Alyssa Sherlock is a writer from the beautiful prairie landscape of Winnipeg, Manitoba (Treaty 1). In her fiction and creative non-fiction, Alyssa explores topics of loneliness, mental health, family, and friendship. Her illustrated debut, this is a love story: poems and essays on mental health, love, and friendship releases April 2023. She was shortlisted for the 2022 CNFC/Humber Literary Review Creative Non-fiction Contest, and regularly connects with writers and storytellers to interview them about their stories.
This is a love story you haven’t read before, a raw and vulnerable story of finding hope, love and friendship through struggles with mental illness.
Alyssa Sherlock was a sensitive, anxious child who grew up into a sensitive, anxious adult. In this collection of poetry and essays, Sherlock lays out the reality of becoming her own person while experiencing anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and the illness of loved ones, before exploring how complex friendships can be the support that is needed for recovery.
This book is for anyone who struggles with their own mental health or the mental illnesses of others, to remind them they are not alone, and that there is love and belonging to be found in the most unexpected places. Written in collaboration with friends Erin Toews and Amelia Warkentin, and including illustrations by Amber Wallin, this honest autobiographical collection is perfect for fans of dodie’s Secrets for the Mad.
Releases April 2023. Click here to get release and launch updates.
“I suppose in one way or another we are all storytellers. Not only artists, but all of us. Lawyers and double-glazing salesmen and teachers and medics. Stories rule. We need them to shape our everyday and our overall existence. I have come to believe that this is what grief is: a crashing of the story in which we had believed. The shock of that dissolution is—literally—unimaginably violent. Recovery from grief involves a gradual acceptance of the unwelcome narrative and the tentative respinning of a new web of story around it. Story and the ability to negotiate narrative are, maybe, a form of mental health.”
Tilda Swinton, The Show Girl in Wonderland
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Copyright (C) 2022 Alyssa Sherlock
Alyssa Sherlock 