Hannah Twinberrow-Hirst interviewed Daniel Sluman for Wordgathering
Introduction by Hannah Twinberrow-Hirst
I was fortunate enough to interview Daniel Sluman, renowned poet and disability activist, in the midst of the April 2025 heatwave (something which neither of us particularly cared for, instead bonding over a love of the Autumnal aesthetic).
One thing that struck me, interviewing Dan, was his generosity. Given that my area of research is the interconnectivity of disabled voices, it felt especially appropriate that he so willingly took the time to speak with a fellow disabled academic and to add to the collective knowledge of our community. When I reached out to him on social media (@danielsluman) he was swift to offer his assistance and happy to discuss his anthology single window (Nine Arches Press, 2021) in the light of COVID-19, mutual care, and the inherent interdependencies of bodies. His raw, honest, and open responses epitomise the vulnerability and care inherent in the interconnected disability narratives I have been keen to explore.
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HT-H: 23rd March 2025 marked the five-year anniversary since the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. Although your collection single window documents your experience of being stuck at home throughout 2016, it was released by Nine Arches Press in September 2021 when the whole world was trying to process their own individual experiences of lockdowns and increased isolation. The BBC reported seven million cases of COVID in the UK by September 2021. How did the pandemic impact the reception of single window – if at all?
DS: I think it did. I was interviewed on a podcast, a couple of years ago, and someone introduced it as being about the COVID lockdown – which it wasn’t – but I’m sure it probably caught a bit of a mood in terms of everyone now being quite isolated and having to put themselves in a position that many disabled people are – and have been – for a long, long time. COVID-19 definitely impacted the context for how the book was received.
HT-H: The disabled community was quite quick to mobilize and to offer support to able-bodied people who were new to this isolation. It felt like there was an offering of “crip-expertise” when perhaps governments were a bit slower to respond. What do you think the broader community could learn from disabled experiences of isolation, both prior to and as a result of the pandemic?
DS: Well, my ideology is that disability is the experience that unlocks so much more for people. I think there is a reticence and natural inclination to push away from the idea of disability, from the idea of deformity, of isolation, of loneliness. These inclinations present a massive barrier to us all – preventing us from living a better life, essentially. I’m hopeful that the COVID-19 experience of lockdown – of people not being able to go out – gave people a better embedded knowledge of what disability and what isolation might be like.
But I also see things in a more general way. I think sometimes when I go out (as an amputee) I feel like I’m kind of like an ambassador for disability. Like I’m an official there to give people a greater understanding – a greater intimacy – to the things that are naturally going to be happening to them at some point. Everyone’s going to be disabled, everyone’s going to be isolated, everyone is going to rely on someone else for physical or emotional care at some point. And the way that I see it, is that by getting people closer to that understanding – that experience – of disability, then it helps them when they experience disability themselves and it also helps to lessen the stigma.
HT-H: I imagine it’s also potentially quite heavy for you to carry sometimes as well. Even though you sound quite cavalier about it, I imagine there are times when you perhaps don’t necessarily want to be an ambassador?
DS: Pretty much. I’ve experienced being in an abled gaze pretty much every time I have left my door for the last 27 years. I’m very good at not letting that affect me too much, but it does accumulate into something that at times can be really lonely and isolating. To know that every time you go out the door it’s like the world doesn’t remember what happened yesterday. Every time you go out the door there’s a whole new set of strangers who are going to look and point and sometimes murmur or say things or come up to you and ask you potentially invasive questions. So, whilst it’s nice sometimes to carry the idea that I’m an ambassador, I’m also aware it’s potentially quite damaging to me too.
HT-H: It sounds like there’s an irony to feeling more isolated when surrounded by people.
DS: I know that if I had a proper conversation with the strangers who stare – even for just five minutes – there wouldn’t be some natural connection that would change the way they looked at me. But in the moments preceding that connection, there’s always this same look – the same question. And it’s a very deeply human one. I have it in me too. I can’t control all my own reactions and I can’t control my own internalized ableism, my own internalized curiosity of things that don’t fit the preset mould of what a human should look and sound like. I have that too, so I understand that it’s a deeper thing in all of us, but it does get to you after a while, yes.
HT-H: single window offers a very vulnerable kind of life writing – would you say that your collection invites people to see your lived experience, like having that conversation in the street, but without necessarily using your physical body as the documentation?
DS: It’s maybe even more aggressive than an invitation – it’s more defiant than that. I am saying: this is my reality and I’m writing through it in as stark and honest terms as I can and you’re going to be faced with the choice: you can either react to it in a way where you flinch from it and you push it away, or, maybe it can help create the circumstances for you to become more curious about disability and the things around disability.
I’m very lucky in that some people write through language, they write through abstract ideas, and for some people it’s the playing with language itself that they’re interested in as a writer. In comparison, I feel like I don’t have anything at stake in writing. I can be as confessional as I want to. In some regards, I feel like I shouldn’t be here because in 1998 I had this aggressive cancer. My chances of survival after five years were around 30%. There’s a high likelihood that this type of cancer comes back in your chest, and I knew that it was a cancer that was untreatable – that’s why I had to have my amputation.
And so, without this sounding too much like we are in a psychoanalysis session, I do feel like I shouldn’t be here in some way and because of that feeling, I don’t really feel like there’s anything at stake in writing about whatever I want to in terms of my own life. I don’t feel that ickiness or that shame or that desire to hide or cover up. And maybe this is also because I can’t cover up when I go outside anyway! People will always see me in a very stark way regardless, and maybe that’s why I write in the kind of way that you’re saying.
HT-H: In single window, you do touch on what most people would regard as intimate topics. You talk about your sexual relationship with your wife. In Bathing, the Body and Community Care (Routledge, 2000) Julia Twigg describes how care can undermine sexual intimacy within couples. Your writing seems to reject or at least resist that premise as the anthology directly addresses disabled sexual pleasure, almost like another layer of kind of mutual care between you?
DS: I don’t want to pretend to have an experience I haven’t had in terms of care. When things were really bad in London I qualified for care through the local council. I had someone come in most days and help me wash and make me something to eat and get me ready for the day. So I have had that level of intimacy from someone professional but not for very long. I know that other people have had that level of intimate care for the whole of their lives. I don’t know what the difference is in how physical touch then becomes seen through you and through your own body if it is something you’ve experienced for the whole of your life. I was able to quite clearly demarcate intimate touch and a touch that is about more professional care.
In a more general way myself and my wife both have to care for each other. We both have to help each other with a lot of day-to-day physical things. And I just think because we’re so close it’s not something that’s ever caused an issue when it comes to a difference between those two types of affection – care and intimacy. We’ve been together since 2014, and we’ve spent pretty much every day together since then. I think the closeness that we have means that it’s not too difficult for me to navigate those two things. I think that those things almost meld into one when you’re in a relationship in that way.
HT-H: You describe a visiting carer in single window as “a woman [who] peels off our socks and strips us layer by layer like she’s fleecing sheep, she plies our skin with emollient thick as grease, and we are left to sit in our own sweat like chops spitting in the pan”. That sits in quite sharp contrast to the intimate and loving way that you speak about the care that you experience with your wife. After all, you describe “a patience that [you] could never summon for anyone else” in relation to caring for (and being cared for by) Emily. The imagery used in relation to the professional carer seems reminiscent of production and consumption – your body is reduced to your capitalist output being described as a “fleece” or “chops.” Does that speak to a critique of the capitalist demands on our value and our bodies?
DS: It’s hard. I don’t want to be too critical, but when you see a different person every day and they’re in a job that is low pay, difficult hours, and incredibly physically and emotionally involving, it’s hard not to feel that the experience is quite rushed. If I am being critical, it’s a criticism towards the environment and the context of the way we see care in our society rather than the people who actually do this work. I think that the general flinching away from disability that I was talking about earlier, I think that’s what we see on a wider level when it comes to our attitude towards care as a form of work.
I think if people understood the real deep necessity for it and the kind of effort that it takes to do these jobs, it would be better paid, better hours, and the quality of it would be much more consistent as well.
HT-H: Your response leads me to consider The Care Manifesto: The politics of interdependence (Verso, 2020) by The Care Collective. They write that “our world is one in which carelessness reigns.” There appears to be a prioritizing of neoliberal capitalism over the quality of actual care. So, given that stance, it feels as though single window is especially relevant right now. When the Labour government is demonetizing, deprioritizing, and demonizing care by cutting disability benefits, it feels like single window has developed another layer of importance. The collection recentres the humanity of care and reclaims the concepts of community care through your various relationships. How would you describe the carer/caree relationships of single window?
DS: My wife has such a deep knowledge of me, but more than that: a deep knowledge of my body as well. And those aren’t necessarily the same things. She has such a deep understanding of what I need, what my body needs, and what would not only put me in a neutral state where everything’s ok but beyond that to what would actually make me feel better. That’s an incredible thing to have someone who knows those kinds of balms to make you feel like you’re more than just existing. You’re more than just staying still.
My dad’s an interesting one. I was brought up by him as a single parent. I find it difficult talking about class sometimes, but I had a relatively working-class upbringing. We had to live with my grandparents when we couldn’t pay rent, we lived in council houses – that kind of thing. But my dad’s been there for me since day one and I think we have a special connection because we went through the cancer together. I actually probably think in some ways it was more difficult for him than me (going through the childhood cancer) because I was very taken care of. Everything was based around not only giving me the care and the treatment that I needed but also making sure that I was happy and doing as well in the situation as I could be. I never felt lonely going through my cancer treatment and I know a lot of people do. It must have been very difficult for my dad who probably thought at various times that life wouldn’t include me for that much longer. So we have a very special connection. We’ve been entangled or fused through that trauma in some way, and so my dad knows me in a way that no one else does. And he was there, post-amputation, helping me, making sure I have everything I need and then watching me develop as I try and work out how to be an adult with the various impairments I’ve got.
I’m very, very lucky to say that I’ve always had this person in my life who has put me first, not everyone can say that. And now I’m a father myself. It is the one thing that I really want, when my son grows up and he leaves one day, I hope he can say that he always felt that I gave him what he needed.
HT-H: How do you feel that parenting has changed your perspective on those relationships and kind of the bonds of care and interdependency?
DS: It’s interesting being the person who cares for something so vulnerable and so fragile. As soon as this little bundle came into the world, one of the first things they did was they gave him oxygen because his lips were a bit blue and so there was no moment to really get used to things without being very starkly reminded of his vulnerability. And I think it’s changed my perspective on the world and on life and I think I’m a little bit happier in the quiet moments now than I was before.
Sometimes I just watch him, you know, whatever he’s doing, and it’s incredible. Before I had him I was very much in the mode of what do I need to do next? I didn’t really give myself a chance to relax or to stay still. Now I can take a breath.
HT-H: You previously mentioned being the ambassador for disability, understanding the interconnection and interdependency of bodies – how do you think you could describe this to your son?
DS: The easiest way for me to describe that to him would be to talk about his mum and dad and talk about how some days, you know, his mum has a bad day and it’s on those days that I might cook something that’s really easy, make sure she’s got her compression gloves on, make sure she has taken her pills and get some fresh pyjamas out of the laundry. And then some days when I’m in pain, these are all the things that your mum does for me. I think explaining it in those kind of terms would be best because I guess that’s ultimately really a metaphor for what we do as a society, hopefully.
HT-H: Mutual aid seems like the ideal. However, in single window there’s a passage where you say, “we’ve pushed our bodies beyond their limit again, unable to consummate the ideas in our heads, having given each other our bodies instead.” How do you navigate this concept of mutual care when you have two disabled individuals, and both have pushed past their limits?
DS: It’s very humbling to be disabled in a relationship. You get very good at letting things go. There’s certain moments when you both go beyond what you can. You have to get used to the conditions or feelings of pain. You have to compromise and give in.
I think with that part I was also trying to think about our ideas around sexuality and around intimacy. In our society there’s a heavily physically performative aspect but I think one of the wonderful things about being in a relationship with somebody else who is disabled is that you learn true intimacy. You learn that actually it is a myriad of things and it’s so much more complex and creative and engaging than the very narrow kind of idealized view that is thrust upon us.
HT-H: There’s a beautiful line in one of your poems where you say “cripples love best because love is an assembly.”
DS: I think that’s what my work is about. It’s about things joining. It’s about the power of two really complex things becoming as close as possible and the creative act involved. Disability gives you the basis to work upwards better than anything else. I know some people who wake up before their partners so that they can put makeup on. Disability is the opposite of that. If you really are in a position where you’re able to love someone fully, then I think you learn a tremendous amount about life and about love and about intimacy because there’s nothing off limits, there’s no room for anything other than honesty.
HT-H: You describe how Emily lovingly alters a pair of your trousers in one of the poems, and in doing so she transforms your scar from a “grimace” to a “crescent moon.” Her care provides this transformative quality of unconditional love.
DS: I think there’s a lot of power in that as a metaphor. I have to have these trousers altered for my amputation and she’s the one who does it very lovingly. She does so with an amount of care and attention that I wouldn’t get from a professional seamstress. I’d be able to name a million different parts of our day like this where we’re looking to make the world a more comfortable and open place for the other person to exist.
HT-H: Your writing seems to investigate the connection and the love between disabled bodyminds: how the daily, almost mundane, care can be transformative and makes navigating the world easier. A lot of the disability narratives we are exposed to either speak about overcoming or succumbing to illness and disability. They are not about the day in day out living with disability and forming connections as a disabled person. If someone new was coming to your work, what would you want to point them to, to help them understand your ideas about care and interconnection?
DS: I think that the poem you quoted a minute ago with the line “cripples love best because love is an assembly” is key. In that one I talk a bit about some of the narrative society creates around normativity and disability. There’s this idea of going to gyms, being seen in a certain kind of body that takes up a certain amount of space, of your hair looking a certain way, your clothes. I think that poem gets to the heart of things. I enjoy reading that poem – I don’t necessarily enjoy reading every poem I write – what I’m trying to do is to point past a lot of these ideologies and narratives that have developed, especially on social media. I think that when the most common and most idealized views are brought to the top of the algorithm and they are further condensed, there’s massive potential to create insecurities and to make people desire for attributes and things that won’t actually make them happy.
Disability is the thing that takes all of that away, the thing that pulls the carpet from under all those things. That’s the power of disability and life. The power of care and the power of more than one person coming together. The power of community. When you multiply that power amongst all these individuals who have worked through a lot of their internalized stuff. When they are very comfortable and clear about what their bodies need. When they’re willing to help other people and to educate, then I think there’s a massive transformative power in that.
HT-H: Well, that feels like a really beautiful point to end on: The transformative power of disabled community and care. Thank you, Dan.
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About Daniel Sluman
Daniel is a poet and disability activist. He co-edited the first major UK Disability poetry anthology, Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press, 2017) and he has appeared widely in UK poetry journals. He is the Arvon Writer in Residence 2025 and recently contributed to the anthology Owning it: Our Disabled Childhoods in Our Own Words (Faber, 2025) which was released in April 2025. Daniel has three collections published through Nine Arches Press: Absence has a weight of its own (2012), The Terrible (2015), and single window (2021).
single window was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and is a hybrid memoir of poetry and photography. Documenting his (and wife Emily’s) experience of spending 2016 isolated at home due to ill health, the anthology offers a deeply confessional insight into the hidden lives experienced by so many within the disabled community.
An amputee with chronic pain (as a result of bone cancer in his femur as a child), Daniel navigates life with his wife and two- year- old son, Theo. They share wonderful snippets of their life as disabled parents on social media @two_crips_and_a_baby.
Daniel is currently working on a new project centred around chronic pain.
About Hannah Twinberrow-Hirst
Hannah is an AHRC (WRoCAH) funded part-time Ph.D. student at the University of York whose interdisciplinary thesis focuses on the interconnectedness of disability narratives in a post(?)-COVID world. A disabled, queer, new mother, Hannah approaches her writing from an intersectional, interdisciplinary and multimedia perspective.
Having initially undertaken a BDS Dentistry – until disability forced her to withdraw – Hannah went on to complete a BA English at the University of Cambridge. She was elected as Wolfson College’s Student Disabilities Representative and volunteered on the University of Cambridge’s Silver COVID task force committee to provide a voice for the clinically vulnerable community.
In 2022, she was awarded the Wellcome Trust Scholarship for MA Medical History & Humanities at the University of York and subsequently achieved a Distinction.
Alongside her Ph.D., managing her disability, and raising her young son with her husband, Hannah works as an EDI Coordinator for York Students’ Union and freelances as an EDI guest speaker. When taking a moment to herself, Hannah loves listening to an audiobook and eating toast.