welcome

beloveds,

Welcome to my stacking of subs. I’m so excited to share this space with you and beyond grateful to all of you for joining along. 

For those that don’t know me, I’m a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist based in New York. I’m a professor of graduate psychology, have a small private practice for therapy, and write (poems, essays, novels).

In the last few months, watching the methodical devastation of Gaza, I’ve been wondering about the models of mental health I’ve been taught and their effectiveness in moments of collective anguish, systemic failings, calls for witnessing, etc. I am increasingly convinced that what will save us is each other, and hope this will feel communal and co-created.

This will be a space of questions, hauntings, perhaps catharsis. A space to play with erasure poetry, collage, linoleum carvings, mixed media. Perhaps most crucially, a place to write and think about love, freedom, Palestinian imagined futures, mothering, and how we care for ourselves and each other.

Truthfully, I’m abysmal with tech and perennially ambivalent when creativity gets muddled up with the pressure to produce, but I do also love a good dose of accountability, so hopefully this will be a nice balance.

My hope is to send out a writing/art prompt every week, as well as occasional musings and microessays.

A note on paid subscription: I can’t say enough thank yous for folks who are able to contribute. Paid subscribers will also receive:

·      A separate post every week of my poem/writing/artwork in response to the prompt.

·      All musings and microessays.

·      A monthly “advice” column. (The quotation marks are very intentional.) Once a month, I’ll answer a couple questions. These can be about mental health, writing, love, literally anything. Let’s be honest, I’ll likely have no concrete answers, but my God do I love the expanse of a question, the way it opens up and becomes a place to live in briefly, the way it belongs to all that encounter it. Feel free to email questions to alyan.substack@gmail.com.

Okay! First prompt:

A written piece (or visual artwork) that engages with the concept of return — to place, to person, to self, to a certain time.

Excited to see where this leads us xx

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