Fake Lake Intimacies: Field Notes Toward a Mad Ecopoetics

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2026.17.2.6299

Keywords:

Madness, Disability, Ecology, Rivers, Toxicity, Ecopoetry

Abstract

How does a river hold its memory? Do the banks feel their former textures and dimensions? Or is it fluid, washed away? What does fake or real, artificial or pristine even mean in a world deeply and violently touched by humans? This lyric essay is part of an ongoing inquiry with the Huron River, which runs through where I live on Anishinaabe land in what is colonially called Ypsilanti, Michigan in the United States. This project uses my own queer body and lived experience with madness as a site of query. How can madness and ecopoetry inform and support us (with us being the human and more-than-human world) in finding new ways to tend and be with and even love each other?

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Stephanie Heit, Independent Artist

Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe territory in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her practices explore the seams of movement, language, and mental health difference often within site-specific inquiries involving water. She is bipolar, a mad activist, a shock/psych system survivor, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collections are the award-winning book of hybrid memoir poems PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022) and The Color She Gave Gravity (Operating System, 2017). Website: https://stephanie-heit.com/

 

Downloads

Published

2026-10-31

Issue

Vol. 17 No. 2 (2026): Eco-Crip Cultures: Disability and the Environment

Section

Creative Writing and Arts

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

a) Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal (CC BY-NC for articles and CC BY-NC-ND for creative work, unless author requests otherwise.

b) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

c) Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).