Regan: My name is Regan Shrumm. My pronouns are they/them. I’m currently situated on the unceded and traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) speaking peoples, which is currently known as Victoria. I was born in the traditional territories of the Anishinaabe peoples in Hamilton, Ontario, and grew up all over the states. And unfortunately, I haven’t looked up every nation’s traditional lands, but for a large chunk of at least my high school years, I lived on the territories of the Swinomish Nation in Washington State. I also work on the traditional territories of the Lheidli T’enneh people in Prince George, BC.

I am currently the interim Director of Learning and Engagement at Two Rivers Art Gallery in Prince George, BC. I was first hired as their Accessibility and Community Outreach Advisor just over two years ago. Previous to that, I was the Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. I also do a lot of accessibility consulting, and community outreach and in-reach consulting. So this includes— I had to actually write it all down.

Both: [laugh]

Regan: So for the past year or the past, during COVID, that has included the BC Museums Association, Cinevolution, the City of Richmond, Open Space Art Society, the Independent Media Arts Alliance, Patricia Huntsman Consulting, and Arts BC.

I am also myself a practicing artist, I am mostly social-practice based. And I also do some textile, and as well as theatre performance slash comedy. It’s hard to kind of define. [laughs] But I think of myself kind of as this-- I started out in curatorial, but I have really expanded what curatorial has meant and really have focused on how curatorial and education can be more combined and fluid. And this often means always working directly with communities.

And then passions. I mean, I just in general have passions for art making.

Both: [laugh]

Regan: As you can tell by where I concentrate my art, my time. In terms of community wellness and health-- pre-COVID I used to volunteer my time at Our Place, which is this houseless community center slash-- they do low-income housing, and they have the safe injection site in Victoria. So it’s a whole bunch of different things.

Q: Mmm.

Regan: I’m really interested in engaging in community, being a part of it, showing up and trying to make BC healthier—because I don’t just stick in Victoria, I seem to travel quite a bit.

And then description of my disability experiences. I have general anxiety disorder, and major depression, which I’ve had both my entire life. I have always constantly also had hearing issues, that in university resulted in hearing loss where I had tubes in my ears for several years that then made things worse hearing-wise, but helped other issues that were going on with my ears. I have chronic lower back pain—so usually, when I work from home, I just constantly have a heating pad, which is very lovely—which can get much worse with particularly stress, to the point where I just have to lay down all the time.

I’ve never formally been diagnosed with autism, fairly certain I’m on that spectrum. I’ve talked to doctors, and there’s always that cost of like $2,000 to officially be diagnosed, which I never had that money. But I also recognize it’s okay to not be formally diagnosed. Many doctors have been like, “yeah, you probably--”  

Both: [laugh]

Regan: And I still have many health things. I’m still not certain. And I always have troubles with medical systems trying to advocate for pain I experience. I have pain in my lower right side for 12 years now that no doctor has figured out. And just constantly am going to doctors to try to push for more testing and figure out what it is.

Regan: When I think of community and who I’m outreaching to, I kind of have two different communities in my mind. Often, when I’m doing a bigger project, that is like a general project that’s not made for a specific “community” of a historically or currently oppressed community, I kind of think of the general geography. So a community of perhaps a city and its suburbs, and the general population. Because every city and suburban area is very unique in what it does and I really want to honour that, of trying to outreach to as many people as possible.  

But really, for the majority of the work that I do, I do concentrate on specific communities of, again, historically or currently oppressed communities. And sometimes that means I’m only working within queer community, even though when I say queer community that is still such a wide term of different communities that that can incorporate, and same with BIPOC, and same with disabled. So, it still has a very wide breadth. Sometimes I try to create programming and work with communities that are any kind of historically and currently oppressed communities. So that includes having more of an intersectional look.

In terms of for me, like, really community, I think of Mia Mingus’ bubbles [pod mapping]. I think of my very close friends as that inner circle, most of who are within queer, disabled, or BIPOC communities. And then I think of their relations and their families or people I know on the periphery within especially the arts context. And then the final kind of last edge of circles are all the community resources. So that can be organizations themselves, and their resources, or it can be that mutual aid situations. There’s a person here in Victoria, who’s trying to like, start our mutual aid disability network, but everyone has low capacity or spoons to start it, but there’s a real trying to gather resources and support each other. So I guess that is another way to look at community for me.

Q: Absolutely. I really love that Mia Mingus resource, the pod mapping. It’s really wonderful and difficult sometimes.

Regan: It was actually non-disabled individuals, mostly from BIPOC communities that informed me. And probably the biggest person in my life was my former boss, Michelle Jacques, who was the Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and is currently the Chief Curator at the Remai Modern.  

So I guess, in my life I have always tried to, like, hide my disabilities, for many different reasons, right? For fear of being judged. When I had talked, particularly to my mom about my depression and anxiety, I had to then comfort her, and she felt like she was to blame. And I just felt uncomfortable talking about it, and really tried to deny the experiences I was going through. And tried to like-- also I had this learned thing from childhood of deny your pain, just go through, just suffer through it.

Q: Mm hmm.

Regan: So it’s probably from childhood that I learned to kind of quell things down or ignore things. And when I started working at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria with Michelle, she was just-- she’s such an amazing individual, who really-- One of Michelle’s greatest strengths is being so open and warm and friendly, and allowing people to have space to be themselves and then, in fact, encourage people to have space for themselves.    

And I think I had been reading Mia Mingus and Sins Invalid, and watching the work of Carmen [Papalia], and also Syrus Marcus Ware, but I didn’t actually bring it into my work. When I started working at the art gallery, that’s when all of a sudden, everything connected and I brought my own experiences into the work and really realized how important and essential that was, for me to connect with other people, for me to make sure for artists or community members that their lived experiences were also valid, and in fact, important in creating program.

Q: Mm hmm.

Regan: So, the three big mentors were Michelle Jacques who worked at the art gallery, France Trepanier who was a curator at Open Space that I had worked for pre-Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and Raj Sen, who was the director at Open Space after I left Open Space. And these are three individuals of colour who, to my knowledge, all didn’t have disabilities or maybe just didn’t talk about them with me, but I think watching them talk about, particularly, their experiences as racialized folks or Indigenous folks and how important that was to their work, really helped me ground myself in disability and queerness around my own work.

Q: That’s really great. Disability Justice really highlights and names the importance of naming our teachers and our forebears, living and dead, and I really appreciate having these names for people who, in some way, taught you and opened up that space for you to step into.

Regan: And all three individuals—one, unfortunately, has passed away, Raj—but they have done so much mentoring. And that also was really important then, that brought into my own work of working with other folks with disabilities and kind of mentoring… yeah, disabled, queer, and BIPOC folks, even though I still am young myself. Other people I didn’t mention in that, that I realized I really want to mention, are other folks with disabilities that are doing this work—Linda Bartram, Joanne Cuffe, and Amy Amantea—all three individuals I hadn’t known about [until] I started to do a lot of work within disability communities for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. It’s always lovely to connect with others and see what people are doing and to learn from them and vice versa, of always learning from each other. Sometimes it’s better to have that hands-on approach rather than just like, reading an article.

Q: Absolutely. I think that there are some big names that we all owe a lot to, but it is also really important to see who we’re actually connecting with in our lives.

Regan: Probably started at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, though I had worked previously at Open Space Art Society, which is an artist-run centre in Victoria, and had done some work around unhoused communities and so that did often involve working with folks with disabilities. So I wrote a BC Arts Council grant to work with Michelle Jacques directly because I had previously worked a little bit with her at Open Space.  

There was this [joint] exhibition called Anna Banana, that was all about the artist Anna Banana. And I really loved working with Michelle, she just seemed so supportive. I loved all of her ideas around community and how to build community. It’s often in curatorial departments in museums, you find that type of like, academic person—people who are aren’t really invested in community and just want to work with those rock star artists, and Michelle wasn’t that at all. I had really seen how genuine she was with other curators. So I was first brought in to work more on the Anna Banana project and to do collections. And slowly, I was doing programming there and I think she saw that that’s what I really enjoyed doing.  

When I started there, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria was on the brink of closing for a renovation project, so one of the big things was to have programs outside of the institution. Michelle and other staff members recognized the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria-- half of it is in a historic colonial mansion, which was very unwelcoming and still is very unwelcoming to folks. And we recognize that the average visitor to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria was often an older white woman who was fairly educated, and there was just whole groups of folks missing out. So Michelle really encouraged me to do programming outside of the institution, to really focus particularly on BIPOC, disabled, and queer artists and communities.

Q: Mm hmm.

Regan: So I did a number of projects there that focused on that, and as I was working on those, I really was delving deep within disability communities, because I was also eventually doing an accessibility audit for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. And, again, this audit looked at not just individuals with disabilities, but looking at all kinds of barriers for historically and currently oppressed folks, and the intersectionality of that. I realized when I was doing all this work—of the audit, and interviewing folks, and paying them for their interviews, and doing a survey-- I realized no one really was talking much about accessibility in the arts.

You know, you’ve had Kickstart [Disability Arts & Culture] in BC. You had Tangled Arts and Workman Arts in Toronto. And you had a couple in between in Winnipeg and Calgary. But unfortunately in BC, there wasn’t much happening. And in Victoria in particular, there was just really nothing being organized.  

So I started this initiative called Disassemble the Arts. It was a bigger initiative to take place outside of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. For the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, it looked like the audit which included community consultation surveys. We had open houses, where we had what we call community conversations. We had two in-person pre-pandemic, and then two over Zoom during the pandemic. During the very beginning of the pandemic, I created sensory kits because that was something that was really wanted. And eventually it was all going to lead to a conference.

Q: Mm hmm.  

Regan: And then that’s when COVID hit. And I quickly pivoted our conference to three artists talks—one with Carmen Papalia, one with Amanda Cachia who is a disabled curator, and then Syrus Marcus Ware’s. And then my contract finished and there was a lot of complicated things happening at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and it was not renewed, and in fact, then Michelle Jacques left that organization as well. So that was really the main start of it.

Q: Wow.

Regan: Yeah, it was a bit-- that was a lot.

Q: These things always have very tangled beginnings. I know, if I were to describe any of the work I do, it would be similarly like, “well, this... and then all of this”.

Regan: Yeah.

Regan: I think access is something that-- how we can treat everyone equally, how we can take care of community members to make sure that their needs are met. It can obviously look like different things because there’s so many different barriers, but acknowledging that there’s the physical accessibility to a building or the financial accessibility of having to transport yourself to that building, or have childcare so you can go out, and having food available that is within your diet—but then there’s also this whole thing of access of, well has this institution itself done harm, or has the entire field done harm? And because I work in the museum field, you know, museums were started as a way to show off colonial power of like, “look at what countries I have taken over and look at the cool stuff I looted and will never give back or will slowly give back but will protest about it”.  

Q: Mm hmm.

Regan: And also arts too. Arts in itself—there’s many notions particularly of contemporary art that are not accessible, that people think you have to be “educated” a certain way in order to engage with it or even to go to it.

I work with this group in Prince George, where I was asked-- a person had never been to the art gallery up there before, and one of their first questions to me was, “well, I don’t have any formal wear.” And I at first laughed, and I was like, “No, of course not,” for someone who’s never been to an art gallery, they may think they need to dress up, because this is kind of the stereotype, and it’s often a very true stereotype that it is kind of the upper higher class who go because they have the luxury of the time, of the finances. And it is really often a privilege to make art.  

So I think about all of those different layers of what is in people’s heads, and the intergenerational education that has been given, or intergenerational harm, or trauma. And then I think of things like attitudinal, financial, physical barriers that are about access.  

Q: Mm hmm.

Regan: I just don’t want folks to have to fight [for access] anymore. I’m tired of it. [laughs] I think most people are tired of it. And we probably still will have to continue to fight... I guess that is the all-encompassing access or accessibility for me.  

Q: Your description makes me think of TL Lewis’s definition of ableism and the ways that non-disabled people are impacted by ableism because it is-- you know, in Gabrielle Peters’ words, it’s the rebar that girds our society.  

Regan: I like to define access as the barrier. So it’s like when you’re talking about systems of oppression or talking about something [like] colonization, you actually want to point out, “what are some of the issues?” instead of just talking in general about accessibility. But I think a lot of organizations I work with within the arts prefer-- They don’t want to touch upon barriers, they want to have the nice word of accessibility, because that sounds nice to them. And it sounds like, “Oh, I could do that. If there’s a checkmark list.”

Q: I definitely encounter the checkmark list as well. It is helpful to have things where it’s like, “okay, these things should just be default, and you should be able to just check them off,” but there are other parts of access that are much deeper—again, getting into attitudinal barriers in particular is a much deeper process. And to engage meaningfully in this work, you can’t just be doing the tick boxes.

Regan: From a personal point of view, the arts and also museums have literally saved my life in many ways. As a child, I grew up-- because of my father’s work, we would move around the US all the time. I didn’t necessarily have the best upbringing, but one thing that we did as a family was to go to museums, which really sparked my love for museums to this day, even though I often-- when I go to a museum, I mostly go to critique the museum.

Both: [laugh]

Regan: And in fact, most museums I don’t enjoy going to, so it seems very ironic, but because of all the histories of under-representation, and how the narratives are often written by [people without] lived experiences of oppression. When I first worked at Open Space Art Society, it was a real eye-opening experience for me because it was the first time I got to work with professional artists [where] this was their full-time work or part-time work. Having conversations—particularly Open Space is known for working with Indigenous artists—really opened up my worldview, and also created an outlet of self-expression for myself as I started an art practice. I have also seen firsthand how it has helped others.

I worked on this team project called Selfhood. It was all about creating-- like, how to use your identity and create arts from it. And we particularly had a number of trans youth who were going through procedures or were having a really hard time at home because their family was not accepting them and [they] often had to leave their home to feel safe. Art was just-- we were there weekly, and it was a real safe haven to express what they were going through, and really build upon that idea of who they are.

Q: Mm hmm.

Regan: So I’ve just seen it help so many people. And the fact that there is not equal access to that—that, again, historically, people who have made arts have been people who have money, people who have time and energy. And often that is not a lot of communities for disabled folks or they’ve not had equal access. They may have to pay a coffee shop to display their artwork, instead of getting paid to do their artwork. I always advocate for anyone to be in the arts, and to do art, because honestly, I feel like art-- life is just a big art experiment.

Both: [laugh]

Regan: And so I just really see the importance in it. Part of what I like to do is make art programming that is about general things that we all can relate to—so like food, or grief, or sleeping—and try to at least lower that barrier in terms of a theme for folks.

Regan: I often use my art practice to either just have fun and experiment... which are things I often don’t even show to anyone. I have a banner here that I made that just says “fuck it”.

Q: [laughs]

Regan: So I do weird textile, things like that. I had a quilt that I made and then embroidered after I had an abortion, and was really feeling-- even though I’ve always been pro-abortion, just still felt guilt about it.

So, often it’s about what I’m going through. But then often what happens is, I think, “Oh, I’m going through this, and probably others are as well.” That’s where my social practice comes in, particularly since I love working with groups of people.

I did a project in the early pandemic around grief called Permission to Grieve and getting strangers to talk to one another about what grief feels like and what we were currently grieving about. And then, because it was such a big topic, I wrote a one-person comedy play titled Neurotic Erotica to like, relieve myself and add humour to my life.

So it is often community— I try to focus on the social practice, but then I also do small things for myself when I have the time.

Regan: Yeah. I’ll connect the dots between my trajectory. I finished my contract at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in November 2020, and I was trying to figure out what to do next. And what I did, in fact, was do a whole bunch of consulting for different organizations about community outreach and accessibility. I had previously done a year at Central Washington University remotely for their disability studies. I then completed that, and also did the basic Rick Hansen Foundation training, even though I have issues with both things—it was for the able-bodied people-- I thought “here, it’s like accreditation”.

I kept on searching within the museum field for different roles. I originally applied for Two Rivers Art Gallery for a different position, received it and went up to Prince George for the first time just to check if I did, in fact, want to live up there and take the role. And I decided I do not—one of the reasons why I didn’t want to move to Prince George was that their health care system up there—Victoria’s [healthcare system] is already terrible—it’s even worse up there, and I go to the doctor so frequently. So, part of the reason was just because my disabilities. But I was then offered this accessibility and community outreach advisor.

Q: Mm hmm.

Regan: [When] I first started in that role, I was asked to do an audit of their website and of their online programming. And that took about a year of paid community consultants in different sectors of disability communities, and then my own self auditing. And then the director at Two Rivers Art Gallery, Sarah Knelman asked me, “Well, are you interested [in] doing a physical accessibility audit?” And I said yes, but I said, “the problem with doing an audit—.“ Even though I did an online audit with community consultants, you only get two or three hours because that’s all the gallery can afford to pay them. I never liked the like Robin Hood approach where you swoop in and swoop out. I want to really build the long-term relationships.  

Q: Mm hmm.

Regan: So I asked her if I could have the approach of a collective who did the physical audit together, so it would all be people with lived experiences. I would train them how to do an audit, but also acknowledge that their own lived experiences that are just as important, if not more important, than what I was training them to do.  

And then together as a collective, we would not only do the physical access audit of the Two Rivers Gallery, but then the art gallery could offer to pay for at least the first month or two to do training and audits with the folks who were interested in doing that work. So, acknowledging that everyone who is part of the group may not want to do that in the end, but again, it was a way to teach folks who have lived experiences different and new skills, and maybe also have an extra income because we’re paying them throughout their time at Two Rivers. I’m hoping that they also get additional pay from different organizations and businesses around Prince George when they do audits or disability trainings.

Q: I really love this way of— as you said, this collective approach to that work, making it a community knowledge base, rather than holding that knowledge as an individual.

Regan: Yeah. And I’m a person with different lived experiences, and I do work a lot with community, so I hear what they’re saying, but the more voices you can have, the more you can really inspect something and see what is working and what is not. I think the more people you can get, the better to do that work together.  

Q: So, the physical accessibility audit is the beginning of this collective in Prince George, that is holding this information and these resources and applying it to their own lived experiences to be able to continue that work potentially down the line after this initial beginning is done.

Regan: Yeah. Unfortunately, Prince George is, I think, one of the major cities in BC that has the longest way to go. Their sidewalks are brick, but all the bricks are coming out, so there’s giant potholes. Several of my participants have talked about how they have tried to get on buses [while] using mobility devices or using a cane and have been denied access.

And I’m sure this happens everywhere, but I’ve never heard such a concentration from the cohort compared to folks in my community-- in disabled community in Victoria and Vancouver. I hear ableism stories of course, but not as many as I’ve heard [in Prince George].

Regan: My favourite thing in the world is to work with community. And a lot of the other things I do, especially in this new role at Two Rivers, I’m not working with community as much. Particularly since for the majority of my time I work remotely—I only go up to Prince George for a week once a month, sometimes less than that. We mostly meet as a collective through Zoom, and it’s such an interesting-- how many of these folks are at different levels of their journey on Disability Justice. And to see that impact of people who were like, “this is less familiar territory.”

One of the artists in the group, Troy Lindstrom—he does digital drawings—because of this group, he put in a Canada Council [for the Arts] grant to make tactile versions of his digital art, and he said he had never thought of that before. He is a big advocate up there for disability rights and disability justice, but he hadn’t considered thinking through for blind and low vision users of how people could interact with his art. So it brings me a lot of hope when I know there’s all these stories of what is happening up in Prince George, and not just in the disability community. There’s also a lot of bad things happening in Prince George with the unhoused community, with particularly Indigenous communities and also with trans communities, but this project gives me real hope for the future.

Q: Mmm.

Regan: We have a group of seven people, and none of them had ever met each other. I would say three are very, very vocal within the disability community in Prince George. So you’d think those three at least would have met? [laughs] And I think the thing that everyone was most excited for, was to create this community of disabled folks who could really-- You didn’t have to-- It was that Mia Mingus thing of access intimacy, like you didn’t have to talk, or have an explainer of all the experiences. You could kind of, get to the point of “this was what I experienced,” and you didn’t have to say, “Oh, this is a common thing that occurred,” everyone just knew. That the most kind of gave me hope was that, at least I’ve brought together this group of people, and they’re all passionate about both making sure that it’s easier for their own lives in accessing the arts, but also are really concerned about making that so for others.

We have a couple individuals who are more disability rights, and what I call maybe older lessons of not liking the term of disability. Perhaps liking “differently abled,” which maybe it’s a judgment that I think it’s an older thought. But maybe it’s just not what I have learned or grown up with. And that’s also an interesting-- trying to manage all of these different lived experiences and trying to honour everyone in that together.

Q: Yeah, obviously, we’re going to have our own biases and preferences and things like that. I think that’s one of the biggest [reasons] that it can be hard to get the okay on community-based projects where the researcher is part of the community, but we’re also the ones that bring an understanding of how to engage with these communities, and what is meaningful and where to be critical. And no one is operating from being objective, like no one-- [objectivity] is false. So when we’re aware that these are at least the communities that we’re coming from, we can be more cognizant of where our potential biases can be.  

Regan: I think it’s so important to have lived experiences being the facilitator, because, for example, in this Prince George collective there’s an individual who is blind. And I started off every Zoom—and if I have a PowerPoint—I visually describe. When we met in person for the first time, we went through an art exhibition, and I visually described it, and it was her first time ever having visual description. And she thanked me because she’s like, “Oh, I didn’t have to--”—she’s in school right now at the local college—and she’s like, “I have to inform my profs ‘please do visual descriptions’.” And she was so happy that I already had that knowledge, not that it was lived experience, but that I had just the knowledge of working with a disability community that that was what was needed when she said that she was a blind individual.

Q: That is that access intimacy that Mia Mingus speaks about and writes about.

Regan: Oh. [laughs]

Q: How does that go for you? [laughs]

Regan: I don’t do that well, to be honest. I think part of this is upbringing of, again, that notion that you need to quell down any pain or that isn’t actually what you’re experiencing, that I learned as a child, with also my work at as a curator in which curators often have to be the in-between of the artists and the institution, and they have to be the ones to buffer that bureaucratic system and let the artists be free to do what they want. And I’m also just a people pleaser in general. So, I often don’t consider, unfortunately, my own access needs. Luckily, often the access needs of others help my own access needs.

But I honestly have worked on projects where-- even currently, the way I’m sitting, I know my back is going to hate me for this. I want to look professional instead of the way I should sit that would help my back out. And I do that all the time. So I am bad at that.

One of the really challenging things was when I was working at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and I was slowly building all of these relationships. Slowly letting people know there was going to be this giant conference that was happening. Really building those relationships well and not just making it about the conference. That was great in many ways for me, personally, to have these connections. But one of the really difficult things was, you know, COVID was one reason why the conference didn’t happen, but also it didn’t even turn into something online, because of my contract ending and then not being renewed.  

Q: Mm hmm.

Regan: And it I feel like time and time again, that happens, right? Of working in communities, building it in very good ways, and then all of a sudden an organization doesn’t have the funding. Or you do an audit or a training with an organization, and then that’s it. Because they think, “Well, I’ve learned everything.” And I find that-- I’ve gotten more and more used to it, but I still find I put so much energy into doing things in a good way and to really working with the organization and building those relationships. I do find [I have] burnout and fatigue from organizations that make promises or organizations who say, “yes, yes, we care about accessibility, this is a “priority”.” But then you don’t actually see the actions to that.

And every time—I work with the organization—I no longer have the same hope [laughs] that I did. I always have to quell my excitement, especially when doing audits with organizations, because that’s the first step to seeing what the problem is. And sometimes I can get to continue with organization and see that work continue a little bit, but often I check back in after I do audits and then they haven’t done anything. And I-- it makes me honestly really concerned about the actual priorities with arts organizations. And I keep on thinking, “Well, no wonder”. I’ve also come into places where there’s been real tension with disability communities, and it’s because the relationships weren’t treated correctly, because promises were made and then not actually done. So holding people accountable, holding organizations accountable... but that’s always so much energy to do.

Q: Yeah. I do find that, talking to disabled people in community, it is something that is often cited as a reason for isolation and burnout and things like that-- is that people try and try and try and you know, you’ve done 2, 3, 4, 10 audits of various places, and you’ve tried to teach people about the importance of access and meaningful inclusion and involvement, and nothing happens. And it is exhausting.

Regan: So I worked with a Vancouver-based arts organization as their accessibility consultant. I was brought in after their last accessibility consultant left to return to school. They have this annual festival that they put on. I was brought in right when the festival was about to start and so of course I had no say. And this festival, one of their-- in fact, their main priority was to make it as accessible as possible, to particularly Deaf, hard of hearing, and blind and low vision folks.

They had ASL videos and captioning with most of the work. And I mentioned some things to them, because part of it was that they wanted to write a report to show, “well, here’s the best practices” and even with that, I was like, “Well, you’ve never worked with disability communities in the past [laughs], why do you think you're the organization to write the best practices.” Because I did-- I started to question from the beginning. In the end, we had feedback sessions and people were generally excited but also said, “Well, there’s so much work to be done. You really didn’t consult with our communities beforehand.”

I had to, [at] many points, talk to the director and be like, “you can’t write this report, here’s all the reasons.” And it was about three months actually, of fighting. And not in a mean way, but just talking back and forth and all that. And they finally got it, but then one of the questions back for me was, “Well, why didn’t you tell me all this before?” And I explained, “Well, there’s many different reasons. You are my employer, I could-- if I rock the boat too much, especially right off the bat, I could potentially be fired. Also, the festival was already rolling way before I started, so there was not much that I could really change,” because, again, disability communities were definitely thought of, but as a secondary thing. And I think in the end, the organization—which is a great organization—learned a lot of lessons that, I think, in actuality they will take with [them] because it was-- they were hard lessons that they learned.