Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Reading 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

( pain piggyback )

How It Feels When Your Body is Weather Sensitive

( swept away )

What Pain Wants

( prosaic poetry in conversation with the world’s most demanding roommate )

The Shadow Syllabus

The teacher may not say this out loud. She’s still also the person who was a university student.

( 4 of 42 items )

ETA: Forgot cut tags. Turns out they don't work the way I think they should anyway. Should I bother? Time for a poll.

There are amazing wonderful vids out there! I hear about some through political colleagues, and some through blogs, and some from just stumbling around. Feel free to drop links in comments (reminder: can't embed videos in DW comments).

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( Twenty seven summer 2013 interns at the American Association for People with Disabilities made a video meditating on the ADA's 23rd anniversary (open captions, audio description) )

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POV, the documentary series for "films with a point of view" organized by the U.S. public broadcasting system, encouraged entrants to submit shorts a web-only contest. Two of these present nitty-gritty life with impairment
( Grounded By Reality explores a day in the life of an artist and art teacher who has very little control over her body (closed captions, no audio description) )

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Sound of Vision uses unusual film technique as it follows a blind man through his days. As is often the case when artists or developers create parallel accessible and non-accessible versions, the film submitted to the contest (where it won six prizes) diverged from the audio-described version. There's a lot of sudden black/white shift in the film, which was headache inducing, so here's the audio description track I preferred (although I think the description should be slightly softer than the film track):
Stream or download MP3 of Sound of Vision with audio description
In addition to those shorts, POV has broadcast many films related to disability. Check 'em out:
video.pbs.org/program/pov/

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( And of course when I think of people with disabilities I think about sex )