Interview with F.I. Goldhaber on What Color is Your Privilege? and the Topics of Their New Collection

Handy, Uncapped Pen: What was the most difficult thing about writing this book?

F.I. Goldhaber: I didn't "write" this book. I compiled poems that were written over a period of eight years. That said, the most difficult part of putting it together was figuring out the best order for the poems and that kept changing as I added more poems.

HUP: How long did What Color is Your Privilege? take to write/organize?

Goldhaber: I first started putting the collection together (and came up with the title) five years ago. At that time it included 20 poems. In a year it had almost doubled in size and I began sending it out to publishers for consideration.

About a year after that, John Warner Smith, who would be named Louisiana State Poet Laureate two years later, hit up the email list of contributors to Black Lives Have Always Mattered, A Collection of Essays, Poems, and Personal Narratives Edited by Abiodun Oyewole published by 2Leaf Press (in which he and I both had poems). He sought blurbs for his fifth collection—which eventually became Our Shut Eyes, devoted to racial history and contemporary issues of race in American society—with an offer to reciprocate.

Of Our Shut Eyes I wrote, quoting one of his poems, that Warner "plays the 'old familiar song, an American song of race, hate, and rage' for new audiences."

Warner described What Color is Your Privilege? as "a book-length blues song decrying racial, gender, religious, and sexual intolerance in America."

While I submitted the book, it continued to grow. Each publisher got a slightly different compilation as I added new poems I'd written and sometimes new versions of previously unpublished poems (I don't consider a poem to be in its "final form" until it's published). I even added poems after Left Fork accepted it for publication a year ago, the last two inserted in May of this year, for a final total of 72 poems.

"But, does anyone hear my words? Do
they heed my warnings? They sit and nod,
sometimes buy my books."
-from "Poetry "
HUP: Writers who are activists can often feel like their words are useless when it comes to inspiring change. What would you say to those writers?

Goldhaber: That poem actually started out as my introduction when I read poetry at live events and gradually morphed into the introduction to What Color is Your Privilege?

To answer your question, I would say keep writing. Keep submitting. If you only reach one person, if your words influence only one reader to change how they think/approach the world, consider that a success. (And you never know which poem will touch which reader when.) You never know when (and may never learn about) one person will make a difference, however small, that will impact another (or many others) in positive ways.

What Color is Your Privilege? received 22 explicit rejections and 12 implicit ones before it found its perfect home (i.e. someone who loved the book and was excited to publish it) at a press I'd only known about as the indicia on books by colleagues. (I never saw Left Fork on a list of publishers seeking submissions, it has a very narrow focus, but turned out to be a splendid fit.)

Although every one of the 72 poems had been submitted for consideration to at least one publication, only 56 were published previously and almost all received at least one rejection.

Perseverance is key in publishing and protests.

HUP: You talk about passing as white in "Little Old White Lady". How has passing influenced your activism?

Goldhaber: Passing allows me to observe the behavior of those for whom I intended this book—privileged, liberal, white, abled, cis people—when they're not performing (and I mean that in the literal sense) as allies and to better understand how liberals contribute to the problems of systemic racism, ableism (always a tool of white supremacy), and other forms of oppression. (Liberals are today's white moderates about whom Martin Luther King Jr. warned us in his Letter from Birmingham Jail: "more devoted to 'order' than to justice".)

It also gives me the privilege of using that assumption of whiteness to advocate for, and when appropriate, interfere on the behalf of those who are not as I did in the incident related in that poem.

If the service is free,
you’re not the customers,
your data’s the product.
-from "Products for Sale"
HUP: I think these lines are so important, especially for marginalized folks and activists when so much can be used (not just for marketing) against them in various ways. Do you have any tips for those who have to be "present" online for one reason or another but want to be cautious? Is controlling what you share and not clicking ads enough?

Goldhaber: It's a start. My best advice is to treat everything online with the utmost paranoia (just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you) and to always give as little information as possible. Every single entity you share personally identifying information (PII) with has a) the potential to be hacked making that information available online for the world to access and b) the ability to share your information with entities that will try to sell you things you don't need at best and seek your destruction at worst. In addition:

•    Don't share your phone number, DOB (use a fake one if it's required e.g. on Facebook), Tax Identification Number (including your Social Security number), home address, etc. anywhere you don't have to, but especially social media accounts, posts, or "private" messages. Even "security questions" asking you for seemingly innocuous information like your first pet or where you went to school, are data gathering traps. Make stuff up.
•    Do not take quizzes, sign petitions, or play online info games. Those are at best data gathering tools and at worst PII thefts (notice how often the questions mirror those "security" questions).
•    Just because someone asks you for information, doesn't mean you're required to provide it (e.g. medical offices and insurance companies ask for your TIN/SSN). Do not give it to them.
•    Don't use your phone to log into social media or access your financial information, doing so shares that information with Google or Apple (depending on whose OS you use) plus the app you're using and whoever it sells your data to.
•    Remember, anything you post on social media, including posts/messages marked private or deleted are never private.
•    Turn off tracking on your phone and use tracking blockers in any browser.
•    Don't use the same email address for social media that you use for your financial or personal correspondence (IMO, everyone should have at least three email addresses and a free gmail or similar type account should only be the one used for social media).
•    Don't log into any accounts, as you're often encouraged to do, with Facebook, Google, or any other social media, because that shares your information with those entities and they will use it. Always create a new, separate, unique account.
•    Use unique, secure passwords (12 or more characters in an incomprehensible combination of letters, numbers, and symbols) for each place you do log into. Invest in a password "safe" to track your passwords (and whatever fake birth date or fake answers to security questions you gave), one that stores its data on your machine not in the cloud, and keep an encrypted copy on a separate storage device.
•    Don't store your data, especially PII, in the cloud.
•    There's plenty more, of course. And if you haven't been doing these things, The Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy: Practical Tips for Staying Safe Online by Violet Blue can help you mitigate damage already done.

Hate speech is not free speech when it drowns

out the voices of others; when it’s

used to harass those with darker skin;

when it incites violence, murder.

-from "Hate Speech ≠ Free Speech"

HUP: I can't tell you how many times I've heard that we have to allow hate speech because it's part of our list of rights and not letting people say what they want is a "slippery slope". What is your response to people who say that?

Goldhaber: I don't tolerate the intolerant.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution only guarantees that "Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech". It doesn't prevent private entities (such as social media companies) from regulating what people are allowed to publish on their platforms, it doesn't require anyone to listen/read hateful words, and it doesn't guarantee freedom from the consequences of one's words (including being fired, shunned, and/or ostracized for hate speech).

Media awarding objective weight to both sides, equating fascist hate speech with leftist calls for change while ignoring the danger of the former and the validity of the latter; comparing violence, death, and civil rights evisceration by the right to protest vandalism from the left, helped create the mess we're currently in.

Words can kill. Hate speech is used to rile up the right, empowering them to doxx, attack, and murder marginalized people and those who fight back (or deliberately harass them into committing suicide). The list of people killed by online hate speech (including Faux News and other so-called "news" media) grows longer every day. People radicalized by "reporters" and "commentators" who get rich pushing conspiracy theories, projecting pedophilia plots, and lying about who's actually interfering with voting rights, education, and the courts, murder children and adults daily.

HUP: I found your poem "Gender Blending Fashion" to be such a sweet, lovely piece about the permission to express gender in whatever way feels true to someone. Why do you feel people try so hard to "police" other people's fashion choices? 

Goldhaber: Policing other people's fashion is very much a part of binary thinking, and an attempt to impose cultural gender constructs on anyone who eschews them. Men can't wear skirts (unless they're kilts) and women must wear makeup and more "femme" clothing. This, of course, ignores the fact that for a time the height of male fashion included makeup, wigs, frilly clothing, and pointy-toed high heels.

Gender is a cultural construction of beliefs/behaviors assigned to people based on their sex. It varies significantly throughout time, across cultures, and controlled by class considerations.

It's ironic that people who claim to be feminists, a movement partially about throwing off gender-restrictive roles, are so critical about enforcing binary, gender-based restrictions. (Which is why I refuse to allow them to claim they are feminists—they're mostly Nazis/white supremacists since that's where fascism starts—eliminating Queer/Trans folk and strictly enforcing gender roles.)

HUP: If for-profit prisons ended tomorrow, what do you think would change in the "justice" system?

Goldhaber: The entire "justice" system is "for-profit" with the sole purpose of furthering oppression of marginalized people. Look at what's considered criminal and what isn't. For example:

•    Police-reported "property crime" doesn't include employer wage theft (~$50 billion annually) more than triple all theft "crimes" complied in "crime rate" statistics.
•    Police-reported "property crime" also doesn't include police civil forfeiture seizures, a large percentage of which are not legal, which steal almost six times as much as all reported burglaries combined.
•    Police-reported "violent crimes" don't include several million physical and sexual assaults committed by police and jail/prison guards each year.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution only partially eliminated slavery and involuntary servitude. Slavery is still legal in this country "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted". Of course, the Constitution doesn't define those crimes and states in the south quickly passed and still enforce Black codes created specifically to maintain the slave labor force.

Those Black codes have become the basis of our entire so-called "justice system." And, because oppressing and marginalizing people is inextricably intertwined with capitalism, the U.S., with the highest rate of locking up its citizens in the entire world, has an extremely lucrative carceral system. As a result, ending it is fought mercilessly by those who benefit from it. This includes police who make six-figure salaries with all kinds of benefits (health care, time off, generous lifetime pensions after 20 years or less, etc.) and practically unlimited budgets to purchase weapons, vehicles, and other toys bullies like to play with as well as well-staffed public relations departments created to maintain the false narrative that cops improve public safety; District Attorneys who are always better compensated than public defenders; and judges (who often start out as DAs, make exorbitant salaries with large benefit packages, and receive almost no scrutiny about how they operate). All three of these groups often ignore the law they claim to care so much about and/or twist it to serve their own purposes and increase their personal wealth.

The entire punitive cash bail system is a huge profit center as are court fees; fines; contracts to provide meals, health care, clothing, and other services at jails/prisons; monitoring costs (e.g. the person required by a court to wear an ankle bracelet is also required to pay an exorbitant amount of money to "rent" it and billions are spent on cameras and other systems observing the incarcerated); etc.

All of these costs are paid for by taxpayers and the incarcerated at the expense of medical care, food, housing, education, childcare, arts, recreation, improved infrastructure, etc.

Although combined we outnumber our

oppressors, as long as we allow

them to divide and conquer we will

never succeed in breaking our chains

-from "Chains of Injustice"

HUP: What do you think is the most effective tool they use to keep us divided?

Goldhaber: Othering. By artificially constructing hierarchies and divisions—whether based on skin color, religion, education, type of employment, gender, immigration status, language spoken, ability, sexuality, etc.—a small number of wealth hoarders pit the rest of us against each other discouraging us from working together to fight their oppression. They project their crimes and grift (grooming/sexual exploitation of children, drug use, theft, government welfare, price gouging, etc.) onto others and create fake issues (abortion, LGBTQ recruiting) to enrage and embolden people who will believe their lies and vote for their sycophants.

Poverty is a policy choice and many acts considered criminal are in fact people trying to stay alive. The cash bail system imprisons poor people who have not been (and may never be) convicted of a crime (often costing them their jobs, homes, custody of their children, etc.) while people with money (if they are arrested at all) are immediately freed.

The federal minimum wage hasn't budged from $7.25 for thirteen years, but the purchasing power of that pittance had gone down almost $3 at the beginning of the year. In that same time period, CEO compensation shot up 54 percent and corporate profits skyrocketed, fueling inflation (but notice inflation is being erroneously blamed on union organizing that has obtained miniscule wage increases) making that already-unlivable wage worth even less.

~*~

Biography: F.I. Goldhaber's words capture people, places, and politics with a photographer's eye and a poet's soul. As a reporter, editor, business writer, and marketing communications consultant, they produced news stories, feature articles, editorial columns, and reviews for newspapers, corporations, governments, and non-profits in five states. Now paper, plastic, electronic, and audio magazines, books, newspapers, calendars, broadsides, and street signs display their poetry, fiction, and essays. http://www.goldhaber.net/

The Beautiful Man: a Portrait by Su Zi

A person approaches a public restroom: on the door is a stick figure of a person and a wheelchair—for many people, this is what disability looks like: the wheelchair. There are invisible disabilities, as not all disabilities are immediately perceivable by strangers. Additionally, disabled people learn to hide their vulnerabilities, their differences, their difficulties in an exhausting camouflage known as masking. Ours is a culture that stigmatizes disability.

In the realm of culture and identity, communities of people can create bonds with others who identify as they do; however, sometimes those very cultures will exclude or silence the disabled among them. In an interview with Gavin Christian Brown (August 2022), he readily identified as a teacher, as an actor (film, TV, and theater), as a writer, and as a Black man. Gavin also has health issues, “It’s ridiculously hard to put on my shoes sometimes…hard to shower…to pick things up”. Yet, because he was denied disability by the government, Gavin did not immediately identify as disabled; this conundrum faces many disabled people where states habitually deny aid to half the applicants. Of this situation, Gavin says,” I know I am disabled. I know what my health is like. I know what my abilities are. We have to adjust to do the best we can, despite limitations imposed on us.” In his case, those limitations include “numerous interconnected health issues” that date back decades, and include permanent damage from physical abuse in gym class at age eleven, and for which he recently had surgery.

Gavin is a teacher, and he says that he practices “selflessness as a teacher”. He is also a public persona, appearing in supporting roles on NCIS and in films, as well as being present online. He says he tries to “inspire a lot of people who think they might give up by trying to be positive”. To this end, he posted a picture of his surgical scar, and followers will often find pictures of Gavin next to stars such as LaVar Burton (“meeting him on NCIS was a big highlight of my life. He is the nicest person. At one point, he stopped production to read to the kids and disabled folk at the center where we were filming. I grew up on Reading Rainbow, so I was a bit star struck”). He believes that we can “inspire each other to do better” and often posts philosophical musings for that purpose.

Although Gavin grew up with “multiple head injuries from abuse”, and “collapsed playing Basketball…November 1994” because of an enlarged heart, the medical care was seen as primitive, and his parents “vetoed” medical treatment because of “skepticism”. In the Black community in which he was raised:

Black disability is a closed, restricted space. For some people, disability doesn’t exist, it’s the realm of religion and prayer. There’s no discussion of going for help with mental health, going to the doctor.

There’s a target on your back.

You have to be tough, and you cannot express yourself, or express your pain. It’s seen as weak.

You cannot ask for help. Support networks are kept to intimate circles, plus there’s the feeling of being conditioned to not need them.

And thus, regarding his identity as a disabled person, “it’s such a rare thing for us to be open about this”

For those who only know Gavin as a writer, it is fair—if an identity must be restricted—to see him for this alone: “Writing keeps me alive…it’s wonderful and beautiful…it’s a joy…I love it so much. It’s a tragedy turned into a triumph”. To his credit, Gavin has written a series of books that he says he is happy “if one person reads” and which are available through Amazon.

And while he repeatedly maintains that “men are socialized to ignore pain”, his post of his surgical scar had some “upsetting and racist” responses, creating yet another situation that he finds “very complex and very difficult”. Yet it is our culture which is shallow and restrictive: a government that deliberately undercounts and underserves a vulnerable but significant population; a section of our own citizenry so marginalized as to disavow the vulnerabilities in the community, to veil people in silence; a teacher financially beleaguered enough to work another job; an artist who must fight publicly unacknowledged restrictions and personal physical pain to release work that is sometimes unnoticed. This is far more than the depiction of a stick figure wheelchair would have the mostly oblivious believe. Yes, disabled people are more than the disability seen from afar. In the case of Gavin Brown, yes, he is disabled, and more importantly, yes, he is a truly beautiful man.

~*~

Biography: Su Zi is a poet/writer and artist/printmaker and edits, designs and constructs the eco-feminist poetry chapbook series Red Mare.

Publications include poetry, essays, stories and reviews that date back to pre-cyber publishing, including when Exquisite Corpse was a vertical print publication, and a few editions of New American Writing. More recent publications include Red Fez, Alien Buddha, and Thrice. A resident of the Ocala National Forest, with a dedicated commitment to providing a safe feeding respite for wild birds, and for a haphazard gardening practice that serves as a life model for all aspects of her work.

Scattered Pain and Nightflare by Lea Ervin

Artist's Statement:  My name is Lea Ervin and I am a 40 year old woman with ADHD, dyslexia, OCD, and stage 4 endometriosis.  I have had learning and physical challenges my entire life, and a year ago, I started painting to explore the body and what it means to live with chronic pain and mental illness.  The three paintings are part of my “Scattered Pain” series in which I depict what is happening inside my body on the outside to give a visual representation of the symbiosis of chronic pain, ADHD, and OCD.  The pelvic regions of each figure have a touch of red to depict the pain and inflammation one experiences with endometriosis along with the scattered colors that represent a neurodivergent brain. It is difficult to express in words the experience of living in this body, so it was necessary to create a visual representation of life with multiple disabilities. These illustrations depict the pain, messiness, and beauty that come with being different and that there is beauty everywhere.  

~*~

Nightflare.

My endometriosis pain swirls, saturates, and swims through my pelvis. It coaxes my heart to beat faster pushing the sweat from my pores. My bowels somersault shifting the bile in my stomach into my throat. The pain crushes my bones.

Feeling well is bait, you see.

An unattainable truth that the pain might stop.

But like a crimson demonic chorus, the endometriosis lesions in my belly snarl.

“Remember girl, you will die. But not tonight girl, oh no no no. You’ll just wish you were dead.”

I am a woman undeserving of peace because tonight, by body says otherwise.

The space has long been empty—nearly a decade since endometriosis took my uterus. However, the spawns thrive, bleed, rip, scar and propagate nights of agony, sleeplessness, and hopelessness.

I writhe in the blanket and wring my hands in the sheets.

Fetal position

Straight like an arrow.

On my back.

Hailing Mary with a whisper as to not wake my sleeping husband, resting peacefully next to me.

Oh, to have that sense of safety and comfort.

But I can only count the clock ticks.

Re-check the instructions on the orange pill bottle lying sideways on my nightstand with the cap partially undone.

Tally the hours on my fingers to determine the soonest I can safely take another, and hope there will be rest.

~*~

Biography: Lea Ervin is a writer and artist in Alabama. She is a writing instructor at the University of Alabama Birmingham and holds a Masters of Arts in Professional and Technical Writing from the University of Arkansas Little Rock. She has taught on both the community college and university level. As a freelance writer, her work centers around endometriosis advocacy and has been featured in The Blossom (Endometriosis Foundation of America), al.com, Reckon South, The Mighty, and Thought Catalog.  Lea also paints to depict the struggle of mental illness and chronic pain and the parts of both that are hard to put into words. When she is not writing, teaching, or painting, she is collecting vinyl records, bingeing her favorite series, reading, cooking, and dancing around her house to indie rock or jazz. She resides in Oneonta, Alabama, with her husband Brad White and their Beagle-mix, Starla Belle.

Horror of the Hoarfrost Fray by Daniel Moreschi

When bloomy bells and balmy days forsake
A sphere of solstice worn, miasmal skies
Enfold a leaden shroud of winter wake,
A falling crystalline array belies.

The oaks are weaned from reach of red and gold
And held by stranded lines of bleary wings,
With sculptured trunk for base of bastions, holed,
To brave the brink that famished lustre brings.

From fleeting streaks of gleam, to chartless height
Of icy dunes, now flanked by sleety sheets.
Yet swallowed beds patrolled by frost and flight
Become graves when homing light depletes.

For daunting dawns, in lieu of morning song,
Are tempered trills of fretful flits that leads
To lurid storms, with swooping strikes along
A shattered fray on view of scanty seeds.

The roots are rattled by a wild cascade
As turning tails are tolls from layers thinned,
While clouds are sated by the tainted glade
And dusky tinge, when lesions stain the wind.

Though sunlit lances lift the sullen screen
To galvanise the depths of faded earth
And breach the unthawed walls for vital green,
There are no quills to greet the spring's rebirth.

~*~

Biography:  Daniel is a poet from Neath, South Wales, UK. After life was turned upside down by contacting M.E., he rediscovered his passion for poetry that had been dormant since his teenage years. Writing has served as a distraction from his daily struggles ever since. Daniel has been acclaimed by various poetry competitions, including The Oliver Goldsmith Literature Festival, the Westmoreland Arts & Heritage Festival, the Jurica-Suchy Nature Museum's Nature Poetry Contest, and the Hugo Dock Snow Maze Poetry Contest. Daniel has also had poetry published by The Society of Classical Poets and The Black Cat Poetry Press.

Overview: Stamped Cross-Stitch by Spazzy Crafter

Everything that comes in a stamped cross-stitch kit:

Embroidery floss

Printed instructions

Needle

Fabric (with the design)

Colored picture of the completed design

The basics and tips:

The easiest way to begin your project is to start from the middle and work your way out. The instructions tell you how many strands of each color you need for each part of the project. Basically, you embroider a bunch of small X’s on the fabric. The most efficient way to not lose your place on your project is to mark off on your instructions. You have to be careful not to get the fabric wet or dirty because it will fade the design. However, dampening your floss a bit on the end helps with threading the needle.

On embroidery hoops:

Depending on the size of the project, you might want an embroidery hoop. Hoops make it easier by allowing you to focus on small areas at a time. I also use them because they are better to hold onto than trying to work with everything laid out. Embroidery hoops don't always come with the kit, but you can find them at crafting stores or Amazon.

To use the embroidery hoop, unscrew the top of the hoop. Put the smaller hoop on the underneath side of the project. Then, put the bigger part of the hoop over the front. Snap the smaller and bigger parts together and tighten the top.

As a disabled crafter:

I need help with inserting the embroidery floss in the eye of the needle and separating the floss strands. My hands just don’t cooperate enough.

Two Poems by Allison Whittenberg

Temperate

my dry wit
held its own
as the rain came down
in spits
then a geyser
we kept talking and talking at the outside table
al fresco -- all wet, oh
still
your zingers
priceless
in the dampness
left us
talking about every little
everything
every
thing.

~*~

The Hard Way

You never know people
till they die
you gingerly page
through their privacy

Those fresh, fateful photos:
mothers in mauve miniskirts,
fathers frying hash browns, wearing floppy hats

After there is nothing at stake,
you find out all that you could have given

A little air comes in,
combats the forming mold that corrupted keepsakes,
contaminated these attic memories

This knowing threatens to sun the was
the is, now, will be more forgiving

~*~

Biography:  Allison Whittenberg is a poet, playwright and fiction writer. Her lastest collection of short stories Carnival of Reality came out April 2022.

Instagram: therealallisonwhittenberg

Twitter: @allisonwhitten6

Neither Weak Nor Obtuse: an Interview with Author, Jake Goldsmith

By Valois J Vera
Interviewer, Handy Uncapped Pen

"I am very ill. That would be the first and most obvious thing
to know. I have something of a haughty and self-important mo-
tivation for writing a memoir, being relatively young, as I have the persistent weight of illness stunting my time to speak. I need a model of myself—to have a promotion of my worth— and so here is no small attempt at a testament to my life and constitution. This work is a show of my growth, of what I love, and some diagnosis as to why I would love those particular things."

The introduction to Jake Goldsmith's Neither Weak Nor Obtuse reveals a glimpse into the raw and genuine pages of this striking memoir. We certainly wanted to learn more about Jake and his book.

Handy Uncapped Pen: What inspired the idea for Neither Weak Nor Obtuse?

Jake Goldsmith: I’m a memoirist, if I’m any sort of writer. I’m very weary and anxious about my life and health and I felt the (indulgent) need to hint at something of a last testament. It’s morbid, and I don’t think it means I will have nothing else to say, but I think the book does hint at fundamentally what my state of mind is as a chronically ill person—my thoughts, perceptions, how I have come to be, who I am.

HUP: Tell us about your writing process.

JG: I normally write notes on an iPad, or paper that I then transfer to an iPad—on Pages or Word. It’s much easier for me than sitting at a computer or desk and I’d normally have some inspiration to write, say, just a paragraph on a particular subject—which I would then expand on or polish later. I rarely rewrite anything substantially but rather make additions or renovate what I’ve initially put down. It is liberating, though, to cut large swathes of text if I have something better. I don’t think my process is too interesting and I don’t have much good advice for anyone I know who wants to write; I write organically, at whatever time it comes to me, and without any real discipline. As my life, it affords something, means I don’t need to be so disciplined or regimented.

HUP: Tell us about your publication experience.

JG: I originally self-published my book. I didn’t care too much about wider ramifications and just wanted something for my parents or friends to point at. It was too difficult to ask publishers anyway, out of embarrassment or just by being a stranger. When I later founded The Barbellion Prize, I was noticed by literary people, who are a closer knit community of people I was outside of, and that lent me a gateway to people with links to independent publishers. Before I would have to knock on the door of publishers as an unknown entity from the outside if I wanted anything, but if you know someone then it’s friendly. It’s unfair, in many ways; cynically it’s nepotism that means anyone can get anywhere—knowing people at the right time and place means a lot more than raw talent or expertise individually (if I have that). But I’m thankful to have made friends, first online, just by being noticed after creating The Barbellion Prize and allowing me some access into an alien literary world. I’d be aware of the literary world, of course, but it’s very much a selection of (often metropolitan) cliques and cultural niches most are not in.

Otherwise, my publisher has been very personable, personal, and entirely receptive of me. This would, I gather, be more difficult with a larger publisher—with its own obtuse marketing directives or other pursuits. I was seen for what I am and given the editorial help I needed, or anyone really needs. It may be a harder world to access if you’re not initiated, but it certainly has its necessary advantages. Purely as a framework for editors, anyone needs a good editor to be anything worth looking at—and that’s harder if you don’t have the means or you’re self-published. Most self-published works will be rougher simply because of the lack of good editing, clearly.

HUP: Looking back at both the writing and publication process, is there anything you would have done differently?

JG: Not particularly. I had regular calls with my editor to go through the text bit by bit and polish it (often while I was in hospital). It was a rewarding experience and I had no real trouble with it, and I’m grateful for it.

HUP: Will there be a sequel, or what projects are you working on now?

JG: I may try to have some shorter articles published. I’m afraid of being one note. I’m strongest when writing this very blunt, frank, open confessional. I have a few thousand words of something that’s akin to Barbellion’s journal. It’s an apt comparison to me. It also rewards writing in short disjointed essays or paragraphs and could be published as a short journal or a collection in a magazine. I have a few brief essays published in the quarterly magazine Exacting Clam, from my publisher Sagging Meniscus, about my experiences in hospital and with people's behaviour and thoughts regarding illness—more phenomenology of illness. I detail less of the basic physical facts of illness and more any thought or philosophical processes, which are more important to me. Coping with the facts of illness are more important to me than simply what those facts are—which are obvious or boring. I don’t need to write down, as much, what my hospital notes are. I need to think about what they implicate, what they mean exactly, what fate I then have and how I am going to reconcile or deal with those realities—if I even can. My emotional or philosophical reactions to my health are more important to detail than my BPM or oxygen saturation.

HUP: Tell us about the Disability narratives in your book.

JG: The whole thing, any political thought, any perceptions I have, are from my reality as an ill person. Through the lens of illness. It’s the defining characteristic and I think it’s a lie, and insulting, unwitting or not, to say that illness or disability isn’t so utterly defining. It’s not shameful, it’s fine for disability to define what you can do and it will define how you think. I’m not sure how that’s escapable without lying about or underestimating what disability and illness is. I can’t be ashamed of it, of course it’s going to shape everything and I’m not sure how it couldn’t.

Otherwise, I talk of how healthier people don’t reflect on or comprehend disability, and illness as a means towards philosophical or psychological evaluation. I don’t portray disabled people as soothsayers, but rather more immediately faced with a reality to confront and think about—while others, self-admittedly, are more blithe about things.

HUP: As a Disabled Author, what is your perspective on Disability representation in literature?

JG: Many of our best historical writers were disabled, in some way. Academically or as laypeople we care not to notice this or appreciate it. We will either not know of it, or if we do we distance it from our daily lives.

Despite historical representation from the likes of Kierkegaard, Samuel Johnson, Emily Dickinson, or any other number of renowned and canon authors, modern publishing is limited in the number of openly disabled people it elects to publish—as much as other industries are also very impoverished when it comes to disability representation, or class representation, etc.

The Barbellion Prize is only a small effort to reward disabled authors (at least I say that, while others say it can be more), and to me it’s still unjust that disability isn’t perceived as a fundamental or primary subject, and we neglect disabled people in literature as much as we do in everyday life—even if we want to pretend we are more cultured and worldly in literature.

It’s common to quote Virginia Woolf, but she rightly expressed in her essay On Being Ill, “ . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature."

It is indeed strange and insulting that this is still true.

Find out more about Neither Weak Nor Obtuse by clicking anywhere on this sentence.