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Call for Submissions: MITA’s 2025-2026 Featured Writer Project

Madwomen in the Attic is seeking featured writers for The Featured Writer Project’s 2025-2026 writing year, which will begin in January 2025.

Open reading period: March 1 – June 30, 2024.

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.

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Maria A

 Piece 1:

           If I could travel back in time:

Well…if I could travel back in time, there’s too many things I’d like to do, too many places I’d like to go, too many people I’d like to meet. My dreams go big and avoid the possibility of going back to a time I existed in; are my heart and mind protecting me?

Mexico City, Mexico, 1690: I’d do a prayer with sapphic proto-feminist nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and maybe we could even exchange poetry.

Paris, France, 1794: I’d offer comfort and aid to a depressed, lonely, newcomer to motherhood Mary Wollstonecraft, so maybe she could get some sleep and realize pursuing Imlay was a lost cause.

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Sanai Sudlow

The Role of Eroticism

Last year being called erotic would have been something I would run fast away from. The most exciting part is I do not know why. Maybe I would run in fear that I would be perceived as overly promiscuous. Perhaps I would run because that placed me in another alternative society category. Maybe I would just not want to be that kind of woman. Labeling myself as erotic, in the past, felt like throwing myself into a room of undesirable women and locking the door. I was terrified of being someone no longer desired by a specific demographic I unintentionally tried to remain desirable to. At the time, I didn’t know the world’s true meaning.

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Alison Turner

Temporary Safety

  1.  

“Look at me,” you say, holding out your hands. We are separated by a desk with a high ledge that you put your elbows on before the person in front of you can move her purse. Your hands are swollen and a darker shade from exposure, darkest under the nails. “I need to shower, but they wouldn’t let me yesterday. Look.”

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December Letters Project ~ 2023 Call for OWLS

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 is MITA’s annual local literacy project, but we encourage others to run a December Letters Project in their local communities. The project’s goal is very simple: to send connection, support, and solidarity –in the form of cards and letters– to our neighbors who are in psychiatric institutions during the winter solstice! We do this by making secular but festive cards and letters, with messages of love and encouragement, during the months of November and December, and delivering them to local psychiatric hospitals at the end of December, on or near the solstice. November is the month to prepare for the project, so we invite you to join us in being part of our December Letters Project or to hold a project in your community.

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Shahrzad Sajadi

Safe is Halfway Across the World

“Otaghet boo adam gerefte” (your room smells like human). This is a classic Ariana expression meaning your room is getting stuffy. Before I can sit up on the bed, she walks to the back of the bedroom and opens the room’s only tiny window. “And clean this mess, will you?” pointing to the bedroom floor. We go back and forth between English and Persian.

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Angelina Tang

Art to the Senses

                  Huà ěr meets her at the corner store.

                  She hadn’t intended it, of course. She’d wished only to pick up dinner after work, absentmindedly enjoying the crinkle of saturated, plastic packaging under her fingers. But she is accustomed to the little pains of the world, to catching and picking out injustices; she cannot help but catch the rise of harsh, male voices crowding around the corner of the store, a writhing mass of dissonance that leaves the taste of rubber on her furu-soft tongue.

                  She does not understand the words, and yet the wiry inflections, as flimsy and prickly as the cheap shelves the goods stand upon, make the message clear. Huà ěr would turn tail and run if a man spoke to her with such mocking, such jeering contempt.

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