The Importance of Reclaiming Weirdness

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I think the progress of my life and all the best things that have come to me are from leaning into weirdness rather than trying to hide it. As I carry on through life, I understand more and more that everybody feels like an outsider in one way or another. Everyone's always busy identifying their difference and often feeling sort of challenged and victimised by that. There's an alluxuria space where other people don't have control of us. A rebellious space, a creative space, a generative space. Just like I like being right on the edge of the sea here. And you could really help keep us afloat with this extended episode. Thank you everyone for listening! Bye for now

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May.

This week Katherine chats to writer Joanne Limburg about the ways that we can find connection in the experience of outsidership.

While writing her astonishing new book, Letters To My Weird Sisters, Joanne sought out women from the past who were marked out as ‘weird’, from Virginia Woolf, who was unable to choose the ‘right’ ballgown, to Katharina Kepler, who was put on trial for witchcraft. Drawing on her Jewish heritage, Joanne urges us all to assert the humanity of those who seem unfathomably different to us - the physically and intellectually disabled people who were considered to be ‘life unworthy of life’ in the Holocaust.

There is so much hope in Joanne’s project to own and cherish her own ‘weirdness’, and to find a kind of sisterhood there, stretching across time. Many listeners will find their community here, too.

JOANNE LINKS

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Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

KATHERINE LINKS

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