Laurie says: I’ve watched my  daughter Cid working intensely on this dance collaboration for the last year.   The article I’m quoting from SFArts is a superb conversation about Your Body is Not a Shark, disability, art and the way limits can lead to brilliant work.  Read the whole piece. (Article is on the red bar [...]

Laurie says: As I’ve written, my photo of Bob Guter was chosen my the National Museum of Art in Osaka to represent my work in the 35th anniversary catalogue of their permanent collection, issued in 2012. They have 12 of my photos in their permanent collection, and this was their choice for the catalogue. Each [...]

Laurie says: My daughter Cid has been working in collaboration with the composer and musician Joan Jeanrenaud and the poet Denise Leto on a major work.  It’s called Your Body Is Not A Shark.  I saw the first section last month at Looking Left in Santa Cruz and it really knocked me out. I’m always [...]

Lynne Murray says: In A Life Interrupted: Living with Brain Injury, author Louise Mathewson brings us small book of poems that resonate profoundly with me. The poems tell the story of reclaiming her life. She has brought back these words from a time of silence that followed a tremendous trauma caused by a serious auto [...]

Debbie says: Helen Keller jokes have been around for decades, since well before the real Helen Keller died in 1968. A little Googling tells me that they’ve gotten nastier in the intervening decades, as jokes in general have also gotten nastier. In case anyone doesn’t have the backstory, Helen Keller was blind and deaf from [...]

Debbie says: Post-traumatic stress disorder as a publicly recognizable syndrome was first formally named when I was almost 30. I can remember the first time a friend told me she had it, and how it sounded kind of clunky and unreliable in my ears; I can trace the progression from there to now, when I [...]

Laurie says: The National Museum of Art has just published “Selected Works from the Collection of the National Museum of Art, Osaka”.  I am delighted that my photograph of Bob Guter is among the chosen work .. .. As Bob Guter says in Familiar Men: “I would like to be able to tell you that [...]

Lynne Murray says: Last night I dreamed about an encounter over a candy bar that ended in court. I wasn’t in the dream but the hero was one of those super-athletic, spandex clad-bicyclists whose high energy bar was stolen when he stopped to render medical aid to a child. How and why the bar was [...]

Lynne Murray says: When I checked in on the irrepressible Dave Roche, whose memoir, The Church of 80% Sincerity, I reviewed here in 2008, I had no idea that Dave had gone and joined a gang–a gang of five to be specific–and taken part in a film, Shameless: The Art of Disability. Filmmaker Bonnie Sherr [...]

Lynne Murray says: I recently learned the term “concern trolling,” which describes a kind of verbal attack that both I (a hypervisible fat person) and my friend (who has an invisible disability) have endured in a remarkably similar way. For both of us it comes as unsought advice and pressure from a medical professional, friend, [...]