Disability Arts Online

Since 2003 I have been developing a way of creating poems by editing the transcripts of oral history interviews with disabled people. This has led to two major commissions from Disability Arts Online and my 2010/11 Leverhulme-funded residency at the Centre for Citizen Participation, Brunel University.

In a happy coincidence, early in 2004 ‘Oral History’ carried Krista Woodley’s article: ‘Let the Data Sing: Representing Discourse in Poetic Form’. This suggested using poetic devices as a way of creating more informative transcription. As I am primarily a writer rather than an oral historian, that led me to wonder whether poetic devices could be applied to transcriptions to create poetry.

I experimented on the transcription of my interview with Paddy Masefield, and created ‘Paddy: A Life’, a set of 32 poems describing Paddy’s work in the theatre, acquisition of ME and subsequent career as a disability arts activist. More recently I have worked with artist Nancy Willis to produce ‘The Explorer’ a series of 23 poems based on Nancy’s descriptions of her works and life.  She has used these to make a short film, ‘Transformations’.