white spaces where we learn to breathe

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>she don't bite my father said about me as a child.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>what he meant was</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>it ain't her fault if your skin reacts to her saliva. it was though</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>partially see if you think we're all in this together but i wasn't the one with</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>black-and-white thinking.</span></p><ul><li><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>from you think autistic people cannot be journalists because we suffer from black-and-white thinking</em></li></ul><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>white spaces where we learn to breathe is art that combines space text and punctuation as social commentary on the both the spaces that are typically white spaces and also the spaces left behind by missing and murdered BIPOC on Turtle Island. The reader is encouraged to breathe inside these spaces and to observe them as one might observe a moment of silence. </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> </span></p><p><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>About Murgatroyd Monaghan</strong></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Murgatroyd Monaghan is an Autistic mother writer spoken work artist and poet of mixed descent. Her spoken word won first place at the Wordstock Sudbury Literary Festival and Myths and Mirrors. Her piece Thumbs won the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. She has been a finalist for dozens of national literary prizes including the Room Poetry Contest and the CBC Nonfiction Prize. Other writing has been published in Chapter House Review PRISM and the Humber Literary Review among many others. Murgatroyd has devoted her adult life to motherhood and is pursuing writing now that her children are older. She is working on several book-length projects. A former asylum-seeker Monaghan was raised in Ontario Canada.</span></p>