Finding crip lit community

My absolute favourite thing in the whole world is hanging out with other wheelchair users. There is something conspiratorial about this particular joy, something brazen about how much space we take up together. I feel a little mean for it, but I love the tight look of panic that bipeds get around their eyes when they see three or four of us clustering on a street corner. I feel spitefully gleeful about forcing abled people to confront their surprise at seeing multiple wheelchair users sharing space.

I wish it weren’t such a spiteful joy, but we live in a world that sidelines and suppresses disabled people at every opportunity. I save my softness for when I am surrounded by crips and mad folk. When I interact with abled people I let myself stay a little sharp at the edges. It’s a defensive manoeuvre, a survival mechanism. Without it, I think I would lose my remaining softness entirely.

Reading disabled poetry and working alongside disabled writers gives me a similar thrill. Disabled poems have teeth. They are sharp, and sweet, and soft. They take so many shapes. Disabled writers are my favourite people: we are fluid, and adaptive, and fierce, and wickedly funny. We know how to turn words into weapons, but more importantly we know how to do the opposite, to take the sting out of slurs. The late and great Nancy Mairs once wrote that she named herself as a cripple because the word makes people wince. “Perhaps I want them to wince,” she explained. “I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates /gods /viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger.”

I am constantly learning from other disabled people, and so grateful to know every single one of them. We all move through the world in such different ways, but something resonates between us. And clearly it resonates elsewhere too. Stories about disability are everywhere, even when disabled people ourselves are absent from them. I am wary of the truths that abled people weave on our behalves, but I can’t deny the power in disability narratives. Our lives and bodies hold a weird energy. We are at once compelling and repellent, invisible and hypervisible, inspiring awe and fear in equal measure. When disabled writers take that energy for ourselves and channel it into our work, that’s when the real power shines through.

I hope to channel some of that energy with Andy Jackson at the National Writers’ Conference at the end of this month, during our panel on disability poetics. I want to create spaces where other disabled people can feel that same sense of connection, of hard and ardent joy, of resonance. That’s who and what my writing is for. If abled people can feel an echo of that joy and connection too, all to the better. If they could only know the kinds of stories we tell to each other, they might understand why I keep my edges sharp. I devote myself first and always to disabled people, to queer and trans people, to queercrips, but the love I have for my marginalised communities has no limits. Love is for everyone. Love is at the core of everything I do and everything I create; not just for those who share my marginalities, but for anyone who listens and feels solidarity in struggle. To quote Jim Ferris: “I sing for cripples; I sing for you.”

Robin M Eames will be appearing in A Raven, A Writing Desk on Thursday 20 June and Disability Poetics, a panel at the National Writers’ Conference (22–23 June). Tickets on sale now.