SFWP Quarterly Special Issue 26 / Summer 2021
SFWP Quarterly
Special Issue 26 / Summer 2021
Editor’s Note
Monica Prince, Managing Editor
This One is Mine: Ownership, Disability, and a Necessary Community
All year, we’re accepting work from writers of marginalized identities for the Quarterly. This second issue is devoted to writers with disabilities considering the idea of ownership. Monica Prince, our managing editor, edited this issue. Editors for each issue will write the introductions.
I have never considered myself disabled.
I grew up with the ADA, with curb cuts in sidewalks, with special education teachers in school. I never questioned “handicapped” parking spaces, automatic doors, or closed captioning options on DVD rentals (y’all remember renting DVDs? Better yet, y’all remember renting VHS tapes?!). These parts of my life are things I’ve taken for granted, since I’ve never considered myself disabled.
When deciding to curate an issue devoted to writers with disabilities, I tried to find a disabled guest editor so I wouldn’t choose works from a place of privilege or ignorance. As I’ve stated in all the intros for the special issues this year—trauma porn isn’t the goal of centering underrepresented identities. Who am I to tell disabled writers, especially those writing creative nonfiction, what narratives are valuable?
Unfortunately, I failed to find a guest editor, but editing this issue shifted my understanding of myself.
In December of 2018, my sister woke up ill in an empty house. We three siblings were in Colorado visiting our mother for the holidays, but I was with my boyfriend at his house and my mother and brother were at work. She took a Lyft to an Urgent Care where they ran her blood sugar and instructed her to go the emergency room. Her glucose level was around 450mg/dL.
For those of you unaware, that level meant she should probably be in a coma.
After two days in the hospital, my sister emerged with a diagnosis: type I diabetes. She was thirty years old.
I have a poem in my first poetry collection called “Tea for a Sick Day,” all about how I could not understand how my sister’s body—a runner’s body, a cross-country and track star’s body, a thin body—could just give up on her one day. I still cannot understand how your organs decide Nah, b, shut it down. And this is one of the common responses to illness—it feels unfair.
Years before my sister’s new diagnosis, I sat in a psychiatrist’s office for a medical evaluation, a recommendation turned requirement after an emergency counseling appointment two days before. I’d been suicidal for weeks and seeing my most recent rapist start dating a friend of mine sent me over the edge. I had woken up earlier that week and told myself I had to get better or die. There was no other option.
After looking over my intake information, the psychiatrist, who never looked at me directly but always over my head, told me I had moderate depression and PTSD. I couldn’t believe that. The depression was obvious, but PTSD?
“I’m not a veteran,” I said without thinking.
“PTSD is not an illness restricted to war,” he replied patiently.
He went on to explain how PTSD develops when a, often repeated, traumatic incident triggers our fight-or-flight response continuously. So, yes, veterans of combat who experience violent scenarios for three tours of duty might have PTSD, but so do rape survivors, abused spouses, and human trafficking victims. PTSD, unlike type I diabetes, isn’t the body giving up on you, but the mind desperate to keep you alive.
I exclusively chose ownership as the theme for this issue because I wanted writers to discuss the ways that owning anything impacts one’s daily existence. The prose, poetry, and graphics in this issue navigate that concept strongly. Some pieces talk directly about disability—like owning the word “cripple,” redefining what it means to be broken, and examining the history of disabled people in America. But others focus more on what it means to have something no one can take away.
When I first received my PTSD diagnosis, I felt discouraged. I actually thought the words, Why can’t I be normal? Alternatively, though, I was grateful for a word that named my experience—the flashbacks, the panic attacks, the insomnia, the hypervigilance. I wasn’t crazy—another problematic term that diagnoses nothing and distracts from everything—and I wasn’t making anything up. My mind just wanted to protect me by reminding me (constantly) that I almost died and we can’t let that happen again.
Accepting this chronic experience helped me take control of my treatment. It helped me restructure my pedagogy to decrease the triggers that might send me spiraling. I got medication, therapy, and a weighted blanket. I started to alleviate the pressure on my mind to keep this whole show running.
I’m not inspired by the pieces written in this issue, though the pieces are inspiring. I’m heartened and grateful for them. I read the work here and empathize, yes, but I also sigh in relief. It’s not that the fight for equity and access is over. It’s not that one issue focusing on disabled writers cures bias and violence against the whole population.
I’m relieved because universal design helps everyone. By removing the barrier of submission fees for all our writers, the disabled writers who might be working with limited income submitted in droves. By emphasizing the inclusion of perceived or hidden disabilities, writers who often feel excluded from submission spaces felt confident sending work to us. By asking for every kind of work—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, graphic work, plays, etc.—even the most niche writers had a chance at publication.
Ownership isn’t just about colonization, property, or control of one’s self. It’s also about responsibility, accountability, and restructuring. I said earlier that I have never considered myself disabled. What I mean is I never considered myself disabled until now. When I plan my semesters around my disability, I inadvertently support my students by demonstrating how I take care of myself. When I edited this issue from that perspective, I stopped seeing disabled writers as a category outside of my identity. If anything, curating this issue made me call PTSD mine, call it my disability, call this community of writers home.
Read these pieces to laugh, to cry, to reimagine. Then vote out anyone who doesn’t support disability rights. And fight for us. Because we aren’t going anywhere.
Monica Prince, the managing editor for SFWP, teaches activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem ([PANK], 2020), Instructions for Temporary Survival (Red Mountain Press, 2019), and Letters from the Other Woman (Grey Book Press, 2018). She is the co-author of the suffrage play, A Pageant of Agitating Women, with Anna Andes. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Texas Review, MadCap Review, American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter and check out her website.
Past Issues of The Quarterly