disabilty

What Language Our Survival Speaks

/ H. E. Casson

Hello good folks (and auto-follow bots). What a noisy, quiet year. Noisy on the input, quiet on the output. Almost every writer I know or follow has spent some (most?) of 2021 living on the writer’s block. I am not immune. I’ve lived there, too.

Just as the year closed out, however, I finally felt that spark. It turned into this piece for the Spoonie Authors Network. Called Welcome to Disability (a House with Infinite Rooms), it’s my letter to the folks with long Covid who are just finding themselves in our ranks, though I think it can speak to anyone who exists in this space called Disabled.

I hope to have more to share soon. I hope you are well. I hope whatever it is you love to create is only hibernating in these wild times. I hope. I hope. I hope. Because I can’t fathom the alternative.

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Best of the Net

/ H. E. Casson / 5 Comments 
(CW: Mental illness, hospitalization)

I first wrote my poem, In Patient, while I was hospitalized because of debilitating symptoms that hit at my intersection of mental illnesses. The poem has lived on my computer for about 20 years, a small moment in a long relationship with my disability. Literary magazine Serotonin not only gave it a home, but they gave it a loving home. Now they’ve nominated it, along with 7 others, for the Best of the Net 2020. I’m heartened by the changing conversation around neurodiversity and mental illness and I’m grateful that my experiences are a part of it.