Make new, restart, ripping up

Hey. You haven’t heard from me yet. I’m a new writer to you. You can call me Kalapani. This summer Diffwys Criafol and I have been writing together in Cardiff, and we discovered something about writing and ourselves. We are intimately learning the true nature of things, obscured by all that neoliberal career climbing discourse; That writing has always been collaborative, and every text ever written was done together. Now, we know we need to work together to help each other. We’re turning this substack into a joint affair, a meeting of both our writings, a collaboration. So a bit about us :

We are two writers who have arrived at taking writing seriously in the past 2 years. Having experienced severe state repression, isolation, and living underclass we have turned to writing as a way to find power and meaning in our experiences. Even though we have had different lives, we both know what it means to be outsiders of our scenes and communities. 

Being anonymous is dangerous for anyone’s sanity. We write because we have to make sure we don’t become disappeared by the state! And because we have seen important truths! On the substack we are going to release everything from thoughts about movies, books, shows to reporting on our local community activities, to fiction and poetry pieces. Even though we both were accepted onto a development programme for writers with Literature Wales we have seen that writing must become free of the pressures and gatekeeping of the mainstream publishing industry. We know that madness and insanity have strong links to the process of writing— this means that we need to learn to create the kinds of bonds that support each other to write without going mad. We are carers who don’t have the privilege to play with insanity. We are dependants who have needed so much help that we know writing to be a material tool. To make our lives better, to set our language down here.

This substack is a place to free our writing practices, and to bring our writing out of the shadows, where we live, into the light of the world!

We are:

against perfectionism  

against the publication norms 

experimenting with cognitive diversity in writing rather than palletising for an imagined neurotypical audience

against sexy novels and bestsellers and booktoks

writing from outside the scene

writing to keep ourselves relevant

friends who love talking

anarchists in forced hiatus

underclass writers who couldn’t keep a job

Writing to become less mentally ill not more

We want to share our:

poetry, nonfiction, reviews, sibling pieces, essays, fiction, responses to our experiences in the publishing world, philosophy, images+writing, journalism

We aim to release writing once a month, but we are ADHD neurodiverse and we will release when we feel ready to release, more regular or less regular than our target, as our lives and mental healths allow.

Hope you’ll be here with us.

Love,

Diffwys Criafol

Kalapani