To mark Spread the Word’s 30th Anniversary, three London-based deaf and disabled writers have been commissioned to create a short original piece of work. These Deaf and Disabled Writer Commissions showcase new work by three London-based deaf and disabled writers, and provide a developmental and profile-raising opportunity. Three London-based emerging writers have also been commissioned for our Emerging Writer Commissions.
The Deaf and Disabled Writer commissions, alongside Emerging Writer Commissions and Borough of Literature Commissions, were printed in the Deptford Literature Fesitval Anthology.
Accepting Dirt as Tenderness by Oli Isaac
Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity. There is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer. [Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet]
The thorn from the rosebush I cut back is lodged, tauntingly, under my skin. Every morning in the shower, it stings – a flash of pain in my thumb, then nothing. My girlfriend says it will work itself out eventually, but I wonder if it’s stuck there for good. Like so much else in my life, it is neither healing nor breaking free, just existing – there – beneath the surface. I blame the cold.
1/ the soil under my fingernails [accepting dirt as tenderness]
My relationship with the garden begins, of course, with a romance.
It is January, 2023. Heidi, once a pen pal, then a lover, then a best friend, returns to my life after a six-year absence. By some strange fate, we are living on the same street – one of London’s many thousands — and it feels inevitable when we immediately start dating. Evenings are devoted to long walks through Camberwell side streets and getting lost in darkening parks. We sketch the lives we lived without the other, holding hands that have long gone numb. Weekends are the gurgle of a coffee machine in the morning, the simmering of an evening shakshuka, my cat’s wariness and curiosity. Then, one Sunday, Heidi invites me to a community garden.
She tells me she’s been volunteering there for years. She says it’ll make the South-East feel more knowable, offer a way to make it mine, six months after moving. But I make an excuse and decline the offer. I don’t know anything about gardening, I tell her. I grew up in Dublin and Zagreb, playing on concrete; nature reduced to a grass football pitch. Every houseplant I own is either dead or barely hanging on. And besides, my vision of a community garden is bleak, a blur of passive-aggressive, elderly allotment politics and corporate team-building exercises. Spending a freezing afternoon there is not my idea of a date. But when she asks me for the third weekend in a row, I relent. Curious about her world, I now see the invite as a quiet gesture, welcoming me in. I show up near the end of a session, unsure of what I’m walking into.
On the way there, I cycle through Burgess Park, a patchwork of reimagined green space resting between Walworth, Camberwell, and Peckham. First proposed in 1943 in the wake of the Blitz, this ‘green lung of South London’ is a post-industrial anomaly – a rare instance of city sprawl in reverse. Rows of terraced houses, along with pubs, factories, and churches, were bought up and demolished, in a slow decades-long drip. By the 1990s, the radical and controversial plan had forcibly displaced around 30 streets, crafting 140 acres of shared public parkland in its place, piece by piece. Sitting on the edge of the park, Glengall Wharf Garden lives on the site of an old refuse depot, where boats once carried London’s rubbish down the Surrey Canal, a waterway long since drained and buried and remade into a path. At 14 years old, the community garden is well established – home to food-growing beds, hugel mounds, polytunnels, a forest garden, a chicken coop, and beehives. Its concrete foundations have been mulched and woodchipped into life. Like much of London, it is a place of dereliction and transformation, of things paved over, uprooted, and remade.
When I walk my bicycle through the gates for the first time, I don’t know where to stand or how to belong. A couple of people hover over flower beds, offering brief smiles before their gazes return to the plants. Heidi runs over when she spots me across the garden. She laughs and mentions that the session is already ending for the afternoon. People are packing up the tools and collecting a harvest to take home – ‘but thanks for coming’. A volunteer named angel, also here for the first time, asks if we can help carry some wood back to theirs for shelves they are building. They offer in return a slice of freshly baked apple cake. It is the first of countless meals the three of us will share.
By the time spring arrives, I am committed. The garden is now a Sunday afternoon ritual, a quiet anchor in my week. When spring gives way to summer, the place hums with life, and the air is thick with warmth and movement. A rhythm takes hold, in sync with the season’s abundance. I lock up my bike, make a round of hugs and hellos, then slip into the fold. I scoop frogs from the drying ponds, haul full watering cans across the beds, ferry the chickens from coop to pen. Faces take on names, names into stories – fragments of pasts, frustrations, small victories and bad dates are scattered across our conversations. Sessions become a series of catch-ups over seed trays and beneath fruit trees, hands in the soil, roots entangling. The garden becomes a comfort, a community.
All of this unfolds without the exhaustion that comes with sustaining a modern cross-borough friendship: the strain of Google Calendar acrobatics, the quiet, nagging guilt of unread WhatsApp chats. Here, presence is fluid. People drift in and out– here one week, gone the next, but inevitably returning if not for a Sunday session, then for fireside songs or spontaneous fundraisers. The casualness of garden camaraderie both belies and enables the strength of friendships and community that have become the bedrock of the garden experience. It is precisely this ease – this looseness – that allows something deeper to take root.
The garden, too, invites a different way of being and being with. Tasks are slow and repetitive. The compost bays always need turning and trugs of greens always need chopping. Again and again. For the uninitiated, boredom can creep in: the restless itch of being without distraction. But the garden asks us to attend: to the droop of a thirsty plant, or the suddenly deepened purple of the artichoke flower. Given time, the mind softens. Boredom gives way to observation, then reflection, then something deeper still. The work becomes a meditation. Attention spills over into conversation – less transactional than outside the garden’s boundaries, freer, lighter, gentler. The garden rekindles something rare—a space for connection that is effortless and unforced. It is a place where conversation can still arise unbidden, like green shoots after rain, or forgotten seeds in the wormery.
This self-organised, volunteer-led garden is a quiet defiance of the logic that understands land as commodity rather than commons. Here, the earth is not something to be owned or extracted from, but tended to – a living system to be nurtured. It is a gift of a place – radical in its generosity, political in its refusal to accept the given order of things. The world insists on its own inevitability: rents will rise, communities will be displaced, winters will be colder, protests will shrink. But the garden reminds me that nothing is fixed. The ground can be broken and remade; a place for redirecting rubbish can harbour foxes, mycelium, nasturtiums: uncountable stirrings of life. The seasons change, and what seems dead blooms again.
The garden thrives not by bending nature to its will, but by working with it in tandem. Beneath this lies the philosophy of permaculture, a way of tending to the land that can be traced back to Indigenous and traditional land practices. Permaculture gardens mirror the resilience and self-sufficiency of natural ecosystems, allowing nature’s impulses to flourish. Nothing is wasted, and everything returns to the earth in time. It is making the most of what’s already there.
The garden practises a mantra of minimal interference, refusing traditional horticulture’s division of plants into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Most ‘weeds’ are left undisturbed, respected for the structural benefits they bring to the soil, and the way they provide groundcover and keep life circling. Uses are found for the few plants that are removed. Nettles are made into soup, borage is soaked and turned into a fertiliser, the bramble forms a thorny mulch under the crabapple tree.
The compost heap, a heaving pile of stems and scraps, holds the memory of past harvests and the promise of future ones. Rainwater is caught and saved before it slips into drains. We plant beans to fix nitrogen for the beds that will follow; in summer, they climb sweetcorn, and are nourished by a soil shaded by squash’s broad leaves: the ‘three sisters’ growing in harmony. We mulch the soil to retain water and stop erosion, sow wildflowers to draw in pollinators, and when the growing cycle of each plant completes, save its seeds.
At the heart of permaculture are three ethics: care of the earth, care of people, and the sharing of surplus. In the garden, this means that everything is connected; that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; that every action is deliberate. Decay is not an end but a beginning, the waste of one system can be the nourishment of another. Permaculture is not just a method but a message: renewal is always possible. In a city where green space is constantly threatened by developers, the garden insists on this – not as nostalgia, but as adaptation.
My gardening know-how remains stubbornly lacking, but my world has widened, my way of being burst open. The garden exists outside the logic that governs the rest of my life, dominated by a relentless need for achievement as a measure of self-worth, and the concomitant pressure to constantly be moving forward, where time is measured in deadlines, where my day is a desperate scramble of to-do lists and a punishing hour-by-hour daily plan. Productivity smothers a depression that threatens to erupt if I dwell too long inside my own mind. It keeps the engine of my body and brain running until it exhausts itself.
But garden teaches me another way. Things get done but they are not hurried. There is time to linger. And in that lingering, I notice what I might otherwise overlook: steam rising from the compost heap on cold mornings, an iridescent rose chafer navigating the ridges of my palm, the soft give of woodchip underfoot after rain, the ethereal sway of a calendula in a breeze, its golden head tilting toward the sun. My gaze settles on small, shifting details and the world slows. Time stretches and loosens its grip, and drifts out of view.
“Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible,” writes Wendell Berry. “A small place… can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure – in addition to its difficulties – that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.” The garden embodies this. It does not demand attention the way the world outside does – through notifications, alerts, obligations. It draws attention through presence, through patience.
Gradually, I begin to understand that stopping to name a plant is its own quiet kind of rebellion, some small but potent refusal of the attention economy. The American poet Mary Oliver once wrote, ‘Attention is the beginning of devotion’. But, in a world where our time and attention have become resources to be mined and monetised, what are we devoted to?
Writer Michael Sacasas, on his Substack The Convivial Society, describes the modern digital-led culture “as a great engine of desire, training us to want what it offers and encouraging us to forget our deep desire for that which cannot be bought”. He calls ours an era of depletion, where life’s boundaries have thinned, where “we are always on and always available,” where human and non-human alike are treated as raw materials, as sites of extraction. The result?
The arc of digital culture bends toward exhaustion. When we think of the way our days are structured, the kinds of activities most readily on offer, the mode of relating to the world we are encouraged to adopt, etc. In each case we are more likely to find ourselves spent rather than sustained. The default set of experiences on offer to us are more likely to leave us feeling drained and depleted rather than satisfied and renewed. In our consumption, we are consumed.
The garden, by contrast, is a space of renewal. A place where time is not hoarded or spent but lived. Where progress is not linear, but cyclical, untidy, slow. It is no coincidence that Bill Mollison, one of permaculture’s founders, framed it as a philosophy of resistance against capitalism and industry, a reimagining of how we live and relate to the world. Novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch writes, “Reality is that which is revealed to the patient eye of love.”
To stop and notice – to truly notice – is to resist. It is to reclaim a piece of ourselves from the relentless demands of productivity and consumption. You cannot rush seedlings into bloom or will the rain to fall. You simply have to tend to what is there and trust in time.
In her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, the American multidisciplinary artist, Jenny Odell, describes time as ‘an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on nothing’. In a world engineered towards constant productivity, that demands an endless growth, ‘doing nothing’ – like spending an afternoon among people and plants – can be radical, and subversive against an encroaching neoliberal consensus that insists all time must be productive. Odell contrasts horizontal time – the linear, forward-driven time of work and progress – with vertical time, the kind that stretches time into something more. A minute spent immersed in a book or watching a tree sway is different to a minute spent on a screen. The garden is a gift of time returned to itself, one that replenishes rather than depletes, nurtures rather than extracts.
We sit over communal lunch, cooked by volunteers, with soil-smudged hands and sweaty shirts, catching up and being there, fully. These small acts of community ripple out. In the promise of permaculture, the garden isn’t a place where growth happens in isolation; instead, it develops into a place where relationships flourish: between species, between people, and between the land and its cadences. Bonfires are lit, solstices and equinoxes celebrated. Folk nights are held, a sauna moves in, yet another volunteer quits their job to become a gardener, we host fundraisers for Lebanon, for Gaza. Friendships spill beyond the gates, reshaping the city itself. Sacasas writes, “By our attention we gain the world and the world becomes a home.” This is precisely the gift that Glengall offers.
2 / the sun sets before 4pm and ice lines the gutters [fallow & forgotten]
It is my second winter at the garden. Where once forty volunteers gathered in summer, now only five or six remain by mid-December. Bitter winds sweep through the beds, through coats, through bone. Sunlight, when it comes, feels all the more precious; a fleeting kind of gold. The vibrant noise of the summer has drained away, leaving only the caw of a crow, the routine rustle of bare branches. Like clockwork, sparrows flit tirelessly back-and-forth between two now-naked trees, indifferent to the humans below. The smell of wet soil after another bout of rain. The sharp crunch of untouched frost underfoot, revealing traces of fox tracks in the morning. Even the chickens are quieter, their feathers fluffed against the cold. The work, too, changes – paring back to the essentials. It is layering mulch, saving seeds, pruning branches. All this is groundwork – the reward only visible months, even years, down the line. And at times, it’s hard to see the point. It becomes harder to show up. As the temperature falls, people drop away, retreating into their homes. The ebb of collective energy. The fatigue of the last weeks of work before another year folds in on itself. Winter has a way of driving everything inward.
One December afternoon, I stand in the garden, oblivious to news reports of a named storm on its way, and I find myself, for the first time, miserable here. The life I face outside of the garden gates is barrelling in. And the feeling terrifies me.
I had hoped this winter would be a threshold – a space to step into something new. To dive into writing, to finally move towards long-postponed, long-neglected desires and calcified dreams. I had romanticised the season. Its restraint, its clarity. No riot of green, no sprawling vines. Just the bare bones of things. I thought it might be the season that saved me.
Instead, I am consumed by a relationship fraying at its edges, a pile-up of unexpected deadlines, a descent into depression. And it feels relentless. A line from my favourite Frank O’Hara poem comes to mind; I move through the world “with the metallic coils of the tide around my fathomless arms”.
I look up and think: winter should be one of two things – crisp, frosty blue mornings, or days blanketed with snow. But not this monochrome sky. This unyielding greyness. Not the sun immured behind clouds. Not the freezing gusts, the second of snow immediately turning to sludge. December blurs. The days at the garden smudged together like the weather itself.
I think back to the start of November. A ‘not guilty’ verdict that had brought no catharsis. A resignation letter sent in the sterile quiet of my flat. A relationship beginning to falter under its own weight. The job was supposed to end, but the relationship was supposed to remain.
I had stood outside Stratford Magistrates Court, tasting anti-climactic relief alongside four co-defendants six months after we were arrested for stopping an immigration raid on a hotel in Peckham. The trial was meant to last two days, but when the day arrived, it was over within a couple hours: a farcically quick ‘not guilty’ verdict. The stress had been in the lead-up: navigating legal aid and endless phone calls with solicitors, the unknown-ness of the day itself pressing at the back of my skull for months. And yet, when it was done, there was no elation, just an absence where the worry had been. That same week, I quietly quit my job. It was a decision I had retreated from making for months. Days spent without leaving the flat had worn me thin. I had lived a decade of fixed hours and wages, but the safety of it, and the comfort of routine, had long turned stagnant: a wound I had let fester.
November got underway, and despite the lack of catharsis, I felt something close to hope. I held onto it as a starting gun – a moment to shed the millstones of stress that had hung around my neck for months. I would embrace unemployment as an opportunity to write. I had commissions lined up and I wanted to see if these could hold me afloat on the waves. I had a plan. I had also told myself that when I quit my job, I would finally take my gender transition seriously, after years of hesitation. That I would become a person I was proud to be – and comfortable being. For two years, I had been micro-dosing hormones – tiny cut-up pills swallowed every morning at placebo-level doses. It was the act of taking them that mattered more than anything. But then, in October, I attended a support meeting for those looking into DIY hormone replacement therapy and prepared to finally reach for something more.
I wanted to earnestly mirror the season: to strip things back, to lay the foundations of a new life in time for spring. And when those seedlings finally broke through the soil, I thought, the sun would feel so pure and kind.
But instead, a rupture. And then, an unravelling of a life.
In the second week of November, Heidi returns from a trip. A comment is made, careless or deliberate, it doesn’t matter. It is a moment where something is revealed, and once seen, cannot be unseen. A line crossed, a trust broken. A sudden lurch in my stomach, the quiet but certain knowledge that things will not be the same. The distance spreads – slowly at first, and then impossible to ignore. It lets in a flood of insecurities. Conversations turn brittle, apologies don’t land. Arguments, circular and exhausting. I try to explain my hurt, but she meets me with something unreachable. The more I try to grasp for certainty, the more slippery everything becomes. We start couples therapy, as if it might help name what is breaking. My flat no longer feels like home, nor like it holds a future It feels like a space we are waiting each other out, but from the farthest edges of the room. Still, I keep going to the garden.
I begin writing late into the night, pouring myself into pieces of work that I refuse to finish. The exhaustion takes its toll. I tumble deeper and deeper into a darkness until I’m in freefall. After a decade on anti-depressants, I had stopped taking them earlier this year, convinced I was steady enough without them. But this old illness, lurking at the back of my head for half of my life, contaminates my thoughts like groundwater. Some days, I feel it before I wake – before the morning even arrives. The weight pressing at the edges of my consciousness. Soon, the promise of unemployment curdles into panic. I tell myself I am too busy to see friends, when the truth is that I no longer know how to be with them. Still, I keep going to the garden.
The person I had envisioned feels as though it is slipping away from me. Tomorrow becomes next week, becomes next month. The slipping feels permanent. A new life postponed and postponed until the gap between myself and the hope I clung to grows too great and shatters. I am untethered, unmoored and too tired to start again. What was meant to be a season of recovery became a struggle to stay afloat.
Despite it all, I keep showing up at the garden. Not because I want to, but because it is something to hold onto, though I don’t know if this means discipline or just a failure of imagination. It’s what everyone tells me to do, day in, day out. TV shows. Therapists. An instructor on a breathwork course I abandoned after one session. Investment gurus on unskippable YouTube ads. I am reminded of something Susan Sontag once wrote – that we value suffering only when it is transformed into something else. Into art, or wisdom, or even just a story with a beginning, middle, and end. But what if suffering remains formless? What is the difference between endurance and being stuck? Between commitment and inertia? Between resilience and resignation? What if the showing up is just showing up? No redemption, no transformation.
As the storm approaches, and becomes a real thing in the sky above me, this space of patience and tenderness begins to warp. The borders around it crumble. The weight of my outside world seeps in. An unease bubbles up. I feel in my body in the worst possible way. The cold bites at my fingers until they feel like something separate from me, and the idling small talk over secateurs, once a gift, becomes intolerable. I want to be anywhere but here.
I sort seeds from the dried mallow for the next year. Gather up rose hips. Pour a hot mint tea. Welcome newcomers. I try to ground myself. And it feels unbearable. My mind is elsewhere, circling the life disintegrating outside this garden. I leave early. Walk past the rows of dormant cherry trees, past the shouts from the football fields. I sit by the man-made lake, drop my head into my hands and cry. Ducks and swans waddle past. Two men carry fishing poles. I wanted to be outside, to sit in these feelings, to let them wash over me in the fresh, open air – but I couldn’t. Winter wouldn’t let me. The freezing wind presses against my face. Relentlessly so. It did not mould itself for me.
And suddenly, I am afraid. Afraid that this space, this last refuge, had been infected with the same sameness that I felt everywhere else.
On the last Sunday before Christmas, I am told to saw thick branches of a beautiful rose bush – something only done every few years. My body uneasy and restless. I hold the old branches, pale and grey compared to the green of new growth, and hesitate. I know this act of bluntness will sustain it in the long run. But, it feels wrong, severing something that has survived this long. I spot a winter raspberry among the debris, perfectly ripe, and slip it into my pocket. I leave with a rose thorn lodged in my thumb.
Within days, it is a faint red scab, a reminder with feeling. Heidi tells me it will work its way out on its own. Not to force it. But it stays in. The cold holds back the blood from my hands and slows down the healing.
And then, one day, just after the start of the new year, it vanishes from view and becomes part of me.
3 / a pale sun, a blue sky, and breath visible for a moment
It is February, 2025. Someone I follow on Instagram shares a passage from an obscure book they are reading, the ‘University of Spiritualism’ by Harry Boddington (published by the aptly named Psychic Book Club in 1946).
Man is both an actor and a circumstance – a cause and an effect. He should be treated not as having will and power to do that which he desires when and where he pleases but he should be born, educated, situated, rewarded, punished as a tree – capable of yielding good fruit only when it is properly organised and conditioned in good soil.
The person adds their own caption: A sickly tree can’t be punished into growth.
At the garden, the numbers blossom from twenty, to thirty, to forty people, drawn in by the vague pull of self-improvement. Something in the air of resolutions, a collective need to start fresh by giving oneself over to community and earth. It reminds me of Judith Butler’s idea of identity as something we perform through repetition, a series of small, deliberate acts that eventually become who we are. Maybe that’s why I keep coming to the garden, even on the days I don’t want to. Even when it feels pointless. Even when I’d rather stay in bed. I know it’s in the repetition that a self that roots – a sense of identity that doesn’t slip through my fingers, built through muscle memory, a becoming in the midst of others. Each time I show up, I choose to believe in something: growth, connection, the possibility of change. Even in winter. My hands ache from the cold, but that ache pulls me out of my head. It reminds me I’m still here.
And so, I try again – to reach out to the life I long for, to the identity, the body, the work, loved and beloved. I step toward a newness, albeit more bruised and burnt from the remaining embers of the old year. I begin to write again, to imagine beyond the next day or two, to move through the world holding out my restless heart.
The garden spills over onto the page. These words I write and the seedlings that I watch grow both require the same quiet, steady practice of looking, tending, and waiting. In the garden, I attune myself to the subtle changes in the soil, the slow unfurling of leaves, the quiet warnings of decay. Whilst I write, I pay attention to the weight of a remembered silence, the way light falls in a familiar room, a shift in a voice that gives something away. It is in these moments that meaning emerges. Here, at my laptop, in the garden, I resist the urge to glance and move on. Instead, I hold a thing in my mind and turn it over until it yields something new, or reveals something deeper beneath its surface. There is the same deep attention, a willingness to sit with the world as it is, to listen, to absorb, to make connections. Without it, language becomes hollow.
Nothing flourishes without care.
I run my finger over the spot on my thumb where the thorn was, half-expecting to feel it again. Healing is like that, I think – quiet, unnoticed, never quite complete. A scab, after all, is not static; it works unseen, beneath the surface. With freezing hands, I am nurturing what cannot yet be pictured.
The branches I sawed down last month lie where I left them, their rough elastic fibres splitting apart, the debris of what once thrived scattered across the beds – an interruption in the slow, patient growth of the trees. A reminder that even the most resilient things must sometimes be cut back before growth can begin again.
I think back to the garden could not hold me. Its usual embrace was distant, and its rhythms were out of sync with what I needed. Its silence, once grounding, felt stark. The work, once meditative, became mechanical. I had turned to it as a counterpoint to whatever was unravelling beyond its gates. But maybe I was asking too much of it, mistaking its steady cycles for promises.
When I first came to Glengall Wharf, I saw it as a sanctuary, a place where I could seal off the noise in my life. But now I wonder if that’s the wrong way to think about it.
It doesn’t offer escape.
It offers work. Sometimes hard, boring, thankless work, the kind that makes your hands ache and leaves thorns in your skin. The kind that feels pointless in the moment but means everything in the long run. An uneven flow of resistance and surrender.
Maybe that’s what I need right now. Something to push against.
In the absence of light, I’m learning to strive for the small, deliberate acts of care that keep life going. Even in winter.
About Oli Isaac
Oli is a writer based in London. Their passion for writing stems from growing up with a severe stutter and experiencing how language can fail us. Currently, Oli is developing their debut audio play as a recipient of Audible Theatre’s Emerging Playwrights Fund. They also teach poetry workshops, most recently with The Learning Cooperative. In 2024, Oli won the Verve Poetry Festival Competition.