Maranda Elizabeth is a writer, zinester, high school dropout, cane-user, daydreamer, flâneux, and recovering alcoholic approaching a decade sober. They’re also an identical twin, a witch, and a white agender sorta-femme. Maranda is the author of three novels, Ragdoll House (2013), We Are the Weirdos (2017), and Oliver A Lover All Over (2019), a non-fiction anthology of the first decade of their zines, Telegram: A Collection of 27 Issues (2012), of which they’ve now written forty-two issues and subsequently retired the title, and the zines Little Acorns (a 24-hour zine) and Edith (fiction). They've been self-publishing for over fifteen years.

For two years, they contributed a column on LittleRedTarot.com, See the Cripple Dance, which they're reviving as a monthly column through Patreon and their personal blog. See the Cripple Dance re-imagines Tarot through disability and madness, and poverty and anti-capitalism. They offer online Tarot readings for misfits, outcasts, weirdos, crazy people, mad folks, borderlines, disabled folks and crip queers, etc.

For many years previous, they’ve written online and in-print about recovery with borderline personality disorder, complex-trauma, fibromyalgia, MCS/EI, and chronic fatigue, with an emphasis on politicizing illness and recovery, and understanding illness (mental, physical, and spiritual) as a debilitating and deadly consequence of capitalism, as well as a form of resistance and protest. They’ve also spent their entire adulthood writing about writing, creativity and friendship; disability and accessibility; witchcraft and Tarot; self-care, support, and $upport; queer mad poor crip lineages; and surviving social assistance and poverty. In Autumn 2018, their essay Trash-Magic: Signs and Rituals for the Unwanted appeared in Becoming Dangerous: Witchy Femmes, Queer Conjurers and Magical Rebels on Summoning the Power to Resist.

Maranda grew up in Lindsay, Ontario (Ojibway, Chippewa, and Anishinabek land), and currently resides in Toronto, Ontario (traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and the Métis). Their work explores themes of loneliness, abandonment and disposability; synchronicity, joy, meaning-making, and memory; and the process of making a home of place and body.

They’re a Libra Sun, Sagittarius Moon, and Gemini Rising, with an Aquarius Midheaven, Venus in Libra, Mercury in Scorpio, and Chiron Retrograde in Gemini.

♥♥♥ WORKS-IN-PROCESS ♥♥♥

Currently, Maranda is working on multiple projects. Two novellas are in process, as well as a sequel to We Are the Weirdos, named We Are the Nobodies. One novella is a #CripLit disability-justice near-future speculative experiment, titled A Change Has Been Proposed for this Site, which you can read an excerpt of, and the other is a fictional work based on their brief time of employment at a sex club. Other projects in mind but temporarily set aside are a book of non-fiction, To Be True to My Own Weirdnesses: Re-Incarnations, Re-Iterations, & Re-Imaginings, and a short story collection called Those Knives Were Her Security Blanket.

They're also in the role of Tarot Consultant with Temperance Cocktails, after a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign in Autumn 2019, and are slowly continuing their work on social assistance art, which readers are invited to contribute toward.

Shorter pieces they're working on include but aren't limited to: Toronto Forget-Me-Not (Parts One, Two, and Three), thoughts and imaginings while visiting the addresses on their grandparents' love letters exchanged in 1950, and a piece on disability, seasonal depression, speculative fiction, and embodiment.

♥♥♥ PAST / ONGOING ♥♥♥

Works worth (re-)visiting for an idea of their writing style and themes, including everything above: What I Was Thinking About the Day Elizabeth Wurtzel Died, A Mix Tape for Oliver A Lover All Over - to listen, to cry, to daydream..., The speech I delivered at The People Phone Ford Rally, with notes on care, rage, disposability, & solidarity, Disability, Freaking Out, & Marilyn Manson, Messy November: we’ve got a lotta care work protest conversations dreams to do together, let’s go, Surgery As Initiation: A process of experiencing, witnessing, & sharing my hysterectomy, Poverty and Isolation are Killing Us: (More, Unending) Thoughts and Conversations on Suicide, Criticism, Responsibility, Purpose, Care, and Love, Extra Dimensions & Misplaced Shadows: Maranda & Cee Interview One Another on Creating We Are the Weirdos, Won’t You Celebrate With Femme Cripples and Other Storybooks, Beyond Borderline and The Protest Psychosis: black & white protest diseases & politicizing madness (Part One), Sometimes I Act Crazy and Conflict Is Not Abuse: continuing to reclaim borderline & politicize madness (Part Two), How to Talk About Pain, bruises self-heal: the body in retrograde, Further Notes on Reclaiming Borderline and Resisting the Sane Gaze, making spaces accessible & scent-free to create opportunities for friendship, connection, & support!,  Things I’ve Tried to Stay Alive, and How to Be A Good Friend to Crazyfolk.

These works date from 2011 - Winter 2020.

♥♥♥ ESSAYS ♥♥♥