Disability Representation Across Literature: What Can You Do?
I have very weak hands, and I mean that quite literally. For one, I didn’t learn how to tie my shoes until the ripe age of twelve. Even as a college student, I’m dropping things left and right and frantically trying to cool off my fingers when they swell from holding plates and books. Opening bottles is a whole other adventure in itself. It’s safe to say I am envious of people who have functional, strong fingers. It’s uber-safe to say when I read a book series featuring a character with a paralyzed left hand, I emphasized hard with him. This character was Alex Stowe from the middle-grade series The Unwanteds, written by Lisa McMann, which I was (and still am) very much into. It was so cool to see a character that also struggled with opening doors and buttoning buttons. I was in heaven.
And then he dies.
He dies quite terribly, frantically trying to defend himself from an enemy with his other, non-dominant arm in the second saga of books. The characters mourn him and his role in the story is ultimately given to his abled younger sister. Life goes on.
Disability representation in literature has long been mixed. Rachel Petri, a disabled student contributor of Clearwater Press, once summarized that stories featuring disabled characters should strive to be real and hopeful and honest and encouraging. Petri brought up the differences between the book Wonder and the book Me Before You. Me Before You featured a story where Will, a disabled character, did not aspire to keep living, and as Petri describes, sent a message that living with a disability is not a life worth living. Wonder featured a story in which young Auggie, a boy with a facial deformity, realistically faced ups and downs, finding a support network.
Before Alex Stowe died, he struggled with implied PTSD and depression. He had nightmares for years about the woman who ultimately killed him. He drove himself away from his family and friends, becoming a shell of his former creative personality. One has to consider what message it sends to kill off a disabled character, especially one struggling with mental health.
Ultimately, The Unwanteds still holds an important place in my heart. I love the world, characters, and story and appreciate that the author was willing to take responsibility for potentially causing harm to her disabled readers. Over the past few years, I have gotten the opportunity to know McMann through a Saint Paul signing and a fun Italian dinner in Arizona; I consider her a dear friend of mine. I have begun to see myself in Lada, a disabled character with cerebral palsy from McMann’s newest series, The Forgotten Five. When writing Lada, McMann found a sensitivity reader in Stacy McNeely, a friend of McMann’s who has cerebral palsy. Lada is fun, intelligent, relatable, and showcases how variable disability can be. Sometimes she needs her wheelchair, sometimes she doesn’t.
So, what can we, as readers and writers, learn from characters like Alex Stowe from The Unwanteds and Will from Me Before You? Fay Onyx, a disabled contributor to the publication Mythcreants, has written quite a few articles on the topic of disability representation. In one of Onyx’s articles, the author discusses the ideas of challenging ableist language, researching harmful tropes (such as the villainous disability or inspiration porn tropes), and even suggests hiring a disability consultant. Another disabled contributor of the blog Metaphors and Moonlight shares similar thoughts. The author, identified as Kit, brings up how important it is to consider one’s reasons for bringing a disabled character into the story and to put research into portraying a disability accurately. Kit ends their post stressing how essential it is to go beyond fictional works and listen to disabled people in real life.
When writing a disabled character, remember that whatever you’re writing can greatly influence your audience and readers. Representation doesn’t have to be perfect but should reflect thoughtful research. The world around us is filled with accessibility barriers and harmful stereotypes, which are important to deconstruct when writing a disabled character. When in doubt, ask yourself if the representation you’ve written reflects careful consideration of disability, and how disability impacts the character in the story.
Meet the blogger:
ABBIE SUNDICH is a senior and aspiring author majoring in English and Communications with an Editing, Publishing, and Writing Concentration who will graduate in the spring of 2024 from Hamline University. Abbie enjoys reading, writing, drawing, photography, napping, and watching Netflix. She hopes to find a job with a publishing house or a nonprofit after she graduates, and specifically wants to write a few animal fantasy novels.
Short Stories: The Bane of the Novelist
If you’re a long-form writer like myself, you know the struggle of reigning in your desire to provide every detail of your character’s life, or else risk your work becoming a massive info dump. You may also suspect that trying to start your career as a novelist with no published work to show off isn’t going to be easy. However, when you go searching for opportunities to get your name out there, you quickly realize that everything you’re finding are journals that only accept—you guessed it—the dreaded short story.
The real question for a novelist isn’t where to submit these stories but rather how to write them in the first place. I have gone out in search of some answers and here is a culmination of advice to keep in mind if you’re struggling.
1. Acceptance
If you start a short story thinking it won’t be as good as your other writing, it won’t be. You must accept that the reader isn’t going to know every little thing about your main character.
For example, a character in a novel—let’s call her Amy—might spend some time complaining about a horrible coffee date she went on in order to show the reader part of her personality and viewpoint. The short story version of this would sum it up with, “Amy knew that her disdain stemmed from one too many dates gone wrong.”
2. Let the Form Serve You
NY Book Editors suggests “[letting] your short story serve as a character snapshot.” This is a helpful way to view the form if you’re having trouble sticking to one idea or moment.
Try walking through a scene with a character in your novel. Curious how your MC would react to a visit from a long lost uncle? Write a short story about it. Wondering how to hone in on the heartbreak of losing a pet? Write a short story about it. These snapshots work double time by both padding your portfolio and allowing you to explore your character.
3. Get to the Point
The most important thing to remember when writing a short story: stay in the action. You may be tempted in the middle of a tense scene to slow down with a moment of reflection but you have to fight that urge. Keep the character focused, maintain momentum with strong dialogue, and utilize the setting as a tool rather than simply a background.
For example, if there’s a park that has sentimental value for your character, don’t have them tell us about it from their bedroom. Set the scene there and see how the emotions naturally shape the narrative.
Center your short story around this question: What is the one thing that is most important to my character? Now showcase that in one instance. It’s intimidating, but once you identify that core desire and key moment, your plot will stay much more focused.
4. Be Precise and Concise
A skill that all writers must learn is how to create complexity and depth in just a few lines. To help achieve this daunting task, Writer’s Edit suggests “employ[ing] clever dialogue, interactions and reactions, flashbacks, and short sharp imagery to develop [your] characters.”
Find something truly unique about your main character and run with it, always making sure to be picky with your word choice. Instead of telling the reader “Samantha was always a smart student,” try working it into her inner dialogue, something like, “Sure, some people might call Samantha ‘intelligent’ because she has a 4.0, but she didn’t want to be reduced to a number.”
I know from experience that it can be difficult to break free from the comfort of your preferred writing style, but if you allow yourself room to play and make mistakes, I have faith that you will be able to reap the many benefits that exist in the world of short stories.
Meet the blogger:
ANGEL KIDD is a senior creative writing major with a focus in fiction. When she isn’t watching YouTube, she is attempting to write a science fiction novel. After graduation she hopes to find a career in the publishing industry or as a manuscript editor before hopefully becoming a published author.
Superheroes: the Patron Saints of Infinite Suffering
Batman lost his parents at gunpoint at age nine. At the same age, I lost my mother to breast cancer. Ever since, feeling like half an orphan, I’ve always felt a special kinship with Batman and people that have felt the devastation of losing others. Since 2020, we all might have felt what it was like to lose someone or to be devastated by grief. Like Spider-Man, I’ve felt the spiritual and psychological fracture caused by multiple tragedies. Occasionally in life, I’ve come across comic books that have gotten me through the hard times. These are those books, those times, Batman and Spider-Man saved not my life but my sanity. The hope is they can do the same for you.
As a consolation for the funeral, my aunt bought me volume one of Ultimate Spider-Man, a retelling of the wall-crawler for millennials. People make a big deal out of Spider-Man because of the costume and the colors and the webs. But I had no idea Peter Parker had an interior existence. He was a boy like me who had seen too much for a tender age. An uncle, a first love, and a best friend all dead before his eyes. This was heightened reality for most people. For me, it was my mother, an infant nephew, and the friendliest coworker I’ve ever met. Reading the pages where Peter put his mask on and went back into the fight showed that it was possible to suffer all the slings and arrows and still function in society. Did it lead me into a false sense at times of saying I’m okay with all this death? Yes, it did. But that’s where my next hero showed I was at fault.
Because I needed strength, because I found comfort in his comfortless world, Batman the saint of infinite suffering became my patron. All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder by Frank Miller shows there’s no character better for the grieving than Batman. Let me rephrase that. Batman is so wrong for those looking to *get over* grief because he doesn’t know how. But for raw grief? When the wound is still fresh and bleeding? There’s no one better to whom you can relate.
In the controversial story, Batman tries to save Dick Grayson from grief. Across eight issues, he drags a twelve-year-old boy through warzone after warzone, trying to leave him no time to cry or soften. Batman eventually succeeds in sculpting him into his warrior disciple Robin, thinking he has delivered the boy from victimhood. However, when Robin has a psychotic breakdown and almost takes the life of fellow superhero Green Lantern with his brutal teachings, Batman realizes a grave error about himself. I, too, realized a grave error about Batman, for I had also become one of his disciples.
What he’s been doing his whole life yields no catharsis, no healing, and is certain to drive a person insane. If Batman doesn’t allow Dick (read: me) his humanity, his time to heal, another permanent victim will stumble in agony through life and Batman will have become the victimizer. Batman comes up with one solution that is unorthodox for him: feel the pain. He rushes the boy to the cemetery and throws him before a headstone bearing his name “Grayson.” This scene ends with Robin weeping and Batman cradling him, maybe accepting some loss of his own as he laments both their pain with this final salvo, “We mourn lives lost. Including our own.” Few comics have a more eloquent statement about grief as a chronic condition. It is okay to mourn yourself and the life you lost when a loved one dies.
I’d felt this way my whole life and could never put it to words. But Miller did. Truly, we become ghosts when our loved ones die and not the other way around. The dearly departed don’t linger. We do. We’re the ones who actually have to walk the earth in a state of purgatory, drained of joy and pallor. Eventually, life comes back to us. Most of us. Not Batman. He will remain the ghost. When I visit my mother’s marker on occasion, see my name etched in stone, I sometimes think I will too…
Meet the blogger:
MICHAEL CLAUSEN will finally know sleep again now that he has graduated from Hamline University. Becoming an English major with a concentration in creative writing has been ten years in the making. Pridefully, he has zero debt to show for it. The system can own him when he takes out a mortgage.
The Language of Flowers: How to Use Emotional Metaphor
“Yes, flowers have their language. Theirs is an oratory that speaks in perfumed silence, and there is tenderness, and passion, and even the light-heartedness of mirth, in the variegated beauty of their vocabulary. To the poetical mind, they are not mute to each other; to the pious, they are not mute to their Creator; and ours shall be the office, in this little volume to translate their pleasing language, and to show that no spoken word can approach to the delicacy of sentiment to be inferred from a flower seasonably offered…” —Kate Greenway, The Language of Flowers, 1884
Curious as to how flowers and metaphors could possibly mend together? Interested in a writing prompt pertaining to the subject? Well, dear reader, you’ve come to the right place. But, first and foremost, I must provide you with a little lesson, or perhaps, a refresher, to those of you who are familiar with the language of flowers and emotional metaphor.
The language of flowers, or floriography, for a more technical term, is the expression of messages and emotions through flowers. Actually quite comparable to this is metaphor, a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas.
This idea of identifying hidden similarities between two different ideas is where the language of flowers and metaphor really combine, especially in terms of emotion. How does one label an emotion to a metaphor, and then on top of that, bring flowers into it? Well, dear reader, I think it would be best for us to take a trip.
Don’t worry, we will not be boarding The Magic School Bus and venturing into the human body. Rather, we’re going somewhere that, hopefully, holds much more appeal: a flower shop. Here, I’ll get the door for you, and you’d better grab a coat because the cooler where the flowers are kept is cold.
Upon entering the cooler, you come across a bucket of yellow carnations. Although beautiful, yellow carnations actually hold a darker meaning than one would expect. If you were to open your now accessible copy of Greenway’s, The Language of Flowers, you would find that the real meaning behind a yellow carnation is actually disdain and rejection. How can you use this flower as an emotional metaphor in your writing? Let’s come up with an idea for a song using yellow carnations as an example. Instead of naming your song “Disdain and Rejection,” call it “Yellow Carnation.” Imagine hearing a song of that name over the radio and expecting some lovely song about spring and joy and flowers to come on and instead emerges a fervent, grave song about a rejected lover filled with disdain for another. Emotional metaphors in relation to the language of flowers can work out beautifully in this way, and pique the interest of both readers and listeners. If I heard “Yellow Carnation,” on the radio and then the darker lyrics that followed, I can definitely say I’d be shocked and interested in the meaning behind the title.
Now that you’ve been introduced to and shown an example of how to merge the language of flowers with emotional metaphor, I encourage you to keep walking through the cooler and find more flowers to identify the meanings behind and write about. Or, even better yet, if you’d like to expand your research beyond the language of flowers, bring emotional metaphor with you.
Perhaps you have had an awful relationship with your father (in which case you’re not alone) and he is a huge fan of motorcycles. Are there specific meanings related to certain motorcycle parts from which you could craft a piece of art from? Or, even better yet, create your own “Language of Motorcycles” novel!
With this final note, I extend the language of flowers to you, dear reader, in the hopes that it can help you, too.
Meet the blogger:
TRISTA KNEBEL is currently a junior at Hamline University pursuing her BFA in creative writing and BA in music. She loves murder mysteries and rain and when she’s not in class she is working at a local florist in St. Paul, convincing herself not to bring home a new plant.
Sculptors, and Painters, and Writers, Oh My!
For many writers, gaining experience and knowledge are major parts of the writing process. Barbara Kingsolver, the author of the creative nonfiction book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle spent a year focusing on eating locally in order to write a book about her experience. Rebecca Skloot, the author of the New York Times Bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, spent ten years conducting research and interviews before completing her novel. In turn, I have been inspired by both Barbara Kingsolver and Rebecca Skloot within my own writing. Rebecca Skloot’s work is a fantastic example of blending narrative with hard facts, and Barbara Kingsolver’s work demonstrates a strong voice and characterization.
Specific research for a book is wonderful, but I wondered if it would help my writing to intentionally engage with other art forms without a story in mind. Good writers read things that don’t resemble their own works. They use a diverse range of sources to improve their writing. The literary world is full of gems, and it doesn’t take much exploring to understand how it shapes your own writing. This extends beyond the literary community. To learn more about multidisciplinary art in relation to writing, I looked to modern artist Simphiwe Ndzube.
When I walked into Simphiwe Ndzubes’s exhibition “Oracles of the Pink Universe” at the Denver Art Museum, I was immediately drawn to the narrative artistry of his work. Ndzube is a painter and sculptor. His art depicts a fictional world and cast of interesting characters. Ndzube’s work illustrates an original creation myth to grapple with the consequences of apartheid in South Africa and racial injustice worldwide.
Not only does Ndzube use interesting characters and intriguing storylines in his work, he carefully crafts the sensory experience of walking into his gallery. His work is a physical manifestation of carefully crafted poetry. Much of his work sits on a flat canvas with 3D elements that add depth. His use of colors helps guide the eyes of the audience around the piece.
Natural colors are juxtaposed with various shades of pink. Everything from the lighting, music and use of empty space has been arranged to tell a story. The poetry his work could inspire is limitless.
Ndzube himself isn’t afraid to learn from other artists. His work takes inspiration from Heironymous Bosch, known for his whimsical depictions of biblical scenes, and Italian sculptor and painter Michelangelo. Ndzube used a multidisciplinary approach by studying magical realism as a literary genre and closely looking at Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The work of Simphiwe Ndzube is far from the only art that writers can learn from. Songwriters carefully craft albums to create an auditory experience, and ballets often tell stories. Abstract artists create tension in their pieces by using texture, symbolism, and blank space. I realized that when I examined the art I am surrounded by every day, I couldn’t help but be inspired. So, learn to knit, listen to that free bluegrass concert in the park, take time to appreciate the graffiti in your neighborhood, buy yourself flowers to examine the arrangement, and most of all, enjoy yourself.
Meet the blogger:
OLIVIA ROSE LEE is working on her BFA in creative writing at Hamline University. She is an aspiring novelist interested in exploring environmental writing, mixed media art, and modern folklore.
