interviews
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Notes From a Time Traveller! Belgium, from the early 1980s to the late 1990s.The classroom moved too fast for the girl near the window. When numbers flooded the blackboard, she could not hold onto them. Instructions arrived layered upon instructions: divide, copy, listen, hurry. A race she already knew she could not win. Fluorescent lights…
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Wandering in early-morning thought, I began to ponder this little musing. We have become sloppy and careless.We have lost the skill to understand poetry,or even to stay with what we are reading and hearing. We speak without thought.We build strong bodies, cultivate minds, and learn to understand our emotions…But where is eloquent language?In what writing…
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A few months ago, I wrote a paper for uni on how the same crime is punished differently by gender. Reading a recent news article about a young woman punished for using a weapon in self-defence reignited that fire. Innocence is spoken of as purity. But why do so many women’s[1] stories begin at the…
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The Lady of the Lake Speaks Her wisdom does not allow imperial-minded restriction,where fear destroys what it cannot control,and then calls the ruin protection. To speak of autism is not a story from the Book of Invasion.But a plea to the folk, to educate themselves, to loosen their grip on old beliefs that turn naming…
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What if “disorder” was only the world’s narrow word for evolution? What is magic in a world bound by the laws of the ordinary mind?It is the colour hidden beneath the black-and-white veil, the secret song smothered by the fear of the unknown. They silence the flowering ones, for they mistake bloom for danger, and…
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Every age needs a monster to chase. In medieval times, it was witches who were marked and burned, as if fear could be turned to ash. In the twentieth century, it was communists, with lists and sweeps that promised safety and delivered suspicion. And now, in the twenty-first century, the sweep is for autism. Presidents…
Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens 