Temporary Safety
“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.”
Continue reading “Alison Turner”
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.
Continue reading “December Letters Project ~ 2023 Call for OWLS”
The Love of This Heart Once Chosen
Life has a funny way of bringing up things long buried or lost at sea. Material or memory, there are feelings, moments, loves, and losses that make the best and worst of us. Rarely named, they are often our most unspoken truths.
Continue reading “Articulate Heart”
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.
Continue reading “Angelina Tang”
This workshop pilot invites people who have experienced involuntary institutionalization or had carceral experiences within psychiatry and the mental health system to participate in a series of four memoir-writing workshops on the subject of psychiatric incarceration. Historically, the bodies and voices of those who have experienced institutionalization have been restrained, contained, and silenced. During the workshop series, we will aim to make our voices heard through the proverbial and literal walls of the institution by shaping memoirs about psychiatric incarceration that aim to dismantle social stigma, pathologization, and criminalization by writing agenda-driven narratives that evoke understanding and empathy, in an effort to reclaim autonomy over our bodies and selves and amplify our voices.
Continue reading “Shouting Through the Walls: Memoirs of Psychiatric Incarceration”
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.
Continue reading “Patricia Del Rosario”
In Walked Mania by Another Name… (and It wasn’t Bud)
I always told myself, “If I could just finish college.” Then, “If I could just move.” And then finally, “If I could just find a job in my major and work.” The voices would stop then. But they didn’t. I finally had to admit to myself this was a for-real lifelong struggle. I wasn’t ready to handle that, and death was my contingency plan.
Continue reading “Jacquese Armstrong”
Child Witch
Summer of 1975. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was released. Elton John’s Philadelphia Freedom manned the top of the Billboard Charts. Michigander Gerald Ford was president, succeeding Watergate- disgraced Richard Nixon. My favorite jeans were vertically striped in white, yellow, green and brown.
It wasn’t Levittown, but it was similar. Livonia was a once new-ring suburb of Detroit, where I was born. Our little burg was called Devonaire Woods and carpeted with post WWII brick ranch homes. All were designed and built alike: three bedrooms, one bath, living room, kitchen and basement. If kids visited someone else’s house, you didn’t need to ask where the bathroom was.
Continue reading “Gina Fournier”
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.
Continue reading “A Book Reception for Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art”
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.
Continue reading “Angelina Pacholczak”
Madwomen in the Attic 