Hi all, I recently found out about a new Internet platform called  Forum that is making it possible for peer counselors to offer various groups. Here is what I am offering! People who choose to join the group will pay a monthly fee, but there are various levels of discount for folks on disability, etc., Please help me spread the word. This web platform was started by a doctor whose father suffered severe burns as a child and went through life feeling very isolated by the disfigurement and disabilities he sustained. So, when Forum.s cofounder, his son, realized becoming a doctor was not enough to help his father heal,  he started looking at the strength of peer support groups and now here we are. It’s a great passion project story. Here is the link to join my group, Live Well with Disability.  Feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions.   https://app.joinforum.com/partnergrouppage/live-well-with-disability-gpid1535 Image description: The fly...

My guide words for 2023 are: wander, receive, open, free. Each a mineral I need not just to grow, but to just to live with uncertainty  and a sense of being trapped after big health lows and losses. 2021 was all about weathering the pandemic and getting sober, some thing I'll write more about in the future.In the fall of 2022, I had to turn away from the surgery I needed to maintain the strength and steadiness in my left leg. In the very operating room, I realized that the PTSD--from anesthesia and intubation problems with previous surgeries was too much, I could not continue. Using my voice and getting off the gurney gave me a huge sense of agency, paradoxical as it was. Leaving the hospital meant meant using my wheelchair and the complications that brought to my daily life.  December 2022 arrived and looking out of my one seeing eye changed abruptly. It was as if I was wearing sunglasses and could never take them off. And there were new, even thicker areas of gauze across my...

  Not knowing when the dawn will come/ I open every door --Emily Dickinson As we leave 2020 behind--the year of a global pandemic, Covid deaths, job loss, isolation, racist murders and the uprisings that have followed, an election season that has revealed how truly divided the US is--I am grateful for the doors that have opened in this terrible time, hopeful entryways into 2021 While people were social distancing and staying in quarantine, I was finding that I had more access to work, friendship, art practice, and activism than I had ever had before. The culture of Zoom and other virtual meeting platforms necessitated by Covid has created these openings. As a person with multiple physical disabilities that make it difficult and riskier for me to navigate the built environment, I can now attend gatherings or join meetings whether or not it is safe to take an Uber, whether or not accessible public transit exists, on days when my remaining eyesight is extremely blurred due to illness,...

"It wasn't Paris, but it passed the time." This morning. I had my usual Bustelo (altho the light, the darkness, I'm sure the owners of this food co. are Latino Republicans) but also now I've totally switched to instant which is tasty enough in #Cuban espresso form. https://t.co/RsWmUimX11 — amber dipietra (@thebodypoetik) September 22, 2020 from Twitter https://twitter.com/thebodypoetik September 22, 2020 at 01:19PM via IFTTT

Join us on Sep 23, 2020 08:00 PM EST via Zoom for our first DASAN visioning meeting about what DASAN can be as a collective. I co-founded this organization with my colleague Cassandra Perry. How can we lift the voices of artists, activists, researchers, educators and others working at the intersection of disability justice and sexual freedom? How can we strengthen our networks, tackle access issues together, create more paths to development, and how can we give peer support to each other? If you have not already signed up, click here to RSVP or contact us with any questions at weare@dasanetwork.org.

  Thanks to the inimitable Kelsey St. Press   for setting me up to offer this pleasure and poetics workshop  Via Zoom August 30 6p - 730 PDT Drawing from somatic practices, sensory awareness exercises, and holistic sex education, this workshop will be an exploration in how poetics and pleasure can build on each and bend toward personal and social liberation.  RSVP  here About KSP The press was founded in 1974 to address the marginalization of women writers by small press and mainstream publishers. From the beginning, we linked our editorial policy to a poetics of allowance, encouraging women to write directly from their own creative imperatives, and to a poetics of inclusion that embraces racial and cultural diversity. In the eighties, we instituted a series of cross-genre collaborative works between poets and visual artists. A decade later, as our list included more established writers, we created the Frances Jaffer Book Award and, then, the FIRSTS! series...

I'm offering The Poetics of Pleasure, Zoom workshop for @KelseyStPress Aug 30th 6pm PDT. Drawing from somatic practices, sensory awareness exercises, and holistic sex ed, how poetry can build our muscle for pleasure. https://t.co/zXb4KdY6ll — amber dipietra (@thebodypoetik) August 22, 2020 from Twitter https://twitter.com/thebodypoetik August 21, 2020 at 10:01PM via IFTTT

for a poetics of pleasure class I'm teaching next week, I of course think of Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space. I find this in it. "A creature that hides and 'withdraws into its shell,' is preparing a 'way out.' This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. If we remain at the heart of the image under consideration, we have the impression that, by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being.” So fitting for the careful, the understated, the abiding pleasures of a time like Covid. So hopeful in it's way.

Hannah hired me to give a workshop on the intersection of disability justice and LGBTQIA+ rights at Metro St. Pete's youth camp last summer. Looking forward to seeing her film. Weds, Aug 12, 7p EST WEDU, click on image to RSVP Hannah Powell (she/they) is a queer, non-binary lesbian activist and artist from Florida. They are passionate about documenting and elevating the experiences of LGBTQ+ people living in the South, specifically peop They graduated from Rollins College in 2018 with a dual degree in Critical Media and Cultural Studies and Sexuality, Women's, and Gender Studies. Hannah's thesis documentary, "Let's Escape Into the Music: A Cross-Generational Oral History of Orlando LGBTQ+ Spaces," explored the history and role of queer nightlife in Central Florida, and centered the impact of hate-motivated violence on queer Floridians through a series of interviews. The film won audience awards across Florida, and the project cemented Hannah's desire to me...

Sex Down South (an ATL -based, WOC lead annual event) announced their first virtual con, which includes hardship ticket pricing. Woodhull has also gone virtual, with four online events coming up in August. Panels will include sex and cannabis medicine; Covid pandemic compared to AIDS crisis response; sex-positive Christianity; and more .

Always record your doctors. #Covid #medicalrationing #disabled https://t.co/nlsZ7qjlMp — amber dipietra (@thebodypoetik) August 3, 2020 from Twitter https://twitter.com/thebodypoetik August 03, 2020 at 02:32AM via IFTTT

Just discovered Rachel Zucker has a podcast with other 70 lengthy episodes. It's not close read analysis, thank god, but meandering conversations @CommonplacePod An expanse of comfort/wonderment to get me thru so much more sleepless isolation. https://t.co/Vfsalj560Y — amber dipietra (@thebodypoetik) July 31, 2020 from Twitter https://twitter.com/thebodypoetik July 31, 2020 at 12:33AM via IFTTT

8. The most celebratory part of this depressing story is that the two ppl in the #NPR #ADA segment were women and POC. Thank you @judithheumann and @Imani_Barbarin https://t.co/oyEzPiJpFS — amber dipietra (@thebodypoetik) July 27, 2020 from Twitter https://twitter.com/thebodypoetik July 26, 2020 at 10:54PM via IFTTT

7. (I should say that yesterday on @NPR , I heard a good deal about how now, on top on Covid, disabled ppl were about to be doubly fucked by the hurricane season.) — amber dipietra (@thebodypoetik) July 27, 2020 from Twitter https://twitter.com/thebodypoetik July 26, 2020 at 10:51PM via IFTTT

6. Yes, there was a good deal about foreign statuary. But in hours of radio, there was only 1 story about the living breathing humans who brought about the #ADA and who depend on the ADA. — amber dipietra (@thebodypoetik) July 27, 2020 from Twitter https://twitter.com/thebodypoetik July 26, 2020 at 10:49PM via IFTTT

5. I scanned thru 100s of segments on the app and heard many many stories about 45, Covid, the economy, Portland protestors (absurdly eclipsing #BLM actions). I even heard a few stories about how other countries deal with their statues. — amber dipietra (@thebodypoetik) July 27, 2020 from Twitter https://twitter.com/thebodypoetik July 26, 2020 at 10:47PM via IFTTT

4. Instead, I just put on #NPR like I usually do and expected to hear ADA -related stories. I listened for hours; while cooking, cleaning the kitchen, taking care of pets, showering, doing, data entry. — amber dipietra (@thebodypoetik) July 27, 2020 from Twitter https://twitter.com/thebodypoetik July 26, 2020 at 10:45PM via IFTTT

3. So, I did not attend any of the online streaming events for #ADA30 , though I know the impact campaign staff around the Crip Camp documentary hosted a really good one. (Mind you, Crip Camp, the film and associated projects, Is something to feel celebratory about.) — amber dipietra (@thebodypoetik) July 27, 2020 from Twitter https://twitter.com/thebodypoetik July 26, 2020 at 10:43PM via IFTTT

2. And more acutely, there is the way #Covid has revealed, more than ever, how rampant ableism is in society and certainly in my home state of Florida. — amber dipietra (@thebodypoetik) July 27, 2020 from Twitter https://twitter.com/thebodypoetik July 26, 2020 at 10:43PM via IFTTT

1. I was feeling less than celebratory about the 30th anniversary of the #ADA , which was today. I've have long had activist fatigue around slow, condescending change, and feel burned about by various systems of oppression (which include business-as-usual bureaucracy). — amber dipietra (@thebodypoetik) July 27, 2020 from Twitter https://twitter.com/thebodypoetik July 26, 2020 at 10:41PM via IFTTT