Contribute to the Disabled Writers Scholarship Fund

Dear writers,

We need more stories that can illuminate the nuanced diversity of the disability experience. Disabled people account for 25% of the United States population (and growing). And yet, writing by disabled authors is painfully underrepresented.
 
In 2020, disabled poet and memoirist Kenny Fries published "Without Us: Disabled Writers 30 Years after the ADA" in the Evergreen Review that stated:
 
"In 2017, I created the Fries Test for representation of disability in fiction and film, akin to the Bechdel Test for women. [Note: The Bechdel Test is a measure of the representation of women in works of art, such as books, movies and TV series. It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. It takes its name from the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who originated the term.] 

Soon after, disabled writer Nicola Griffith reported her social media call for novels that passed the test garnered fifty-five titles. 'According to Stanford Literary Lab there are about five million novels extant in English,' Griffith wrote in The New York Times. She calculated that 'to proportionally represent the experience and reality of the American population, the number of novels on my list should be 1,250,000. One and a quarter million. And we have fifty.'"
 
Additionally, many disabled people live at or below the poverty line, making classes inaccessible. Much like the pink tax (the tendency for products marketed specifically toward women to be more expensive than those marketed for men), there is what's known in the disability community as the "crip tax," the additional cost that comes with living with a disability because of needing additional care items, such as hearing aids, wheelchairs, adapted vehicles and other mobility aids that are very rarely covered by insurance.
 
The disability community is ever-shifting; all of us could become disabled at any time, and most of us will experience some form of disability as we age. Disability – the way we use our bodies, and the way our bodies are seen - intersects with so many other things: pop culture, the way we dress, the way we design our buildings, our classrooms and our communities.  
 
This fall, I am teaching an online creative writing class for women writers called Writing the Body. It will focus on three key questions: What does it mean to have a body in the world? How can we find language for the experiences of our bodies? How can writers find language for and reclaim the story of their own body from the way others might be telling it? 
 
Disabled* voices must be included in this class, and I'd like to offer two full scholarships to disabled writers, totaling $500. By providing the funds for these two scholarships, you'll be supporting disabled writers as well as supporting me as an instructor. 

If you learned something in this blog post, I invite you to give. Even just a few dollars will get us closer to our goal. The link to give is here. 
 
If you’re interested in applying to Writing the Body, the application is currently open and will close on October 5th. You can apply here.

Your support is so appreciated,

Allison Kirkland

Writer & Educator
allisonkirkland.com