I am the metaphor for the hero to learn a “valuable lesson.” I am your “afterschool special,” your vengeful monster and scarred villain. I will die or be killed gruesomely to serve as motivation for the protagonist, or I will overcome and be healed. This is how the world views people with disabilities; how the […]
“The future doesn’t belong to you,” a friend tells me, when we walk home together one night. Not in those words, of course. Rather, he talks about scientific advancement, genetic manipulation, and how soon, we won’t have disabled people anymore. We can fix you. We can fix those who can’t be happy because they don’t […]
The ableist world would like us to feel alone. At fourteen years old, recovering from massive medical malpractice and teaching myself to walk again, school was Hell. I was mocked, had my books thrown, and when I staggered, boys would often “bump” me to try to topple me over. It’s easy to think I was […]
I’m writing this in the corner of an empty house, my aging laptop propped up on a retired army duffle bag found at the surplus store. When Elsa reached out to me and asked if I could write an essay on disabilities and fiction I was elated (Uncanny Magazine is awesome and I’ve loved the […]
Space Unicorns, I leave you with a Question. I have an open-door policy when it comes to able-bodied writers asking me questions about disability and the crafting of disabled characters. Whether it’s specific questions about disabled experiences, or a borrowed detail here and there to help build a nuanced disabled character. Any writer working on […]
This is a story of how I found my life in a book, and what happened after the final pages. The book in question was John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (also titled Re-Birth) and I first read it when I was perhaps twelve, in snatches over breakfast or in the school dinner queue. As for many, […]
What often makes literature meaningful is that the reader can see themselves in the text, whether through a skin tone they share with the characters or a temperament or a locale, whether a particular familial dynamic, or even if they find in the text a simulacrum of their own psyche. To see oneself twinned, depicted, […]
Maybe the first thing I should say is that this story has a happy ending. I was a sickly, nerdy kid whose financially-strapped single mom carried baggage of her own and could never quite cope. I was an obsessive lover of books, one of those prodigies who was reading at two and polishing off chapter […]
When I was a child, the world had a lot of surprises for me: even as a rough-and-tumble tomboy who delighted in running and climbing trees, the world of books was an endless imaginative joy. It seemed that reading them opened up a door in the back of my mind and I could just fall […]
Pain and fatigue are everywhere in speculative fiction. The more dramatic the stakes of the story, the more likely you are to witness the protagonist dragging their broken, battered body through a slew of ridiculous challenges to succeed. From Frodo and Sam entering the caldera of Mount Doom to Ripley fighting evil aliens for her […]