Countdown to Spoon Knife: from "Kelly's Blackbird" by Nick Walker

Today's excerpt from The Spoon Knife Anthology comes from "Kelly's Blackbird," by Nick Walker.

Autonomous Press is now taking pre-orders for The Spoon Knife Anthology, as well as Barking Sycamores, Year One and Imaginary Friends.  Order at www.autpress.com.  (See the latest issue of Barking Sycamores online at barkingsycamores.wordpress.com.)

This year I’m in the Gold Star class for art.

I don’t like the name. The Gold Star class. Sounds like we’re in kindergarten. If I hadn’t been sent to this place, I’d be a freshman in high school now. Instead, I’m in the Gold Star class.

Despite the name, the Gold Star class doesn’t entirely suck. For one thing, no one gets into the Gold Star class unless they have a solid track record of making it through art classes without engaging in what the staff call disruptive behaviors. Most of the time I’m a great fan of disruptive behaviors, but it’s nice to be able to concentrate on my art without being distracted by a lot of shouting. And without having to watch out for flying crayons, clay, paint, and other airborne hazards. And without having my table crashed into by people who are fighting, flipping out, or being tackled by staff. The absence of that sort of thing makes the Gold Star class a major improvement over the art classes I was in last year.

Another improvement is that in the Gold Star class we get to use the good art supplies they don’t trust the other kids with. Like today I’m using this little wooden-handled tool called a gouge, which looks like the offspring of a chisel and a potato peeler. The kids in the other art classes don’t get to use anything sharp. Not even pencils. Which is ridiculous, because they all use pencils in math class.

I’m using the gouge to carve a picture of a bird into the surface of a square piece of linoleum. I’m almost done, except for a few final touches. Then the square of linoleum can be coated in ink and pressed against paper to make prints. That part of the process isn’t so interesting to me, so I might skip it. The carving is the interesting part.

The art teacher advised me to draw the outlines of the picture on the linoleum first, but I decided to ignore this advice and just let the bird emerge as I carved. And now here it is, almost fully emerged from its hiding place within the gray linoleum, spreading its wings like it’s about to take flight.

“That’s really nice,” a girl’s voice says from somewhere above my right shoulder.

At first I don’t even realize it’s me she’s speaking to. Once I get into working on something, it’s hard to shift my focus. Fortunately, someone else is here to help me this time. A head with dark hair and neon pink lipstick leans sideways into my field of vision. “Hey, queerboy,” the head says. “Wake the fuck up. She’s talking to you.”

This is Trina. I don’t want to deal with Trina, so I twist around to look up at the first girl, the one who said “That’s really nice.” She has pale white skin and long straight hair a dozen shades of blonde. This is Kelly. Kelly and Trina are best friends, even though Kelly is always kind to people and Trina is mean to everyone except Kelly. No one is mean to Kelly, at least not here. General opinion among both guys and girls is that Kelly is the coolest girl in school. Though even the kids who are considered cool in this place were once outcasts among the normal kids, so I guess coolness is relative.

“Will you make me a blackbird like that?” Kelly asks.

Blackbird?

Until this moment I hadn’t given any thought to what kind of bird it might be. I don’t think it looks like any real-life bird at all. It’s come out more abstract than realistic, the carved lines jagged and wild, emphasizing motion. If I had to guess, I’d maybe say it was a raven.

But girls mostly don’t talk to me at all, certainly not girls like Kelly who is the coolest girl in school and also so beautiful it hurts to look at her. So now it’s a blackbird. And I’d gladly make her one, or give her this one when I finish it. Or maybe I should use this carved piece of linoleum to make a print for her?

Before I can decide which option would be best, Trina grabs Kelly by the sleeve of her denim jacket and pulls her away, walking fast. “Come on,” she says. “Fuck this shit. You don’t need to talk to that little fucking faggot.”

Kelly’s pretty easygoing, but in ordinary circumstances she’d never allow Trina to drag her around like this. In the team of Kelly and Trina, Kelly is the leader and Trina is the sidekick. But Kelly seems to have become mesmerized by this bird I’ve carved, and she just looks at it over her shoulder and blinks in a bewildered sort of way as Trina leads her back to their seats on the other side of the room.

I go back to putting the finishing touches on the carving. By the time I’m done, art class is almost over. Across the room, Kelly and Trina are whispering to one another with fierce intensity, heads together, not even pretending to be working on their art projects. This doesn’t look like the kind of conversation I want to interrupt, so I guess I can’t just walk over there and hand my finished carving to Kelly. Instead, I hand it in to the art teacher for safekeeping. The art teacher loves it, and by the time she’s done bubbling about it the bell has rung and Kelly and Trina are gone. 

Countdown to Spoon Knife: from "Something Plus One"

Today's excerpt from The Spoon Knife Anthology comes from "Something Plus One," by Bridget Allen.

Autonomous Press is now taking pre-orders for The Spoon Knife Anthology, as well as Barking Sycamores, Year One and Imaginary Friends.  Order at www.autpress.com.  (See the latest issue of Barking Sycamores online at barkingsycamores.wordpress.com.)

Day Four

Each day here feels worse. I wonder if I'll ever get out of here. The sense of Other is tangible, like a film that covers every surface with a greasy dust. Of course, there is also real, non-metaphorical, greasy dust. I wish I had some Pine Sol and a scrub brush. I know I'm still in the same hospital, but on this floor everything is different. If I wasn't terrified, I'd be joking about how One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest this place is. Not that there's anyone to joke with. No one's visited since I was moved. Not even my mother.

The Turtle Man stops by the ward but doesn't speak with me. I can't tell if that bodes well or not.

Countdown to Spoon Knife: What is a Spoon Knife?

In today's Excerpts from The Spoon Knife Anthology: the Introduction, "What is a Spoon Knife?", by Michael Scott Monje, Jr.

Autonomous Press is now taking pre-orders for The Spoon Knife Anthology, as well as Barking Sycamores, Year One and Imaginary Friends.  Order at www.autpress.com.  (See the latest issue of Barking Sycamores online at barkingsycamores.wordpress.com.)

Introduction: What is a Spoon Knife?

The first question I got from my partners and blogging friends when I started talking about spoon knives was “What is that?” Every one of them had heard about Christine Miserandino’s “The Spoon Theory,” of course, and they could tell I was referencing it, but none of them seemed to be familiar with traditional woodworking tools, because they didn’t see that reference or its connection to activist work. Not at first, at least. Once I posted some pictures of various spoon knives and the bowls they were used to carve, the idea caught fire.

To start understanding the idea of the spoon knife, you need to start back at “The Spoon Theory,” that wonderful, dynamic metaphor for living with chronic pain and disability. If you’ve never read the original essay, it’s worth the time, and it is available online at www.butyoudontlooksick.com. In it, Ms. Miserandino details how she used a collection of spoons to symbolize her pool of resources when a friend asked her what it was like to live with lupus. As she detailed the tasks of a regular day, she took spoons away, to show how her energy had to be spent. At the end, when there was only one spoon left and the only item on the list—dinner—was likely to take two spoons, it helped to drive home the choices and the careful safeguarding of resources she has to make as she plans her daily activities.

The essay is a powerful statement about the importance of long-term planning, of not doing everything, and of prioritizing self-care. At the same time, though, it also begs a question: How does one get more spoons? To extend the idea in her original essay, each day is treated like a table, and each table is set with a different number of place settings. Sometimes, there are more spoons than you need to do everything on the list. Sometimes, though, there are not enough. That complicates planning. What if there was another way, though?

Interdependency, that principle that governs so much of the way that disability and disabled cultures are constructed, seems to suggest that the whole room does better when we are willing to send extra spoons to other tables. That, at least, is the organizing principle in most of the activist organizations and groups I’ve been involved with, whether they are formal or informal in nature. What about when the whole room is packed, though? How do we get more spoons when everyone needs them?

The answer is the spoon knife, that old woodworker’s companion that looks something like the tool it is used to make, only sharp and nasty and quick. A spoon knife is used to carve the bowl, which makes it curved, like a melon baller. It shaves away the unnecessary parts of the wood in layers, too, so it has to be sharp and strong, to keep slicing and slicing until it has peeled enough to make a depression in an otherwise smooth stick. It looks thin, like something made from an old beer can, but in a master’s hands, it rewards patience and precision.

If we’re keeping with our extended metaphor, though, then we still have to ask the question: What is a spoon knife? We know what our symbol does, but what in our community is capable of doing that thing—cutting away layers of what shouldn’t be there, to leave us with the ability to do more, reach further, and nourish ourselves more successfully. What looks thin and weak, but nonetheless digs deep channels into reality?

My belief is that the spoon knife is a story. For some, it’s an expression of solidarity that refills our emotional reserves even as it bolsters the morale of the one who offered support. For others, it might be an example that provides the cognitive scaffolding needed to get out of an abusive situation, or even just to recognize one in the first place. It’s also possible for it to be a confrontation, a reality that will not yield to our need until we learn to wield it and to control its damage with unwavering precision.

It’s fitting that the spoon knife looks both weak and menacing at once, because story is a thing that can be blown away on the wind, or it can slice away the people around you by revealing what lies underneath your initial presentation. And, at the end of the day, a spoon knife is absolutely unthreatening unless one chooses to make it otherwise.

If I’m right, then this collection of knives will provoke new spoons when the right kinds of readers connect with them, providing the things those readers need to navigate their own daily tasks and challenges. And who knows? Maybe a few of them will look into this volume and see more than spoons. Maybe those readers will see the possibilities that arise when you study the uses of the knife. And you know what? We will be waiting for them.

Countdown to Spoon Knife: from "My Mother GLaDOS"

This month, Autonomous Press releases three new titles, including the first volume of The Spoon Knife Anthology.

Pre-orders are now open online, but if you'd like to get a sneak peek at Spoon Knife before you order, stay tuned.  We'll be running excerpts from works in the anthology from now until the release date.

Today's excerpt is from "My Mother GLaDOS," by Dani Alexis Ryskamp.

You, SUBJECT NAME HERE, Must Be the Pride of SUBJECT HOMETOWN HERE

You come from a long line of people who really loved cake.

“Cake,” of course, is a euphemism for sex.  Straight sex.  The kind of sex that is always implied, never stated; the kind of sex one assumes happens in marriages but tastefully omits to mention.  Good-girl sex.  Lie back and think of England, where cake is served alongside afternoon tea.

In 1690, your great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Harold Kennedy, disowns your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Harold Kennedy, depriving the latter of several thousand acres of southwest Ohio in addition to the usual emotional connections one associates with family.  Three hundred years later, the remaining records only mention that the disowning had to do with Harold Junior’s conversion from Presbyterianism to Methodism.  You’re in graduate school before you learn that “Methodism” is a euphemism for “enjoying too much cake with the wrong people.” 

It might even be a euphemism for “enjoying cake with your own team,” as it were.  You can’t tell.  The familial euphemisms for non-bakery-approved relationships are even more dense and confusing than the euphemisms for vanilla cake.

In 1901 or thereabouts, your great-great-grandmother’s sister, “Aunt Marie,” scandalizes the society pages of the Urbana, Ohio newspaper by declining to have her impending marriage memorialized in them.  Instead, she runs away to Florida for her nuptials.  Ninety years later, your great-grandmother is still heavily implying that Aunt Marie ate her cake and had it too. 

How many Methodist bakeries are there in Florida?  The sketchy end to which Aunt Marie came is repeated, technicians inform you, by your great-aunt, whose decades-long friendship with the first openly gay mayor of Key West may or may not have involved cake.  If the family knows, nobody will discuss it.  “That has nothing to do with us,” your aunt announces staunchly at her funeral.  Of course it doesn’t.  Still, when he is cremated, half his ashes go to his artist partner in Florida; the other half live in your great-aunt’s house, caked in the bottom of a glass tumbler.

“I knew this bisexual thing was just a phase,” your mother says in 2005 or thereabouts.  She’s not referring to the six months you’ve spent attending Methodist college youth meetings – she doesn’t know about those.  No one does.  That has nothing to do with us.  Your mother is talking about your cousin, whose actual bona fide relationships with women were followed by an actual bona fide relationship with a man, whom she married.

Your mother’s voice oozes scorn.  You decide not to mention the Methodist youth group.  Your gaze drops to the cake lying on your plate, half-eaten.

Only after you’ve been safely married off to a straight man do you start to suspect that the cake is a lie.

Official AutPress Statement on the TASH Response to Slate

Encouraging update!

Autonomous Press and TASH had a very encouraging meeting this morning on the topics of Communication Justice and research.

TASH reaffirmed their powerful commitment to human rights and quality of life for people, which puts us clearly on the same side, and so we look forward to a fruitful partnership.

Stay tuned for more detailed news about future developments soon.

 [Ed. note: We want to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to see this statement of our principles on communication justice. So we reprint it here and invite you to reprint it on your own blog if you wish; to see the original, go here. Thank you very much for your attention, and for helping us stand strong in defense of everyone's right to communicate. -Ib]

Following the statement from TASH regarding their official stance that they will not support or directly endorse facilitated communication, the partners at Autonomous Press have decided that we cannot do business with the organization or any representative acting in their capacity as such while this policy is in effect. As a press started by a majority autistic partnership, one whose own members type to communicate frequently, we do not feel comfortable attending, selling at, or promoting this organization or their events in any way.

We make this decision with a heavy heart. Many of us have friends on the board. In addition to that fact, though, one of our editors on Typed Words, Loud Voices, our groundbreaking anthology of typers, is herself an FC activist. She has presented at TASH to specifically address the ways she communicates and barriers caused by false and ableist skepticism leading to poorly designed and agenda-driven “studies.” We can only imagine the strain that this institutional decision has placed on her, implying as it does that TASH does not stand behind those that they invite to share their knowledge and ideas.

It is out of a desire to make our commitment to representing voices like hers, and not to privilege some forms of accommodation and some forms of communication over others, that we make this move:

Until TASH officially embraces FC and the right of all disabled persons to communicate with the methods they choose for themselves, Autonomous Press will be forced to avoid the TASH conference, withdraw outreach funding from any travel grants being used by TASH presenters applying for our assistance, and withdraw our memberships (for those of us who are members). The partners are also asking that AutPress authors who wish to present at TASH during this period, however long or short it is, do so without promoting the books they have published with us or directly tying them in to their abstracts (casual mentions are fine).

We are happy to fully embrace any organization within our community that supports and embraces our mission and the authors we represent. When an organization leaves itself open to the idea that the books, presentations, and other intellectual work by facilitated communicators are not genuine, that is the same thing as stating that they are open to the idea that we have created false or counterfeit scholarly work. It’s unfortunate, but we cannot have a relationship with organizations that take such a position and declare it to be principled.

We look forward to communication justice becoming, once again, a priority for TASH, and await a new institutional statement showing it.

On Stigma (Ode to the Secretly Neuroqueer) by E.J. (Ibby) Grace

It is a very serious problem that for many people, the heavy and unfair stigma attached to their disabilities forces them to live "in the closet" in order to be safe.

I was just thinking about definitions, and for me, my being neuroqueer means I'm both neurodivergent and deliberately fierce and fabulous about it.  But this way of living was not always within reach for me.

You can be secretly neuroqueer. You can be secretly fierce and fabulous while keeping yourself safe. Be who you are with people you can trust. We are rebuilding the world so that we can all reach a point where we don't have to keep worrying about the very real repercussions of our labels.

If I'm talking to you, and you see yourself in this, love and solidarity. I have your back, and there are many others like me who feel the same way. Please pass this on to others who may be wondering if anyone could ever understand.

There Is No Case Without D. Johnson's Testimony.

When I came of age a quarter of a century ago, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities were often classified by “mental age” based on various test scores. If they were adults, but called a “mental age” that was less than their chronological age, it was widely assumed that they could not be interested in love and sex. After all, “He’s just like a three year old.”

That was offensive then, and it’s offensive now.

A woman was discussing her daughter with me once, back then. Her daughter was older than I then was, but deaf, without having had much access to the culture. The mother was talking to me about the daughter’s business because she wanted me to convince her to get off birth control pills. What could she possibly need with those? She was not interested in sex, according to her mother, because “She tells me everything. I would know.” I was uncomfortable with the conversation but I did point out that if I were hanging around with my mother in the mall, having a root beer or whatever, I can’t imagine myself announcing “Nice ass” or something whenever someone attractive passed by. She’s my mother. Boundaries.

To her credit, this woman had an epiphany then and said she would not ever have discussed such things with her own mother, either. She realized that her daughter, who was then about thirty, could decide for herself whether she was interested in men, and what to do about it, without maternal input.

Twenty-five years ago, this was.

A few years after that, the Health Sciences University around there wanted to do a pilot project of peer education on safer sex, for AIDS prevention. There was a huge outcry that people with visible Down syndrome, for example, were involved in making video tutorials in which they mentioned sex. This would be a terrible “example” and “corrupt” the “kids,” to hear the detractors tell it. These “kids” were adult – even middle-aged – and were already well aware of how to have sex. Even when the medical school students said that not knowing about how to have sex in safer ways might kill people, many of their relatives tried to block the program.

Around that time, someone I knew who lived in supported apartment housing fell in love with a homeless young man. Because her “staff” wouldn’t “allow” “conjugal visits” with him (yes, jail terminology was really used back then for free adults) she fled to be with him on the streets. He was accused (against her strenuous objections) of “raping” her because her parents did not like that he was not of the same religious sect as the one in which she was raised, and also they knew for a fact that she was “childlike” and could not be a part of such "sins." Had he not been able to prove that he, too, was developmentally disabled, he would have been taken into prison instead of the “system” of state-supported group homes.

Apparently, if that guy had not been disabled, there would be no other explanation for him loving and being attracted to his girlfriend who loved him too, other than his being a creepy sex offender. She could not possibly have consented on her own, because her parents had filed for guardianship.

That was more than twenty years ago, but people still assume that developmentally and intellectually disabled people can have lovers only if they are being victimized against their will by evil perpetrators who should be punished for loving them. Unless we are fairly successful and can communicate readily, in which case those who love us must be some kind of saintly martyrs, bless their cotton socks.

Although developmentally disabled, I’m typing this blog post all by myself, which makes my wife a saintly martyr instead of a sex offender, I guess. She’s lucky I became interested in writing!!

So, everyone, it’s been a quarter of a century, and I declare that Mr. Johnson is the one who knows if he loves Anna Stubblefield and consensually wanted to be with her. If he is not attracted to her and she was being creepy to him, let him tell us. His family is not who knows this information and neither do judges and juries. Not allowing him to testify is malarkey. It is still malarkey even if most people consider themselves intellectually superior beings who can decide if it’s “wrong” for others to hook up. Ableism is somewhat understandable because it is so pervasive, but we must not let it govern us. (Racism is also no way to make decisions.)

If Mr. Johnson says that Ms. Stubblefield is a creepy stalker who pushed herself on him, then she fits that trope, but again: he is the one whose opinion matters here. Legally claiming that a person is not fully a person capable of choice is a mess, and so is the notion that certain people are automatically undesirable and so thus whoever desires them must be suspected of evildoing.

It is twenty-five years later than it was a quarter century ago. Let us hope we have evolved.

Some further reading:

http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2015/09/professor_accused_of_sex_assault_declares_love_for.html

http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1717 

http://julieswritings.blog.com/2015/09/13/some-of-my-thoughts-on-the-anna-stubblefield-case/

http://autonomous-press.myshopify.com/products/typed-words-loud-voices

https://emilybrookswriter.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/disability-rights-on-trial-whats-really-at-stake-in-the-stubblefield-case/

Thank you for letting me share.

Love,

Ib