Who Can Write Disability? commissioned by Spread the Word

THINK

I’m a writer, I am – despite the earliest unhelpful pronouncements that I would never succeed. As a council house kid from a working class background it wasn’t the done thing. And to make it extra hard for myself, from my beginnings I acknowledged my own experience of disability within my work.

I got slapped down further because no-one wants to read about that, cripples and ill people, do they? They didn’t in the 70’s but punk lit a fire under my arse and inside my heart, illuminating my thoughts that flew as poems to endless fanzines. No one cared on those pages if I raged about the injustice that surrounded my life, that as a wheelchair user I faced barriers at every turn. Those days were fun and fierce, and gave me a safe, welcome arena in which to learn my craft and meet like-minded people. This also led me into the beginnings of the radical disability arts movement in the mid 80’s. It was here I started to earn a bit of money from my words, where I could write about the disability experience in a way that the mainstream still did not accept.