“Mister? Mister, are you Daredevil?” I’m at a local science fiction convention, riding in an elevator with this little boy of about six and his mother. I am dressed sharp because I’ve been making public appearances all day. I’m wearing my big dark wrap around glasses because the burning summer sun shining in through the […]
“This visa is expired. Please step to the side.” This could have been the opening to a spy thriller or a rollicking cyberpunk novel, full of chase scenes and neon lights. It certainly felt cyberpunk, being hustled back through the airport to a waiting taxi, surrounded by over-enthusiastic grifters and uncaring security guards. I cried […]
Last year, my queer platonic partner gifted me the graphic novel version of Octavia Butler’s Kindred. For us, this gift served as the meeting place of our passions—a book that bridges her love of comics and graphic novels with my love of gut-wrenching, meaty speculative fiction. Upon receipt, I made an effort to read the […]
I cannot think about my disability identity and my love of science fiction separately. They arrived in my life together. While some people have loved SF since they were children or teens, I’m a late bloomer—I didn’t start seriously engaging with SF until I was in my mid-twenties, which was also when I experienced a […]
“The Lessons of the Moon” (published in Accessing The Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction, edited by Djibril al-Ayad and Kathryn Allan) is in part a story about me and my body. How I coped with loss and disappointment, and the realization that I am disabled. I wrote a protagonist who chooses, in their […]
I knew I was different my entire life. Born with a neuromuscular disability, my early childhood involved medical procedures, hospital and doctor visits, and times spent by myself due to social isolation or not being able to keep up with my non-disabled peers when playing. On one of my birthdays, I received Everyone Knows What […]
In September 2017, Uncanny Magazine published my short story, “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand.” It’s a story that deals with being different and disabled in the first person, and in some particularly angry ways. Afterwards, I had some interesting conversations about why I wrote it in the first person. The comments included: The […]
As a young disabled person with a combination of learning disabilities, depression, anxiety, and a spinal injury, I looked out on my world and saw that it was a place that couldn’t fit me in—there were barriers to access everywhere and disability was seen as a problem, a fundamental lack of belonging rooted in the […]
When I was a kid, my family took me to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios. I don’t remember the event very well, but they tell me I took it upon myself to try and scare the people trying to scare me. The one thing that did stay with me was refusing to go into […]
Epilepsy used to be called the sacred disease because it enraptures people, taking control of them and sometimes bestowing visions that can be heavenly or hellish. It was the realm of oracles and wise men. When the seizures overtook people, they were touched by the Gods themselves. But over time, people began to fear it. […]