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The Disability and…Podcast gets right to the heart of some of the most pressing issues in arts, culture and beyond with a series of bold, provocative and insightful interviews with disabled artists, key industry figures and the odd legend. The Disability and…Podcast is currently monthly.
Colin Hambrook
Welcome to the Disability and... podcast bringing together thoughtful discussion and debate. I’m Disability Arts Online’s Founding Editor Colin Hambrook and this month I chat with writer and activist Jet Moon, about You Are Here an intersectional resource which shares interviews and creative output from a broad range of survivor writers.
Colin Hambrook
Welcome to the Disability and... podcast, and it's my great delight today to have Jet Moon on the show. Jet is a multi-disciplinary artist who writes, performs and collaborates on work that aims to create intimate spaces of sharing and visibility with marginalized communities and for today's podcast, we are going to be talking about You Are Here, which is a peer-to-peer surviving writing platform. It's a deep dive in into queer and survivor politics and expression and creativity and builds on the first platform that Jet produced playing with fire, which took place in 2021. So Jet, yeah, it's great to have you on the podcast.
Jet Moon
Oh, thanks, Colin, nice to be here,
Colin Hambrook
And a big thank you to our audience for joining us too. I wanted to ask you, whose writing motivates you to keep going and why?
Jet Moon
I don't want to sound like a complete egotist, but really top of the list, it's my own writing. And the reason I say that is that writing is very much a way of surviving for me like it's a really basic thing of, how do I do something creative? How do I do something that's about more than dealing with the mountain of admin that, in my experience, is part of disability, of constantly doing battle with, you know, like state apparatus and all of those things which I can become so weighed down with and so exhausted by that I have to make sure that I do something else. So, for example, this morning, I just got up a bit early so that I would have some time to just sit down and continue the bit of writing that I'm doing about complex survivorship. And in that case, was just spending a bit of time this morning picking through some writing about experiences of chronic fatigue services and denial within those services. But yeah, you know, like for me, it's, it is. It's very personal. But of course, I do have other writers that I really love
Colin Hambrook
in the in the interview with Nat Raha, you talk about writing as a form of proving our own existence, which I thought was quite profound.
Jet Moon
I do think that that's essential, and I feel that there's so many external things that can either give a really negative portrayal of in my experience of, you know, different aspects of my identity or my own capacity to survive financially or in any material, means that I really need those other reflections. You know, I need to hear like good stories about people that I feel connects to my own experience, or I just need to hear truthful stories about people's lives, rather than the barrage of bullshit that's around us all the time, you know, in the press or government messaging, which, I mean, has been horrific around disability over this last year. I mean, not that it's ever been amazing, but it has been really distressing.
Colin Hambrook
absolutely and I think one of the one of the other interviews on You Are Here with Julie McNamara, she talks about talking truth to power and gaining a sense of community and the sense of a strength through, through that that coming together and sharing experience.
Jet Moon
Absolutely but Julie also talks about shifting the lens in terms of accessibility, because they talk a lot about their commitment to real accessibility, rather than a kind of tokenism, and they go very much in depth into what that is. And so I think that that's another form of that truth to power, because it's, okay, well, this is what real accessibility and real involvement could look like, versus that kind of checkbox thing where it's like, oh, look, we've, you know, we've asked you a questionnaire, or we've, we've done the very, very basics and, and I think that having that much more or something that actually, really, yeah, I'm just trying to think about the actual wording of what Julie says. But there is a, but there is a short piece that is a sample of her interview where, you know, she talks about, like, what that is. And I think it's that, in itself, is also truth to power. You know, it's not just the story itself. It's like, how does, how does the creation process actually function. How do people actually be involved in that? I mean that it's not just the words
Colin Hambrook
Yeah, yeah. And there was, there was a I can't remember who said it, but there was another sentence that was about pushing back against erasure, misinformation and loss, which I picked out, which kind of meant a lot to me personally, that that that need to put your experience down in you know, into writing, into words, that that that validate your experience in a world which it persistently invalidates us.
Jet Moon
I think also, when I speak about this thing of, you know, writing ourselves into existence, it's also the ability to even identify experience. Because for me, I would come from a background where maybe I wasn't I didn't have language to name my experience. I didn't have a context or a social surround to say to me, oh, okay, well, this is maybe a really typical experience of someone who's queer or autistic or has experienced trauma. For me, I was needed to rediscover that concept of the personal as political, but actually then have more exposure to ideas and other people's words to even be able to name my own experience, if that makes sense,
Colin Hambrook
what does the title of the survivor writing project You Are Here? What does that mean to you?
Jet Moon
Well, it's quite literal. I mean, it is a thing of like, You Are Here. Like you like when we look at, look at a map or something, and there's that spot, which for a very directionally challenged person like myself, is always helpful, like, oh, okay, so this is where we are on the map. But it's also the thing of, like we are here. We're existing. We've survived in the in the sense that, you know, like we're physically still here. But I think it's also about the thing of, as you say, like having a story, having relevance, having a finding a voice, because I think that is a really vital aspect of the survivor writing, and it's something that often people are struggling with, is that a they have a story, that their story is valid, that their story means anything to themselves or anyone else. You know it's it's really this empowerment sense that you're important,
Colin Hambrook
One of the things that Debbie McNamara says about psychiatry, talking about it as such a dehumanizing experience, and the way that it can just obliterate you and reduce you to a diagnosis and a set of prescriptions for drugs and treatments that just further kind of dehumanize and destabilize and make it impossible for you to function as a human being. I talk a lot about being disabled by psychiatry in a social model sense. You know, I kind of see that psychiatry has very much defined who I am, because it's been at the core of my lived experience through childhood, and it continues to be such an oppressive force, kind of dressed up by the state as this, you know, kind of necessary tool for wellbeing, you know. And it's the, it's the complete opposite.
Jet Moon
Debbie speaks really beautifully about the survivor poetry and the chorus of you know people who have experience of that psychiatric system, or have you know who identify with that mental health picture, but how empowering it is to have other people listen from a place of experience and. And I think that Debbie's voice is very joyful at the same time as conveying a lot of information. But the things that she says about the power of having gone through experience where bringing that into writing gives other people a window into something that maybe other people don't have that experience, but it's that it's also a power in itself, to bring something through in the form of creative writing, and that, you know, just the that that is an act of survivorship. So I think that Debbie and I are very much on the same page with these things, but also the power of peers and having that as your listening audience, where you know you're giving that amazing oxygen of approval to each other. But there's also a real resonance of experience, which I think is very important. And um, I mean, when you talk about this suppressiveness of psychiatry, when what I had been writing about this morning was this bizarre experience of going to a chronic fatigue clinic, which the only things that they offered was graded exercise therapy, which has now been banned, or meditation classes or a psychiatrist. And I spent a really long time talking to this person about how external denial and very negative messages around chronic illness and energy limiting illnesses affected my own ability to manage my condition, because I was constantly being told, just try harder. It's all in your head, you know, like, maybe you could, yeah, just do some meditation, do some exercise, things that would make me worse, and um, each time, I would think, oh, she understands. She understands how this works. And each time I'd go back, it would be like she'd forgotten everything I'd said. I mean, maybe she was just really bad at taking notes. But we had just like Groundhog Day therapy for the longest time, where this person would look at me and like, nod and make sympathetic noises and it was the most bizarre thing. And this was a treatment for a physical illness, apparently, very strange. But at the same time, I need to write about that to think, yeah, that really did happen when there's so much external gas lighting? It's like, oh, maybe I'm just being a bit harsh. But it's like, you know, I know that that person also then wrote in my notes that I was, um, had difficulties engaging with the therapeutic process. I don't know what that was supposed to look like. I mean, maybe they're looking for some form of capitulation, or I just don't know, but I mean,
Colin Hambrook
yeah, it's shocking. It's shocking. You know, you know that the NHS approach to disability is based on the biopsychosocial model of disability that was invented by an insurance company.
Jet Moon
I didn't know that that it was, but, unsurprising
Colin Hambrook
it was. It was headed up by Lord Freud, originally, about 20-30, years ago. It was in the it was actually in the late 1990s that, you know, so they the state, have been planning this attack on disabled people for a very long time.
Jet Moon
I mean, planning, or whatever. I think that it also comes from, like a underlying, I would say, a eugenics view of disability, you know, like a basic lack of understanding and hatred.
Colin Hambrook
I was intrigued to know what the process was for bringing the survivor writers together for the project, for interview and also there's, there's quite a lot of commissions of creative pieces on the platform too.
Jet Moon
So, a little bit different between the commissions and the interview. So the first time I did the survivor Writers Project, it was called playing with fire, and it was just a half day workshop and commissions to create a zine and also support for myself, like finishing a novella, and this time I expanded the project, so it would be those original workshops, but it was also a writers group and a set of interviews, and again, writing time for myself. And it was also bringing in Wellcome Collection as collaborators. So we'd have a place for the archive. You know, there would actually be this body of work the You Are Here, survivor writers platform would have a home that would have some longevity to it. And the process of bringing people into the survivors writers group was an open call. So, it was through Spread the Word. It was putting something online. It was saying. Hey, there's this offer, are you a survivor? Writer, very, very open idea of survivorship. So that's including people who have experienced sexual violence in their lives, but it's also really anyone who feels that trauma has been part of what's coloured their existence as a person, and we were explicit in saying, you know, we also would include like, racism, transphobia, homophobia, discrimination against disabled people would also be a form of trauma. So really leaving it because I think that often, when there are these catchments that people could, how can? How are people, do they belong to the demographic, or whatever, there's often a bit of a list. And for me, I wanted to be more open than that, because there will always be things that I don't know. And if people feel drawn towards that concept of survivorship and sharing space with other survivors, and they feel a need for that. I want it to be open in that way. And we asked people to put forward pieces of writing. It was really hard making selections, because we had loads and loads of people apply, and only a small number of places. So, you have to say no to people, which is hard. Also tried to make it accessible in terms of offering bursaries for disabled people and also bursaries for people from working class backgrounds, and for the interviews I suppose I was, I had in my thoughts of what's a range of experiences around survivorship, where I can go to people who I have some kind of connection with. Because normally, I'm, I'm not just like cold calling people, saying, do you want to do an interview? We would have met or had some kind of connection. And, you know, then offering people the opportunity and saying, well, look, this is the project. This is the aim. This is what will happen with the work. Would you be interested in doing this?
Colin Hambrook
Yeah, and I think the impact of the project comes across in the writing itself, that's on the platform. And Julie McNamara, again, she talks about that kind of listening and connecting to others stories, how it changes our bodies physically, the hairs on the back of our necks, or the freeze in our guts, the tension in our bodies when we're listening to aspects of somebody else's story as she talks about the kind of it being a real excitement for her, which I thought was very, very moving powerful.
Jet Moon
I think it might even say it being about their whole reason for living. But I mean, Nat Raha also talks about this embodied experience of writing. Nat’s doing a lot of reading poetry out loud with an audience and a kind of what happens with the audience in that process, or, like, who feels a connection to the work, who's hearing what within the work? Yeah. I mean, I think each of those writers has a very particular approach. I mean, it's people who, I mean, they might be academics or researchers. Christine Bylund in, Sweden, you know, they're, they're an academic and researcher, even though they they also have a history as like a stage director as well. But you know, Debbie's more involved with that poetry world. Julie McNamara is producing stage plays. Dior Clarke's producing stage plays like writing and performing. Yeah. So, there is a huge range within that. And there's also um Frankie, who speaks about the importance of private writing. That's a whole interview about someone who's talking about, it's not they're not someone who's like, really aimed towards publishing. They are talking about how private writing is a transformative process for them. So, I think it's a, it is a massive range. And they also talk about, you know, when you've been through a very traumatic experience or something that has set out to destroy you, that when you create something, you're acting in the opposite direction to that. So, you're actually absolutely disobeying that traumatic instruction,
Colin Hambrook
I wondered, in the process of building the process. Project and structuring it. How did you go about ensuring that the writers involved felt safe, considering the, you know, the labour of writing, sharing experience about trauma and living through trauma and finding a way to celebrate ourselves?
Jet Moon
Yeah, I mean, maybe I went about that in quite a long hand process, and for me, that's what it takes. You know, it's not just a very quick contact and setting something up. So, of all of those people, I'd have a connection of some kind. So, we do know each other, even if it's in a small way, like we have experience of each other. So that starts to build a bit of a connection of trust. I do have the history of the other work that I've done, so I've been working with communities, you know, doing mutual aid projects and as an activist for more than 30 years, so there's a bit of a track record. And I think it's also to properly research interviews. Would spend, like, an enormous amount of time, like, trying to provide people with something that shows that we've looked at their work in a substance. We've not just, like, given some off the cuff questions, because it also means that people can then answer more in depth. With some people, I got help, you know, like, I just got an access assistant to just be like, oh, can you look I would say to them, can you look at this, this and this. I'm really interested in those things, you know, can you help me to draft some questions, but with other people, say with Debbie or with Christine, with riba. I know those people quite well, and so I also already have an idea of where I want to go with things, because we've already had conversations between ourselves. But I would say, like, Dior Clarke was probably the person that I knew least. I'd met him in an audition years ago, you know. And I could say, oh, look, I've followed your work. I, you know, we had met and also, when I present people with the questions, I think there's also an air of Do people think that you're genuine. Can you, you know, present something where people know that you care about things? I think it's about peer experience as well. Also. It was like, well, you always have the right of reply. I'm going to we're going to do this interview, we're always going to check that what you've said is okay, because people said some very exposing things. And you know, within the Wellcome Collection, there's the redacted and the unredacted interviews. There's the things that anybody can listen to in there, the things that other people might have to sign something to listen to the full thing, and that we'd be sure that people were not going to share that information, and that people's identities will be respected and so forth. So a kind of carefulness.
Colin Hambrook
How did the peer support work amongst the group?
Jet Moon
I mean, I cannot guarantee how things are going to go. I can bring together a group of people. I can hope that it's going to be supportive. One of the things I did was I also sought advice about how to manage a group like this, and one of the things was to have a counsellor on side during our zoom session, so that if there was something that someone felt was very triggering, rather than the whole group have to kind of stop, we're all kind of go into that, or whatever it would be okay. But you can also step to one side, have a private conversation with a therapist and maybe have a way to deal with that. And I think that um, as far as I know, that only got used once, but having, because people know knew that I'd thought about it at that level, it provided a measure of security. It was like, oh, okay, so the spaces carefully held, and while there wasn't a limit on what people could write about. There were limits in terms of, you know, how we would speak to each other or how we would share the space, but I think that the way people behave to each other was more than I could have imagined because they were so supportive of each other, and things that could have been instances where dissension could have happened, and like splitting, can often happen, where people have different experiences, instead of coming together, they see the differences that people chose to see similarities. People would be like, Oh, well, you have an experience that comes from something that isn't my experience, but maybe it's similar to a kind of oppression that I experience, which I wish we had a bit more of that where, I mean, it's not saying that differences don't exist, but it's a real movement towards trying to understand each other, and I think that that that builds a lot of strength in the group. I think that the idea of holding a trauma and survivor centred space that was a free for all is not something that I'd be interested in doing. And I feel that if other people want to do that, fine, good luck. But to me, it just feels unsafe, and it feels unfair. And one of the things that I mean, I spent such a long time thinking about, Oh God, how can I hold this kind of space without everyone just like triggering each other, and we all go away feeling more traumatized than we did in the first place. And one of the key things that we start out with is that we might name experience. So you've said, oh, like, you know, I'm a survivor of psychiatry, and I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, I've, like, lived with chronic illness for a long time, or, you know, I've had X, Y, Z experience. And okay, so we would go with those key points, but we wouldn't unpack the story. Wouldn't be like, oh and there. Then this happened, and people would not narrate the details of their experiences. And this would be a thing that we would have. I think other people, by default, chose to go with trigger warnings, which I sometimes I'm a bit like, oh, I feel that's quite complex, but we did go with that. And people would talk use trigger warnings. We'd encourage people to use the mute button if they felt that they needed a break from what someone else was saying. Because I think that's completely valid, you know, like, take a break, leave if you need to leave, and just probably quite a lot of rules about, you know, we would in the groups that were not the survivor writers, ongoing groups, in the group where people came for, like, a one off workshop, We'd be like, oh, well, we only going to get going to give people positive feedback in this group. This is the first time we've met. We're in a very vulnerable space. We'd spend, like, quite a lot of time talking about, you know, like obstacles to writing. You know, how what things do people get stuck on? But at the end, we would have a space where people really could share whatever writing they wanted, and they could share things that could be possibly triggering. But I felt that we'd built up trust over quite a period of time to get to that point, and it did feel very intimate. And I think it was also that people trusted and brought their vulnerabilities into that space. People wanted to have the space. And I think that often one person doing that can make space for another person to do that as well. So a little bit of vulnerability then helps the group to open. And I'm also very much say clearly, okay, but I if I think that you're making a comment on someone else's experience, or you've gone into the area of giving advice or any of these things, I will stop you, and I'll say, Oh, hi, this is not what we've agreed on. I think that's okay.
Colin Hambrook
It's clear that you've learned a lot through the process of producing You Are Here. Do you have any top tips, any recommendations, things to think about that you would give others for reflection in creating a similar space for Survivor writers?
Jet Moon
I think it really depends on who you are and what the group is that you're wanting to work with, because I think it is going to have specifics, and I think it's okay to you know you don't have to be all things to All people. For me, I was making a space that was open to a broad range of survivorship, but it was also focused around creative writing. So, you know, that is quite specific. I find it really confusing when there's no guidelines, because then I don't know what I can and can't do, and I spend all of my time trying to work out whether I'm doing the right thing or not, and it makes me very uncomfortable. So I find, I find vagueness in terms of how the group operates is actually really, really hard to navigate. And if you have clear guidelines, you can always have a discussion about what people do or don't like that, but if you have vague guidelines, to me, that's setting people up for failure. And I feel that in terms of navigating oppressive structures, often the words of other survivors were hugely important to me. This interview I made with Christine Bylund, who is the Swedish researcher. She's been particularly doing research about the impact of state assessments on disabled people who are seeking support. It's an amazing piece of work. I mean, all of her work is incredible. And so we could also have this conversation. And at the time, I was going through a PIP review that was, I mean, sending me deep into trauma territory, you know, was really, really affected my ability to function. And also the I was swamped with the paperwork that that brings with it. But I would had also other friends who are going through that very brutal and I just really disgusts me, that whole assessment process, it's so completely bent. But I would find pieces of Christine's interview where she would talk about acknowledging the reality of the impact of those experiences. Because there's always been one person who pops up and says, Oh, but my assessment was fine, fuck that person, you know, like, good for them out of like thousands. And so I found that I would look at these pieces of her writing and draw strength from it. And at times, you know, like, copy paste bits of this interview and send it to other people and be like, you know, we have to be really, really clear that this is the reality of what we're going through. Don't let yourself be gaslit, you know, kind of stand with it, realize that this is an assault. This is about finding ways to deny people support and proceed from there. So I think that that reality check and that clarification and all of the work that other people are doing about providing windows into real experience gave me a lot of strength, because I in these interviews, I didn't feel I didn't feel overwhelmed. I didn't feel like, oh, God, we're all going through such a lot. I often felt quite buoyed up by the process of speaking with others, and it would lift me and just give me hope. You know, which for me, the way that my brain works, it can quickly flicker away, and I need to reinstall that hope and have another conversation and look at, you know, engage with another group of peers, but that, for me, is really the essence of navigating those oppressive structures, is having affirmation, having someone who has shared that experience or shared similar reflect back to me and say, Yeah, this is really happening, and then we find ways through
Colin Hambrook
I think a lot of it is about affirmation, isn't it? That's, that's, that's a real key to the strength of You Are Here, and
Jet Moon
also that we suffer from a real lack of richness of stories we are sold so many shallow and inaccurate and discriminatory stories about ourselves and others, you know, like the whole thing about Like migrants are living in luxury, in hotels, people who claim Motability do it with a snap of their fingers and are again, just having this luxurious thing that other people are not having.
Colin Hambrook
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sickening,
Jet Moon
and that is it's just like this little crusty scab on the top of reality, where the real stories give real depth of experience and something about real lives and Something that's nourishing and exciting.
Colin Hambrook
What's next for the You Are Here project for the survivors writing group?
Jet Moon
So it took a lot longer than I would have liked to get it done, but and to get it up online, to get it all catalogued, to have it launched online. And now what I'm doing is that I got a small. Small amount of funding from Grand Camp Maisie Fund to reprint the book, like the anthology of the survivor writers work, and which has excerpts from the interviews and the creative work in it. And also all of the work is now up online, both in sound form and in text form. And so it's a resource. And what I'm starting to do is to find ways to share that with other people. So recently, I did a workshop at a drop in centre for survivors, like it's like a night drop in centre, and did a survivor writing workshop with a few people. And that was that was really amazing. And as I said, you never know how things are going to go. But um, sitting with that group of people and playing some of the short excerpts of the recordings, and having those little things, like Frankie talking about the importance of private writing, or Christine Bylund saying, you know, would I wish that I didn't know the things that I know now, you know, like, what's my perspective on having knowledge about oppression? What I would I rather have? It or not? But hearing those voices with another group made the whole project make sense. And it was a thing where afterwards, lots of people kept, like, patting their chest, in a way of like, we felt a lot about that together, and we did, and I have also done a more, like a bigger, broader workshop just introducing the project. I'm talking not so much through literature, but I mean, how are we surviving, like having that discussion with people, and holding space for that, and using the work as a resource for that, because it is very intersectional. You know, people talk about many different kinds of oppression and survivorship, so that's where I'm at next is finding ways to share that. But it's always on a bit of crip time. It's always figuring out, you know, like, how can I do that? What energy do I have? But, you know, it exists. It's there, and I will find ways to do that.
Colin Hambrook
Have you, have you had feedback from Wellcome themselves?
Jet Moon
They were so helpful to work with before I start. They were just really, really helpful in how to go through that quite complex cataloguing process which I had no knowledge of whatsoever, and my poor PA spent many, many hours dealing with, like reading spreadsheets and stuff which are impossible for me and, you know, picking through, you know, errors and finding doing catalogue numbers and All this kind of stuff. But Wellcome were very supportive, and their feedback was that they were very positive about the project, and they said this is the reason that we support non-academic and non-professional researchers, this kind of research coming into the archive. It gives sense to that whole way that we do support people who are working, you know, who coming from peer groups, or who are doing things in a different way that is outside of the usual structure that they're like, Yeah, this, this is why we support that,
Colin Hambrook
that's, that's, that's absolutely terrific. And you know, I have a personal, very kind of strong sense of the value of people's stories, having come from a traumatized background myself, and you know, all power to you for having produced this and got it out there through Wellcome. It's something certainly on a personal level. I think it's something that you kind of delve into the writing there, kind of when here and there, when you've got time, I wondered, did you have any thoughts on how your audience would would access the interviews and the creative work?
Jet Moon
Yeah, so obviously it depends on maybe personal interests. So what are people drawn to? Because there are other interviews, there is poetry, there's a play, there's some work that incorporates graphic elements. You know that there's lots of different types of writing there. And when we were constructing the work on the website, we tried to think about, how can people dip into things? So each of the interviews has a couple of pull quotes, so, like, very short, like, maybe 30 seconds, so you can hear the other person's voice, and you can also listen and read at the same time, because I find that helpful to me, if I can follow something, and it's also, I think the experience. Of hearing someone and reading the writing can also be an interesting difference.
Colin Hambrook
It helps to get that kind of personal connection through the audio.
Jet Moon
But it's also, what are people seeking at this point in time? You know Lisa Davies is, you know, they're a disabled writer who's a chair user. They're also an incredibly fierce academic, but they're a poet, and we have their poems, you know, one of which is called fuck hells. And so it's like, if that's something that to me, there's this very wry humour, but it's also who is going to most connect with this? Or Dior Clarke’s work is about, you know, as a gay man with a Afro Caribbean heritage, he's talking about, how can he represent his experience, but also represent a complex experience as a black gay man? He also talks so beautifully about breaking through into the process of writing and that struggle of you know, he's like, have the fight with yourself, but just like, write it. Write it. You can think about how to get it out there afterwards. And I love that. Or Nat Raha, she's, again, like an amazing academic, and she's also a woman of trans experience, a woman of colour, and she's writing about this whole history of colonialism and carceral systems through the means of poetry. So there are so many different places to go within the work, but I think those snippets can help. But there's also the booklet is available to download online, so you can also download, like the booklet itself. So there's a lot of different ways to go into that, and as you say, like dip in and out of it, or find what feels most relevant to you.
Colin Hambrook
I found the interview with Nat really fascinating. And she, she talks about, I, you know, the impact of colonialism in creating all of these Island prisons across the world. And that that that kind of really resonated with my own kind of sense of feeling isolated in being able to express personal experience of oppression and trauma, and it made me think much more deeply about carceral systems, as you say, it's a very powerful interview.
Jet Moon
I liked also that she says some things about time and embodiment, because there's a place where she talks about using letters, like handwritten letters, which resonates with me as well, because I have this kind of migration experience. And the whole thing of, like aerogram letters being this thing where you could only use a certain amount of space. A letter is very expensive to send, and you have this distance, which is, you know, like pre-Internet, and not easily bridged. But then she is talking about what happens through the process of writing and reading for her, in this kind of embodiment and a kind of rhythm or that takes over, and this physical sense, which I thought was also, again, very powerful, because then it's like, what, what's happening in time? And when she talks about, is trauma a present personal experience, or is it also something that can be like generational institutional, and bringing it so complex, and then again, back to the body, back to the speaking and speaking of space and sharing with other people and this idea of she talks about writing and often using the word the term we. But who is We Who starts to identify with that and leaving it very open so there's a possibility of connection, which I think is, yeah, and that's a great thing.
Colin Hambrook
It's been absolutely fascinating talking to you about You Are Here Jet, and it's been a real delight to have you on the podcast.
Jet Moon
Thanks, Colin. I mean, I appreciate it, and I hope that at least some of it makes sense, and if not, the work is there online. You know,
Colin Hambrook
thanks very much. And thank you to our audience for listening. And this is Colin Hambrook and Jet Moon signing out.
Outro
We do hope you've enjoyed listening to this episode of Disability and... further episodes of Disability and... can be found at www.disabilityarts.online.