Tag: feminism

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.

Continue reading “Memoirs In The Attic: A Workshop In Honor of and with Thanks to Debra Shulkes” →
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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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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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Patricia Del Rosario

Boxing Fight

The opposing fighter was tall and long, at least for a 141 lb. I thought cutting the 15 pounds this past week would give me an advantage making me bigger than my opponent, but this guy was much bigger than I had anticipated. I took a deep breath in. My head felt light. Cutting that weight had taken its toll but there was no turning back. My opponent was in front of me, and I had no choice but to vanquish them.

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A Book Reception for Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art

This month, the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo hosted a book reception for “Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art” (Vernon Press), co-edited by Jessica Lowell Mason (MITA’s co-founder) and Nicole Crevar. The reception was held held at UB in Clemens Hall, North Campus, on March 15, 2023.

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Angelina Pacholczak

A Queer Feminist Ethics of Eros 

A Chapbook of Feminist Poems 

The following works inspired this chapbook of poems: Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis and Action by S. Lamble, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action by Audre Lorde, Are the Lips a Grave? by Lynne Huffer, Educating a Women: A Feminist Agenda by bell hooks, and Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (“Towards a New Consciousness“) by Gloria Anzaldúa.

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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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Jarrah Hodge

Eulogy for the Green-Skinned Space Babe

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Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

– Shakespeare (1606), Marta (2268)

We still don’t know exactly why they sent Marta to the asylum. Continue reading “Jarrah Hodge” →

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Liza Mohr

“If the right to speak, if having credibility, if being heard is a kind of wealth, that wealth is now being redistributed. There has long been an elite with audibility and credibility, an underclass of the voiceless. As the wealth is redistributed, the stunned incomprehension of the elites erupts over and over again, a fury and disbelief that this woman or child dared to speak up, that people deigned to believe her, that her voice counts for something, that her truth may end a powerful man’s reign. These voices, heard, upend power relations.”

– Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions

I said something.  It took over twenty years. Continue reading “Liza Mohr” →

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