Alicia E. Goranson and Peggy Munson were co-winners of the first Project: QueerLit contest for first-time queer novelists. With the release of Origami Striptease Alicia had some questions for Peggy about the novel, writing, and living with disability.

ALICIA GORANSON: I have a feeling both of us wrote our books with an agenda beyond pure storytelling. What was yours?

PEGGY MUNSON: This novel is a love story, but it's also about the lives of the invisibly disabled and cultural ableism. Ableism is the forgotten -ism--probably because the reign of the "strong" over the "weak" seems so hard-wired into our biology that we act like it's normal. A lot of my agenda is about alerting people to the appalling statistics of domestic violence against people with disabilities--who are two to five times more likely to be battered--so that shelters and hotlines become more accessible. Imagine trying to get a restraining order while homebound, call 911 with a speech impairment, prove that your deaf lover is raging at you, or find an accessible shelter if you go into anaphylaxis from cleaning products. Abusers often batter disabled partners in unconventional ways that defy legal definition, and thus are hard to prosecute. For example, the partner of a blind woman might put things in her path so that she trips and hurts herself, or the partner of someone who is wheelchair-bound might sabotage that person's adaptive equipment so that he can't get food. A woman with MS was murdered when her caregiver fed her a bagel, knowing she would choke to death. Imagine trying to prove to a jury that the murder weapon came with a side of lox! Disabled folks really do live in an absurdist reality where they have to teach people a completely new language.

Also, I want people to start becoming fragrance free so that my sick friends and I can have access to public venues. I once listened to Cesar Chavez speak, and his words were so powerful that I never went back to eating non-organic grapes. I wish that I could have the same effect on people. One person's use of fabric softener sheets (or scented shampoo) literally bars other people from the workplace, public transportation, stores, and hospitals. It's not a personal choice issue. It's an issue of "First, Do No Harm." I'm not saying this to make people feel guilty, as we've all been mind-controlled. But I do hope some good humanists will read these words and throw out all of their scented products and drop me an email about it. It will give me and my sick friends faith in the world.

AG: In your interview with Susie Bright, referring to your erotic "Fairgrounds" story, you said, "I often go to a magical place of bearded ladies when I write." The eroticism in Origami Striptease is always complicated though. What sort of space did you go into when writing it?

PM: I think eroticism IS complicated. It certainly is for these characters because they are dealing with trauma, illness, dissociation, queerness, gender, and sinister Zamboni ice resurfacing machines. I don't like easy sex. I see sex as having such healing, redemptive potential, so I don't like to compartmentalize it from any aspect of life. I like to mix it all together, so that sex can embrace and transform all that is there.

AG: You set your narrator up to receive the poisoned ink as a punishment for her behavior/attitudes. Is it dangerous to express the onset of a disability with morality or karma--the effect of a cause?

PM: You weren't the only person to read it that way, but that was the opposite of my intent. I hate victim-blaming of people who are sick. For some disabled people, the only way to get help might be to pander to troubling ideologies. The speaker in the book isn't receiving the ink as punishment, except in an S/M sense of the word. But there are parts of the book where she is self-flagellating about her own illness, because she is taking on the ideology of her external world. In a larger sense, the narrator is culture's toxic repository, an untold and inverted story--a swallowed sea of ink--that needs to come out.

AG: The narrator's sickness causes her to face a lot of her issues from when she was abled. Are there any particular struggles from the book which are directly taken from your life?

PM: Absolutely. My story is not hers, but I have faced abuse, abandonment, neglect, and other things due to my illnesses. I've been in impossible, soul-deadening, life-threatening situations. Being disabled is hardcore survivalism. It has been easy and delightful for me to be queer: being disabled is a completely different story. I've also--admittedly--sampled the Whitman's Sampler of Queer Bois, and yearned for my own Jack.

AG: You keep Jack (the character for which the narrator longs) as an enigmatic figure. If it's not too much of a spoiler, what does he look like to you physically?

PM: Well, of course Jack is completely hot, since he's my butch/transguy dreamboat! If I describe him too exactly, though, it's going to sound like a personal ad.

AG: The book is in iambic pentameter. Did you have to pull any writerly "tricks" with yourself to keep the text in the right meter?

PM: Actually, it's not pentameter, just iambic, and the iambic meter is not wholly consistent. In fact, the iambic meter itself was a trick to keep my brain functioning through the cognitive problems I have from CFIDS [Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrom], and it made it easier--not harder--for me to write. I love poetry, and poetic prose, so doing this kind of writing was very natural to me. I'm a very anal person, and it was fun for me to construct rhythmic sentences like "The old phantasmagoria of my amygdala was gone" or "A girl was blowing out the Jesus candles on her cake." It's like Dr. Seuss gone horribly wrong.

AG: There is a moment of lucidity where the narrator admits that her caregiver is making some substantial sacrifices for her, despite the neglect and abuse perpetrated on her at home. Do you believe the caregiver has any comparable moments of revelation regarding her?

PM: I think the caregiver loves her as much as he is capable of love. And love takes place in action, which sometimes makes the world a place of un-love for people who need practical care, and the abuser a source of true love in the form of needed care. The caregiver in this book is a pathological narcissist, so he probably doesn't possess much true empathy. But the book doesn't really place blame. As the abuser asks the narrator, "Who else has motive to repair you now? Who else will help?" I don't mean to imply that the abuser doesn't suffer. He does, because he can't really connect with anything. Will he be enlightened about the harm he has caused? I don't know.

AG: You have a line, "The landscape changes utterly when you are sick, so that the most unreasonable cures seem sensible." to explain why the caregiver is allowed into her life. Can you explain this a little more?

PM: People talk about "secondary gain" when they are suspicious of the disabled. This is a term to denote the perks someone might get from being sick. In fact, I find the opposite: that many people won't caregive unless it provides them with some kind of secondary gain. Abusers get the secondary gain of having an easy-to-control victim who won't run away. People might get the secondary gain of bolstering their self-esteem by showing they can take care of someone. There is a certain perversity of the abusive caregiver/disabled person relationship. He needs to know her weakness, know it intimately, to control her: in that sense, he may be a true witness in a way that is powerful, and redemptive, even as he takes her down. It's a very complicated dynamic.

AG: You can tell a lot about a person from their passions. What sort of food do you allow yourself to indulge in?

PM: I love all forms of chocolate, but I should add that I'm super organic or people will start emailing me pseudo-cures.

AG: Sometimes it helps to personify the things which hold us down. I picture depression as like Maxine Hong Kingston's Big Butt Ghost who sits on her mother, from Woman Warrior. What form would you give to CFIDS and MCIS? PM: That's funny, I think about the sitting ghost from Women Warrior a lot. An acupuncturist once said of CFIDS, "This illness is like constant punishment." If you make one wrong move with CFIDS, you can be punished for years. You can do the most benign activity--like, say, try to take a little trip--and pay for it with precious scraps of your life. You may have marginal, carefully rationed functionality before that trip, and be totally bedridden and unable to follow the plot of a movie for six months or a year after it. CFIDS is inhumanly punishing. In that sense, if I were to personify it, it would probably be Joseph Stalin. Or, it would be the story of Sisyphus if he not only pushed the boulder up the hill forever, but had to endure extreme physical pain and torture as the boulder rolled over him, crushing him with its weight every time it rolled down the hill. MCS [Multiple Chemical Sensitivity] is most definitely the landscape from a Western, where nobody is to be trusted, there is gunfire everywhere, and every bit of atmosphere can cause your organs to fail with some 19th-century disease. A friend of mine just learning to live with MCS said to me, "How do you deal with the fact that everyone has become your perpetrator?" With MCS, nothing is safe or accessible anymore. You might as well forget about most of humanity because people will generally choose Axe body spray over your survival. You can go into organ failure from other people's pedestrian choices, die from vapid consumerism. I read a really good article about the famous "bubble boy" and how he was actually angry a lot. MCS is that anger. A true rage against the machine. But a rage that really needs to be heard, as it sounds a warning about the toxic monster we have made.

AG: This isn't your first book, but it's your first novel. How was compiling this different from your anthology on CFIDS, Stricken: Voices from the Hidden Epidemic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

PM: I loved doing the anthology because it connected me to so many people with CFIDS, and has continued to spawn meaningful connections in my life. I also got amazing feedback in the form of people telling me it inspired them to be more of an activist, or enabled them to educate their families about their suffering. Both projects were highly emotional. I was kind of secretive about them. Both, interestingly, were projects I took on while trying to get a publisher for books I considered more "finished." Both taught me it's okay to be gritty and raw.