The Brain-Smashing, Pity-Bashing Art of Blind Punks

“You must sing like an angel,” a woman said to me as I prepared to go onstage with my “Avant Accordion Brain Smash” act in a Brooklyn warehouse performance space. She either did not notice my hand-sewn black bustier, or decided that my white cane rendered all the badassery surrounding it null. When I began bellowing about some murderous renaissance… Read more

The Blind Feeding the Lame: Growing Disabled with Dad * Essay & Live RISK Performance

This essay about the very different experiences my father and I had growing disabled first appeared at Catapult last June. I performed a storytelling version for a live taping of the Risk! Podcast, which aired in December in an episode called “Quality Time.” Scroll down for the performance followed by the essay. I republish both versions here in honor of… Read more

Flaubert’s Rule for Artists: Be Regular? Settled? Ordinary as a Bourgeois? Essay 28 of #52essays2017

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” –Gustave Flaubert I first encountered this quote a few weeks back in my Catapult Advanced Writing Workshop with the amazing R.O. Kwon. I liked it and it felt right. Having no set schedule as a writer makes it very hard to allow… Read more