All My Broken Dishes: Being Hemiplegic in a Bilateral World
All My Broken Dishes: Being Hemiplegic in a Bilateral World is a hybrid novel that explores what it means to live in a world built for symmetry after a traumatic brain injury left the narrator hemiplegic. Blending autofiction and lyric essay, the book rejects conventional narrative arcs in favor of a fragmented, multimodal form that mirrors the nonlinear process of recovery and reassembly. Through vignettes, quirky vocabulary lessons, philosophical digressions, and imagined dialogues, the narrator grapples with memory, desire, motherhood, rage, and the cultural expectations of rehabilitation. At once intimate and politically sharp, All My Broken Dishes is a story of survival and subversion in a world obsessed with normalcy.
Almost Unimaginable
Almost Unimaginable blends autofiction, memoir, journal entries, and public newspaper columns to follow Kay Richardson, a poet and mother rebuilding her life after a traumatic brain injury leaves her hemiplegic. At the heart of the book is her decades-long friendship with Ben, a brilliant, sharp-tongued engineer who uses a wheelchair and refuses sentimentality. Through their banter, late-night confessions, and shared mischief, Kay confronts love, rage, ableism, and the cultural myths of “recovery.” Almost Unimaginable is both a portrait of survival and a manifesto for living unapologetically while disabled. In this mixed-media novel, we witness Kay’s journey through joy and abuse, wonder and loneliness, life and death, and even psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. We witness her life, which is almost unimaginable.
I Don’t Exaggerate When I Say Poetry Saved My Life
I Don’t Exaggerate When I Say Poetry Saved My Life is a memoir of survival, self-discovery, and the unexpected paths that shape a life. After surviving an automobile accident that claimed the lives of two close friends, the author searches for meaning in her survival with a traumatic brain injury. She details her struggles navigating university life and her discovery of poetry, which set her on a new path. She joins the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan, hoping service will answer the question of why she lived—but when that chapter ends, she accepts a teaching job in Egypt, where she meets her future husband. Through marriage, cross-cultural life, and the ongoing challenges of disability, poetry becomes her anchor and her means of making sense of the world. Weaving personal narrative with reflections on craft, the memoir reveals how art, love, and resilience can remake a life that at first seemed too much to bear.