dis/connect: Sustaining Disabled Creativity: An Interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Nerve to Write’s Editor-in-Chief
I feel like it’s common to begin these types of interviews with a question on origin. I’d prefer to begin with one of genealogy. When developing Nerve to Write — “a space for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers to build the literary community we have long been denied” — imagining its investments and contours, what writers, editors, and activists were you thinking with? In what ways has disabled kinship and community helped create and sustain NtW so far?
I love this question because it focuses on community and collaboration, which are at the heart of our mission, as well as sustaining disabled creativity. Nerve to Write began as an extension of a craft book I published with Sundress Publications in 2025 — Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice — a craft text that interrogates power and privilege within the creative writing classroom, making space for disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence. One of the only craft texts that explores the dangers of the ableist writing workshop, Nerve shares my experience living and writing with disabilities to offer readers essential tools and techniques to develop their own disabled writing practices. This book is in conversation with disabled writers and activists like Alice Wong, Sonya Huber, and Travis Chi Wing Lau, among so many others, whose work has been vital to my understanding of disabled kinship.
I was overwhelmed by the support this book received from readers and writers, many of whom experienced ableism in their writing programs and in literary publishing and were looking for ways to build crip community. Talking with readers about the trauma of ableism, which injures our spirits and stories, and the desire for more disabled community, I knew this journal was something we could build together. I would say, more than anything, these are the creatives I was thinking and working with, even if they are not on the masthead.
This kind of grassroots collaboration is ultimately what we’re trying to do with the journal. While there are certainly powerhouse writers, editors, and activists — many of whom are currently on our masthead or in our inaugural issue! — the community we are building with Nerve to Write is by and for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers and artists who are looking to build a space that sustains their spirits and stories. This could be someone who is just starting out with visual art or an accomplished ceramicist, someone who has published their third poetry collection or has never published before and has been discouraged at the response their work entering disability has received when they’ve submitted it for publication. We all have something to contribute and collective care is how we sustain ourselves and each other.
On a related note, I am struck by the forthright anger on your “About” page, a rage at a literary culture that has largely built itself around standards of inaccess. What, to you, is the role that disabled rage plays in your writing practice and your editorial/curatorial practice?
I’m so glad this stood out! Disabled people face pressure to perform disability in certain ways if we are to receive access and dignity. We are faced with the pressure to be cheerful, hopeful, inspirational, optimistic. We are expected to simultaneously perform our suffering and shield people from our trauma. And above all, we are expected to perform disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence for abled comfort. Literary publishing, in particular, has strict expectations for the kinds of disabled stories that receive publication. It is rare that publishing features disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence, and many are written by healthcare workers of the friends and family of disabled people. Those published pieces that are actually written by disabled people often must conform to ableist expectations if they are to be published at all.
It’s no wonder many of us feel anger about social and political attacks on disability rights, America’s poor health care system, and everyday ableism that seeks to divorce us from our deserved dignity. Anger is part of our mission because our anger is so often silenced, and we wanted to invite readers and writers to examine the dangers of this imposed silence and to provide a safe space for readers and writers to consider their own anger and what it might accomplish. There is great power in anger, and we wanted to invite people to witness the power of anger to fuel creativity and activism.
But while disabled rage fueled the start of this magazine, so did disabled joy. Much like disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent people face immense pressure to shield people from our rage, we also face immense pressure to shield people from our joy. We are often expected to be pitiful, dejected, and depressed, and while we certainly feel these things, these are not our only identities. We live lives of joyful abundance, which is why cultivating rage and joy are essential to our mission, why our aesthetic design, for example, is colorful and exuberant, why we seek to make space in the journal for all the ways we are excluded in an ableist world.
Many readers new to disabled writing from disabled people may be more familiar with narratives “about us, [but] without us.” Others may be accustomed to seeing narratives of sickness and linear recovery/healing that do not address the complexities of disabled survivance, especially those of us who are never going to get better. What are you looking for, as an editor, as you select pieces to highlight? What do you wish to see more of, in your inbox and in the world?
You’ve absolutely touched on what we’re looking for in your question! We’re looking for writing that resists ableist expectations for work about disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence. We want work that dwells in complexity, that does not accept pressure to be inspirational or cheerful, that does not privilege recovery or cure if this has not been the writer’s experience. We want work that is written by disabled writers for disabled writers, rather than work that is written for an abled audience. We’re also looking for work that has nothing to do with disability, because so many disabled writers feel a pressure to only write about this experience.
It’s important for me to also read every single piece that arrives in our inbox, and an unapologetic voice is something that I always look for when reading submissions. I want to read work whose author knows what they want to say rather than writing to please an editor or particular audience. When I come across a work where it is clear the writer has a strong authority over their intention, this immediately grabs me.
But I work with a tremendous group of editors and graduate students at Bridgewater State University. Emily Lapomardo is one of our graduate student interns who has been with the magazine from the start and reads many of the submissions that come in. And Mialise Carney is a fantastic writer and editor who has worked at some of the leading journals in the country, so we were thrilled to bring her on board when the magazine launched to write book reviews and author interviews for the site. Their thoughts on the kind of work that grabs their attention are below.
We’re looking for writing that resists ableist expectations for work about disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence. We want work that dwells in complexity, that does not accept pressure to be inspirational or cheerful, that does not privilege recovery or cure if this has not been the writer’s experience. We want work that is written by disabled writers for disabled writers, rather than work that is written for an abled audience. We’re also looking for work that has nothing to do with disability, because so many disabled writers feel a pressure to only write about this experience.
Emily Lapomardo: Personally, I gravitate towards pieces that authentically capture the lived experiences of being disabled, without trying to make them “tidier” or more digestible for non-disabled audiences. In addition to that, I would love to see more works that normalize disability, gesturing to it or including details when relevant, but not necessarily making it the defining feature or piece of a character/artwork/poem/et cetera.
Mialise Carney: As an editor and reader, I’m excited by stories that center the experiences of disability while also exploring the nuances of disabled people’s lives — I’m thinking of Ravishing by Eshani Surya who I interviewed for the magazine, whose novel explores invisible disability at the intersection of coming of age inside the predatory beauty industry, Indian American identity, and the joy of girlhood friendships. Another example is The Devil’s Castle by Susanne Paola Antonetta, who digs deep into the painful history of eugenics that has defined social attitudes and medical treatments of disabled people for centuries, while also shining a light to early disabled/neurodivergent artists and activists who claimed their experiences not only as ones of pain but also as expressions of humans’ vast, variable experience, spirit, and creativity. At Nerve to Write, I’m excited to see more stories like these and other inventions by and for disabled writers that engage with the great, often overlooked, diversity in disabled people’s lives, community, and art.
No literary space is easy to sustain, but sustaining such a space when you and your colleagues are working on crip time adds another level of difficulty. What does your collective editorial practice look like in light of the access needs of editors and readers, potential timeline disruptions, and other quotidian difficulties? What, to you, does it mean to sustain and expand disabled art?
Absolutely! One of the things I always say as a disabled writer and scholar is that you can’t tend to your body of work if you don’t tend to your body. Rolling this magazine out has definitely been a learning lesson in crip time, but a lifetime of living as disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent people has prepared many of us for the balance that we need to have in order to sustain both ourselves and this space.
A big part of this is building in ample time for editorial review, copy editing, and digital galley review, both for ourselves and for our contributors. I see a lot of magazines these days sending emails to contributors asking for quick turnarounds — last month I received one requesting a turnaround time of 48 hours! — and this simply isn’t possible for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers. We’ve designed a production schedule that allows for quite a bit of review time and provides the understanding that contributors can ask for more time if necessary, without apology or shame. By granting grace to our contributors, we also grant grace to ourselves, which can help combat internalized ableism that we may feel.
We’ve also learned to share labor and be flexible in what this requires, because crip community is about collective caretaking, and so taking care of this magazine is also about taking care of each other. We have clearly defined roles and people step in as necessary so that if someone needs rest and recuperation time, someone who is currently able to assist is willing to do so. Again, collaboration is key, and so having a team of people with disability experience allows us to consider how we want to do things in a way that is sustaining and affirming.
You can’t tend to your body of work if you don’t tend to your body.
Finally, because so much of what we are trying to do with Nerve to Write is about building community, we also rely quite a bit on our contributors and readers to sustain and expand our process. When sending out galleys, for example, we invite contributors to weigh in on our web design, including use of alt text, animation, color, etc., to help make things more accessible. While at AWP, for example — which we have to remind readers is not accessible for all — we met with quite a few disabled writers, many of whom we solicited directly or collaborated with on journal accessibility. We see ourselves as facilitators rather than gatekeepers of a larger conversation and community, so there are many of us that are involved and we hope many more will reach out to get involved. And because of this rich sense of community, there are many more good things on the way!
dis/connect: Sustaining Disabled Creativity: An Interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Nerve to… was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.