Dr Alex Dunkin is the founder of micro-publishing label Buon-Cattivi Press. He launched the label in 2018 with Peering Through and since has had the privilege of publishing one or two books a year, including Gertrude Glossip’s Queer History Tour Book Queen of the Walk, and Dona Juanita and the Love of Boys by Gabrielle Everall, which featured on the ABR’s 2020 Books of the Year list.

Jace Reh (he/she/they) is a queer, disabled Gamilaroi person living on Kaurna Yerta, raised on Narrunga country. With a passion for words and social justice, she endeavours to create deeply personal works that speak to his journeys of self-discovery and community building. Jace and their partner Theo have created Collaborative Radical Intersectional Performance Spaces (CRIPS) in the hopes of bringing together non-normative body-minds to create the perfect space to learn from one another.

Oh, How We Laughed* is a new anthology of work by queer and disabled South Australians, published by Buon-Cattivi Press. I spoke to the anthology’s editor Dr Alex Dunkin and co-curator Jace Reh about the collection, and about disability justice and creative expression.

Book cover art by Tikari Rigney.
Photograph of Jace Reh and Theo Brown by Dean Arcuri.

Dani Leever: Hi team, thanks for chatting to me! Firstly, can you tell us a little about Oh, How We Laughed* and how it came about?

Alex Dunkin: I was connected to the project via a mutual colleague, Dante, who happened to meet Jace at a conference. I was emailed a brief outline and knew fairly quickly I wanted to be a part of a project like this.

My micro-publishing label Buon-Cattivi Press was set up so it could focus on lesser-heard, experimental, or uniquely expressive works. The label also leans heavily toward publishing South Australian and queer works, so Oh, How We Laughed* ticked all the boxes.

DL: Laughter is signalled as the thread that connects the anthology together. Why did this feel like an integral throughline, and was this decided before or after collating the pieces?

Jace Reh: I was mostly inspired by the diaries of Lou Sullivan, an iconic chronically ill trans man whose diaries have made an incredible impression on many of us [in the community].

Entitled We Both Laughed in Pleasure, he shares the highs and lows of his entire life, and who he shared these moments with. Oh, How We Laughed* is deeply connected to the people who have come before us, so this nod to his work was very important to me. From there it grew.

I thought of the dinners I have shared with my disabled comrades, laughing, crying and scheming together, dreaming of our futures. I wanted that represented in the title. Queer and disabled people are often stripped of our personhood, and by using this title, we highlight that we are more than our labels; we are what we share together.

DL: The title has an asterisk in it, which is quite rare in book titles! What is the footnote that the asterisk signals to, and what was involved in the decision to include it?

AD: I loved the key connecting point of the works being laughter. The title idea came from Jace, and centring a positive in the title became a natural point of focus. However, as anyone who reads the book will find, the emotions shown in the works are complex and varied.

Even the laughter itself may be from exasperation or exhaustion. It can be from happiness and reaching a point of joy. None of it is linear – our experiences fluctuate with our emotions.

The asterisk signals to these other emotions connected to lived experiences of being queer and disabled.

On the title page inside the book, it reads:

* Cried, chuckled, suffered, retreated, enjoyed, blanked, masked, cringed, smiled, consumed, planned, protested, disappeared, felt, ruminated, withdrew, celebrated, raged, meditated, screamed, froze, danced, existed…

DL: In the curators’ notes, you and co-curator Theo Brown write: “Our love story started the way any two gay disabled trans men could in the middle of a pandemic: on Grindr.” This is very blessed. Can you tell us a little about how you’ve gone from Grindr to publishing an anthology together?

JR: What a question! It was funny writing the curators’ notes – it can often create such a sense of separation when you sit there writing something, that you forget that everyone who picks up the book will actually (hopefully) read it.

The same thing happens when I’m writing poetry: it exists in the confines of my mind and fingers until it’s in the minds of the readers and listeners.

I think that everyone felt a little lonely at the height of government restrictions in 2020, and for me, I had just moved to Adelaide with no social circle to speak of. [Theo and I] very quickly moved in together and realised just how value-aligned we are.

I’ve always been a boisterous presence, while Theo is much more of a stoic body in a room. Theo’s incredibly well read, whereas I can barely sit down long enough to open a book, let alone read it! So together, we made the perfect pair.

His cool, calm head mixed with my veracity and penchant for making myself known allowed us to create a presentation entitled ‘Dreaming Disability Justice’. This project took the work of Sins Invalid, paired with [disabled writer, educator and social activist] Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s extrapolations on that work, and shared these ideas, imploring people to bring the principles of disability justice into activism.

DL: You’ve stated that this anthology is designed as an “exhibition in printed form”. Can you tell me a little bit more about the creative process behind collating and structuring the book as such?

AD: Jace and Theo did a brilliant job of drawing out so many different voices from our community.

The contributors’ styles and approaches to creativity and expression came from many different angles, so we kept the brief for the anthology broad until we made our selections.

The depth of the submissions did present a challenge of how to order the contributions in a way that gave them each their own time and space within the book, while still being clearly natural parts of a larger project.

Usually for an anthology, I try to find a narrative or theme thread. For example, in our first anthology, Green, there was a lifecycle, birth to death narrative that created the start-to-finish flow.

For Oh, How We Laughed*, without a dominant narrative to draw from, the aim was to present the different contributions as if they were on show in a physical art space.

Readers can then head towards whatever catches their eye first, sample at random, or consume a curated start-to-finish exhibition that balances the light and dark pieces – as well as create pacing and statement punctuation.

DL: There are a lot of different genres and forms of art in the anthology. Why was it important to showcase such a broad range of creative expressions?

AD: When considering the creators we hoped would submit, placing any restriction on form, genre or style felt like placing unnecessary limitations. It would restrict freedom in expression and create additional burden on time.

The creative time available for any neurotypical and abled person can be enough of a juggling act, so when wanting disabled people to share their voices and creativity, it needed to be as much on their time and in their way as possible.

Ensuring flexibility is then the duty of us as curators and editors.

DL: Besides laughter, what other themes did you find connected most (or all) of the stories together?

AD: Care. I found a lot of care for others in the pieces.

Within each piece – and while working with all of the contributors – there was a moment that centred, noted, or uplifted other people. And from Jace’s and Theo’s curation work, there was care in making sure no one was overlooked or left out.

JR: For me, I felt most drawn to the beauty of ‘rage’: an all-too-often overlooked emotion, [commonly] dismissed for its irrationality. However, I truly believe our strength as queer and disabled people is our rage.

As multiply marginalised people, we exist in a world that rarely puts us first, with no change on the horizon unless we use our rage to make this world better for us all.

Oh, How We Laughed* is available in paperback and eBook directly from Buon-Cattivi Press. Copies are also available at the Bookshop Darlinghurst, Hares & Hyenas, and can be ordered from any independent bookstore.

Buon-Cattivi Press is a micro-publishing label based on Kaurna Country (Adelaide, South Australia). South Australia is lucky to have a history of publishers dedicated to the release of local, creative content and Buon-Cattivi Press seeks to complement this local publishing space with its niche angles and concepts.