“Did you two ever connect?” the message read. I was sitting in an ordinary restaurant with my ordinary family eating an ordinary meal, and “Ding!” went the phone. “Did you two ever connect?”
Continue reading “Kelly Price”Kelly Price
G.B. Lindsey
Look Up An Inch
Climbing out, it turns out, is much the same as falling in. The pit has insidious walls. They reverberate like plucked piano wires. Every minute is a sound, and every minute that hits them bounces back, resounds and resounds until that minute, that moment, that second becomes endless, infinite. Each echo darkens the dark, and each sickly, sickening thought that you beg not to think glares brighter and brighter until it rewrites itself against the flesh of your brain. Until it blinds utterly.
Continue reading “G.B. Lindsey”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. 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 women and queer people. MITA, as an organization, acknowledges equality and celebrates neurodiversity. MITA’s featured writers are not simply writing to showcase their work– they are also writing as a form of advocacy or activism – to self-consciously be part of building an archive and legacy for women and gender-non-conforming people who have been affected by the mental healthcare system, mental illness diagnostic labels, trauma, disability, or emotional distress. More information on the project and its goals is available on our FAQ page.
Continue reading “Call for Featured Writers for the 2022 – 2023 Year”
Lolo W
puddle kingdom
A little monster clogged my drain
Forced its mouth to bend
Space
Continue reading “Lolo W”Joni Ravenna
BEETHOVEN AND MISFORTUNE COOKIES
Based on the true life story of Kabin Thomas
Written by Joni Ravenna
TRT: 60:00 (may run straight or with intermission)
In 2006, Kabin Thomas – a 43 year-old, black Music Appreciation Professor at The University of Arkansas whose classes all had wait lists and a 90% attendance record – was fired after a white student complained about the use of profanity and a graphic image depicting a lynching in one of his lessons. This is the story of how he lost himself and then found his way back.
Continue reading “Joni Ravenna”Gwendolyn Harper
Sleep of Waking
I tire of sleeping
And yet all around are the somnolent
The unconscious
The dreaming
The listless and stirring
Continue reading “Gwendolyn Harper”Nicole Luongo
The Becoming is a brutal account of mental illness by a woman who doesn’t believe in mental illness. A lifetime of addiction, eating disorders, and trauma culminates explosively after the author begins a PhD at the University of Oxford, and while in hospital she is liberated through psychosis. Her journey from terror to self-acceptance is grueling, and she makes meaning of it by weaving reflexive narrative with classic and nascent scholarship. Part phenomenological recounting, part social critique, the text disrupts bio-medical approaches to altered states by exploring their emancipatory potential. It also illuminates how conventional mental health treatment pathologizes human suffering. In doing so, The Becoming contributes to anti-psychiatry and Mad studies projects, each of which asks, “what does it mean to be sane?”
Continue reading “Nicole Luongo”Shaneisha Dodson
Vagina Rights
A Set of Monologues by Shaneisha Dodson
Cast of Characters
KENYA: African American female, fighting against genial mutilation.
JUDY: Any race, female. Transgender. Big personality.
SANDRA: Any race, fighting against sex trafficking.
LAURA: Any race, female. Victim of domestic violence.
MONICA: Any race, female. HIV positive.
ESTELLE: Any race, female. Secretly suffering from depression.
Continue reading “Shaneisha Dodson”Eliah Lüthi
Poems translated from German based on an audio-interpretation by Tanja Barbian, http://www.englisch-dolmetschen.de.
– I –
Many years ago, I told you:
I told you of wondering creatures
that wander, full of wonder
through my worlds.
Worlds, which make me wide
and draw my nights in magic lights.
Continue reading “Eliah Lüthi”