Up:Rising - A Collection of Rebellious Imaginings From Authors With Lived Experience of Mental Health & Addictions
For the second time in over three decades of supporting artists living with mental health issues and/or addictions, Workman Arts in collaboration with Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness is publishing a print literary anthology – forthcoming in November 2025. That’s big news!
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, a collectively-run publisher of radical culture grounded in anarchist ideals. 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.
Meet The Editors
Kelly Rose Pflug-Back
Kelly Rose Pflug-Back is a writer and creative writing workshop facilitator. Her fiction, poetry, and journalism has appeared recently in publications like The Briarpatch, The Deadlands, and This Magazine, as well as anthologies such as Queer Little Nightmares (Arsenal Pulp, 2022) and Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (ChiZine, 2012) . Their debut collection of poems, The Hammer of Witches (Caitlin Press/Dagger Editions, 2020), recently placed as a finalist in the upcoming Bisexual Book Awards.
Hanan Hazime
Hanan Hazime is a multidisciplinary artist, creative writer, community arts educator and, creative writing instructor. She has a Master of Arts degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor. Hanan’s writing has appeared in a number of publications including The Windsor Review, Feckless C*nts: An Anthology of Feminist Writing, and on CBC Arts. Her poetry chapbook Aorta was published by ZED Press in 2018. Hanan is one of the co-editors of the anthology Muslim American Writers at Home (Freedom Voices Publications, 2021). She is also a former editorial assistant for Rampike Magazine. Currently, Hanan is the Education Manager at Workman Arts.
Teyama Alkamli
Teyama Alkamli is an award-winning Syrian filmmaker based in Toronto. Her visually tender and deeply human work deals predominantly with issues of identity, sexuality, displacement and migration. She is an alumna of DocNomads, the European Mobile Film School, Hot Docs Emerging Filmmaker Lab, TIFF Writers’ Studio, and the Canadian Film Centre’s Director Lab.
In 2021 Teyama’s mid-length documentary, Hockey Mom, won a Canadian Screen Award for Best Documentary Program. Her films have screened worldwide at festivals such as TIFF, Berlinale, and Doc Lisboa.
