This week we welcome Steven T. Licardi (he/him), a social therapist, science fiction writer, spoken word poet, multidisciplinary artist and performance activist working at the intersections of art and social policy. He travels internationally using the power of performance to create empathic dialogue around, to confront the realities of, and to assist communities in confronting historic narratives surrounding mental health and madness.
He co-founded the design and consulting studio WhyWOW, which partners with businesses and individuals to design spaces that optimize our human capacity for world-building. In the role of a facilitator, he leads social therapeutic groups and workshops on various poetic and sci-fi techniques in grassroots organizing spaces. Steven wonders: “How do we create the futures we want with the histories we have?” As an autistic/neurodivergent creator, Steven maintains a monthly sci-fi newsletter, “Cross My Heart And Hope To Write,” where he shares stories centering underrepresented characters and lived experiences: thesvenbo.substack.com
“Much of my work is concerned with exploring the hidden history of mental health treatment in the Western world, with a focus on the contradictions and injustices purposefully or apathetically obscured from historic accounts. I understand this history to be a form of erasure, and I believe unfurling my own lived experiences is a means of un-erasing and re-revealing the truths and stories preserved therein. Furthermore, I’m interested in spatial memory, which has most recently manifested in the ongoing project ‘rows and rows and rows and’, documenting thousands of remaining, and often contested, burial grounds left in the wake of deinstitutionalization — the en masse closure of state hospital systems — across the U.S. I believe neurodivergence and disability are evidence of other types of worlds in the present, insofar as we whose minds and bodies are designated disabled exist in the world, and may yet still be perfectly suitable for other types of worlds. Whether in my poetry, prose, or performance work, I seek to uplift the ways in which madness asserts itself as a means of world-building. Further, I see language as a tool that can push us beyond the limits of (in)sanity and (ab)normality. Indeed, we are surrounded by a multiplicity of ways of being and perceiving that affirm this, if we consider that other types of worlds, and by extension other types of normal, exist. (These ideas have been explored elsewhere by my dear friends and colleagues Ashley Shew and Bayo Akomolafe.) I refuse to settle for the world we have and seek to imagine other worlds. In doing so, I invite others to consider building such worlds in the present. As a facilitator, I collaborate with communities to develop opportunities to “embrace a willingness to be disturbed” (Margaret J. Wheatley). I’ve engaged in this methodology with performance activists in Thessaloniki, Greece (2019); with youth in Lagos, Nigeria (2020); with teaching artists in Oslo, Norway (2022); and with psychiatric survivors across the U.S. and Canada”
A poem by Steven T. Licardi
The Cure Mentality
I was born a broken Tinkertoy.
The pieces of my mind configured
to not fit quite right.
Great gaps separated synapses,
whose dendrites reached like desperate fingers for siblings falling away.
Those hands held secrets,
the neurons whispering:
“I am not broken.”
Doctors tried to fix me,
patch up the perfectness of my disorder,
feed me medications
that damned the divides between my skittering nerves,
but they only served to flood the majesty of my Grand Canyons, because my mind wasn’t falling
away—
it was flying.
When you strip away the bells and whistles of our brains— rearrange the cogs and play with the knobs—
you’ll discover the world has changed.
The mind is just a filter through which reality is fed.
What you see is only one of many worlds I feel inside my head.
This moment has a texture.
Every sound has a voice.
I can’t read the furrows of your face
because my brain can’t filter out the noise.
Your social cues confuse me,
but do you know all the names of the presidents’ wives? I can recite to you the history of music
between 1932 and 1989.
I obsess, I know…
but there are patterns everywhere.
Let me describe to you the streets of London,
even though I’ve never been there.
Don’t be scared; I’m not!
I don’t talk much because my brain can’t stop to think. I promise you, I’m in here,
kept warm by the stimming I’m swaddled beneath. My mind is hyperaware of the world.
That is the gift that I have been given:
to over-perceive the subtle vibrancies
that permeate this existence.
That blue is not the only blue;
numbers have feelings too.
I know I can’t control this world of mine, but neither
can any of you.
Because I was born
a broken Tinkertoy,
but no physician could force my pieces to fit.
The way the light dances off my Grand Canyons could never be muted by medicine.
You can’t cure me of me.
My perfection does not exist on a spectrum.
You don’t know the comfort of a repetitive movement! My light is always bright.
Whole worlds exist between my gyri and sulci.
If you’re wondering where I am,
I’m playing there.
I’m flying.
