Divergent Design: Its Roots in DeafSpace
Plus: updates chez Davis-Rose (cw: cancer) || from cheery resilience to weary resilience, and some flailing about regarding disabled activism || upcoming courses
Tickets go on sale soon for several of my most popular/requested workshops: Starting a Substack ($10, tickets go on sale tomorrow!), Neuroqueering Shame in our Creative Lives ($20), and Creating in Spiral Time($20, or both for $36). Sign up to the interest list and we will notify you when tickets go on sale. For more information on these courses, see below.
So yeah, I’m struggling a bit.
I’m not down bad, exactly, but I do feel like I’ve moved from cheery resilience to weary resilience. Still plugging along, one foot in front of the other, still seeking—and finding—joy and pleasure in making and the balm of loved ones and community.
But we’re tired over here. A couple weeks ago Joel was diagnosed with prostate cance—this is in addition to, and actually unrelated to, the kidney cancer he had surgery for at the end of January. We are now facing another surgery for Joel in June, the fifth between us in two years. We have lots of support, and (for now) decent insurance … but still, it’s a LOT.
And then there’s, you know, fascism. As I’m writing this, people are being disappeared off the streets by thugs without ID and without warrants, and shipped off to foreign concentration camps. The Trump regime is denying the authority of the courts, including the Supreme Court, and this development feels like an escalation even from DOGE and tarifs and all the rest of the shit the regime has been flooding the field with since the inauguration. Immigrants are under attack, trans people are under attack, protesters—especially those protesting genocide in Gaza—are under attack, and without even the most basic protections of due process and habeas corpus … well, this field of shit is feeling very scary very fast.
I think a big part of what has taken my cheery resilience to weary resilience is feeling utterly immobilized in the face of everything that is going on outside in the world. The difficulties we are facing here at home suck, but they feel manageable. Joel and I are in a good place. We have lots of support. We’ll be ok.
But the rest of it? I really find myself flailing around for something to do. Joining organizations and marching in the streets really isn’t sustainable for me anymore. I give some money to causes I think matter but we don’t have much at all to give. I’m not sure how effective the various calls to boycott are, but being broke is its own sort of boycott—we have cancelled Amazon Prime, Netflix, and we have basically dropped out of consumer culture, not so much as a matter of principle but simply because we just have so little money for any sort of discretionary spending. I no longer believe that cowardly politicians who seem to have no strategy whatsoever in the face of all this are going to be moved to meaningful action on account of my phone call or email.
I know lots of folks are in the same position as I am. I am thinking about ways that art can be used as education and activism—so called “craftivism”—which I feel very called to and could be done from inside my house, which I rarely ever leave these days. I know lots of other disabled folks who are house or bed-bound who might be interested in doing some craftivism with me. I have some vague ideas, but I’m really not sure about the specifics. I’d love to hear from you if you’re interested.
Upcoming Courses
Please take a moment to register your interest in any or all of my upcoming courses and workshops, and we will be in touch with further information and reminders.
Write & Launch a Substack, $10, Sunday May 4th at 12:00—1:30 pm EDT. Tickets go on sale tomorrow, 18 April.
Have you considered writing and launching your own Substack, but aren't sure how to start? Do you struggle with confidence about the quality of your content or your ability to maintain consistency? In this session, Marta will share what she has learned in the process of writing and launching The Spiral Lab, particularly what has worked for her as a neurodivergent writer, and will discuss your specific questions, ideas, projects and struggles. Submit questions in advance or during the session. Can't attend live? The session will be recorded and shared with all ticketholders.
Neuroqueering Shame in Your Creative Practice, newly updated! $20, Sunday May 18th, 12-2pm EDT
Creating in Spiral Time, also newly updated! $20, Sunday, May 25th, 12-2pm EDT
Book separately, or as a bundle for 10% off at $36. Tickets on sale from 2 May; to get updates and reminders make sure you Register Your Interest.
Shame: Shame is a powerful political tool used in almost every area of our lives—our families, our schools, our workplaces, even our identities—to wrench us into conformity with the values of industrial-colonial time and compulsory executive functioning. In this workshop, we will look at the ways shame disables us for deviating from neurotypical expectations and norms, and the ways it creates dysfunction in our creative practices. Through creative care invitations, we will examine some of the ways shame shows up and explore how we can compost and transform it, so that it becomes less and less debilitating.
Spiral Time: Neurodivergent people are often plagued by a sense that we have “wasted time” and “fallen behind” our peers in terms of productivity and creative accomplishment. If there is any hope for finding a more enjoyable and generative relationship with time, and with our pasts, we need new metaphors that defy the contemporary Western ones that have colonized the world. We will explore alternative metaphors and values of slowness, cyclicality, ritual and rest. Through creative care invitations, we will explore the ways we might reclaim the buried treasures of our seemingly “wasted” pasts, and move in our creative lives in new and generative ways.
Divergent Design: Its Roots in DeafSpace
This is an excerpt from my work in progress, a book about Divergent Design which I am writing in real time here on Substack for paid subscribers, and which I plan to publish under a new press that Joel and I and a few others are working to launch in the next year. Thank you to everyone who signed up to be interviewed for this project—I haven’t forgotten you, I’ve just been a bit whomped (see above) and am behind on everything!
Dolly Parton famously said “Find out who you are, and then do it on purpose.” My friend KR, with whom I am taking a year-long novel writing course, has adapted this adage to the way they teach writing: they encourage their students to figure out what we already do as writers, and then “do it on purpose.” Rather than trying to conform to the conventional wisdom when it comes to both writing process (you must write every day!) and craft (avoid flashbacks!), figure out what actually works for you—for me, it’s working on my novel one to two times a week; also, my friend and writing partner Het and I have a new fancy term for flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks: time turducken—and then do it, confidently, and on purpose!
I think the same thing is true for how we use and design our homes. Too often we try to conform to what is expected in a home, how it should be done, and what other people will think. We beat ourselves up for the doom piles covering the dining room table, for eating dinner in front of the TV, and for buying art supplies we forget all about and never use. We make resolutions to do better, and we invest in all sorts of systems and hacks and coaches and courses to break us of our “bad habits.”
It usually works for a while, but eventually we revert to form. We feel like failures, engage in toxic self-talk, and shame ourselves before anyone else has a chance to do it for us—what’s wrong with me? Why am I such a slob? Why can’t I do anything right? We don’t need outside voices anymore to shame us because the sound of those voices has just become the air we breathe. We’ve been hearing them since we were little kids with messy rooms, students who forgot our homework only to find it weeks later crumpled and torn at the bottom of an overfull backpack, employees who can’t find the very important document our boss needs right now. We’re all-too-aware of the many ways we fail to manage and use our space efficiently and productively. So we fall back on shaming ourselves rather than asking, might there be a better way? Might there actually be a way that comes naturally to me?
That question was already beginning to form itself in my own life and in my own home, but it wasn’t until I was able to ask it from the outside looking in, rather than from inside the mire of shame, that something really clicked into focus.
That focus is what I began calling Divergent Design, but the aha moment came when I stumbled across something called DeafSpace. Divergent Design, like Deaf Space, is rooted in disability justice; it is not some bougie consumerist trend-driven niche of interior design, but a fundamental accommodation for neurodivergent people in our most intimate spaces: our homes.