Tag: Catapult

Revisiting “Cancer Vs. Blindness”

*I’m facing another biopsy this week and I’m trying not to freak out! Besides hoping that the results are negative, I’m also crossing my fingers that I’ll not have to deal with ableism at the doctor’s office like last time… With respect to making lemonade out of a sour situation, “Cancer Vs. Blindness” was the first essay I wrote for… Read more

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

NOTE 2023: My RISK! performance is rebroadcast for Father’s Day! * 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… 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