Dispatch 001: The Manifesto

We do not write in sunsoaked cafés, listening to soft jazz as we sip lattes and stew on word choice. We write in the margins of our own lives, sneaking moments between shift changes or diaper changes or sea changes.

We are mothers: of children, of stories, of selves. And not all who mother wear the name. This is for the nurturers, the night-feeders, the caretakers of what roars in a world that wants it quiet. We care, we feed, and create in the dark, in the unquiet, when rage and sorrow and love would otherwise burn us alive. 

We write stories that haunt. We write endings that rot. We write beginnings that kick and scream their way into the world.

We demand to be seen.

And, reader, know this: I see you.

We see each other.

Cradle & Crypt is our space. For discourse. For chaos. For creation in all its wretched beauty and its delicate rot. For the dreams that refuse to die. For those of us who nurse babies and hope in rooms lit by nightlights and by fury.

We will not be soft. We will not flinch. We will not be sedated by domestic bliss and whitewashed fiction. We keep receipts.

We believe the cradle is sacred. The crypt remembers. The mother and the monster walk side by side. Writing is haunting. And exorcism. And homecoming. And birth.

If you’ve ever bitten your tongue until it bled, if you’ve mothered in the dark, if you find your home in the shadows: welcome home.

Cradle & Crypt is a sanctuary. A cathedral. A love letter to the lost, the broken, the ones told their dreams were not practical, were not safe. A shout into the void. A radio signal to others who dare to create and to mother and to be seen, moonlight and gravedirt and broken glass.

Will you answer? 

Enter. Stay. Remember. Create.