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2/3/2025 Featured: Our Will PowerOur Will Power is a project by mother and son team Janice and Brandon Will, both disabled in different ways, writing from both sides of the caregiving relationship, and participating in advocacy to address ableism, ageism, and our country’s inadequate care infrastructure. Using writing and other creative media, our mission is to create space for ourselves and those facing similar circumstances to remember the fullness of who we are and have been, beyond our roles giving and receiving care: Our many forms of grief and inspiration. Our griping, thriving, and coping. Our jubilance and joy. To create the future that’s yet to be written.  Janice: I was really doing this. Sixty-three, and for the first time in my life stepping forward to read my poems to friends and neighbors gathered in this library and eagerly looking to me. But I was embarrassed to call attention to my lack of expression! Parkinson’s was the reason. Facial masking. My family doctor had diagnosed. Then the neurologist he’d sent me to wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t certain of anything. Wasn’t myself. Didn’t talk much. Voice, weaker. I’d become dull of emotion. Aside from concern and self-consciousness. Like a painter’s palette stained from past bright colors, but with only splotches of grays and browns to work with now. When my youngest, Darren, had moved to New York, taking no books, I’d donated his childhood Paddington collection to our local library. Knowing they’d be loved. I’d wanted to go and grab his books from the stacks, I missed him so much. How to release that longing? Adult enrichment classes. At the community college. Enlivening! I made a whole new set of friends. We went to readings in Ann Arbor and downtown Detroit. But I never read my work like friends did. Always pictured I would. Once I found my voice. My professional life had been spent writing human interest stories and marketing copy. Semester by semester, I took whatever was offered. Fiction hadn’t been a fit. Sounded stilted. I was proud of some essays. One published in a local paper. But I’d always been called to poetry. The three piece band that had accompanied the readers before me began. I hoped that I’d brought the emotions to my words that I couldn’t to my face or voice while reading them. Just weeks before I’d watched my middle son, Brandon, at his MFA graduation reception, read his work with confidence and finesse, wowing the whole full room. I knew how long he’d been rehearsing. Remembered the crowd of stuffed animals lined around the Franklin Stove, getting the best seats in the house, when he was a child. If he could’ve been in my audience, I knew he would’ve understood how much I missed him, too. Brandon: Not being at Mom’s first reading—it didn’t feel right. She’d been there for mine. At the mall. When I was seven. She was proofreader for my first published work, too. Cricket Magazine. She always encouraged me. All the way to moving to Chicago for college in my twenties, where I became part of the city’s vibrant writing community, and began performing my work frequently. But aside from my MFA reading, during my two years in New York, I’d only been able to bring myself to read one other time. I hadn’t been this shy since Junior High, inexplicably overwhelmed (undiagnosed “severe” ADHD). After I returned to Michigan to intervene in her health spiral, we talked about how we’d each like to start reading again soon. To be a part of more communities, see our writing through, and to perform our work, both separately and collaboratively. But “soon” evaporated into a series of crises, a decade’s worth of traumas: The heedless progression of Parkinson’s, a betrayal by a family member that pushed us toward a new beginning in Chicagoland, the isolation of the pandemic, three major hospitalizations in six years, learning to live with disability as she lost her mobility. Despite this, these two hearts generated a quarter million words: journals, a screenplay, our joint memoir written from both sides of the caregiving relationship, and a nonfiction book for Brandon that had broken off of our collaboration. But it seemed less and less possible we’d ever perform again. read the full post here
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February 2025
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