Placing Disability presents an international collection of personal essays that address the experience of disability in particular geographical locations. Each chapter engages the question of what it means to be disabled in a specific place, exploring issues of movement, work and play, community and activism, artistic production, love and marriage, access and social services, family and friendship, memory and aging—all informed by the places that people inhabit. The book is organized in terms of topographies and vistas, rather than being bound by the map, to emphasize the defining, constitutive effects of place. The authors included in Placing Disability hail from different countries, neighborhoods, climates, and landscapes; from various backgrounds and professions; from a range of disciplinary perspectives and strategies. They are trained as academics, literary critics, poets, students, public speakers, memoirists, educators, philosophers, administrators, and activists. Their essays refine our understanding of the complex dynamic between self and circumstance as they survey the impact of geographical region on their life experiences. This book is intended to be useful in creative-writing workshops, Disability Studies seminars, and classes on environmental literature, and to appeal to general readers of memoir as well as to scholars of contemporary body theory or the Anthropocene.

This title explains how to read, interpret and write about the world around us in a critical and informed way. How well are you able to decode the signs that surround us in our daily lives? All of us, consciously or unconsciously, are constantly engaged in the act of reading and interpreting the signs in the world around us. This book answers the needs of students of composition, rhetoric, creative writing, stylistics or literature: it provides a process orientated guide to analyzing anything. Fraser and Davidson teach the reader how to perform semiotic analysis and formulate in plain language a logical set of instructions on how to write it up. The central idea is that analytical writing can be performed on any kind of text. The authors move from theory to practical analysis, featuring sidebars throughout that expand on relevant points. There is a clear trajectory through research, planning and writing with concrete revision strategies. The book includes links to insightful and witty readings on its expansive Companion Website, together with a Lecturer Handbook, extra material and additional essay tasks. This is the textbook of choice for all students of writing.

It is our everyday explorations-the small explosions within life, family, and "ordinary" survival-that make up Gregory Fraser's fourth collection of poetry, Little Armageddon. Fraser writes at eye level, detailing the experiences of fatherhood, love, and the quiet of daily life, poised at the brink of abrupt upheaval. These poems are an exercise in precision and reflection. Free verse, prose, and precise sonnets blend with pastorals that show readers the life within the landscape. In "My Daughter and the Lizard," the speaker reflects on grace, meditating on the reptile his child is inspecting: "I scissor-jab three holes through the lid / of a Mason jar and tell her to be gentle, / 'It's a living thing,' I say, 'not a toy.'" We are how we live. These poems balance imagination and truth telling with rich verse that brings the reader's ear closer to the quiet-and how intense it truly is.

This title explains how to read, interpret and write about the world around us in a critical and informed way. How well are you able to decode the signs that surround us in our daily lives? All of us, consciously or unconsciously, are constantly engaged in the act of reading and interpreting the signs in the world around us. This book answers the needs of students of composition, rhetoric, creative writing, stylistics or literature: it provides a process orientated guide to analyzing anything. Fraser and Davidson teach the reader how to perform semiotic analysis and formulate in plain language a logical set of instructions on how to write it up. The central idea is that analytical writing can be performed on any kind of text. The authors move from theory to practical analysis, featuring sidebars throughout that expand on relevant points. There is a clear trajectory through research, planning and writing with concrete revision strategies. The book includes links to insightful and witty readings on its expansive Companion Website, together with a Lecturer Handbook, extra material and additional essay tasks. This is the textbook of choice for all students of writing.