If there is a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
Toni Morrison
Books & Articles
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Books
I have been writing, on and off, for most of my life. Only a few pieces have made it through to the mainstream media. Most have been published by organisations with which I have been connected, or I have self-published. This does not seem to have stopped the pieces being widely read and, I hope, are helping to make people think. I hope to add to this list as time goes on.
An Ordinary Baby
Micheline Mason
ISBN 9-781914-424663
Tales of Childhood Resistance
All-powerful adults organise the lives of children but rarely take into account the fact that children have minds of their own, disabled children even less so. This account is a remembered story of one such child, born in 1950 with an impairment called Osteogenesis Imperfecta, or ‘Brittle Bones’.
Micheline invites you to experience the world from her point of view and, in particular, how she developed and executed an escape plan from the segregated and shrunken world that most people expected her to inhabit for the rest of her life.
Her story highlights some horrific memories of children’s wards back then but also the good times: the fun and support given to her by her unusual working-class family.
Her own illustrations add images to the words, giving the reader a sense of how her identity as an artist/activist began to develop and eventually led her onto the world stage.
Micheline Mason is a life-long Artist/Activist and Writer. She was born in the 1950s to a working-class family, a fireman’s daughter. At four days old she was diagnosed with Osteogenesis Imperfecta, or Brittle Bones, seen then as a severe ‘handicap’ which would define her life.
Her struggle against any such false limitations led her to help disabled people to develop the concept of disability as a social oppression, kept in place by segregation and loss of human rights, which needs to be constantly challenged.
Since becoming a mother she campaigned for a fully inclusive education system to become a right for all children.
She is now 71, ‘retired’ and living in London, with more time than ever to stir things up.
- Available to order online from Amazon UK : An Ordinary Baby
The Phenomenon of the Human Distress Pattern
Micheline Mason
ISBN 9-781914-424755
Our only Real Enemy
We are born with three extraordinary powers naturally available to us free of charge – the power of touch, the power of attention, and the power of imagination, but no one tells us this. These powers are barely understood and therefore greatly underused. If they were understood and used we would not find ourselves in the precarious state we are in.
Our beautiful world and all it’s natural wonders are being threatened by hurt human beings who are consequently unable to think and act in our own best interests.
This little book tries to explain how our minds work, how they become partly frozen by painful memories, and how these ‘ice-balls’ can drive our behaviours. It looks at how we can help each other to melt these inner ice-balls using the natural powers we all have.
The author suggests how we can harness these powers to halt our own destructive behaviours, allowing nature to heal not only us but also our damaged ecosystems before it is too late.
Micheline Mason is an artist, writer and activist. For over forty-five years she was part of an international organisation of people who developed a simple but profound way to help each other to recover from past emotional injuries.
In this community she helped develop the theory and became a teacher of the method, exchanging attention with thousands of people in many different countries.
In her ‘retirement’ she has chosen to share what she learnt with as many people as possible with a view to empowering them to continue the work themselves. She lives in London.
Available to order online from Amazon:
INCURABLY HUMAN
Micheline Mason
ISBN 0-9546351-1-6
An attempt to take the reader on her journey of discovery, starting from her childhood certainty that she was already fully human, and therefore not in need of a “cure”, to a much later understanding that all human beings are “incurable” at our core, and that the inclusion movement is this inextinguishable flame made visible. The book covers the three driving forces behind the current inclusion movement: Disabled survivors of segregated education; parents of disabled children who believe their children should grow up and be educated alongside their neighbours within mainstream schools, and the many professionals who have helped pioneer and develop richer, more diverse classroom practices.
- Available to order online from Inclusive Solutions: Incurably Human
DEAR PARENTS
Micheline Mason
ISBN 0-9546351-5-9
Parents are key to the mental and physical well-being of their children, but who do they turn to for information and support when their child is disabled?
Micheline asked many disabled adults to tell her what their parents had done well when they were young, and also what they wish their parents had known. The resulting insights and wisdom is a voice few non-disabled parents ever get to hear but can make a huge difference as they realise that their ‘job’ is not to make their child ‘better’ but to be their child’s ally against discrimination and lack of rights in the world.
- Available to order online from Inclusive Solutions: Dear Parents
SORRY I DON’T HAVE THE TIME – Poems About Modern Life
Micheline Mason
ISBN 978-1-4269-259-2
Micheline wrote poems in secret from the age of fourteen, keeping them hidden in a battered green file and read to no one. Many years later the well of thoughts and feelings from which these writings had been born started to burst out again. This time her confidence had grown to such a point she thought they were worth publishing. They cover a wide range of subjects from ‘Forms of Torture’ about filling in Housing Benefit Forms, ‘The World Stepped Back’ about childhood diagnosis and ‘Things I Don’t Need’ about how materialism can obscure what really matters to people.
Micheline has read many of these poems in public and the reaction has often been both tears and laughter as well as provoking new thoughts in the listener/reader.
- Available to order online from Trafford Publishing : Sorry I don’t have the time
HEALING THE HURTS OF CAPITALISM – From Isolation to Connection
Micheline Mason and Alan Sprung
ISBN 978-190964-477-9
Written with Alan Sprung, this book is based on many interviews and shared reflections with ordinary people from many ages, backgrounds, and abilities.
Many speak of the hurts they have endured whilst growing up immersed in a system which is fundamentally competitive and driven by the profit-motive. More importantly perhaps are the insights into ways we can recover from these hurts by talking about them in safe listening environments. This is not simply individual therapy but the authors believe it is the essential first step to freeing up our ability to act together towards a different future. In the current awareness of growing inequality, degradation of the natural world and the climate crisis the need has never been more urgent.
“How do we break old habits and routines that stop us making progress? In organising politically, how do we escape ways of doing things that are either self-defeating or out of date?
Those involved in radical politics frequently put their heads in their hands in despair as old habits die hard – too often they are as destructive as ever. Or attempts to break the mould seem as eccentric and counter productive as the patterns they would replace.
It seems that we are on the rails, travelling to a destination that has already been determined. How to escape? Let’s open the book and see what Micheline and Alan suggest…”
Ken Loach
Film Maker
- Available to order online from Amazon UK:
Healing the hurts of capitalism