From the Lighthouse Archives: Disability Pride

At Lighthouse we livestream and record nearly all our events, one of the reasons being that we want the wisdom shared and questions asked to move beyond one moment and one room, to bring enjoyment and learning to folks where they are and where they are able to access it.

Welcome to the Lighthouse archive, a semi-regular blog series exploring past events, lists, articles and resources, using something that’s currently on our minds as a starting point - bringing beloved books and authors back into the spotlight.

July is Disability Pride Month and we've gone through the website picking up much loved bits to celebrate. The conversations, written pieces and authors featured here all offer ways of looking at the world with more of us in mind - visions to work hard for and make real every day in every way we can.

For last year's Book Fringe Polly Atkin joined us to talk about her book Some of Us Just Fall, on nature and chronic illness.

If fiction is what your heart desires, check out our recorded launch event for Hell Sans by Ever Dundas, a novel that satirizes the way the state treats disabled folks.

For the Radical Book Fair 2021, organisers Zoe M Bouhassira and Nish Doshi talked about disability in social justice organising. Here's Organising for a Planet on Fire

Here's a conversation about feminism and disability with Louise Kenward, Laura Elliott & Five Leaves Bookshop. It was the second part in a three-night launch of the excellent collection Disturbing the Body

Back to fiction, we of course have to mention our celebration of The Coward by Jarred McGinnis with the author and AL Kennedy. The Coward is a phenomenal, darkly humorous debut novel about masculinity, family, disability and love.

In the list below, you'll find books by authors mentioned above along with some of our favourite books exploring disability justice. For more books by disabled authors, do check out this blog by writer and activist Pippa Stacey on celebrating disabled and chronically ill voices.

Lastly, this seems like a perfect opportunity to once more highlight our stance on masks, and why we continue to ask everyone to wear them at events. Several cases of COVID have popped up in the extended Lighthouse gang in the last few weeks, a reminder that what seems like an inconvenience or a blast from a socially distanced past for some, remains a real and serious risk for so many others. We are here for everyone, and this is one way in which we protect our community.