Panelists: Meg Day, Lisa Glatt, Jackie Hymes, Emily Rapp Black, Jillian Weise
One of the most common workshop responses to nonfiction written by people with disabilities is “Wow, I didn’t know your life was like this!” Given that every person living in a body—i.e., every single reader—is an accident, an illness, or a decade away from disability, it’s remarkable how much literary airtime writers with disabilities are pressured to devote to education. This panel brings together disabled and Deaf writers to discuss the imposition of repeatedly teaching Disability 101 in our nonfiction; encounters we’ve had with literary and editorial ableism; and techniques we use in memoir, essay and video art to subvert what’s expected of disabled and Deaf writing. Citing the groundbreaking scholarly and literary work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomsen, Laura Hershey, and others, panelists will discuss their artistic development with the larger history and culture of disability, inviting others to see themselves as part of this centuries-old cultural tradition.
Emily Rapp Black began with an introduction of the panelists. Jillian read an access statement, and a handout with information about the panel was distributed.
Emily asked the panel the first question about what they have found frustrating teaching any kind of narrative.
Jackie: “It’s important to think about how to act in the classroom space. I tell my class that I’m hard-of-hearing and they have to face me. They have to learn and adopt the new behavior. In teaching, I’m leading, and they have to learn how to re-learn and not use certain phrases. We discuss the cliché of ‘falling on deaf ears’ and why they shouldn’t say that. They have to think about what they say.”
Emily: “You have to think about the conversation before you enter the room. That is an extra burden. These issues are encountered the most in written work with phrases like ‘paralyzed by fear,’ ‘crippling debt,’ and strange depictions of the tiny Tim trope in some stories—the good-hearted disabled person who is a compensation for another character or the opposite…Students are on the defensive because they hear these things in our culture and in the mainstream media, then a friction results and complicates authority in the classroom.”
Meg: “It does more than complicate the authority and it dehumanizes us and puts us on the defensive. Students don’t like that they cannot write ableist metaphors. We are defending our humanity without any kind of support. CNN and the current administration do not support us. Disabled professors are ‘rare’ we don’t have any camaraderie. It is a far more drastic and dire situation that we are forced into and that our students are afforded much more, many more liberties in that moment.”
Jackie: “We are in a dangerous place. A colleague wanted to teach a class at my university. Her class did not make. The fact that classes are so important are not making is because of lack of interest is scary. That means that able-bodied people are not interested in learning about people that are not like themselves. What difference is there really? Why aren’t these classes taken?”
Someone in the audience asked if there is another way to say “Disability 101.” He asked the panelists if they find the word to be “pejorative.”
Jillian: “Yes…pre-disability 101. But no not at all. In 2018, we are reclaiming the word. We’re not ashamed of it. That would be like pre-disability 101.”
Someone in the audience asked: “Do you feel like any space that you are an instructor in automatically becomes Disability101 no matter what the topic is? Or no matter what you are writing, are you being asked to perform disability rather than write about other subjects?”
Emily: “There is a tendency to. I used to get a lot of requests to write about end-of-life care, but when I had no experience with end-of-life care. Then when my son was in hospice I had a lot to say about end-of-life care. There is a performative element of being the right kind of disabled person. Laura Hershey was an activist who talked about being the wrong kind of disabled person. She was not able to perform. Once you start writing in the world of nonfiction you can write about… ramen without bringing up your amputation. It touches every element of your life but you’re not conscious of it every second.”
Jackie: “It’s exhausting to live it and then have that expectation that I must have that out there in the world. I want everything else that I do to be out there. Or that everything that I write is sad and awful because I have such a lack and am so full of pain. So when I send in something that is humorous, they say the tone is totally wrong for this piece, and I’m like ‘fuck you,’ but I can’t say that.”
Meg: “There is an interesting tension there, too. One is obviously wanting to have agency and autonomy of what we write about. I really don’t want anybody who is not deaf to write about it….So often my students are like ‘I want to tell people’s stories. Give people a voice,’ and the irony in deaf culture of that is really intense. The conflict there is that we are already always assuming that there are not enough of us, when like we’re fucking everywhere.”
Someone from the audience asked: ‘Who is allowed to write about this? One professor that I had was the child of deaf parents. She had a memoir and talked about her parents being deaf but she was not deaf. Is it unfair to say that she should not have written about it? Is that exclusionist?”
Jillian—”I want to say about being ‘exclusionist’ that this space is excluding people who are in wheelchairs from being in it.”
Yvette Benavides is a professor of creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. She is a book critic for the San Antonio Express News and a commentator for Texas Public Radio. Her work has been published in the Bellevue Literary Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Huizache, Aster[ix] Journal, The Americas Review, Mothering, Latina, the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and The Texas Observer, among other publications. She is a 2018 fellow of the Scripps Howard Journalism Entrepreneurship Institute.
Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies 