Unlearning the Ableist Writing Workshop
Recently an editor who was publishing my work wrote, “Are you sure? Did this really happen?” in response to an essay about my life. Though the writing did not directly concern disability, the editor found my disabled experiences suspect.
The comments reminded me of those I received while workshopping essays about neurodiversity in graduate school. Feedback often questioned the veracity of my stories, asking me to explain or justify my existence, sometimes even suggesting my topics were not worth putting on the page. When I began submitting Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, a book about mental illness, many publishers were interested only if the book concluded with my search for a cure finally achieved with a magic pill. But this wasn’t the case — like many disabilities and chronic illnesses, mental illness is a lifelong negotiation. I did not want to sell a story that implied tidy resolution was possible. I did not want to write the ableist story of my disabled life.
Much has been said about the limitations of the traditional writing workshop. In his essential text, Craft in the Real World, writer and professor Matthew Salesses writes “When craft is taught unreflexively, within a limited understanding of the canon, it reinforces narrow ideas about whose stories are important and what makes a story beautiful, moving, or good.” Disabled writers often receive pity and shame, suspicion and blame from the writing workshop. Unlike many of their colleagues, they are tasked with proving their stories are possible and also of value. They also face the reality that outside of the workshop their stories may not be given an audience at all. In Disability Visibility, disabled writer and activist Alice Wong explains, “One common response from publishers and editors, when confronted about the lack of diversity in their staff or coverage, is that claim that it’s too ‘hard’ to find disabled reporters or writers.” There are, of course, many disabled writers, but their stories are often silenced and erased. And those whose stories do reach abled audiences must often rewrite them to conform to ableist standards.
Disabled writers must claim space in workshops that do not claim them back. In fact, many of these inaccessible spaces prevent disabled writers from thriving. Syllabi do not feature disabled writers, so students may write the only disability texts the class studies. Disabled students must navigate educational barriers, microaggressions, and tokenization. The feedback they receive reflects this power imbalance. Writer Ross Showalter examines the experience of being the only Deaf student in a workshop where peers were only receptive to stories about abled discomfort. “Surrounded by hearing peers,” Showalter writes, “I wanted them to read what I knew instead of writing something they knew and expected. In order to move forward as a writer, I had to reject the idea of hearing approval.” Yet rejecting approval can be difficult when success can depend on collaborating with abled peers and mentors and navigating networking opportunities that seldom do not recognize disabled perspectives. Writer and professor Travis Chi Wing Lau writes, “So often we are, intentionally or not, encouraged to capitalize on our pain to be legible to audiences and publishers wholly uninvested in us as people living with pain. As with many BIPOC and queer writers, such rehearsals of our pain are seldom for us and in fact limit the horizons for how we collectively imagine pain and those who have relationships with it.”
Though I value my experience in creative writing classes, finding my way as a disabled writer has required unlearning much of the ableist advice I received in writing workshops. Much of my craft education has come from other disabled writers outside of the traditional writing workshop. In her vital craft text, Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto, writer and professor Sonya Huber shares a similar experience, writing “I found support from other disabled writers, and the work they’d done to reframe disability as an insight-giving window into reality, rather than a deficit, helped me to begin to rebuild my life and my writing.” For many disabled writers, the ableist writing workshop can actually hinder creativity. Instead, we learn craft and find community outside the workshop, building our collective canon though careful unlearning.
Here are some things I’ve unlearned from the ableist writing workshop:
Work about disability does not need a triumphant recovery arc. Requiring disabled stories to provide a magic cure implies these stories are only of value if disability is eradicated.
Disabled characters do not need to serve as hope or inspiration. Disabled stories do not exist to teach abled characters a lesson or to make abled readers feel superior about their own existence. They are not of value simply because they allow abled others to feel pity or relief.
Disabled stories do not need to be cheerful. Anger, sadness, sharp humor, and exquisite joy are essential to writing about disability.
Disabled writers do not need to shield readers from their suffering just as they do not need to perform their trauma.
Disabled writers do not have to write for abled readers. Disabled identities do not exist to serve abled readers and disabled writers have to translate their experiences.
Writing workshops have a responsibility to question abled friends or family members writing about someone else’s disability or using disabled identities to serve their own stories. These writers are not serving as a “voice for the voiceless.” They are appropriating.
Ableist metaphors about blindness, deafness, madness, or any other disability are unoriginal and unacceptable. In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote that “illness is not a metaphor” so it’s time to retire these ableist clichés.
Disabled writers get to determine their terminology. Abled workshops may insist “disability” is a dirty word and favor terms like “handicapped” or “differently abled” and abled colleagues may insist on their right to use ableist terminology because they have disabled family members. But when workshops colleagues refer to disabled writers as “special needs” or “superheroes” it is often about abled writers’ comfort rather than inclusivity.
Disabled writers can and should resist calls from the workshop to explain every detail about their medical histories. A disabled writer does not need to justify or prove their existence.
Not every piece by a disabled writer must be about disability. Despite the instance of abled workshops, disability is not a disabled writer’s only plot and purpose.
Finally, the writing practices valued by workshops often do not support disabled writers. Writing workshops are full of advice on how frequently to write, what time of day to write, how long it takes to write a piece or a book. As a disabled writer, I cannot always write every day, every week, or even every month. I cannot always write a set number of words each time I write. I cannot always type or write by hand — in fact, I have been unable to use a keyboard or pen for several months and am dictating this piece into a microphone. I cannot always write at the pace of my abled colleagues or even former versions of myself. I cannot always meet quick deadlines or deadlines at all when my body and mind are consumed instead by the task of survival. Prescribing ableist writing practices to disabled writers is a form of erasure because if we follow this advice, many of us risk injury, risk being unable to write at all, our stories silenced.
I wrote much of my most recent book, Halfway from Home, in short bursts of scattered time between symptoms. Because this is a book about time and impermanence, about searching for home and identity, it resists simple structures and tidy resolution. As a writer with daily chronic pain, I’ve learned in the years since my graduate workshops how to write in ways that support my disabled identity. I’ve also learned to craft work that best reflects it. The essays in this collection are lyric and nonlinear, comprised of segments and collages that rely on the sensory experiences I was often accused of constructing. They are the kinds of essays I could not have written if I had followed the advice of well-meaning workshop colleagues who told me to simplify and justify.
It is a book I learned to write because I dared to unlearn at all.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press), and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @SF_Montgomery
