Why I Wrote this Poem

    In the late 1980s and early 1990s,

I began working to understand,    

and promote, disability culture. 

I learned early on that just talking

about disability culture would not work. 

I began collecting movies, art, comics,

writing, recordings and anything else             

that I thought could convey what I hoped

people would understand when I discussed disability culture. 

    As a writer myself, I also wanted to try to write something about disability culture.  Although I frequently write in essay style, that method was not how I wanted to present disability culture to live audiences.  So, I turned to poetry.  I had written lots of poetry over the years, but I had never gotten much positive feedback about it.  Still, it seemed to me, that poetry was what I needed to do.

    I wrote “Tell Your Story” for two specific reasons.  First, to try and develop my own personal style of demonstrating what I meant by disability culture.  Second, to show how vital it was for people with disabilities to share our stories.  I felt sharing our personal experiences and stories was one of the most important things we could do, both for ourselves and for future generations.  I chose to focus on three stories of interesting people I knew.  In the following pages on this site, I’ll comment on those three people and their stories. 

    I began to perform “Tell Your Story” at every opportunity:  presentations, workshops, poetry readings, and so on.  I also wrote other poems, related to the disability experience, such as “Tap-Dancing on the White House Lawn,” “The Wheelie,” and “Martyrs.”  These four poems were the cornerstone of a 1995 chapbook, “Pain, Plain and Fancy Rappings:  Poetry from the Disability Culture.”

    I also continued writing poetry and, much to my surprise, in the mid-1990s, living in southern New Mexico, I became recognized as a writer and teacher of poetry.  I was asked to perform my poetry in various venues and I worked with poetry students of all ages to discuss composing poetry. 

    As an untrained poet this was heady stuff, indeed.

    During the mid to late 1990s I began writing poetry in a completely different style than I had developed when writing the poems mentioned thus far. Two of my first efforts at poems about disability issues that did not incorporate rhyming were “Where Is...?” and  “Sonata in the Lingering Keys of Life.”  Both were published in my 1996 chapbook, “Voyages:  Life Journeys,” which also included many poems that did not have disability-related content.

    By the early 2000s, I had both gotten tired of reading “Tell Your Story” and of the rhyming style in which I wrote it.  There were other poems I would have preferred to perform.  But after more than a decade of doing “Tell Your Story,” people began to ask for it when I gave presentations and I resigned myself to its continued performance. 

    I recently became enamored with “Tell Your Story” once more for two reasons.  First, the explosion of electronic tools have enabled me to update the poem with additional media.  Much of what is on this website was first developed as a Keynote slideshow.  Second, I keep hearing the phrase “tell your story” in numerous, and varied, venues.  Even though I’ve now been doing this poem for more than fifteen years, the necessity of telling our stories has not diminished--in fact, it may have accelerated.

    That is why I wrote “Tell Your Story” and a bit of its history.  Please enjoy the poem, which is on the following page, and then take a look at the pages that explain the photos associated with the poem in the Keynote slideshow. 

    I don’t think I realized until I began writing these explanations how much thinking actually goes into each line of a poem.

    Steven E. Brown

    November 2006

    Honolulu, Hawaii