Cristina Cortez is a first-generation Latin-American poet born to immigrant parents. She holds a B.A. in English, Creative Writing & Literature, and History with Minors in Latin American & Caribbean Studies with Honors & Distinction from Hofstra University (2015), and a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing & Poetics, from the University of Washington Bothell (2018). Her thesis, Un-bound is a cross-genre memoir about living life with a disability. She was a speaker at TEDx Everett (March 2017).
Her work has been published in I Come From the World Literary Journal (Summer 2017) and La Guagua Poetry Anthology: Celebration & Confrontation (March 2019), the United Spinal Association’s New Mobility Magazine: the magazine for active wheelchair users. Cortez was a guest speaker at Breed Middle School’s Spanish National Junior Honor Society Chapter "Rigoberta Menchu" Peace Nobel Prize, and interviewed on Radio Shows Cambiando el mundo de personas con discapacidades with Raquel Quezada (April 2019), Fortaleciendo la Familia with Rafael Disla and Conceptos TV Univision, Boston with Efrain Abreu (June 2019).
She completed the Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities (LEND) fellowship program (2019-2020) at the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) at Boston Children's Hospital, where she studied neurodevelopmental disabilities as a self-advocate or person with a disability fellow (PWD, also called persons with lived experience or self-advocates). The program provides "advanced interdisciplinary training to health and counseling professionals, families, and self-advocates to improve their knowledge in working with children, adolescents and young adults with developmental and related disabilities. This training is multi-focused and ranges from policy issues and team collaboration to specific clinical practice and support models."
Cortez also participated in the Charting the LifeCourse Ambassador Series fellowship program, at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC) Institute for Human Development, in affiliation with Mass Families for Change via Zoom (2021)
https://www.cristinacortezauthor.com/
Her work has been published in I Come From the World Literary Journal (Summer 2017) and La Guagua Poetry Anthology: Celebration & Confrontation (March 2019), the United Spinal Association’s New Mobility Magazine: the magazine for active wheelchair users. Cortez was a guest speaker at Breed Middle School’s Spanish National Junior Honor Society Chapter "Rigoberta Menchu" Peace Nobel Prize, and interviewed on Radio Shows Cambiando el mundo de personas con discapacidades with Raquel Quezada (April 2019), Fortaleciendo la Familia with Rafael Disla and Conceptos TV Univision, Boston with Efrain Abreu (June 2019).
She completed the Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities (LEND) fellowship program (2019-2020) at the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) at Boston Children's Hospital, where she studied neurodevelopmental disabilities as a self-advocate or person with a disability fellow (PWD, also called persons with lived experience or self-advocates). The program provides "advanced interdisciplinary training to health and counseling professionals, families, and self-advocates to improve their knowledge in working with children, adolescents and young adults with developmental and related disabilities. This training is multi-focused and ranges from policy issues and team collaboration to specific clinical practice and support models."
Cortez also participated in the Charting the LifeCourse Ambassador Series fellowship program, at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC) Institute for Human Development, in affiliation with Mass Families for Change via Zoom (2021)
https://www.cristinacortezauthor.com/
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Books by Cristina Cortez
--@Susana Reyes, Editorial Ojo de Cuervo
Waiting in Solitude
By Hector Escalante Rivera
Medium: Digital painting
“Waiting in Solitude” is the title of the painting featured on the cover of As I Am/Soy Como Soy, by Cristina Cortez. The image represents introspection, the act of contemplating oneself in solitude, where one perceives feelings and thoughts while analyzing our own and other people's beha- viors in our individual reality. This process of internal analysis allows us to know, understand and accept ourselves through a deep, solitary, and complete exploration of our being with the possibility that, in time, we can make the necessary changes and adjustments that guide our steps in life on better paths. Introspection helps us, not only to get to know ourselves better, but to respect, love and accept ourselves as we are physically and emotionally.
“Espera en Soledad”
Por: Héctor Escalante Rivera
Medio: Pintura digital
“Espera en Soledad” es el título de la obra de arte en la portada de As I Am/ Soy Como Soy, de Cristina Cortez. La imagen representa la introspección, el acto de contemplarse en soledad uno mismo, percibiendo sentimientos y pensa- mientos, mientras analizamos conductas propias y ajenas desde nuestra exclusiva realidad. Este proceso de análisis interior nos permite conocernos, comprendernos y aceptar- nos a nosotros mismos mediante una exploración profunda, solitaria y completa de nuestro ser con la posibilidad de que, con el tiempo, podamos realizar los cambios y ajustes nece- sarios que conduzcan nuestros pasos en vida por mejores caminos. La introspección nos ayuda, no solo a conocernos mejor, sino a respetarnos, amarnos y aceptarnos tal cual somos física y emocionalmente.
A CELEBRATION OF THE INCA PAST
Tawantinsuyu: Poems of the Time of the Inca is a representation of the Andean past. Each poem is a celebration of the cultural achievements of the indigenous people and is written from the perspective of the structures that were built during the Inca period. By letting the monuments speak, I am giving a voice to the permanence of indigenous culture in the region. This is exemplified in the poem “Coricancha” when it declares:
the spaniards built a church to their god to cover up the past.
but i still stand.
an earthquake crumbled their church. but i still stand.
ii
The personified strength of the Coricancha temple mirrors the history of the building and in the text symbolizes the continued relevance of indigeneity in Perú and by extension the American continent as a whole.
The poems appropriate the idea that the Andes should be considered one of the cradles of human civilization, as argued in the lecture set titled Lost Worlds of South America taught by Dr. Edwin Barnhart.
The technique of appropriation is usually the conscious act of a writer to take a previously written text by another author and use it in his/her own writing without citations. In the case of the book, I have appropriated the spoken material of the lectures into the text of the poems as a way to embody and recreate the oral tradition shared by indigenous peoples.
The oral quality of Tawantinsuyu is echoed in the poem “Saksawaman” when the speaker of the poem says, “i stand strong.” The repetition suggests that the poems are the result of writing down oral memory from the people of the Inca
iii
period since repetition is a means of passing on communal stories in a tribal context.
The text is written in the gothic mode as can be seen in the inconsistent observance of grammatical rules, only res- pecting the capitalization of proper nouns. The use of the gothic mode was inspired by my encounter with “The Descent of Alette” and “Alma, or the Dead Women,” by Alice Notley and The world as Phone Bill by Stan Apps. In these texts, the disregard for the conventions of writing that the authors used allowed me to explore the power of an inhibited free association in writing. By using this technique, I broke away from the traditional presentation of indigenous history as beginning with the encounter with western civi- lization.
Also Tawantinsuyu intentionally begins with the litany of the different manifestations of the god known as Virachocha in poems i-v in the section "You Will Find My Face."
The cover of the book aims to show the contributions of in-
iv
digenous people to the cultural identity of Perú. It features an Incan tocapu, a polychromatic textile, used as a writing system to record daily life events, cultural traditions, and biographies or diaries. Superimposed on the tocapu back- ground are four Chacanas, Andean crosses. The chacana is the symbol of Inca imperial power. The use of the chanana on the cover is intended to refer back to the indeleble mark of the Inca on the history of Perú and the Andean region. The cover was designed by Puertorican artist Héctor Escalante Rivera.
The title Tawantinsuyu: Poems of the Time of the Inca is a reference to the name of the Inca Empire that in quechua means ‘land of four quarters’. The book is a celebration of the history and culture of the Inca and the Andean region that should be honored and remembered.
Papers by Cristina Cortez
&
Discovering a Machine Made of Words: The Poetics Styles of Matthew Zapruder’s Come on All You Ghosts and Sun Bear
In order to explore the role of Magical Realism in literature and history, this paper will analyze the following: Of Love and Other Demons by Garcia Marquez, The Green House by Vargas Llosa, The Garden of Forking Paths by Borges and The Good Conscience by Fuentes. In addition, this paper will pay particular attention to the work of Garcia Marquez as well as his biography. In this context, the primary sources under consideration include: the painting titled “Cuadro de Castas,” the Nobel Prize acceptance speeches of Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa, The New York Times literary releases for all the works. The secondary sources are JSTOR articles : “Decadence and Modernity in the Unfinished Society: The Latin American Novel” by Larry S. Caney and “Symbolism and the Clash of Cultural Traditions in Colonial Spanish America in Garcia Marquez’s Del Amor y Otros Demonios” by Arnold M. Penuel.
In relation to the sources that are to be used, the historical components of the analysis will consider the social and political environment that led to the development of the movement of Magical Realism. Likewise alongside this consideration, the impact of these literary works on the public will be taken into account. To this effect, the questions that are to be examined include: What are the origins of Magical Realism? What are the stylistic characteristics that define the movement? How does each author implement these stylistic elements in the selected works? What are the social and political references found in the works? What are the social and political messages and themes explored by the author individually and collectively? These substantial questions will be the bulk of the paper and in this way they aim to make the reader aware of the historical context from which these literary works and their authors came.
Overall, the scope and methodology to be used in this paper aims to provide an examination of the historical relevance that can be found in the selected works. Furthermore, the purpose is to demonstrate what makes these pieces of literature part of the movement of Magical Realism. In this way, as a form of popular culture, literature is one of component that leads to a rounded understanding of the historical events that shaped the Latin American countries under consideration.
Thesis Chapters by Cristina Cortez
Finding My Language for Disability in Un-bound
Disability is a part of my life, and to me the topic was too private to write about. But disability has found its way into my writing over the years. It was in my poems and in the blog of my Study Abroad trip in Ireland. During the first quarter of my MFA I wrote “New Trails” where I described the problems I had with my wheelchair when I first landed in Washington. The reaction of my cohort made me think it was time to tackle the challenge of writing about disability. So I wrote this memoir.
In the process of writing the memoir, I began by putting together all the pieces I had written about disability in my life, in poetry and prose. Afterwards when I met with my thesis adviser, Rebecca Brown, we talked about how I should take a look at contemporary memoirs about disability to get a sense of the genre. As per her suggestion, I read Body Remember and The History of My Shoes And The Evolution of Darwin’s Theory by Kenny Fries, Plain Text: Essays by Nancy Mairs, Planet of the Blind by Stephen Kuusisto, and One More Theory About Happiness by Paul Guest.
In the memoirs, I found that the authors talked about their experiences with disability, particularly about the nature of the disabled body. I felt uncomfortable with the attention they gave to the physicality of their disabilities, and after some time of reflecting about my discomfort, I realized that I didn’t want to talk about my body as a physical object and the transfer of control that is inherent in my disability. Instead I wanted to focus on the development of my identity as a person who happens to have a disability. I wanted to share with the reader my growth as a person through learning. My memoir was going to be a window into my mind and process of thinking about disability. In the memoir, the reader finds how we are alike in the ways we think about ourselves, feel about the world around us, and dream about what the future holds.
I started to map out my disability experience by going back to my thesis proposal and my second-year plan. In my proposal, I stated that I intended to write a full-length memoir using poetry and prose. My memoir was going to be about my life as a person who happens to have a disability, while constantly encountering social barriers in the form of people’s perceptions.
In the process of writing this memoir, I engaged with the following questions:
How did the perceptions of family members, friends, and teachers, shape my earliest self-perceptions?
How did these points of view help or hinder my development?
What has made me want not to resign myself to my limitations?
Where does the stigma surrounding disability come from and why?
What lives, real or fictional, are in dialogue with my experience of disability and sense of self?
Also, this memoir is a follow-up piece to my talk at TEDx Everett Tearing Down Walls - Building Bridges where I shared my life’s story. It was a great experience, but I was unsatisfied with the wording I used to talk about myself, and the language of disability and self-representation. Then the language of disability became a main concern to address in my memoir.
I decided to go to the roots of my disability experience. I found that it was closely associated with the negative memory of being singled out as “disabled” (in second grade) when I was introduced to the book Helen Keller by Margaret Davidson. This is a moment that I describe in Part 1 of my memoir that left me with a sense that the most important thing about Keller was her disability. The only way I was going to get past my negative impression of her was to read her books and I read all of them.
For half of the summer before the second year of my MFA I read continuously about Hellen Keller and for the rest of the summer I read about the life of Stephen Hawking. After reading about Keller and Hawking, I put together the first draft of my thesis. When it comes to Keller’s work, the most influential books on my memoir are The Story of My Life and The World I Live In. They showed how Keller gradually understood herself as a person in the world who was given independence through learning, a parallel to my own life experience.
In the writing of the memoir, I didn’t realize that there was a direct connection between the books that I have read in my life and the development of my identity, as Rebecca Brown pointed out to me in one of her revision letters. Literature is synonymous with my freedom, because when I read or write my disability becomes irrelevant and my mind is what matters. In the many books about Stephen Hawking, I found that his disability changed the way he worked as a physicist but didn’t stop him from doing it. For him, as for me, disability is just a fact of life.
In my memoir I mention my disability as something I often ignored, not to be frustrated by my body’s inability to function as it should. I acknowledge that I have a disability, I use a wheelchair to move around, and I need technology to live my life as I want to. These devices are part of the way I move through the world. However, I consider these devices extensions of myself rather than as integral parts of my identity. To show this, I have consciously chosen to use phrases such as “I use a wheelchair” instead of “I am wheelchair-bound.” The choice of this kind of language puts me as a person at the center of my work and not my disability.
My identity as a person who happens to have a disability has changed over the years. In Part 4 of my memoir, I discuss the social aspects that come with having a disability, such as people’s misconceptions of people with disabilities, discrimination, and ableism. To talk about these social issues, I explored disability theory culled from different sources, including videos like Aimee Mullins on Today Show, The Aesthetics of Prosthetics: Aimee Mullins, Changing my legs—and my mindset, The opportunity of adversity, and My 12 pairs of legs. These videos allowed me to understand the relationship that exists among the individual with a disability, the technology she/he uses to navigate in the world, and society.
The hardest part of writing my memoir was the social critique of people’s perceptions about disability. I narrate the experience of my life while making the reader aware of the social backdrop that surrounds me. In Parts 4 and 8, I talk about my relationship with my disability, and my sense of self as an individual in relation to technology. In terms of technology, I discuss my wheelchairs while also giving the reader a glimpse of how I read and write.
The title of my memoir is Unbound. I chose the title after much debate with myself. The title was inspired by the line “Your mortal coil sprang back unbounded” from the song “This Gives Life to Thee” by Akala, and the song, in turn, is based on William Shakespeare’s canon of works. I chose Unbound to reflect my central theme of freedom, and because my work is in conversation with many writers I have read over the years. All those books have influenced my life.
During my MFA I have been exposed to the poetics of many thinkers like Lyn Hejinian and Fred Moten. From them, I have learned the importance of speaking or writing in a community and the reinvigoration of language. My understanding of these ideas came out of Professor Jeanne Heuving’s class BCWRIT 510 Writing and Cultural Change.
Through my explorations of what poetics is, I have come to think of it in terms of Lyn Hejinian’s definition:
Poetics is always in an unbounded, excessive relationship to its art, which may in part account for the difficulty one has in defining the term. It is more than theory and more than practice; it is what identifies an artist’s largest aspirations and discovers the ways those become manifest—the ways they are activated and provided with the manner in which the artist applies him—or herself to realizing those aspirations and, when lucky, something more besides—expanding, perhaps by virtue of their inherent contradictions, between affect and structure, materiality and sensibility, aspiration and patent failure, ostensibility and abstraction, assertion and silence. (From “An Art of Addition, an Eddic Return,” unpublished paper given at first Fall Convergence.)
I have taken this interpretation of poetics to mean that a writer should explore the subjects that occupy her mind the most and these subjects must drive her to be compelled to write.
Poetics emerges through the writing; writing comes first and poetics follows. Through the act of writing, the writer’s interests come up repeatedly and turn into “fascinations and/or obsessions” as Hejinian calls them. Fascinations and obsessions are then at the core of a writer’s poetics. In my case the nature of disability on the personal and social levels has been the fascination at the center of my writing during the MFA.
As my poetics takes shape, I realize that poetics is an ongoing “process of becoming” as Tracy Morris said at the Fall Convergence. At this moment my poetics is to follow the lead of my fascinations as they assert themselves until others come to take their place. Then poetics is not made up of a fixed set of “fascinations and/or obsessions,” rather a writer’s poetics is ever-changing and in constant flux.
In the excerpt from The Language of Inquiry titled “Who Is Speaking?” Lyn Hejinian shows that writing is a form of communication that constructs the world that the reader is entering through reading. Language constructs the world and presents the predominant perspective of the society in which and for which it is being written.
--@Susana Reyes, Editorial Ojo de Cuervo
Waiting in Solitude
By Hector Escalante Rivera
Medium: Digital painting
“Waiting in Solitude” is the title of the painting featured on the cover of As I Am/Soy Como Soy, by Cristina Cortez. The image represents introspection, the act of contemplating oneself in solitude, where one perceives feelings and thoughts while analyzing our own and other people's beha- viors in our individual reality. This process of internal analysis allows us to know, understand and accept ourselves through a deep, solitary, and complete exploration of our being with the possibility that, in time, we can make the necessary changes and adjustments that guide our steps in life on better paths. Introspection helps us, not only to get to know ourselves better, but to respect, love and accept ourselves as we are physically and emotionally.
“Espera en Soledad”
Por: Héctor Escalante Rivera
Medio: Pintura digital
“Espera en Soledad” es el título de la obra de arte en la portada de As I Am/ Soy Como Soy, de Cristina Cortez. La imagen representa la introspección, el acto de contemplarse en soledad uno mismo, percibiendo sentimientos y pensa- mientos, mientras analizamos conductas propias y ajenas desde nuestra exclusiva realidad. Este proceso de análisis interior nos permite conocernos, comprendernos y aceptar- nos a nosotros mismos mediante una exploración profunda, solitaria y completa de nuestro ser con la posibilidad de que, con el tiempo, podamos realizar los cambios y ajustes nece- sarios que conduzcan nuestros pasos en vida por mejores caminos. La introspección nos ayuda, no solo a conocernos mejor, sino a respetarnos, amarnos y aceptarnos tal cual somos física y emocionalmente.
A CELEBRATION OF THE INCA PAST
Tawantinsuyu: Poems of the Time of the Inca is a representation of the Andean past. Each poem is a celebration of the cultural achievements of the indigenous people and is written from the perspective of the structures that were built during the Inca period. By letting the monuments speak, I am giving a voice to the permanence of indigenous culture in the region. This is exemplified in the poem “Coricancha” when it declares:
the spaniards built a church to their god to cover up the past.
but i still stand.
an earthquake crumbled their church. but i still stand.
ii
The personified strength of the Coricancha temple mirrors the history of the building and in the text symbolizes the continued relevance of indigeneity in Perú and by extension the American continent as a whole.
The poems appropriate the idea that the Andes should be considered one of the cradles of human civilization, as argued in the lecture set titled Lost Worlds of South America taught by Dr. Edwin Barnhart.
The technique of appropriation is usually the conscious act of a writer to take a previously written text by another author and use it in his/her own writing without citations. In the case of the book, I have appropriated the spoken material of the lectures into the text of the poems as a way to embody and recreate the oral tradition shared by indigenous peoples.
The oral quality of Tawantinsuyu is echoed in the poem “Saksawaman” when the speaker of the poem says, “i stand strong.” The repetition suggests that the poems are the result of writing down oral memory from the people of the Inca
iii
period since repetition is a means of passing on communal stories in a tribal context.
The text is written in the gothic mode as can be seen in the inconsistent observance of grammatical rules, only res- pecting the capitalization of proper nouns. The use of the gothic mode was inspired by my encounter with “The Descent of Alette” and “Alma, or the Dead Women,” by Alice Notley and The world as Phone Bill by Stan Apps. In these texts, the disregard for the conventions of writing that the authors used allowed me to explore the power of an inhibited free association in writing. By using this technique, I broke away from the traditional presentation of indigenous history as beginning with the encounter with western civi- lization.
Also Tawantinsuyu intentionally begins with the litany of the different manifestations of the god known as Virachocha in poems i-v in the section "You Will Find My Face."
The cover of the book aims to show the contributions of in-
iv
digenous people to the cultural identity of Perú. It features an Incan tocapu, a polychromatic textile, used as a writing system to record daily life events, cultural traditions, and biographies or diaries. Superimposed on the tocapu back- ground are four Chacanas, Andean crosses. The chacana is the symbol of Inca imperial power. The use of the chanana on the cover is intended to refer back to the indeleble mark of the Inca on the history of Perú and the Andean region. The cover was designed by Puertorican artist Héctor Escalante Rivera.
The title Tawantinsuyu: Poems of the Time of the Inca is a reference to the name of the Inca Empire that in quechua means ‘land of four quarters’. The book is a celebration of the history and culture of the Inca and the Andean region that should be honored and remembered.
&
Discovering a Machine Made of Words: The Poetics Styles of Matthew Zapruder’s Come on All You Ghosts and Sun Bear
In order to explore the role of Magical Realism in literature and history, this paper will analyze the following: Of Love and Other Demons by Garcia Marquez, The Green House by Vargas Llosa, The Garden of Forking Paths by Borges and The Good Conscience by Fuentes. In addition, this paper will pay particular attention to the work of Garcia Marquez as well as his biography. In this context, the primary sources under consideration include: the painting titled “Cuadro de Castas,” the Nobel Prize acceptance speeches of Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa, The New York Times literary releases for all the works. The secondary sources are JSTOR articles : “Decadence and Modernity in the Unfinished Society: The Latin American Novel” by Larry S. Caney and “Symbolism and the Clash of Cultural Traditions in Colonial Spanish America in Garcia Marquez’s Del Amor y Otros Demonios” by Arnold M. Penuel.
In relation to the sources that are to be used, the historical components of the analysis will consider the social and political environment that led to the development of the movement of Magical Realism. Likewise alongside this consideration, the impact of these literary works on the public will be taken into account. To this effect, the questions that are to be examined include: What are the origins of Magical Realism? What are the stylistic characteristics that define the movement? How does each author implement these stylistic elements in the selected works? What are the social and political references found in the works? What are the social and political messages and themes explored by the author individually and collectively? These substantial questions will be the bulk of the paper and in this way they aim to make the reader aware of the historical context from which these literary works and their authors came.
Overall, the scope and methodology to be used in this paper aims to provide an examination of the historical relevance that can be found in the selected works. Furthermore, the purpose is to demonstrate what makes these pieces of literature part of the movement of Magical Realism. In this way, as a form of popular culture, literature is one of component that leads to a rounded understanding of the historical events that shaped the Latin American countries under consideration.
Finding My Language for Disability in Un-bound
Disability is a part of my life, and to me the topic was too private to write about. But disability has found its way into my writing over the years. It was in my poems and in the blog of my Study Abroad trip in Ireland. During the first quarter of my MFA I wrote “New Trails” where I described the problems I had with my wheelchair when I first landed in Washington. The reaction of my cohort made me think it was time to tackle the challenge of writing about disability. So I wrote this memoir.
In the process of writing the memoir, I began by putting together all the pieces I had written about disability in my life, in poetry and prose. Afterwards when I met with my thesis adviser, Rebecca Brown, we talked about how I should take a look at contemporary memoirs about disability to get a sense of the genre. As per her suggestion, I read Body Remember and The History of My Shoes And The Evolution of Darwin’s Theory by Kenny Fries, Plain Text: Essays by Nancy Mairs, Planet of the Blind by Stephen Kuusisto, and One More Theory About Happiness by Paul Guest.
In the memoirs, I found that the authors talked about their experiences with disability, particularly about the nature of the disabled body. I felt uncomfortable with the attention they gave to the physicality of their disabilities, and after some time of reflecting about my discomfort, I realized that I didn’t want to talk about my body as a physical object and the transfer of control that is inherent in my disability. Instead I wanted to focus on the development of my identity as a person who happens to have a disability. I wanted to share with the reader my growth as a person through learning. My memoir was going to be a window into my mind and process of thinking about disability. In the memoir, the reader finds how we are alike in the ways we think about ourselves, feel about the world around us, and dream about what the future holds.
I started to map out my disability experience by going back to my thesis proposal and my second-year plan. In my proposal, I stated that I intended to write a full-length memoir using poetry and prose. My memoir was going to be about my life as a person who happens to have a disability, while constantly encountering social barriers in the form of people’s perceptions.
In the process of writing this memoir, I engaged with the following questions:
How did the perceptions of family members, friends, and teachers, shape my earliest self-perceptions?
How did these points of view help or hinder my development?
What has made me want not to resign myself to my limitations?
Where does the stigma surrounding disability come from and why?
What lives, real or fictional, are in dialogue with my experience of disability and sense of self?
Also, this memoir is a follow-up piece to my talk at TEDx Everett Tearing Down Walls - Building Bridges where I shared my life’s story. It was a great experience, but I was unsatisfied with the wording I used to talk about myself, and the language of disability and self-representation. Then the language of disability became a main concern to address in my memoir.
I decided to go to the roots of my disability experience. I found that it was closely associated with the negative memory of being singled out as “disabled” (in second grade) when I was introduced to the book Helen Keller by Margaret Davidson. This is a moment that I describe in Part 1 of my memoir that left me with a sense that the most important thing about Keller was her disability. The only way I was going to get past my negative impression of her was to read her books and I read all of them.
For half of the summer before the second year of my MFA I read continuously about Hellen Keller and for the rest of the summer I read about the life of Stephen Hawking. After reading about Keller and Hawking, I put together the first draft of my thesis. When it comes to Keller’s work, the most influential books on my memoir are The Story of My Life and The World I Live In. They showed how Keller gradually understood herself as a person in the world who was given independence through learning, a parallel to my own life experience.
In the writing of the memoir, I didn’t realize that there was a direct connection between the books that I have read in my life and the development of my identity, as Rebecca Brown pointed out to me in one of her revision letters. Literature is synonymous with my freedom, because when I read or write my disability becomes irrelevant and my mind is what matters. In the many books about Stephen Hawking, I found that his disability changed the way he worked as a physicist but didn’t stop him from doing it. For him, as for me, disability is just a fact of life.
In my memoir I mention my disability as something I often ignored, not to be frustrated by my body’s inability to function as it should. I acknowledge that I have a disability, I use a wheelchair to move around, and I need technology to live my life as I want to. These devices are part of the way I move through the world. However, I consider these devices extensions of myself rather than as integral parts of my identity. To show this, I have consciously chosen to use phrases such as “I use a wheelchair” instead of “I am wheelchair-bound.” The choice of this kind of language puts me as a person at the center of my work and not my disability.
My identity as a person who happens to have a disability has changed over the years. In Part 4 of my memoir, I discuss the social aspects that come with having a disability, such as people’s misconceptions of people with disabilities, discrimination, and ableism. To talk about these social issues, I explored disability theory culled from different sources, including videos like Aimee Mullins on Today Show, The Aesthetics of Prosthetics: Aimee Mullins, Changing my legs—and my mindset, The opportunity of adversity, and My 12 pairs of legs. These videos allowed me to understand the relationship that exists among the individual with a disability, the technology she/he uses to navigate in the world, and society.
The hardest part of writing my memoir was the social critique of people’s perceptions about disability. I narrate the experience of my life while making the reader aware of the social backdrop that surrounds me. In Parts 4 and 8, I talk about my relationship with my disability, and my sense of self as an individual in relation to technology. In terms of technology, I discuss my wheelchairs while also giving the reader a glimpse of how I read and write.
The title of my memoir is Unbound. I chose the title after much debate with myself. The title was inspired by the line “Your mortal coil sprang back unbounded” from the song “This Gives Life to Thee” by Akala, and the song, in turn, is based on William Shakespeare’s canon of works. I chose Unbound to reflect my central theme of freedom, and because my work is in conversation with many writers I have read over the years. All those books have influenced my life.
During my MFA I have been exposed to the poetics of many thinkers like Lyn Hejinian and Fred Moten. From them, I have learned the importance of speaking or writing in a community and the reinvigoration of language. My understanding of these ideas came out of Professor Jeanne Heuving’s class BCWRIT 510 Writing and Cultural Change.
Through my explorations of what poetics is, I have come to think of it in terms of Lyn Hejinian’s definition:
Poetics is always in an unbounded, excessive relationship to its art, which may in part account for the difficulty one has in defining the term. It is more than theory and more than practice; it is what identifies an artist’s largest aspirations and discovers the ways those become manifest—the ways they are activated and provided with the manner in which the artist applies him—or herself to realizing those aspirations and, when lucky, something more besides—expanding, perhaps by virtue of their inherent contradictions, between affect and structure, materiality and sensibility, aspiration and patent failure, ostensibility and abstraction, assertion and silence. (From “An Art of Addition, an Eddic Return,” unpublished paper given at first Fall Convergence.)
I have taken this interpretation of poetics to mean that a writer should explore the subjects that occupy her mind the most and these subjects must drive her to be compelled to write.
Poetics emerges through the writing; writing comes first and poetics follows. Through the act of writing, the writer’s interests come up repeatedly and turn into “fascinations and/or obsessions” as Hejinian calls them. Fascinations and obsessions are then at the core of a writer’s poetics. In my case the nature of disability on the personal and social levels has been the fascination at the center of my writing during the MFA.
As my poetics takes shape, I realize that poetics is an ongoing “process of becoming” as Tracy Morris said at the Fall Convergence. At this moment my poetics is to follow the lead of my fascinations as they assert themselves until others come to take their place. Then poetics is not made up of a fixed set of “fascinations and/or obsessions,” rather a writer’s poetics is ever-changing and in constant flux.
In the excerpt from The Language of Inquiry titled “Who Is Speaking?” Lyn Hejinian shows that writing is a form of communication that constructs the world that the reader is entering through reading. Language constructs the world and presents the predominant perspective of the society in which and for which it is being written.