Wigan’s poet at large, Shaun Fallows has completed a short run of poetry shows at The Edinburgh Fringe, and whilst he found bringing his work to a new audience positive, the experience of being a disabled performer in a city and festival that is actively inaccessible, was harder to take.
‘In my venue there was beer crates in the lift every day, and I kept asking for them to be removed, and it didn’t change’ He told me, as we sat in the sun in Greyfriar’s Kirkyard. Shaun is witty and relaxed, yet full of passion. His anger at the obvious ableism and unlawful practices at his venue is mingled with a dry wit and charismatic sparkle.
Shaun flits between anecdote, personal history and poetry. He recites his work with the same intensity, lines from his new book They Race Me In The Streets pepper his speech.
‘In these days of epic exposure/ I can’t believe we act like disability has just been discovered/ When we’ve always been out there/ Just no longer strapped to a bed or locked in a cupboard.’
This, his second poetry book shows his maturing as a working class man and how this intersects with disability. I ask him how audiences react to his poetry. ‘They automatically assume your life is really, really bleak, and I wanted to show that I really, really love my life, I wouldn’t change the position of being in a chair, I want other people’s attitudes to change.’
Shaun is very funny, his adoration of Michaela Strachen inspired. ‘When I was younger/ you made me jealous of a giraffe/ Giving that one lucky giraffe a bed bath.’ His work has actually reached the celebrity via friends.
His work isn’t all lightness of touch. He sees his work as a ‘tangible sign of resilience’. We talk about how much needs to change, that no-one seems to be championing us as disabled people, that no-one upholds The Equality Act. ‘If I am honest, and maybe I’m being cynical, I don’t think any of these things will change until I am dead’ Shaun laments, I try to frame a positive response, but there is no escaping the reality of our situation. Change is very slow, and despite our activism, it is very easy for the able-bodied majority to ignore us.
‘I went to a disabled only school, so I wasn’t mixing with able-bodied people, why set it up like that?’ Shaun questions, citing our enforced segregation as a root to why we don’t see more accessibility and integration.
He feels he’s matured, not trying to be like Paul Weller and The Jam anymore, ‘He looks like your grandma now’. I asked, despite Edinburgh being very inaccessible, would he return next year? ‘Yes, definitely’, I was relieved, because Shaun is an amazing poet, and we are lucky to have him at the festival. The festival needs to listen to Shaun and make real lasting changes.
Shaun Fallows was talking to Simon Jay.
