Scoliosis in Books: What’s Missing?
Portrayals of scoliosis in fiction often lack realism. Why is there so little reflection on the factors that affect a person’s journey?
Portrayals of scoliosis in fiction often lack realism. Why is there so little reflection on the factors that affect a person’s journey?
An estimated 1 in 7 women suffer from chronic pelvic pain; it’s bizarre and disappointing that despite these statistics, there are distinctly zero characters with this condition.
A mistake I see a lot of writers who write about disability make is asking only one person for help. I’ve heard so many people say things like, “I have a cousin who is blind, and she read the book and said it was good at portraying blindness.”
“How did you manage to capture that voice?” beta readers would ask. “How did you know to describe those particular feelings?” I was starting to have a few self-revelations about that.
Predictably, many of the tropes relating to D/deaf and hard of hearing characters deal with communication methods and degree of hearing loss. Most, if not all, of these tropes have to do with people’s assumptions and wishful thinking about hearing loss.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I could finally understand that from the time of my diagnosis, my education was not going to be “complete,” because I did not have the full access I needed. It was as if intensive speech therapy and itinerant teachers were more important than having a sign language interpreter in my classes.
When we see institutions in YA, we usually see them in one of two contexts: a “sane” person wrongly incarcerated in one, or a spooky (often old, sometimes abandoned but haunted by ghosts) asylum filled with “crazy people.”
Romanticization is a common element of mental illness narratives, including many in the YA category; what kind of message does that send?
I can feel their eyes on me. They’re all staring, judging.
During April 2015, we’re holding an event dubbed Autism on the Page. Why is this event important? And what can you expect from us?