7/23 #CripLit Twitter Chat: Disabled Writers & Disabled Characters

Q1 Please introduce yourself, your areas of interest as a writer, and any links to your work #CripLit

Q2 Do you identify as a disabled writer (or writer w/ a disability)? If so, why? Or do you prefer to be thought of as a writer, period? #CripLit

Q3 Among writers, what groups/communities do you have an affinity towards? Who supports you & your work? #CripLit

Q4 Do you connect with other disabled writers? If yes, why is that important? #CripLit

Q5 Are there disabled writers you love & want to highlight? Please describe and share your faves #CripLit

Q6 Who are some of your favourite disabled characters? Why? #CripLit

Q7 What is your process in developing a character, a disabled one in particular? Describe some disabled characters you created #CripLit

Q8 What tropes and stereotypes are you careful to avoid when constructing disabled stories & characters? #CripLit

Q9 What’s your advice to disabled & non-disabled writers who want to write believable & compelling stories about disabled ppl? #CripLit

Q10 What do you want most in terms of support? Better representation at conferences? (If so, which ones?) Something else? #CripLit

Additional Links

Disability Art, Scholarship and Activism

Nicola Griffith (5/18/16)

Writing Culture Has An Ableism Problem

Denarii Monroe (6/14/16)

Writing program association continues to debate access for members with disabilities

Josh Logue (3/28/16)

About

Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women’s self-defense, fronting a band, and arm-wrestling in bars, before discovering writing and moving to the US. Her immigration case was a fight and ended up making new law: the State Department declared it to be “in the National Interest” for her to live and work in this country. This didn’t thrill the more conservative powerbrokers, and she ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, where her case was used as an example of the country’s declining moral standards.

In 1993 a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis slowed her down a bit, and she concentrated on writing. Her novels are Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995), The Blue Place (1998), Stay (2002), Always (2007) and Hild (2013). She is the co-editor of the BENDING THE LANDSCAPE series of original short fiction. Her multi-media memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life, is a limited collector’s edition. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in an assortment of academic texts and a variety of journals, including Nature, New Scientist, Los Angeles Review of Books and Out. She’s won the Washington State Book Award, the Tiptree, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, the Premio Italia, Lambda Literary Award (six times), and others.

Source: https://nicolagriffith.com/2014/02/24/about/

Alice Wong is a San Francisco-based disability advocate, freelance journalist, television watcher, news junkie, cat lover, and coffee drinker. Currently, she is the Founder and Project Coordinator for the Disability Visibility Project (DVP), a community partnership with StoryCorps and an online community dedicated to recording, amplifying, and sharing disability stories and culture. Currently she is a co-partner with Andrew Pulrang and Gregg Beratan for #CripTheVote, a non-partisan online campaign encouraging the political participation of people with disabilities. She is also a Staff Research Associate at the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, UCSF.