2006 - Vol. 3, Issue 5

This man strives to cast
Briar–like shadows
From his woolly strands of hair
That stroke our silken sham.
All our coffee mugs are broken.
I ceased sipping my green tea from his beer steins
Since the artificial sweetener has become bitter
At the union of our scents
Of beer, chamomile, and fish oil.

Lynn Manning is an award–winning poet, actor, and playwright in Los Angeles. He is also a Paralympic silver medalist and former World Champion of Blind Judo. Recently, Kari Pope sat down to talk with him about his 2005 tour of the United Kingdom with his one–man play, Weights.* (Weights was most recently featured at the Bodies of Work Festival** in Chicago, in April.) Lynn also discussed his success as an artist and athlete and the power of creative endeavors to shape people's lives and make the world a better place.

KARI: What I'm most eager to talk with you about is your tour of the United Kingdom. Was the response to Weights — as a piece of disability theater and culture — any different in the UK than it has been here [in the US]?

I recently attended a conference where I listened to David Eisner, the Chief Executive Officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service (a federal agency that supports volunteerism in America), discuss people who inspire. My immediate reaction when I began to hear this discussion of inspiration was to disparage Eisner's comments.

Activists with disabilities frequently view the word "inspiration" as a negatively charged one. We are often called inspirations, even when we don't feel like we've done much inspiring. We just live our lives as best we can. For instance, have you ever been grocery shopping when someone you've never met before stops you and tells you how inspirational you are? I think something like this has happened to every single person with a visible disability whom I know. It has become legendary; we share stories like this when sitting around with one another. We are all puzzled by how such a routine activity like shopping can serve as an inspiration for someone. We generally feel we're being informed that the other person cannot imagine how we can accomplish living our lives while we use a wheelchair, or when we are not able to see or hear or process, like those who are labeled not-disabled. We are "inspiring" not because of anything we've done but because we are all bombarded with images of people like us not being able to do much of anything at all.

I recently had the chance to email with Norman Meldrum. In addition to his work on the AbilityMaine news, events, and advocacy site, Norm created the Breath & Shadow website itself and converts the published submissions into HTML so that the pages are formatted.

ERIKA: What do you do for the journal?

NORM: Mostly I don't do much for Breath & Shadow...  just put the stories and poems into HTML. Occasionally, I find a small error and then I can go, "Ha!" I used to do a lot more before it got all organized and Sharon told the other people on staff that they had to work, too. We can't pay them; it's just the glory. I used to nag a lot, but Sharon does that, too. I think she's management material.

1. double steel doors

SLAM: nosebleed. Ninth grade lunch is over and a dam has broken inside my head. The crimson–caramel unnavigable lake of me pours down my chin, purls inside my sleeves. I rush to my next class. If you are late, you are punished. My forearms are crusted with river mud. I stop briefly at the lav to scrub. Black turtlenecks do not show blood. Cold water, disintegrating towel, pink liquid soap that smells like diluted bleach. All during History I itch. My sleeves and arms try to sew a new skin between them. I didn't see it coming. There's a metaphor.

2. prostheses

The house lights dim. Gurneys are wheeled onto the stage. Dancers jump in from the wings like newly risen monsters. For this act they have borrowed bandaged glory. A professional orthotist designed these extra limbs and braces. They writhe, half robot, half wraith. Strings shriek. They move in slow motion so even I can see the intention, how bodies will haul their weight, asymmetrical, away from gravity's grip. Later the artist tells me the part she did not write, the second half, when the dancers throw down their crutches, dissolve into the correct amount of limbs. I don't say anything.

When I started Breath & Shadow, I listed one of our goals as "promoting disability culture." I didn't have a precise definition of disability culture in mind, but as Supreme Court Justice Stewart believed of obscenity, "I'd know it, when I saw it." In fact, I used the phrase "disability culture" pretty much interchangeably with "disability aesthetic," "disability perspective," and "disability consciousness" to describe what I was looking for in writings submitted to Breath & Shadow.

However, as submissions came in, I discovered how ethereal my concepts were of what "disability culture" was and thus, what was appropriate for Breath & Shadow. Members of the editorial board raised these questions, too when they asked me how to evaluate submissions. Some readers also, especially those in academia, asked me to define "disability sensibility" or asked me to point them toward examples in literature that embody the disability aesthetic Breath & Shadow purported to espouse. Perhaps by exploring these questions here, we can move toward defining these emotionally and culturally meaningful, yet elusive, terms.

Since Breath & Shadow only publishes work by writers with disabilities, why does it have to define "disability culture" at all? Isn't anything it publishes automatically an example of disability culture?