Your bitch applied for an artist residency to work on shit this summer.

Why?

Why not.

The worst they’ll do is turn me down.

At best? We get a stipend to work on cool shit like this here website and other things and we meet other artists and work with them.

Fuck it. Let’s ride.

The fucking kicker was the bio I wrote:

Ashley Halliwell (they/any) is a 27 year old neurodivergent, disabled, and chronically ill multidisciplinary artist. Their they/them is, in fact, plural, as they discovered in their teens that they were a DID system after surviving a massive stroke in infancy. The stroke cost them roughly an eighth of their brain, most of the use of their left hand, but in return, they got synesthesia, a foul mouth, a near photographic memory, a heaping dose of stubbornness, off the charts pattern recognition and intuition, and the ability to play instruments by ear. On top of that, they deal with AuDHD, CPTSD, an as of yet undiagnosed set of chronic illnesses, and even more genetic mutations. And that was only the second time they almost died.

They often joke that whatever god(s) made them made them sick because if they were abled, they’d be too powerful.

Much of their work is wry, chock full of dark humor, inspired by their life, and as bold and colorful as they are. They’re unafraid to fail their way forward, paint everything in vivid colors, and use the strongest language you’ve ever heard.

They’re a four time published author. They released their first poetry collection The Caesura and the Silence in 2016, followed by their second poetry collection To Dance with a Cyclone in 2019, their first play script Lavender and Scissors in 2020, and their third poetry collection Singing Molten Gold To The Morning in 2021.

They’ve also produced, engineered, released, and recorded 15 albums under the name Candy For Trees, the most recent being 2023’s Hardshell. Pretty impressive for having functional use of only 1.333 hands, right?

When they aren’t sleeping or eating a galaxy’s worth of food, they’re trolling bigots on the Internet, telling stories about their roller-coaster of a life, or working on their current project, their chaos haven/online art collective in the making, Open Sorcery, which can be found at opensorceryy.co.

We’ll see what happens. Results arrive shortly…

-Allēna