Tag: disability

Memoirs In The Attic: A Workshop In Honor of and with Thanks to Debra Shulkes

Madwomen in the Attic and Herstory Writers Network, in Memory of Debra Shulkes, Present:

Memoirs in the Attic

A Free Public Writing Workshop Held Virtually

Fridays, 1:30 – 3:30 PM EST

*Except on occasion, when the workshop day will be moved to held on a Monday night or Sunday afternoon, instead of on Friday, for those who cannot attend on Fridays

Beginning April 17th, 2026

A partnership between Madwomen in the Attic and Herstory Writers Network, Memoirs in the Attic is an ongoing, free-to-the-public weekly online memoir workshop offered in memory of and with thanks to Madwomen in the Attic member Debra Shulkes (1975-2022). The workshop invites people who have had personal experience with carceral mental healthcare systems and institutions or with psychiatric treatment and diagnoses to come together to craft memoirs from and through the walls of the proverbial attic. The workshop explores Mad counter-narrativity in and through the genre of memoir with those who identify as Mad, psychiatric survivors, psychiatric consumers, neurodivergent, or in other self-defining ways in relation to or rejection of psychiatric discourses and apparatuses. In the 2015 collection Madness, Distress, and the Politics of Disablement, the late human rights and psych survivor advocate Debra Shulkes put forth an intention of “imagining communities that value and fully respect the rights of people who experience madness and distress.”  This workshop aims to do just that by bridging the Herstory method with Mad feminist praxis in order to familiarize writers with Herstory storytelling methods of memoir-writing in a space that is Mad-affirming and that aims to be anti-carceral, anti-racist, human rights-driven, needs accommodating, differences-respecting, and caring. In Memoirs in the Attic, we shape stories that are personal-agenda-driven and that combat institutional violence, social injustice,  and discrimination through the power of Mad storytelling to change hearts, minds, and policies where consciousness, behavior, and our psychic, social, and bodily realities are concerned. We invite people affected by mental health systems, psychiatric diagnosis, social stigma, and psychiatric biomedical violence to use the power of their voice to do healing work, to share wisdom, to speak back to systems of power, to challenge harmful ideologies, and to create Mad-positive futurities. To register for this free virtual workshop, please send a message of inquiry to workshop facilitator Jessica Lowell Mason (she/her) at madwomenofwny@gmail.com,  including some information about yourself and your interest in the workshop.

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Hearing Feminist Voices: Writing with Feminist Theorists MWC Workshop Series 1

Hearing Feminist Voices: Writing with Feminist Theorists, Series 1 (2026 – 2027)

In Hearing Feminist Voices: Writing with Feminist Theorists, we will write together in conversation with feminist theorists and consider how creative writing is a space for the making of Mad feminist theory. In this workshop series, we will write with feminist theory by hearing the voices of feminist theorists as a Mad feminist practice and by considering selected ideas from feminist theory as we write through theory and consider together how our writing practices are forms of and informed by feminist theory – ultimately, shaping feminist theories through our writing by hearing these voices,  calling them from the past to the present and into future. We will dive into writing our way through questions of selfhood, experience, suffering, strength, power, and joy by turning to feminist theorists and writing through fragments of their theoretical lenses, which can act as prompts and inspiration for us to think and write together. ‘Writing into theory’ is a practice feminist writers have been engaging in for more than a century. By hearing feminist voices, we will explore and write through the feminist theoretical constructs of writers such as bell hooks, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Sonia Sanchez, bell hooks, and others. In this Hearing Feminist Voices: Writing with Feminist Theorists series of workshops, we will write with some of the great feminist genre-changers, exploring what it means for a writer to create new knowledge by doing that very thing. The Mad Collective will be the first to experience and, therefore, to shape this workshop series, which will eventually be offered to others, in the form of workshops and courses. 

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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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Mad Feminist Activism in the Global Feminist Movement

A Mad Feminist Dialogue for a Mad Archive: “Mad Feminist Activism in the Global Feminist Movement: A Dialogue on and of Dissent”

This event was part of the 7th Biennial Seneca Falls Dialogues, in 2020, hosted by the Women’s Institute for Leadership and Learning. The dialogue brought together mad activists and scholars to discuss old and new directions in Mad feminist activism and to consider mad activism’s role in a larger feminist agenda. It will also touched on the rights and positionality of women, Black and Indigenous People of Color, and LGBTQ+ folx living with psychiatric labels or who have had psychiatric experiences, and those fighting for their rights from unique locations within larger social justice efforts. The dialogue considered non-normative activism and elicited discourse on what mad feminist activism has been and is becoming, considering the ways that mad feminist activism has dealt with and deals with identity, erased histories, and contested activist and advocacy tendencies and trajectories. By exchanging ideas and sharing experiences on mad feminist activism, our hope was that our dialogue would serve as a moment of mad grassroots organizing.

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Bonnie Henderson Schell

That’s It

By Bonnie Henderson Schell

Strange things were happening to me, and I was scared. I knew that I had developed tardive dyskinesia and torticollis. The skin around my lips was chapped because my tongue hung out of my mouth, making a circle, licking my lips. I drooled all night on my pillow and down the front of my clothes. It was difficult not to walk to the left because lately my neck and body were painfully twisted in that direction so that the necklines of my sweaters and tunics fell off my left shoulder. I had stopped going to lunch with anyone and turned down phone calls using Facetime. I avoided the mirror over the sink.

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Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art

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.

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Glynnis Reed-Conway

“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. 

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Call for Featured Writers for the 2022 – 2023 Year

Madwomen in the Attic is seeking featured writers for The Featured Writer Project’s 2022-2023 writing year, which will begin in January 2022.

Open reading period: August – October 31, 2021. We feature women and gender-non-conforming writers and artists.

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.

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