white spaces where we learn to breathe

she don't bite, my father said about me as a child.

what he meant was

it ain't her fault if your skin reacts to her saliva. it was, though

partially, see, if you think we're all in this together, but i wasn't the one with

black-and-white thinking.

• from "you think autistic people cannot be journalists because we suffer from black-and-white thinking"

"white spaces where we learn to breathe" is art that combines space, text and punctuation as social commentary on the both the spaces that are typically "white spaces", and also the spaces left behind by missing and murdered BIPOC on Turtle Island. The reader is encouraged to breathe inside these spaces, and to observe them as one might observe a moment of silence.

About Murgatroyd Monaghan

Murgatroyd Monaghan is an Autistic mother, writer, spoken work artist and poet of mixed descent. Her spoken word won first place at the Wordstock Sudbury Literary Festival and Myths and Mirrors. Her piece "Thumbs" won the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. She has been a finalist for dozens of national literary prizes including the Room Poetry Contest and the CBC Nonfiction Prize. Other writing has been published in Chapter House Review, PRISM, and the Humber Literary Review, among many others. Murgatroyd has devoted her adult life to motherhood and is pursuing writing now that her children are older. She is working on several book-length projects. A former asylum-seeker, Monaghan was raised in Ontario, Canada.