“There is so much that able-bodied people could learn from the wisdom that often comes with disability. But space needs to be made. Hands need to reach out. People need to be lifted up.”
– Alice Wong,
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century (2020)
CILT strives to support our community sharing and celebrating stories of our lived experience. We believe writing and telling our stories is important for the disability community so we offer opportunities build these skills.
Disabled Writers’ Drop-In
Our monthly virtual meet up is a chance for a cross-disability group of
writers to connect and write in community. Each month we choose a theme and provide prompts to spark the creativity of emerging and experienced writers.
In each session we have an opening go around sharing the successes and challenges of our writing this month, time to write together, a “Resource Wrap Up” and we end by reading a poem by a disabled writer.
We also create a collective poem in each session based on the monthly theme. Read our monthly Disabled Writers’ Drop-in poems here.
Wordplay Creative Writing
This 6-week program explores writing as a form of creative and self-expression rooted in the ways that lived experience of disability informs how we write and what we write about. Each session uses a variety of writing prompts to welcome our minds and bodies into playing with words. There are also opportunities for sharing work, giving/receiving supportive feedback and building revision skills. We also read and talk about writing by Disabled writers.
Check out the work of Wordplay Creative Writing Participants here.
The Helen Henderson Literary Award
CILT grants the Helen Henderson Literary Award annually to recognizeto a CILT member, or an ally recommended by a CILT member, who produced an outstanding piece of writing related to raising public awareness of a disability issue or barrier. Applications are typically open August-September and the award is given at our Annual General Meeting in October.
Learn more about Helen Henderson and read the work of past winners here.
“Storytelling itself is an activity, not an object. Stories are the closest we can come to shared experience…. Like all stories, they are most fundamentally a chance to ride around inside another head and be reminded that being who we are and where we are, and doing what we’re doing, is not the only possibility.”
– Harriet McBryde Johnson,
Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life (2006)
Past Writing and Story Telling Programs at CILT
Digital Storytelling at the Intersections of Queerness and Disability with Emmy Pantin and Fran Odette from Community Story Strategies
We Move Together Reading and Discussion with Author Illustrator team Kelly Fritsch, Anne McGuire and Edwardo Trejos presented in partnership with Silent Voice, The Ontario Federation for Cerebral Palsy and the University of Toronto Disability and Pregnancy Study
Crip Storytelling with Ophira Calof presented in partnership with the MNjcc Accessibility and Inclusion program
DisWrites with Dorothy Palmer and Melissa Graham
Creative Writing Workshop for BIPOC and Disabled/Deaf Writers with Kitty Rodé and Asifa Sheikh from Firefly Creative Writing
