Almost as if she responds in keeping with the subject of her essay on muteness, Denise Noe’s e-mailed answers aren’t long. One thing I can sense, though, even through the many miles that separates my home in the desert Southwest, is her eagerness to be heard, especially about being paid for her work. “Every little bit helps,” Noe writes frankly. “I can’t earn a living...I need the help.”
Monetary benefits aren’t the only ones she got from “The Mute Speak”, one of the few essays included in the “Dozen” anthology of work from disability arts magazine“Breath and Shadow’’s first twelve years. “{Silence being broken} was something I really wanted to write about.” She added “Getting paid for writing helps me feel, psychologically, that my work has value.”
She describes herself as having an “invisible” disability that makes it hard to explain why she can’t cook or drive a car.In contrast, the disabilities of the people she profiles, such as physicist Stephen Hawking,Irish poet and memoirist Christopher Nolan and writer and institution survivor Ruth Sienkiewicz Mercer are profound enough to make fighting to express themselves the work of a lifetime. Noe does not shy away from assistive technological advantages(Hawking’s communications device and software,Nolan’s comparatively low-tech head-pointer that he nicknamed his “unicorn stick”) or in Mercer’s case, the profound social changes from the disability rights movement that helped her former teacher realize Ruth had a story to tell.
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