Funding supports: Afrikaans translation, South Africa distribution, greater awareness
Goal: $3,500

Hanna’s first book demonstrates that generosity is not a luxury. It is a profound, life-giving lifeline.

Hanna’s creative practice combats the isolation and the confinement of ALS. In Bedsores and Bliss, Hanna explains this beautifully. She says the illness told her to end her career. But a donor’s gift gave her a new beginning—the ability to enroll in an MFA program, which provided the structure and support she needed. That first donation is what gave her permission to prioritize her creative practice. And her voice and work drew together a community of editors, fellow writers and artists, and a publisher who will steward her work into the world.

So the impact you are funding is agency, voice, and community. It’s about funding the life that is still vibrant inside Hanna’s dying body. It creates meaning and beauty out of suffering. That ultimately is what makes her life worth living.

A vivid, heart-lifting and heart-breaking report from the teetering balance between devastation and joy. These short writings form a collage of Hanna du Plessis’ experience through two years of life after receiving a terminal diagnosis of ALS. Hanna gives us rare insight into the details of her experience with a progressive disease while also earning a graduate degree in creative writing and traveling the world. These short essays are laced with sharp detail, surprising humor, and observations about how to live and die. We all experience endings, fadings, losses and deaths. Hanna helps us find grace in the mundane and wonder in the wreckage. Hanna’s whimsical sketches make delightful companions to her vivid and often humorous language. It is rare to find these two things so well-forged together: an unflinching gaze into loss and an undaunted determination to fully experience life.