Interviews

I’m starting off with a bit of a broad question, but how did you discover your passion for writing?

Well, I’ve liked books since I was a kid. I’ve always been reading books. My dad forced me to read the dictionary when I was a child and was constantly forcing me to read, but I don’t remember that ever annoying me then. He pushed me into reading because he was a big reader himself, and then I just kept on reading and plowed voraciously through all of my schooling. 

Back then, I wrote a story for school about a guy walking down a street, when a truck suddenly flips over, covers him in acid, and melts him. I forget which of my teachers did it, but I remember a teacher read it randomly to the class and praised it for its imagery and such, and that just cemented something  of a feedback loop—this very dangerous feedback loop—where I was told all throughout school that I was a really good writer, and that was dangerous because I thought I was hot shit by the time I hit university.

I barely learned anything during my first stint with university because I was too busy thinking I was better than everyone else…and then I dropped out. I went back later and actually learned how to write and how I write, and I learned very quickly that I’m not better than everyone, nor was I ever. All of it stuck with me: the love for reading, the love for writing, and the self-reflection. 

I’m in awe of the clarity and wittiness in your Substack nonfiction pieces. What inspires the topics of these pieces and the passion behind their writing? 

It’s kind of a mixed bag! Some of it is inspired by my life; obviously, living as a disabled person, much of my writing is pulled directly from my own experience. Other ideas, especially those that are less disability focused, come from my work in academia, things that I’ve observed, and things I’m taking interest in at a given time. Suggestions from friends, readers, or even social media sometimes worm into my brain and I get a hankering to write about them too.

The passion comes from primarily how angry I am at the state of the world when it comes to disability.

I think a lot of that passion is really a reflection of rage that cannot be legally expressed out and about in the world. It has to come out via writing so that I’m not burning buildings down and doing the other things that I really want to be doing, but can’t do.

I think something that a lot of people forget—especially those going through the North American schooling system—is that anyone from any kind of marginalized community didn’t gain rights solely through peace and peaceful protests, or expressions of conformative empathy and compassion. We’re taught that because that’s what folks in power would like us to believe. 

In reality, most, if not all, of our rights have come via expressions of violence, civil disobedience, and, in the case of disability rights, it took people in Denver and Berkeley committing mass midnight defacement of public property to convince the city to create just curb cutouts. Even the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, was created not via peaceful protests, but via violence and violent-adjacent protests. It’s a bare bones piece of legislation at that, but that’s not what we tend to forget.

I saw that you write fiction as well! What topics and literary genres are you particularly drawn to? Any recent projects to declare? 

My fiction actually went through a mass revision recently. When I was younger—especially in university, between seventeen and nineteen—I stylistically fashioned myself as a Gaiman-esque writer, but that never really worked for me. While there are a few short stories that I like to this day, most of what I wrote in that time period fall flat in retrospect. Now that I’ve started accepting that my writing style does not have to match Neil Gaiman’s, what I would call, very academic, detached writing style, I’ve realized I’m more Pratchett-esque.

While working on my master’s degree, something that my department chair pointed out is that my fiction almost never mirrors the things that I find really important in my life. I almost never write about disability or anything of that nature in my fiction. Instead, I’ve always liked writing with setting at the forefront of my mind. Everything comes after, but I think setting is so important to me because I’m a hiker. I like going outside. I like walking around. I like trees and rocks and lakes. Even before characters, I’m always thinking, “Where is this taking place, and why is that important to the story?” Then everything else follows.

My current fiction revolves around folktales, especially North American folktales. My first book was a retelling of the Paul Bunyan legends and myths. I’m still working on it, but my second book is inspired by my two favorite places in the world—Ireland and the mountains of the United States—and I created a pastiche landscape of the two and set a story about revolutionary politics at the center of it all. Incidentally, I think my third book is going to cover disability, but that’s in the future still.

In your interview’s companion essay, one thing that particularly stood out to me was the topic of deception, reflection, and our sense of self. Do you think that writing, especially creatively, is a way to mitigate policing identities? 
I do think that. I think that the act of creation allows us to escape more concrete identities that we may have or feel forced into. Relatedly, I have always disagreed with the notion of a singular being. Many, including myself, are increasingly comfortable with what I think is called “masking” now, but in linguistics, when I studied linguistics, we call it “code-switching” as well. Code-switching follows this idea that you don’t really have one specific state of being; rather, you switch between masks and codes.
I think creative writing, whether it be nonfiction or fiction, is a great way to explore the various masks that you don’t necessarily get to practice in real life. In my earlier example, regarding my desire for disability-sponsored violence, I can express that in my nonfiction and, hopefully, my fiction. 

Then, even when you start getting into identity, I believe that fiction is a beautiful place where you can explore the various personas that you hold. You can write them into existence and, even if you don’t publish it, even if you don’t share it, you can hold onto a piece of work like that as proof of concept of the various beings that make you whole. You can have greater effects in art than you can in your life. You can express who you want to be in a relatively safe space, as art does not have to be published. You can paint something gorgeous that resonates with you that you may be afraid to share, and you can slap it on your wall, call it a day, and no one will ever see it.

In your Substack piece, “Looking at the Blind,” you write about how the definition of blindness differs from person-to-person, and that most authorities on blindness are anecdotal and heavily personalized. What is your experience with representations of blindness in writing and media? Have you ever explored or thought of exploring blindness in your work? 

I’ve been writing another book, a nonfiction book specifically, and I have several chapters written already on that exact topic. The book centers on disability representation in media, and something I’m trying to focus on is taking a very active stance in pointing out good representation in art, so I’ve studied this exact question extensively for years. In fact, the nonfiction portion of my master’s thesis was on this topic of disability representation. However, the sad reality is 9 times out of 10, the representation is bad; it’s a spectrum of bad, and it’s a spectrum of a spectrum of bad. 

You have representation like Daredevil, for example, where you have this blind character who is essentially rendered sighted with their superpowers. I mean, it’s Daredevil. He’s beating the shit out of people in alleys. He’s flipping over rooftops. He’s fighting crime. He’s doing this, doing that, all this stuff. And while it’s initially inspiring, when given any kind of thought, it’s ridiculous and totally inaccurate. As much as I would love to be able to say that I, as a blind person, can walk into an alleyway and start beating the shit out of the mafia, I can’t. I’m blind. It’s not going to happen.

But then, on the other hand, on the other side of the spectrum, you have examples of blind people as comedy or as being useless. And that tends to be the more common depiction. An example that immediately comes to mind is Forrest Gump—the 1994 movie, not the book. Forrest Gump acts as the sort of two-pronged offense against disabled people; it is both inspiration porn and, what I’m going to call, “safe ridicule” of disability. There’s so many jokes in Forrest Gump at Forrest’s expense and, specifically, at his disability’s expense. But at the same time, we’re led to believe that without any kind of intervention, in an incredibly bigoted society, Forrest is able to just…become a multimillionaire…complete inspiration porn, completely inaccurate.

So, those are just two examples of bad representation, but you’ll find plenty of other bad examples just by reading or watching anything, really.

A really good example, to me, is Ted Lasso, the Apple TV series featuring Jason Sudeikis. The show honestly has the best depiction of disability I’ve ever seen. Mild spoilers, but one of the characters gets disabled and Ted, as the football coach, tries to push this character past that disability, both for the sake of Ted’s pride, but also for the game’s sake. And it destroys this character. Not only does it end his career as a footballer, it also ends any kind of hope he had for potential physical therapy or anything of that nature. The rest of the show follows how this character now frequently struggles with this disability that probably wouldn’t have been as bad had he just sat that game out or not pushed himself. Had he been realistic about the bounds of his disability and not been pressured into doing something that was unsafe for him by his social group, he would have been fine. I think that’s brilliant because it shows that you can’t do everything when you’re disabled. And, if you try, there are frequently devastating consequences that affect not only you, but everyone around you. I love Ted Lasso for many reasons, but that is one of the main reasons I love Ted Lasso.

Toy Story 4 is one of the most egregious examples of inspiration porn, somehow. There’s this motorbike toy voiced by Keanu Reeves, and the whole point of the toy is that he’s supposed to jump really far and high. A kid gets this toy for Christmas, but his is broken and it can’t jump at all. That’s just disability. The motorbike toy is an obvious allegory for disability.
Then, at the end of the movie, after an hour of setting up this character as being disabled, they have him jump off of a Ferris wheel and across this huge chasm to save the day…I find this depiction especially scary because it’s a children’s movie. To me, that tells disabled people, especially disabled children, “Hey, if you just believe hard enough, you can overcome your disability.” That’s very dangerous to tell a disabled person. That’s terrifying. And, to me, not only is it inspiration porn, I also think it’s designed to make pre-disabled people feel better about disability because—this has been making the rounds on the internet lately and I love it—disability is the only minority group that anyone can suddenly join.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a very prominent disability scholar, has this book called Extraordinary Bodies which centers on a theory that explains a lot about why disabled people draw so much scorn from pre-disabled people, and why we never see the accessible communities that we need to see. A lot of it has to do with pre-disabled people being terrified of disability because it can happen to them. It can happen randomly, it can happen easily, and it can happen with frightening intensity. It scares pre-disabled people to think that they could just trip and fall at home one day, hit their head in the right way, land on their arm in the right way, and suddenly they’re blind or their arm has to get amputated. The sheer possibility of disability terrifies them, so, pre-disabled people constantly want a reminder via media that, should they become disabled, when they become disabled, they’ll be able to believe their way out of it.

In another one of your Substack pieces, “Video Games are a Disabled Sanctuary,” you talk about how a lot of video game designs are not accessible for disabled gamers. Do you find a similar problem in the writing world, where we so often assume text on a screen or page is the only way to present literature? 

I do find big problems with it, the first and most obvious problem being access. For me, as a blind person, I’m very lucky that my disease is degenerative. If you look through a straw, that’s how I see right now. If I’m staring directly at something, the lighting is really good, and I can control the focus, I can read on my e-reader and whatnot, but I’ll be 100% blind in five years just because my disease does, again, degenerate. I’ve looked into reading alternatives because my whole life revolves around literature and books, and reading and writing.

There are two, technically three, options when it comes to accessing books as a blind person:=

You can buy Braille copies, which are massive and expensive, and also entails learning Braille to begin with, which is a massive and expensive undertaking.

You can buy audio books, but the problems with audio books is that they vary wildly in quality, accessibility, and they are always at least double the price of not just the paperback but the hardcover of a book. Some audio books go for upwards of $50. I understand there’s a lot of production that goes into audio books, but that doesn’t mean that disabled people miraculously have more money to pay for them.

The third option is to have someone read to you, but that’s completely dependent upon having someone who is willing and able to read to you for however long you want.

Then the real problem we come upon, especially when it comes to books, is that there isn’t an easy solution to this in any way, shape, or form. It’s just a struggle that blind people have to go through when it comes to reading books and enjoying that activity. I’ve looked into other disabilities, dyslexia is a big one, and a lot of publishers use fonts that are not dyslexic friendly. 

I was talking to a friend of mine who is a published author, I sent him my manuscript, and he goes, “What is this font that you’re using?”

I say, “Oh, it’s the most readable font for people with varying disabilities that’s available on my word processor.”

And he replies with, “Okay, well, don’t send this to publishers because they’ll think it’s a children’s book.” 

Of course, I ask, “...What do you mean?”

“The fonts that look like this are reserved in the publication world for children’s books, and that’s it.”

So, you find that it’s a rarity in the publication world to use visually-accessible fonts for people with dyslexia or any number of disabilities that relate to reading because the fonts have this weird, predetermined stigma around them in the publishing community and industry that make them “look like children’s books.” There’s just so many books out there, especially older printed books, with fonts that are wicked tiny and little scripts everywhere, and it’s just ridiculous. 

You were an editor for Copper Nickel and are now an editor for Peiskos Lit and staff for Bardics Anonymous. That’s a lot of experience in the literary scene! Do you have any advice for younger and/or emerging writers to finish us off? 

A big magazine like Copper Nickel, which is run by University of Colorado Denver and nationally regarded, gets heaps upon heaps upon heaps of submissions. The beginning of any job of any editor at Copper Nickel is, for time’s sake, to read the first paragraph of a piece, or even just the first two sentences, and make a decision right then and there. When I was working as an editor, we either passed or failed a story, or, if it was kind of good, we read a bit more. Sometimes we were told to skip to the end and just read the ending, or we just rejected the piece outright. This is very cynical and I hate to peel this layer away, but this is what’s happening at almost every medium-to-large-sized publication. Sadly, a lot of editing is learning how to effectively skim a document, quickly deconstruct a story, and figure out if it is indeed working for the goal of the publication.

As soon as you start getting into the more prescriptive side of editing, that’s when you start pulling things apart. It’s kind of a balancing act in the sense that you’re constantly having to decide, “What is the author trying to do?” If there’s a “mistake” in there, like a comma splice or a wacky word or some generally-misused punctuation, is that “mistake” trying to prove a point or is it actually a typo? In other words, you’re constantly trying to balance what you think the author is trying to do versus the “rulebook” of writing. You’re also doing that in a developmental sense; whenever I read a piece that needs developmental editing, I try to think, “Is this something that the author is trying to use as a way to further their rhetoric?” Or is it, for lack of a better term, bad or not working? I think that’s the hardest part of editing, trying to determine if what an author is doing is intentional or unintentional, working or not working, or generally needs more development. And there’s no science to that. There’s barely an art to that. It’s a situational deal, and you’re not always going to get it right. That’s why it’s important to have a team of editors, at least two sets of eyes for every submission.

Now, the publishing world, especially when it comes to short stories, is very quickly heading towards micro presses and community presses as being the best ways to get published. You look at these much larger presses, such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and even something like Copper Nickel, and they publish only a handful of stories at a time. In fact, they publish minuscule amounts of short stories but are getting thousands of submissions, if not more. It’s not just competition at that point, it’s about being seen to begin with.

So, I would recommend starting small. It can be discouraging, I think, especially when you recognize that you’re not getting paid for your work. We’re told that money and holding a copy of The New Yorker in your hands with your name in the byline is success…but I don’t really think that’s success anymore. I think it’s better to find your audience in a smaller press that caters to a pre-existing community. It’s much easier to get published there and, more importantly, it’s easier to build and connect with your audience from that angle. When you get published somewhere like, for example, Peiskos Lit or Bardics Anonymous, the community is ripping for interaction. They want to talk to the authors and artists that they see, and they have more immediate access to them than authors and artists published in larger presses. 

Then you can take that audience and carry it with you, and you can go to, for example, Copper Nickel and say, “Hey, I have this community that already enjoys my writing. I’ve been published in these community-run publications several times, and it always gets a lot of buzz.” Whenever I read something like that while at Copper Nickel, I gave that submission more attention because, as cynical as it is, we live in a capitalist society, and the point of these larger publications at the end of the day is to make money. And it sucks to have to say so, but Copper Nickel exists to make money. The New Yorker exists to make money. The Atlantic exists to make money. The secondary goal, of course, is literary in nature, but publications need readers in order to accomplish that secondary goal. So, if you go to Copper Nickel and mention that you have an audience who already likes your writing, the implication, and you don’t have to spell this implication out, is that there are 60 to 200 people behind you who are basically guaranteed to buy at least one issue of Copper Nickel. And there you go. You’re speaking to the money side already. You’ve got your foot in the door, and you can use that jumping off point to build up slowly from publications like Peiskos Lit and Bardics Anonymous, to something like Copper Nickel, and then you can start moving up into the big magazines like The New Yorker. Then your career as a writer is basically made.

Don’t get me wrong! It doesn’t hurt to aim high and submit to publications like The New Yorker, but this is what I would do: If I took one story and I submitted it simultaneously to two presses—one being The New Yorker and the other being a community-run organization—and the community-run organization gets back to me first with an acceptance, I’m probably not going to wait the six or more months that The New Yorker is going to take to get back to me. Instead, I’m going to withdraw the story from The New Yorker, publish it in the community-run magazine, and then build from there.

Some people I know will have a perfected piece that they’ve been editing and working on for years, and they reserve that work for a dream magazine. Perfect! Have that piece and dream magazine in mind, and, every time something like The New Yorker’s submissions are open, submit it. You can have that one work where you go, “I’m holding on to this as something that goes to the big boys.” There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s also important to start getting your name and writing out there, whether it’s slow—and it is going to be slow—or whether some sort of miracle happens and you get your foot into the dream magazine’s door early on.

If anything, something to take away from all of this is to always keep learning. I don’t mean that in a generic, platitude sort of way—I literally mean educate yourselves simply because you should never stop receiving education. My opinion of this comes mainly from disability; so many people I meet don’t know anything about disability because you’re not taught it. You do have to seek it out. Read books about disability and homophobia and racism. Read books from authors of color and queer authors and disabled authors. That’s how you learn, and just because you’re not in school anymore doesn’t mean that you don’t have a social, moral responsibility to perpetually learn. Because you do. 

It sounds like work, but I don’t think it is because these writers—and not to brag as a queer, disabled writer—queer writers and disabled writers and writers of color put out the best stuff, especially when compared to mass market and mainstream publications. This corner of education is so fun to get involved in, but, again, you also have a social responsibility to do it. You have a social responsibility to read critical race theory, which will take you maybe an hour, if that. You have a social responsibility to read Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. You have a social responsibility to read The Wealth of Nations and literally all of the foundational texts of every ideology you can come across. To be a well-informed individual—especially in the societies that we’ve constructed that are riddled with nasty rhetoric and people who just love to lie with the singular goal of taking our money and time and energy—means constantly educating ourselves, especially on the plight and the reality and the experiences of folks who are vulnerable and systemically oppressed.