​This free event offers a unique opportunity to engage in meaningful Q&A with the creators. Celebrate resilience, community, and visibility with us as we amplify marginalized voices through storytelling.

​Featuring Vol.7 Contributors:

• ​Carol Krause

• ​Kay Kassirer (featured poet)

• ​Jordan Prochnow

• ​Brittany Brewer

• ​Clarissa Pulotu

​This event replay is free. Your donation helps us in our advocacy for health equity. Consider supporting the magazine on Kofi.

Read Kay Kassirer’s poems “performing my pain” and “I wipe the condensation off the mirror and my mother’s face stares back at me” inside Vol.7.

Get your copy by clicking the image below!

Q&A

Is there any standard publishing or creative advice that you disagree with? Or any standard advice that you feel is too often neglected?

I disagree with the advice that you should establish a routine of writing every day in order to build a creative practice or move through writer’s block. For some people this is helpful advice, but I know that for me the pressure of feeling like I need to be creating can reinforce the feelings of stuckness. I’m currently writing the first draft of a manuscript of poetry, and thanks to grant funding I have a set deadline that the draft needs to be finished by. I find looming deadlines like this fairly daunting and I’ve found that what helps the most when I’m in periods of writer’s block is giving myself a week or two where I don’t need to make any progress on the book. This releases the pressure that can build up, and I often find these periods really fruitful even if I’m not writing or editing. There’s more space for me to really sit with and think through different ideas when I’m not trying to force those ideas onto the page before they are ready.

How do you come up with ideas for your work?

The manuscript I’m currently writing focuses on grief, disability/illness, and distrust of the medical system. The poems largely focus on my mother’s death and juxtapose our illnesses and the ways we have and have not accessed care for them. Recently I’ve been in research mode, and as someone with a terrible memory I’ve been surprised by what I’ve been able to learn. I’ve been going through my mother’s facebook messages, her and my medical documents, emails, and anything else I can get my hands on. This research has not only given me ideas for individual poems, but has also changed the structure and themes of the manuscript as a whole.

Describe your ideal reader/viewer/listener:

When I first started working on my manuscript, I spent some time thinking about who my ideal audience would be, who I want to be speaking to as I write. And while I did come up with certain groups and communities that my book will likely resonate with more, I realized that it’s also really important for me that my work is able to land with folks who haven’t been exposed to these groups or communities. My poems about navigating the medical system are both for disabled folks who might feel less alone in their rage, as well as people who might have never considered how inaccessible medical treatment often is. My poems about sex work are both for sex workers as well as people who have never heard anyone openly talk about being a sex worker before. I believe that poetry can connect people across differences in lived experience, carrying stories and perspectives that are often excluded from mainstream media to people who have never heard them before.

Kay Kassirer (they/them) is a white queer spoken word poet and community organizer living on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations - colonially known as Vancouver. Kay has toured internationally with their autobiographical poetry, exploring themes of grief, disability, and sexuality. They’ve competed at over a dozen national and international poetry slam competitions, earning their place on several competitive final stages. Kay curated and edited “A Whore’s Manifesto: An Anthology of Writing and Artwork by Sex Workers” published by Thornapple Press. Their work has been featured in Arc Poetry Magazine, Frontier, Foglifter, Button Poetry, and more. Find their work here: https://kaykassirer.com/poetry

Read Kay Kassirer’s poems “performing my pain” and “I wipe the condensation off the mirror and my mother’s face stares back at me” inside Vol.7.

Get your copy by clicking the image below!

1.

my doctor told me
he once pulled
a cockroach
out of a woman’s
ear.

she’d come in dizzy.

my doctor tipped light
inside of her
and
there it was –
the copper body with
the terrible
head.

we killed it with lidocaine,
my doctor told me,
before flushing
it out
with saline.

when it was over
he stuck the corpse
on a laboratory desk
to remember it
i suppose.

i’d show you,
my doctor told me,
but patients
aren’t allowed
back there.

2.

at sixteen i fainted in chemistry class when Mr. S
drew a diagram of Eustachian tubes
on the whiteboard

his fingers pointing at
the delicate cylinders
to indicate their response
to pressure.

i knew we were dealing with a thing
more sensitive than
anyone was
letting on –
this tender opening of a woman

crushable by air
by flight
by atmospheric
atoms.

why was mine the only body
that fell that day?

my left ear pressed to linoleum
my right to Mr. S’s mouth
as he begged me
to wake up.

3.

queens can die
through their ears.

you can pour poison
into the labyrinth made
by their soft small cliffs
and watch a country
fall.

maybe this is why that lover
put his mouth
above my lobe,
fitting teeth to tragus
to scream
untender things.

in the shower, sometimes still
i can hear those words
if i tip my head to the left
and let the water run in.

4.

this is a phrase
i keep
remembering:

a girl is good
when she listens
first

you see i am always
listening
but i am never

good

5.

did you hear that my left ear is the one
angels use
to talk to me — trees too if i let them
a holy caravan of voices
filling me
like night-wings
i can’t tell
anyone
about

because i’d probably
be killed
for it.

scala tympani
scala vestibuli
cochlear
cupula

amen
amen
amen

6.

i should have asked
if the woman
was surprised.

did it hurt
to hold a thing dying
inside of her

like that?

or was this
her thousandth
time

flushing out her head
to make it
her own?

7.

because women only women
only women understand
what a voice can do
when it’s found its way
inside of you

KATE MCGUNAGLE (they/she) is a queer and genderqueer writer and multimedia artist who believes in the tender, the curious, the disruptive, and the sublime. Their fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Five Points, The Whitefish Review, Passages North, The North American Review, and elsewhere – their essay “Passive Voice” was the recipient of the 2021 Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction and named a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays 2022. Kate is the author of The Fruiting.

Love it?

Kate was our guest editor for Vol.7. Meet them this weekend in discussing the issue at our free Pride Reading.

RSVP Here

​You have a story idea. You’ve had it for a while, actually. And somehow, the pitch still isn’t written.

​Let’s fix that in one hour — starting with a shit pitch.

​A shit pitch is the first, unpolished version of your pitch that you write in 15 minutes or less. No research required. No more procrastinating. Just getting the pitch on the page fast enough that perfectionism doesn’t have time to stop you.

​In this 60-minute workshop, you’ll…

• ​Write the first draft of your pitch

• ​Get a free pitch template you’ll actually use

• ​Learn what makes a pitch land (and what quietly kills it)

• ​Hear real talk from a full-time freelancer of six years

• ​Walk away with three real examples of pitches that got published

​Meet Your Instructor

​Jillian Anthony is a freelance culture writer and editor who’s been published in Vox, HuffPost, Cosmopolitan, Business Insider, Marie Claire, and many other publications. She writes the newsletter Cruel Summer Book Club about making space for your art and yourself, and hosts a podcast of the same name. She’s supported many writers and creatives through 1-on-1 pitch coaching and career consulting.

Read more

Trigger warning: mentions of suicide and death.

I am twelve
standing silently in the cold outside my dad’s house
watching the condensation of my breath cloud the air
I am always outside early, waiting for my mother
her words echo through my mind
I don’t have all the time in the world
if you’re not ready, I’m going to leave

I am fifteen
lying in a hospital bed drifting in and out of consciousness
feeling like a failure, couldn’t even kill myself right
my mother is perched beside me fiddling with her zipper
we don’t speak but I know her worry is a car with no seatbelts
and I keep slamming on the brakes

I am sixteen
my mother and I sit in the psychiatrist’s office
he lowers his glasses and tells us I have traits of bpd
he comments on my behaviors
smoking weed to fumigate the swarm of wasps in my mind
staying awake playing tetris on my phone to avoid being alone with my thoughts
playing connect the dots using my freckles and a sharp object

* * *

on the car ride home
my mother makes my diagnosis all about her
throws her hands up in the air
and says her life makes so much sense
smoking cigarettes to remember how to take deep breaths
staying awake watching ghost whisperer reruns to avoid being alone with her thoughts
playing connect the dots using unanswered voicemails and self hatred

I am nineteen
my mother lies in a hospital bed drifting in and out of consciousness
I wonder if she feels like a failure, couldn’t even kill herself right
I am perched beside her picking at my fingernails
we don’t speak but my worry is a car with no seatbelts
and she keeps slamming on the brakes

I am twenty-one
standing silently in the cold at the cemetery
watching the smoke of my joint cloud the air
I am always trying to find ways
to connect with my mother beyond the grave
her words echo through my mind
I don’t have all the time in the world
I’m going to leave, you need to be ready

KAY KASSIRER (they/them) is a white queer spoken word poet and community organizer living on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations - colonially known as Vancouver. Kay has toured internationally with their autobiographical poetry, exploring themes of grief, disability, and sexuality. They’ve competed at over a dozen national and international poetry slam competitions, earning their place on several competitive final stages. Kay curated and edited “A Whore’s Manifesto: An Anthology of Writing and Artwork by Sex Workers” published by Thornapple Press. Their work has been featured in Arc Poetry Magazine, Frontier, Foglifter, Button Poetry, and more. Find them @kaykassirer on Instagram

Love it? Kay has two pieces inside Vol.7. Get yours, now.

Get Your Copy

Don’t forget to join us in our Substack Chat to discuss the issue!

After a nine-month hiatus, we’re back with our seventh issue. It has been a pleasure to create something so meaningful, and the entire team is more than delighted with the outcome.

Inside you’ll find

• 18 poems (many wonderfully experimental in structure)

• 1 flash fiction story (the quick comfort read before bed)

• 3 short stories (things aren’t what they seem)

• 2 paintings (a world in full colour)

Get Your Copy Now

Our featured poet is Kay Kassirer

Kay has toured internationally with their autobiographical poetry, exploring themes of grief, disability, and sexuality. They’ve competed at over a dozen national and international poetry slam competitions, earning their place on several competitive final stages. Find them on Instagram @kaykassirer

Our guest editor is Kate McGunagle, who says of the issue,

A peek at the table of contents:

Intake | Kath Healing

Self-Portrait as Charli XCX’s Apple | Jordan Prochnow

After Picture | Heidi Spitzig

performing my pain | Kay Kassirer

New Voicemail | C. A. P. Pulotu

Something Rotten | S.K. Stewart

Call it a homeland and it becomes a mother | Elizabeth Jacyshyn-Owen

In which I promise my beautiful girlfriend I’ll go see the doctor | Ellen Pearson

Perfectionist Imposter | Hansa Sethi

Skin Tag | Steven Cordova

Purgatory Lexicon | Brittany Brewer

Chronic Illness Logic | Colleen S. Harris

The Recovery Room | Carol Krause

A Slideshow of Constraints | Hannah Behrens

She’s Still Missing | Elle Jay Snyder

Insomnia | Christa Fairbrother

Self Diagnosis | Steven Cordova

The Aviary | Elizabeth Jacyshyn-Owen

Superperson Imposter | Hansa Sethi

How to Love a Woman with a Broken Brain | Tatiana Chaterji

I wipe the condensation off the mirror and my mother’s face stares back at me | Kay Kassirer

I Need to Go to the Doctor’s Soon | Cypher

Translation Error | Heidi Spitzig

Pain Scale | Colleen S. Harris

On Turning Twenty-Two Next Month | Jaya S. Basu

We couldn’t be happier with this volume of work. When the world spins mad and you feel totally alone, we’re here to guide you back to community. Dive into our pages to feel the warmth of these creators, and join us in our Substack chat to discuss. We can’t wait to hear what you think!

Warmly,

The Anodyne Team

Get Your Copy Now

Anodyne Magazine was launched in autumn 2023 to address a real, tangible problem that FLINTA* people experience every day: we aren’t getting the support we deserve in our healthcare.

We’ve been promised cutting edge healthcare, sold a story that problem after problem has been solved. But when we go to the doctor, we are repeatedly told it’s all in her heads, or that the problem has no data to back it up.

We know better.

The stories, poetry, and artwork that you find inside this magazine represents a group of people who lean into community in order to advocate for better support. Reading the magazine is like a warm wash of comfort for your soul. It reminds you that your needs are valid and that you are not alone.

How You Can Get Involved

We embrace that feeling every single day via our workshops, in our Substack chat, and on our social media. We are constantly working to ensure that you can navigate a system that wasn’t built for you with the support you deserve.

You can help us make the world better by sharing Anodyne with your local library or bookstore. With queer and feminist erasure rampant across the world, our voices are ever more critical for both change and caring for the community. We provide a toolkit to help you share the magazine with the world.

Share

What to Expect from Us

We publish two issues per year (for now 😉). Each issue functions like a record: you can buy the e-book and get a beautiful full colour PDF that can be viewed on any device. Or you can purchase the print magazine and receive a code for the e-book just like you would when you purchase a physical record.

We believe that physical artefacts last and have a impact that will go beyond our generation. But we also believe that digital saves trees.

No matter which format you purchase, you will receive our audiobook with pieces read by the contributors themselves. You’ll hear their voice, their emotion, and their beautiful work accessible to those who prefer to listen.

When you become a paid subscriber here on Substack, you get the print issues in your mailbox, full access to our workshop archive of replays, and other goodies. Free subscribers get our resource posts, calls for submission, and access to the community we have built here on Substack. So if you’re not subscribed, yet, we urge you to consider it. Any tier is the right tier.

Finally, all of this is for you, so if we can do better, let us know in the comments.

Yours in Health,

Veronica‘s Zora Kirin

Cofounder and Editor-in-Chief

Bring along a few pieces of text about your condition, a print-out from a health website, a letter from the hospital or the list of side effects from your medication (something you don’t mind scribbling on).

Blackout poetry is a really good way of warming up your writer’s brain, getting your creativity jump-started after a fallow period or exploring your feelings about something you can’t quite find the words for. It works a little like magic, plucking words from an existing piece of writing to form something new and original.

By the end of this workshop, participants will feel able to:

• use any text as a starting point for a poem.

• take a piece of writing about a topic and find its ‘side effects’.

• use the ‘blackout’ technique to edit and refine their own longform poetry,

• find new ways to approach expressing feelings about their own condition

About Your Instructor

Alex Prince (she/her) is a queer writer with a long-term heart condition. She is a former teacher who holds an MA in Creative Writing from Sheffield Hallam University, UK, where she graduated with distinction in 2024. She loves experimenting with form. Her poetry has been published in Anodyne Magazine, The Literary Times, Humana Obscura and in the anthologies Queer Responses to Dante’s Paradiso by Carrion Press and It’s Not Symptomatic It’s Systemic by Sunday Mornings at the River Press.

Read more

​This workshop will teach you all about how your human experiences are more important than ever to share online in the age of AI slop. You’ll walk away with real-world tools and frameworks to help you combat current search changes, and more confidence in your own expertise.

​Key takeaways:

• ​Why human expertise matters more than ever now in the age of AI.

• ​The difference between traditional search and how search works now.

• ​How to improve findability for your work with real-world frameworks and tools.

• ​Trusting your own expertise and writing when AI slop is everywhere.

​

​About the Instructor

​Coco Poley is a creative content marketer and writer with over 10 years of experience in technology and storytelling. Currently a full-time Technical Content Marketer at TinyMCE, they craft engaging content strategies, blogs, tutorials, and resources. Coco excels at transforming complex technical ideas into accessible narratives that drive audience growth and brand visibility.

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Pop culture has typically been a space for storytelling, but it’s also a space of power. Who gets to create? Who gets to be heard? And most importantly, whose experiences become the stories we all know and love?

Across art, writing, and music, FLINTA* creatives have always helped reshape and build cultural landscapes, oftentimes in spaces that were not originally built for them. The term FLINTA* itself emerged in activist and cultural communities to recognise gender identities historically marginalised within a Western male-dominated creative industry. We want to spotlight some of these creators who continue to make an impact within pop culture, whether that be from sharing important experiences to challenging heteronormative perspectives.

Literature

Writers throughout history have utilised storytelling as a way to resist dominant, traditional narratives. Contemporary authors such as Ocean Vuong (author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous), Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House), and Torrey Peters (Detransition, Baby) centre queer and gender-diverse experiences. Often exploring themes of memory, embodiment, and identity, their works have challenged and reshaped what contemporary storytelling can look like for queer communities.

Music

FLINTA* creatives in the music industry are equally influential. Producers and musicians like SOPHIE have revolutionised experimental pop through albums like *Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-insides* which uses avant-garde, hyperpop production to deconstruct gender norms and celebrate trans identity. Artists such as Arca continue this tradition. Arca’s music and visual art, particularly the Kick album series, explore gender fluidity, queer identity, and technological metamorphosis.

Visual Art

FLINTA* artists have also increasingly used portraiture and self-representation to challenge centuries of white male-dominated artistic traditions and techniques. Artists such as Shona McAndrew and Yoyo Lander have developed pieces that rethink identity, subject hood, and representation within contemporary art.

At Anodyne, we are deeply invested in the ways creative communities amplify and highlight voices that have historically been overlooked. Our community is not just as a trend, but an ongoing cultural practice of attention, collaboration, and care.

Thinking about FLINTA* creativity across pop culture, we want to highlight art of all forms (writing, poetry, music, etc.) that shifts perspectives, disrupts traditional frameworks, and challenges assumptions, creating new spaces for expression and acknowledgment.

Who are your favourite FLINTA* creators shaping the world? Comment some of your recommendations!

The replay of this inspiring session is available free to all our subscribers for three months, after which it will be accessible exclusively to our paid subscribers. Don’t miss out—sign up and join us for the next Office Hours, always free for our community.

RSVP to Office Hours

This workshop is for writers in any stage of their career who feel stuck in their craft, like they can’t tell the stories they know they need to tell and aren’t sure why. Attendees will learn ways to unmask roadblocks to their work and find a sense of freedom to explore topics, emotions, and feelings that have, up until now been “forbidden” to them unconsciously or otherwise. The freedom attendees will find in this workshop will improve their craft by bringing more authenticity and less FOMO/people-pleasing motives to their writing whether prose or verse.

In this workshop you will:

• Find safety and permission to consider who told you “no” in your life and how’s that translated to being stuck with your writing

• Learn tools and exercises to discover and flesh out what you’ve been saying to in your writing

• Practice framing your taboos in ways that enhance your own freedom and steward your readers into freedom themselves

Megan Wildhood is a neurodiverse writer and editor recovering from Oldest Daughter Syndrome so deep she used to not be able to wear tennis shoes with skirts because she overheard her mother complain about her doing so to a friend. When Megan hit a roadblock she couldn’t resolve by switching writing projects, she did some digging and found a plethora of “rules” her people-pleasing younger self had been contorting herself to follow all her life to earn her emotionally unavailable mother’s love. She connected the rigidity she learned in her youth, all the ways her mother told her “no” via silence, invalidation, and withdrawal of relationship to her fear of telling the truth in her writing and, now that’s broken free of those chains, wants to help other writers find the same freedom. To learn more about her writing and her work, which is informed by her training in the social work field and years of working with freelance clients struggling to find the permission to use their voices, please visit meganwildhood.com

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Get inside me.
Twisty turn
the key, jump
start me, please.
Electricity find
me firing on all
cylinders. Spark
fizzy fizz in
my buckled
knees. Jolt buzzy
buzz battery
behind my head
light eyes. That tingle
touch into finger
tips just won’t give
or jerk. I don’t know
just fucking go!
Creak in the heat,
joints won’t jostle,
maybe it’s time
someone else fixed
me. A busted body.
Back off! Back up!
Against four walls,
garaged and exhausted,
push the pedal. Brake
me. Trample me
steady. Clutch me
ever so tightly.
Is this worth
saving? My inhibitions
ignition: click, click,
click. I never could
accel. Titanium gears
won’t whirl. My dash
board barely blinking.
Use me, my console
to rest. Call AAA
to tow. Head south
to gut my rusted
parts. Let me break,
darling, down into dirt.

LARISSA LARSON (she/they) is a queer poet who lives in the Twin Cities and recently received their MFA in Creative Writing. They have served on the editorial board of award-winning literary journals such as Water~Stone Review, Runestone Literary Journal, and The Briar Cliff Review. Larissa works at a used bookstore, explores the many lakes with their partner, and watches scary movies with their cats, Athena and Midas. Their poems have appeared in Gyroscope Review, Welter Online, Sheila-Na-Gig, Kelp Journal, and forthcoming in Great Lakes Review.

Get your copy of Vol.3 to read more of Larissa’s work.

To the Shop

Join us this weekend in Leipzig for an IRL event! We are collaborating with indie shop Orinoco Books alongside the Leipzig Buchmesse (book fair) — second-largest book fair in Germany. You’ll get to meet several folks from our team and contributors, listen to beautifully crafted work, and join discussion about the health equity movement.

RSVP Free Here

Can’t make it but love supporting indie publishing? Consider subscribing to our Substack — and receive two print copies of our magazine per year!

Subscribe now

Today is International Women’s Day, a day that invites us not only to celebrate progress, but also to fight against the persisting gaps.

At Anodyne, our work is rooted in recognizing that global health systems continue to discount, misconstrue, or altogether ignore …

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March 1st is Equal Care Day. This international day of action shines a light on unpaid and undervalued care work, work that is often carried out by women.

Care work is the backbone of our families, communities, and health systems, but it is too often invisible and u…

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Valentine’s Day is usually framed as something to buy into: roses, prix-fixe menus, perfectly packaged romance. But at Anodyne, we’re more interested in the quieter, longer-lasting forms of love — the kind that shows up in collaboration, care, and shared commitment.

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January is a time to reset. The new year brings us a time to plan, to resolve, to imagine what comes next. Yet January also asks us to sit with what is already here, whether that means colder mornings and shorter days for some, or warmth and light for others in a w…

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While we’re at it, we want to know how we can support you in 2026. What workshops, events, and communities would help your creative practice grow? 🧑‍🏫

Please take a moment to complete this poll so we can get busy planning! (PS —…

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One of our 2026 Pushcart Prize nominees.

check red blood cell count normal white blood cell
count low normal   check number of days in
the past year you experienced   discomfort
interfering with quality of life   check   liver function
normal   normal   normal
kidney function   iron levels suggest deficiency
unlikely   check B12   normalwhile
you’re at it scree…

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The beginning of January marks Cervical Health Awareness Month. This month encourages and reminds people of the importance of regular screening for early detection, and acts to educate and spread understanding on the subject. Inside Anodyne, we shout women’s health righ…

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