Flesh - Call out for submission from Writers and Storytellers with Disability

The body and mind are inseparable.

They are root of how we perceive everything. This isn’t a surprise—our bodies house the eyes that see (or don’t), the hands that touch, the skin that shivers with goosebumps. Our bodies, our flesh, is central to experience—the interface between our consciousness and the world. 

For people with a disability (PWD), this centrality is particularly apparent. It is a borderland of friction. For PWD, the movement of the body against the world can often feel like an arthritic joint, a synovial space filled with gravel. 

The symbiotic relationship between the world and the body means that you can’t understand one without the other. To better understand the world—how it is, and how we want it to be—we need to catalogue the diversities of human experience.

We need to listen to PWD. Now. Because they will help create a better world, and because they have bloody good stories to tell.

We are calling out for stories from PWD on the themes of flesh; stories that show how the body soaks into every moment of our experience, how we can feel crushed at the periphery, excluded by a world designed for the so-called ‘normal’.

We seek stories that breathe, shiver and ache, written against the dull metronome of pain, the creeping fog of fatigue.

We seek words given shape by footpaths, by steps and crowds and linoleum skinned doctors’ offices.

Send us the stories that live under your skin.