For You
You told we are beyond any boundaries
I traversed and transgressed every boundary
For you
When I asked you do the same
You want to limit in your limits
And started hurling loaded words
Trust, honesty. . .
Continue reading “Pulkita Anand”
Madwomen in the Attic is excited about the publication of “Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art,” forthcoming from Vernon Press (2022). One of its editors is MITA co-founder Jessica Lowell Mason and its other editor is MITA member and featured writer, Nicole Crevar.
There is certainly a need for more books on madness and mental healthcare written by and for people whose bodies and life trajectories have been directly affected by mental healthcare systems and practices, and this is one book that affirms Mad people and people affected by the mental health systems as knowers and producers of historical, theoretical, social, creative, and other knowledges on the subjects of consciousness, the mind, madness, mental health, and psychic and bodily existence.
Continue reading “Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art”
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 annual December Letters Project. This year, we are sending out our announcement early so that you will be able to join us in holding a December Letters Project card-drive in your local area or participating in ours!
Continue reading “December Letters Project ~ 2022 Call For OWLS”
I Collected Four Pall Bearers Along the Way
1: The Notifying Officer
Estranged is an elegant word for a particular brutality. My family is sick with it. My brother died within the immurement of many estrangements: from me, from our bad father, from our mother, from (presumably) friends and old lovers. Meaning, he died alone. “Unattended” is the word the very gentle sheriff used when he broke the news to me a full country away from that brother, away from his body that was now in need of a next of kin. We don’t discuss how or why my brother was not in possession of a next of kin during the last moments of his life nor in the many days he waited after death for neighbors to summon a clean-up crew.
Continue reading “Deb Rogers”
In Memoriam
September 30, 2021
Four months ago, my partner and I broke up.
We were together for six years. We met during our first year in graduate school. We clung to each other like lost children. We had sex the first time we kissed. Twenty-four hours later, they told me I was the one. I was the one for years. The one who got lost in a department store in New Jersey. The one who was bullied for being Asian. The one with the traumatic memories. The one who almost made their mother faint with their difficultness.
Continue reading “MT Vallarta”
And a Cherry on Top
It was a brisk January day, the sun was bright and shining. It was the kind of day when I look out the window and the sun convinces me Spring has come early, I go outside and then have to immediately zip my jacket all the way up, pull my collar high around my neck and shove my ungloved hands into my pockets: ridiculing myself for being naïve.
Continue reading “Diane Renee Tomasi”
“Why Do We Whisper Our Stories?”: Disability Frameworks and Multiply Marginalized Subjects
I start this essay with the question posed by Jennifer Eisenhauer (2010) in their article “Writing Dora: Creating Community Through Autobiographical Zines about Mental Illness”: Why do we whisper our stories? They propose this question in response to a student with a mental health disability who approached Eisenhauer after class, speaking of her hospitalization in hushed tones. Those hushed tones address the shame, invisibility, and silence suffered by neurodivergent people in the quiet, in the dark, in the back, unseen, and rarely heard in their own voices. I begin my writing with this quote because my own silences about my personal experiences as a neurodivergent person have come to their limit and I am now in the place where I choose to speak louder, to articulate more of my truth. Why do we whisper our stories? Because we are shamed by the normative, ablebodied world to the madnesses we inhabit.
Continue reading “Glynnis Reed-Conway”
what a diagnosis is
a way to justify a pill prescription,
a dull tool,
one doctor’s opinion,
an idea we can ponder
in the isolation room,
Ally’s Party
Continue reading “A. Whittenberg”
The Woman Who Wasn’t There
In a moment of despair,
I killed the man I could not scare
I killed the man I could not bear
I killed the man who wasn’t there
Continue reading “J.D. Harlock”
Madwomen in the Attic 