Doctor/poet starts festival on Dis/Abled poetics
Dr. Shane Neilson, MD, poet, PhD candidate, is pulling together many strands with his new initiative; the disabled, the creative, the socio-political
AS I
SOON AS ASKED Dr. Shane Neilson if he’s sometimes seen as an inspiration to others with disabilities, I wanted to claw the words back into my mouth — shades of, you know, that kind of paternalistic “credit to your race” backhand compliment, though I didn’t mean it that way.
Shane answered with patience, humour and modesty. He said he didn’t want to feed into that “super crip trope” (Terry Fox, etc.), but, he granted, “I guess you can say I persevered.”
Talking to Shane, you quickly realize there are complex layers of understanding, awareness and, yes, politics, around our concepts and language concerning ability/disability — and what they signify.
He is a medical doctor. He is a PhD candidate at McMaster in English and cultural studies. He is an awardwinning published poet. Earlier this month, he received a 2018 Talent
Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, recognizing academic achievement, originality of research and potential for leadership. It was presented to him by Governor General Julie Payette.
And now, he can add festival founder/organizer to his CV. Today, The First AbleHamilton Poetry Festival culminates in a series of readings, panels, broadcasts and other program features in Hamilton and Guelph. The festival actually began in late September in New Brunswick, where Shane was born and raised.
And there’s something else. He lives with an affective disorder that has made it impossible for him to work at various times in his life, episodically since he was very young (though not recently), one time for a year and a half.
“There are visible and invisible disabilities,” said Shane. His is technically an “invisible” one, but, he adds, if you’d seen him during that year and a half you would’ve known.
I paused when he said “super crip,” short for super “cripple.”
“Crip” is used sometimes in disability vocabulary and disability studies as a slur reclamation, sometimes ironically, similar to “queer” and “bitch” in identity language.
Language and metaphor are such important parts of how we construct, process and categorize our experience, even in the sciences, that poetry should be a required subject. And Shane told me he finds, circulating among doctors, that many of them, “ground down by the clinical clock of biomedical” work, have expressed curiosity about his involvement in poetry, saying some of them seem to see it as a question of “how do you get free?”
“My connection with dis/ability is through lived experience,” said Shane, who came to Ontario when his wife was studying in Guelph to be a veterinarian. That lived experience, of necessity, informs his poetry, his voice. And he has spent much time with dis/able poets.
There is some overlap of his medical work, his PhD thesis and his interest in language/poetry. His PhD work focuses on chronic pain, from both a medical and cultural standpoint, and representations of pain in terms of weaponry and damage, with descriptives like “stabbing, burning, shooting.” He considers the use of alternate metaphors.
“The idea for the festival came about because I was doing a lot of that anyway.” Supporting poets, taking them to festivals, helping them get published.
So far, the festival, which he has organized with Ally Fleming and Paul Lisson, has been a great success. In the New Brunswick phase, the poets had success selling their books. And a week ago, in Hamilton during Phase 2 at the McMaster Centre for Community Engaged Narrative Arts Long Table, many new people came out, beyond what Shane calls “the regular clientele.”
The long table panel involved artists and poets with disability or who engage with the topic of disability as a result of caring, loving, and living with persons with disability. “The topic had resonance,” Shane said.
“The festival is a baby now. I’d like to see it happen again.” Ultimately he’d like to publish an anthology of Canadian dis/abled poetry, along the lines of ‘Beauty is a Verb’ in the United States.”
This weekend’s final phase of the festival will feature poetry readings starting at noon by Robert Moore and Jim Johnstone at the Central Branch of the Hamilton Public Library; and, from 7 to 10 p.m., at The Staircase (27 Dundurn St. N.), readings by Phillip Crymble, Jeffery Donaldson, Sue Sinclair, Robert Moore, and Ally Fleming at the Issue Launch of Hamilton Arts & Letters issue 11.3: The New Brunswick Poetry Issue.
The evening will also feature the unveiling of plans for issue 12.2: The Canadian Disability Poetics issue.
For more, visit HALmagazine.com.
“The festival is a baby now. I’d like to see it happen again.” DR. SHANE NEILSON