How does writing about creative practice, such as your book Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice, impact your craft?

Writing about craft always gets me excited to experiment and innovate in my creative work. It can be easy to get formulaic if we don’t remind ourselves that writing is a kind of play. Writing about craft has always been a way for me to remove myself far enough from my creative work to be able to reinvigorate and challenge myself. As a multi-genre writer, I like to move between genres to keep myself trying new things. I also give myself writing challenges, often based around form and structure, which are my favorite ways to play on the page. Many of the essays in Abbreviate came directly from these challenges, and writing a flash collection was also a challenge I set for myself, because my previous nonfiction books were a collection of longer essays and a memoir.

While I’ve written a lot of pieces about craft, Nerve, my craft book about how disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers can innovate their practices, came from a moment of necessity. My disabilities resulted in several severe spinal injuries which left me with permanent nerve damage in all four limbs. I was unable to type or hold a pencil, unable to hold a book or use a computer. I was also unable to sit or stand for more than a few minutes at a time and required frequent movement to ease the chronic pain. This, of course, made writing nearly impossible, so I needed to find a way to alter my writing practice and craft to reflect my reality. Writing a book about the creative practices that might be useful to disabled writers has radically impacted nearly every aspect of my craft.

How have you unlearned ableist mentality manifested in a traditional writing workshop experience?

I’ve learned to resist ableist craft advice often perpetuated in traditional writing workshops like using disability as metaphor, asking writers to explain or justify their disabled experiences, requiring disabled writers to perform optimism or inspiration, asking disabled writers to focus on recovery narrative arcs even when these are not possible, and requiring disabled writers show their suffering or trauma on the page. This has been essential because the more I resist ableist expectations about the kind of work I am allowed to write, or the kinds of stories about disability that others want to read, the more authentic I am to my own experience and the more this instinct guides and strengthens my work.

Unlearning ableist expectations around process and productivity has also allowed me to develop a disabled practice that incorporates Crip time and spoon theory into my approach to writing. Now I reframe rest as an essential part of the process, and I write in short, infrequent bursts depending upon my fluctuating abilities. I’ve also redesigned where I write, shifting my traditional writing office into a physical therapy space full of assistive software and technology that allow me to write even though I cannot use a computer for any length of time or hold a writing utensil or book. Designing a space that best supports our bodies and minds is essential for disabled writers, yet writing workshops assume every writer sits at a desk in an office or at a coffee shop table, writing by hand or typing on a keyboard. Disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence have also shaped things like the form and structure of my creative work and the ways I approach the business of being a writer, all of which I discuss in Nerve. Many times the writing workshop assumes a universality of experience, yet disabled writers are not supported in the workshop and are actually harmed by these practices, which is why unlearning them is so essential for our work.

To follow the above: having written a book on creative writing workshop pedagogy, have you noticed any changes in your writing process?

As I mentioned previously, I wrote Nerve after several severe spinal injuries left me with permanent nerve damage in all four limbs, which definitely impacted my writing process. I used to write longform prose—my previous books are a lengthy researched memoir and a collection of long essays. But I can no longer write this kind of work because I can no longer type or write by hand and can no longer write for any length of time. I can typically work for about twenty minutes at a time, so I’ve shifted away from longform prose and embraced brevity.

Abbreviate is the direct result of this change to my writing process. The collection is quite short and is comprised of short essays of just a few pages each. Many of these essays were written in a single session. But I haven’t just embraced brevity for ease—the form works well to demonstrate the themes of the collection, which examine how the violence and injustice of girlhood leads women to accept—and even claim—small spaces and stories. While I’ve certainly written about these themes before in longer prose, the change in my writing process led me to experiment with form in ways that were more beneficial to both my body the work. 

I was very taken by your choice of narrative stance in Abbreviate. I’m curious about your choice to write solely in the present tense. As the reader, it feels as though we are living your childhood alongside you.

Since I was a child, I’ve always disliked thinking about time linearly, the sense that we are marching from one fixed position toward another, the sense that things get left behind as we search for something else. I’ve always viewed time as fluidly as I view gender or genre. At any one moment in time, I feel as though I am all the versions of myself that have ever existed and none of these versions at all. This is why I tend to write in present tense, especially when I’m writing about childhood. I still feel like the girl, the teenager, the young woman in these essays, and I don’t want to lose those versions of myself by separating us any further through tense. Plus, I’ve always found present tense a more visceral reading experience. The immediacy of the present tense creates inherent tension and allows the reader to experience the circumstances alongside the writer. 

I also wrote in present tense throughout the collection to link the essays. This is a collection about the dangers facing girls and women, and even though the speaker ages from childhood to adulthood, the dangers she faces remain the same. The speaker is older, but the things she feared as a child are not so different from the things she fears as an adult. The collection is unified by present tense because trauma, sexual assault, and domestic abuse are all things that girls and women face regardless of age. 

You mention the scent of your perfume through different periods of your life —whether it’s a vanilla fragrance or Victoria’s Secret’s “Love Spell.” Is smell a way you categorize or remember periods of your life?

Absolutely. Scent plays a big role for me when it comes to memory. I attach the smell of many things—whether it’s perfume, laundry detergent, candles, campfires, fresh cut grass, the smell before a rainstorm, animal fur, or summer sun—to memories and mindsets, and I often think of scent as symbolic or thematic. The smell of lemongrass, for example, reminds me of devouring queer literature in a dark room when I was in high school. The smell of hibiscus reminds me of driving down dusty back roads in the sun-bleached heat of summer with my childhood friends, who were also my first loves.

Abbreviate centers the experience of young girls, so scent plays an essential role. Young girls are often taught to perform gender through dedication to the body. Throughout the collection this dedication is demonstrated through an obsession with thinness, grooming through makeup and hair, tending to the bodies of friends, and fragrance. Scent becomes a way for girls to claim space in a world where they are not afforded any. Scent becomes a way for girls to claim beauty—and thus power—when they do not feel they possess any. Scent becomes a way for girls to try on different personalities as they are trying to figure out who they would like to become.

As a former Polly Pocket fan, I am drawn to your piece “Pocketed,” splicing your lived-girlhood with the safety and comfort in childhood play. However, I’m curious to know if there is a piece in Abbreviate that you feel most connected to. If so, would you mind sharing?

One of the pieces from the collection that most illustrates my lived experiences is “Men Teach Me How to play Dungeons & Dragons.” This essay shares the story of learning to play the imaginative game with a female friend and our male partners. Even though players are encouraged to make the storylines their own within a defined set of rules, my friend’s husband was very demanding about how I engage with the game. He had strict expectations for everything from my imaginary character’s name and backstory to the choices I made during my turns. As the game progressed, it became clear he expected my character to support his survival and assent to power, even if this was not what I wanted to do or whether it was in the best interest of my character or the outcome of the game. At first I complied, stunned into silence by his childish behavior and convinced that speaking out would ruin the evening for my friend. But her husband grew more and more petulant as began to resist his orders, referring to me as “woman” and throwing the dice across the table at me. The essay ends as defiantly as the game did, as I refuse to let him control my narrative.

This essay speaks to the idea of permissible behavior for women and the notion that while men are allowed to play, women are expected to comply. I write a lot about toys and games in this collection because I find it fascinating and frightening how often girls are instructed to entertain themselves by performing domestic labor for others through the form of dolls or play kitchens. Boys, on the other hand, are often encouraged to live lives of exploration and imagination in videogames or games like Dungeons & Dragons. Yet even when women try to play these same games, they are policed, controlled, and relegated to the role of domestic caregiver. 

Do you prefer to think things through before writing or do you find yourself writing through moments?

I definitely prefer to write through moments. I often choose to write about things that I don’t fully understand yet in the hope that the act of writing will give me clarity. I tend to perceive daily life and the world around me in symbols and metaphors, and since writing lends itself well to this kind of thinking, I can often translate these images and ideas directly onto the page. Many of the essays in this collection—especially those about domestic violence, predatory men, and sexual harassment—are about experiences I didn’t fully know what to do with before writing about them for this book.

I also don’t think my writing through before I begin work on something. If I try to force myself to brainstorm or outline, the writing becomes prescriptive and flat. I prefer the surprise of discovery, which for me only comes when I let my brain wander, get lost, and then find its way again. Nearly all of these essays happened by accident, their shape and substance the result of surprise.

You write “girlhood demands injury” in your piece “Skip It.” Do you feel that us women break ourselves to be smaller?  

The girls and women I write about throughout this collection were broken by others, which certainly led many to continue breaking themselves. These essays explore how the world demands silence and compliance from young girls, which encourages them to participate in their own vanishing. These essays also examine the violence that young girls experience through emotional or physical abuse, or by witnessing the violence adult women endure. Even the toys young girls play with—which I describe in this Sweet essay you refer to—encourage girls to risk injury, rewarding their ability to escape inevitable danger through smallness.

As a result of being broken by others, the girls throughout this collection eventually learn to break themselves. Young girls accept abuse by adults because they don’t believe they deserve to be treated differently. Teenage girls embrace disordered eating and self-harm. High school girls continue these dangerous behaviors and enter abusive romantic relationships. College girls experience sexual assault and domestic violence. Adult women experience workplace harassment and verbal and physical assault by strangers in an increasingly misogynistic America. Each of these links back to the way childhood breaks girls down and encourages them to accept their abuse and believe they must make themselves small for protection. 

To follow the above: which ways have you found work to stop shrinking for the comfort of men?

Some of the ways I keep from shrinking for the comfort of men include refusing to smile or apologize when I don’t mean it, refusing to allow others to interrupt me or speak over me, and speaking up when people touch me or others without consent. I’ve learned to claim time for myself for pleasure rather than domestic labor and shifted the gendered burden of domestic labor to a more equitable practice in my household. I’ve learned to say no to male requests to pick my brain over coffee or for professional help without consideration of my time or compensation for my work. Personally and professionally, I’ve also learned to demand the time, attention, and compensation that men often expect, and to negotiate without apology for what I deserve.

I’ve also learned not to shrink in my work. My body and my body of work are not for the male gaze, so I’ve learned not to alter my writing to align with gendered expectations. We shrink through silence and this encourages our erasure. That’s why I choose to write all the stories others would have me keep silent.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of the flash essay collection Abbreviate. She is also the author of Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice, Halfway from Home, Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.