Nothing WIthout Us

By Renaissance

We are the heroes, not the sidekicks.

“Can you recommend fiction that has main characters who are like us?” This is a question we who are disabled, Deaf, neurodiverse, Spoonie, and/or who manage mental illness ask way too often. Typically, we’re faced with stories about us crafted by people who really don’t get us. We’re turned into pathetic, tragic souls; we merely exist to inspire the abled main characters to thrive; or even worse, we’re to overcome “what’s wrong with us” and be cured.

Nothing Without Us combines both realistic and speculative fiction, starring protagonists who are written “by us and for us.” From hospital halls to jungle villages, from within the fantastical plane to deep into outer space, our heroes take us on a journey, make us think, and prompt us to cheer them on.

These are bold tales, told in our voices, which are important for everyone to experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Renaissance
• Release date: Oct 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781987963670

Book preview

Edited By Cait Gordon

and Talia C. Johnson

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to any events, institutions, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional.

NOTHING WITHOUT US ©2019 edited by Cait Gordon and Talia C. Johnson. All rights reserved.

The Bellwoods Golem © Myriad Augustine. Knit One, Purl Two © Carolyn Charron. Names © Jennifer Lee Rossman. Mafia Butterfly © Raymond Luczak. Dress Rehearsal © Nicole Zelniker. The Descent © Jamieson Wolf. Bug Hunt © Joanna Marsh. Oliver Gutierrez and the Walking Stick of Destiny © Elliott Dunstan. Crutch. Cage, Sword, Kerfuffle © Dorothy Ellen Palmer. Iron Bone © J. Ivanel Johnson. Sometimes You... © Tonya Liburd. Search and Seizure © Shannon Barnsley. Backbone © Madona Skaff. The Case of the Silenco Scientist © Maverick Smith. Flight © George Zancola. Panic in Paradise © Diane Koerner. The Blessing Cookies © Laurie Stewart. Jungle Demon © Tom Johnson. The Living Among the Dead © Tasha Fierce. Alone © Nathan Fréchette. No Room at the Inn © Emily Gillespie. Charity™ © Derek Newman-Stille.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact Presses Renaissance Press. First edition.

Cover art and design by Nathan Caro Fréchette. Interior design by Nathan Caro Fréchette. Additional editing by April Laramey, Victoria Martin, Myryam Ladouceur, and Evan McKinley.

Legal deposit, Library and Archives Canada, October 2019.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-987963-66-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-987963-67-0

Presses Renaissance Press

pressesrenaissancepress.ca

To Nathan, for supporting our plan to take over the world.

And to our authors—this book would be nothing without you.

CONTENT WARNING

The stories in this book aren’t always pretty or neatly wrapped with a bow on top. Even when in fantastical settings, the feelings and experiences of the characters can be relatable to many of us.

Nothing Without Us is a collection of tales that feature protagonists who identify as disabled, Deaf, neurodiverse, Spoonie, and/or who manage mental illness. Sometimes the content includes themes of self-harm, suicide, facing terminal illness, isolation, the death of a loved one, institutional/medical mistreatment, miscarriage, and the spectrum of ableism (from internalized to externalized narratives). Because our authors are from diverse backgrounds, NWU’s content also explores experiences of racism, xenophobia, or phobia against the LGBTQIA2+ community.

We wanted to give you, our readers, a heads-up, so that you can be prepared for what’s in the coming pages.

But most of all, we must warn you that the content of this anthology includes a whole lot of awesome.

It does not, however, contain any inspiration porn.

We hope you love these stories as much as we do.

Table of contents

CONTENT WARNING

From the Editors

Foreword – Derek Newman-Stille

The Bellwoods Golem by Myriad Augustine

Knit One, Purl Two by Carolyn Charron

Names by Jennifer Lee Rossman

Mafia Butterfly by Raymond Luczak

Dress Rehearsal by Nicole Zelniker

The Descent by Jamieson Wolf

Bug Hunt by Joanna Marsh

Oliver Gutierrez and the Walking Stick of Destiny by Elliot Dunstan

Crutch. Cage, Sword, Kerfuffle by Dorothy Ellen Palmer

Iron Bone by J. Ivanel Johnson

Sometimes you… by Tonya Liburd

Search and Seizure by Shannon Barnsley

Backbone by Madona Skaff

The Case of the Silenco Scientist by Maverick Smith

Flight by George Zancola

Panic in Paradise by Diane Koerner

The Blessing Cookies by Laurie Stewart

Jungle Demon by Tom Johnson

The Living Among the Dead by Tasha Fierce

Alone by Nathan Fréchette

No Room at the Inn by Emily Gillespie

Charity™ by Derek Newman-Stille

Author and Editor Bios

Acknowledgements

From the Editors

In September 2018, we called out to our people:

Not like your ableist patriarchal publishing monocultures,

with standard narratives that narrowly define.

Here at the beginnings of our anthology we exist:

two mighty women with ideas that cannot be contained.

"Keep, traditional publishers and editors, your inspiration porn,

your stories that objectify and demean," we cry.

"Bring us your fabulous stories,

with diverse characters.

Bring us your Deaf heroes, your disabled, your neurodiverse,

your characters breaking free from the shackles of normativity,

those who are not refuse, but fabulous.

Send these your homeless stories, tempest-tossed to us.

We lift them up and celebrate them at the gate of our anthology.

And our people responded, blowing our expectations right out of the stratosphere:

They brought us their fabulous stories,

their diverse characters, breaking free of the shackles of normativity.

Free of the tempests of traditional publishers,

they have come forth to be lifted up,

and celebrated with the unified shout:

NOTHING WITHOUT US.

Nothing Without Us is a collection of stories where we who are marginalized now head onto centre stage. We are the heroes and not the sidekicks. The stories are told in our voices, spanning multiple genres, combining realistic and speculative fiction.

From deep in outer space to right here on Planet Earth, our protagonists show us how they perceive the world they are in, and how they dwell within it. These tales aren't always neat and tidy. Some are harsh, others hilarious, but we cannot help but feel they all have an edge, a cool factor. They are brilliantly crafted and can be read or listened to again and again.

Nothing about us without us is an anthem that tells people not to speak (or set policies) for others without sharing a lived experience. Nothing Without Us includes authors who represent the intersections of several marginalized communities. The diversity of our writers spans age, beliefs, race, sexual identities, and gender identities. What links us all together is that we know what it's like to live as people who are also disabled, Deaf, neurodiverse, and/or manage mental illness and/or chronic conditions.

Most or all of the people who touched this book also identify as disabled, Deaf, hard-of-hearing, neurodiverse, autistic, Spoonie, and/or manage mental illness. So, really, practically nothing in this anthology was done without us.

And we wouldn't have had it any other way.

~ Cait Gordon and Talia C. Johnson

Foreword: One of us! One of us!

By Derek Newman-Stille

Like many disabled young people, I sought out representation of disability in the fiction I was reading, wanting to see stories that included me. I read as a means to find other spaces of belonging, since I was surrounded by messages in the real world that we disabled people didn’t belong. I loved literature and thought I could find myself in the books I enjoyed reading. I sought out stories about us, stories that represented our lives. Instead, I found trope after trope that reduced disabled figures to simple one-dimensional and highly-problematic characters: the Tiny Tim, the Inspiring Mentor, the Crazy Woman in the Attic, the Disability that is Really a Superpower, the Person Who Fakes Disability, the Self-Loathing Cripple…the list goes on and on. But these weren’t fleshed out characters; they were poorly devised plot devices. Disability was used in these stories as inspiration for abled people, as body horror, as signs of social collapse. We were constantly turned into symbols of something wrong.

I sought out autobiographies by disabled people, hoping that at least there I could find real stories about real people, but even most of the autobiographies were infused with the same ableism—whether it was an internalized ableism that writers who grew up in an ableist culture imposed on themselves, or whether it was publishers telling them that their actual life story needed to be changed to fit with social assumptions about disability, I still wonder about. It became clear to me that writing about disability had constantly meant writing through ableism, and I wanted something richer, something that disrupted ableism, that came from a disabled perspective, that challenged the social assumptions about disability. I wanted something about us, with us.

As a disabled writer, I had a moment when reading Disabled poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, where I came across this passage:

Disability Justice allowed me to understand that me writing from my sickbed wasn't me being weak or uncool or not a real writer but a time-honoured crip creative practice. And that understanding allowed me to finally write from a disabled space, for and about sick and disabled people, including myself, without feeling like I was writing about boring, private things that no one would understand.

I read it while writing from my bed, and I realized I was part of something, part of a tradition of disabled writers who used the accommodations at their disposal to get their voices out into the world. I was again reminded of the child I was, yearning for representation, and, more than that, yearning for disability. I wanted to read disability, to read works by disabled people, and to get our voices out into the world to make changes. Because our voices do make changes. Our words are transformative. We create new ideas with our words and those ideas spark other changes. The things we write matter.

Nothing Without Us not only disrupts tropes of disability, it provides a space for our words to drift on the breeze, pollinating other ideas, sparking change, and inviting others to think and write and spark their own changes. Creating a collection like this is more than sharing entertaining stories (and they are so incredibly entertaining), it is also a call to action, an invitation to write with and through disability and to articulate a disabled form of writing. The stories in this collection challenge ableism while also illustrating how powerful our stories are. These stories uplift without needing to be Inspiration Porn, they illustrate Disabled struggles with an ableist world without making us look weak, and they tell our stories without being tokenistic.

I can’t describe how refreshing it is as a disabled person to read about fully fleshed out three-dimensional characters. Not only are we pulled out of our trope-ridden literary history, we are given substance. The authors in this collection bring in personal knowledge and experience into the creation of their characters and their characters aren’t simplistic. They aren’t just defined by their disabilities. Instead, their disabilities intermingle with other aspects of their life, whether it is career, class, age, sexuality, gender identity, race, or ethnicity. They are like the rest of the disabled community—complex. These stories don’t try to reduce our complexity, but instead revel in it, because we are complex people and can’t be reduced to simple tropes or one dimensionality.

These are stories that satiate more than a craving for disability representation, but a need for representation, a desire to feel a sense of belonging, a desire to feel at home with our stories and to create a comfortable space through telling our stories. These stories are fictional, but they tell truths that can’t always be expressed in simple here’s how it happened tales. These stories use abstraction to express our needs, wants, desires, fears, and anxieties. They write our disabled identities into past landscapes, other worlds, and the future in a way that says:

We’ve always been here, we are here now, and we will always be here.

Reading these stories, whether you are Disabled or abled, you are being invited into the tradition of disabled writing, you are having the opportunity to share in what matters to us, and you are getting the chance to become, as the characters in Todd Browning’s cult classic film Freaks say, One of us! One of us!

The Bellwoods Golem

Myriad Augustine

The proper manufacture—no, not manufacture. Perhaps assembly? Still too formal. Birthing? Too sentimental. We shall compromise by calling it crafting, for it is a craft—not quite an art, not quite a science. Let us begin again.

The proper crafting of a golem, what later amateurs have variously dubbed homunculi or automata galatea or even the rather imaginative blue smoke drones, requires four fundamental components. One might call them elemental, in fact, for each of the elements is at the core of their purpose.

A shell or a skin, which can be given a shape and retain it despite weather or impact; this can be said to be earth. The earliest of our work was fashioned in mud or in clay, the most ancient stories speak to this; however, this is not the whole. The earthenware golem, as classic as a design as it is, has mostly fallen out of fashion because practitioners forget that the outer shape must be made firm. The clay must be fired, the mud compressed and dried, or you simply have a mound of dough without a crust, so to speak.

This brings us to the second ingredient—the blood, or rather, that which mimics water and grants us motion. To return again to the golem of clay, the traditional pairing would be a slurry, a semi-liquid familiar to all who’ve witnessed the ceaseless churning of a cement mixer during sidewalk repair. Another common mistake of the novice would be to use water, unmixed, but erosion is a lesson that need only be taught once. The sudden, shattered weight of a golem surging forward on a tide of its own magicked fluids is not a sight easily forgotten.

The third, if we deem the first a skin and the second blood, would be the heart itself, though this is where the metaphor becomes imperfect. Whereas our own hearts are mechanically vital for us to move through life, the nature of a golem’s heart is entirely philosophical—its reason to be, to continue, to do anything other than plod aimlessly. This is its fire, sometimes a literal ember ensconced in its chest, sometimes the quicksilver spark of a lightning bolt, sometimes things far stranger and unmentionable. It is the most important ingredient, but also paradoxically the only one that can be missed and still permit the golem to rise. What does this say about ourselves, I wonder, if a golem is simply an approximation of G-d’s creation? Can our fires be extinguished and our lives still persist? I wish to deny it, but I fear the proof marches past us every rush hour.

Our final element, air, is deceptively simple to procure and pass on. This determines our creation’s longevity, as ours was defined when our creator breathed life into us. And so we all too often use our breath, but it is a fraction of a fraction and raises a child that will never reach maturity. I will not give examples of alternatives, as there have been great crimes wrought in pursuit of such things, but I will confide that there are very different kinds of breaths in the world. This is evident in the first gasp and cry of a newborn or the rattling exhalation of the dying, and it falls on the practitioner to weigh what such vitality is worth and what each truly costs.

And so we are done. But of course, you protest! This is a shopping list, a recipe, not a story. And I know that you crave stories—this last was not intended as a tale in itself, but rather as context. For the crafting is such a careful thing, not to be delayed or distracted from by mundanities, particularly if the need is great. A secret, though: the need is always great, for those in need. It is a privilege to assume we can do without.

Hadas woke in pain, as was usual, but with a curious lingering of sense echoes—a dream with a little more substance than usual, sticking cobweb-like against them. The feel of mud, the scent of dog shit, the bracing cold of a winter wind.

It was cold enough within the little apartment they shared, their bedroom carved out alongside another from what was once a modest and woefully under-insulated dining room. They lingered as long as they could justify within the nest of their bedsheets, trying to root themselves once more in the space where they spent so much of their time. Why the mud? Why the wind? They hadn’t been outside in days. They couldn’t remember any dream to deliver such things. They hardly remembered dreams most of the time, though; they drank or smoke until the pain gave way to the exhaustion, then slipped off into an empty rest borne of a heavy hand’s worth of antipsychotics.

Finally, they began to stand, always a process, hearing and feeling the pops and cracks and realignments as bones and tendons fought to make a semblance of a moving body. With some motions the pain ebbed, while with others it awoke new sources—the usual shuffle of morning. Today their left leg seemed most afflicted, but that might change by the time Hadas reached their door, or by breakfast. Or it might persist for days, sometimes hours. They reached with a practiced, scooping hand for their glasses in the approximate area they’d been discarded; it was not uncommon for things to migrate during the night, as they turned and contorted and re-contorted, in their attempts to find a comfortable position. They pawed clumsily at the light switch, blinked as the lenses brought the room into focus.

Something shin-height but stocky as a toddler stood next to the bed, eyes shining gold and blinking right back.

Hadas was not one to scream, was not overly fond of horror movies or other things to deliberately court fear, but could objectively (long afterwards) appreciate the clichéd jump and shriek they gave in response. In a second, they were back on the bed, cracking the back of their head off of the hanging lamp and shattering the bulb. Fantastic, they thought, putting aside the certainty that some rabid raccoon had cornered them, now it’s dark, the bed’s covered in glass, and I’m barefoot, surrounded by it.

They stayed imperfectly still, as still as one can manage with muscles already strained by the basic task of standing, periodic quivers coursing through them like aftershocks. They heard a rustling, the gentle sound of glass against glass like eggshells. They still weren’t sure where the raccoon or whatever it was had gotten to.

Finally, their legs gave out, left side first, bringing them down to the bed in a trembling mass. The earthquake following the aftershocks, a reversal of nature in their weary limbs’ collapse. They felt done for the day that had only just started, and still, something was in here with them.

My phone, Hadas thought, reaching slowly towards the pillow where it usually fell from their hands as sleep overtook them. Nothing. They reached towards the overcrowded nightstand, upsetting precarious piles of bus transfers and half-finished books. Nothing.

A light flicked on.

The creature—not a raccoon, it was clear now—held Hadas’s phone as if it were an infant cradled in its dirt-brown and curiously smooth arms. The senses of their dream came back to them, the smell and feel of dirt. It stood at the edge of the bed, illuminated by the phone’s flashlight as if telling ghost stories at camp; the light threw strange shadows up from its hunched shoulders and jutting chin, revealing the lack of mouth or nose, and those gleaming eyes and deep-etched forehead. Hadas couldn’t read the characters carved on its face, had lost that particular skill memory at some point in the cycle of psychiatric meds or self-care strategy memorization or sheer mental exhaustion, but they recognized the language from the non-transliterated side of their siddur. Hebrew.

I have to call my rabbi.

The creature made a rapid movement, clay fingers flickering into definition from the rounded stubs, then softening away again, holding the phone out for Hadas as it began to ring. It had bypassed the password somehow and, sure enough, Rabbi Andrea Myer’s number shone up from the screen.

The rabbi hadn’t picked up, and Hadas had found themselves incapable of describing the problem in a voicemail. After a long interval of staring at each other, hunger and a failing phone battery had broken the impasse. Hadas had plugged in their phone, giving the little figure a wide berth as they made their way towards and out the door. The glass from the bulb