The longevity and power of My Wide White Bed

Books that resonate with disabled people in Aotearoa, in the here and now, are still few and far between. While I enjoy good books on the subject from the US, UK and Australia, I’m always looking for books exploring disabled lives, experience and world views that are truly ours.

It’s therefore exciting to see a fourth reprint of Trish Harris’s much-loved poetry collection, My Wide White Bed. Re-reading my copy now is just as enjoyable and thought-provoking as it was when it was first published.

A fourth reprint is very unusual for poetry, a testament to the wide and continuing audience appeal for a little book that punches above its weight.

My Wide White Bed, published in 2017 by Landings Press, loosely follows Trish’s journey of a long hospital stay, an experience all too familiar to many disabled people. The short, pithy and very accessible poems are adapted from journal entries made while at the coal face, a ward in Hutt Hospital. The book has delightfully simple illustrations scattered throughout. Trish navigates the wayward currents and rough waters of a prolonged hospital stay from the mooring of her wide white bed in a hospital sailing “like a tall ship down the crease of the valley”.

Hope, and sometimes wry humour, are threaded through the interactions with medical and general staff and other patients - the boredom, the mundane and familiar daily hospital routine. There is also fear and pain. Trish is no Pollyanna. The poems are deceptively simple, but the light touch and acute observation is anything but lightweight.

It packs a satisfying sharpness and astringency of observation when you least expect it. Trish explores the intimacies and the spaces between people in a situation of sometimes unchosen intimacy as a daily occurrence, an experience of people thrown together by circumstance, understood only too well by many disabled people.

My Wide White Bed has wide appeal. Along with her memoir The Walking Stick Tree, Trish has taken her work to explore the patient experience and disability in hospitals, and at medical conferences, combining dialogue, narrative and small poems to educate an audience that doesn’t often hear about this experience in such an engaging and accessible way. Trish writes about medical situations, but takes us beyond the medicalisation of disability, often rejected by disabled people, to the essential and universal humanity of disability and the hospital experience.

The book has appeal to a general audience too, being favourably reviewed by well-known poets such as Jenny Bornholt and Harry Rickets.

In the Landfall review, Ben Brown says: "Hospitals have the capacity to refine your thinking. Generally speaking there are only two ways out. In her delightfully insightful way, Harris shows us a possible third: 'Part of me is desperately trying to have an out of body experience'."

Writing that speaks to disabled people as well as the wider general audience is to be celebrated.

Trish is co-founder of Crip the Lit, a network of Deaf and disabled writers as a way to “have our unique voices, perspectives and stories included and valued in mainstream writing in New Zealand. We want to tell our stories our way.”

My Wide White Bed will be available from August 23 from Landings Press for $22, or it can be ordered from your favourite bookshop. It's also available as a Kindle e-book on Amazon for $3.94

Trish’s memoir The Walking Stick Tree is available for $10 from thewalkingsticktree@gmail.com

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