That September night—once the homework was done and my laundry was safely on spin cycle—I made the lonely walk across the empty quad. Yet with each step it seemed to grow more populated, one silhouette after another springing forth beneath the street lights.
Maybe there were six of us in all, all budding writers whose love for the written word far surpassed our ability to actually write them. Undeterred, we’d stuffed our pockets with our poems anyway, and then—just hours after our coded, hushed whispers had been tendered and received—began our trek to poet Carl Sandburg’s birthplace, just a mile or so off campus.
When Christy Collins’ daughter was born, the doctors were baffled. The baby’s body was larger on one side than the other, and her skin was covered with unusual birthmarks. The girl had low muscle tone and fluid in her lungs, and her legs felt doughy to the touch. But why? Medical experts could not say.
This was the beginning of Collins’ journey to find her daughter’s diagnosis. A freelance web developer, Collins already had two healthy children from uneventful pregnancies and was completely new to the disability world. Her journey over the next eight months would span multiple clinics, countless websites, and even continents before yielding answers. Just a few decades ago, children with seemingly undiagnosable conditions—children like her little girl—received a catchall label of “multiple disabilities” without further investigation. But things have changed.
In her new book, Emily Bernard writes she is “most interested in blackness at its borders, where it meets whiteness, in fear and hope, in anguish and love.” She examines this intersection closely, with her own life as a case study, to see where the pieces fit together neatly like a puzzle, and where their edges collide. The result is the collection of deeply personal essays in Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine.
Eamonn Forde has been writing about the music industry for nearly 20 years. Though slightly sullied by an opening section that spurns laying out the reasons why EMI was a household name in favour of business arcana, his account of what happened next is an addictive blend of tragedy, comedy and insight.