Interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery

Hi writers and readers

My March Substack features an interview with writer and educator Sarah Fawn Montgomery about her book Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice. Here’s an excerpt:

AK: Sarah Fawn, congratulations on this gorgeous and necessary book. I could feel my orientation to my body and to my writing practice changing in real time as I read Nerve. I’d love to know how this book came to be and what challenges you faced while making it. How did you want it to be different from other craft books you’ve read?

SFM: Thank you so much! I’m so glad it resonated with you, and I hope it will resonate with others. This book came about after I wrote the ANMLY article you referenced because I received so much feedback from readers who shared similar experiences that I knew there was more to say. I wanted to build community but also share all the different ways disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers could unlearn the ableist writing advice they might have encountered in workshops. I also knew that many creative writing instructors wanted to make their classes more inclusive, but simply didn’t know how.

This book was definitely a challenge to write, because, as I explain in the book, I have a disability that makes writing for any length of time painful and potentially dangerous. In addition, due to this disability, I suffered several spinal injuries that left me with permanent nerve damage in each of my limbs, which makes using a computer impossibly painful. As a result, I wrote this book using a microphone and assistive software in short spans of time—sometimes just ten or fifteen minutes per session—over many months. My writing life is secondary to my disabled life, and my work must be scheduled around several hours of daily physical therapy, frequent appointments with specialists, symptom management, and various procedures and surgeries, which makes extended projects a challenge.

But writing this book while navigating my disabilities and injuries got me thinking about not only my own practice, but the many innovative practices of disabled creators, who find all sorts of ways to write beyond sitting at a computer or notebook for extended periods of time. Many craft books assume an abled reader and universal process, but this isn’t true for disabled creators. Instead, I wanted this book to dismantle the notion that writers approach the physical and mental acts of writing from a shared perspective. I also wanted this book to center disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent experiences, and to frame these identities as rich sources of innovation and creativity rather than deficits to be overcome, which is how the ableist world often frames things.

You can read the rest here.

Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice is available now for free in digital and audio formats via Sundress Publications. Click here to access.

My Substack publication, the intangibles, is a celebration and exploration of the writing life and the genre of creative nonfiction, often through the lens of my own experience.