Neither Dying Nor Being Cured - This is the essay version of the Ethel Louise Armstrong Lecture I gave last year at Ohio State University. It was first...
- Guidelines for Non-Disabled Writers - Just republishing this for future reference. First published in Literary Hub, August 23, 2016 Recently I have read several articles about disabled...
- Living Fiction, Storybook Lives - As individuals and societies we are shaped by story: our culture and sense of self literally cannot exist without it because we only know who and what we are when we can tell a story about ourselves. We learn how to tell our story by listening to the tales that are out there and picking through them, choosing some details and discarding others.
- My Story, Mystery: A Letter to Hild of Whitby - "You were magnificent, I think, but hidden: a black hole at the heart of history. We can trace you only by your gravitational pull." This essay first appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, September 2015.
- The Women You Didn’t See: A Letter to Alice Sheldon - "You were brilliant, I think, but consumed by the inevitability of the abattoir. In your fiction all the gates are closed; characters are funnelled down a chute to flashing knives." Epistolatory criticism first published 2015.
- Disability: Art, Scholarship, and Activism - On Friday May 13 I gave a presentation at the University of Washington’s Pacific & Western Disability Symposium. The theme of this...
- Writing Slow River - Is there such a thing as an "essential self"? If so, can it be warped, encouraged, or destroyed? How far outside the moral and physical boundaries of that essential self would I we be willing to step in order to stay alive? And—if we stepped so far out that we became someone we did not recognise or like—would we still be us? I wrote Slow River to answer those questions.
- Writing from the Body - Art and the Body are huge subjects with all kinds of branches and nooks and crannies. In what follows I poke around in those topics that interest me—the philosophy of dualism, cyberspace as nirvana, the concept of genius, the religious right—and see which pieces connect along the way.
- As We Mean to Go On - An essay about how Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge met at a writing workshop and how books and the written word made their love possible.
- Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow - I read Brackett's The Long Tomorrow for the first time in 2005. Five pages in, I wondered why I'd never heard of this novel. Twenty pages later, I was wondering why it wasn't universally acknowledged as the first Great American SF Novel.