In the throes of the early AIDS crisis, people began stitching panels to remember their loved ones. The panels were joined in quilts, and the quilts were joined with each other until they became bigger than a tennis court, bigger than a football field. So unwieldy it became, the giant quilt had to be broken into pieces in order to be manipulated. Chunks would tour on display. It now has a virtual existence too and is curated by the National AIDS Memorial.

In 1989, Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman made Common Threads, a 79-minute documentary, narrated by Dustin Hoffman. Based on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, their film traced the stories of five people who had died through the words of their grief-stricken friends and family. The survivors describe the solace that they had derived from quilting memorial panels for their loved ones. They also refer to milestones in the disease history: the president who would not utter the word; the movie star who acknowledged his own disease only after 15,000 had already died. The five divergent tales serve to emphasize the awesome scope of the tragedy: each panel and each name must recall an equally unique and cherished life cut short. In their final scene, the AIDS quilt lies on the Mall in Washington as names of hundreds of loved ones are read by grieving families and friends.

As the drone-less but steady camera slowly pulls back high above the patches of color in the evening light, I was reminded of the famous, expanding scene midway through, Gone with the Wind, as Scarlet O’Hara picks her way through the waste of Civil War wounded and dead. Common Threads is equally political, and it too is a love story. It won the 1989 Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. I cannot help but imagine that the quilt and the film helped to generate the protections against discrimination of people living with HIV/AIDS provided by the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law in 1990.

Stitchery, knitting, embroidery, macramé and crochet have long been significant components of occupational and art therapy for mental and physical health (Leone 2021; Youngson 2019). But they have been marshalled into numerous anti-war, anti-discrimination, pro-environment causes with remarkable aplomb, talent, and humor. Remember the pink Pussyhats from the Women’s March in 2017? Patterns for them still abound on the web. The possibly antediluvian origins of crafting protest are featured in history and fiction: recall Charles Dickens’s knitters at the foot of the guillotine (Tale of Two Cities, 1859); or Margaret Atwood’s Zillah who makes art from dryer fluff, calling it “naive surrealism with a twist of feminist lemon” (Cat’s Eye, 1988); or even Peggy Erhart’s more frivolous parking-meter protest in small-town America (A Dark and Stormy Knit, 2024).

Self-described “craft nerd,” Betsy Greer coined the word “craftivism” in 2003. She wrote Knitting for Good (Roost Books, 2008) and edited an anthology that goes well beyond knitting to other techniques and contexts (Craftivism, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014). Scholars have noticed (e.g., Moreshead and Salter, 2023; Vachhani et al, 2025). The diffuse movement has even found critics who challenge its “white, feminist appropriation of graffiti,” and seek to empower it to “evolve and become a more intersectional” practice (Close, 2018).

References 
Close, Samantha. Knitting activism, knitting gender, knitting race. International Journal of Communication 12 (2018): 23-23. 
Leone, Lauren. Craft in Art Therapy. Routledge, New York and London, 2021 
Moreshead, Abigail, and Anastasia Salter. Knitting the in-visible: data-driven craftivism as feminist resistance. Journal of Gender Studies 32.8 (2023), 875–886.
Vachhani, Sheena J., Emma Bell, and Alexandra Bristow. The Affective Micropolitics of Craftivism: Organizing social change through the minor gesture. Organization Studies 46.4 (2025): 525-547. 
Youngson, Bel. Craftivism for occupational therapists: finding our political voice. British Journal of Occupational Therapy 82.6 (2019): 383-385. 

Web image by Medhum.org

Demon Copperhead is nothing if not a novel centered on social concerns. It tells the story of a child born to a drug addicted mother in an oxycontin-ravaged community in western Virginia. He is delivered inside an intact amniotic sac, an anomaly that foreshadows a life-long fixation to see the ocean, any ocean. His mother has abysmal taste in men and repeatedly chooses to live with men who abuse her and physically threaten Demon. When she dies of a drug overdose, Demon is placed in foster care and forced to work countless hours as a virtual slave under horrible circumstances, without any consideration for his safety, by the person who is supposedly responsible for his wellbeing. He runs away and has a miserable encounter on the road with a streetwalker who entraps him and steals the hard-earned money that he has secretly saved and stashed away. Against all expectation, Demon reconnects with his dead father’s family, and they place him in a much more stable and secure environment – the home of the venerated coach of the local high school football team.  

The coach takes a liking to Demon. He recognizes Demon’s hidden strengths and talents and encourages Demon to try out for the football team. Much to his surprise, Demon achieves star status as a tight end, no longer a faceless hillbilly from the back country of mobile homes. But true to the trajectory of the novel, Demon suffers a major injury to his knee. He refuses surgery and tries to tough it out. Pain medication is key to this strategy and, of course, this being Appalachia in the late 1990s, oxycontin is too easily prescribed by doctors and too accessible to patients. A painful decline into addiction and despair ensues. Many of Demon’s peers fall victim to the oxycontin plague. But unlike them, Demon is resilient. He is a talented artist, and from early childhood he would draw cartoon-like sketches to escape from his desultory life.  

With the help and support of an art teacher who takes him under her wing during high school, Demon creates a comic strip that dramatizes life in the backwoods of Virginia and that gains regional notoriety. As the novel nears the end, there is a dramatic passage in which Demon confronts his social nemesis on a mountain ridge during a windswept rainstorm. It evokes a climactic episode in Kingsolver’s earlier prize-winning book, The Poisonwood Bible, where the life of a key character is threatened by an attack of army ants in the middle of the night. Ultimately, Demon enters drug rehabilitation, perseveres through the rigors of withdrawal, and gets clean. Against all expectations, Demon finds love and redemption. The woman of his dreams has been there all along, but when it happens, you cannot help but smile as you watch the two lovers acknowledge their feelings for one another. 

The title of the novel is a dead giveaway of who inspired it and Kingsolver acknowledges her debt to Charles Dickens in the postscript. Like her Victorian predecessor, Kingsolver is writing to protest the neglect and abuse that people, but especially children, living in post-manufacturing America have been forced to endure at the end of the 20^th century and into the next. In her vision, the grim experiences of people like Demon and his family, whose lives are attached to the land, are profoundly different from city dwellers. After their land was stripped of its natural resources, the rural communities in states like Virginia and Tennessee were left to languish economically and fall victim to predatory pharmaceutical companies which promoted the use of drugs that the proprietors knew would increase dependence and addiction.  

There is a relentlessness to this story and Kingsolver’s voice in many respects echoes the Biblical prophets. For some readers, the book is almost too depressing. But I think that fails to give enough credit to her Dickensian style and outlook. The sequence of episodes in different locations and with a revolving cast of characters is reminiscent of the publication of Dickens’ novels in serial installments that can almost stand alone. The narrative pulsates with non-stop action and there is an optimism that Demon will always pull through. He is an engaging character, blessed with emotional reserves and intellectual gifts that enable him to overcome his baleful surroundings. In that sense, his story, like Dickens’ novels, may strike some as unrealistic. Perhaps that is the most effective way a writer can successfully enlist readers to rally to her social cause, by offering a vision of personal triumph over social and cultural adversity. 

Coming back to the question I asked at the outset, can a novel inspired by social protest survive its era and outlive the conditions that spurred the author to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard? Novels like David Copperfield and The Grapes of Wrath are affirmative answers. I predict that the artistry of Demon Copperhead will ensure that it will still be read long after the environmental damage incurred by the coal mining industry and the human devastation of the opioid epidemic recede into history. Demon’s voice is so alive, his character is so engaging, and his tale is so moving that I am confident that the book will be on bookshelves or in data storage tools in a hundred years. It may be necessary to add notes to explain the ins and outs of the coal mining industry and how oxycontin was approved and marketed to an unsuspecting population, but those will be details that will not obscure the deep humanity of the book.  

Oprah In Conversation with Barbara Kingsolver

DEMON COPPERHEAD 
Barbara Kingsolver 
Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2022, 548pp 

Web photo by George Hiles 

The Iranian-American author, Azar Nafisi (b. 1955), reminisces about her experiences teaching English literature in Iran before, during and after the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). The book opens near the end of her sojourn in Tehran. A small group of young women, who have been friends since they were University students, gather in the author’s home to read and discuss English novels. They wear western clothes, remove their veils, and eat sweets. Some have been in prison. They conceal their simple purpose from fathers, husbands, brothers, because meeting to read Western fiction would be construed as an act of defiance.  

In four sections, two named for twentieth-century novels and two for nineteenth-century authors — “Lolita” “Gatsby” “James” and “Austen,” Nafisi constructs a series of flashbacks that describe the events of late 1970s to the 1990s in the inner and outer world of an academic woman. The books and writers used in the section headings have walk-on parts or starring roles that jar in this ostensibly alien context. Yet, they work surprisingly well for the women students, stimulating them to think in new ways about the situation in which they find themselves. Conversely, as the students assimilate the English and American writers into their world, we learn more about their Iran. 

Myriad details of moment, garb, color, and food, evoke the everyday “feel” of protests and atrocities that are known in the West only through journalist’s reports. The long descriptions contrast sharply with a relentless and probably deliberate lack of precision about several basic things. For example, the author withholds her age and the identity and the nature of her relationship with “my magician,” a greatly admired man –perhaps a lover or a teacher–who seems to exist on chocolate and philosophy.  

Possessives and the first-person singular are used liberally (“my students”) to remind us that this is one woman’s story—notwithstanding the solace, but barely developed presence, of a husband, two children, and a mother. The decision may have been made to protect personal privacy. But the result also conspires to build a narcissistic tone, as if the author marvels at her own creativity, attractiveness, resilience, survival, and escape.  

Some of the most engaging passages describe the male students’ difficulty with literature that they perceive to be immoral (for its sexual content or for the agency it assigns women). In the social climate, the young men are utterly unable to accept great writing on its own terms. One wonders how they would react to Nafisi’s own book and her portrayal of them. The wonderful device of a mock trial of Gatsby (pp. 120-136) challenges the students by going to the heart of the conflict of politics, religion, literature, and justice; it would work well as an excerpt and is worthy of emulation in our classrooms. The work deepens our understanding and complicates the impressions of Iran that are generated by a steady diet of news reports. 

In 2024, Reading Lolita in Tehran became a film directed by Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis. 

Born into a privileged, Iranian family and educated in both England and the United States, Nafisi saw the great changes in her beloved country as the encroachment of a retrograde, unthinking tyranny, hostile to women and to reason. She moved to the United States in 1997 and became a citizen in 2008. She has served as a professor of English literature in several universities, holds at least nine honorary doctorates and numerous awards and prizes for her creative work. 

Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi
Random House, New York 2003
347 pages

From the Vault:
In these times, certain works of literature seem to be as relevant to us now as when they were published — possibly more relevant than the times that they depict. From the vault of the now closed Literature, Arts and Medicine Database, we will pluck a few items for their power and timeliness.

Web photo by  ariyan Dv 

Located near Woodstock, geographically and culturally, Jened offered a space free from the discrimination the summer residents encountered elsewhere. Campers engaged in uninhibited physical activities, uncensored storytelling, self-governance, mutual caretaking, real friendships, irreverent insider humor, romance, and fun. One powerful, sobering scene allows viewers to overhear campers with diverse disabilities share common experiences: being disrespected or ignored at school, overly protected at home, isolated everywhere. Another tracks the campers’ hilarity and pride over an outbreak of “crabs.” One camper declares his counselor’s demonstration of how to kiss, “Best physical therapy ever!”  

The second and longer part of the film follows several former campers into their adult lives. They become parents, spouses, professionals, and disability rights activists at a crucial historic moment for disability legislation. Both parts of the film propose that the liberty and solidarity experienced at Jened emboldened several of the campers to seek opportunity and equality in the world beyond their camp. 

While former camper Jim Lebrecht narrates the film, Judy Huemann—who died in 2023—is its political and moral center. A wheelchair user, Heumann rose from Jened camper to counselor. Campers revered her for successfully suing the New York City Department of Education for the right to teach. When she and several former campers unexpectedly reunited in Berkeley, California, they participated in the Independent Living Movement that famously started there. An astute leader, Heumann inspired an astonishing 25-day sit-in at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) offices in San Francisco’s Federal Office Building in 1977.  She and her disabled colleagues risked their health and their lives—they slept on the floor and improvised medical necessities—to convince HEW to enforce the anti-discrimination section of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act: Section 504. Heumann’s uncompromising standoff with the HEW representative is unforgettable. As is her daily urging for the occupiers to hold fast. Regular deliveries of food, supplies, and solidarity from the Black Panthers and other marginalized groups fueled the protesters’ determinism and ultimate success. 

In other archival footage, Heumann, demanding accessible taxies, leads demonstrators to gridlock traffic in New York City intersections. Still other protestors abandon their wheelchairs and pull themselves up the steps of the U.S. Capitol to insist on disability civil rights. Recently filmed interviews with several former campers affirm that, despite the work toward disability justice that remains, they live fuller, more vibrant lives as a result of their camp experiences and the legislation they demanded.  

Crip Camp is an indispensable film because it’s told from the rarely seen perspective of disabled teenagers . The Jened campers’ irrepressible personalities, candor, and accomplishments demolish stereotypes about disability. It’s simultaneously painful to confront the inhospitable world they had to navigate and still do. The film’s co-directors, Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnhan, prompt us to ask why histories of the civil rights projects of the’ 60s to ‘70s have largely ignored the struggles and successes of disability activists. Yet as Crip Camp raises awareness of the “nothing about us without us” campaigns for disability rights, it also makes me restless for more documentaries. Without doubt, we have more to learn about the history and politics of the passage—and enforcement—of laws through the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act and its 2008 Amendment.

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution 
Directed by Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnhan 
Higher Ground Productions: 2020, RT: 104 minutes 

For more information about Crip Camp and its Impact Campaign, please visit https://cripcamp.com/