Genre: Disability Non-fiction/Memoir, Anthology
Published: Footnote Press, October 2023 My Rating: 2/5 stars
"It's reminded me of the instability of my world, of inhabiting instability. Internally, there are fluctuations, and externally too. I need to avoid shingle beaches, fields and slopes, all uneven ground. And now I see the unevenness of ground everywhere." - Louise Kenward
Moving Mountains should’ve been a homerun for me… I love disability memoirs/non-fiction ánd I love nature-writing, and this hyper specific subgenre that combines both is one that speaks to my soul and I can’t get enough of. When I found this anthology of just that I was over the moon excited: not only for the pieces in here, but also as a way to be introduced to new authors whom backlog I’d like to look into.
Despite all the green-flags hinting that I’d love this, I ended up feeling absolutely nothing towards this book. Which might in the end be worse than disliking it.
What I liked:
Moving Mountains bundles 25 pieces of short-fiction, essays and a handful of poems by disabled authors, themed around the way their disability frames their interactions with the natural world around them. The foreword and motivation by Louise Kenward does a great job of introducing new readers to why this is such an important theme for many in the disabled community, and I could very much relate to this.
I liked the variety of styles and perspectives included in here. I liked that the collection took care not to frame nature as some sort of panacea to “cure the sick”, which is one of my most hated tropes when it comes to this genre. I also liked a handful of pieces enough to seek out the authors other works (listed below).
What I didn’t like:
The main problem, and it pains me to say this, is that 90% of this collection was utterly forgettable. The power in combining nature- with disability-writing is that you have to nail both components, and barely any of the essays here did that for me. Many are personal accounts of the authors’ experiences with their chronic illness or disability (which there’s nothing wrong with!), that feel like they have a metaphor about nature clunkily tagged onto it to fit this collections theme. The stories they tell, are powerful, but for many, the way they were told just simply wasn’t…
Additionally (and again, this pains me), very little in this collection was insightful to me, or offered me a new perspective I hadn’t considered before. This is very personal to me: I’ve lived with a disability the majority of my life, I work as an MD with chronically ill people, and I do a lot of reading, thinking and writing on the subject myself, so my bar might be unrealistically high. That being said, this felt like a very “introductory” collection at best, that I don’t think will offer many new insights to readers who’re already familiar with common thoughts and metaphors in this subgenre.
Standout pieces to me were:
- Endometriosis and the Female Trinity in the Peak District by Rowan Jaines
- Threatening Rain by Polly Atkin unsurprisingly, as she’s the author of one of my favourite books in this subgenre Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better
- Things in Jars by Louise Kenward
- On Becoming Ocean by Victoria Bennett
You can find this book here on Goodreads.
Comments