Eli Clare, "Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming" (Duke UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Eli Clare, "Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming" (Duke UP, 2025)
Date: November 21, 2025
Host: Clayton Gerard (he/him)
Guest: Eli Clare (he/they)

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode features author and activist Eli Clare discussing his new book, Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming. Blending poetry and creative nonfiction, Clare explores themes of queerness, disability, nature, time, categories, access, and dreaming. The conversation offers insights into the creative origins of Unfurl, its structural innovations, and the activist, philosophical, and deeply personal roots of its essays and poems. The episode is notable for its exploration of fluid identities, ways of being, and the importance of dreaming liberatory futures.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origins and Structure of Unfurl

• [04:02] Clare describes how Unfurl began with a commission from Alice Sheppard of Kinetic Light, a disability arts ensemble, to write a poem for a performance prioritizing multilayered, nonvisual access. The resulting piece became the title poem and inspired a broader exploration of transformation and kinship.
  • “It was a poem, a long series of almost poetry fragments called ‘Unfurl and Invitation.’ And in that poetry ... I started working with this idea of becoming … transformation and porousness and kin.” (Eli Clare, 04:02)
• [07:20] The book is rooted in four core “practices”: remembering, survival/sorrow, porousness, and dreaming—framed as ongoing, dynamic processes rather than static themes.

2. Practices: Remembering, Survival and Sorrow, Porousness, and Dreaming

• [09:17 – 09:52] These practices reflect lived, embodied processes across time, each rooted in Clare’s decades-long engagement with memory work, survival, attunement with nature, and dreaming futures.
  • “Practices are ongoing and fluid and responsive to conditions, both material and social conditions.” (Eli Clare, 09:52)
• The book treats temporality (past-present-future) as intertwined, “fluid and bendy,” challenging linear Western notions of time.
  • “I write about time as an accordion. I write about time as a trapdoor swinging wide...time arcing, about time skipping...fluid and bendy.” (10:58)
• Clare credits Black feminist thinkers, particularly Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Adrienne Maree Brown, and Octavia Butler, with reframing the work of dreaming the future as both personal and collective practice.

3. Porosity: Intimacy with More-than-Human Life

• [15:32] The sense of being “porous” with land, water, and non-human life has shaped Clare’s experience since childhood, despite cultural foreclosure by white supremacy/colonialism.
  • “The practice of porousness ... started for me from a really early age ... people weren’t going to believe that ... But more recently, it’s like, this is a big part of how I move through the world.” (Eli Clare, 15:32)
• Boundary-fluidity extends from literary genre (poetry and prose merging) to gender, resisting rigid binaries in both.

4. The Violence and Limits of Categorical Systems

• [24:31-31:27] In the essay “Creating Categories,” Clare interrogates Library of Congress headings that mis-categorized his earlier book Exile and Pride—erasing self-chosen descriptors, imposing diagnosis, binary gender, and nation-state framings.
  • “Systems of categorization never exist in isolation. They’re always interlocked, they’re reinforcing each other. And that’s part of how the social control of this works.” (Eli Clare, 24:31)
• Calls for flexible, “bendy” categories or, in contexts like gender, abolishing the binary and resisting any new rigid categorization.

5. Access and Intimacy

• [36:31 – 46:43] In “Moving Close to the Ground,” Clare reflects on the intimate and tactile ways that crawling, scooting, or using alternative mobility creates different forms of access and connection to nature—beyond walking.
  • “Moving close to the ground brings me to those details in this incredibly both intimate and porous way.” (Eli Clare, 41:07)
• The concept of “access intimacy” (coined by Mia Mingus) describes the deep connections forged through access practices—sometimes joyful and smooth, sometimes awkward or incomplete.

6. Innovations in Accessible Literary Form

• [50:10 – 58:40] Clare discusses his use of “format notes”—explanatory, descriptive textual guides to the visual arrangement of poems and prose for readers using screen readers or alternative formats.
  • “Format notes are part map and part description ... meant to be a provocation to ask other people—okay, what do format notes look like?” (Eli Clare, 52:36)
• Writing format notes led Clare to revise poems, exemplifying how access work is integral to the creative process, not an afterthought.

7. Dreaming as Practice

• [58:40 – 63:39] Clare highlights “dreaming” as a teachable, collective skill.
  • “Dreaming as a skill we can teach each other ... what gets stolen away when we don’t dream? How does patriarchy and white supremacist settler colonialism benefit from our kidnapped dreams? And how can we teach each other to dream?” (Eli Clare, 59:57)
• He recalls being pushed by queer/trans BIPOC activists to imagine not just what he opposes (the “no’s”), but the affirmative “yeses” and possibilities for the future.

8. Memorable Close: “May Day 2020”

• [64:44 – 67:33] Clare reads the poem “May Day 2020”, celebrating mutual aid and the refusal to give up imagination even amidst the losses of the pandemic.
  • “We must not relinquish imagination.” (Eli Clare, 67:31)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the formation of practices:
  “There was something about writing this book that clarified those four framings, those four actions, those four ways of living as practices ... the writing itself clarified the process behind all four of those.” (Eli Clare, 07:20)
• On porosity and childhood:
  “The sense of being porous with the land, with the water, with the earth... started for me from a really early age. For a long time, I didn’t talk about it... But more recently, it’s like, this is a big part of how I move through the world.” (Eli Clare, 15:32)
• On categories:
  “We need to create categories that are flexible, that are changeable, that bend and break to match what’s being categorized rather than vice versa.” (Eli Clare, 24:31) “As a categorization system, I believe the gender binary needs to go. ... There are way too many genders in the world to easily categorize.” (Eli Clare, 24:31)
• On moving close to the ground:
  “Moving close to the ground slows me down. It makes those details, it makes the spores on the undersides of ferns and the orange newts that are hanging out in the crevices... incredibly both intimate and porous way.” (Eli Clare, 41:07)
• On “access intimacy”:
  “We need to take Mia Mingus’ wonderful coining and early work about access intimacy and develop it and deepen it. And I hope that this essay of mine does a little bit of that work.” (Eli Clare, 46:43)
• On format notes and access experiments:
  “I realized...I had written a bunch of pieces where the literal shape of the piece wasn’t necessarily accessible. ... What do format notes look like? If format is important on a page, then how do we make where the words are on the page more accessible to more readers and listeners?” (Eli Clare, 52:36)
• On dreaming as skill:
  “Dreaming as a skill we can teach each other and as a skill we can practice together.” (Eli Clare, 59:57)
• Closing poem:
  “We must not relinquish imagination.” (“May Day 2020”, Eli Clare, 67:31)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:36] Start of the interview: book summary and author introduction (skip to here)
• [04:02] Origin of Unfurl; commissioned poem and the evolution toward the book
• [07:20] The four practices described in the introduction (remembering, survival/sorrow, porosity, dreaming)
• [10:58] Eli’s conception of time; influences from disability theory and Black feminists
• [15:32] Porosity with the more-than-human world; childhood experiences and cultural barriers
• [24:31] The violence of categories; Library of Congress headings and their limits; dreaming of post-binary worlds
• [36:31] “Moving Close to the Ground”: access, intimacy, and non-walking forms of connection with nature
• [41:38] Access intimacy, Mia Mingus, and deepening the idea in disability practice
• [52:36] The invention of format notes for accessible poetry
• [58:40] Dreaming as a practice to be collectively cultivated, including healing from trauma and shifting from “no’s” to “yeses”
• [64:44] Reading of “May Day 2020”
• [67:33] Closing thanks and invitation to read Unfurl

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Tone and Language

The conversation is contemplative, generous, and intimately engaged. Both participants speak in reflective, occasionally poetic language. Clare’s tone is thoughtful, vulnerable, and activist-oriented, always returning to the idea that lived experience, community, and dreaming are practices of both survival and rebellion.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode offers a deep, accessible exploration of the philosophy and practice behind Unfurl, emphasizing that processes like memory, survival, porosity, access, and dreaming are collective, dynamic, and intertwined. Eli Clare calls listeners to question rigid systems—not just by critiquing or naming harm, but by inventing new, flexible modes of living, writing, and relating, always making space for rebellion, joy, and liberatory imagination.

Transcript

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[Eli Clare]

WA Mark welcome to the New Books Network.

[Clayton Gerard]

Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Clayton Gerard. My pronouns are he, him, and today I'm here with Eli Claire, author of Unfurl Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming. A queer disabled love song to trees and beavers, tremors and dreams, Unfurl explores the pulsing core and porous edges of survival, sorrow and dreaming. Blending poetry and creative nonfiction, emotion and activist thinking, Eli Clare invites us to unfurl ourselves into the lovely multitude of genders. Beyond the binary of woman and man, the fierceness of street protest, and the long, slow time of granite at every juncture, these poems and essays embrace porousness and the power of dreaming. Ultimately, Unfurl is an invitation to rebellion and joy. So thank you so much for joining me today, Eli, to talk about such a beautiful and exciting new book. Before we dive into the conversation, I wanted to hand it over you to introduce yourself to the listeners.

[Eli Clare]

Thank you, Cretan. I may like Claire. My pronouns are he and they. I'm speaking from Vermont, occupied unceded Abenaki territory in the Lake Champlain Basin. I'm a writer, rabbleser, camper, hiker, reader, and I'm delighted to be here talking about this. This is Actually my first public conversation about the book. So thank you for having me.

[Clayton Gerard]

Awesome. Thank you so much. I feel honored to be able to have this first public conversation about Unfurl with you. As the little intro mentioned, Unfurl is a beautiful, creative work that's both poetry and prose and brings in lots of different themes of queerness and nature and ecology and possibility that I'm excited to explore with you in our conversation. So I guess to get started, would you mind sharing a little bit about how this book came about for you?

[Eli Clare]

Right, so pre pandemic in 2017, my friend Alice Shepard, who is a disability dancer, founder of the disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light, and I were talking about the performance she and Laura Lawson and Michael Maggs were working on at the time, which was a full length evening performance of a queer, disabled, multiracial love story called Dissent. And Alice and her collaborators were working on how to create a multilayered sonic experience of descent to create access for folks who needed all sorts of non visual access to the performance. And among other things, they wanted a poem written about the Proof Woman. So Alice asked me to write a poem for Dissent that commission turned into the title poem of this collection. So it's a poem, it's a long series of almost poetry fragments called Unfurl and Invitation. And in that poetry fragments, I started working with this idea of becoming. And the idea of becoming turned into this, into this series of ideas and images and metaphors about transformation and porousness and kin. So the book really started with writing that commission and being involved with this very multilayered sonic access project partly based in Kinetics White's commitment that disability access is never an add on to art, but an integral part of disability art.

[Clayton Gerard]

Yeah, thank you for speaking to that and giving us a little background on how the book came into being. And I love how you know, just that anecdote brings to light how important community is for this topic of becoming and, you know, Unfurl as you explore it throughout the book. I'd love to start a little bit with the introduction, which seems to be a natural place to start the conversation. Your book begins with the introduction entitled A Cluster of Practices. As a way of grounding our conversation, could you share about some of these practices that you include in that introduction and why you just started to. Or why you decided to start the book off with a set of practices.

[Eli Clare]

So the introduction describes four practices that are embedded in the book. They're a practice of remembering, a practice of survival and sorrow, a practice of porousness, And a practice of dreaming. I wanted to call those four screaming practices rather than themes, to underline the process embedded in all four of them and their movement through time, through past, present, future. And truthfully, the book didn't start with those four practices. Those four practices emerge for me as practices through writing this book, which is an odd thing to say, because I've been working with memory and remembrance and remembering. I've been working with survival and sorrow. I've been thinking and living poisonous with the natural world for decades, for almost my entire life. And I've been growing into the importance of dreaming liberatory futures for the last. But there was something about writing this book that clarified those four framings, those four actions, those four ways of living as practices, that the writing itself clarified the process behind all four of those.

[Clayton Gerard]

That'S so interesting to hear about. And then also just thinking of, like, the underlying concept of unfurl that is obviously central in the book. Just how these practices, as you mentioned, were processes and things that you embodied throughout, like, multiple years. And just tying that also to this idea of becoming and how these, you know, experiences and concepts and topics aren't always, like, stable or isolated, but very fluid and developing and unfurling.

[Eli Clare]

Right. And that's part of the power of this idea of practice, that it removes remembering from some kind of static place, and it removes survival from a static place because practices are ongoing and fluid and responsive to conditions, both material and social conditions.

[Clayton Gerard]

Yeah. And that also really ties into how you talk about temporality as, like, past, present, future with a hyphen in between the words to kind of almost, like, lump them together as, like, the experience of temporality itself. And is. I just appreciate this conversation so much already because even though the book in itself is so beautiful and reading it is moving, it's also just very cool to sit with these ideas and process them and, like, speak through them and how they, you know, uncurl on their own.

[Eli Clare]

In the book, I write about time as an accordion. I write about time as a trapdoor swinging wide. I write about tangling, about time arcing, about time skipping. I really believe that time itself is fluid and bendy in a way that a white Western conception of time as linear doesn't reflect at all.

[Clayton Gerard]

Right. For sure. It's such a limited place to be to consider time and such a linear and sequential unfolding.

[Eli Clare]

I think so much of the work around Crip time or disability kind of think about Allison Caver's work and Ellen Sana's work and now Chen's work and Margaret Price's work. And like Jimmy Beatson Simon says, work around time and future and slow time and fast time. I've learned what I'm thinking through in the book about time. It's so informed by all those people and more that I just named in the book. I also think very specifically about grief time and granite time. You know, the long flowed tongue of granite.

[Clayton Gerard]

Yeah, for sure. These different scales of thinking about time really does bring in new nuances and textures to experience it, which I really appreciate.

[Eli Clare]

And another piece of the theme about time is this. This is a book that's about dreaming liberatory futures and the importance of doing that work of dreaming into the future. And I'm learning so much of this from Alexis Paulingams and Adrienne Ray Brown and Octavia Butler's work. And so a lot of this thinking about dreaming futures is work coming from black women and femmes. And I think that's really important to name. And one of the ideas from that body of work is that we're dreaming those features and dreaming those portals, but we're also working on living them right now. So it's a way that present and future again isn't linear. As bendy as a switchback trail than the accordion.

[Clayton Gerard]

Yeah, for sure. Thank you for highlighting that and spotlighting that work from the black feminist work and writing and those kinds of interventions because it's so important. And this kind of living out this freedom dreaming or liberatory dreams, as you mentioned, it really connects to how I felt moved by your practice of porosity throughout the book. That's one of the four that you mentioned in the introduction. And I think it kind of stood out to me most this first time reading. I don't know if more or different practices will stand out in subsequent readings, but I'd like to sit a little bit more with this practice of porosity, as you mention it, which you describe as like the boundaries between human and the more than human dissolving and. And also like even the format of your writing with prose and poetry blurring and blending with emotion and analysis and storytelling. And there's a real intimacy with more than human kin and life worlds throughout this book that is very like palpable almost. Could you talk about developing this practice of porosity and what it has been like to channel it in your writing that is featured in Unfurl?

[Eli Clare]

I love that question. And you ask it as if the development of horses hoarseness in my life is somehow discreet and distinct and traceable and that my Life is a kind of a cosmic joke. The great question that's just the idea that this might be distinct is just not how it's worked for me. So this practice of porousness, the sense of being porous with the land, with the water, with the earth, with all kinds of beings on this planet, started for me, started for me from a really early age. For a long time, I didn't talk about it. I didn't talk about the experience of stones and trees talking to me, partly because I knew as a kid that people weren't going to believe that. And later than the dog, it was like, oh, this. Oh, this is just not socially or culturally the white person in the U.S. acceptable. But more recently, it's like, this is a big part of Hawaii. Move through the world with this sense of being porous with the planet. And the more I talk about it, the more I hear about these experiences from a variety of people coming from a variety of communities and cultural backgrounds, past presents and futures, that I begin to believe that it's more common experience than. Than white supremacy would have us believe. So naming it as a practice, naming the practice of porousness is a thing I discovered in writing the book. But living, living those experiences have been with me for many decades now.

[Clayton Gerard]

Nice. Yeah, thank you for speaking to that. I totally agree. I think there's some kind of like, foreclosure that, like white supremacy and colonialism and capitalism and such place on what it means to exist and experience the world and be in relation with it. And I think you're really pointing us towards the different ways that these kinds of intimacies are embodied, that we take for granted or are trained out of experiencing.

[Eli Clare]

And there's an activist poet. The notion of fluidity rather than binary and rigid category has been really important for a long time, certainly in terms of genre. I came up in the mid and late 80s and early 90s when lesbian feminist Dry Inc. Was in such a place of explosion. And so many of us writers and thinking of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich and Julie Grohn and Pat Parker and Kate Russian and Christos and on and on and on. Surimaraga Glorian. So many of those writers were. Were wildly mixing genres. They weren't paying attention to genre boundaries. Thinking of Sri Moraga's writing in Spanglish, the Spanish and English being mixed wildly. And certainly Moraga is not the only way to do that. But I came up as an activist and writer with this sense of boundary fluidness in terms of genre. As a trans activist being really clear about the fluidity of gender and the violence of a rigid gender binary. Not necessarily the violence of the genders of men and women, but the violence of saying that those are the only two genders that exist. And so that sense of fluidity that I've had in a number of areas in my life has also increased the sense of porousness.

[Clayton Gerard]

Yeah, I appreciate you speaking to that. And like not only just writing and literary genres, but also just like modes of being and expressing gender or expressing just yourself. It's so important to recognize that these are all within prescribed categories that have been constructed.

[Eli Clare]

And categories in the book I wrote about categories, both at the system of organizing knowledge and that kind of system sometimes really useful. But categories also, often at the very same time, are forces of social control.

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[Clayton Gerard]

Yeah, yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up and I think that's a great segue to turn into one of these pieces that you write and unfurl. And your piece creating categories you reflect on your first book, Exile and Pride, Disability, Queerness and Liberation and how it was titled or not titled, how it was categorized after its publication with headings like Cerebral Palsied Women, Political Activists, and United States. And in that piece of creating categories, you kind of explain why these headings that your book was categorized under weren't necessarily resonating with what the book was truly about and thus kind of creates this disjuncture between what you're speaking to in the book and the way the book is presented as in an organizational framework of, say, a library. Could you tell us a little bit about how your confronting these categories in your writing and specifically in the face of, like, the multiplicities and fluidity of, you know, experiences like gender or even, you know, geographical borders and such. And then also how might we think about categories and like, creating categories differently?

[Eli Clare]

Right, right. So the three categories you named are all Library Congress subject headings. So the essay uses the three Library of Congress subject headings to think more broadly about categories and how categories are shaped and how categories are used and forces of central control. Library of Congress might sound like a really innocuous place to start, but it was really useful to dig into this categorization system that got exiled, pride, wrong, and some really significant ways that a diagnosis I live with, cerebral palsy, gets turned into an adjective and my self chosen descriptor of disabled gets dropped out of it. By using a diagnosis, the Library of Congress hands authority over to the nada grandeur complex. So it's one of the moves that systems of categorization makes are relying on other systems of power to do the definitional work of taking the power of defining ourselves away from us and hand it to various kinds of systems of power. To call me a woman, a woman political activist, is to place my work within the gender binary. Again, tangling the Library of Congress system of categorization with the gender binary. Part of the point of this exercise of looking at the Library of Congress was to look at how these systems of categorization never exist in isolation. They're always interlocked, they're reinforcing each other. And that's part of how the social control of this works. So many of the categories we create are rigid enough that we're bending what we categorize to fit into those boxes, rather than bending the boxes to fit what is being categorized. So one of the things I think we can do as we think of when is categorizing useful, is to recognize that every category we create, something will be left out, something will exist in the zones between categories. And so we need to create categories that are flexible, that are changeable, that bend and break to match what's being categorized rather than vice versa. I also believe that there are times and spaces where we just need to leave the categorization systems behind as we expand gender. And this. It's a really difficult time to be talking about this, right in this time of rising fascism in the US where trans people are one, trans and non binary and gender non conforming people are among the many groups of people being targeted by this rising fascism. But as a categorization system, I believe the gender binary needs to go. We just need to toss it out, needs to be gone. Not the genders of women and men. Those are two of this incredible universe of genders. But as we toss the gender binary out, and I think that's both a future dream and the present reality that some of us are living some of the time in some places, like a Taputo, that already exists as we start living this possibility of a world without the gender. But I don't think we ought to try to create another categorization system because I think there are way too many genders in the world to easily categorize. I think it's a place where I envision us living without a gender categorization system, which are different from thing we ought to live without genders and not say that some of us, some of us want to live without genders, but some of us do. And it's interesting to dream about a world that has a universe of genders but no gender categorization system.

[Clayton Gerard]

Yeah, I really appreciate that and kind of where you're pulling us to think about what can be existed or what can be expressed and embodied outside of these categories that are so rigid and very limiting. Because, you know, kind of as we started this conversation, it's all a process of becoming an unfurling and a process. And that seems to be counterintuitive to a lot of these categorical structures. And it really brings your point home of questioning what the categories are meant to do in the first place.

[Eli Clare]

Right, because right behind a lot of the categories, right behind the naming the United States where exile and pride lives, you know, of reaffirming the nation state rather than the indigenous land that is important to exfound pride or the bioregion or the watershed, there are lots of geographical ways to locate a book and nation state. The only one of them I'm locating books only by nation state strengthens settler colonial borders, for instance. So, yes, where I was going is right behind the categories are these systems of power that wreak havoc in our lives, that wreak Havoc in lots and lots of ways. The nation state and settler colonialism and white supremacy, who, for instance, are still the driving forces behind deportation and kidnapping of people assumed to be immigrants, whether they're immigrants or not. And I want to use the word kidnapping for specific reasons, but the point I want to make is right behind these categories are systems of power that have so much. Create so much material and social damage.

[Clayton Gerard]

Right, yeah. Thank you for speaking to that and really calling that out, because it is a very intense moment that we're in where we're seeing these categories utilized for the explicit purpose of social control. And, like, regimes of oppression and authoritarianism.

[Eli Clare]

And the categories edge again and again into who's human or who's seen as human and who's seen it less than human. I mean, again and again, we're seeing that who's valuable enough to have health care, for instance, and who's not. Who can we declare not worthy of having a house, having a place to live? I mean, that line between who's seen as a person and who's not is really intense right now.

[Clayton Gerard]

Yeah, thank you for speaking to that and really highlighting that. I wholeheartedly agree. And I also want to kind of think a little bit more about what you're doing throughout the book of Unfurl because. Because you have such, like, powerful critiques, but then you also open up these really generative spaces of exploration and dreaming and also grief. And one of the really moving essays that really resonated with me was a prose piece that is called Moving Close to the Ground, A Messy Love Song, which you write in such a beautiful way, but with topics that, like, I haven't really read about before or, like, seeing people explore very much. And at one point you write, quote, neither a protest against ableism nor a performance of disability. Moving close to the ground offers me many possibilities and connections and end quote. So I just wanted to kind of sit with that a little bit and talk with you about how, you know, there are these, like, really heavy and really imposing authoritative regimes of oppression and such. But there are also ways that we can reconnect to what's around us, and we can imagine and practice other ways of doing things in more intimate and accessible ways that really give us insights into a different way of living. So can you talk about how you explore in this essay of moving close to the ground, these topics of access and intimacy with the world by the simple, you know, entry point of, like, what's it like moving close to the ground and not just walking or assuming that Everybody is always walking or everybody should walk.

[Eli Clare]

So thank you so much. Like our work, or at least my work right now, is one part naming the power regimes, and the second part is pivoting away from those regimes. Naming and naming connection, naming conscience, naming grief, naming drawing, naming rebellion, naming, naming the worlds we want to live in. Right. So moving close to the ground is this exploration of my lifelong use of crawling and scooting and crab walking as ways of mobility. My I'm Milwaukee walkie and disability community is a word that describes those of us who walk rather than roll. But it's not intended as a binary because in disability communities we know that there are a thousand ways to roll and a thousand ways to walk, and none of us do both. But wallkie as a word is used to call out a privileged mode of mobility that many of us, particularly many non disabled people, take completely for granted. And therefore it becomes invisible in the way that the air we breathe is invisible. So I have as a walkie who is not very steady at the very best, my balance is always precarious. And so from the moment I started to walk, I've also used crawling and scooting and crab walking, particularly in the natural world, particularly when I'm hiking and I encounter something that where walking is just not going to work for me. And so this essay really talks, really explores these modes of moving close to the ground and was inspired part by an endnote and a review that Alison Kafer wrote about the film Fixed. And in the end note, she really challenges us to explore other modes of mobility beyond walking and rolling. And then the essay I specifically punctuated with descriptions of moving close to the ground to catch the sensory details, to catch the intimacy I have with mushrooms with pine needles, with the glacier lines in gramite and schist with icicles hanging from the tips of eastern red cedar branches. Moving close to the ground slows me down. It makes those details, it makes the spores on the undersides of ferns and the orange newts that are hanging out in the crevices of fern, they bring. Moving close to the ground brings me to those details in this incredibly both intimate and porous way. There's that word again. And what's my next thought here? Well, I think I'll stop here. You. You may have another question that will help me with that and.

[Clayton Gerard]

Well, yeah, I really appreciate what you were saying and it. I also want to note that throughout the piece you bring up like specific vignettes of being in different locations and geographic spaces and landscapes and how, you know, that kind of. You're bringing and weaving together these concepts of access and intimacy. And I'm trying to remember the name of who initially coined access intimacy.

[Eli Clare]

So. Mia Mingus.

[Clayton Gerard]

Mia Mingus.

[Eli Clare]

Named Access and smoothy. So dropping down to the ground when I'm hiking on a trail that's steep, when I'm near an edge that I feel like I might fall over, when I need to cross a stream that most people would border, hop across, or walk on a narrow bridge without handrails, or when I need to cross a tangle of driftwood to get onto a beach, dropping down onto my butt. So lowering my center of gravity. The way of creating access. It's an access move. It's a move for a lot of other things too, but one of them is that it's an access move. It creates more access for me. This. I also wrote about hiking with my longtime partner, Samuel Lurie. And he and I have hiked together dozens and dozens and dozens of times, probably a hundred times at this point in the last 25 years. And he. So he had a very visceral sense of my rhythm and pace and when I might need a third point of contact when I'm walking and when I just need a third point of contact. And he will often extend his hand to me without saying anything, just extend his hand to me and. Or take it. And some of those times I'm reluctant to take it because of internalized ableism. But in the taking of his hand, I often feel both mentally and emotionally really close to him. Sometimes this. Depending on where we're hiking, sometimes this will be five or ten minutes that we're holding hands, or I'm holding his wrist and we're walking in sync. Sometimes. Sometimes he's ahead of me, sometimes he's at my side, Sometimes he's walking backwards to support me. So it's very slow and it's very intimate. And we have a. We've done this long enough that much of this can be nonverbal between or non speaking between us. There's a lot of communication happening, but it's often largely non speaking. And so this huge level of intimacy created through this access work. And me and Mingus so beautifully, about a decade ago, described those dynamics as access intimacy. And what I very much believe is that we need to develop what access intimacy means, that there's more definition of work to do, there's more work to do about what's the whole range of access experiences of access intimacy. When is access intimacy really lovely and easy? When is it awkward as hell. Because sometimes access intimacy isn't easy, isn't smooth, is a lot of work. Sometimes it's awkward for a while, sometimes it's embarrassing, and then the embarrassment slides away into something else. Sometimes there's these intense access intimacy that work for a while but then move in the other direction and kind of fall apart and need something else. Where access is building something important, but it's not building more intimacy. I think we need to take Mia Mingus has wonderful coining and early work about access intimacy and develop it and deepen it. And I hope that this essay of mine does a little bit of that work.

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[Clayton Gerard]

Yeah, I can at least say from my end, I really found it valuable in that regard to recognize like access into me intimacy as like a starting point to unfurl a lot of these considerations. Because it's not just the intimacy of like access needs or practices, but also the like access that can be created through intimacy and the like vice versa. Like it's always going back and forth and it really plays into what you're emphasizing throughout this book of just like the process of becoming and how these relationships and practices of care that you describe with your partner when you go hiking. Like that doesn't fit into an easily categorized care practice that can be in like an insurance code or something. For health insurance, it's a very like fluid thing that just becomes as you know, it unfurls. So I really appreciate what you're gesturing towards and like, compelling us to really dig into deeper.

[Eli Clare]

So as we name access, I want to say that in the book, I consider access as a fifth process and the fifth practice. So in the introduction, I verified the four practices we talked about earlier. And then kind of part two of the introduction, I talk about access practices. Again, I use the word practice because access is an attract list that happens once. Access is an ongoing process, an ongoing practice. Access is also so incredibly relational, which is one of the brilliant things about Mia Mingus original work on Access Intimacy is she's really thinking about access in a relational way.

[Clayton Gerard]

Yeah, I so appreciate that. And also how you kind of circle back to a bit of the structuring of the book, which I wanted to specifically speak about how you structure different access practices or, you know, attempts to make things more accessible, specifically, since you incorporate more creative writing and poetry as well as, like, prose and more analytical writing as well. So. And that really embodies, like, this practice of care that you try to model in your book through, you know, accessible language or even, like, format notes. And I wanted to kind of give you a chance to reflect on how you developed these different things in that are features in the book to make it more accessible. And also kind of how we mentioned at the beginning how accessibility can also influence the art and, like, be part of the art practice and the artistic expression. And I guess as like, an example from my experience as a reader, I felt so much more appreciation for the poems having the different format notes that you include, because poetry is not something that, like, comes naturally to me if anything comes quote, unquote, naturally. But I've struggled a lot more with poetry and, like, having the format notes to be more accessible entry points into the poetry was such a different reading experience. And for example, you have a poem called Pawn Speaks. And in the format note, you mentioned that the italicization that you use in the poem for different lines can be thought of as, like, the words being the pond, quote unquote, celebrating light. And like, the light reflections that can happen on the surface of the water. And I just thought that was so beautiful and such an interesting way to really frame experiencing poetry with a more accessible entry point. So I wanted to give you the opportunity to reflect on any of those pieces that you incorporated in your book and how that might have influenced, you know, your creative expression that ended up being included.

[Eli Clare]

Right. So thank you. So what the hell are format notes? Some of the listeners are going to be like, what the how is a format note? The format notes are an access feature that I include with some of the pieces in the book that use the page in ways that some readers won't have access to by virtue of maybe you're using a screen reader to read the book, or maybe you're someone who's low vision and you track all the words you need to read by using the left margin. There are a variety of ways that text that's not hanging on the left margin might not be accessible and we don't need to know why. That's one of the things about access practices. We don't need to know why people use different modes into a piece of writing. We don't need to know the why and all. But in Unfurl, there are a variety of pieces that use the page in ways that might not be accessible. There parts of poems that hang on the right margin. There are several poems that are two column poems. There's a poem that's a three column poem. There's a poem that the shape of the poem mirrors the shape of the sugar maple. There's another poem that mirrors that attempts to appear like a mirror. I realized at some point as we were beginning to produce the book that I had written a bunch of pieces where the literal shape of the piece wasn't necessarily accessible. And so out of conversations with more than a half dozen people, again the communal nature of working on access through benchmark conversation, this idea of format notes arose. So format notes are part map and part description of the shapes and pieces that don't necessarily always use the left hand margin. And then writing those format notes and passing them by several people who were users of screen readers or users of magnification to read text. What they heard is partly we want to know where words are on a page, yes, but we also want to know how that Napoleon connects to what the poem is about. So hence I started writing format notes that included lines like the one you just quoted, Clayton. So the format nodes are an access experiment. I've never actually ever seen format nodes of this nature in the book of poems. None of the people I worked with had ever seen format notes. I don't want to suggest that this is a first, like claiming a first is risky. I don't care if it's a first, but there's an underdeveloped at least experiment and access. So the format notes are an experiment and access. All the ways they fail, and I'm sure they fail in a bunch of ways, are my responsibility Rather than the collective responsibility. This group of people I work with, all the failures are mine and mine alone. They're also meant to be a provocation to ask other people to like, okay, what do format notes look like? If format is important on a page, then how do we make where the words are on the page more accessible to more readers and listeners? And in writing the format notes, I learned so much about the poems I had been working on and in a number of cases, went back and rewrote parts of poems because of what I was learning as I was writing the format notes, which is the perfect example of how disability art embeds access and how access embeds the art, that it's this mutual emoji directional relationship.

[Clayton Gerard]

Yeah, I love that. And thank you for speaking to that. And as we're, like, slowly wrapping up this conversation, I want to kind of turn towards one of the pieces that we highlighted in the beginning and want to circle back before we end. And that's kind of the dreaming aspect. That's one of the key words in your subtitle. And, you know, you talk about kind of how the practice of dreaming and those kinds of things have been influenced by your introduction to the work of, like, queer and black feminist writing and those different areas of activism and such. And I wanted to kind of ask you about leaning into dreaming as more of a activist, survivor, poet, you know, place that you call yourself. And one of the things that I wanted to include is a quote that you say in your essay on learning to dream, quote, dreams beckon us. Reach into the past, present, future. Unfurl the flamboyant and improbable. Reveal the essence. End quote. So would you be willing to spend a little bit more time talking about, you know, dreaming and how we can lean into that and what, you know, dreaming might hold for us?

[Eli Clare]

Right. So I think one of the real core things of this book, things seeing the book, is dreaming as a skill we can teach each other and as a skill we can practice together. So I think there's a way in which dreaming gets talked about as something we either have or we don't have. We don't think of it as a skill, and we don't think of it as a skill that is teachable and practicable. And so the book really makes this claim that it is a skill we can teach each other. And I got to that by knowing I needed to write about my experience as a survivor of really significant childhood violence. And they're not going to be any details of that. Violence here. But one of the impacts of that violence is I didn't have a very active dream life for a long, long time until I was about 35. I had some recurrent nightmares, but I didn't have a very active dream life. And through working on that violence, working on the impacts that that violence had on my life, I started having a really common, ordinary dream life in my mid-30s. And I think that experience of coming into a dream life has made me just more aware of its importance. It's the way it grounds me, what it gives me. And then in the last 20 years, I feel like I've been pushed really hard by a number of queer and trans bipoc activists to dream about the future. What are my dreams of the future? And for a long time, all my dreams were in the negative. I dreamt of an end to violence, I dreamt of an end to shame. I dreamt of an end to war. But it was no, no, no, no. My dreams were about these nos. And this whole cohort of queer trans bipoc activists kept telling me in a number of ways, what are your yeses? What yeses do you dream about? And so that's a. Learning to dream is really an exploration of how do we learn to dream? What gets stolen away when we don't dream? How does patriarchy and white supremacist settler colonialism benefit from our kidnapped greens? And how can we teach each other to dream?

[Clayton Gerard]

Yeah, I love that. Thank you for speaking to that. And really underlining the importance of dreaming that can often be taken for granted or just shaken off as not something that's consequential. But like, there is so much value and importance in, like leaning into this aspect of being and experience.

[Eli Clare]

Right. I wonder if we could end with a poem.

[Clayton Gerard]

Yes, of course.

[Eli Clare]

So I am trying to find it because I didn't know this is going to happen. This is a poem called May Day 2020, and it's about the importance of imagination and in turn, the importance of dreaming. Unless you have a poem you would rather end with. Clayton, do you have something?

[Clayton Gerard]

No, Go for it. I would love to hear this, especially as it's been prompted to you in this moment.

[Eli Clare]

So it's got Mayday 2020. So written during the early, early pandemic yesterday on the phone, longing looped through your words. I cannot imagine a world without capitalism. My heart lurched. I wanted to draw, quote, Carl Marks curl into a hollowed out redwood stump. In this time of epidemics, our doors closed, windows open as we ward off virus and Worry about death. Let us turn off the news. Funeral is doubling every three days. We who sing from balconies and play klezmer music on front stoops. We who check in every day over text phone, Zoom, Skype, Facebook, FaceTime. How are your lungs? Can you make rent this month? Did you lose your job today? Are you hungry right now? Do you have enough insulin, estrogen, Prozac, Klonitin, blood pressure meds? We who drive across town to deliver sartines, fresh kale, chicken soup, half bottle, the Tylenol, the last box of face masks to ex lovers and best friends. We who have always shared everything we had. We who keep each other alive. We who will be turned away from. We who will be turned away from emergency rooms. We who will be turned away from emergency rooms and denied ventilators. We who will never go to the hospital. We who will die and we who will live. Wall street crashing, cruise ships docked. World Bank. World bank panicked renters and Amazon workers striking. It is time. It is time. It is time to listen to our grief and soothe our jangle nerves. We must not relinquish imagination.

[Clayton Gerard]

Thank you. That's so beautiful to just listen to and experience with you. I love that so much and it's such a perfect place to wrap up today. Thank you so much for joining me, Eli, Claire and to the listeners, feel free or please pick up Unfurl as it has come out and and thank you so much for joining me.

[Eli Clare]

Thank you for having me.

[Clayton Gerard]

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[Clayton Gerard]

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[Eli Clare]

Com.