Emma: I started in 2012, I think, I was at UBC, I applied for this job… We had a big Kickstart Festival in the Fall of 2013.  When I started, Geoff McMurchy was still there. [He] was a great leader of Kickstart always, he was the person who started it. I had a disability but I was walking, you know, I was kind of distant from it. But I took on that Artistic Director thing. They were hiring Artistic Director which they had never hired before—it had always been Geoff.

I started and I was not a very experienced arts administrator. You know, I’d done a lot of art stuff but I hadn’t done arts administration. It was kind of a mystery to me in some ways. The funding and-- So at that time, Kickstart was kind of having trouble. It wasn’t really a super functioning organization. You know, it’s kind of functioning.

So I started working there. We hired this woman to be… business manager or something and she worked with me. But both of us, I would say, were inexperienced. And it was coming up to… we had decided-- Kickstart had decided-- people had decided we [would have] a big festival. Kickstart had had a couple of festivals. It was… I don’t even know what festival it was, third or fourth or something like that.

I think my inexperience really showed. But probably like-- no one was really there saying, “Okay, if you’ve got to get this amount of money together, you’ve got to get these people together”, all that sort of stuff. I was a little bit lost. And I had, as a person with disability, been to disability festivals. There were lots of people who I had seen, performing at those festivals, all that sort of stuff. So I was quite excited about it, but the money was not there. We didn’t really get the money from the Vancouver Foundation. We didn’t really get the money from Canadian Heritage. The money just was not really there.

Q: Yeah.

Emma: And so I started in June or something. I started and it was like “Ah?”, like it was kind of like, “How are we paying for these things?”  That was a bit of a problem. I didn’t even really realize how much of a problem that was until we got closer to the festival.

Q: Mm hmm.

Emma: We did programs for the festival. Geoff had done a lineup for the festival, so these people were expecting to perform and the festival was happening. It’s just that, “How was it happening?”  

There were some incredibly fantastic things that happened at that festival, I gotta say. Big Daddy Tazz did stand up comedy. It was fantastic. [B-boy Luca “LazyLegz” Patuelli], he didn’t have the use for legs and did hip hop dancing. He did a lot of stuff. We had Elizabeth Shefrin, who had done visual arts shows for Kickstart before, put together a visual art show.

Q: Mmm.

Emma: So we had the gallery at the Roundhouse. Elizabeth selected artists. She’s a very experienced curator. It was very beautiful in that thing and the Roundhouse does very beautiful things. We had that no-audition choir that Patti Powell is the choir director for the [Swamp Angels Community Choir]. They performed… I mean, there were things that were really, really fantastic. It’s just from my end, I felt like, “Oh my God. What’s happening now?”

Q: I feel like that’s often how admin roles go, is you’re seeing all of the tangled mess behind the scenes.

Emma: You know, you know way too much.

Q: Yes.

Emma: So we had things where people would come and talk, and I remembered David Roche in particular stood up, and he said, “Let’s think about these festivals, like really.” And he’s done, a ton, a ton, a ton of stuff. He’s done things in England. He’s done things in the States. He’s done all this sort of stuff, and he said, “Why do we do these festivals? They are extremely hard for people.”  

So, in the end—and I ended up writing a thing like this for Kickstart—but it was like, festivals require a lot of money that comes together for one weekend, and we people with disabilities often have trouble going somewhere for one weekend. So it’s just that maybe they’re not that exciting. Festivals, especially the first couple of festivals Kickstart had, [were] really exciting because people with disabilities that never got to see anything, right?

So those are really exciting, but… I just felt by the end of that thing, it didn’t really work. There were things that were absolutely fantastic. But, where were we gonna go from here? We have to deal with the fact that we didn’t really have any money.

Q: Mm hmm.

Emma: So the beautiful thing that happened after that was the person who came—which made a big difference in my life—Yuri Arajs. He was the Director of Kickstart after me. We got [a grant] from [the Vancouver Foundation] that paid for Yuri to come and work with me on my things that I have trouble with: typing, reading, using the computer, whatever. He just would come over and sit there, and I would say, “Now I want you to do this, now we do this” because I have a lot of trouble doing those things. That was absolutely fantastic. And then, you know, it’s like things didn’t fall apart. Yuri’s main experience is in art curation, so we put together art shows.

One of the huge things that happened was, this group at that 29th Avenue SkyTrain station, at that little hall there—in Vancouver they used to have houses where people lived in the park in the house, and then they decided that it was ridiculous to do that, for whatever reason. They let artists take those houses, and this house at 29th Avenue SkyTrain Station got taken by Art House in the Field. So they said we could have whatever we wanted in there, for free.

Q: Wow.

Emma: So we organized a series of [events] and then VAMS (Vancouver Adaptive Music Society) said, “Okay, we’ll give you the musicians and we will supply someone to do the sound.” So every once in a while, we had these events at this hall. Very small hall but it was a hall, it was wheelchair accessible, it’s right next to the SkyTrain station. And we could have musical events. It was absolutely fantastic.

And that was the thing, and it was just absolutely-- because we’ve had this festival, we didn’t have any money for the festival, “how are we gonna do this?” And we did these musical events for free. For us.

Q: Yeah.

Emma: We [had] a few things. Like for instance, we had Geoff McMurchy, Persimmon Blackbridge, and Cat L’Hirondelle doing a talk [moderated by Bernadine Fox] about when you’re doing a presentation, how do you work with people who are able-bodied? How do you get help making your art? And they had different things that they had to say, and they were absolutely amazing, those three. We recorded it, and guess what? We recorded it, and it’s on Facebook so we don’t own it.

Then we had the two writers, one of whom has MS and does writing about having MS and having sex. And the other woman had breast cancer and she did the thing about having sexual writing. The two of them were fantastic. And they were in the Writers’ Union and when you’re in the Writers’ Union, little known fact, the Writers’ Union is very expensive to be in. Like, that’s why I’ve never really been in it because it’s expensive. But if you’re in the Writers’ Union, they pay for you to do readings.

Q: Oh, cool.

Emma: Yeah. Anyway, they had those things. So we did the postcards and I can’t believe-- I don’t know if you’ve come across those postcards, but we made postcards for every single thing. They were beautiful, actually.

So that was our miraculous thing that enabled us to get out of debt, really. We didn’t 100% get out of debt. But the only debt we had left was paying the Roundhouse. And my friend Jay said, “Oh my God, they’re a publicly-funded public institution. They should be giving the space to the disability festival. They shouldn’t be charging any money for it.” My concern was to pay all the artists on that art show, to pay the people who were performers at the festival didn’t quite get paid.

Q: Absolutely.

Emma: Like you say, if you were someone who really knew about arts administration, not me, you could have probably dealt with that whole thing, no problem. I was not really experienced at applying for grants, I was not experienced at doing budgets. I am someone who, if I don’t have the money then I don’t know have the money. I don’t-- but people don’t do that. People who run folk festivals and stuff, go into debt, quite freely. But I never did that.

So, but the good thing about it was, in the end of that, there was a bunch of us who’d sit around and talk about these grants, applying for grants. The Canada Council is very helpful. And we decided that festivals are not the way to go.

We decided that it’s better to have programming throughout the year. It’s better for people to know that people with disabilities make art all the time, not only for festivals. So that was the big, big change. And we-- yeah, we did that.

And Yuri, who had been the saviour of my life. Yuri had worked a lot in Minneapolis. He had to work with people with disabilities in Minneapolis. He’d done a lot of art things and he’d work with those people. That’s why he was interested in Kickstart, because he had worked with that group. I think it’s safe to call him a guy with a disability. So then we did this whole thing and then he took over from me. And he did a lot.

Q: Gotcha.

Emma: You know, when I was getting in touch with Patti Powell and I said, “You know, we’re just trying to pay all of our bills and everything, we just want Kickstart keep happening”, because Kickstart has to keep happening.

And Kickstart has a federal charity number, which is a very important thing. It [enables] you to apply for grants, it enables you to do a lot of things. And I just didn’t want to lose the charity number. Like, I didn’t want to let the organization collapse, and… You know, we were never going to get that number back is what I thought.

So, Yuri took over from me, he did a lot, he took that same direction. And he found money. And he got this huge grant from the Vancouver Foundation, basically [to] support Kickstart for years. He did a lot of that kind of stuff. We had a nice link with the Pendulum Gallery and he kept that. So that was very good.  

Q: That sounds incredible. Quite the dive into Arts Admin from having no experience into like, trying to save the organization from financial collapse, there.

Emma: Well, the thing that I didn’t even realize, that saved me. Because all I knew about Kickstart was I’d been to a couple of events. And you know, I did participate in the first Kickstart art show [Wide Angle Media Festival]—you started with a 12 by 12 sheet, and for that art show I made a glass case full of glass bottles. It was about messages, my messages in my body traveling but pretty slowly. That was what that [piece] was about. There was a whole thing that Persimmon, I think, curated about cyborg [Borg Again]. I did a piece for that show.  

And Geoff had a very, very-- Geoff McMurchy, founder of Kickstart—who I know we shouldn’t just say founder of Kickstart, but he was—the thing that Geoff did was not accept what is called “community center art.” He wouldn’t. He was like, “You’re gonna have an art show, it’s gonna be up for a couple of weeks, you’re gonna be paid an artist fee, you’re gonna do beautiful things.”  

I remember talking to Geoff and he said, “You’ve got to include mental health. Don’t let anyone tell you not to include mental health. Mental health, disability, you’ve got to include it." Our problem is that we have too wide a field.

Q: Mmm.   

Emma: Like, they have an organization that deals with people who can’t walk. But Kickstart deals with everybody really, which makes it a bit more difficult. For me, I was just coming to terms with my own disability, and then I was there doing that Kickstart thing. I didn’t even use a wheelchair most the time. I feel like Kickstart really is on the art end of things and that’s really different from other [organizations]. Kickstart embraced different people doing different things, and Geoff got some amazing people.

He had a very, very daring artistic vision a lot of the time. Especially because before he—in the classic move of a young man—dove into some water and broke his neck, he was a dancer. And he always had a really strong interest in dance and in performance, and he was always really courageous about that. Which I think-- it's not huge in the disability arts world.

Q: Mmm.   

Emma: That place where Yuri Arajs worked in Minneapolis, [Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts], did a lot of performance. These guys singing “Too Many Chromosomes to Drive A Car”. That’s a pretty fantastic little piece of work.

So Geoff would always stretch-- You know, if I was in charge of it, I probably wouldn’t have taken on those things but he just took them on. “We can do this, we’re artists, we’re doing real artistic work. And we’re gonna be paid for it. And people are gonna see it.”

That’s what made Kickstart stand apart from a lot of disability groups. And people really admire it. And tragically, [Geoff] died. He was in the art world dancer and he was just courageous. I think I was hoping I could be as courageous as him but I’m not. At the time he started Kickstart, he had not been able to walk, he had been in a wheelchair, and he had met all sorts of people and he thought, “Hey, I can do this.” You know, the person he reminds me of who’s around Kickstart is Andrew. [He] has CP, he’s an actor, does a lot of performance stuff.  

But anyways, so it’s a performance thing, but it’s an art thing that I feel like Kickstart has always done.

Q: Mm hmm.

Emma: Did I pull that off? I don’t know. But the thing was, you have this idea in your head and you’re-- you can do it. Like I think it was a lot of that: Don’t think “What can’t I do? Because I have a disability,” just think “Okay, have an art thing. Do art.” And it was a very, very exciting thing that Kickstart took on. I mean, that’s the main thing I have to say about Kickstart. Is like, we did it. We’re an art group. We do art things, we write grants.

Q: [laughs] Yeah. This project is a grant project that Kickstart is supporting me through, and just like, the tremendous labor that it requires.

Emma: Grants are-- I’m in Prince Rupert and I have been involved with the Prince Rupert [Community] Arts Council. There’s not very many people involved. And there’s this thing, “We can’t live off grants” and it’s like, “Yes, we can. Guess what, that’s why there are grants. Because we’re artists.”

Q: That’s like, half the point. [laughs]

Emma: You know, and that’s the thing. We’re not trying to make money. We’re trying to contribute to the community and the culture. And it’s important for people to know about people with disabilities. It’s important to know what we do. And that is what’s really-- it’s not about making money.  

And Geoff, thankfully, never had that thing. Geoff did make us see change. Not that there wasn’t really anything before that, but I had a friend who worked at DDA (Developmental Disabilities Association), she said, “We’re gonna have an art show tonight.” And I said, “For how long?” and she said, “It’s just for tonight.” And the show people with disabilities are used to, they show up and people buy their art and if you’re too late to show up, you don’t get anything. The idea is that you might want to look at the art and see how it fits in your life.

That was an amazing thing that Geoff did.

Q: Yeah.  

Emma: We organized this public art show. Velveeta Crisp did an art show about happiness [Get Happy]. It was a pretty amazing show. It was on the street at Commercial and Broadway. She got all sorts of people to perform on the street. Like, they would sing, and they would dance, and whatever. Yeah, it was a very beautiful thing.

She did that. What else did we do when I was there? Mostly what I did was that thing at the Art House in the Field. If you want to pay a whole bunch of people to do a whole bunch of things, you can’t get a billion of them.

Q: Mm hmm.

Emma: The thing that I found which may or may not make a difference but it should. The thing that I found was, those of us with disability have a lot of trouble doing things all the time. Like, my energy levels are low. And so and, and so when Yuri’s issues are not to do with fatigue. I could ask him to do things and he could do them. I often couldn’t do things. So I think that’s a very important thing for people with disabilities to remember, that it really helps if you got some able-bodied people hanging around. They can just do things and you just can’t do them. They can move things, they can, you know, just generally. Because I get tired especially in the heat, I get very tired.

Q: Yeah. I find either having an abled person or having—and it’s not always ideal because I think a lot of disabilities have that energy component that you’re talking about. But I have a habit of pairing myself with other disabled people who have very different disabilities than I do. And so our needs versus what we’re able to supply each other with kind of, like, meshes together like a puzzle piece sometimes. Which, you know, brings different challenges and benefits. Like, I don’t have to explain being disabled to another disabled person.

Both: [laugh]

Q: Yeah, it’s very helpful to have someone who has consistent energy levels.

Emma: Yes, and the weekend thing. You know, I’ve done a lot of folk festivals in my life, all that stuff. You can’t just assume that people can stay up all night on the weekend. Like, they can’t.

Q: Well, that was an incredible journey through your time at Kickstart.

‍

Emma: I kinda had an interest in writing—I was going to be a journalist, I was going to be a radical revolutionary. I was working at the women’s paper, which there used to be in Vancouver, a women’s paper called Kinesis. I was working there, and it was right at the time that there was a huge rift in the women’s [opinions] between anti-pornography and anti-censorship. I had friends who were artists who said, “These two things don’t go together, the anti-pornography and the anti-censorship.”  

So three of us, me and Susan Stewart and Persimmon Blackbridge, made a series of photographs. Susan took all the photographs. Persimmon and I had sex in all the photographs. We made a bazillion photographs, but ultimately [it became a] show of 100 photographs that went from mild to... very, really. The idea was that you would come in and you would draw the line where the images had gone too far. It was called, creatively, Drawing the Line.  

It was huge. It was massive. It was massive. Only women could write on the wall because in that time there was a very clear gender division between women and men and what we were concerned about was women’s opinion. Mostly women didn’t draw the line anywhere—they just commented all over the place. It went to Australia, it went to Holland, a video of it went to Hong Kong, it went all over the place.

I personally hadn’t really thought about it much. I mean, I thought a lot about pornography, but I had not really thought about art very much. So hilariously, when we would go talk to classes, me and Susan and Persimmon, and they would say “What art are you working on now?” and [Susan and Persimmon] really didn’t like me to say I’m not an artist.  

Q: [laughs]

Emma: So, I was not allowed to say that. Susan said, “Just say ‘I’m not really ready to talk about what I’m working on right now’.”

So we had this massive connection to the art world. We went all over the place. Then we did performance which was related to Drawing the Line, we did videos about Drawing the Line—there are videos by Lorna Boschman, a video maker around Vancouver. There’s a video about Drawing the Line and there’s also a video by Lorna Boschman called Before the New Millennium [which is] a video of us performing.

Then we wrote a book called Her Tongue on my Theory, and it was a book of sex and essays and photographs published by Press Gang Publishers. It won the Lambda Literary Award. We also produced a postcard book of Drawing the Line, [published by] Press Gang Publishers. [Her Tongue on My Theory] did very well. Very exciting moment. And then we sort of got tired of it. You know, how much do you have to say about pornography and censorship? You don’t really have that much to say about it, maybe.

So now Susan has gone on to be an instructor at Emily Carr. Persimmon did a whole bunch of stuff with Kickstart, she had a couple of books, she’s a sculptor. She does beautiful art pieces. She’s living on Hornby. Once a year, amazingly, this woman at McMaster University in Hamilton gets us to go and talk to her class once a year.

Q: Incredible.

Emma: That was my big thing that I ever did. We made it into the Oxford Dictionary of Art. Every once in a while someone comes out with some book that has us in it. Kiss and Tell, that was our name. But you know-- there was a woman from the Queer Arts Festival in Vancouver who wanted us to remount [Drawing the Line] because it was 25 years, and we said, “Inappropriate.” Women are not fighting about pornography anymore. It’s a meaningless thing now. Someone said, “Oh no, no, there’s a lot of conflict.” Yes, but that particular conceptual art that we created has come and gone. It’s over.

Q: Absolutely.

Emma: I wrote a book called Two Ends of Sleep. It was [a bit later than] when I was newly diagnosed with MS. It’s about your body turning into shit. I remember in that book, [the character] goes to the grocery store and she gets a shopping cart, because then she’s got a walker. No one will know. For some reason, you don’t want anyone to know you have a disability—even though duh.  

Q: [laughs]

Emma: It’s like when I was first getting my wheelchair. I had the choice between the scooter and the wheelchair, and I said, “Well, I kinda want the scooter because able-bodied people have scooters.” And my therapist said, “Have you honestly ever looked at that anyone on a scooter and thought ‘oh, there’s someone who can run’?” Like duh. Anyway, I got the wheelchair because they wouldn’t give me a scooter. They don’t give scooters to people with MS, because all of us end up using wheelchairs.

Anyway, I wrote that book. It did okay. Not much happened with it, except that amazingly I still get royalties from libraries.

Q: Oh, that’s fantastic.

Emma: I published that in ’97. And I still get 150, 200 bucks for 3 years. That’s what your taxes go [to].

Q: Honestly, I’m more than happy for them to go to libraries and libraries paying artists—I would love for more money to go to that.

Emma: [Two Ends of Sleep] didn’t take the world by storm, which it was supposed to. The very first piece of art I did was massive, so I thought they’re all going to be like that. That’s not the way it works. It used to be that if you told someone you were in Kiss and Tell they would want to know your opinion on things, but it’s not that way anymore. People don’t really know about Kiss and Tell. And why not? The world has changed.  

Q: I find that part of what you said like really interesting—how some art has a cultural moment that it exists in and is relevant to, and past that moment it’s not as big or it doesn’t belong everywhere the way it did before.

Emma: At that time that we did [Drawing the Line], the vast majority of women had never seen pornography, so the idea that they would go to an art gallery and there would be lesbians having sex on the wall—it blew their mind. But now, you just turn on your computer. It’s really different.

Q: Absolutely.

Emma: Well, I wrote it as the 3-Day Novel [Contest]. At that time I had always done things for lesbians. I was the lesbian feminist writer. That’s what I always did, that’s who I always aim things that. So I did want to let that community know that part of that community had a disability. It was like opening up this world that I was in. It took place in Vancouver, about a lesbian living with her girlfriend off Commercial Drive. That’s who I knew.

[Kiss and Tell had] that book, Her Tongue on My Theory—it won an award, so I had a publisher. I thought that three-day novel would be a lark, which it was. I have never really gone on to write-- I have written other things, but I have not written another novel. The world has kind of changed. It was a particular thing. This character is dealing with her girlfriend having an affair and-- well, things have changed.

Q: I think about how your art, again, is responding to like a particular moment and reality, but it still has themes that are relevant and resonant today. There is still a line through it that that carries on.

Emma: Just because it has things that are relevant today does not mean you can recreate it. That’s what we’re trying to say to the Queer Arts Festival people. This woman from the festival said, “Well, those photos are beautiful.” And it’s like the photos are beautiful, but you’ve seen sexual photos before. Part of that thing was it just blew people’s minds.

Q: Mm hmm.

Emma: And then when you say, “No one forced us to do this,”—because Deep Throat had just come out, I think—that makes a big difference.

[My book] Two Ends of Sleep has a lot about dealing with issues... I have a different perspective now. I think, at that time, I was younger. Young people, of whom you may be one--

Q: [laughs] I am.

Emma: Young people are not afraid of saying they know what’s right. That’s how they make change. They don’t go “wait a minute”, they just do it. And that was the thing. We [Kiss and Tell] just did it.

--Suzo’s feeding the cats, here in Menagerie Manor.

Emma: We have three cats and one dog.--

The world does change. Like, lesbian politics has changed so much.

Q: Absolutely, yeah.

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Emma: The hugest influence for me always was Persimmon, [who had a] very strong political influence on me. Learned a lot from her about art and writing. Susan, who was in Kiss and Tell with us—unbelievable. She moved here from Calgary, in 1982 I think. Susan had the big art thing. Persimmon had the real politic thing, Susan had the real art thing. So the two of them were good people to get hooked up with.

Q: I mean, y’all obviously made some incredible stuff. Like, it’s great art and it’s really thoughtful, and it’s also just cool art.

Emma: Art can be cool.

Q: [laughs]

Emma: I’m just thinking of people in the Kickstart world. There’s this woman named Julie Milano, and she has Down Syndrome, and she does these amazing paintings, that you just love. My partner Suzo [Hickey]—who is a painter—went to one Kickstart show and she said, “Oh my god, this woman is such an amazing painter.”

There were a lot of people who did very amazing things. David Roche, same thing. Kiss and Tell did all these performance things [but] it’s just completely different [with] David Roche and his performance things—it’s a different community. People do those amazing things, and partly I just get amazed and people…

People with disabilities have no money, by and large. I remember when I was working with Elizabeth Shefrin—we were curating this show, we ran around to people’s “studios.” Ha ha ha [sarcastically]. People with disabilities don’t have fucking studios. They paint in their living room.

Q: Yeah, I’m thinking about how so much of this project is being done from my bed.  

Emma: Yeah. Exactly. I don’t know, if the world was a better place we would get-- I do actually get social assistance. I don’t get a lot, but I do kind of get enough to live on, probably. But all sorts of people can’t even do that.

Q: Yeah, and even that is below poverty and it’s still means tested. You still have to qualify to live below the poverty line. If you don’t qualify, how much further are you?

Emma: When Bonnie Klein made that movie from NFB [National Film Board of Canada] called [SHAMELESS: The ART of Disability] about people with disabilities, she [interviewed] all these people and then at the screening of the movie, a person [said], “Everyone in this movie is kind of rich.” And Bonnie Klein said, “Well, yes, that is true.” But this was who Bonnie Klein knows. And she said, “Think of it as an example of what you could have.” I still don’t know how I feel about that. But she chose not to make a movie about disability poverty—partly because her husband is a doctor, partly because of who she knows.

But someone’s got to [make] that movie [about disability poverty]. Social assistance has not been increased for 10 years, so seriously, why isn’t someone making that movie? It’s not gonna be me, because I don’t have any money.

Q: I think we found the problem.  

Emma: We need someone making movies about the lives of people with disabilities who paint in their living room.

There was that woman in that show that I curated and part of her thing was these splints that she had made for her leg. She made them out of cardboard!  

Anyway, the short answer is poverty is the problem.

There’s a lot of things that I get paid for. I have a wheelchair—they cost, you know, $20,000—I didn’t have to buy it. I didn’t have to buy a hospital bed. There is social assistance in Canada.

It’s not a profit-making venture, the art thing. And certainly not the disability art thing. That’s why you have to support the Canada Council—it enabled me to go [to Winnipeg for Sick + Twisted’s cabaret]. [Sick + Twisted] paid airfare. They paid my hotel. They paid my meals, they paid everything. They only got that money from the Canada Council.

So… I don’t know where we ended up.

Q: We were going through like influences and whatnot, and I think that led into the conversation about poverty and such.

Emma: Well, that has to do with my particular thing, which is politics. That’s where I always end up. That’s how I got involved in Kiss and Tell. That’s how I got involved with Persimmon.

Q: Which I think is really important to make sure to highlight in this [project].

Emma: Yes. And just, there is amazing disability politics out there.