Author: Janie Braverman

  • Death of a Resident Redux

    Death of a Resident Redux

    Things Happen

    Janie Braverman

    On May 8, 2025, I wrote about the death of a resident in an assisted living facility, The post, also about butterflies and starvation, is here.

    This post is about yet another death of a resident in yet another assisted living facility. It is also about a bridge, how words matter, and an assault by fire.

    Unknown number of residents

    Six workers on a bridge

    Jamal Khashoggi

    One woman

    Resident #19 remains unidentified in public documents.

    The woman assaulted by fire has been identified in the press, but I’m not naming her here.

    The source material regarding the workers on the bride was originally titled: “Faster Communication Could Have Saved Bridge Workers’ Lives, Safety Agency Says”

    Updated, the source material became: “Investigators Zero In on Cause of Ship Outage Before Bridge Crash: A Misplaced Label”

    The six men on the bridge, unnamed in either version of the source material:

    José Mynor López

    Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes

    Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera

    Maynor Yasir Suazo-Sandoval

    Carlos Daniel Hernandez Estrella

    Miguel Angel Luna Gonzalez

  • How is a stigma not like a zombie?

    How is a stigma not like a zombie?
    Janie Braverman

    Alice Wong.

    Writer, activist, founder of the Disability Visibility Project, 2024 MacArthur Foundation genius grant recipient.

    Died November 14, 2025.

    An obituary. A remembrance. Wikipedia. She was 51.

    Let us remember Alice Wong. And remember there is always more work to do.

    Wong’s obituary was published in The New York Times the day after her death.

    On the same day, in a series titled The New Old Age, I was dismayed to find a column titled “Wheelchair? Hearing Aids? Yes. ‘Disabled’? No Way.”

    Ways to kill a zombie are legend.

    Ways to kill a stigma are not.

    Read Alice Wong’s memoir, Year of the Tiger, An Activist’s Life, and the books she edited, Disability Visibility, First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, and Disability Intimacy.

    The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s iconic memoir about one small snail and her own chronic illness. Learn about invisible and dynamic disability.

    Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System, Sonya Huber’s essays on disabling pain.

    Too Late to Die Young, Nearly True Tales from a Life, memoir by Harriet McBryde Johnson.

    Places I’ve Taken My Body, memoir, and The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, poems, both by Molly McCully Brown.

    Raising a Rare Girl, memoir, by Heather Lanier.

    Read Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black and Michael Northern.

    Educate yourself. Don’t put all of that responsibility on people with disabilities. Many of us have enough to contend with already.

  • woof

    woof

    It’s all fun and games until …

    Janie Braverman

    Source material: Dog Accidentally Shoots and Injures a Pennsylvania Man, Police Say.

    This would be funnier if not for the gun safety issues. Or maybe it’s not funny at all. Consider the following, all from the same source material:

    The nonprofit Gun Violence Archive recorded the event as an accidental or negligent discharge of a firearm, among the 1,156 unintentional shootings in the United States it has recorded in 2025, as of [the] week [of November 14, 2025].

    In 2018, Matt Branch, a Louisiana State University football player, was shot in the leg when a Labrador retriever named Titus stepped on the safety mechanism and trigger of his shotgun which had been placed on a truck bed during a hunting trip. His leg was amputated.

    In March, a Memphis man told the police that he was grazed in the thigh by a bullet fired from a gun when his puppy, Oreo, got his paw stuck in the trigger…

    In 2011, a duck hunter in Utah was shot in the buttocks when his dog stepped on a shotgun, injuring him, news reports said at the time.

  • we lived and we ate

    we lived and we ate

    on this Thanksgiving Day

    Janie Braverman

    Source material: “Duration” by Deborah Kay Kelly, written after looking at a broadside of Ilya Kaminsky’s poem, “We Lived Happily During the War.”

  • Raw pine and antlers

    Raw pine and antlers

    a seven pass poem for DKK

    A seven pass poem from “Out West” by Deborah Kay Kelly. Click here to see her accompanying photographs.

    Raw pine and antlers, a few skins. This room, its dusty windows claimed by cottonwoods that shine more than full-grown sunflowers, leaves smooth as persimmon. Under them, sheep shed lanolin and scat on the low breeze.
    We walk downstream. Leaves float under     the wide-timbered bridge like water-lanterns. We smooth the river beach with our hands and sit.
    Until a bulb-nosed truck stops mid-bridge, a tight noon-    shadow of gray-green metal, pitted-chrome bumper. Side panels crumpled like monstrous skin. Its engine-greased pulse builds to imminent explosion.
    Who drives the bald cab? Wh    ose fist pounds the hood? It doesn’t really matter. We walk like giants. When we were children, he shoved our faces in mud, counted to 100, but we are older, and made like a suspension bridge, to flex and persist over smother, even in high winds.

  • A singing heart

    A singing heart

    for JTB, who makes my heart sing

    Janie Braverman
    Photograph of a dried heart-shaped leaf.

    Sourced via 4 passes and a little compression from Jane Hirshfield, “A Hand,” Given Sugar, Given Salt

    Photo by the erasure artist, taken on the Mary Carter Greenway Trail where it lies west of the South Platte River

  • Body Parts

    Body Parts

    A (slightly) late Halloween post

    Janie Braverman

    The time-sensitive source, published on October 31, is here.

    I didn’t see it until November 4, or you would have had it for Halloween!

  • Headstrong

    Headstrong

    An off cycle post about a book I recommend

    Janie Braverman

    Not every book tells a story, but every book has one.

    Headstrong: Embracing Alopecia and Becoming Pañuelo Girl is a book that both tells and has a compelling story.

    Christy Bailey’s memoir is generous, openhearted, and a compelling story. I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to know everything that came after, even though I already knew there wasn’t a lot of after to tell.

    The cover of the book, Headstrong, by Christy Bailey

    Headstrong is also a well crafted memoir. That is the story of this book.

    In the summer of 2025, my friend Lia Woodall told me about the collaborative effort to complete and then publish Christy Bailey’s memoir.

    Christy had written a draft of her memoir. When she fell ill, she asked Susanna Donato to be her literary executor.

    Susanna, readers of this book owe you a debt of gratitude for saying yes.

    Christy Bailey died in 2015 from Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC), a rare and aggressive type of breast cancer.

    Susanna took on the task of revising Headstrong. She is credited on the cover as the editor, but completing a book is more than editing a book. Lia wrote the Epilogue: Whatever Comes. Terry Lynn Arnold, Founder of the IBC Network Foundation, wrote the Afterword. Susanna wrote the Acknowledgements.

    Then, with help, Susanna took on the task of getting Headstrong published.

    Well done, Christy Bailey. Well done, Susanna Donato. Well done, Lia Woodall and Terry Lynn Arnold.

    You can find Headstrong: Embracing Alopecia and Becoming Pañuelo Girl here.

    For the writers among us: Where you can find your own literary executor is a mystery to me. What I do know now is how much it matters.

  • gaze

    gaze

    & when we don’t gaze

    Janie Braverman

    ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

    ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

    when we don’t gaze

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    ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

    The poems:

    Source material: Charles O. Hartman, “Fascination,” from Island

    The word gaze appears in each stanza of “gaze.”

    There is no gaze in “when we don’t gaze”.

  • Jane Explodes Narrative

    Jane Explodes Narrative
    Janie Braverman

    Source text is an excerpt from Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, by Jane Alison.