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A Chat With.... Anne FingerBy Amy Halloran
Finger has published two books of nonfiction, a novel and a collection of short stories. Reading her book Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth. Her latest book, Elegy for a Disease, came out last fall and leads readers through the story of her life with polio and the life of the disease in history. I talked with Finger recently by phone. Q: How old were you when you began to embrace the disability community? Was it a gradual process? AF: I was pretty close to 30, late 20s; it took me a long time. It was something that I came to intellectually rather than emotionally. It was emotional, of course. What drew me to it was a broader political belief, rather than a big emotional moment. There was a point where I went to a conference where people had had polio, and I really had this feeling of a real sense of community and a sense of emotional, cultural similarity. I thought that this is what it would be like if you grew up in a Jewish family in Kansas or something, and then all of a sudden you were in a room with all these other Jewish people. That sense of being culturally at home — that was a pretty powerful moment for me. Q: Did the process of writing the book (Elegy for a Disease) bring you closure of any kind? AF: I don’t really think that it did. I’m not a big believer in closure. Given my family’s reaction to the book, I had a lot more things opened than closed. When I first talked to one of my sisters after she read an early draft of a book, I had one of the best conversations I’ve ever had with her in my life. She told me in very moving detail about experiences she remembered when we were kids. She remembered when our mother came to visit me when I was in the hospital and she waited in the car for an hour because, of course, kids weren’t allowed in hospitals in those days. She could draw from memory the parking lots at each hospital I was in, every parking strip, every lamppost. Then, when I was maybe 6 and she was 7 and a half or 8, we went to the clinic where I was getting follow-up care, and they sat her on the examining table beside me. They tapped me with the reflex hammer and said, “Here is the abnormal child,” and they tapped her with the reflex hammer and used her as an example of the normal child. She said she knew there was something very wrong with that. In January of 2006 my father died and then my mother. Shortly before the book came out, my mother read the book, and people in my family got very upset at me for upsetting my mother. Specifically it was around the physical abuse, the fact that I had talked about the physical abuse. I’m pretty alienated from most of my family right now. One of my sisters screamed at me, and I don’t want to kiss and make up. Q: How has the book been received within the community of disabled people and beyond? AF: I think it’s been very well-received in the disabled community. I think there’s a real hunger for work that both takes in the kind of broader social-political realm and where there’s also attention to craft and attention to the way the work is put together. I’ve gotten good reviews, and I’m very pleased with the response to it. Q: Can a culture that still regards disability through a lens of guilt and pity receive a memoir like yours openly? AF: If guilt and pity were the only things people felt, I think it would be hard, but I think actually there are always attitudes that work against the grain, where ideology is changing. I think many people want an overcoming memoir, and I’m not about to give that to them. It might be easier if I’d written something about healing or reconciliation, but I’m not interested in any of that stuff. I think it doesn’t match my life experience, and it doesn’t match my political beliefs about disability. I don’t see it as a personal challenge or as sort of a testing. I really think of it much more in terms of social situation and community and political change. Q: Post-polio syndrome, and the cultural lapse of memory surrounding it, is shocking. Yet you don’t show much anger about this. Was this a conscious effort? AF: No, it wasn’t a conscious effort not to show anger. I don’t so much have a sense of anger about over-rehabilitation because I think that sense of “work harder, try harder, go out there and fight for what you want” — that’s such a part of my character, my personality. But I think I have a real sense of anger about the surgery because it was so traumatic, and the aftereffects of it have been so difficult in my life. Q: Tell me about your teaching experiences. AF: I actually very rarely had disabled students. Most of my teaching experience was at Wayne State in Detroit, and I think that disabled people think that they can’t take a creative writing course because they feel they have to get an MBA to deal with the financial realities of being disabled. I really like doing classes with disabled people. There’s such a wealth of untapped experience and such a hunger to be heard. Even very basic issues like “What does it mean to write when you can’t hold a pen?” Figuring a way around those things can be very exciting. Q: Can you talk about your involvement with the disability rights movement? AF: Currently most of my involvement is with the Society for Disability Studies, which is a group that’s been around for 25 years, and I’m actually on the board, but I’m term-limited out. It’s a group that has established disability studies on a par with gay and lesbian studies, with women studies, and we have an annual conference, and I find it very exciting to be there. Q: What are you writing now? AF: I’m working on short stories because I really love the short-story form. I’m actually working on a series of short stories that are connected to one another. They’re stories set in the disabled community, by and large, and I’m interested in looking at a world where disability is a given and there’s more than one disabled person in the room, as opposed to fiction, where there might be one disabled person in he room. ****************************** Amy Halloran, is a writer who lives in upstate New York with her husband and two sons. |
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Copyright © 2007 by ILCHV |
I had the
chance to meet writer and disability rights activist Anne Finger last summer at
a writers conference in the Pacific Northwest. Among other topics, she spoke of
the differences between writing fiction and nonfiction and the sensitive issue
of a family’s influence on a memoir-writer.