Wordgathering

A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature

Volume 10     Issue 4     December 2016

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Essays in this Issue

The December issue of Wordgathering continues the journal's tradition of featuring both personal essays by writers that draw upon their own experiences as persons with disabilities and more scholarly essays that explore previously written literature through a disabilities lens. In the first class are Kathryn Allan's haibun-like essay on living with pain and invisible disabilities and Michael Amram's narrative of body-building as an outgrowth of physical disability. Using the death of his father as a framework for memoir, Karl Sherlock reflects upon loss, a partner's illness and his own disability in the context of father-son relationship. In the fourth personal essay, Lelani Squire uses her experience as a writing workshop leader to look at the difficult issue of veterans of the Iraqi wars trying to find a means of communicating their experiences through writing.

Two much more academic essays, each focus on a different literary work. In the first, Melissa Gilstrap looks at both the negative and positive representations of disability among working class people in Charles Dicken's Our Mutual Friend. In the second, Elizabeth Dahab makes the case for a poetics of amnesia in the Khaled Osman's debut novel, Le Caire à corps perdu. Dahab makes her own translations from this work, which is not yet available in English.

• Kathryn Allan, The Weight of Matter
• Michael Amram, Exercising Demons
• Elizabeth Dahab, The Poetics of Amnesia and Reverse Migration
• Melissa Gilstrap, Working Class Crips
• Karl Sherlock, Thrift
• Lelani Squire, Never the Same, Again

In addition to the essays, Anand Prahlad's "Venice Beach" taken from his forthcoming book The Secret Life of a Black Aspie can be found in this issue's Excerpts section.

Wordgathering invites the submissions of literary essays, particularly those that help establish disability literature as a field of study. Essays on the work of other writers with disabilities are especially desireable. In addition, the journal is always seeking new work of fiction by writers with disabilities. We also accept disability-related fiction by writers without disabilities that counters stereotypes of disability. Queries can be addressed to comments@wordgathering.com.

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