Tag Archives: disability

by

An Interview with Amanda Leduc

Spec Can: To begin our interview, could you tell folks a little bit about yourself?

Amanda Leduc: Absolutely! I am A Canadian writer currently based in Hamilton Ontario. I’ve been an avid reader of spec fic for most of my life, and have a BFA in Creative Writing and Philosophy from the University of Victoria and a Masters degree in Creative Writing from the university of St. Andrews. I’m disabled, and have cerebral palsy. And I work for the Festival of Literary Diversity in Brampton, ON.

Spec Can: I am really interested in your use of fairy tales in your fiction. I think they are so powerful and convey so much. What got you interested in incorporating fairy tales into your work?

Amanda: I’ve always been a huge fairy tale fan—I’ve always loved them. But it took a long time for me to be comfortable with using them in my own work—partly because I felt like I needed to write realist fiction in order to be taken seriously in the literary landscape.

My first novel is not about fairy tales, but uses fabulist elements under the guise of spiritual discussion—again because o felt like that was the only way to “seriously” sneak magical elements into “lit”, whatever that means.

But after MIRACLES (my 2013 novel with ECW), I really found myself drawn to stories that were strange and had all kinds of strange things happen in them.

Spec Can: I love that idea of sneaking in the magical elements.

Amanda: I was working on a short story collection in 2015 and just let myself go into the strangeness of that world—it was very liberating. And then in 2018 I was working on The Centaur’s Wife and was away at a writing retreat, and walking through a forest, and I started ruminating on the connections between fairy tales in particular and disability.

Understanding that I could then write my OWN fairy tales was very liberating. The omniscient narrative style of many fairy tales—plus the understanding that anything goes with magic!—really made me feel like I had license to write about whatever I wanted.

Spec Can: I love that image of the freeing power of writing your own fairy tales. What was freeing about writing your own tales?

Amanda: Just that anything could happen in them—anything at all! I could make a mountain talk. I could make an octopus into a character. I could make a woman give birth to centaur triplets without worrying (too much) about the scientific impossibilities of it.

Spec Can: Can you tell me a little bit about the need to write realist fiction as part of the literary landscape?

Amanda: I don’t think there’s as much of a stigma now, if at all—and in fact I think that spec fic is very much having a moment. But when I was in school, back in 2003-2006, there was definitely a kind of snobbery around fantasy and spec fic in particular vs. so-called “literary” fiction.

And I internalized so much of that! I remember writing a story that became the basis for THE MIRACLES OF ORDINARY MEN in 2005–it REALLY went over well with my class.

So even back then, people were receptive to my weird stories—but *I* was also being a snob.

*I* was afraid of putting them out in the world, of not being seen as a “literary” writer.

Spec Can: It’s fascinating how much we absorb and internalize some of that literary snobbery even when we, ourselves, enjoy reading spec fic and imagining fantastic possibilities. What helped you to start to recognize the potential of the speculative and fantastical?

Amanda: Oh, writers like Karen Russell and Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Carmen Maria Machado, etc. Karen Russell in particular was like…a knight in shining armour!

I also really loved how non-fiction writers like Maggie Nelson and Sarah Manguso were doing speculative things, if you will, with non-fiction—blowing the form wide open, re-imagining what it could be.

But the seeds were there in my younger years. In a 2003 workshop class with the writer John Gould, he once told our class, “You can do ANYTHING YOU WANT in a short story, so long as you do it well.” It took me a long time to really embrace that.

But also—I just loved, and continue to love, reading literature of the fantastic. It gives me a very particular kind of reading joy…and writing it does the same for me. So eventually I was like…why not give in to joy? WHY NOT?

Spec Can: In Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, you examine the role of disability in fairy tales and the ways that we disabled people are often either erased from the fantastic entirely or portrayed as villains, but while doing so, you also examine the subversive power of fairy tales and I really noticed that subversive power in the fairy tales you wove into The Centaur’s Wife. What gives fairy tales that subversive power?

Amanda: I think part of it is that when it’s a fairy tale, we allow anything to happen. We allow for magic, we allow for a world to change. And for me, that gets my subconscious going and asking: why do we allow the world to change in fiction, but don’t stretch our imaginations to meet that change in real life?

Spec Can: Well said! I love that.

Amanda: In the TCW fairy tales, I was particularly interested in how we use fairy tales in two ways: to inspire possibility (the tales that Tasha’s parents tell her), but then also as cautionary tales (the tales Heather’s father tells to her).

So they are tales that at once hearken to possibility but also strive to keep the world as it is to help everyone stay “safe”, such as it is.

Spec Can: As a fellow disabled person and fairy tale enthusiast, it meant so much to see your writing about disability and fairy tales and then to see a disabled protagonist in The Centaur’s Wife. So often, we, as disabled people, are often encouraged to write disability in a way that is laden with tropes or to ONLY tell autobiographic stories. What inspired you to bring disability into the fantastic and to write a complex disabled character who didn’t fit into easy tropes or categories?

Amanda: Well—to start with, Heather was not disabled when I began writing the book. I only realized that she was disabled about 2-3 years into writing it. The novel came out of a short story written in 2014, and I started writing it as a novel in earnest in 2016. And I also started working for the FOLD (Festival of Literary Diversity) in 2016, and really started to explore my own identity as a disabled writer during that period. So the centaurs, which initially were meant to be a metaphor for desire, morphed into a metaphor for disability in the early stages of writing the book. And then in and around early 2018 I realized that Heather was also disabled—that she HAD to be for the story to do what it needed to do.

Which is—it’s a story about grief, and also still about desire, and about how the way that we survive trauma and grief is through community. But how do you do that when community is broken—when it keeps people out? How do you learn to adapt in the face of world-altering sadness? This is something that disabled people are VERY familiar with.

I do feel like I needed to come into my own as a disabled woman in order to full write this story the way that it was meant to be.

Syrus Marcus Ware quoted Octavia Butler in a panel I was in with him last year—I don’t remember the quote exactly but the idea is that it’s actually disabled people who fully understand what it means to create a world that is radically different—and that spec and sci-fi in particular are genres that have a responsibility to make this happen through words and narrative.

So as I came into the fullness of writing TCW I think I was also reckoning with the radical responsibility of writing dystopian fiction from a disabled perspective as well. It is too easy to assume that disabled people are left behind when the world collapses. We need to imagine different futures.

Spec Can: I feel like we are at a critical moment in the potential to develop a disabled fantastica (a delving into the possibilities of writing speculative fiction from our perspectives as disabled people) and possibly shifting the way that disability is represented. What are some things that you think we can do to develop a disabled fantastica? What are some things that you feel are important to the genre?

Amanda: Well, for starters I think it’s important to include disabled characters in all elements of storytelling. Both narratives where disability is at the centre, but also narratives where disability just IS.

I also think it’s important to include wide-ranging representation. I have no problems at all with disabled villains if I can also be given insight into their motivations and understand WHY they do what they do.

Heather for example—she’s not a villain, but she’s also not perfect! She is not Tiny Tim! Her disability HAS made her bitter and makes her put up walls that hamper her happiness. But this/these are tools she’s using to survive.

I think it’s important that we showcase a huge range of disability representation so that audiences understand that disabled people, just like their non-disabled counterparts, should be allowed to have messy lives and make questionable decisions.

Just as they should also be allowed to triumph. So many narratives don’t let disabled people do either.

Spec Can: I absolutely adore Heather in The Centaur’s Wife because she isn’t the Tiny Tim ‘Good Cripple’ figure. She is complex, often engaging in problematic behaviour, and isn’t particularly nice. I think this makes her such a wonderful character. She is fundamentally human and not a trope.

Amanda: Yes! I love her so much. She’s so prickly, but I think that she’s also very loyal.

And HURT. And ANGRY.

Spec Can: I think it’s so important that we showcase characters like her who are complex. They aren’t a villain just because they are disabled and they aren’t a hero because they are disabled either. They are morally complex as so many of us are.

Amanda: Yes! Exactly.

Spec Can: Did you find any resistance to writing about disability in this way? So many people in our community have tried to create manuscripts with complex disabled characters only to be told by publishers that the character didn’t reflect their image of disability or that the character’s narrative wasn’t about disability enough.

Amanda: I was lucky to not encounter resistance…but then also lucky, har har, in that I had signed for the book before it was written. So PRH gave me the go-ahead for a book and then I snuck disability in while I was writing it, heh heh.

My editor was REALLY lovely and absolutely adored the disability angle, especially the way that Heather’s relationship with her father is so fraught.

Spec Can: I think that was the most devastating and also incredibly significant part of The Centaur’s Wife – when you reveal that her father brought her up onto the mountain to try to ‘cure’ her of her disability. So often, the cure is represented in fiction about disability as the goal of every disabled person and the ‘solution’ to their disability and I thought it was so powerful that you presented a character who was devastated not by not getting a cure, but instead by her father’s insinuation that she NEEDS a cure.

Amanda: I actually wish this was talked about more in interviews. You’re the first publication to really ask about it! (Not surprising, I guess.)

Spec Can: For me, I always find it so problematic to see cure narratives and again see the way that abled people believe that we are incomplete until cured. Can you talk a little bit about your feelings about the cure narrative?

Amanda: Yes, the cure narrative is so complicated! I think the issue in many ways comes back, again, to limited disability rep in the world. Look—most people who see “A Marriage Story” don’t leave it saying, “I am NEVER GETTING MARRIED because that looks awful!” because we have been exposed to millions of different kinds of marriage representation on our screens and in our books.

People understand that there are so many ways to have a marriage because we SEE so many ways to have a marriage.

But we only see a few dominant narratives about disability, and these all too often fall into the villain/Tiny Tom tropes. So people who don’t have experience of disability see the same narrative about quadriplegics through movies like My Left Foot and Me Before You and think that’s it, that’s all there is to the disability experience—why WOULDN’T anyone want a cure. But if we saw more widely varied representation—and understood that there are ways to support disabled lives that mean they don’t necessarily NEED to be cured in order to gain the things they want—love, acceptance, freedoms, autonomy etc—then the understanding shifts.

I also want to leave space for the realty that some disabled people DO want cures. I think it’s so complex. Do I want to be cured of my CP? No. Do I want a cure for my chronic pain? Yes, absolutely.

In order to showcase this complexity, the stories we tell must also necessarily be complex.

Heather as a character both accepts her body and also rails against its limitations.

Spec Can: I think that’s why she speaks to me as a disabled reader.

Amanda: I don’t think it’s realistic (ironically) to have characters who DON’T hold both of these things at the same time.

Spec Can: When I have been recommending The Centaur’s Wife to people, I’ve been calling it Mythopocalyptic because you blend the mythical so beautifully with the apocalyptic. There have been so many different apocalyptic narratives in recent years, but I think you take a really interesting route with the narrative by weaving the mythical and magical through the apocalypse. Can you talk a bit about why you decided to tell an apocalyptic narrative and also why you decided to go with a mythical reclaiming of the world?

Amanda: Well, the apocalyptic narrative came first, and it was only after I’d written Disfigured that I understood where the fairy tales fit in the narrative.

But also, the element of storytelling was very much a part of the story from the beginning—i just had to figure out why.

It’s a novel about survival, and the way that we survive is by telling ourselves stories.

Spec Can: I think it’s so significant that your book came out in the middle of a pandemic because so many of us have been surviving by telling ourselves stories or reading the stories of others.

And of course, you know I am excited to ask about the centaurs. What inspired you to use these amazing creatures in your narrative?

Amanda: Well the centaurs were initially a metaphor for desire. I was interested in writing about forbidden love—what it looks like when you love someone you can’t have.

And that does continue through the book, with Heather and Estajfan, but when I wrote the centaurs’ origin story and saw what happened to them at birth, the disability metaphor was immediately apparent.

I also knew fairly early in that they weren’t “traditional” centaurs as we know from Greco-Roman myth. They needed their own origin story, partly because I didn’t want to be beholden to the established myths in place.

Spec Can: To wrap up our interview, is there anything else you would like to mention or any new projects you can tell us a bit about?

Amanda: I want to just mention that The Centaur’s Wife is available in all accessible formats.

I am working (very slowly, much slower than I’d like) on a few new projects: a novel about a pair of sentient hyenas, a book of collected fairy tales, and a memoir/exploration of grief and friendship using the cosmos as a guide. Small potatoes.

Spec Can: That is fantastic. Thank you for taking the time to do this interview and for your incredible and brilliant insights. I hope we get a chance to do another interview soon!!

Amanda: Oh thank YOU, Derek! I’m excited to see the interview up and this was so lovely. Thank you so much for this space.

Amanda Leduc is a writer and disability rights advocate. She is the author of THE CENTAUR’S WIFE (Random House Canada, 2021), DISFIGURED: ON FAIRY TALES, DISABILITY, AND MAKING SPACE (Coach House Books, 2020), and THE MIRACLES OF ORDINARY MEN (ECW Press, 2013). Her essays and stories have appeared across Canada, the US, and the UK, and she has spoken across North America on accessibility, inclusion, and disability in storytelling. She has cerebral palsy and lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she serves as the Communications Coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), Canada’s first festival for diverse authors and stories.

Interviewed by Derek Newman-Stille, MA, PhD ABD (They/Them)

by

Disability and Identity in a Changeable Universe

A Review of James Alan Gardner’s Hunted (HarperCollins, 2000).

By Derek Newman-Stille

Edward is a man with an intellectual disability who grew up being treated as a child by his sister and as an embarrassment by his father. He was taken under the claws of the queen of the Mandasars, a race of strictly hierarchical lobster-like aliens until their planet went to war. He was then made part of the Explorers, who are better known as Expendables because they are sent into risky situations that no one else is sent into. The Expendables are all made up of people with disabilities and “disfigurements”, people who didn’t fit into their society’s ideas of beauty, and it is because of these disabilities that the Explorers are treated as expendable people. James Alan Gardner’s Hunted begins with Edward being taken to a new planet but when the entire crew of his spaceship except for him dies as they cross into open space, he is placed at the centre of several conspiracies with galactic consequences and implications for what it means to be human. As Edward’s body and mind begin to change, he comes face to face with his own identity and questions what it is to be himself and who he is as his selfhood becomes unfamiliar.

Hunted, much like Gardner’s Expendable is an exploration of disability and what it means to be disabled. Few authors examine disability in future settings, erasing the idea of a future for disabled people. Most science fiction authors treat the future as a period in time when all disabilities are “cured” and erased. This has implications for the disabled community because this negates the important role we play in our current society and even the possibility of us having a role in our future. Much of Sci Fi’s treatment of disability is eugenicist in nature, treating disabled bodies as ‘mistakes’ that are meant to be rectified out of existence. For disabled readers, this has implications about our identities and reinforces ableist practices and ideologies in our current cultural circumstances.

Although there are some challenges to the way that Gardner constructs disability in Hunted, he powerfully presents disability as an essential part of Edward’s identity and illustrates Edward’s fear of becoming something different and losing his disability. Gardner also recognizes the way that disabled people tend to form our own communities and Edward is placed in the context of other disabled Explorers Festina Ramos (who has a reddish mark on part of her face) and Kaisho (who is a wheelchair user and has a symbiotic relationship with sentient glowing moss). Characters have complicated relationships with their disabilities just as disabled people do, but both Edward and Festina embrace their disabilities are part of their identities, not wanting to change them.

Hunted in addition to its disability narrative, and perhaps because of this narrative, is a discourse on identity and what makes a person an individual. Gardner questions ideas of individuality and the idea of a stable personality and personhood and instead illustrates that personhood is intensely malleable and changeable and that people are not nearly as independent as we think. In addition to Edward’s identity crisis about who he would be without his disability, Edward also discovers that he has alien DNA, questioning the barriers of his humanity and whether he can consider himself the same person he has always been. His identity is shaken by changes in his body that make him question himself. Kaisho is similarly presented as a question in individualism and identity as someone who is human, but whose body and mind are symbiotically connected to sentient moss that is considered a more advanced and more intelligent life form. Gardner invites the reader to question where one being ends and the other begins. In addition, Gardner brings attention to questions of identity and individuality by presenting us with the Mandasars, a race of beings that have an insect-like relationship to authority and hierarchy. Their entire society is controlled by their queen through pheromones that immediately overpower most of their sense of will, and, additionally, each of the Mandasar social/biological subsets needs to be in contact with the other two subsets or they will change their personalities – for example, workers kept amongst workers will become so complacent that they become slavish and warriors kept among warriors will become more war-like and violent, and gentles will become sociopathic individuals who privilege science over anything else.

Hunted plays with ideas of identity and examines the barriers of individualism while illustrating that those barriers are not as firm as we like to believe.

To find out more about Hunted, visit https://openroadmedia.com/ebook/hunted/9781497627321

To discover more about James Alan Gardner, go to https://jamesalangardner.wordpress.com

Review by Derek Newman-Stille, MA, PhD ABD (They/them)

by

Primordial Futures

A review of Amanda Leduc’s The Centaur’s Wife

By Derek Newman-Stille

Heather and Tasha are both storytellers. Both weave tales for their own needs. When meteors fall and humanity is left starving and disoriented, Heather carries on her father’s tradition of telling fairy tales to create a more magical life while Tasha keeps telling others the bigger fairy tale – that they can all survive. 

In The Centaur’s Wife, Amanda Leduc reveals the power of storytelling, necessary lies, and complicated truths. She reveals the human need to create stories and the transformative power of the tales we tell. Part apocalyptic fiction, part myth, and part collection of new fairy tales, The Centaur’s Wife demonstrates Leduc’s versatility and brilliance as a storyteller. 

The Centaur’s Wife is a tale of the liminal, the between, and not just because centaurs are half human and half horse. Leduc tells a story about outsiders, edgy Others who belong neither completely to one world or another. Leduc reveals the power of not belonging, of existing outside the order imposed by those in power. Her characters question easy categories and simple social structures, revelling in complexities. They disrupt norms and it is through this disruption that they invite in new possibilities.

To discover more about The Centaur’s Wife, visit https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/551899/the-centaurs-wife-by-amanda-leduc/9780735272859

To find out more about Amanda Leduc, visit https://amandaleduc.com

A review by Derek Newman-Stille, MA, PhD ABD (They/Them)

by

An Interview with Nathan Caro Frechette on SFCanada

I have had the wonderful opportunity to do some writing for SFCanada and as an introductory interview, I was able to interview author and Renaissance Press editor Nathan Caro Frechette.

Here are some quotes from our interview:

“So often, our stories are told by people who’ve never even met a person like us. It’s not just a question of it being annoying or disappointing: it can be downright dangerous for us to be misrepresented.”

“As marginalized people, we tend to come up against huge and frequent barriers in everyday life that prevent us from doing a lot of things, or even existing in some spaces. Because of that, we tend to spend a lot of time thinking about solutions and possibilities that people who have fewer or no barriers would never think about, because those possibilities aren’t missing for them. So I think we have a natural ability to imagine worlds where these barriers are removed or worked around in original fashions.”

“Good representation matters now more than ever.”

“We were also noticing that a lot of the complaints from authors around us included the fact that there was a lot of gatekeeping in the publishing industry preventing marginalized authors from publishing, and since Renaissance was made to elevate the voices of those who were often left behind by the industry, it seemed like a natural conclusion that we would focus on marginalized authors.”

You can check out our interview at SFCanada here

by

Authors in Quarantine – Cait Gordon

With this this series, I am hoping to capture how this cultural moment is affecting our speculative fiction authors and how our authors are surviving during the COVID-19 outbreak

No haircut? No problem!

Spec Can:What have you been up to during the COVID-19 outbreak?

Cait Gordon: For the first two weeks, I levelled up to 1000% disability advocate mode, encouraging people to flatten that curve. But also being connected with other disability advocates meant my social media timeline soon became demoralizing. There was no attempt from many abled people (even those in authority) to disguise that they thought we were expendable during this crisis, no veil at all, and the eugenics-based mindset drained me. I found myself entering into The Overwhelm™, and had to pull back in order to preserve my own mental health. An interesting tonic for this was April’s Camp NaNoWriMo. I was no way in shape to do it, but I went into Oh, why the heck not? mode. And the WIP I chose to work on was Iris and the Crew Tear Space a New One. This episodic series focuses on a command crew whose senior officers are disabled, Deaf, blind, and/or autistic, but my intention is to craft a world so accommodating and accessible, my characters just are. The focus is on their adventures, instead of an all-consuming narrative about their disabilities and/or conditions. I really needed the salve of living in Iris and the crew’s world while my own world felt like the ugliness towards my community was escalating. Thank goodness for speculative fiction. For me, it’s a true form of self-care at times like these.

Spec Can: How are you adapting to social distancing?

Cait Gordon: HAVE YOU MET ME? I was social distancing before it was cool! Seriously, though, as a mobility disabled person who lives in a suburb without decent transit, I’m usually housebound at least five days a week. So, I’m kind of a pro at it. However, my stresses tend to derive from other people not knowing how social distancing works. The streets around me typically empty in the BeforeTime, but now more people are at home, so more people go out. And in my opinion, they don’t always get how keeping one’s distance works. I’ve not gone on many walks because I’d feel myself heading for autistic burnout from others not adhering to the rules. Although, I am so tempted to buy a ridiculously wide hoop skirt to keep people at bay. Fiddle-dee-dee, I say!

Spec Can: How is the outbreak affecting your writing?

Cait Gordon: There’s always an ongoing hum of stress in my mind, and that makes writing difficult because I don’t have enough brain spoons. But thankfully, my online writing group, The Inkonceivables, restarted during the outbreak, so they are inspiring me to have something to read out loud every two weeks. (By the way, anyone who tells me I must write every day, especially now, will be walloped with The Whacking Pillow. Fair, right?) Since my current WIP is written like episodes instead of chapters, I just have to think in short-fiction goals, which I can handle right now. I love short stories; they’re a delightful challenge all of their own. In fact, I decided to keep up the 2020 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge on caitgordon.com, as another distraction. I thought I’d be the only one writing, but all the other authors who participate in it were grateful I kept it up. So, that was very telling to me. We creatives sometimes have to sit back to soothe our minds, but others need to tinker with words. Both ways are valid. And as I keep telling people, we don’t have to be productive during a pandemic. For now, we survive. Then, we thrive!

Cait Gordon is a disability advocate who wants everyone to pummel that curve! She’s also the author of Life in the ’Cosm and The Stealth Lovers. When Cait’s not writing, she’s editing manuscripts and running The Spoonie Authors Network , a blog whose contributors manage disabilities and/or chronic conditions. She also teamed up with Kohenet Talia C. Johnson to co-edit the Nothing Without Us anthology in an attempt to take over the world. Narf.

Interviewed by Derek Newman-Stille, MA, PhD ABD

by

Authors in Quarantine – Liz Westbrook-Trenholm

With this this series, I am hoping to capture how this cultural moment is affecting our speculative fiction authors and how our authors are surviving during the COVID-19 outbreak

COVID fashion statement: bleachy duds and shaggy hair.

Spec Can: What have you been up to during the COVID outbreak?

Liz Westbrook-Trenholm: Domesticity way up, writing way down.

I’ve been washing and bleaching everything inside and from outside our home, baking comfort foods, (state of emergency diet now enacted for the month of May) and sewing (searching for the most bearable face mask), all while listening to audiobooks, all cozy and historical mysteries as I seek respite from COVID news.

Routine has become strict and rarely varied. First it’smorning coffee, when we mutually drown in the firehose of social media, followed by a few hours spent on projectsuntil it’s time for an afternoon walk timed to beat the 3-5 pm jogging and biking rush hour on our preferred nature paths. We come back, dry off (we go in all weathers), readand play board games until wine-time, dinner, chat and music. Our day concludes with TV and bed. Rinse and repeat. Every day.

Excitement is laundry day, a video chat with a friend or relative, or Hayden’s weekly trip to the grocery store, me waiting at home for my hunter/gatherer (he has better lifting power than I do and we don’t run a car) to bring our weekly food, which I dunk in bleach mixture, except for eggs. Trust me, eggs in soggy cardboard containers do not go well. 

​The routine is comforting, at first, giving a sense of control to the uncontrollable situation we all find ourselves inhabiting. How can we react to the endless torrent of sorrow, disaster, fear and conflicting advice pouring from our media? Why, bake cinnamon buns, what else?

Aaaand it doesn’t take long for the comfortable routine to become a prison. Hayden starts taking dyspeptic pictures of himself in his bathrobe and turning them into silly gifs. I’m trying one hair style after another. After gentle discussion, we decide we need to schedule in some spontaneity. We write lots of activities on slips of paper which go into a cookie tin. (Hayden rejects ‘give each other haircuts’) We pull one out every couple of days when we get edgy. Sometimes just a game we haven’tplayed forever. Reading to each other, possibly with dramatizations. Looking at photos from years ago. A take-out Mexican food fiesta. Birthday party, with home-made hats (I knew there was a reason I’d kept a shoebox of orphaned earrings and feathers for decades). Other activities that are MYOB, so there. It’s not so much what we do, but that we burst out of the wire cage of routine we’ve built, and change things up a little. It’s surprisingly refreshing. Sex in the afternoon is awesome. Oops. I said I wouldn’t talk about that.

Spec Can: How are you adapting to social distancing?

Liz Westbrook-Trenholm: All of which spills over into how we deal with social distancing. Note the ‘we’. This would not be possible without each other. Always a close couple, a kind of two-person party, we’ve become, if anything, even closer, more careful and tender. Of course, it was disappointing for two inveterate travellers like us to see our plans collapse and our world shrink to only anywhere we can walk to. We can get tetchy, but we cut each other slack when the black dog drops by, or when one or the other wants to be all alone. We don’t take offense. It all makes sense. An old friend once said, “Where is it written you should be happy?” Sometimes it’s necessary to sit under the dark cloud and just breathe until the sun comes out again. It does come out again.

That being said, we work hard at keeping in touch with others via Zoom, Facebook chat, phone, email and text – whatever medium works best for each. We have especially upped our calls with family. I talk often now with my daughter who is distancing alone in London (the UK one). She’s worked out some solutions and has produced some powerful art in her off-work time, but it got pretty dark and desperate before she found her COVID groove.My sister and I vent constantly, bless her for being there.Calling friends and acquaintances and hearing that they’reokay releases swacks of relieved endorphins and hugely shortens the list of people I have to worry about. If they’renot okay, I’m there to hear it out and keep in touch. Sharing their burden paradoxically lessens mine.

​Another side-effect is my tendency to babble uncontrollably at sight of another human. I strike up two-meter distance chit-chat with total strangers or the pharmacy clerk behind her plexi-glass shield. My urge to chat about anything anything at all, at some length, is difficult to contain. I try. Truly I try. Let me tell you ALL about it sometime.

​I’m also thinking about what comes next as treatments and, we hope, vaccines evolve over the coming one or two years. Years. Yeah. As an asthmatic baby boomer smack dab in the middle of one of the at-risk demographics, I’ll need to keep shying away from close contact with anyone who might be a carrier. While we’veall been in it together, it’s been do-able. When I become a minority, it’ll pose new challenges. My friends with disabilities and health issues are nodding their heads with grim grins and saying, ‘Yuh-huh. Tell us about it.” No need. In sharing your stories and concerns, you gave the world a lot of information and demonstrated a lot of coping strategies, long before COVID came along. I expect to be using them shortly! I’ll likely write about it.

Spec Can: How is the outbreak affecting your writing?

Liz Westbrook-Trenholm: The times have affected my writing in two main ways. One is that I have done much less. My writing often takes me deep into dark corners and edgy issues that can leave me drained. I’ve been a little nervous to approach it.

But now, after a hiatus for bleaching and retreat, I find I’m approaching it with a gentle, cozy style. A young woman, a run-away on her last legs, physically and psychologically, falls into a carefully dug hole in the middle of a forest. She looks up from the pre-dug grave at a man silhouetted against the dawn who says, “That’s mine.” And they go from there, into a gentle interaction of restoration and understanding between generations.

Or the old woman, isolating alone in her apartment, who opens her door to the god of the underworld in the form of a lost toddler in a really odious diaper. She draws him into her home and nurtures him, fearless and practical. What deal will they cut when he reaches his full size? 

End of life is a theme in the back of mind for all of us right now and in both of these stories. It’s a topic that turns up in my fiction regularly, but in these, my emerging ‘COVID’ stories, I find the characters less fierce and more wise and accepting than my frequently angry, feisty dames. 

So. How about that COVID thing, eh? Who among us thought we’d be living through history in the making? How can anything be the same again, any more than it was after the plague years, or the potato famine, or the abolition of slavery in the west, or the world wars? So many scabs have been ripped off our social shortcomings. So much strength and ability has emerged, showing us what we, as a society, could be. What will we do with it? Where will we take this experience, both within ourselves and in the way we interact with each other? Now, there’s a good writing topic for any spec fic writer.

Interviewed by Derek Newman-Stille, MA, PhD ABD

by

Authors in Quarantine – Nathan Frechette

With this this series, I am hoping to capture how this cultural moment is affecting our speculative fiction authors and how our authors are surviving during the COVID-19 outbreak

Spec Can: What have you been up to during the COVID-19 outbreak?

Nathan Frechette: I’ve been fortunate enough to work from home for my day job, so I’ve been doing a lot of that. I have children at home too, so I’ve been spending a lot of time caring for them. I’ve been cooking a little bit more, and I’ve been playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons.

Spec Can: How are you adapting to social distancing?

Nathan Frechette: As someone who is disabled and introverted, there hasn’t been much of an adaptation. I do feel like I have more physical energy now that I don’t have to commute so much, I’m able to be much more productive in my work. My mental energy has really been all over the place, and I miss my friends and family.

Spec Can: How is the outbreak affecting your writing?

Nathan Frechette: I see a lot of creative folk talking about getting writing done, but I have been too harried to write, really. I have been working on my graphic memoir, since that was scripted and thumbnailed months ago, I just have to draw, which is more mechanical than creative for me. I’m having lots of creative dreams, and even trying to record them has been difficult.

Interviewed by Derek Newman-Stille, MA, PhD ABD

by

A Disabled Body Is A Political Act

A Disabled Body is A Political Act

A review of Dorothy Palmer’s “Crutch, Cage, Sword, Kerfuffle” in Nothing Without Us (Renaissance Press, 2019).

By Derek Newman-Stille

Combining protests of the G20 summit, a sword from Roman Brittain, a disabled body, and the loss of a foetus, Dorothy Palmer’s “Crutch, Cage, Sword, Kerfuffle” examines the way that disabled women’s bodies are politicized and that disability itself is an act of protest. Using complex imagery of cages and walls, Palmer brings attention to the way that our lives are shaped by restrictions and controls.

Wrapping up the mythic from Arthurian legend into the complex stories around the G20 summit, Palmer brings attention to the nature of storytelling and the way that stories are complex, fluid, and ever-changing things. She explores the culture of surveillance and police violence around the G20 summit and the bodily impact of protest (as well as the need for protest), but this story revolves around the need to speak up and fight back.

To find out more about Nothing Without Us, visit https://renaissance-107765.square.site/product/nothing-without-us/117?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=false&category_id=2

by

The Flow of Disability

The Flow of Disability

A review of Elliott Dunstan’s “Oliver Gutierrez and the Walking Stick of Destiny” from Nothing Without Us (Renaissance, 2019).

By Derek Newman-Stille

For folks like me, who are disabled, we develop a certain intimacy with our accessibility devices. They are both part of us… and not at the same time. They are extensions of our personhood, ways of challenging the idea of a singular, biological body and we engage with them in unique ways that often shift. One could say that we are in a conversation with our accessibility devices. For Elliot Dunstan’s character, Olivier Gutierrez, that conversation is literal. 

Gutierrez, who uses “xe/xem” pronouns, first discovered xe was in conversation with xyr accessibility devices when xe was given xyr first pair of hearing aids at 4 years old. Xe quickly discovered that xyr hearing aids would talk to xyr. 

Gutierrez feels that xyr life has been a series of steps away from the idea of normalcy and Xe asks at the beginning of the story “how many things could one person have wrong with them”. Xyr story has been one of being treated as abnormal, as Other. Xe experienced a life of labels, some avoiding words like “crazy” by calling xyr “imaginative” or “creative” or “odd”, but these words didn’t mask the intended meaning. Xe describes xyr self as “deaf. And crazy. And queer”, illustrating an intersection of different oppressed identities.

Gutierrez has an opportunity that few of us do, to enter into direct conversation with our accessibility devices and xe is able to learn how to negotiate xyr own identity through this conversation, figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

In Oliver Gutierrez and the Walking Stick of Destiny”, Dunstan examines the multiple intersections of disabled identity, exploring the complex milieux of overlapping experiences and knowledges while also illustrating to the reader the complex oppressions and internalized ableisms that occur at that intersection.

To discover more about Elliot Dunstan, go to https://www.patreon.com/elliottdunstan

To find out more about Nothing Without Us, go to https://renaissance-107765.square.site/product/nothing-without-us/117?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=false&category_id=2

by

More Than A Statistic

More Than A Statistic

A review of Tonya Liburd’s “Sometimes You…” in Nothing Without Us (Renaissance Press, 2019)

By Derek Newman-Stille

People with mental illness or those who identify themselves as part of the Mad Community are statistically more likely to be victims of violence than they are to be perpetrators of violence. I think this is something that needs repeating, especially since so much media attention is focussed on making mentally ill people seem as though they are dangerous, threatening, and in need of police action. So, let me repeat – they are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.

Before getting to my review, I want to also nod toward the work of activists in the Mad Community, who have created a space for the reclamation of terms like “mad” and have worked to critique oppressive psychiatric and medical systems that have done damage to the Mad population. In acknowledgement of their work, I will be using “Mad” throughout this review.

I bring up the violence against the Mad population because Tonya Liburd brings attention to this violence in her story “Sometimes You…”. Whereas many people don’t seem to retain the statistic that the Mad population is more likely to be victims of violence, Liburd provides a powerful story about that violence, exploring both the pain of violent abuse against a person in the Mad Community as well as the internalized damage that comes from abuse. Not only does Liburd give a recounting of a violent encounter, but she positions the reader as the person in the Mad Community who is being attacked, using the second person throughout the story.

Liburd illustrates the predatory nature of people who prey on the Mad Community, giving details about how they target people and how they make people in the Mad Community feel unsafe in public spaces. Liburd illustrates the lasting damage of these encounters and the fear and pain and feeling of not belonging that gravitates like a miasma around people after violent encounters like this. She points out that even spaces that are constructed as “safe” frequently still have gaps and can still allow damage and violence to happen.

Liburd examines the precarity that exists particularly for homeless Mad people and the systemic violence that they experience from a system that doesn’t provide them with resources they need. Yet, Liburd points to other communities that can be found and developed to create a support network.

“Sometimes You…” is a powerful story that speaks to the need for community and the need for safe spaces for people in the Mad Community. It is a story that invites the reader into the mind and experiences of a member of the Mad Community, allowing them to experience the real world violence that people in that community are subject to and the repercussions of that continued violence. Liburd uses her gift of storytelling to paint a picture that goes beyond simple statistics about the Mad Community and instead gives a realness and three dimensionality to the population and their experiences.

To discover more about Tonya Liburd’s work, go to https://www.patreon.com/TonyaLiburd

To find out more about Nothing Without Us, go to Renaissance Press’ website at https://renaissance-107765.square.site/product/nothing-without-us/117?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=false&category_id=2