Sonya Huber is a Marvelous, Disabled Writer
Friday, December 11th, 2020 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jesse_the_kReading her work is looking in a mirror that's also a magnifier that's also a portal. She captures the experience of chronic pain, midlife disability, fighting insurance companies, raising her son, loving teaching, wrangling with doctors — all in exquisite language: precise, funny, smooth. She has rheumatic disease (often misnamed as rheumatoid arthritis) and teaches creative non-fiction at Fairfield University. Lots of good reading at her site https://sonyahuber.com as well as on sonyahuber Twitter. Her most recent published work is:
Pain woman takes your keys and other essays from a nervous system
https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803299917/
Library – Ebook – Paperback – Bookshare
Her stuff is so good I had to sample 1000 words from four sources.
Her experience of COVID
There was a roiling surge of irritation, the anchor of my meditation cushion, the frustration at daily tasks, the irritation of noises, the desire to curl into myself and be as quiet as possible.
There was an ache across the back that crept up within the first few weeks and stayed and stayed, and I didn’t know whether it was my lungs or my kidneys. Then I knew it was my kidneys, and around that time I found a graphic from a researcher on Twitter that showed with a map of the researchers’ symptoms where I was: kidneys at 10 and 11 weeks. Whenever I moved, it felt as though my swollen and bruised kidneys were slamming against my ribs.
How It Feels When Your Body is Weather Sensitive
The sky has its way with me. As clouds lower their shoulders against the horizon, a warm front’s humid body slides along my skin, lifting the hem of my dress to curl around my waist and stretch along my spine.
Closer still, the atmosphere enters me soundlessly. Barometric pressure squeezes my joints, each a tiny fishbowl of synovial fluid that cushions the space where two bones pivot and swing.
My immune system loves and defends me too diligently. I am one of the joint-diseased and chronic, we who have lupus and rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis. If we could map our pain, the constellation of joints would glow on the map, lit to follow storm fronts and hurricanes. A joint-sick friend and I trade texts: Rain coming—Got bad at 2 PM, now flat on the couch. You?
What Pain Wants
Pain wants you to put in earplugs because sounds are grating.
Pain has something urgent to tell you but forgets over and over again what it was.
Pain tells you to put your laptop in the refrigerator.
Pain runs into walls at forty-five-degree angles and ricochets back into the center of the room.
Pain resents being personified or anthropomorphized.
Pain is a four-dimensional person with fractal intelligence.
Pain wants to be taken to an arts and crafts store.
Pain likes to start big projects and not finish them.
Pain wants to clean one countertop.
Pain asks you to break itself up into neat, square segments like a chocolate bar.
Pain makes a hissing, popping hum like high-tension power lines.
Pain has ambition but is utterly unfocused.
Pain will get its revenge if you ignore it but sometimes forgets what it was angry about.
Pain wants to watch a different channel than you do on tv.
Pain looks at you with the inscrutable eyes and thin beak of an egret.
Pain stubs out the cigarette of your to-do list.
Pain will first try to do some things on that list but will end up with socks on its antlers.
Pain demands that you make eye contact with it and then sit utterly still.
Pain folds the minutes into fascinating origami constructions with its long fingers.
Pain leaves the meter running.
Pain asks you to think about the breath flowing in and out of your lungs.
Pain will ask you to do this 307 times today.
Pain does not mean any harm to you.
Pain is frustrated that it is trapped in a body that is ill-fitting for its unfolded shape.
Pain has been born in the wrong universe.
Pain is wild with grief at the discomfort it causes.
Pain wants to collect bottle caps to show you the serrated edges, which mean something it cannot explain.
Pain keeps pointing to serrated edges and scalloped patterns but cannot explain how these will unlock it.
Pain emphasizes that it is not a god, but then makes the symbol for “neighbor” over and over, and you do not understand what it means.
Pain puts its beaked head in its long-fingered wing hands in frustration and loneliness.
Pain winks at you with its dot-black eyes and tries to make the sign for “I love you.” Pain folds up its wings and legs and spindles quietly and blinks up at you when you say, “I know.” Pain understands that you cannot say “I love you” back but that there is something bigger behind “I love you” that you do not have the words for.
Pain also understands that the background to “I love you” is something like a highway.
Pain licks at its hot spots like an anxious dog.
Pain, when held in place, spirals down into drill bits, so it has to keep moving to prevent these punctures.
Pain asks you to breathe deeply so it can zing about and not get caught on the edges and corners of calendars, books, and electronic rectangles.
Pain’s favorite music is the steel drum, and its favorite flavor is fig.
Pain prefers any texture in which tiny seeds are embedded.
Pain shakes its head—no, it says, that is you who likes that texture—and will have nothing to do with spheres.
Pain wants only for you to see where it starts and you stop, but you are a transparent bubble.
Pain and its kind have waited patiently for humans to evolve into the fourth dimension, but they are worried the project is failing.
Pain feels as though Earth’s gravity is as strong as Jupiter’s. Pain has something metallic in its bones and is captured by the magnetic core of our hot planet.
Pain envies flesh and its soft strength and ease of movement.
Pain inhabits curved, soft bodies in hopes of fluid movement and then cries when it breaks them.
Pain would like french fries and Netflix.From Pain Woman Takes Your Keys https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1375&context=unpresssamples
The Shadow Syllabus
The teacher may not say this out loud. She’s still also the person who was a university student.
I’ll tell you exactly how to get an A, but you’ll have a hard time hearing me.
I could hardly hear my own professors when I was in college over the din and roar of my own fear.
Those who aim for A’s don’t get as many A’s as those who abandon the quest for A’s and seek knowledge or at least curiosity.
I had bookmarked a citation for that fact, and now I can’t find it anywhere.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-12 12:28 am (UTC)‼️‼️‼️‼️
Date: 2020-12-12 12:43 am (UTC)World is tiny.
Was she a good teacher?
Can you tell me one thing you're still using that you learned with her?
Re: ‼️‼️‼️‼️
Date: 2020-12-12 11:27 pm (UTC)I don't know that I learned much about the craft from her--it was a 101 creative writing class and I was writing very different stuff than the rest of the class and uhhhhh better because of nearly a decade of practice at fanfic--but she did an excellent job running the peer concrit circles and shutting down people who were defensive babies about receiving criticism for their biographic fiction.
Re: ‼️‼️‼️‼️
Date: 2020-12-13 07:44 pm (UTC)I appreciate your refusal!
Thank you!
Date: 2020-12-12 03:37 am (UTC)Re: Thank you!
Date: 2020-12-12 07:05 pm (UTC)Ah, there needs to be a word for "revealing the opening to a rabbit hole I just emerged from, grinning."
Pain makes me incoherent, so it's especially gratifying that she's able to be so specific about its impact.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-12 09:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-13 07:44 pm (UTC)<3 So glad to share.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-12 04:56 pm (UTC)Amazing writing. Thanks for sharing those samples. I'll see if I can't get my library to buy an electronic copy.
If "non-fiction poetry"
Date: 2020-12-12 05:04 pm (UTC)...was a thing, she'd be on it.
Re: If "non-fiction poetry"
Date: 2020-12-12 06:06 pm (UTC)I'd say "non-fiction poetry" was a thing! A lot of poetry is non-fiction--just, maybe, with funky line breaks.
Re: If "non-fiction poetry"
Date: 2020-12-12 07:31 pm (UTC)Keep teaching me about poetry, punk. By age 75 I may be able to get it :,)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-13 07:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-13 07:45 pm (UTC)She brings that meta observation to every thing she writes. Double the enjoyment.