“Through writing we have an opportunity to communicate an experience”
An interview with Charlotte Heather
Since March 2020, Charlotte Heather has run the remote body, a series of writing workshops that center and prioritize chronically ill and disabled folks. In addition to their work with the remote body, Heather is a writer who explores illness and queerness through poetry and fiction.
I first encountered Heather’s work through their short-lived (but amazing) food- and grocery-themed newsletter engross, and when I realized they were disabled it was just the latest dot connected in the wonderful, close-knit, almost-too-small disability arts and literature community. I was delighted to get to interview Heather about their writing, the remote body, and sick/disabled community.
When you first announced the remote body, you wrote that while it stemmed from the stress and isolation of the pandemic, it was intended to continue beyond that “knowing firsthand that isolation is an everyday reality for many — especially in the crip, sick & disabled communities.” Can you talk a bit more about the development of and inspiration behind the remote body? Is it something you’ve had in mind for a while?
At the start of the pandemic there were a lot of online events, which was great, some with more emphasis on accessibility than others, but talking to friends who, like myself, often find it hard to get out to gigs or exhibits or poetry readings for various reasons, there was a lot of pessimism as to whether this newfound accessibility would continue beyond the pandemic. We are not beyond the pandemic, but in the UK the shift back to in-person events has eclipsed those online. I’m not begrudging people for wanting that in-person experience, and I run IRL workshops too, but it feels pretty emblematic of attitudes toward accessibility.
Ever Cassandra-like, it seems, the chronically ill and disabled community predicted this (and so much of what has happened over the pandemic), so it was important to have online events put on by people in the community predominantly for the community if it was to last.
It’s pretty clear that the remote body is much more than just a series of writing workshops, and many of your materials reference the project’s work to foster community. What do you see as the role of writing and art in building community?
Someone could probably write a whole thesis on this, but I’ll be brief! Through making art or through writing we have an opportunity to communicate an experience, and I think those different approaches to communication can be a big part of community building, both in the “finished” work put out and often in the process, in having space where we discuss and share — through writing workshops I have found a great deal of community throughout my life and exploring writing around illness and disability has helped me to feel valid when wider society has invalidated my experiences.
It’s important for me that other people use and benefit from the platform, and that it’s not “mine” in a sense. Amazing people have been involved over the past year and a half, running book clubs, events, and doing live captioning — all for free.
On the topic of community, you’re currently collaborating with the resting up collective and previously partnered with SICK magazine (among others) for some workshops. The disability arts and literature space feels quite small to me at times, but I suppose the flip side of that is that it has always felt really close-knit. How did these partnerships come together?
I think the seeds of some of the relationships had started to sprout through Rita Munus, a collaborative project founded by myself and artist Sop, which was the first time I was getting stuck into working in the chronically ill and disabled community as a workshop facilitator.
With the resting up collab, I’d been in a writing workshop previously with member Lucia Osborne-Crowley and that’s how I first started hearing about the project. the remote body had provided the Zoom and platform for a few workshops with other members, too, and so the group approached me to work together on the series and I, of course, said yes.
I feel a bit like collaborations breed more and more collaborations, and I love to collaborate: it’s a way of working and making that brings me a lot of happiness — and community.
I’d love to hear more about your pre-remote body workshop days with Rita Munus and elsewhere. How did you first get involved in teaching and workshop facilitation?
When I moved to London I did some workshop facilitation for students and had been part of various facilitation/workshop and community events throughout university in Liverpool. It didn’t really solidify until I started volunteering at DIY Space for London, where I put on my own series of writing workshops and events, and then it grew from there and with Sop through Rita Munus. So that’s about an eight-year time frame, I think. My time at DIY Space really changed my perception of what one can and can’t do, I thought — I want to run workshops, so I will!
They let me use the space and my workshop practice was born. I got to work with a few different organizations that really helped bolster my confidence and my practice which led to me teaching alongside my workshop practice. It’s been a weird thing that feels like it moved infinitesimally across ten years but with hindsight I can see the major things for what they were, having space to explore at DIY Space, co-founding Rita Munus with Sop, becoming a writing teacher, starting the remote body, and now here we are.
Of course, in addition to teaching and facilitating workshops, you’re also a writer. What’s the relationship between your teaching/workshop facilitation and your own writing? Do these two practices feed each other or feel more separate?
They hugely feed into each other, it’s a cliche perhaps but through teaching I learn a lot because people always ask interesting questions that make you think about your own practice. Often my workshops are concerned with things that I’m especially interested in with regards to my own writing, so at the moment I’m putting together a workshop on narrative shapes that aren’t the conventional “arc” we hear so much about, because that’s something I am exploring in my own writing, I think is fascinating, and I want to share with others — and I don’t doubt that participants in this workshop will discuss things that open up the subject even more, helping to feed into my own ideas (without me stealing anything from them of course!).
So have you always been a writer?
Honestly, I always liked reading but I wanted to be an illustrator. When I was seventeen I did really badly at art in my A Levels because, well, I was seventeen and I was busy with other things that British seventeen-year-olds do, like drinking in the park. I had a boyfriend who was a couple of years older and I was obsessed with, who is now an incredibly talented illustrator, but he was going through some stuff and took it out on me saying I couldn’t be an illustrator — I think he told me I couldn’t draw faces or something — and that I should go study creative writing.
Well, I did, people pleaser that I was, and turned out I loved writing. For me and my ME/CFS, it’s an accessible practice — you don’t need expensive things to write, if I have low energy I can do it from bed, if I am very sick then I rarely write because of the brain fog but sometimes writing in that state can be quite interesting, particularly poetry, in terms of the weird things that can be drafted when the brain finds it very hard to grasp words. It’s a bit like the old “write drunk, edit sober” adage, except my drunkness is just extreme fatigue. Not to say people should write/make work during a big flare!
I suppose the other thing that really drew me to writing is the ability to communicate, I’ve historically been a very bad communicator, I was incredibly shy and I still am though I hide it well most of the time, and I’m hugely conflict-avoidant. Writing is a place where I can think about the words I use carefully, think about what I want to say, and communicate different things to the world that I find very difficult to explain or talk about in other mediums.
Your work tends to explore themes of queerness and chronic illness. How does writing help you process life with multiple marginalized identities?
Writing gives me a voice when I don’t always feel like I have one, even if only I see what I’ve written it takes on a new reality, legitimizes feelings. I often feel like I’m not enough of something to claim it as part of my reality, e.g., I’m not sick enough, I’m not disabled enough, I’m not queer enough, I’m not non-binary enough — big imposter energy, and writing helps me process that. It allows me to see myself as one of a kind of canon of queer writers, of disabled writers, of GNC writers, of sick writers, and that is very helpful for me. When work is then published, it can be helpful for me to situate myself and occasionally to send to others, family, and so on, to give them an insight into my experience if I haven’t been communicating it to them clearly. It’s not a very direct or perhaps healthy approach, but sometimes a poem or a short story can illustrate the truth of a situation better than the actual facts can.
You mentioned that writing itself is a fairly accessible practice to you, which is something I (and probably many other sick and disabled creatives) can really relate to. Of course (and unfortunately), writing communities and events are not always so disability-friendly. What kinds of things make writing communities, events, or education inaccessible to you?
With events, it’s often a combination of traveling there, not being sure what the seating situation will be like and the cost — knowing there’s a big chance I won’t be able to make it on the day because of health issues makes paying for events very sticky for me. I’ve wasted a lot of money just this year buying tickets for things and then not being able to go! I don’t know exactly what the solution to this would look like but it would be great if more events had a live streaming option if feasible.
There’s also my ability to commit to things regularly; writing workshops can be difficult if there’s an expectation that I’ll be there every two weeks as I don’t know how I’ll be, and so feeling like [with the remote body] it’s acceptable, encouraged even, to bow out and rest from time to time is really important.
What have you learned — about accessibility, community, or yourself — from your experience starting and managing the remote body? Is there anything you look back on and wish you had done differently?
Oh, there’s probably so much I would do differently. I don’t know if I’ve ever thought something could be “fully accessible” but I’ve definitely learned a lot about how accessibility takes a flexible and proactive approach from organizers.
And I’m always learning about accessibility, and always will be, because I don’t believe it’s a fixed point but a shifting thing — though there are basics that are fixed that event organizers should have down, of course. In the first iterations of events on the remote body, I got carried away, as I often do. I bit off more than I could chew while my capacity was higher and then my capacity dipped and it all felt a bit chaotic. Our first Zoom got infiltrated by internet trolls, too, so that wasn’t a great time.
All of this has given me some hard lessons in organizing, in managing one’s time, and in my own limitations not just as a sick/disabled person but in terms of what I can provide. Something I’m still working on and trying to figure out is working with closed captions on no budget. We pay for an external auto-captioning service on Zoom, but frankly it’s not good enough; but we don’t have the budget for a person to live caption and so how do we do better? I’m not sure but I’m working on it, and I think that transparency is also important — not as an excuse for accessibility shortcomings, but to be part of the conversation to learn how to improve and hold space for suggestions and constructive criticism.
Do you have any advice for people interested in starting their own workshops?
Do it! Try not to feel like an imposter, you likely have something interesting and important to share, teach or explore within a workshop context. Think about your timings, allow space for discussion to go on, and have extra activities tucked away in case participants are more quiet than you expected. Give people space to talk but don’t force people to do things they don’t want to (obviously!). Talk the format through with someone. Think about breaks, the comfort of your participants, and accessibility, of course. Talk to your participants beforehand about their needs and see how you can make the space as comfortable for them as you can, e.g., if it’s on Zoom, make it clear that people can go off camera if they need to.
For folks who might be interested in teaching with the remote body or organizations who might want to work with you, what kinds of things do you look for in a workshop proposal?
The platform is there to hopefully be used by people who are facing barriers to getting workshops off the ground, and I’m keen to help and support people with their ideas, and so we really encourage proposals from people with intersecting marginalized identities (class, race, gender, etc.) and those facing barriers to their workshop practice. There’s no ideal kind of proposal but I would avoid proposing something similar to what we’ve done before. If the idea you have feels too experimental, complex, or plain weird, I want to hear about it!
It’s been great to watch the remote body grow these past couple of years. What’s coming up for the project in 2022?
Our program for next year will include a series of workshops from Catriona Morton of Life Continues After, I will be doing some standalone workshops on Sundays alongside a host of other great practitioners. There are going to be workshops on narrative shape, manifesto writing, crip time in fiction and portraying liminality.
Want to keep up to date with the remote body or register for a workshop? Follow the remote body on instagram and head over to the project’s website.
And, for more from Charlotte, check out their writing in Spam, Hotel, and New Gothic Review.
