Rusty's Ghost Engine (also known as.......... Jinky Spring) asked Leah Bobet:

Where did your inspiration for Above come from?

Leah Bobet The first piece was a book called Exile & Pride, by Eli Clare, that was assigned reading for an undergrad philosophy course I was taking in third year. There's an image there, of the author standing under bright lights to have his disability diagnosed, feeling inspected and objectified and in pain, that struck me right between the eyes. I might have sat back in my chair, it communicated so hard.

That stuck to a few other things: A song lyric here, a question about how people could -really- build a secret underground society and still eat, Matthew's narrative voice. There are about sixty things that are the start of that book, but that image of someone feeling small and destroyed was the one that got me to the keyboard.

flag