white text on maroon background says rising and gliding. A sub stack at the intersection of disability and culture.
What is Rising and Gliding?
Rising and Gliding fills the “disability gap” that pervades media and cultural commentary in the United States. People with lived experience of disability or impairment have historically been left out of the media landscape. Television, movies, literature, and news stories that include disabled characters are often written and produced by not-currently-disabled people. Rising and Gliding is a space is for cultural commentary from a disability studies perspective.
Why Should I Care?
We live in a world where success is defined by personal progress. growth. wellness. optimization. As Kate Bowler says, "a world that loves us better when we are good, better, best." The truth is: disability can happen to anyone at any time. Living through a disabling event or growing up with a disability does not make one heroic: it makes us human. And for BIPOC and members of LGBTQ+, communities, a disability will only compound the difficulty of living in a white supremacist, patriarchal society. Reading about the world from the perspective of disabled writers helps pull back the curtain of able-bodied privilege, so that we all might see barriers to access.
Who is Erin Ryan Heyneman?
Hi! I'm Erin Ryan Heyneman (she/her). I had to leave my career as an educator when, at 35 years old, I became disabled by a catastrophic Multiple Sclerosis Flare that left an apple watch face-sized a hole my brain. Acquiring a motor and cognitive disability shifted just about everything in my life: my priorities, my role as a mom, my relationships; even the clothes I wear and the food I eat changed dramatically. I write about what it's like to be a disabled cis white woman in the United States, where everything from city planning to media, news, pop culture, and art have only started to move beyond disabled hero stories and tokenization toward inclusion. To me, inclusion in the culture space means consistently and accurately discussing specific disabilities and barriers to access. It means not just consulting with disabled writers, but paying them to write. It means casting people with disabilities in roles that require them. It means more roles that showcase the mundane aspects of disability, and less roles for “disabled villains.”
What’s With the Title?
I chose Rising and Gliding as the title for this project because I have always loved a particular line from Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer." In the poem, the speaker attends a public lecture on astronomy to hear of the "facts and figures," of the universe. By the second stanza, they are bored by stuffy academia. Whitman writes,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself
When we analyzed this poem in my English class, I'd ask my students how a person might "glide" and we'd have fun trying to reenact an easy, laid back stroll. I didn’t have a student who used a wheelchair, so I never thought about how a wheelchair or rollator glides. Or "how soon unaccountable," (out of nowhere) I might find myself tired and sick from the effects of Multiple Sclerosis. Or how, after my disabling event, I would become lonely and "by myself" a good amount of the time. Still, I find the internal rhyme of the "i" and "ing" sounds to be gentle and surprising to the reader.
I try to imagine myself rising and gliding in a life that is not at all like what I'd planned. Like the lines, I hope to be gentle and open to what comes next.
My socials and other work can be found on my linktree, and my professional CV can be found at erinryanhey.com . Thanks for reading Rising and Gliding! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work, and send to a not-currently-disabled friend while you’re at it! :) xo erin
