Annual review

2022: Our Year in Review

Salmon pink backdrop. A white hand places golden candles that form 2022

A Year of Few Spoons

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:

New Spoonie Authors Podcast episodes

Dianna Gunn gave us great interviews with these authors:

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:

#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!

Event image: Spoonie Authors Network [Re]Launchpad logo is in the top left, consisting of three flying rocketships with open books on their hulls. Text within a dark rectangle indicates the time and the authors. Along the bottom of the advert are all the book covers.
Featuring Tangela Williams-Spann, Jamieson Wolf, Nicole Zelniker, Stephen Graham King, Dianna Gunn, and Diana L. Pomeroy!

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!

Advert featuring the book cover of a watercolour of a brick wall with graffiti that says Nothing Without Us Too, Edited by Cait Gordon and Talia C. Johnson. 

Text on the advert includes this quote: “Stories featuring disabled characters that are written by disabled authors themselves are inherently stories of transformation and the new—because they come from people who’ve had to view the world in different ways in order to get by, to survive, to thrive in ways that only we know how.” 

~ Amanda Leduc, author of Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, and The Centaur’s Wife

Available at Chapters-Indigo and many online booksellers.

Thank you!

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

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