Kimberly Dark

Essays on Love, Harm, and Transformation

Damaged Like Me

“Nothing is more brilliant and juicy to me than a woman stepping fully into her self—mind, body, and spirit, full throttle, without apology. Kimberly Dark has been illuminating the path for a long time. This book is a triumph. This book is a jailbreak from cultural inscriptions meant to keep us locked up, shut up, and conforming.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and The Book of Joan Fat, Pretty, and Soon to be Old is a moving, funny, and startlingly frank collection of personal essays about what it means to look a certain way. Or rather, certain ways. Navigating Kimberly Dark’s experience of being fat since childhood—as well as queer, white-privileged, a gender-confirming “girl with a pretty face,” active then disabled, and inevitably aging—each piece blends storytelling and social analysis to deftly coax readers into a deeper understanding of how appearance privilege (and stigma) function in everyday life and how the architecture of this social world constrains us. At the same time, she provides a blueprint for how each of us can build a more just social world, one interaction at a time. Includes an afterword by Health at Every Size expert, Linda Bacon. Kimberly Dark is a writer, professor, and raconteur. She has written award-winning plays, and taught and performed for a wide range of audiences in various countries over the past two decades. She is the author of The Daddies, Love and Errors, and co-editor of the anthology Ways of Being in Teaching.

A Makeover for Self and Society

Fat, Pretty, and Soon to be Old

Daddies

The Daddies is a love letter to masculinity, a kaleidoscope of its pleasures and horrors. But who is "Daddy" in American culture? This book aims to find out more than who – but how the process of knowing Daddy can prompt readers to know themselves and their society.

The Daddies

Ellyn Lyle

Sean Wiebe

Liz Day

Peter R. Wright

Mitchell McLarnon

As teachers, we share experiences with one another. It is a way to make sense of our teaching lives and teaching selves. Ways of Being in Teaching is that kind of sharing; it is a scholarly conversation that will appeal to teachers who are tired of the tips and tricks, and want to talk more deeply about how to flourish in this profession. Most of us know ways to strengthen and sustain self, soul, heart, identity, and how these key touchstones also strengthen teaching. This book recognizes that who we are, where we are, and why, is as much a social process as a personal one. Attending to life purpose is a way of attending to teaching. Chapters in this text are insightfully forthright, challenging us to undertake the rigourous work of discovering who we are as human beings and how this impacts who we are with our students. Canadian curriculum scholar Cynthia Chambers asks us to listen for what keeps us awake at night, and with Ways of Being in Teaching we bring what we have heard into the daylight, into the conversation. “This collection of reflections and conversations does more than provide provocative reading for the reflective teacher. It invites practitioners to find their own place at the table of sharing and to welcome the stories that will certainly come as a result of engaging with this community of life writers.” – Carmen Schlamb, Professor, Seneca College

Conversations and Reflections

Ways of Being in Teaching

Kimberly Dark is a writer, storyteller and raconteur, working to reveal the hidden architecture of everyday life one clever essay, poem, and story at a time.

Love and Errors

People who have been damaged, thrown away, marginalized, or traumatized are more capable of apprehending social patterns, precisely because they’ve needed to be aware and vigilant about how the world works. For too long, those who rely on long-held rights and entitlement have claimed that others are biased about the very topics on which they have expertise. Damaged Like Me is a series of essays and stories that reveal a complex social landscape. It shows how possible and vital it is to build roads to a more equitable and loving collective culture that includes body sovereignty, racial justice, gender equity/liberation, and much more. It does so by relying on the insights and approaches to knowledge production of those on the receiving end of inequity and violence, those whose “objectivity” on issues of oppression has been consistently maligned despite their having the most to teach us.

Kimberly Dark

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