Electric Lit Interview with Kenny Fries, Wendy Lu, Naomi Ortiz, and Khadijah Queen
Disabled writers —Kenny Fries, Wendy Lu, Naomi Ortiz, and Khadijah Queen answer questions about their creative lives and work, and how both are influenced and augmented by disability.
Naomi Ortiz quote
“NO: No one makes art truly alone. Most of the poets and visual artists who influence me have been my peers—people I found through political organizing who are also artists.”
“NO: Over the past ten years especially, I’ve noticed a lot of changes within the ecosystem, and yet, when I’ve looked for art or writing that speaks to the experience of climate change or climate grief, I’m often confronted with extremely ableist analyses. The problem of climate change is often defined as sickness or disability, and the answer as restoration or cure. The solutions presented are uniform, like going zero waste, with an assumption that it can work for everyone. But, for example, I am a disabled person in need of plastic cups. I am also an environmentalist who is concerned about the overwhelming plastic in our ecosystems. In my new book, Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice (forthcoming from Punctum Press in 2023), I explore how climate change impacts my relationship with place, expands on and complicates who is seen as an environmentalist, and reimagines what being in relationship with land can look like.
I researched my first book, Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice, because I was curious if self-care could be one tool for the activist communities I was part of (and also excluded from) to build creative capacity. Sustaining Spirit was the book I needed to address burnout when I was working within social justice movements. I feel the same way about Rituals for Climate Change. It’s the book I couldn’t find about the difficult and often unanswerable questions posed by climate change in the US/Mexico borderlands.” - Naomi Ortiz
Read the full article at: https://electricliterature.com/the-future-of-disability-is-diverse-and-visible/
