Chronic—A Chapbook on Living with Illness, edited by Yvonne Wabai

There’s a certain silence that often settles around chronic illness—a quiet that comes not just from pain, but from being disbelieved, misdiagnosed, or forgotten; a loneliness that wraps itself around fatigue, flare-ups, and the invisibility of always feeling unwell in a world that demands constant performance, productivity, and resilience. This chapbook is an invitation to speak into that silence.

This is a call to the chronically ill—the sick, the disabled, the weary, the ones surviving in bodies that are dismissed and disappeared. We are looking for writing that refuses erasure—work that is raw, tender, furious, exhausted, joyful, inconvenient, alive. 

We seek poems, essays, fragments, and reflections about what it means to live in a body that does not “get better.” This is for the ones who wake up tired. For those waiting on names for what’s wrong. For those who carry pain quietly. For those grieving the version of themselves that existed before. And for those who have found new selves, new rituals, new forms of beauty, despite or because of it all.

Chronic is not looking for stories of overcoming. This is not a call for inspiration porn or sanitized suffering. We are not interested in redemption arcs or recovery stories meant to comfort the able-bodied gaze. We want the mess. The rage. The long nights. The appointments that led nowhere. The systems that harmed you. The dreams that keep you going. The truths that are hard to name. The lives lived in pain, love, and complexity. The stories that live in the waiting rooms, in the pills, in the daily negotiations with your own body.

This chapbook is grounded in the belief that sickness is political. That the medical industrial complex is necropolitical and carceral. That disabled people are canaries in the coal mine, and that the world we live in is one shaped by eugenics, capitalism, and abandonment. And still—we live. We imagine. We create. We resist.

This call is open to Black and African writers from anywhere in the world. Chronic welcomes work from disabled and chronically ill people, including those at the intersections of multiple marginalizations such as queer and trans folks and neurodivergent folks. We welcome work on chronic illness in all its forms—diagnosed, undiagnosed, physical, mental, visible, invisible. You don’t have to be a “writer” in any formal way. You just need to have something to say.

Submission Guidelines:

• – Only poetry and nonfiction/essays are accepted 
• – For poetry, submit up to 3 poems max in a single document
• – For nonfiction/essays, submit max 6,000 words
• – Hybrid and experimental forms welcome
• – Word docs or PDFs only
• – Include a short bio (and, if you wish, a note about your relationship to illness)
• – Deadline: 15th July 2025

All work must be submitted through Submittable. This chapbook is self-funded by A Long House, and all contributors will be paid a modest honorarium of $50.

Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash