When speculative writer Mary Buchanan Sellers founded Libre in 2024, she didn’t imagine it would become such a success. Originally just a girl and her blog, the magazine now consists of a team of writers and artists, all of whom work to support the magazine’s unique mission. Libre aims to uplift the voices of the mentally ill by publishing fiction, poetry, and visual art by people with mental health issues and their loved ones. In creating the magazine, Mary Buchanan’s talents extend beyond the literary—she designs vibrant graphics that accompany each published prose or poetry piece. The design of the website itself is a celebration: the stylish Libre logo on the homepage is situated above a candy-pink brain and an animated turquoise background. The About Section features a cartoon replication of a frowning Grecian bust, with (comically) the brain popping off the head. With these joyous graphics, Mary Buchanan honors the effervescent qualities of people with mental illness: their quick minds, their ability to create, penning words and pictures that are evidence not of any deficit, but of their capacity for resilience.
As a new intern for Libre, I wanted to learn more about Mary Buchanan’s vision for the magazine. We talked over Zoom about her inspiration behind Libre, her creative background, and Libre’s new issue, based on the iconic poet, Sylvia Plath.
What inspired you to create Libre?
I’d been going through a rough period—I have Bipolar II, was diagnosed with it in 2019—a month’s long depression that had taken away my ability to articulate myself. I experience pretty severe seasonal depression. It starts in November. Last year was the first year that it really hit me—a cue of my growing older, perhaps. Felt like one of the famous ads on television where the depressed person’s a scribbly blob. I could not think, I could not write well. I was driving around—it was about eight o’clock in the morning—and it sounds made-up, but I had a vision, and it was of a magazine that was crisp and clean, that was centered around mental health writing and the arts.
It stuck with me for about four hours as I ran errands, and I finally had to pull over. There’s this lake that I live next to. My grandparents used to take me there and we would feed the ducks, and it holds a monumental amount of visceral memory for me. I pulled over at that lake and I pulled out my notepad and I started writing down name ideas for the website, because I wanted something that encompassed what I wanted to do, which was, I don’t know, to almost liberate people with mental health issues. I finally settled on one name. I was like, “Libre, I like that. It sounds like liberty.”
And then I went home, went to work, kind of put the magazine on the back burner for a little while. Three months passed without my doing much work for it besides nursing a stray thought or two. I was teaching at the time—I didn’t have the money to invest in it. When summertime rolled around and I had some free time, I sat down one day and was like, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to start it off as a blog, see what sticks.” Nobody knew about it—I didn’t plan to tell anyone about it, but I paid $20-something to sign up on Squarespace. I chose a color that I hoped couldn’t be gendered, and quite literally crossed my fingers. A few days later, I wrote the mission statement in a dentist’s chair, while waiting for a crown adjustment (I’d just had a root canal).
One thing I love about this realized dream is that you publish not just writing, but visual art by people with mental health issues. I’m curious about your background with digital art, because on the website you have all these incredible graphics. How did you learn to make them?
It’s self-taught. I took the Praxis in art content, but that was something I studied for pretty profusely over the summer. So I’m new to that. I’ve always loved art as a consumer, but I have never practiced it. I had several social media internships, which have forced me to learn how Canva works, and I eventually want to get a better graphics program—I think I’ve hit the wall in terms of what I want to do and what Canva will allow for. But I do everything in Canva; it’s just experimentation. I’m a spaghetti-on-the-wall kind of girl. Sometimes it’ll be 11 o’clock at night after a long day and the only thing that appeals to me is making something visual.
I wanted our aesthetic to be something that we were known for. I wanted to make Libre appealing without glamorizing our concept, almost new age-y in a way. I like the glitchiness of it: it mimics what the brain does, while also calling attention to our *very online* presence. I lean towards bright, kind of poppy colors, but I take the incorporation of color very seriously. I don’t want to say I want to make mental health fun by any means, but I do want to elevate it a bit—we’re allowed to have a nice-looking magazine, also, without doing serious harm to the seriousness of our subject matter.
You always run the risk of aestheticizing the hell out of something—wiping clean the point of a cause. My greatest fear is that people will say, “She’s making light of something. She’s trying to glamorize something.” I don’t know. I think that it should look good too, just because it’s a mental health magazine, it doesn’t mean that we can’t have a little fun and make it colorful.
I definitely don’t think it’s making light of mental health. A lot of times when we think about someone with mental illness, we focus on the diagnosis and forget about the person beyond the label—that he/she/they can be lively or interesting or fun or creative. I think the magazine’s vibrant aesthetic also creates an inviting space for people who have struggled within an unforgiving mental health system.
Yeah, thank you. Good, I’m glad. I worry about that constantly, because it’s a fine line to tread, but some of the most colorful people I know have a mental health condition. I mean, history’s on our side: we’re a bright, talented, empathetic group of people, and I want that spirit to show up in the magazine.
How do some of your favorite pieces speak to the spirit and mission of the magazine?
The way they handle, encapsulate, expand on mental illness. They say something new about it, they surprise you. I’m not going to disparage anybody’s submission because that is not my place, and I hate rejections because in my mind I’m like well, I’m rejecting this person, somebody’s palpable pain, and there’s no way you can say hey, this isn’t valid or hey, this isn’t good enough, because that’s somebody’s unique experience.
The ones I particularly am interested in don’t play into the tropes of mental health. These pieces elevated the typical mental health stories in some meaningful way, either through words or through art, or just the language itself might be breathtaking, while also doing much deeper work—expanding our concept of what art about mental health can and should look and sound like. I’m a sucker for lyricism, so if you can give me something lyrical that also has to do with mental health, I’m your girl. One of my favorite fiction writers who occasionally writes around mental health is Aimee Bender. The Butterfly Lampshade. It’s sturdy literary fiction and portrays a mental health crisis through the lens of magical realism without nullifying it, without swapping the seriousness in favor of fairy tales. She productively—and I think—successfully, blended magic with mental health and didn’t make it corny, didn’t devalue the serious aspects of mental health; she said something new about it as all great writers do.
As a reader, I love to find a piece of writing that surprises me, that does something in a new way that I wouldn’t expect, so I definitely appreciate the kind of work you’re looking for.
Something we’ve talked about recently is having Libre partner with other like-minded organizations to do charity and outreach work. What got you interested in doing some of that?
I wanted to make sure Libre had a foundation on which to rest on. Literary magazines aside, I’d founded this thing to provide meaning—to do so, there needs to be a greater good we’re working towards. I’m not a doctor. I don’t pretend to be. I can barely add fractions. But I wanted to make sure that Libre became or was in some way helping to promote productive resources for mental health, which is why the website provides links to several mental health resources. We link to NAMI, Project Healthy Minds, NIMH, the Birth Injury Justice Center, The Awakenings Project, Cerebral Palsy Guide, International Bipolar Foundation, The Ryan Lich Sang Bipolar Foundation, and the Neurodiversity Foundation.
I think that Libre has the adaptability to become something more. I want to reach out to like-minded individuals, to foundations and charities, that are really doing serious work for mental health, and I don’t think that’s too much of a reach, either. I think Libre could be both.
So, over at Libre, we’re getting ready for Issue Two, which is based on Sylvia Plath. What about Plath moved you to create a Plath-themed issue?
PLATH was something I was afraid to approach for several reasons: the lore, the precious nature of her topic, and, most importantly of all, the way she died. I think she’d probably hate it, too, the concept of our Issue. That bothers me enough to keep me awake at night, but not enough to stop me from attempting this. But she–like she has so many millions of women–has haunted me since I was seventeen and newly depressed for the first time. From my research, only a handful of people have written about her mental health in a clinical nature. We speak about her death as if it’s token. We speak about her writing as if it were Biblical. But we somehow skirt the issues surrounding her deteriorating mental health in ways I find criminal. I was and still am worried about how this issue will be received. There’s no way around it: I’m aestheticizing a woman who died by suicide, but I am also, most desperately, attempting to celebrate her. I’ve gathered poetry, prose, and art that either reflect her own stylistic choices, write around topics she spent time with or, lastly, make mention of mental health in a way that tugs true to the fabric of Sylvia. I want this issue to not only spread further awareness about mental health, but also seek to encapsulate her essence in a way that is respectfully humble, devout.
I wanted to do something that celebrated her, did something productive. I’ve tried to pull from clinical sources and serious journalism, and I’ve accepted pieces that celebrate her, reconfigure or emulate her language, or speak about topics that she herself wrote about. We love to fetishize her death, but there’s rarely anybody talking about, or anybody that I’ve read talking about, the more serious aspect of her illness, how she was disintegrating pretty rapidly, the abuse she experienced with Ted. There’s too much there to ignore. I mean the guy married two women and they both committed suicide. That’s a problem.
The same way I think too.
How do you think the pieces that you’ve chosen avoid some of these cliches and harmful tropes?
So, a lot of them deal with Ariel, which is probably her most famous book. The contributors either write their poems in the style and meter of one of her poems, which I think is beautiful, or they reconfigure some of her language in a way, which I think, again, is celebratory. One author we’re including, he actually included footnotes for it. It’s incredible—by Hugh Finley. He pulls from, let me count, 18 different sources. Most of them have to do with either Plath or another literary figure, work, or element, and he constructs a poem that sounds like something Plath would’ve written. It’s in her same register. There’s Jennie Meyer. Her family actually knew Plath. I mean, I’m so lucky to have even received her submission in the first place. Something of a godsend. Other contributors: Devon Balwit accomplishes the great task of blending husbands with death, and in Plath’s same vein, wraps it in a tight and tidy language package; Michelle Chen references Plath’s famous tarot card and occult leanings in a sprawling epic, while prefacing it with erasure poetry. William Miller’s poem unfolds in the Deep South—paying homage to our Southern slant—and deftly depicts a woman’s admittance into a psych ward. He defies all tropes. We have mothers, wild beasts, young daughters, handbags, and mirrors. Every contributor plays a pivotal role in fleshing out her imagery. This issue, thanks to its writers and artists, pays attention to the details—something that Plath is famous for doing.
I love that. They’re commemorating her and her talent. They’re not fetishizing her. They’re really celebrating who she was, I think that’s incredible.
Do have any big plans for the magazine’s future? Where do you hope to see Libre going?
My secret, somewhat embarrassing dream is for Libre to make it to AWP one day. I worked on the Southern Review in Baton Rouge when I was in grad school there getting my MFA, and had the chance to attend the 2016 one that took place in L.A. If you’re a serious literary magazine, you’re there in the springtime, trying to make your bid for it. One day, I’d like to have a table that’s turquoise. Everything blue, with a big, friendly brain on it.
We couldn’t do that this year obviously, and maybe not even the next—it takes money, the kind of prestige and respect a magazine can’t buy, inherit, or cajole folks into giving. I don’t think we’re there yet. I think we need to establish ourselves a little further. I don’t know, it’s a big “if,” but it’s a dream. Libre’s built on those.
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