Tag: writer

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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Tiara Raven Marie Clover

Blood for Water: Hands

I could begin with how I often lay in bed thinking about the blood running down my arms while looking out at the flowers from my window. I could trace my laying out to the fact that we don’t talk about Jerry. Jerry, who supposedly was cleaning his gun in the laundry room and the gun went off.  I could talk about the ways the story changes over time from person to person.

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Arianna Taylor

Mary

I stopped believing in Omma’s God the day she covered herself in plastic wrap. When I was younger, Dad used to pick me up from middle school around three in the afternoon, his poorly hidden shooter bottles laying across the floor of the backseat. His breath was hot and his cadence mean—I did not talk to Dad, then. We only yelled. Screamed loud enough until one of us cried—who would break first? Me, knowing this, and him, desperate to drink, would both coalesce rather simply to the idea of dropping me off at Omma’s after school, leaving him to do God knows what with the drug dealers that lived further down on Fulton. Just seven houses down and he’d get his fix. Only had to figure out what to do with me, first. The only issue was that Omma, at that time, had fallen quite far off of the wagon. In fact, I recall thinking that a wagon wasn’t high enough. That it would make more sense to say she fell off a very high trampoline, or a cliffside, perhaps a telephone pole or even heaven. Gracefulness never had less of a place than with her during my sixth, seventh and eighth grade school years.

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Nancy Jensen

The Room

I am alone in the Room.  It has dirty old orange shag carpet on the floor and no furniture except a trash can.  The windows are boarded up so you can only see treetops and sky at the top.  On the other side of the Room are French doors, also all boarded up.  A person standing on the other side of the French doors would not be able to tell that there is a Room beyond those doors.  In the Room a light bulb hangs down from a cord, but the control switch to turn the light on or off is not in the Room.

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Fanney Björk Ingólfsdóttir

Fragments of a Story

1.

It‘s hard for me to describe my surroundings. Maybe because I just keep looking down at my hands or maybe because the tears are blurring my vision. I can clearly make out my mother’s voice. How stern it is, rough as always when she is giving someone a piece of her mind. But at the same time there is a tremble in it now, a nervous vibration that I have not heard before. Almost as if the sternness is breakable, at the verge of shattering at any moment.

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Sara Hobler

The following poems are from Sara Hobler’s poetry collection, E=MC^2.

Holy Lunch

Chief complaints are boredom and back pain

And Hunger, puts the body under a strain

Hungry makes arthritis hard to ignore

They weren’t lying when they said it keeps the score of your life and mentality

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Beth Sheeran

Sonnet 43

I begged them for the tools to move in with you

I promised to tear down the shack called medicine falling down on you

I wanted my hands to blister and age and wrinkle putting up new walls to cover you

I wanted to bring you wildflowers in the morning to enjoy with your coffee and greet you with a smile

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Sofia Stremlin-Adams

Maed

At five years old I had an impressive resume: aspiring coven leader, professional frog wrangler, and avid Michael Jackson fan. Absent from my curious resume was the ability to spell my own name. Even though I would be repeating kindergarten in the fall as a result of my creative spelling, I was in no hurry to uncover what seemed like an impossible cipher.

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