Dr Cath Nichols (Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Leeds) writes:
“I am putting together a literary disability studies book that will focus on practitioners of creative writing whose writing is informed by their experience and/or awareness of disability/ illness. The provisional title is: Hearts, Minds and Surprising Bodies: Writers in the British Isles Discuss Disability in their Work. The book is not yet commissioned but has received favourable interest and now needs further development. Six prose writers, seven poets and six theatre-makers have agreed to take part. Some are writing their own chapters but a few have asked to be interviewed. Kei Miller (based at Glasgow University) is one such writer requesting interview.
I anticipate that the interview chapter would explore hearing voices/ other states of being in Miller’s novel The Last Warner Woman. In this book, the protagonist Adamine Bustamante grows up in Jamaica in a house of lepers and later joins a revivalist Christian group where she prophesies to great acclaim. But when she is sent to England to be the wife of a man she has not met, her gift is not understood. Her husband hates her and has her committed to an asylum. On her entry form under ‘supposed cause’ of illness or admission, is written ‘of West Indian origin’. The book has an unusual structure and is also quite humorous. The Times described it as ‘Poetic and totally original.’
I am looking for an interviewer and chapter writer with an interest in voices/ other realities and possibly a background in literary postcolonial research to undertake this chapter. If you might be interested in this task please send me an email explaining your interest. Thank you.”