Preorder "Up:Rising: A Collection of Rebellious Imaginings From Authors With Lived Experiences of Mental Health & Addiction" (Patreon)

Up:Rising is an unapologetic chorus of Mad voices that refuse to conform or cower in the shadows. It was born from a collaboration between two organizations rooted in community care:  Workman Arts, a multidisciplinary arts organization supporting artists with lived experience of mental health and/or addictions; and Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.

From the Editors: We invited writers with lived experience of mental health and/or addiction issues from across Canada to send us their stories, poems, daydreams, imaginings, and manifestos around all the things it can mean to rebel. 

What we received exceeded our expectations. While some pieces whisper rebellion through quiet acts of survival, others rage loudly against psychiatric incarceration, systemic violence, and various forms of injustice. Many of the pieces stare you defiantly in the eye while rupturing sanist stereotypes. They subvert genre. They challenge traditional literary structures. They dare to crip time and space, to be nonlinear. Some pieces queer what healing means and turn the notion of recovery on its head until it is too dizzy to stand. None of these works follow a straight path. They all twist and tangle into a messy but bold collection of rebellious imaginings. This collection isn’t about overcoming madness, it’s about thriving with our madness, fully and fiercely, on our own terms. 

Featuring both new and established writers, this diverse collection of short stories and poems shatters stereotypes of mental health and addiction in a miasma of razor shards as glitteringly beautiful as they are piercing. In these pages, the self is dissolved and re-made; reality is pulled from its moorings and turned inside out; and the human spirit, even in its most brutalized states, stops at nothing to find beauty in the fractures of a hostile world.

If you’re ordering from Canada, then please visit our Canadian partner for this project, Ratti Incantati for more reasonable shipping options than we can provide.