Essays, Reviews, + Other Non-fiction
When the Museum of Memory Becomes a Haunted House - Interview with Jiordan Castle, Electric Literature, 2023
Excerpt:
“The book’s dedication—”For me then, and for you now” —immediately signals to the reader a rare intimacy; that we will be led—sometimes smiling, sometimes wincing—into a moment in time not often shared beyond the performed facade of the nuclear family…”
On Erasure - Educator Essay, Poetry Foundation, 2022
Excerpt:
“Erasure is my leaving the land acknowledgment as the last aspect to develop for a presentation.
Erasure is my attempting to suppress and/or conceal my visible neurologic disease symptoms from peers while teaching a poetry workshop.”
Performance Review: Oxygen, 2020 - response to Laura Tuthall’s multidisciplinary show on disability, art, capitalism, etc.
Excerpt:
“…If ballet’s call is to cast the illusion of beauty, youth, and ease, Tuthall responds by turning the technique on its head, coupling elegant extensions with gestures describing, amongst other traumas, self-harm and sexual violence. Most notable, though, is the way Tuthall transitions between dancing un-assisted and using her wheelchair or cane. This “unveiling” is both a direct challenge to the dance world’s pressure to hide pain and disability – or broadly, that which is mortal – and a direct challenge to ableist assumptions about permanence; that a body is either “abled” or “disabled”; that such categories are or should be recognizable to the outside eye; that identity is static….”
Her Art - personal essay, Hopwood Writing Award, 2013
Excerpt:
“… she told me about her evolving projects and how she goes through phases (she was “into sewing bloomers” a while back; she liked to play with molding small sculptures; she sang in a band), how she spends her days dancing and sleeping and eating and making art, how her mom in Texas believed in her, how she inherited her various mental pathologies from her genius theoretical physicist father. I marveled at her non-issue regarding her identity as an artist; unlike her apparent peacefulness towards being someone not fit for “the academy,” I hoard all sorts of complexes about what I “should” do, trying to reconcile my family’s expectations of my future professional career with my own doubts that such a life would even be livable, never mind happy-making. It turns out, I later learned, that she is no stranger to such insecurities, but at the time it felt like a whole new paradigm in which to imagine the acceptability of our non-standard inclinations and needs…”