The feminist movement itself has been startlingly negligent in considering women with disabilities. Throughout my studies in feminist literature, activism and poetry I have only seen disability mentioned twice. In her recent interview with Danielle Pafunda on the concept of the Gurlesque, Arielle Greenberg points out, “One might well ask similar questions about class, ethnicity, ability, and other issues of power and privilege. Where are the Gurlesque poets writing about these things, or where are the _____ poets who are writing the Gurlesque?” In the new introduction to Of Women Born Adrienne Rich also touches on the subject in regard to forced sterilization for women with disabilities. Third wave feminists have started to acknowledge lapses in communication in regard to race, education, and class. However, a brief perusal of feminism blogs, magazines and women’s-only anthologies show that disability is not on the radar, period. (The exception is able-bodied mothers discussing their children with disabilities.) Likewise, at a recent feminist art panel at the Brooklyn Museum, “Beyond the Waves: Feminist Artists Talk Across the Generations,” one panelist made a point of noting that the discussion had covered all bases — racism, gender, ageism, feminism, sexism, and transgender.

The tendency is to consider this lack a benign oversight, and yet one is not so sure. The body remains an intensely personal space. It is how we define ourselves. It is what accounts for attraction, movement, the ability to have and rear children. The feminist thought and poetics seem at a loss of how to deal with disability issues. The difference in experience may account for much of the oversight. While an able-bodied feminist fights against motherhood-as-a-given, the woman with a disability is expected not to have children. While the able-bodied feminist fights against being sexually objectified, the woman with a disability is sexually dismissed. While the able-bodied feminist fights for equal academic pay, the woman with a disability has to argue to get even considered for a position.

Although the universities have adopted affirmative action when employers ‘encourage minorities to apply,” they concretely mean women or racial minorities, not academics with disabilities. With an approximate unemployment rate of 77%, theoretically, people with disabilities should be the first in line.

When I have pointed out these inconsistencies in various forums, the topic is met with dismissal at best, hostility at worst. Men and women who so avidly involve themselves in other civil rights debates are awkward, nervous, or disinterested. While blogs such as Ron Silliman’s and the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet are hotbeds for the gender/race debate, disability is rarely brought up. Silliman points out “Nope. I can’t see that there is anybody who wants to debate that.” If, as Spahr and Young note, a publisher/anthology/prize/university employs/publishes say 25% women, one can estimate that number becomes 5% for non-whites and 0% poets/academics with disabilities.

Historically, poetry has been a place for human fragility and yet most experimental  ‘movements’ veer away from the lyric. They are grounded in a more masculine humor or a girlish sexiness. In attempting to diverge and satirize the typical, they keep the able-bodied status quo. So-called experimental poets and editors may make the assumption that all works by poets with disabilities are narrative/identity poems. To make the argument that these poets do not exist – or do not write in various forms – is to make the same argument society made/makes against women, homosexuals, and non-whites.

One only has to take a look at Larry Eigner’s work to find that the experience of the different body is the ideal landscape from which to write poetry that is broken, disjointed, or fragmented. It is not despite Eigner’s cerebral palsy that he was an innovator, but because of it. The different body slows the corporeal down, so that the poet is able to see as others cannot. A similar voice can be found in the recent work of Norma Cole. After a stroke, Cole lost and regained her ability to speak. She used her experience with temporary aphasia and slurred speech to compose a poem of a list of words that she could no longer enunciate. The result of her reading this work was alternately hilarious and devastating. Cole laughed at the ridiculous condition of a poet losing words, and the audience laughed with her. Yet, the poetry wasn’t as simple as that. Although the audience laughed, they were also visibly uncomfortable. From the sophistication of Cole’s work, one can guess that this dichotomy was no accident.

Some places that have acknowledged the different body are Drunken Boat’s ASL issue and Reginald Shepard’s presence on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog. Ironically, most Deaf people do not self-identify as ‘disabled.’ Nor do many consider Shepard’s health problems (HIV and cancer) disabilities – although they certainly can be much more debilitating than say, cerebral palsy or MS.

This is not meant as an attack. I am a champion of women’s poetry and respect all the fine anthologies that have been put out in the name of ‘equaling the playing field.’ Nor do I have a desire to make disability the minority du jour. I realize it is not completely fair to single out feminists – men are complicit too. This is more of a wakeup call. I would, ideally, like the movers and shakers who follow the inclusion model to realize it is faulty until people with disabilities are put on the radar. I want able-bodied poets and editors to move away from feeling nervous about entering the discussion.

Jennifer Bartlett is the author of two poetry books, Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM) and (a) lullaby without any music (Chax). She was a 2005 NYFA Fellow. Her articles on disability have been published in Feministing and Delirious Hem and forthcoming on the WILLA website.

People have nice things to say about the novel!

“Reading like the troubled offspring of Claire Denis’s L’Intrus and the surreal ending of Jim Thompson’s Savage Night, Spivey’s Flowing in the Gossamer Fold creates a deliberate and satisfying confusion between the habitations of the skull, of the word, and of the world. A strange and satisfying debut.”
-Brian Evenson

“Malcolm Blackburn (motivational speaker, estranged husband of a bird with orange pubic hair, and lover to a mannequin) has a voice that throttled me from the first page, while Ben Spivey–an extraordinarily talented and shockingly young new writer–demonstrates that his own voice is versatile, vivid, funny, and trenchant. I read the book in one eager sitting. Flowing in the Gossamer Fold is a bizarre and genuinely exciting debut.”

-Nick Antosca

Go, buy, now.

The many poems in this fine collection are small stories, the kind that make the ordinary extraordinary. It is certainly easy to find a few themes that run strong in this collection–snapshots of the elderly, pragmatic yet empathic accounts of encounters with strippers, call girls and aging hookers, poems from the borderlands of Arizona and the tensions between white men and Mexican women and accounts of the workaday life–but Schneider’s creative interests are broad, insightful and engaging.

One of the strongest elements of this collection is the way in which Schneider manages to surprise. For example, there’s a poem about that great battle between The Dollar Store, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar and Dollar General, in the poem “We’ve Always Been a Family Dollar Family.” Schneider’s work is no stranger to humor when he writes Yes, I know there are people who swear/by The Dollar Store, which is/ok I guess, you can get/some good deals sometimes, but you/see, at The Dollar Store everything really isn’t a dollar./At Family Dollar/everything’s a dollar./I think a name should reflect the/spirit of the store.

While there is an emotional distance in many of these poems, Schneider still manages to infuse his work with tenderness and real understanding such as in the poem, “Bulimia,” which is so good I will simply share it in its entirety. Further commentary is not necessary.

BULIMIA

Her arms are origami,
her head totters on a toy neck
and her back is bowed
like a bone violin.
She wants to be loved
for who she is,
for what she is inside:
she wants to be pure soul
but it’s all inseparable
and her soul is fading away
like her flesh,
like her gums and hair and teeth,
her ribs poking out
like an animal that’s traveled too far,
like some child or saint or martyr
who would crumble
if I tickled her.
When we hug goodbye
she’s so tiny
it’s like she’s a part of me:
my hands reach all the way around her
and touch the soft
tender places
under my arms.

Anyone who has worked as a telemarketer or bill collector will enjoy the suite of poems about the soul killing drudgery of such work where Schneider notes in “Three Weeks I’ll Never Get Back,” that Only the real masochists stuck/around long enough/to stand outside on/smoke breaks/and brag/behind the bullet proof building.

Drought Resistant Strain is a dense collection of poetry that is a real pleasure to read because every single poem in the collection is so damn readable and relatable. Mather Schneider has the poetic eye of a keen observer and he puts his skill to good use in his first full length collection. Run don’t walk to get your copy of this excellent book.

She wrote:

Please note, this is my experience and that of many folks I’ve talked to or read stuff from, not a universal experience.) that the submissions from women and poc are often disproportionately sucky, which is sometimes why even the proportions of women and poc who submit aren’t reflected in the proportions of women and poc actually published.

Now, there are many things that can be said about the slush pile, but in my experience, this is not one of them and furthermore, I know lots and lots of editors and I have never once heard the complaint that the writing of women and POC is measurably worse than the writing of white men. The only complaint I consistently hear is that dealing with the slushpile can be overwhelming. Now, it could be that the editors I know are afraid to discuss this subject with me because I’m a woman of color, but anyone who knows me personally knows that I’m not crazy and that they can discuss anything with me so I think maybe Light is talking to the wrong editors.

What’s interesting is that she precedes this statement with a statement that this phenomenon is true and people simply don’t want to talk about it, that we’re too wrapped up, I assume, in political correction to just admit what she believes to be true.

When I read submissions, I don’t think about race and I rarely think about gender. Sometimes, I will notice I’ve read 84 submissions and only 14 of them have been from writers with noticeably feminine names and I’ll think the discrepancy is troubling but it doesn’t influence an editorial decision and the quality of those submissions from women writers is in no way different from the submissions from male writers.

Light then asserts that women and POC writers don’t make the leap from niche/ethnic/community publications to mainstream publishing for many reasons including that they think their work will not get fair consideration at the mainstream literary magazines and publishing houses.

As I read the post, I couldn’t help but feel that I live on a vastly different planet from the one where Light is residing. I understand many of the points she raises with regard to the barriers women/POC face in publishing but there was a tone of… condescension, perhaps that has me unsettled. I have discussed the real lack of diversity in publishing and there are indeed writing communities of POC who don’t participate in mainstream publishing but when Light starts talking about knowing the rules etc etc etc, as if there’s some sort of secret handshake required to break into mainstream publishing, I really feel like she jumps the shark completely. I don’t think that its that women/POC writers don’t know the lay of the land.  I do think they know about Writer’s Market and Poets & Writers.  I knew about the Writer’s Market when I was a teenager at boarding school in New Hampshire and found a copy in the library. It is the first book that writers from any community go to. It’s like the Bible. It’s not some secret document for white men only.

Light ends her post with some helpful hints for encouraging more women/POC writers to submit to magazines and publishing houses and as I read the list I felt my irritation growing. Some of the suggestions, like highlighting submission guidelines clearly and explaining what a successful submission looks like are great ideas to help any writer but she also suggests that editors should also state explicitly that submissions from women and POC are welcome, and should send encouraging feedback to “minority” writers and put some “minority” folks on editorial boards. I really feel like the crazy just builds at this point. How on earth can you know someone’s race from their submission? I have no idea, save for a poet who is a friend of mine in real life, who is or is not a person of color amongst the PANK writers.

What takes the cake is when she says:

When you go through your back issues/backlist for the big names to list on your website, be sure to put the names of women writers and poc front and center. A publisher/magazine that has a lot of recognizable “minority” names on its website is basically putting out the welcome mat for “minority” writers. This is a subtle language you must learn to speak.

I find that a little insulting. I do. Am I alone in this? These are difficult issues and Light makes some interesting points and is encouraging a useful discussion about the diversity problem (and it IS a problem) but if these sorts of ideas she’s setting forth, ideas I find simplistic, short-sighted and condescending, are the solution, I worry for the writing world. I’d love to hear what other folks think about this, about her ideas, and about what we do to encourage more diversity (of all kinds) in modern letters.

There are three primary means of raising the money to pay writers that don’t make me uncomfortable–via advertising sales and subscriptions, via grant funding or donations, or by subsidizing expenses with your own money. As a print magazine, advertising sales (theoretically) and subscriptions account for a significant portion of the money we use to print each annual issue. It would not be sustainable for us to direct those funds toward paying writers who currently receive a copy of the issue in which their work appears as an honorarium. Grant funding, particularly for very small magazines, is very hard to get. We write grants and try our best but grant money is always soft money and as such it is also not a sustainable option. We have never received a donation but we do believe in fairy tales. Subsidizing the magazine with personal funds, which is what most independent publishers do, is as realistic as a given publisher can afford but if you are not independently wealthy, this option, lest I sound like a broken record, is not sustainable.

Some magazines charge reading fees to pay writers, most notably Narrative and while I won’t get into the ethics of that approach here, I will note that writers such as Robert Swartwood have taken up the issue quite eloquently. Other magazines hold contests for which they charge a fee and for the very big magazines these contests allow them to not only pay a handful of writers significant prizes, they can also cover operating costs for more than one issue.  PANK held its first contest in 2009  and we were able to pay the full prizes. Additionally, each entrant receives a free copy of PANK 4. We didn’t make any money from the contest and we continue to discuss how we feel about the idea of the writing contest, a situation where many contribute to the benefit of a few.

As a writer I must confess I am always shocked when a literary magazine pays me for my writing. It makes me feel uncomfortable, so accustomed have I become to writing for free and sometimes not even for contributor copies. What does it say about the state of literary creation that compensation has become entirely foreign and as elusive as a mythical creature?

Some of the big literary magazines pay anywhere from $10-50/page to $1,000 per creative work but those magazines are few and far between. There is a tier of magazines who pay a token amount of $5 or $10, with the implication (and one I understand), that the gesture is more reflective of the thought that counts rather than appropriately compensating writers for their creative work. Sometimes, when I get a check in the mail for $5  I think, why bother but then I think hey, that’s a case of Diet Cherry Pepsi and I get happy. Time and again, I see great writers who allow their chapbooks to be published without receiving even a token honorarium or contributor copies and who don’t seem to have a problem with that.

As I think about compensating writers from the perspectives of both writer and editor, I have to ask. Is the simple act of being published enough compensation for the modern writer? At what point does not paying writers become exploitation? As writers, how do you feel about publications who offer micropayments and token honorariums? What is your writing worth?