Interview with Heidi Heilig about The Girl from Everywhere
Heidi Heilig and S. Jae-Jones sit down to talk about the book’s portrayal of bipolar disorder, writing mental illness, and writing with a mental illness.
Heidi Heilig and S. Jae-Jones sit down to talk about the book’s portrayal of bipolar disorder, writing mental illness, and writing with a mental illness.
Magic and technology often minimize disability in SF/F. How can authors meaningfully engage with disability and the ways that speculative elements can affect disabled characters?
This book definitely had its creepy moments, but I think other books have taken the protective older brother trope and did it better—without turning the younger brother into a plot device.
Autistic people learn, change, and cope like anyone else. However, when a character is autistic, many authors appear to see only one route for character growth: effectively making the character less autistic.
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.”
A one-armed astronaut superhero is the lead in Dangerous, the unusual new novel by NYT bestselling and Newbery Honor-winning author Shannon Hale, who sat down with us for a great interview.
Skim does a good job of showing misguided attempts to help those with depression, and lets the reader see the absurdity for themselves.
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.
We recap the highlights of our #diklSFF Twitter chat, including a link to the full Storify.
The world does its best to remove our autism from the mainstream narrative of life, hiding either it or us whenever possible. In the world of fiction, we often see these same attempts.