-
Nov 11, 2024 | 
snackmag.co.uk | Megan Willis
Madeline Docherty is a writer living in Glasgow. You can find her book reviews, personal essays and general musings on her Substack, one good egg. Gender Theory, her incisive debut novel about illness, identity and how we care for those around us, was published in 2024. Where did the inspiration for the novel come from? There wasn’t a lightning strike of inspiration or a moment when I knew I wanted to write a novel.
-
Oct 14, 2024 | 
snackmag.co.uk | Megan Willis
Jane Flett is a Scottish writer who lives in Berlin. Her fiction has been commissioned for BBC Radio 4, featured in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize and she has performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She was a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award.
-
Jun 29, 2024 | 
heroica.co | Megan Willis |Molly Mahoney
Trigger warnings: references to self-harm, sexual abuse, miscarriage, suicide, addiction By Molly MahoneyAs a woman in my twenties, newly diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (EUPD/CEN), I’ve been reflecting on the ways in which London shapes my experience of mental illness. As an English Literature and Creative Writing graduate, I once rolled my eyes when the professor argued that a city can be a central character in a novel.
-
Jun 12, 2024 | 
heroica.co | Megan Willis
Ancestors in Training™ is an educational project and lived experience that centers sacred traditions, new technologies, intergenerational healing and grief work. This work of tending to our legacy in real-time, while we’re still here, is not easy. It takes so much self-regard, community care and healing to unearth cycles in our lineage that we want to interrupt. There are also cycles we wish to generate.
-
Jun 6, 2024 | 
heroica.co | Megan Willis |Amber Wilkinson
By Amber WilkinsonCapitalism is killing us. Neurodivergent people have always been aware of this, masking and trying to live in a society not built for us while burning out behind closed doors. But is there an alternative way of living for all of us? Capitalism Sucks (Duh)Tamra Kaghembe’s essay for Heroica, ‘Rise and Grind’: Why We Need to Stop Normalising Grind Culture is a necessary read for why it is necessary to start distancing ourselves from the idea of ‘grind culture’.
-
May 18, 2024 | 
heroica.co | Megan Willis |Lauren Bulla
By Lauren Bulla Someone asks the fateful question: Where did you get that top? What band are you listening to? Where was that cafe you posted about? Aghast with shock, pondering why their admiration of your obscure interests couldn’t be in silence, you find yourself in the midst of a moral dilemma. I remember feeling high and mighty upon my self-constructed pedestal for liking obscure bands in high school.
-
Mar 19, 2024 | 
heroica.co | Megan Willis |Laura Griffin
By Laura GriffinValentine’s Day, a holiday that crosses many lines of gender, religion and politics, sees twenty-five million cards sent in the UK alone every year. Love it or hate it, it’s a fixture of the calendar we all contend with to some degree. I’ve had Valentine’s Days that passed noticed only by its absence, with a partner who would wax lyrical on the holiday’s commercialisation in an attempt to explain away his coldness and sometimes casual cruelty.
-
Mar 9, 2024 | 
heroica.co | Megan Willis
By Isobel LewisI know there are bigger issues in the world at the moment than a row over which celebrity deserves to be the most publicly self-satisfied. But omitting to nominate Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie for an Oscar while Ryan Gosling was up for an award felt like an unsavoury rejoinder to Jo Koy’s Golden Globes comments. While Barbie’s plastic ‘big boobies’ taint her creator and lead actress with superficiality, Ken’s plastic pecs pose no comparative obstacle to serious recognition.
-
Feb 21, 2024 | 
heroica.co | Megan Willis |Alekia Gill
By Alekia GillI was watching a sweaty bouncer chase my friend as she ran down Ealing Broadway, clutching a reproduction of Banksy’s Girl with Balloon. My friends and I were nineteen and bored, and we tended to forget that our actions have consequences. In an act that could only be described as giving the art back to the city – graffiti is meant to be public, after all – she made it to the end of the road before the canvas was snatched from her hands.
-
Jan 27, 2024 | 
heroica.co | Megan Willis
AnonymousIt always starts slow. A moment of uncertainty: here is where you falter. You promised never to do this again – so you don’t. Don’t acknowledge the signs, don’t acknowledge the patterns. Don’t let yourself google the same questions you were asking yourself a year ago and don’t show your friends the messages. This is not a love story. Bringing her back to life; getting her through the year, again and again – she could have never done this without you.
