2007 - Vol. 4, Issue 3

You may have noticed something new here at Breath & Shadow — and at AbilityMaine and ROSC. We're now sharing a top navigation bar to enable our mutual readers easy access to the three sites. Please note that the ROSC pages have recently expanded to include news and events that are important to the progressive community.

The story behind it all: The AbilityMaine site was originally conceived to be a stand–alone news and resource project for the use of people with disabilities. For the first few years that's what the site contained.

Then, a page was developed for our parent entity, Resources for Organizing and Social Change (ROSC). It contained a few links and information about ROSC. Soon, a need was seen to have information about another ROSC project, Maine Draft and Military Counselors. A new set of informational pages were added for that group.

Then, along came Breath & Shadow. Breath & Shadow was a happy accident. It all started when I came a cross an article on the internet titled "Tied to the Railroad Tracks of Progress: How the American Ideology of Progress Fuels the Oppression of People with MCS." It's still online at: http://www.disabilitystudies.com/SWachsler.htm. I liked the article a lot and naively wrote to the author for permission to reprint it on AbilityMaine. I got that permission, and in chatting with the author, Sharon Wachsler, I also discovered that she wrote disability humor articles. Not only that, but she had, and still has, a weird sense of humor. I bribed her with an extraordinary amount of money, $20, to write some articles for AbilityMaine. This went on well for a couple of years, until Sharon got tired of producing regular articles for a piddling reimbursement and we conceived the idea of Breath & Shadow. Well, it really wasn't quite that simple, and Sharon might question the chronology, but her memory is no better than mine, so if questioned, we would probably both be wrong.

Ah, the "Troika Reigns" thing. A troika is a harness arrangement for a traditional Russian sleigh. It involves three horses being harnessed side–by–side to pull a sleigh in one direction. The useful definition for reigns here is, to "sway [the reign of good will]." Mostly, I just couldn't resist the pun.