By Natalie Klinkenberg, Mishelle Kennady, Frankie Harnett and Eden Soughton
The independent publishing world is constantly working toward inclusivity in the industry, with presses bringing marginalised voices to the forefront. Dizzy Press, an East London-based independent publisher established in 2021 and in the care of eighty-two-year-old poet Joe Bidder, is one of those presses. Bidder stated that Dizzy Press’ mission is to “champion the voices of survivors of the mental health system and disabled people,” granting them the opportunity to share their beautiful stories with the world through accessible publications. With the goal of publishing ten books in ten years, Dizzy Press will become a home for poets with disabilities and survivors in the UK where their voices can reach a global poetry audience. Their first two anthologies, Blue in Green and Warriors and Saints, have been funded by the Project Grant scheme from the Arts Council England’s National Lottery.
Dizzy Press is not Joe Bidder’s first encounter with the poetry world. He began writing when he was thirty-seven years old after being a chemical engineer working at chemical plants and oil factories. He co-founded Survivor’s Poetry, which started as a self-help group before it became the movement it is today. A feature on Bidder in the Hackney Gazette stated that “mental health and disability have always been a key feature of Joe’s poetry,” as seen with his anthology Blue in Green. Having served as a chairman for the Arts Council of Great Britain’s Arts and Disability Advisory Panel, Bidder has always advocated for those with disabilities to share and enjoy their art with the world.
Joe Bidder says he was first drawn to poetry by taking Hebrew classes in his youth and memorising whole passages, where the rhythmical form of the old text felt comforting and poetic. Bidder officially took on writing later in his life after feeling his hidden passion spring forth in his late thirties. He had initially experimented with literature but soon realised that his true calling was to poetry after all. His 2021 collection, Blue in Green, offers forty-three new and old poems narrating aspects and lessons from Bidder’s life while paying homage to the jazz nightclubs he often visited. It includes stories told about his Jewish culture, his previous career as a chemical engineer and to what ends that experience took him, discusses his disability, and makes vivid depictions of mental health struggles and feelings of being othered by society. Joe says that the collection is “really my autobiography. It is me telling an audience about my life and everything in there is true."
Set to be published throughout 2023 and 2024, Dizzy Press is launching a new series of Survivor’s Poetry, the Warriors and Saints Program. Survivor’s Poetry is a movement giving voice to people hidden from mainstream view who have suffered under our mental health system. The Warriors and Saints Program, comprising poetry anthologies, a commissioned film and a series of creative writing workshops, epitomises the central values of the movement.
The Warriors and Saints Program is primarily made up of four literary publications. The self-named Warriors and Saints anthology is an illustrated poetry anthology that celebrates the works of twenty-five British poets, including Vanessa Vie and Patience Agbabi. Both anthologies, Interesting Times and Skating on Thin Ice, are dedicated to celebrating a singular author's poetry by exploring their experiences of life, disability, relationships and/or mental health struggles. Created to showcase emerging authors and proactively further accessibility within the community, the New Voices anthology is a collection of poetry written by submissions from the public, spotlighting the experience of being a person with a disability or a survivor of the mental health system.
In many forms of media, it is common to see characters with disabilities who are defined by their disability – especially in audiovisual mediums, in which there is a tendency for characters with disabilities only to be featured if the story in some way is about their relationship to their disability and how that affects their day to day life. Furthermore, there is a tendency for disabilities to be portrayed by actors who are not disabled, which both creates a performance that may be inaccurate to the reality of living with disability while also taking roles away from disabled actors.
In that sense, literature is a better medium to depict characters with disabilities in a more balanced manner. Literature grants a reader access to a character’s inner thoughts and allows more time for the story to flesh out their lived experience. This creates a dual effect: for one thing; the reader gets to experience the lives of a character in ways that aren’t tied to their disability, their hobbies and interests that shorter form visual mediums simply do not have time to show. Secondly, being within a character's mind allows them to be identifiable to everyone; entering a character’s head becomes much more challenging to simply label them an “other”. Then there is, of course, the matter of representation. Portraying people who live with disabilities as those with whole and full lives shows those readers who live with those disabilities that there is indeed a place in the world for them.
Independent presses such as Dizzy Press may be the solution to improve disability representation within literature. Only a small percentage of published books have characters with disabilities – a percentage far smaller than that of the general population. Spotlighting authors with disabilities, who are best equipped to portray the lives of people with disabilities accurately, can only represent a shift towards greater levels of representation – even if it takes some time to get there.