties them to the scene, and Evelyn, long used to cleaning up her sister’s messes, is sure Vivian’s guilty.

Things spiral when the sisters are abducted from the precinct by a madman brewing black-market psychedelics—but the attack is no random act. After escaping, they turn to Vivian’s underground ties for answers, only to uncover a chilling truth: Ben and their father were part of a CIA mind control program, and now a former test subject—turned drug queenpin—is using Evelyn’s corrupted formula to unleash chaos on the city.

To stop her and clear their names, the twins must navigate a hallucinogenic underworld and unravel the secrets of their past. But their fragile bond fractures under the weight of guilt, betrayal, and buried trauma. Evelyn has always feared Vivian’s recklessness—but now she wonders if the real danger isn’t her sister… but something inside herself.

Lindsay Kent, aka The Hallucinarrator, is an award-winning filmmaker turned fiction writer whose work explores the luminous edges of consciousness and psychedelics. Her films include the 2014 documentary Going Furthur, retracing the arc of MKUltra and America’s counterculture;  the Gaia docuseries Plant Medicine, set at an Ayahuasca retreat center in Costa Rica; and the acclaimed comedy short The Split, about life with (and without) an ego. 

Now returned to her first love—fiction—Kent blends a filmmaker’s eye with a psychonaut’s curiosity, blurring the boundaries between science and spirit, cinema and literature. Her debut psychedelic thriller, MY TWIN THE MURDERER, the first installment in a new novel series, is out June 20, 2026.

Across mediums, her work shares a singular aim: to bridge reality and the beyond through stories that are accessible, entertaining and transformative. More at TheHallucinarrator.com.

Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature presents writers, authors and poets, while giving back to the creative community and to our neighbors. (https://telhilit.org)