Page 144 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

NOTES

The story is part of a wider story collection and prose poem work in which I use

imagination and speculative means to investigate women's connection to water. During

the time of writing these stories, I trained in various body work modalities in the water

(aquafitness, Watsu, Ai Chi), and I participated in water protection rituals, often linked to

the NoDAPL movement, and indigenous women’s care for our world. I worked on the

Salamander Project, an art project in which disabled people go swimming together,

semi-nude in public, going underwater, exploring liminal space.

Questions that intrigued me included, how does settler colonialism’s repression deform

myths? How do contact zones reinvent themselves in surrealist lineages? My writing and

art work as a white queer disabled performance artist is informed by feminist lineages,

and by Donna Haraway's recent work: how genre forms reshape affective regimes and

do their own labor in opening up to strange touching kinships.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a

community performance artist. She is a Professor at

the University of Michigan, and she teaches on the

MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. Her

most recent poetry collection is PearlStitch (Spuyten

Duyvil: 2016). Her stories have appeared in Drunken

Boat, The Sycamore Review, Visionary Tongue,

Future Fire, Capricious, Wordgathering, Festival

Writer, and Accessing the Future: A Disability-

Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction. Her first

fiction podcast, Ice Bar, came out with PodCastle In

March 2017. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability

culture collective. She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with her poet partner and collaborator,

Stephanie Heit.

Website: www.petrakuppersfiction.wordpress.com

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