Writing & Sound
Serious Play: Teaching to Play in Oral History
co-authored with Liza Zapol, in Oral History Review, August 2025.
Abstract: Oral history is not just about archiving spoken memories—it is an embodied, creative practice that thrives through play. Serious Play, a graduate course at Columbia University, and Push Play, an experiential workshop, reimagine oral history as an artistic, performative act. By engaging sensory memory, movement, and improvisation, participants explore how bodies, beyond words alone, can serve as vessels of memory. This approach challenges conventional interview structures, fostering inclusive and expansive ways of listening and remembering. Through collaborative exercises and artistic prompts, Serious Play creates a dynamic space where oral historians become artists, oral history becomes an act of creation, and the boundaries of memory stretch beyond speech. Reframing oral history as serious play opens pathways to deeper engagement, joy, and radical inclusivity, thus shifting the field toward more expansive, decolonial possibilities.
Oral History Beyond Speech and Narrative
Published in Oral History Review, February 2025
Abstract: This article challenges the conventional boundaries of oral history by exploring communication beyond speech and narrative, particularly in the context of intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). The prevailing oral history practice, reliant on speech, inherently excludes individuals who communicate nonverbally. Drawing on over a decade of practice, disability scholarship, and the author’s personal experiences, this work argues for a more inclusive approach to oral history. It examines alternative forms of communication; such as embodied movements, gestures, and other nonverbal expressions, positioning the body as both language and archive. By focusing on the experiences of people with IDD, the article critiques ableist constraints and reimagines oral history as a practice of “being with” rather than “listening for” stories. Through a case study of arts-based collaborations facilitated by the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University, the author demonstrates how IDD individuals’ expressions—often overlooked—are crucial for expanding the field’s scope. While procedural and process-based modifications can make oral history more inclusive as a speech- and narrative-centered practice, the author argues for reimagining oral history in form as something new, beyond speech and narrative.
File/Life: Remediating the Pennhurst Archive With Community Archivists
In Cripping the Archive: Disability, Power and History, edited by Jenifer Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy. University of Illinois Press, 2025.
A Different Story: Narrative Allyship Across Ability
Winner of the 2021 Oral History Association Article Award. Published in Disability Alliances and Allies (Research in Social Science and Disability, Vol. 12), Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020, edited by Allison Carey, Jan Ostrove and Tara Fannon. This chapter proposes narrative allyship as a practice in which nondisabled researchers work with disabled nonresearchers to co-construct a process that centers and acts on the knowledge contained in and expressed by the lived experience of the disabled nonresearchers, with a particular focus on oral history as a social justice praxis.
Gail Mary Killian Sound Recordings: 1971 – 1985
Published in The Oral History Review, Volume 27, 2020.
Review of a collection of audio recordings made by Gail Mary Killian, a young woman with Down syndrome. 18 audio cassettes, archived in the Oral History Archives at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University.
Walking the Edge
As a participating artist in Walking the Edge, I wrote as a mother to and student of Jonah, age 8, who has Down syndrome, Autism and hearing loss, and a profound connection with water. Read my reflections and the prompts I offered to others to listen differently to what the waters of New York City have to say.
Words for Water
An essay for Underwater New York’s Labor Issue, Fall 2019
Cold
A short story about Barren Island written for Underwater New York’s January 2015 event at Winter Shack, a temporary exhibition space designed by Alex Branch and Nicole Antebi. January 2015.
Crack and Break and Heal
A short story written for an Underwater New York reading in collaboration with the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibition “COMPASS: Folk Art in Four Directions” at the South Street Seaport Museum. Inspired by the history of the Museum’s building and the works of art “Cane with Female Leg Handle” and “Noah’s Ark.” September 2012.
The Birdcage
A short story inspired by a birdcage found in the Gowanus Canal. October 2009.
On Once and Future Water
An essay on New York City’s shifting edges, for the Penn Program on Environmental Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. May 2019.
Photo by Robin Michals
Dead Horse Bay
Winter Shack
An audio installation for Underwater New York at Winter Shack, Classon Ful-Gate Community Garden, January 25, 2015.
A Roll of the Dice
Audio installation for Underwater New York at Governor's Island, for IF THESE WALLS.... a site-specific show curated with A.I.R. Gallery. September 12, 2015
Source Materials: field audio from Ontario, Canada and Staten Island, New York; readings from THE POETICS OF SPACE by Gaston Bachelard.
An Accidental Documentary
Multimedia, live documentary made for Oral History Summer School, framing the historical, social and philosophical questions addressed in applying oral history in mixed ability settings through personal and historical archival materials, text, images, and pedagogical performance. June 2015.
60 minutes. Viewable on request.
Photo credit Walter Hergt