There certainly isn’t a lack of disability narratives on the shelves of libraries and bookstores. From classics like Of Mice and Men to more recent popular fiction like Me Before You to the nonfiction by Oliver Sacks, there has long been an abundance of stories that highlight questions of agency and autonomy and what it means to live in a body and/or mind that deviates from societal expectations of normalcy. Yet what does it mean to do this work well, to narrate experiences in ways that accurately portray the complex, layered, and nuanced lives of disabled people? Stories that do not devolve into tropes of evil or pity—and are told by the people who have the greatest stake? To address these questions, memoirist and disability studies scholar Jessie Male brought together three writers—Keah Brown, Sonya Huber, and M. Leona Godin—who are actively publishing about disability in a variety of genres. In this dialogue, they address these questions while also commenting on marketing expectations, creative instincts, and the challenges of getting published during a time of expected viral-ability.
Jessie Male
I’ve connected with all of you in different capacities over the years, and I am really excited to gather the three of you together, because I’m familiar with all of you as memoirists, and how lucky to share space with three writers who very much have informed my thinking on disability memoir. I’m very excited to hear about some of your thoughts on disability representation in memoir, but also in other genres as well.
Do you want to introduce yourselves to each other?
Keah Brown
I am the author of three books: the memoir The Pretty One, a children’s book titled Sam’s Super Seats, and a young adult novel titled The Secret Summer Promise. I tend to deal with happily ever afters. I think they get a bad rap. I like writing about identity but not have it be the main focus of who characters are; I like to attach it to my characters and let them live in the world and make mistakes. I’m also cheesecake obsessed, Paramore obsessed, Drew Barrymore obsessed, and Mandy Moore obsessed. That’s the rundown of me. I call it the House of More.
Sonya Huber
I’ve written about chronic pain a lot.
Brown
Really well, by the way.
Huber
As you have written well. And what else? I’m a professor. Keah, I love what you said about happy endings, though. I find myself drawn to writing about big, depressing issues, but I also like to write the smallest delight.
Brown
We deserve them. We don’t get enough of them. We really don’t. Especially when you write about disability or chronic pain. It’s like, “Oh, no, this person has to die,” and I’m like, “No, they don’t.”
Huber
Right—tragedy.
Brown
I’m like, “No, they could live. What a marvel!”
Leona Godin
They can live. Amazing!
Huber
Oh, and I’m from the Midwest. That’s important.
Godin
I appreciate being in this group. I am sort of a memoir-ish person. My first book was There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness. I do write a lot of personal-reported-type stuff, which is pretty much thus far tied to my blindness and the blindness spectrum. I’m also extremely obsessed with smells. So that’s kind of the direction I’m trying to go, to think about not lack, but augmenting other senses. That’s where my next book proposal is—all about the senses. I just picked up a new job; it’s working as a curatorial researcher in a museum that is to be about blindness. It’s really exciting because they want it to be super multisensory and multimodal.
Male
I’ve been so appreciative of all the work you have put out in an array of genres. When I taught Disability Memoir at NYU, all of you appeared on my syllabus. And students were raving about your writing; they ravished it. They were really appreciative of the ways you frame disability as a complex, nuanced way of being in the world.
And this is moving into a pedagogical conversation, but I’m having very mixed feelings about some of the discourse that’s going on about how students aren’t reading whole books. And I keep thinking about how it’s time to embrace the essay collection, or the short story collection, because that really is the genre of our time, with the ways that our brains have been impacted by COVID and our shorter attention spans. In [Huber’s essay collection] Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, each of those essays can exist on its own. But when you put it together, it becomes something different. And for students who are not in the right bodymind to read an entire book, they can still get so much out of reading an essay or a handful of essays without feeling like a failure or an inadequate student. Do you have any thoughts on this? It’s something I’ve been ruminating on.
Godin
I think that’s true too. But it still feels like publishers—or at least my agent tells me that publishers—are not as willing to take on essay collections, for some reason, as they are memoirs. It sounds more intimidating in a weird way, or at least marketers don’t know how to [promote the essay collection]. In my book, I think it works well that you can dip in anywhere. And some people really like the history and some people like the more personal material, and so I’ve started telling people to just start wherever you want to. Even though it is marketed as a “book,” the chapters themselves are very essayistic. I think you’re onto something, though.
Male
It feels like a very “cripped” way of reading. It’s dismantling the idea of linearity. There is more than one way to be able to fully engage with a text.
Huber
And I don’t think I can write that way either. I’ve definitely tried. I think because the publishing industry has said for so long, “We need narrative through line,” and so I have sort of tried to wrangle every single one of my books toward that direction and then, with some, just completely given up. But I think my default, like my brain, is very just oriented toward essays.
Godin
I think so too.
Huber
But yeah, there’s something to this assumption that a full-length book will pull you through with the narrative. The sort of intensity of forward motion. And I don’t even enjoy reading books like that for the most part, when you grab on and then it shoots off like a rocket. I want a slower ride anyway.
Brown
When The Pretty One came out prepandemic, I remember one of the issues the critics had with the book was they felt like even though the collection was twelve essays, their biggest critique was that I gave too much room to two particular themes, that I would go back to certain themes throughout the collection, and I was like, “Aren’t you supposed to do that? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?”
Huber
Well, that’s what I loved about it.
Brown
It’s my dream to write another essay collection, because so much life has happened to me since The Pretty One. But my literary agent keeps hearing “We would need to see an essay be individually published first in order for us to be invested in a full book.” So now I’ve been on the journey of getting this essay that I wrote, and love, published individually, so that I can be perceived as relevant enough to get an essay collection to matter. And for me as a person who has written essay collections and fiction, the process is so different. Because with fiction it was like, “Oh, it needs to be beginning, middle, end. No breaks.” I’m like, “Great, cool. I can do that.” That was so much easier for me than making something that was nonfiction be beginning, middle, end, because I’m still in the middle of it. And I think that’s what publishing doesn’t quite understand, is when you’re writing memoir, or any sort of real-life thing about yourself, you’re still in the middle of it. You can’t tie it neatly in a bow, and you can’t say, “Oh, this is how this is all going to turn out,” because who knows? I didn’t know when I wrote the book [The Pretty One] that we were going into a full-fledged pandemic mere months after publication. And I think that’s the problem; it’s always about the projection of what could be in publishing. Instead of accepting what is.
Huber
I’ve also heard from my agent that I should just try to get an essay published. Which is not a problem, but I think what they mean is get it published somewhere and go viral. But—I was just talking about this with my magazine class—the structures to go viral aren’t there anymore. All the algorithms, all the social media is different. So, they have hung sort of a marker of our success onto something that is almost impossible now in our current media landscape to achieve.
Brown
And also, it doesn’t matter anymore. People go viral every five seconds. It doesn’t have the staying power that it once did. It doesn’t have the weight that it once did. Somebody can go viral for slipping on a banana. And then ten minutes later, somebody else will go viral for slipping on two bananas. There’s no staying power to virality anymore at all. And it’s so funny that publishing is like, “You have to have a certain amount of followers. You have to go viral, you have to use your famous friend and have them post about your book,” and I’m like, “That’s not a marketing plan.”
Godin
I’ve heard that it isn’t even true. That having ten thousand followers or a hundred thousand followers actually didn’t turn into book sales. As if the people who read 140 characters are going to be the people who necessarily read books. Or look at Instagram and then buy a book. Not that those platforms don’t sell books, but I don’t think it is the translation that publishers assume it to be.
Brown
I can only speak for myself, but as a person on multiple social media platforms that has more than ten thousand followers, it didn’t translate to sold books. I have famous friends who posted about the book, but it didn’t break the mold. I didn’t end up on any bestseller lists. Just because someone likes a Twitter post doesn’t mean they’ll buy the book.
But I think putting the onus on the author to be the main marketing person for their book is where publishing frustrates me, because when I did my children’s book, they were super champions of the book until the book came out. And then it was crickets. I’m like, “Hey, I know we’re in the middle of a panny. But, like, are we going to do a virtual book event, something on Zoom?” [They said,] “No, not really. People don’t really do that for children’s books.” I said, “Okay, well, what are we going to do?” [They said,] “Well, we don’t have anything planned right now,” but I’m like, “You fought for this book. I’m confused.”
I think the thing with publishing is they expect the author to do all the work, even when they invest their own money in the book. It’s never for marketing. It’s always just to get you to say, “Yeah, sure, I’ll go with you.” And then the second you do, it’s you and you alone, and that was such a frustrating experience for me.
Male
This is a common story that I’ve heard from friends and colleagues who are composing disability narratives, as well as those who are completely removed from the world of disability storytelling.
I’m wondering if/how you are seeing positive pivots in terms of how disability is being discussed in publishing, or if there is more extensive interest in terms of the types of narratives that are deemed “worthwhile” of being shared with an audience? Are there spaces where we are witnessing representational progress?
Huber
One of the things I always follow are memoirs about mental health issues. What My Bones Know [by Stephanie Foo] was so good. And another one, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground [by Alicia Elliott]. Both of these books, and others I am thinking of, didn’t feel like they had to display their abject trauma first, as a way to even make the story matter. That clearly wasn’t a requirement of the publisher. And that goes back to what you were saying, Keah. I want a whole person. I don’t want to see suffering on page 1.
Brown
When I wrote The Secret Summer Promise at Levine Querido, they were amazing. The main character has cerebral palsy, but we’re not going to make it “a thing.” She understands herself. She loves herself. It’s not coming to terms with disability. She knows how to stand up for herself. In fact, I thought it was very pivotal that she has a scene where this guy is trying to make fun of her, and she just obliterates him in front of all of his friends. And she just walks away. She’s like, “You know what? You’re not going to see me struggle at all; that’s not your right.” And that was so important to me. Because I remember when I was writing The Pretty One and thinking, How much of my trauma do I have to mine for this thing to exist? How much pain do I have to put on the page? In the last essay in the book, I talk in depth about suicidal ideation and my desire to die, and I’m so proud of the essay, and I think it’s beautiful, and there’s a lot in The Pretty One that I love. But I found that people think they know me. People think they know everything there is to know about me, and that I treated it like a diary entry. They don’t view it as a craft choice. Because it’s my lived experience.
And so now, when I write about myself, I have to be so careful because I don’t want anyone to think that I’m not an actual writer. Because I’ve had people say, “Oh, you just basically wrote down your feelings and then you wrote a book. It had to be so easy.”
I’m like, “No, there are so many things. You know what I chose to tell you.” I think that’s part of it, too, is people really find themselves, even in the best cases of kindness, thinking that they know everything that there is to know about you.
So yeah, it’s nice to see books not mining trauma in order to get published.
Huber
Right, and even that essay at the end of The Pretty One, it was clear to me what you chose to do, to go there for a really specific reason that has to do with larger cultural silences. That was a risk that you sort of had to take. But it was not just about your own story.
Brown
That essay and another essay about being able to put my hair up for the first time at twenty-four and how magical that was—people really like those two essays for varying reasons. The reason they like the ponytail essay is because they never thought about it that way. That’s so cool. But in the last essay, they think they know so much about me. I’m like again, it is about me, but at the same time it’s about the larger cultural context of the way that we view disability and what it means to live a life as a disabled person. It’s not just about my experience with disability but about the experience of so many people who don’t get the chance to write a book or tell a story. Sometimes I think publishers care more about what will go viral rather than what it says about the world that we live in.
Male
What about you, Leona? Do you have any thoughts on this question of what it means to have trauma being mined for public consumption, and readers feeling like they are familiar with you in an intimate way?
Godin
Well, I think that I avoided that a little bit, because I was so interested in writing this kind of cultural history that didn’t follow my life. There are anecdotes. I’m very present in the book, and so it’s definitely from my perspective, no doubt about it, but it follows sort of the history rather than my history personally, and I think that I struggle with that because people think that blindness is pretty much the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. I mean, there are literally people that come up and say, “You know, I’d rather be dead than blind.” And my experience of blindness is so far from that, both because I lost vision over so many years—so there is no crisis [point] right? There’s no climax, especially in a degenerative eye disease situation, right? If I wanted to mine a pity party, it would be really long.
And so, it was very important for me from the very beginning to be like, this can’t be my story. I mean, at least in the way that I imagine. And maybe this is me being forced into this idea that it has to be some sort of traumatic thing, and that’s the only way that people are going to be interested in this kind of story, in a horrible, traffic accident kind of way. So, I kind of avoided it by making it not my story exactly.
And I will say that it’s clear that things are changing to some extent; we can have a few different disability narratives in the conversation. But it still is worrisome. Because somehow, the word isn’t really getting out. I’ll just give you this example. I was invited to go and chat with my friend, who happens to be the amazing Andrea Elliot, who wrote Invisible Child. She is teaching a journalism class at Princeton. So, Princeton journalism students, immersive journalism, the best and the brightest. And they didn’t know what the word “ableism” was. And I was so stunned. I asked, “What do you think it is? Just take a guess.” And of course they were able to figure it out, but it’s one of those little anecdotes that makes me realize that one of the main problems is that there are basically no openly disabled professors at Princeton. Right? And so, I guess I make an analogy with publishers in that we can write all the amazing books that we want. But until we really have publishers and agents identifying as disabled and who get it, it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be harder than it should be.
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Male
I hate to preface this by saying, “I am hopeful,” but I am hopeful that one of the advantageous circumstances to come out of so many people being impacted by COVID—Sonya, you’ve written about this—and long COVID is that more and more people are going to become disabled who are already existing in the publishing world and in academia. And suddenly, this is going to become significant in a way that will potentially result in a stronger interest in these kinds of stories.
Brown
But what pisses me off about that particularly is that we would have to wait for somebody to become disabled in order to see disabled people as deserving of having our stories told. And I think the thing that really upsets me, as Leona said, is we can write one million fantastic books, but we need these people in positions of power to be disabled enough to get it, or to just be like, “This is a good story. Whether or not I live in this experience, it needs to be put out into the world,” and we don’t have enough people in positions of power who think like that. They’re not thinking, Oh, I don’t need to see myself in this, but I think the world should see this thing. They’re thinking, So, who’s the character that’s most like me? Who can I relate to?
I had a reader email me to tell me that she set my book on fire.
Huber
What?
Male
Whoa!
Godin
Wow!
Brown
Yeah, she was so angry. It was right after the book came out, and I was on the Today show and she was like, “I just want to let you know that I set your book on fire because I thought it was going to be disabled manifesto celebration, and you talked too much about being Black. I just couldn’t take it anymore. So I burned your book.”
I said, “Well, thank you for your purchase. Have a good day.” I was like, “You bought it, so I don’t give a fuck what you do with it.”
Godin
Not to mention, did you take a picture of it and put it on Instagram? Because I bet that would sell some more books.
Brown
I’m like, “Go ahead, post it. And when you do, tag me.”
She didn’t like that I put race in tandem with disability, because she just wanted the book to be about disability. And I was like, “But I’m not going to stop being a Black woman because you don’t like it.”
So, I think a lot of it is that publishing tends to be afraid to push stories that live outside of the person in the [more powerful] position to tell the story or sell the story. I’ve been very fortunate that there are people who have published my books who aren’t disabled, Black, queer women, but I think now, more than ever, it’s harder for me to get a yes. And I think that’s so strange, because you would think as time goes on, it would be easier, but it’s so much harder now, even than it was when I published The Pretty One.
Godin
Do you think it’s because people think that when you’re disabled you have the one story to tell?
Brown
Oh, absolutely.
Godin
Because that’s the thing, right? I write about this quite a bit in my book. They just want the memoir, and that’s it, and that’s the only book. And God forbid you should start to want to try and write novels that have some aspects of who you are in it. That doesn’t fly. We just want to know your story, suck it up like vampires, and that’s that.
Brown
I had that exact conversation when I published the other two books that weren’t memoir. They were like, “Are you Sam from Sam’s Super Seats? Is Andrea you?” And I’m like, “They can be Black and disabled, and not be me, I promise you.” There are more than one of us. And so—and I say this all the time in interviews—there are pieces of me in every character that I create. But they’re not me. I’m not spending my time thinking what version of me can I create to make another book.
Godin
Nobody is asking that question of the white dude. Nobody’s asking that of Cormac McCarthy.
Brown
It’s strange that we give space to white men to tell the same story a million times and call it fresh and new and then, in the same breath, say that anybody who’s marginalized in any way is just telling one story a multitude of times, and that’s not the case.
Huber
You know, Jessie, you had mentioned COVID. I had proposed a book on long COVID, to an agent who is no longer my agent. And she said that nobody wants to read about disease.
Godin
My God.
Male
Whoa!
Brown
My gosh.
Male
That is quite a bold and inaccurate statement. A lot of my work has been informed by my mother’s experience as a polio survivor, and increasingly, people are very interested in learning about her life and how it was shaped by the virus. In part because of COVID, viruses are part of contemporary discourse.
Brown
Also, it’s so funny when they say, “We don’t know what to do with your book.” I’m like, “That would be great if you could pitch it. That would be amazing.”
Godin
That speaks to the big problem, right? There’s something about publishing in recent years. There’s just so many books going out that if there’s not an angle, the agents and editors and publishers are like, “We like it, but we don’t know what to do with it.” My gosh! I mean, you either like something and you fight for it, or you don’t. Trying to figure out the market for something that’s going to happen in a year or two years or three years down the line—it’s just so silly, right? I mean, the world moves so fast, trying to forecast trends when a book comes out is just so ludicrous.
Brown
Have you guys ever gotten a note that you should think about marketing and publishing while you’re writing, because I’ve had people say to me, “Think not only of your audience, but think of who would want the book once it’s out.” I’m like, “I’m not even done with it. I don’t even know what’s going to happen.” I can’t think of all that while I am also developing these characters. One’s got to be sacrificed. I don’t want it to be the character.
I’ve had people be like, “This isn’t being bought right now. They’re not buying middle grade. They’re not buying essays. They’re not buying X, Y, and Z. So don’t write that.” But what if I just write the thing that makes the most sense, because trying to force a book out of yourself in a genre that you don’t really feel like writing in right now is not going to make a good book. So, either way, it’s not going to sell.
Last year I tried so hard to write a middle grade book, and I was in the thick of the most debilitating depressive episode of my life. And I was like, “I’ve got to write because I’ve got to pay bills. I don’t have the luxury to not write.” And I was just curling up in a ball every day, crying because I couldn’t get out of bed. But I wanted—I needed—to write a book, and I remember my literary agent emailed me. And he said, “Hey, I’m so worried about you. Put the book down. Get help. I love you.”
It’s so wild, the way we tend to treat trends, because it will make you panic about what it is that you can create.
Male
I also want to say, it’s such a difficult experience that you’re sharing, but also what a moment for your agent to just say, “Don't worry about it.” To have that level of compassion.
Brown
And just the permission to be able to stop and get the help I need, get the meds I need, and him to say, “Listen, don’t worry about me. Don’t worry about the book. You’re not my only client.” He just needed to remind me that everything was going to be okay, so that I could breathe a little easier.
Godin
I will share one heartening story. I got involved with a middle grade book of essays by disabled writers that’s coming out from Faber. And it’s so awesome, because the people that reached out are disabled agents. They’re writers as well, but they’re also agents. And so, from top to bottom, right? This book is for and about disabled kids and written by disabled writers. And it’s just really cool. And it’s just lovely to work with them. It’s so amazing.
Huber
That’s so amazing. I don’t know why I never even thought that disabled agents were a possibility.
Godin
That’s what it has to be. Marketers, agents.
Male
Working in academia and teaching disability studies classes, there is a sense that from the ground up, there will eventually be a shift in the discourse around disability and how it’s being shaped. Whether it be publishing or medical establishments, or within systems of higher education, there is a sense—or at least a hope—that evolution is taking place, even if you can’t fully picture it because it is moving so slowly.
Leona, you’ve talked a bit about the influx of books that are being released. It can feel impossible to parse through and assess which texts are representing disability in ways that align with disability justice and disability identity. Who recently have you all either discovered or rediscovered who is “doing disability” in complex ways?
Huber
I’m a big fan of Sandra Gail Lambert. Her most recent book [My Withered Legs and Other Essays]—it came out from Crux, which is the University of Georgia series in nonfiction. It’s great because it’s about disability. But it’s also about her lifelong political involvement. She’s really speaking as a movement elder, and that is a beautiful thing to me. I am particularly interested in stories of disability activists. And there are those that are difficult to find. It’s a beautiful, beautiful book. This book and A Certain Loneliness are incredible.
Godin
Speaking of elders and disability activists, I just received the autobiography of the late Neil Marcus. I got it from his sister. She’s an agent, and she could not find a publisher for this book, because there’s no [living] author. He was amazing and so influential in so many ways, and his book is lovely, and I just finished reading it and I don’t even know how to say it, but his writing is just very present and alive and just like how he thinks. There’s a famous line [from Marcus] that I’m always quoting to people: “Disability is not a brave struggle or courage in the face of adversity; disability is an art.” It’s woven all through these pages. It’s called I, Spastic, because he had dystonia, which is where the word comes from.
Male
What about you, Keah?
Brown
I’m a very bad person right now, because I haven’t been reading disability narratives lately. But I will say, one of the people that I will stop everything that I’m doing and read forever is Esmé Weijun Wang. She is brilliant, and The Collected Schizophrenias is really, really brilliant, and she’s one of my favorite people to ever exist in the world.
I read—and I guess this shouldn’t count, because I’m in the anthology . . .
Male
We’re absolutely allowed to name any text we’re in!
Brown
So, if you’re looking for a really fun, sweet set of stories about disabled characters, there is an anthology that I’m also in called Firsts and Lasts, edited by Laura Silverman. It was really fun to be a part of, and it’s a whole bunch of stories written by disabled people about disabled people, and I wrote mine about the first crush you have.
I also recommend, even though she doesn’t identify as disabled, Roxane Gay’s Hunger. I think fatness and disability sometimes go hand in hand.
Male
Oh, absolutely! She addresses disability beautifully in that book.
Brown
And so, Roxane wrote a piece recently called “Stand Your Ground.” And I listened to it, and I wept. She’s forever going to be on my list of people that I will stop and read. Whatever she writes. She could write out a grocery list.
But I will say, even though I haven’t been reading books, I’ve read a lot of great Substacks. I love Substacks. I have one called Tell Me Everything. Frederick Joseph, though, his Substack is called In Retrospect. And it is one of my favorite things to read. He has MS and he talks about it, and he talks about culture and the world. He is one of the most brilliant minds of our generation, and I think everybody should be reading his work.
This year, I became a fan of basketball, and now I’m hyperfixated. So, I’ve been reading about and watching a lot of basketball, because the WNBA finals are coming and they’ve been talking about, not exactly disability, but just what it means when players are hurt and how that shifts everything for them. So, I also would recommend Frankie de la Cretaz’s Out of Your League SubStack.
And go, New York Liberty!
Male
As someone who grew up in a LiveJournal era, it does feel like with Substacks there is a kind of return that I’m finding to be very satisfying. Of course, there’s always that question of how we make money as writers. And yes, some people are able to do that through their Substack, but I do think a lot of people that I’ve talked to, disabled and nondisabled, are locating joy in the Substack in a way they’ve been having difficulty locating. There is a sense of freedom in it.
Okay, so I just have one more question. And I’ll preface this with the fact I appreciate the transparency and the recognition of so many of the difficult positions writers are placed in the publishing world. And yet, people are still compelled to produce and are actively producing material. What advice would you offer those who are navigating disability-driven material in their works in progress?
Huber
I will just start by saying a Big Five publisher is not necessary. I’ve had such a great career with university presses. I find it to be a space where experimentation and good literature are totally celebrated. Of course, it’s a completely different publishing experience. So, you really are doing a lot of the promo work yourself. But the expectations [for copies sold] are lower.
Brown
That’s so real.
Godin
I actually just got that advice from Maggie Nelson. She said exactly the same thing. The smaller publishing houses are just much more nurturing for interesting literature. But the thing is, I do think it’s helpful to have a faculty job, a professorship, because you’ve got to make money. I want a small publisher, but I also don’t know if I can financially do it, and that’s my own fault for not pursuing an academic career. But that’s a whole other conversation.
Male
Re the academic career. As someone who’s currently working three part-time gigs within one institution, the financial struggle is still very much there.
What about you, Keah? Any advice for disabled writers and/or people navigating disability-related content?
Brown
Well, I echo Sonya. And Leona in that—and I say this without having one, let’s be clear—have a day job. Don’t quit it. If you can, if you have a gig, keep it and write on the weekends. You’ll figure it out; don’t let stable income go. Because I went to school for journalism, and I love journalism, but does it pay? Not particularly. And so, I spend a lot of time scrambling up speaking gigs and articles to pay the rent. But if you have an actual nine-to-five gig, keep it.
Male
And also, for health insurance!
Brown
Yeah, exactly. And also, I think the biggest thing that I wish somebody would have told me as I was writing The Pretty One, and before The Pretty One came out, particularly, is write what you want. There’s this pressure to write what is popular and what’s trendy, and what somebody might love. But that’s your name on the book spine. That’s the thing that’s in the world that is yours. Whatever it is that you create, however long it takes you, make sure it’s a thing that you actually are happy with and that you actually love. So that when it’s out in the world, and it’s no longer yours, you’re still proud of the thing that you created.
And also remember, people are just waiting to hear your story. You can tell your story the way that you know how, because everyone else is just waiting to hear it. But you got to write it.
And I don’t really believe in the whole “write every day” thing. For disabled people and chronically ill people, some of us can’t. There are days when my hand cramps up, and I’m like, “Well, I’m voice noting it,” or “I’m going to rest today.” And so just be patient with yourself. Love the thing that you’re creating and remember that no one can tell your story like you can tell your story, whatever it is, and there will be people willing to wait to hear it.
Huber
Oh, I love that.
Godin
Hear! Hear!
Keah Brown is an award-winning journalist, author, and screenwriter. Her work on disability, identity, and pop culture has appeared in Town & Country Magazine, Teen Vogue, Elle, the Los Angeles Times, Marie Claire UK, and The New York Times, among other publications. Her essay collection The Pretty One, picture book Sam’s Super Seats, and young adult novel The Secret Summer Promise are out now.
Leona Godin is the author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness (Pantheon, 2021), the founder of Aromatica Poetica, and the creator of scented/tactile performance journeys. Her current work explores the rich potentials of sensory translation and disability aesthetics, challenging ocularcentric expectations and celebrating multisensory experiences.
Sonya Huber’s nine books include Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook, Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto, the award-winning Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and the forthcoming anthology Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means to Us. She teaches at Fairfield University.
Jessie Male is a memoirist and academic, currently teaching disability studies and nonfiction courses at the University of Pittsburgh. She works as a freelance accessibility consultant, helping individuals and institutions to foster inclusive environments for disabled and neurodivergent students, faculty, and employees. Her personal essays and interviews have been published in creative and interdisciplinary publications including Guernica, BOMB, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and Lateral.
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