Reading · Able’s Substack

Able Zine Issue 2 - Environment

Content Warning: Nudity, COVID-19, Substance Abuse

Hi Family and Friends,

Welcome back to the next instalment in our environment newsletter series. We hope you enjoyed reading about Olivia Dreisinger and her newly published project 'Companions & Earthbound' in our previous edition. Today we are pleased to share with you a piece on mental health and environment by writer EA Douglas and the invigorating photographs of Lior Alley.

The Able Zine team are hard at work pulling together Issue 2 and while we do so, we continue to mourn the losses and struggles faced by this community in the time of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, the perspectives and experiences of disabled people especially, have often been sidelined or omitted. Because of this, community will be at the heart of all our upcoming newsletters.

We hope these emails continue to provide some sense of family and togetherness. You are not alone.

With love,

Team Able Zine

*Please note: All of our previous newsletters are available to read on our website.

For enquiries and submissions for future newsletters please contact sub-editor
Noni Benus noni@ablezine.com

A nude figure in a cave landscape of crushed rocks curls around a small patch of sand at the water’s edge. Two hands tenderly pet the ground. In the background, a lake appears. Double exposed over the figure shimmers the tiny bright pock marks of sunlight on water, breaking up the figure as they descend in a diagonal spread from the upper right corner of the frame, dissolving into the body.

Lior is a trans visionary artist specialising in somatic sorcery, evocative portraiture, and yoga for erotic embodiment. As a disabled single parent living with Ehlers-Danlos, creating accessible opportunities for healing and collaboration is essential in their quest to manifest an empathy utopia. They serve the community through programs like weekly yoga flows designed for ALL bodies and monthly free art shares through @GoingBeyondTheLens

The following series of images are self-portraits on 35mm Portra 160 film taken on the Barton Creek greenbelt in Austin, Texas.

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EA Douglas is an artist and writer currently living on the unceded territories of Squamish, Musqueam and Tseil-Waututh First Nations known as Vancouver. A mentally-ill queer woman, she self-publishes the perzine titled Strange and Mysterious Creatures in both digital and tangible formats. EA is the former host and organiser of the award-winning The Sophisticated Boom Boom Reading Series and is fortunate to have had her work included in Feels Zine, Muses & Vices Zine and SAD Mag. You can read and subscribe to EA's newsletter here.

The river water, clear and pale green, cuts the image in half, lens flares sparkle below on the waterfall while a lens flare brings the implication of sun to the dense, green forest on the hill that rises up into the horizon. A layer of thin white foam splashes at the bottom.

Fingers curled through a chilly chainlink fence I watch an excavator pull at a boulder. The rock is smooth and gray and larger than the van I went camping in last summer. Its ginormous heft gives the undertaking a comical tone like watching someone move a watermelon with a teaspoon. The teeth of the excavator gut sharp, white mars on the rock’s surface.

“Really reminds you we’re in the mountains, eh?” Says a fellow wearing an orange and yellow vest through the partition. “Yeh,” I mumble back, not one for talking to strangers.

The land we’re standing on is categorised as a part of the Coast Mountains, a strip of peaks rolling south from the Yukon to just about where we are now. Vancouver’s city skyline is at my back, on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

A pair of dark tree trunks stand as pillars framing a narrow strip of rock face lit up by sun. Among the ferns sprouting soilless on the unforgiving sharpness is a figure, skewered by the light into a fixed gesture – as if caught in the act of animal, trying to step out of its assigned humanness like a skin. A new shape emerges, tethered by thin shadows that anchors the body into the earth.

Before the peoples, the names of things and the history that took place - there was this rock. As it is scooped and rolled, my sense of time collapses in on itself and I see my being reflected within the stone. Cool, calm, strong - existing.

Like most rocks in this area, it is granite. Formed when a row of volcanic islands slammed into the local shoreline about 115 million years ago. The friction between these two caused part of the surface to go under, dip into the Earth’s core and melt itself into hot, bubbling magma. Which then rose, boiling and transforming everything it touched.

In this allegory too, I see myself.

A failed double exposure shows evidence of where the figure touched and was touched. The body leans into the rock and the rock resists. In the hands, the hair is held, as if the whole body was hung by this point. Far down below, green water gleams darkly. The pale imprint of stray lights freckles and blurs the soft expression of the face as it looks up into the viewer, hairy and speckled with red marks, armpit hair curling in whorls like the stone..

Years ago the facets of my identity collided. Raised in an abusive household, I went into the world unaware of my own boundaries. With people-pleasing behaviour, I was driven by an unquenchable thirst for approval, self-medicating in the same way that I saw in my peers, shunning healthy coping mechanisms to embrace self-destruction. At the same time, a family legacy of mental illness smouldered. Regularly my major depressive disorder would burst forth and I would be captive for weeks. Unable to go to school, just making it to work, sustaining myself on take-out and needing to get drunk to fall asleep. I tried to soothe the wounds of childhood by dissolving myself in substances and the needs of other people.

For most of my twenties, I volleyed from a facade of joy to depths of self-hatred. With few passions or projects of my own, all energy was siphoned by non-reciprocal relationships. My life was bleak and I despised it. I wanted to refashion my existence.

In the wee hours of one morning, I confided this in my closest friend, “You don’t need to go on anti-depressants,” she scolded me as we sipped beer and smoked, “you just need to get out with us more.” But, already the tectonic plates were shifting.

A double exposure of water’s horizon inside the circular mouth of a cave. A stripe of dark cuts through the mouth like an iris, gives the whorl the look of an eye. A stone in the opening of the cave situates itself like a pupil. The whole watches, looks right, and the crease of clams fringing the top become lashes, the column of sand becomes the bridge of a nose. The bright curve a bone, and suddenly, a cheek appears.

Through desiring change, I was reprioritising. This hope that things could be better, that I could live a life similar to the one I daydreamed about, sent me into the depths. Like the land, millions of years ago, going inward led to a burning metamorphosis that consumed all. It incinerated friendships, scorched my social standing. The transfiguration left me singed and sober, a little less nice and a hundred times happier. In the ashes, I was able to locate my creative path and start the work that brings meaning. This led to me changing cities, moving to the other side of the country to start fresh.

Now I find myself standing on a mountainside, witnessing the exhuming of a stone and I know intimately the journey it took to become its ever-present, taken for granted gray self. In this is comfort. It may not be as pretty as the peaked crystals lining my window or as peaceful as the pebbles on the beach, but the firm, strength of this boulder, its persistence despite all, is a foundation for a life that I want to lead. I am grateful for the rock’s example and the beauty it brings to the world.

Unwinding my fingers from the fence, I nod at the foreman and continue on my way.

The camera sits in the thicket, looking out at the river’s edging, the way eddies have created other ecosystems. A long exposure shows what is still and what is movement. The hill rises, stoic while the sandy figure blurs in union with the water, trickling in three soft fans of blue coming down from the rock. In the water’s reflection the whole vision shimmers in colors unbound by hard lines, merging and exchanging precious nuance.

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Environment series #2...

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