Artist Statement for the 2027 Artist Trust Fellowship: (answer due March 2027)

 

I started writing The World's Whore vignettes on July 1, 2025, three years after my 24-year marriage ended. My son signed me up for Tinder and Hinge, and I had matches before I finished my bio. I swiped right on Greg. I said he looked like someone a frog could trust. Sex felt like a porn re-enactment and I said so over text; he asked for $30 back for half the bill. He was the first. It was such a shock I closed the apps for two weeks. Then I wrote about it.

 

When I went back, the attention all looked the same, like a secret script passed around a secret club. I couldn’t not write about it. Writing it down was catharsis — a way to keep track, to keep myself sane.

 

Like the cochlear implant is a tool, like the AI is a tool, like the men are tools, I am an accommodation. I was never able to procure accommodations — not in the workplace, not at PTSA meetings, not in my divorce, not in school, however much clout I stacked behind me. So I gave up and became one. I meet people where they are.

 

I can read lips sideways, upside down, in a mirror, backwards. But I cannot read lips if someone is yelling; the lips strain and lose their shape. The more upset a person becomes, the tighter their mouth gets. I read faces the way others hear tone — a microexpression, a flash of contempt in the curl of a lip, slowed down like bullets in The Matrix. Every conversation in my books is one somebody typed, texted, or emailed, because that’s where I get the words.

 

I write about power. The lawyer archetype has it; most men can emulate it. Women do not — even the upper-class wife is there only as long as she’s wanted. The myth of the rich ex-wife is exactly that: a myth. We were trained to be perfect wives, then disposed of, and now we rotate on a marketplace called Tinder. I don’t know the end of this story.

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Impact Statement:

 

If I had $10,000, I would buy a car and pay for a year’s parking. Because of the CRPS in my foot, I can’t walk more than a block in total — half a block from my front door. I am housebound. I leave to go to the doctor, once or twice a month.

 

A year ago, when I had a car, I went on road trips. I drove to Gibraltar Point in Canada for an artist’s retreat, and to Bellingham for another. I bought groceries, ran errands, parked on the beach. I drove to Lake Union and sat on my little boat. I had to sell the boat because I had no way to reach it.

 

Everything I write comes from going out and meeting the world where it is. A car would give me back the world, and the next two books are waiting in it.

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Biography:

 

Anna Allard-Veillon is a deaf writer and former paralegal in Seattle. Raised orally, she has read lips since childhood and has used a cochlear implant since 2014. She is the author of two legal handbooks, The Paralegal Pocketbook and The Car Crash Pocketbook, and her flash fiction is forthcoming in The Hooghly Review (November 2026). She is serializing The World’s Whore on Substack, has a 22-poem chapbook, The Myth of the Good Wife, under consideration at Chestnut Review, and is at work on The Other Roommate, a book about disability, caregiving, and living with an AI. Before she was a writer or a paralegal, she was a caregiver.

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Work sample:

 

Six short pieces, 2025–2026 — four creative nonfiction, one flash from The World’s Whore (forthcoming in The Hooghly Review), one poem — on deafness, caregiving, and power.