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The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight

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Andrew Leland

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“White genderqueer writer Meg Day wrote of meeting Laura Hershey at a Lambda Literary retreat and Laura asking Meg why she wasn't reading certain Deaf and disabled writers, saying, "these are your foremothers." I didn't know about Laura or her writing until after she died—she'd FB friend requested me but I didn't know who she was. Yet, as Laura Hershey wrote in her poem "Translating the Crip," here we are: "thriving and unwelcome, the irony of the only possible time and place." And we are writing and creating our own media whether or not the abled world can see hear read or witness us.”

AbleismNeurodivergenceDisability JusticeDisability WritingDisabled LiteratureDisabled WritersDeaf CultureDisability StereotypesDeaf LiteratureDisabled History
Book:The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
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“When I think of disabled literature and writing, I can think of a breadth of writing that spans decades and generations, that uses the D-word and does not. I think of Audre Lorde—Black Lesbian poet warrior mother, legally blind, living and dying with cancer, whose work shines with the knowledge she gained from living with bodily difference and fighting the medical industrial complex. I think of Gloria Anzaldúa, queer Latinx maestra who started her period at age three and lived with bodily and reprogenital differences, living and dying with diabetes. Some of my work as a disability justice writer has been to look at the legacies and work of those foundational second-wave queer and trans feminist writers and creators of color—Audre Lorde and June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa and Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, Chrystos and Sapphire, to name a few—and to witness the disability all up in their work, even if they did not use that word because of any number of factors including the whiteness of the disability rights movement of the time. June's last decade of writing was all about her cancer. Gloria's writing had everything to do with her diabetes and neurodivergence and life-long bodily differences. Marsha and Sylvia were both neurodivergent Trans Black and Latinx activists and creators whose writing, performance, and art was at the center of their lives and activism. Chrystos and Sapphire's Indigenous and Black feminist incest survivor stories and poetry write from spaces of surviving extreme trauma, chronic pain from stripping and cleaning houses, CPTSD, grief, and psychiatrization. "I also think of the deep legacy of disabled writers (some dead, some still living but having done this for a while) who intentionally, politically identified as disabled. Laura Hershey. Leroy Moore. Qwo-Li Driskill. Aurora Levins Morales. Billie Rain. Dani Montgomery. Nomy Lamm. Cheryl Marie Wade. Emi Koyama. Pat Parker. Tatiana de la tierra. Raymond Luczak. Anne Finger. Leslie Feinberg, who died of Lyme disease. Peggy Munson. Beth Brant. Vickie Sears. Writers who are small press, micro-press, self-published, indie press, out of print. Writers I know and cherish, whose names I call when I talk about disabled writing. We are so often kept apart, we disabled people, and kept from knowing each other's names. We are told not to hang out with the other kid with cerebral palsy, told to deny or downplay our disabilities or Deafness or ND. We often grow up not learning disabled history, Deaf literature, or that those are even a thing.”

AbleismNeurodivergenceDisability RightsDisability JusticeDisability WritingDisabled LiteratureDisabled WritersDeaf CultureDisability StereotypesDisability History
Book:The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
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“When I'm talking about disabled writing and the struggles to create spaces for disabled literature—in talks, to other crip writers, to whoever—I tell the story a lot about the fight I got into with an editor in the last weeks before Care Work was going to the printer, where I insisted that the BISAC codes (the codes on the back of the books that tell booksellers what section to place them in) on the back read Disability Studies / Disability Justice / Queer Studies when she wanted them to read Social Studies / Health / Queer Studies. The editor's response was dismissive: "Well, we do have to go with the official BISAC codes," (note: there is one for Disability Studies, and has been for decades), "and I've never seen a disabled section in a bookstore—have you? Of course I had. Modern Times Books, where I was the events coordinator (and cashier) from 2009 to 2011 had one and was known for it. Third Place Books, Left Bank Books, and Elliot Bay Books—my three favorite bookstores in my current city of Seattle—all have robust disability sections and Queer Disability special displays. Anjula Gogia, who ran the Toronto Women's Bookstore for decades, confirmed that they'd had a disability section since the 1980s and it was always one of their best-selling sections. I fought back, pulled the white crip guy (friend) card, and was like, ELI CLARE HAS DISABILITY STUDIES / ACTIVISM ON THE BACK OF BRILLIANT IMPERFECTION. IF HE CAN DO IT, SO CAN I. I DO NOT WANT MY BOOK NEXT TO THE GOUT CURES. We compromised on "disability studies / queer studies. Four years later, Poets.org would ask me to curate a disability justice poets folio for their 2022 theme of "Poetry and Disability Justice." It was a wonderful task, and I ran into the reality that Poets.org, like most poetry databases, didn't have "disability" or "disabled poets" or "Deaf poets" as keywords. As with most poetry databases, the closest you get is "illness" or "the body." Something as simple as having "disability," "disabled poets," and "Deaf poets" as keywords or search terms allows us to find each other, to come together, for disabled and Deaf people searching for words to illuminate our experiences and create a community to find them.”

AbleismDisability JusticeDisability WritingDisabled LiteratureDisabled WritersDeaf CultureDisability CommunityAbleism In PublishingDisability In PublishingDiscrimination In Publishing
Book:The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
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“I thought of Care Work as a community in your pocket when you have no crip friends or you are all alone, as so often we are. I have written or co-created nine books, but it wasn't until my fourth book that I started writing unapologetically about disability. It still felt like a risk. As a friend once said, "Everyone wants to write the poem that makes people go "yeah!" and pump their fist at the performance." So much of the time when I'd tried to write, or read poetry about being disabled, about being chronically ill, the opposite happened: instead of wild clapping and screaming, I got met with awkward silence, the nervous laughter, the "I'm not sure if it's OK to laugh," the #SadFace. If you wanted to be the best, to have people love your work, too often if felt like too much of a risk to write and perform crip work. I was able to finally take that risk and write and perform and publish disabled poems in Bodymap, my third book of poetry, because of the collective work in disability justice writing and performance. Because of Sins Invalid and individual disabled BIPOC writers, because there was starting to be a movement of disabled writers and creators, queer and of color, who were creating space to do our work. I could believe there was an audience who was hungry for the work, and I got it. Without that, my writing would have stayed in my journal, stayed in the drafts that didn't make it into the books I published.”

AbleismDisability RightsDisability JusticeDisability WritingDisabled LiteratureDisabled WritersDisability CommunityDisabled ArtDisabled PerformersDisabled Poets
Book:The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
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“If society is used to not seeing disabled people in stories, society becomes used to not seeing disabled people in real life. If society is used to not seeing disabled people in real life, society will continue to build a world that makes it exceedingly difficult for disabled people to participate in said world, thus perpetuating the problem.”

DisabilityRepresentationAbleismDisableded
Book:Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
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“For a while, the rise of sociopolitical discourse both online and in physical spaces felt like slowly breaking these boundaries down one by one: we started to teach each other that everything we knew about gender, or being fat, or poor, or chronically ill, was decided by a system that had no intention of caring for us. But then the fear of being too much slowly began to reinfect all of our minds. We began to second-guess our ability to change the world, so settled with self-optimising instead.”

SexismHomophobiaAbleismSystemic ChangeFatphobiaSocial Barriers
Book:Poor Little Sick Girls: A Love Letter to Unacceptable Women
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