'This intriguing issue presents essays, memoir and creative work by disabled and non-disabled writers on the subjects of disability and of the interrelation of writing and disability.
'Blind writer and critic Amanda Tink discusses the impact of Henry Lawson’s deafness on his style and created world. Ben Stubbs walks the streets of Adelaide blindfolded to learn more of the sightless city. Deaf author Jessica White discusses the deafness of Maud Praed. Josephine Taylor writes an incisive essay on Vulvodynia. There are discussions of visible and invisible disabilities, of the poetics of disability, of disability and silence, of little known or largely unrecognised disabilities, and of the difficulties confronting discussion of disability in the first place. There is also Southerly’s usual feast of reviews and recent Australian and New Zealand writing, including striking new works by Anthony Mannix, Elizabeth Holdsworth, Peter Boyle, Koraly Dimitriadis and many others.' (Publication summary)
Writing Disability in Australia:
This work has been affiliated because disability is its main subject. For details, see the individual work records.
'Disability may be thought of as comprising layers of disadvantage and marginalisation, with each specific form of disability expressing and responding to its own particular combination of layers - its own unique cross-sectional profile. Layers may include the site where disability is experienced and the form disability takes, among other possibilities. In vulvodynia, the site of disability is the female genitals, and the form of disability is chronic pain, with the cause of pain being unknown and generally invisible [...]' (Introduction)
'She turned up on the sunny veranda in Alphington in 1988, wild, precocious, full of story. She was twenty When we published her first story she was eighteen...' (Introduction)
'I've been wanting to write about non-normative body and an elusive word has been stalling me. What is it to be - distopic'? 'Dystrophic' ? 'distropic'? distopia is a place - a society - or condition 'in which everything is as bad as possible (OED). Dystrophia refers to defective Nourishment (OED: dystrophic is a term reserved for lakes particularly laden with dissolved organic matter). The dystrophy in 'muscular dystrophy' refers more to atrophy than what my mind insists to me 'dystrophy' should refer to. But what is that?...' (Introduction)
A woman wakes up and prepares for the day before her carer arrives. She walks herself through the first steps of relieving herself, getting up, and taking her pills in a practiced routine. At the last moment, as she's trying to stand up fully, she makes a miscalculation.
The narrator with Meniere's struggles with misdiagnoses and arrogant doctors who don't listen to her, suffering a relapse as a result.
The narrator describes her experiences with spastic diplegia and cerebral palsy: the unsolicited questions and pity, the condescending love of her father, and the plain insults of young children that she ultimately prefers.
Various struggles with public perception, ineffective suggestions, and medication for depression and schizophrenia.
The narrator works at a mental health institution and comes into contact with several different patients.
The narrator describes a 'gentle friend' she once had: an Indian man with schizophrenia that she kept in contact with all her life. In and out of mental health institutions, he nevertheless manages to make time for the narrator, bringing her a wedding gift and having meals together. He dies without her knowledge.
Voula has recently been diagnosed with motor neurone disease. A Greek mother of two children, she stubbornly insists on continuing on as she did before, cooking and working. A bad fall at work costs her her job; she takes offense at one of her relatives bringing her food, declaring that she can cook for herself. Meanwhile, the family has no success in finding Iplex, an experimental drug that was patented and kept off the market.
After another bad fall, Voula is wheelchair-bound, dependent on her family to care for her. She feels that she is dying, and asks her daughter to make Voula's famous cherry flan, and drifts off as she waits for it.
After being diagnosed with rheumatism, the narrator's friends and family drift away, and he cuts off contact with them.
Long Paddock
Writing Disability
vol.
76
no.
2
2016
10762465
2016
periodical issue
