Welcome to author Dorothy Palmer!
Dorothy Ellen Palmer is a disabled senior writer, mom of two, retired English/Drama teacher, improv coach and union activist. Her adoption-disability memoir, Falling for Myself, (Wolsak and Wynn, 2019), was acclaimed by The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and Quill & Quire. Longlisted for the ReLit Award, When Fenelon Falls, (Coach House, 2010), features a disabled teen in the Woodstock-Moonwalk summer of 1969. Wiggins: Son of Sherlock, featuring a feminist-disability lens appeared this spring with MX Publishing, London, England. Her fiction and nonfiction appear in literary and disability anthologies and journals, including Reader’s Digest, Refuse, This Magazine, Canthius, Wordgathering and Nothing Without Us. Winner of the 2020 Helen Henderson Award for Disability Journalism and the 2021 Cecils Award, she tweets @depalm.
Tell us about your life outside of writing.
I’m a disabled senior, a mom of two, a binge knitter and a retired
English/Drama teacher and union activist. In pre-pandemic days, to get around
in the world I used a walker, a wheelchair and a mobility scooter. Since March
8, 2020, like much of my disabled community who are under double threat from
the virus and eugenics, I have been sheltering in place. I haven’t left my
apartment trying to save as many lives as possible. During that time I’ve
watched far too much TV and read more Scottish mysteries than I could ever
imagined existed on the planet.
Do you have a work in progress?
Yes, I’m working on my thriller, Liar, Liar,
Wife on Fire. It’s the story of Roberta Brandt, a mom of twins
and a disabled high school history teacher with my tiny feet, who slowly
realizes her husband has been gaslighting her for decades. In tense, personal
affidavits, in increasing fear and peril, she exposes him as a cheater, a
thief, a sex tourist, a serial predator, and worse. Pushed to the brink
of despair, Roberta joins forces with other women he has burned - her
daughters, her mother, her mother-in-law and a teenaged sex worker in
Argentina. Tragically,
not every life can be saved, but, together, these charred women rise from the
ashes to deliver their own verdict of collective justice.
I’m also working on
a picture book, The Scooter Twins, contracted to Groundwood Books. It’s about a
pair of feisty twins going shopping for their first mobility scooters.
What was the most difficult section/piece you ever
wrote? What made it difficult?
In my memoir, Falling for Myself, I confide many things about my
past that were difficult about both my adoption and my disability, but the most
difficult section was about admitting that I now wear adult diapers. I put it
in, I panicked, I took it out, then put it back in. Surprisingly, I have gotten
more email about that, thanking me for it, than about anything else. I think
people need to have that normalized and seen.
What sort of research do you do for your work?
It varies book to book. For my novel, When Fenelon Falls, I
spent years immersed in the pop culture and news of the year I and the main
character turned fourteen, 1969. For Wiggins: Son of Sherlock, I
had spent a lifetime as a Sherlock fan, but still researched the specifics of
Victorian life to learn more about how a disabled girl might be treated in the
1890s. For my memoir, Falling for Myself, I did a great deal of
live, in-person research, consulting with my disabled community about
representation and how to present my life in an authentic light.
Which books and authors do you read for pleasure?
Is there an author who inspires you?
During the
pandemic, I’ve been able to write about it, but I’m finding it really hard to
both write about it and read anything serious. As I mentioned, for escape and
pleasure, I’ve been reading endless Scottish mysteries. The authors who will
always inspire me are Thomas Wolfe and Audre Lorde, one for his ability to
capture human music in words, and the other for helping marginalized disabled
women see themselves.
Was there a person who encouraged you to write?
Not really. I was born in 1955. My working class
parents didn’t believe in university for girls, let alone the ridiculous dream
of being a writer. My English teachers gave me a love of books and suggested I
become a librarian. I had to find my belief in my work myself. My now grown
children have always encouraged me to write and wanting to be worthy of that
support has always sustained me.
FALLING FOR MYSELF
In this searing and seriously funny memoir Dorothy Ellen Palmer falls down,
a lot, and spends a lifetime learning to appreciate it. Born with congenital
anomalies in both feet, then called birth defects, she was adopted as a toddler
by a wounded 1950s family who had no idea how to handle the tangled
complexities of adoption and disability. From repeated childhood surgeries to
an activist awakening at university to decades as a feminist teacher, mom,
improv coach and unionist, she tried to hide being different. But now, in this
book, she's standing proud with her walker and sharing her journey. With savvy
comic timing that spares no one, not even herself, Palmer takes on Tiny Tim,
shoe shopping, adult diapers, childhood sexual abuse, finding her birth
parents, ableism and ageism. In Falling for Myself, she reckons
with her past and with everyone's future, and allows herself to fall and get up
and fall again, knees bloody, but determined to seek Disability Justice, to
insist we all be seen, heard, included and valued for who we are.
Buy: https://bookstore.wolsakandwynn.ca/products/falling-for-myself
WIGGINS: SON OF SHERLOCK
On New
Year’s Day 1891, Sherlock Holmes summons the limping street urchin, Wiggins, to
Baker Street and decrees he must die at dawn. Wiggins, however, has other
plans. To fulfil the dying wish of his mother, Irene Adler, he schemes with his
two formidable American aunties to keep two important facts from the great
detective: Mrs. Hudson is actually his Aunt Grizelda, and he is both Holmes’
child and a girl pretending to be a boy. Through a series of mysterious letters
Adler bequeathed to Wiggins, the dark backstory of her parents and all their
long-kept family secrets unravel. To flee the mad King of Bohemia trying to
claim Wiggins as his heir, Holmes and Wiggins begin their Great Hiatus. From
Mycroft to Moriarty, from Dr. John H. Watson to the Baker Street Irregulars,
from P.T. Barnum to Jumbo the Elephant, Wiggins learns little is what it seems.
Slowly learning to trust each other, Holmes and Wiggins travel from London to Reichenbach
Falls to New York City to a small farm in Canada which holds the secrets of
their family history. Together, they correct the errors in Watson’s tales, bond
over Wiggins’ disability, drop their masquerades, and deduce a father and
daughter future.
“Wiggins
is full of surprises, pulling us back into the world of 221B from an entirely
original angle - as if Palmer had found a secret hiding space even the Great
Detective had never accessed!” -- Angela Misri (Portia Adams
Adventures).
Buy: https://mxpublishing.com/products/wiggins-son-of-sherlock
