Luke Rolfes: Poet and author Sarah Fawn Montgomery is out with a wonderful new book called Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop your Disabled Writing Practice from Sundress Publications. This text is part craft discussion, part personal narrative. It challenges the current ableist practices of the traditional workshop model in the hopes of a more inclusive way forward. Thanks for taking some time with us today, Sarah Fawn! I always start holistically with these interviews. Can you give us a sense of how this project came to be? How long has this been in the works?
Sarah Fawn Montgomery: Thanks so much for talking with me! This project came out of necessity. I’d written a fair amount about both disability and creative writing craft prior to this book, but after I suffered several severe spinal injuries that left me with permanent nerve damage in all four limbs, I was unable to write using most of the conventional wisdom I’d encountered in my MFA and PhD programs, as well as the advice I often dispensed as a professor in my creative writing classes. I was unable to type or write by hand and unable to read physical or digital books. I couldn’t stand or sit for more than a few minutes at a time, and I experienced incredible amounts of chronic pain. My injuries required hours of daily physical therapy, numerous medical appointments, and various painful medical procedures and surgeries. After it was revealed that these injuries were permanent, I knew I was going to have to find a new way forward if I wanted to keep writing.
Nerve was the start of that new way forward, a book I wrote as I was figuring out how to keep writing as a disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent person, and one I wish I’d had even prior to my injuries. Because I had to reinvent nearly every aspect of my practice, this book is extensive in its approach, organized into various sections including unlearning ableist craft advice, strategies for developing disabled writing practices, techniques for designing disabled writing spaces, methods to discover disabled forms and structures for creative work, practical tips for the business of being a writer, and various craft exercises and creative writing prompts.
LR: Who do you see as the primary audience for this book? Who are you most hoping to reach?
SFM: The primary audience for the book are other disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers who have struggled to succeed in the traditional writing workshop. Our experiences in the writing workshop are often fraught with rampant ableism, including microaggressions during workshop critiques, a lack of disabled voices in course materials, and strict attendance policies that do not offer grace for those who experience symptom flare or who require extensive medical care. Inherently ableist by design, the traditional workshop silences disabled voices and can hurt not only the creative spirit of disabled writers, but also their physical and mental well-being. As I describe in Nerve, the spinal injuries I suffered were in large part because I had been forcing my disabled body to adhere to ableist writing practices for a long time and doing so led to directly to irreversible damage. By modeling alternative strategies for disabled writers, including how to resist ablest pressures for their work, I hope to prevent them from similar injury and build a collective community of creative care.
But this text is also designed for writing instructors who wish to offer greater access in their courses. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to writing, yet we tend to teach writing as a universal experience. Many instructors model their courses on the traditional writing workshop because there are so few alternatives represented in craft texts and teaching materials. But offering access should never be a burden or an afterthought—instead, it should be viewed as an opportunity for both creativity and the craft of teaching.
LR: I was struck by this line, “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.” To my mind, we’ve become a society that has become increasingly focused on myopic results and tidy resolutions. Can you talk about the concept of the “ableist story” and how it is shaping creative writing in today’s world?
SFM: Society has a lot of expectations for disabled people and the stories of their lives. Disabled people are often reduced to their disability and little else, and portrayed as burdensome for family, friends, and loved ones. Disabled people are expected to be visibly disabled so that they are easily recognizable and to also be visibly always trying their hardest to prove they are disabled enough to warrant accommodations, medical treatment, or basic kindness. Even though symptoms can ebb and flow, disabled people are expected to be consistently disabled lest they be seen as untrustworthy. They are expected to be cheerful, pitiable, and inspirational, though never angry, depressing, or too happy. Disabled people are also expected to accept invasive questions or unsolicited medical advice, along with disbelief and statements like “But you don’t look sick” or “You just need to keep trying.” They are expected to demonstrate that they have tried everything in their lives to be well and to search for cure, even when many disabilities have no cure and are inherent parts of disabled identity and community.
All of this plays out in creative writing where audiences enforce strict expectations for the stories disabled writers are expected to tell and the ways they are expected to tell them. Audiences are often presumed to be abled, disabled writers expected to translate their lived experiences for others, frequently at the expense of their authenticity. Many times, the most popular stories about disability are actually written by abled people—family members writing on behalf of deceased loved ones or chronicling the difficulty of caregiving for a disabled person. This isn’t to say that that abled people can’t write meaningfully about disability, but rather that we must center disabled voices in order to fully understand the disability experience and render it accurately and respectfully on the page.
LR: You emphasize that disabled writers need to find a process that works for them, and that abled expectations (such as writing 1000 words a day) can be detrimental. “Setting goals around practice instead of product will help.” Does this advice come back to the idea of controlling the things that one can control? How important is self-awareness in setting this process?
SFM: Disability has taught me that control is nothing but an illusion. Everything is in constant flux—symptoms, treatment, medical care, ability. Instead, I think of process in terms of ease. I want to be as at ease in my body and my body of work as possible. I want to remove as many barriers to my comfort and my creativity as possible. Writing practice is often described in terms of rigid requirements but reframing process in terms of ease allows writers to shift from a scarcity mindset into a mindset pleasure, which allows us to enjoy being in our bodies and in the work.
Self-awareness is essential to this process. We must be willing to reject what does not work for our bodies and our bodies of work, even if this means rejecting what we have been taught. We must be willing to rethink methods that never or no longer work for us and reinvent them entirely. We must be willing to notice our patterns and habits and consider the ways that subtle shifts might influence them. One such shift for me has been reframing the development of my process—which includes designing an accessible writing space, incorporating radical rest, changing my output goals depending on my medical needs—as an essential part of the creative work. I used to think of creative work as an isolated product, but process is as much a part of creativity as the work itself.
LR: You offer this advice: “We cannot center every story around disability, because while disability certainly informs our experiences, we deserve to write stories as rich as our experiences. In fact, like many marginalized writers, disabled writers often must ignore much of the advice offered in writing workshops altogether if we are to best tell our stories.” And then later in this section you add: “Not every piece by a disabled writer must be about disability. Despite the insistence of abled workshops, disability is not a disabled writer’s only plot and purpose.” I noticed a theme in much of your advice—that a disabled writer should never apologize for writing what and however they want to write. How vital is giving oneself this grace?
SFM: So much of the disability experience involves apologizing for our existence. We must apologize for feeling unwell, for making others uncomfortable, for needing to rest or cancel plans, for being unable to meet the expectations of the abled world or even the expectations we had of ourselves prior to illness. We must apologize for being frustrated, angry, and depressed over invasive questions, poor medical care, lack of accommodations. We must apologize for the needs of our bodies and brains and the ways these conflict with the expectations of others. We apologize to others for being unable to meet their demands and then we apologize to ourselves for still trying to meet them even at the expense of our health.
Because disabled people spend so much time apologizing for our existence the world, it is essential we claim an unapologetic existence on the page. If we frame the stories of our lives as an apology, then we deny our very right to exist. By rejecting pressures to write for abled expectations, we reclaim our identities, our stories, our inherent worth.
LR: “Part IV: Designing Disabled Writing Spaces” functions somewhat as a list of how-to or best practices for creating a space to foster creativity while at the same time prioritizing mental and physical health. How did you go about creating this list?
SFM: My spinal injuries necessitated a complete redesign of my space, which was the impetus for creating this section. While writing spaces differ based on a writer’s living situation, current creative project, and aesthetic, the expectation that a writer create from a desk or table, often from a seated position and using either a computer or notebook is fairly common. So too is the notion that a writer is surrounded by books, notepads, and hardcopy or digital research materials.
But after my injuries I found myself unable to write without the use of a standing desk and several different kinds of seats, along with various technology to assist me in typing, setting timers, and playing music, and collaborators to help me use a computer. Similarly, I was unable to write without room to stretch and use many pieces of physical therapy equipment. Because I was no longer able to write by hand, desk drawers previously filled with notebooks and pens became filled instead with various medications and medical devices. Because I was no longer able to read physical books, it didn’t make sense to keep them in my space, so I began to replace them with the tools that helped my body find comfort but also the objects that inspired me, things like shells and leaves and beautiful stones. I also embraced writing from locations other than an office, including bed, the bathtub, and the doctor’s office. This has been a liberating redesign. Rather than trying to force my disabled body to occupy an ableist writing space, I have transformed the space into one that better supports my body and my work. There are countless ways to do so—everything from furniture to flooring, lighting to sound.
LR: You offer this late in the book: “Don’t compare yourself to the voices on social media who reinforce capitalist values and define your worth by your work. Social media is for finding community and for cat photos—if it becomes a competition, close it immediately.” I couldn’t agree with this idea more! Why do you think it’s so easy for writers to fall into the trap of comparison to each other?
SFM: It’s easy to fall into this trap because that’s precisely what the algorithm is—a trap for our attention. When only posts about extreme success or extreme failure are rewarded by being pushed to the top of the feed where they receive more engagement from an audience, it can seem as though these are the kinds of stories we must replicate. It can certainly seem as though everyone is publishing all the time, but this simply isn’t accurate. It’s helpful to remember that not every writer publishes a book every year or every five or even every decade. Some of the best writers haven’t published a book at all. The metrics by which social media advertises success often have very little to do with the writer and much more to do with the platform or the publisher’s publicity team or the timeliness of a particular book in today’s ever-changing news cycle.
If writers are constantly comparing themselves to others, they will inevitably feel as though they are failing because it isn’t possible to publish at the rate or scope that social media makes it seem is required. And this feel of failure can lead to actual failure because it is not possible to live our lives comparing ourselves to others while retaining the motivation, confidence, and creative energy we need to write. I don’t even want to compare myself to previous versions of myself—let alone to strangers on the Internet!—because this distracts me from the writer I am now. What I do find helpful about social media is when I see writers sharing their real lives—the pies they bake, their gardens, the museums visit, their children, their animals, their new tattoos, a day they felt cute, a cloud formation. These are the moments that inspire creativity rather than shame.
LR: What is the best way for the writing community (as a whole) to support disabled writers?
SFM: Much of this is similar to how we support any writer! Read our work, purchase or request our books from libraries, invite us to participate in reading series, solicit our work for magazines, mention disabled voices in mission calls, publish disabled writers and work about disability, put together special issues or folios or anthologies featuring disabled voices. Often disability is treated as an afterthought when it comes to diversity, so centering disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent voices is an essential way to show support, especially now that disability rights are under attack by our current political administration.
But you can also support disabled writers by cultivating accessibility. Teachers, publishers, reading series, and conferences can offer accommodations from the start rather than relying on disabled writers to ask. This might mean offering extended deadlines, offering various ways to submit, offering virtual options, and offering editorial notes via voice notes or written notes rather than track changes. You might offer interview questions in multiple formats or provide them ahead of live events. You might offer events both in-person and virtually. You might ensure there are ASL interpreters or captions available for events. You might ensure events are recorded for disabled audience members who might not be able to attend live. You might ensure images have descriptions and that websites are screen readable. Additionally, encouraging disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers to reach out for accessibility questions allows for an open dialogue where both parties can facilitate access and build community.
LR: Can you offer us a couple books (or writers) that folks should put on their reading lists?
SFM: Absolutely! Some of the disabled writers I turn to time and again are Alice Wong, Sonya Huber, Jillian Weise, Terese Marie Mailhot, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Sara Nović, Khairani Barokka, torrin a. greathouse, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Naomi Cohn, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Keah Marie Brown, Sage Ravenwood, James Tate Hill, Ellen Samuels, s.e. smith, and the list goes on!
LR: What’s next for you, Sarah Fawn? I know you have a brand-new book out from Small Harbor Publishing called Abbreviate. Are you kicking around any other project ideas?
SFM: Yes, Abbreviate just came out, which is exciting! This book is a small collection of small essays that examines how the injustice and violence of girlhood leads women to accept—and even claim—small spaces and stories. The collection of lyric flash prose is a hybrid between my love of nonfiction and poetry, and it felt very timely to focus on the lives of girls and women and way the world expects them to shrink.
I’ve also been writing and publishing a lot of poetry about chronic pain and navigating a broken American healthcare system, including a recent poem in Laurel Review. Living with invisible disability and chronic pain means that my reality is often unacknowledged and disbelieved, so these poems are a way to articulate that reality. There may be a book project at some point, but for now I’m enjoying the process.
LR: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us! Best of luck to you and your writing! Please check out Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop your Disabled Writing Practice at https://www.sundresspublications.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Montgomery.pdf
---
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of the craft text Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice and Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, which The Atlantic says, “Exemplifies a nuanced approach to life with mental illness” and The Paris Review describes as “The wakeup call we need.” She is also the author of the essay collection Halfway from Home, winner of a Nautilus Book Award for lyric prose, the flash collection Abbreviate, and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.