Wordgathering

A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature

Volume 7     Issue 3     September 2013

Essays and Interviews in This Issue

One of the rewards of editing Wordgathering is the chance to "re-discover" previously published quality writing and bring it to a much wider audience. That is the case with two of the essays presented in this issue. Yvette Green's "My Cabbage Patch Doll" and Laura Emerson's "Understanding Peter" both originally appeared in a local Philadelphia publication, I Could Hear My Stomach Doing the Lambada: Prose Writing From the Inglis House Poetry Workshop(2007). Each essay is a narrative reflection on an experience of the writer who has an a disability as an adult, about an encounter with disability as a child. Both writers imbue their work with the freshness of a child's viewpoint. The third essay in this issue is the second of Diane Hoover Bechtler's account of a successful able-bodied writer who now has to see her life through the eyes of a person with a disability. Part one appeared in the June 2013 issue.

In this issue, Wordgathering also has the opportunity to present interviews with two exceptional people – both poets. Artist and poet MaryAnn L. Miller discusses her approach to art and poetry and the connections between them. In a very different sort of interview poet Laurie Clemens interviews British poet Mark Burnhope about Poets Against Atos, the poetry blog and organization he founded to protest contemporary changes in disability assessment and entitlements by the British government.

Representative samples of MaryAnn Miller's poetry and screen monotype prints can be found be found in the poetry and arts sections, respectively, of this issue of Wordgathering.

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