Discussion → Beauty is a Verb to be continued ...

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    Ann Bogle
    Aug 09, 05:11am

    Sheila Black contacted me today after "someone" had sent her a link to my comment on Larissa Shmailo's "Madwoman Exercises a Civil Right" regarding the decision not to include "mental disabilities" or "mental illnesses" in the disability poetics anthology named Beauty Is a Verb after our AWP panel in Denver 2010. She apologized for not including me in the discussion or the decision and offered her support of a further anthology to include "mental disabilities" and "mental illness" in poetry and poetics. My interest is in prose and prosetics and disability if it comes down to it, a diagnosis of ideas.

    My reply to Sheila (edited slightly):

    Sheila, thank you so much for your message. I met, via an online dating website, unbelievable as this sounds, a scholar at U of Pittsburgh who had agreed to moderate a Beauty is a Verb panel there that was canceled due to a security threat on campus of some sort. Curtis Breight. In fact, we didn't "meet," but we emailed about disability, my interest in it and my participation on the panel. It came out because I remembered that Ellen McGrath Smith is at Pittsburgh. Anyway, Curt urged me to get involved and perhaps to come to Pittsburgh when they restage the panel.

    I just started the subgroup at Fictionaut yesterday called M ILLNESS. It's my attempt at an erasure title. A few things converged so I started the subgroup. One of those things is my ongoing interest in prosetics. If you google "prosetics," you will be urged to select "prosthetics" instead. In other words, there is not a lot on it besides what I have done, really since 1991, just before my diagnosis with bipolar at U of Houston, and definitely since 2001 when I collaborated in prosetics for a time with Miekal And. Recently, I digressed at the OtherStream group at Facebook about prosetics, and Jeffrey Side, who published (issued) my two short story e-collections at Argotist Ebooks, took offense at my prosetics digressions in a poetry context, and later he banned me from Argotist Online group for posting a fiction link and started what turned into a long thread about my transgression (digression). Several men came to my defense, some defended my creative writing, some defended me as a friend, and quite a few attacked me and my inquiry. I moved the prosetics inquiry to Fictionaut to an entry called WHAT with pi sign insertions. Then I invited Ron Silliman and Mark Wallace and Miekal And and a few others to take a look at it. I don't know if they did, but Mark and Miekal had been early interested in it. Silence from them and the thread against my prose digressions as well as one other employment-related situation at Mad Hatters' Review caused me to suspect (not know) it was stonewalling (ideas not me as a person) due to sexism, genre interstices, and what I call psychophobia.

    Anyway, it's hard to go about this without a "real" book under my belt in short story, and I just have to hope that my work in journals online (60+ stories) and at Fictionaut can speak for itself. Haven't been able to find a publisher for my mixed-genre prose narrative collection. Minnesota, being in it as a disabled freelance writer, may be slowing it further. 27 years working at short story and short prose forms.

    I am so encouraged by your letter, by your interest in this process. I agree that disability prosetics (?) before there is an abled prosetics? is a wide open area to explore. An anthology could come of M ILLNESS stories at Fictionaut alone. Thanks again.

    ~Ann

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    Ann Bogle
    Feb 10, 04:45am

    True Is a Verb is a provisional title (and IS true)

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    Ann Bogle
    Mar 15, 11:33pm

    Here is the text I wrote in English as comment on a photo at Fb of my friend, Christa Forster. It expresses a thought I had had prior to my participation on the ~Beauty Is a Verb~ panel at AWP in Denver in 2010. I withheld my thought in order to spare the panel's fun title. ~True Is a Verb~ is the title I will or would use for the mentally ill poetics anthology I have been urged to edit. I suggest that we include patients of eyes, ears, nose, and throat doctors and CNS medical network specialists:

    "Regarding _beauty_, it is a reputation, and it refers to one's personal physical appearance and not, for example, to Olmsted Peak at Yosemite, as it once might have without the appositive _natural_. One's own natural beauty (personal physical appearance without apparatus or cosmetic) has been caught in self-portraiture, and often then."

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    Ann Bogle
    Mar 16, 02:18am

    eye, ear, Point.

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    Ann Bogle
    Jan 04, 08:18pm

    Update from 2013. Beauty is a Verb, volume 2, fiction, is in process and is set to include a closing section on fiction as it relates to the so-called mental disabilities, whatever those may be. Digression is the error in my presentations, often, one that does not offend equally, and distraction, the art of being easily distracted by fleeting thoughts that dart in other movements away from on-topic discourse (that eschew roman numeral outlines) comprise mental disability for me; being suspected of having mental or emotional flaws in relating to others is yet another externalized manifestation. The new volume of BIAV will contain work in fiction by writers with physical disabilities as well as a closing section by writers with thought- or mood disorders that some people think of as being thought and mood capacities equal to or greater than before their discovery.


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