How does anything happen? A little over twenty years ago, a good friend of mine told me she'd always wanted to put out a book of her own writing but didn't think she could do it alone. She had heard, from a mutual friend of ours, that I had written some poetry, and suggested we could team up – weave our short poems and prose pieces together into a self-published book. I hadn't planned on making anything I wrote so public, but sure, why not? Maybe I, too, had things to say. As someone whose body stood out as different, as other – I have severe spinal curvature due to Marfan Syndrome – I was acutely aware that there were huge issues under the surface of our regular social interactions and assumptions. Increasingly, writing felt like a way of speaking back, unearthing the reality of how marginality feels, and suggesting how things might be different.
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