The Architecture of Impunity is a forensic audit of the systems that normalize violence against women and girls. Moving through language, culture, law, medicine, media, and the courts, Mary Simmerling examines how predation is softened, disguised, administratively absorbed, and made to appear ordinary.
Blending case files, cultural criticism, poetry, and visual documentation, the book traces the structures that protect perpetrators and the institutions that enable them: objectification, disbelief, credibility policing, publication bans, NDAs, institutional prestige, and the epistemic frameworks that discredit survivors. Drawing on her work as a philosopher, poet, curator, and survivor, Simmerling has innovated a method she refers to as investigative moral philosophy. This is not a book about isolated incidents or individual bad actors. It is about architecture: how harm is built, normalized, and defended in plain sight.
Write Where We Belong was created from the belief that each of us is born with creative genius and that the creative self has the power to heal—not only the self, but the world we live in. Two decades ago I shared a single poem that helped ignite a global movement using art to challenge the myths that silence survivors. That same conviction continues to guide everything I do: to leverage the healing powers of the creative self to help ourselves and each other heal and become agents of healing in our own communities.
This ecosystem is built on a simple premise: healing requires truth. We do not break free by sanitizing what has happened to us, or by smoothing violence into something more palatable for the comfort of others We write and create on the axis of trauma, grief, and repair. My work centres on people with lived experiences of grief and loss—whether through gender-based violence, sexual violence, or other forms of traumatic violence—and on the many personal and collective losses that shape our time: the loss of our freedoms, the loss of our own voices, the loss of loved ones, the loss of our earth, our forests, our rivers, and the climate that sustains us—the loss of the nature that keeps us all alive—the loss of ourselves, and the loss of our connections to each other as human beings. It is through writing and art that I seek to understand what loss reveals about meaning, resilience, and the possibility of repair.
Write Where We Belong is a multifaceted Canadian literary and arts organization focused on using writing and art as tools for social justice. With a core dedication to advancing social justice, ending violence, and harnessing the powers of the creative self, Write Where We Belong hosts workshops, literary and arts events, and provides editing and production services for creative works. Write Where We Belong Press curates, edits, and publishes writing that emerges from the layered geographies of structural and gender-based violence, grief, loss, and hope.
By creating spaces for writers and artists of all levels to explore, discover, and share their stories, we hope to cultivate new conversations that will be the impetus for change. Things can be different. We can do better, together.
I work at the intersection of philosophy, poetry, cultural criticism, and public art. My writing and curatorial practice are grounded in a simple but demanding premise: justice is inseparable from voice. I am interested in the mechanisms by which violence is minimized, aestheticized, or laundered into something socially acceptable. In my essay The Lolita Signal, I describe this as “cultural laundering—literature reduced to an alibi” and as “literature as camouflage.”
Across essays and poems, I treat language as a site of power. When discretion masquerades as sophistication and silence functions as social currency, we train ourselves into normalization. My work insists on accurate naming and on refusing the rituals of minimization that protect perpetrators and erode truth. This framework informs my poetry, where I have written about “algorithms of erasure” and the incremental stripping away of truth and humanity. It informs my editorial practice as well, where I structure anthologies to move from fracture to reckoning to light—making visible the arc of survivor knowledge rather than offering false resolution.
I am trained in Adlerian theory, grounded in the understanding that we are not only indivisible from ourselves but indivisible from one another. This belief in gemeinschaftsgefühl—our shared social interest and capacity for belonging—underlies every aspect of my work. Transformation and meaning-making are not solitary acts, but practices we engage in together.
Through Write Where We Belong, I have built an ecosystem that integrates workshops, publishing, and public installations. The “What Were You Wearing?” exhibits I curate bring survivor words into public view, explicitly designed to upend victim-blaming narratives and re-center truth. The expanded 2026 installation model develops this work into a multi-modal intervention—storyboards integrating survivor testimony and data, audio-visual documentation, and site-specific public engagement across multiple cities. This is not symbolic programming. It is infrastructure—designed to be replicated, taught, and used in professional training and community education.
My work integrates the disciplines and practices that have shaped my life—philosophy, Adlerian theory, art, poetry, neuroscience, ethics, research, and the curatorial work of creating and exhibiting art. Each is part of the same inquiry into how we live with suffering, beauty, and moral responsibility.
I understand neurodivergence not as a deficit but as a way of perceiving—a way of noticing what others often overlook, of questioning what has been accepted as inevitable, of creating new frames for understanding and repair. Divergent minds hold the capacity to build connections between disciplines and to design new pathways for seeing, understanding, and healing.
I believe that art and writing as crafts belong to everyone and that a writer is someone who writes. This conviction shapes how I teach, facilitate, edit, curate, and create: every voice matters, every story belongs, and the act of writing itself is both art and community.
In all of it, I return to the same claim: Silencing is itself a form of violence. And so I write—and build—so that silencing can be interrupted.
Through Write Where We Belong, I invite others to join this community: to write, create, and bear witness together. Together, we can participate in healing our broken world by using our creative selves to transform trauma into meaning, and meaning into change.
