It’s that time of year: December Letters Project preparation time!
We invite you and/or your families, clubs, organizations, schools, and communities to be part of MITA’s – 2026 – December Letters Project. This is MITA’s annual local literacy project, but we encourage others to run a December Letters Project in their local communities if you’re not local to the greater western New York region.
Continue reading “December Letters Project 2026”
The Madwoman in the Attic
(for Sue)
I am the madwoman in the attic.
A psychic cancer dwells deep in me
and I am unable to control its preying tentacles
which creep and crawl through my mind’s dark passages.
Continue reading “Sandy Jeffs”
Reflections on a Mad Course
On the first day of the second semester, I remember it being extremely cold outside, which heightened my anxiety around meeting my last class of the day. Up until this point, I had only ever taught writing courses to first-year and upper-class students. These students were going to be different. The majority of them would be English majors, and by default, would be looking forward to the content. Maybe, I thought. Once I entered the room, I let out a half smile as I noticed all 20 students. I was met by many with the same kind of half smile.
Continue reading “Javiera Green”
Love among Survivors: Bastille Day 2014 (July 13-16)
Day two, Tuesday, begins overcast and noisy. The racket from the various kinds of traffic on Holland Avenue is getting in my skull and rattling around with the voices that have recently rejoined me from the ward, the clinic and the root cellar. I stayed up all night with activists Kathy, Lauren and George, holding the vigil for those who have been killed, incarcerated, incapacitated and silenced by psychiatry. I walk up the street to the hotel where the other vigil participants are staying, and slide into my psychiatric patient mind. The voices are too loud. The traffic is too close. God, I need some pills. Can I get off the street before someone notices that I need to be locked up?
Continue reading “Sharon Jean Cretsinger”
I Keep Sitting In The Madhouse / Yearning For / A Mad Transsexual Witchspell
– Abigail Silversmith Irfan
I Keep Sitting In The Madhouse
Here in the bed I was tied to before,
I sit,
thinking of possibilities we hold –
us and our mad kin.
The world takes holding away from our bodies and make them fall.
Nobody yearns for tartarus.
Continue reading “Abigail Silversmith Irfan “
The Pill
She is small and elongated – capsule couching the deep-seated hurricanes of your heart. She hails from medicine mothers and Martians alike, feels like beads of a rosary at your fingertips.
She is split into two colors. One half is orange and the other is white – two halves of your fractured whole.
She is centuries of claims for happiness and how this can all go away if you just followed the right instructions. She means you sought professional help (despite being a problematic professional yourself).
She is pink. She is red or blue. Your colorblind lover asks which of her you placed into your mouth. You swallow before answering.
Continue reading “Alyza Taguilaso”
A New Holiday Outfit
Thanksgiving is tomorrow and none of my clothes fit me. After eight years of being together, my partner and I took that big step and finally moved in together, bringing our clothes, furniture, cat, and love to a cozy one-bedroom apartment in Astoria. Cozy is the key word here- the apartment is nestled on the main street of a bustling but quaint area of Queens, catering to both his need for quiet, and also my desires for things to do and people to see. For the past few months, we have been busy at work, making it “home” deciding whose couch fit best (his- no question), what types of curtains to purchase (I wanted delicate lace, but compromised for something a little more sturdy and private), and constantly battling and making up over things like how to clean the kitchen, where to put the litter box, and how much space my art supplies should occupy. (We almost did not recover when he threw out a seemingly random piece of paper, which was, in reality, a treasured piece of ephemera that I sought to re-purpose later. Of course, once I discovered that it was gone, it was my most treasured piece of scrap paper ever).
Continue reading “Maria Guarino”
Madwomen in the Attic is seeking featured writers for The Featured Writer Project’s 2027-2028 writing year, which will begin in January 2027.
This is a non-competitive call for submissions, open to writers from any location across the globe; all who wish to be featured writers and who fulfill the submission guidelines will be included in this project and archive. MITA seeks to offer a space in which veteran writers write alongside novice writers as a form of literacy and advocacy to dismantle stigma and support gender-marginalized people affected by the mental health system, trauma, and stigma. The project features women and other gender-marginalized writers and artists who have been affected by the mental health system, psychiatric diagnostic or other mad-related stigmatizing labels, trauma, or forms of societal oppression that have been othering or alienating.
Continue reading “Call for Submissions: MITA’s 2027-2028 Featured Writer Project”
through time as
I lay thinking always
remembering
how this crap shoot of life
crushed my dreams spinning
me into an unlikely comedy
Continue reading “Joan McNerney”
Excerpt from the work-in-progress manuscript The Hollow and the Light
I could imagine a million gardens and libraries—perfect places that held magic in the air. But the beast still loomed.
Continue reading “H.R. Gordon”
