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. At the end of the program writers are invited to share their pieces in both a virtual reading event and to publish their writing here on the CILT website.
Below you will find recording and publications from past Wordplay Creative Writing programs.
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Wordplay
By Rebecca Wood
What a joy to play in the secret language of disability
Of bodies and rest and possibility and creativity
Without pressure of explaining our experience to an ableist world
Without a sense that communicating daily life stories
Is a trade for access
Or and invitation to inspiration
Writing together
Noticing what images bloom
And what feels good on the page
Making space for stories that mean something to us
Writing our worlds with our tools and aids and strategies
Our pain and progress
Our joys and challenges
The complexity of them all existing simultaneously
Words and stories and reflections and imaginings
As a group disability is not one thing
Access is not one thing
and still we catch the meaning in the musings that might be missed
We see ourselves in another’s words about waiting for attendants
Or the way relationships with mobility/hearing/visual aids change over time
The way our minds and bodies are ours
The we move through the world
Exploring and expanding meaning
What a pleasure to play with words in this exceptional multiplicity
What delight in this knowing together
About the Facilitator:
Rebecca Wood is writer, speaker and Program Coordinator at the Centre for Independent Living in Toronto. She uses writing to explore and share her experience as a multiply chronically ill woman with an episodic disability. She has had personal essays and poetry published in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, and Poetry in Corporeal Magazine, Wishbone Words and The Blood Project. Her poem “Emergency Contact” received an Honourable Mention in the League of Canadian Poets summer contest 2024.
