I don’t know about you, but 2022 wore out this Spoonie editor-in-chief. That’s the thing about disabled-led initiatives—sometimes we run low on spoons. And this year, I seemed to be constantly operating on a spoon deficit.

Still, some cool things happened!

New contributing authors

We are always grateful for authors who volunteer their time to share their experiences with us. This year we had two new contributors to our blog:

• Nicole Levigne wrote Learning the Hard Way

• Wendy Kennar wrote Dismissals and Rejections of Symptoms and Submissions

New Spoonie Authors Podcast episodes

Dianna Gunn gave us great interviews with these authors:

• Exploring Grief Through Story with Sarah Chorn: A Spoonie Authors Podcast

• Fencing with POTS, Disability and Traditional Publishing, and More with Lillie Lainoff: A Spoonie Authors Podcast

• Motherhood, Grief, and Stress Cooking with Leila Tualla: A Spoonie Authors Podcast

• Disability, Comics, and Entrepreneurship with Mugabi Byenkya: A Spoonie Authors Podcast

• The Writing Process, Editing a Short Story Magazine, and More with Jaecyn Boné: a Spoonie Authors Podcast

Publishing Professionals Series

This is a series that will hopefully be ongoing as I find more Spoonies who are in the publishing business! So far this year we had interviews with:

• Beverly Bambury, Publicist

• Robert Kingett, Audio Description Writing Services, Accessibility and Usability Consulting, Sensitivity Editing for Blind and Visually Impaired Characters

• Dianna Gunn, Marketing Mentor and Consultant

• Éric Desmarais, Book Layout Designer

#SpoonieAuthChat

While I had to take December off for health reasons, the Spoonie Authors Chat (#SpoonieAuthChat) on Twitter has had some great conversations. If Twitter still exists in 2023, we’ll keep going, although I have created a Discord server, and we’ll decide if that’s where we’ll need to move to next!

The ReLaunchpad announcement!

As we continue to make the Spoonie Authors Network more of a community initiative, we announced the pilot of the Spoonie Authors Network ReLaunchpad event. It’s a free virtual book-launch space where we will feature independent or small-press authors who manage spoons. They can either launch or relaunch their books at these events! The debut event is January 15 at 2:30pm EST. There will be author readings and giveaways too! For our pilot, we have six amazing authors reading from their awesome works.

Future events will be more panel focused with fewer authors per event, but there will still be short readings too!

To learn more about January’s ReLaunchpad and how to register for it, visit our ReLaunchpad event page!

What’s next?

Well, let’s hope 2023 will have more spoons for us all around. Instead of laying out the plans, I think we’re gonna take things one day at a time. I can say that we have a really interesting interview to be posted on January 5, and please do consider attending the ReLaunchpad on January 15!

Okay, I’m doing it. Presenting an unspeakably shameless plug!

One of the main reason for my spoon drainage was because a lot of my time in 2022 was dedicated to a labour of love. Nothing Without Us Too, co-edited by myself and Talia C. Johnson (foreword by Amanda Leduc) was produced and released this year! Like Nothing Without Us, it’s a multi-genre collection, this time with 27 short stories. So, if you’re looking for more authors who are disabled, d/Deaf, Blind, neurodivergent, Spoonie, and/or who manage mental illness, you really can’t go wrong with this collection. We’re so thrilled and are glad to share it with the world. Here is where you can find it, but also ask for it at your library or local bookstore!

Thank you!

Thanks as always for supporting the works of Spoonie creatives. Wishing you all the rest and spoons you need for 2023!