Early in Rumaan Alam’s third novel, Leave the World Behind, the author introduces the kind of alarming, unplanned events that are both becoming increasingly common and difficult to adapt to: vast blackouts, lost cellphone reception, social isolation, animals exhibiting mass unusual behavior. It could be nothing, a mere inconvenience, or it could be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

For the white family on vacation who rents a house on Long Island from an older Black couple, the unknown possibilities of the environment disrupt everything.

The novel seamlessly bounces between perspectives and occasionally zooms out to provide clues to the world’s state of emergency. The result is a panoramic view of how we handle being stuck in place and navigate personal and collective fear. 

In mid-September, more than six months into the global pandemic, I spoke with Alam on the phone from my house in Tallahassee. 

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Aram Mrjoian: How were you thinking about this novel as both looking toward a speculative future, but also toward our present moment?

Rumaan Alam: When writing a book about people who are effectively trapped inside of a home, now with a readership who are also effectively trapped inside of their homes, it’s sheer coincidence. The bigger question that you’re asking is whether or not it’s the role of the artist to predict stuff, maybe not in terms of lottery numbers or concrete facts, but to predict a feeling or sensibility that will be prevalent. I think that’s probably the case. I keep forcing myself into conversation with these two other much better books. I should probably email the writers and ask for their forgiveness, but I think of these books as being really engaged in some sort of a similar pursuit as my own. One is Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible and the other is Jenny Offill’s Weather. They’re both books that are thinking about climate change and its effects on society and the individual psyche, they both possess a feeling of being trapped. They’re talking about a lot of the issues that I was talking about in this book. It’s maybe helpful to think of my book as a part of a larger segment or part of a larger interest in literature. Sometimes you can only make sense of these things retroactively. You need the context of a couple of years to understand what that movement was or what that line of inquiry was. 

I don’t know if it’s my work as a critic that’s helped inform that, although it is a case that since I’ve been working more as a critic, I’ve been reading more up to the moment. I’ve been more conscious of what some of the better writers out there are working on. Actually, you will have to include Ali Smith’s novels, the seasonal quartet, in this grouping of works that are interested in the individual psyche in a moment of global existential turmoil. 

I didn’t read any of these works I’ve just mentioned before I wrote my own book. So, again, it’s either just coincidence or it’s not and it’s really hard to say. The only thing I’ve been saying a lot is that it’s sort of like when people who watch fashion very closely, when a bunch of fashion designers use the color lavender in their collection, it’s like, well, where does that come from? Where do these resonances among artistic peers come from? I don’t really know the answer.

AM: You mentioned the way even something like reality TV can make it feel like we’re moving quickly and consuming a lot quickly even if we’re stuck at home. I’m paraphrasing, but I heard you on a podcast discussing the idea in Leave the World Behind of giving the readers the same sense of immediacy that the characters in the book are feeling. As someone who writes books and also has consumed a lot of books, film, music, art, what do you think about the notion that we are consuming culture and information differently today? Is that part of the vision of the book, that we have to adapt to things so fast? 

RA: The book aims to talk about the pace of contemporary life, which is a very commonplace motif. We hear all the time about lamentations of people’s attention spans, things like the discrete chunks on Twitter has affected people’s ability to actually read something, read like a 40-paragraph newspaper story, let alone a 500-page novel. I don’t think you can deny any of that is the case, right? That’s just what’s happening to us. And in the book, the way that plays out, or the way some of it plays out, is that the characters don’t have access to the Internet. And they experience to varying degrees, almost what you might describe as withdrawal symptoms. I’m just having fun with that in the novel. 

I wanted you to feel like you’re inside of this book. I wanted you to feel like you were stuck.

In a bigger sense, how will the actual book be received in a culture that reads this way now? I can’t control how people read or don’t read the book. I can only do what I’m doing on the sentence level or the page level. I do think that this is a strategy of the way this book functions, which goes back to what you were asking about, the reader inhabiting the same space as the character. It’s just a strategy for getting people to engage with the story. And in a way, I think that’s a question about genre, because it’s a book that is trying to use the conventions of genre, as I understand them, to create a certain kind of reading experience that I really wanted. I wanted you to feel like you’re inside of this book. I wanted you to feel like you were stuck. I wanted you to feel like you couldn’t stop turning the pages because you felt so much like the other characters in the book, which is that you just want to know what is happening.

And, of course, in the book and in life, there’s no real answer. Even if the book tries to deploy the strategies of the thriller or the work of horror, the fact remains that it’s fundamentally a realist book, because that, to me, is what reality is in a nutshell, your desire to know how the story ends, which you have to reconcile with the fact that you will never know how your own story ends.

AM: Yeah, I definitely felt that when I was reading. I read this book very quickly. It was one that I just sat down with over a weekend. I think it speaks to your expertise in doing exactly that. You mention the withdrawal symptoms from technology. Two of my favorite chapters in the book are early on. Amanda and Clay stock up on all this expensive and decadent food, these groceries for vacation, and there’s just these really beautiful details. I just kept thinking, well, what do we do with the fancy wheel of cheese, when the world goes to hell? Can you talk a little bit about your attention to detail and what details you were really focusing on?

RA: I mean, it’s funny, because one of the other ways in which I couldn’t predict this would be newly resonant is that the first thing so many of us did, upon hearing that we needed to stay home back in March was go to the grocery store. And there were people who wanted to get their hands on heirloom beans, then there were people who just wanted to get a case of ramen, or you know, whatever it is that meant to you that you would have sustenance. I spend a lot of time on a shopping list in the beginning of this book. I think that it provides a lot of exposition if you look at it closely. I’m sure there’s a reader who will just think it’s terrifically boring, but I think it establishes who these people are, how they see themselves, what exactly a vacation means for them, what their perspective is on their place in American society. There’s a certain kind of person for whom the splurge on those ugly heirloom tomatoes coming out of really crinkly cellophane wrapping tells the story of who they are as consumers and the story of people and where they stand in the class hierarchy. And that’s important. I found it really fun to write. And I hope there are readers who find it really effective as a tool for explaining these people to you.

The details contain the interesting stuff, right? Rather than saying, these are people of the middle class, who aspire to see themselves as people in the upper class, but they really aren’t. You can just have some fun writing about somebody buying cilantro at the grocery store.

AM: Amanda goes from very untrusting and standoffish to defensive and then kind of bounces between these feelings until eventually at one point she looks to Ruth for wisdom and security. For a minute, I was worried about the novel going in the direction of a stereotype by having Ruth as the wiser, older Black woman that is there to comfort Amanda. But I think that with Ruth’s character, internally and externally, it feels like you’re fighting against that. I was interested in that choice and if and how you are pushing against the problematic ways that Black women are portrayed in literature. 

RA: That is a really good question. There’s a challenge in writing about stereotype or archetype or convention. Because if you deploy the convention, are you then reifying it or are you critiquing it? It’s really, it’s sort of in the hands of the reader. In my second book [That Kind of Mother], I was writing about a white woman and her relationship with her Black nanny. And that’s a thing, right? There’s a tradition of that in this culture and it’s a valid thing to write about, but how do you write about it in a way that looks at it critically, but is also deploying it and playing it for what it is on the page. It’s a tough thing and so I wanted exactly the confrontation that you’re describing, where you might begin to suspect that the Black people are in this narrative to provide comfort or wisdom, which is such a trope, especially in Hollywood, the sort of typical Black person who is there to solve problems for the white person. That’s exactly what Amanda tries to do in the end. Ruth resists that, but I also think it’s a human impulse on Amanda’s part that she’s looking for human comfort. It just happens to be that a Black woman is the only person there and so there’s a complex moment where you think, no, it’s rubbing right up against stereotype and kind of looking at it and kind of not looking and not really resolving. 

I think you could argue that the book is deploying somewhat discomforting racial conventions from the outset. The notion of a Black person turning up at the door, unannounced or unexpected, and then you have to deal with the problem of their race—that’s just a convention from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It’s a way of doing storytelling that we are comfortable with in this culture and it’s fun to deploy those conventions because people recognize them, which gets your guard up and it makes you react. Your hackles are up and you’re like, oh God, what’s going to happen right now? Hopefully, you feel like what happened isn’t necessarily what you would have expected. 

AM: It’s out of your control, but thinking about this idea of critiquing or reifying stereotypes, I know this has already been picked up by Netflix with some big-name actors to hit screens. What’s it like having the work kind of out of your hands? How involved are you in the process of seeing this adapted? 

RA: But that’s precisely what it’s like to publish a book anyway. You do the work on the page. You hope that you’ve done it well, and then you hand it over to the reader and the reader makes of it what they will. You may feel that you’re picking apart a complicated thing about racial dynamics and another reader may feel that you’re just reifying a really base stereotype. There’s no way to know, it’s just utterly out of your control and that’s just one of the things you have to make your peace with as an artist. The book only lives when it’s in the hands of an audience, but you have no role in dictating what that audience’s response is. In a way it’s something I’m familiar with, because this is my third book and I know that’s how it goes. 

With respect to the adaptation, I don’t really have a creative role in making the film. But I do have a lot of faith in the person who I chose to make the film with. Sam Esmail has a signature artistic approach. When you look at that work you see not only visual and narrative sophistication, but also an understanding of hard to articulate dread, things that are not quite said. I just have a lot of faith in Sam. I think he’s a brilliant artist. And I also accept that it will be his work more than it will be mine and that’s that’s totally fine. That’s part of what it is to work as an artist is to trust to whatever degree you can in what you’ve done. If I could have the conversation I’m having with you with everyone who picks up the book, then I could guide how the book went out into the world, but I can’t. It’s not part of a deal. It’s not part of the bargain. And so here we are. 

AM: Sorry, this is kind of both a bleak and hopeful question. I know you’re a father. In this novel, you have two teenage characters, who are kind of just finding themselves and still figuring out who they are. Again, to use a convention, two teenage characters are going on a family vacation and may not be the most excited about it, but then everything goes up in the air. Writing something like this, what are you thinking for the future and about the world that your children are inheriting? What was on your mind when you were writing those characters?

There’s a kind of animal instinct in protection of children and protection of the species.

RA: Absolutely. For me, that was the animating interest of the book. That was the principal concern and principal interest. You often hear this ascribed to Stephen King. I don’t know if it’s something he actually said. Stephen King said of the horror that animates his work, especially the early work, that it was about him as a father imagining the worst for his children. And I know what he means when you look at some of that work. That sentiment holds water for me. I hope it’s a book that’s not only effective if you are yourself a parent, but I do think there’s a kind of animal instinct in protection of children and protection of the species. 

I’ll leave it to you to tell me if the book is optimistic or pessimistic about what it’s actually saying about the world we’re going to hand over to our kids. I think it’s pretty clear what my take is on the state of the world is and what we have done to it and what previous generations have done to it and what children today are going to inherit from their grandparents and great grandparents’ generation. 

The post Trapped Inside While the World Burns appeared first on Electric Literature.

Our first official date was at the cinema, where I fainted in the lobby. We already knew each other because he’d dated my best friend when we were still at school, though I hadn’t spoken to him for a long time. I’d recently broken up with my first serious boyfriend. I probably wasn’t over it, but I was trying very hard to appear as though I was. We’d been together for a few years, I was studying up North while he worked in London. There’d been a growing distance between us for a while, and we’d stopped calling as much as we’d used to, made excuses not to see each other at the weekends. Sometimes I’d find myself forgetting that I had a boyfriend, his presence only floating back if someone asked about him. I’d kept a photo of the two of us on my bedside table, and as the months went on it’d become more absurd to look at this image of the two of us together; teeth bared, eyes manic and searching.

We broke up over dinner, where he agreed very quickly that we weren’t compatible. We didn’t say much for the rest of the evening, ate quietly and tried not to look at each other. It was unclear to me if I felt sad or relieved. At one point he excused himself to go to the bathroom, and I hoped he was going there to cry. There were other couples seated near us. Dressed smart, talking and gesticulating with their forks. I wondered if to them we looked like a couple who’d just decided not to be together anymore, or if we looked like the kind of people who enjoyed going out to chain restaurants to eat in amicable silence. It would look bad either way.

Soon afterwards, I contacted James. I’d had a brief crush on him while he’d dated my friend, though I’d never told anyone about it. He’d been in one of the more successful bands at school, regular gigs at pubs that stamped your hand on entry and served alcohol to pretty much anyone. My friend and I would drink cherry shots while they played and ask people for cigarettes outside. Sometimes he would talk to her after they’d finished playing, but they mostly interacted online, and at school they pretended not to know each other. We discussed their sort-of relationship on her bed after school; why he never liked her Myspace photos, why he didn’t say hi in the cafeteria. He has issues, we decided, making quotation marks with our fingers when we said issues. After a while he began to distance himself, stopped messaging her so much, and then she got a real boyfriend and we started talking about him instead. I’d known then he probably wasn’t a great person, but secretly I’d been pleased nothing ever came of their relationship. He’d sent me messages too. Long emails that I sensed were more personal than the ones he sent to her. He told me he was terrible with girls, which I found endearing because boys never said stuff like that. You’re different, I said one evening. I got a feeling he would like it if I told him that, and on some level it was true. He didn’t smoke weed in the park at the weekends, hadn’t tried to get girls to sleep with him at parties like other guys at school had. That means a lot, he replied, though I’d wanted him to say the same of me. He only called me pretty once, and I saved the conversation on to my phone so I wouldn’t have to keep scrolling up to read it again. His parents had separated when he was young, and my parents were just about to. I told him about the night I found my father sleeping in his car. He wasn’t as sympathetic as I’d wanted him to be, but I still imagined myself weeping in his arms as though I was his girlfriend.

Then he went to university and his replies became blunt and scarce. I assumed the whole thing was done and didn’t bother to open the last message he sent me. Then I went to university myself and got together with my boyfriend. I didn’t think about James again until my boyfriend and I broke up three years later. I was listening to a band that I remembered James liking, and I felt an intense urge to tell him, an urge that I would later claim was symbolic, almost biblical. I searched for him on Facebook and saw he hadn’t updated his profile picture in over a year, that he had a beard. He’d whittled his list of friends down to thirty, deleted most of the people we’d known from school, even my friend. I started writing him a message, held on to the dim memory of the late-night emails we used to send each other as I typed. I apologised for my silence over the years, as though it’d been something I’d chosen to do. Then I told him about listening to the band we both liked, how it’d made me think of him and isn’t that weird? Then I sent the message and felt that it had been a good, spontaneous thing to do.

He replied within thirty minutes. Emma, wow! It’s been so long! He said he was a teacher now at the school we’d both attended, and not much else had changed for him. I’ve been single for a very long time, he added, and I felt an immediate shift in our conversation, like a space had been opened up for me. We started messaging back and forth, as frequently as we had as teenagers, and I felt as though our conversation had a new meaning, like we were supposed to find each other again. We talked about the books I was studying, the big and banal things that had happened to us. I operated automatically, as if my brain wasn’t fully aware of what my body was doing. My knees bounced as I waited for his replies. Then he asked if we could meet up when I was next home, and I replied, sure, I’d like that.

 

*

 

He hadn’t mentioned that he still lived with his mother, but there were neat flowers and plants with glossy leaves lining the driveway outside his house, a pair of jewelled sandals by the door that I noticed as I took off my shoes. He hung my coat up for me and a small dog barrelled out from another room and started to bark at us. On the wall was a photograph of him as a child in a baggy football shirt and flappy white shorts. I pointed it out and said it was cute, and he ushered the dog into the kitchen, said that he’d only recently moved home after a stint in London that hadn’t worked out. Why’s that? I asked, and he said it was a story for later, waved his hand for me to follow him upstairs.

His room looked as though he’d tried to tease it out of his teenage years, shirts and ties hanging outside of the wardrobe and on the back of the door like a statement, I work now. There was a widescreen TV balanced on a small coffee table that shuddered as I entered the room. He asked me if I wanted to play Xbox and started turning it on before I answered. Then he sat down on the floor and I joined him, our legs stretched out in front of us, feet nearly touching. He played a game that I didn’t really understand, something about fairy tales that he thought I’d like, and once in a while a character would say something and he would laugh and turn to me to see if I was laughing too. Every now and then the dog would bark downstairs and he would ignore it, even when it started to make a sad whiney noise. I felt the afternoon slipping away, pulled out tiny hairs from the carpet and looked at the photos in shiny wooden frames on his desk. The pictures were more recent, him standing at a lake with a big fish in his hands. Him next to a field full of yellow flowers, holding a long tree branch like a staff. The sheen of the glass was new and clean, as though they’d been bought specifically for my visit.

After a while, we moved from the floor to the bed, and I sat with my back against the wall while he laid down, his head on the pillows. The sheets were rough to touch, little balls of cotton coming away in my fingers, and I wondered if his mother still did his washing for him. We were quiet for a moment, and I listened to the buzz of someone mowing their lawn outside. Then, unprompted, he started talking about his ex-girlfriend, a girl he’d met at university. He said she was crazy. So crazy, Emma, and I liked the way he said my name, as though he wasn’t afraid to say it, in the way I was too nervous to say his. He’d had to have therapy after they broke up. She had problems. He told me she would lie awake at night weeping hysterically for no real reason, and he couldn’t help her, couldn’t tell what was wrong. I agreed that it was strange, even though I could recall several occasions where I had done the same thing. He went on, said she’d once gotten so drunk she’d thrown up over his carpet, that she’d come round to his house in the middle of the night even though he hadn’t asked her to, and he’d had to clean it all up himself. With my bare hands, he said gravely, and he turned to look at me while he said it, his expression so intense I wasn’t sure how to arrange my face. Then he stared up at the ceiling and let out a deep, agitated breath, as though he hadn’t really wanted to talk about any of it. I tried to change the subject, told him about an ex-boyfriend who’d cheated on me. Twice! I said, as though it was a big joke. He didn’t react to this, just closed his eyes and sighed in a loud, dramatic way. She was awful, he said after a pause.

I tried to talk more about my ex-boyfriend, tried to mash our experiences together in a way that would make us seem as though we were suited to each other. I thought that he might pick up on this, but I could see he was distracted, his face blank. I started babbling, answering questions that I wanted him to ask me. Talked about an eating disorder I’d had when I was younger, rambling about diet pills and starving myself. I didn’t normally tell people this stuff, but I felt compelled to talk about it, as though he’d been the one to tease it out of me, reeling it in like the big fish in the photo. When I finished, he was unmoved, still blinking up at the ceiling. He cleared his throat, like a teacher, I thought, then told me my problems were the product of being young, naïve, that everyone experienced these kinds of issues at some point in their life. He spoke in a mild voice, like he was listing the ingredients off the back of a packet, and didn’t look at me. I remember looking at my hands in my lap and thinking about how ugly they were. Then I said something like, I guess I worry too much about what people think of me, and he turned to sit up on his elbow and faced me. You shouldn’t care so much, no one goes home at night and thinks about other people, you know? He said this gently, and I thought for a second that he might take my hand. Then he changed the subject and I felt my body go heavy, like it was full of thick, oily water, as though what he really meant to say was that no one ever thought about me, not even in a bad way, not in any way at all.

 

*

 

We met up a few more times while I was home. We played chess in his garden and built a new hutch for his guinea pigs. On Friday nights he would travel up to London with a group of Christians to give out soup and tea to homeless people, and he talked about this a lot. I wanted to do it too and asked if I could come with him, and he’d said, sure, of course, but he didn’t invite me. Sometimes he would call on his way home and sound distant, as though he didn’t really want to call me at all, and when I asked him what was up he’d say that he was overwhelmed, that he couldn’t speak about the things he’d seen. I’d never been with someone who was selfless enough to actually go and do something about the things we agreed were bad, who didn’t just talk about how sad it was to see people sleeping on the pavement. I found myself tripping up over what I wanted to tell him, realising how selfish and narcissistic it sounded in comparison. I began to lie awake at night thinking about all the terrible things I’d ever done, listing them quietly in my head, each selfish little thing, my body numb with guilt. I came to the conclusion that I’d never done anything that wasn’t ultimately for myself. James spent his weekends hauling flasks of soup and coffee up to London, giving his old clothes away to people that needed them. Everything he did began to take on a noble quality, as though reading in the evenings instead of going out to bars was a selfless thing to do. The more time I spent with him, the more I resolved to do better. When I wrote about this to him in a message he seemed pleased, told me that it was never too late to change, that I could still be a good person if I wanted to.

After the holidays I went back to Durham, and James arranged to visit me for our first official date. He said that he’d felt bad for not offering to take me anywhere while I was home, and I was flattered by how quickly he booked a hotel and a train ticket. I asked if he wouldn’t rather stay in my room at the college to save money, and he said that my single bed would probably be too uncomfortable for the both of us. I hadn’t envisioned us sleeping together, and learning that he had gave the trip a different meaning, an ambivalence I wasn’t quite ready to wade back into. I’d envisioned him staying at the college with me, meeting my friends and drinking with us in the bar, but when I asked him if he wanted to do this he said that he didn’t like drinking, and I felt bad for assuming that he did. I knew there was an underlying expectance for me to stay with him at the hotel, that he’d paid a lot of money to travel up to see me. But it’d still only been less than a month since I’d broken up with my boyfriend, and I couldn’t quite imagine the shape of someone else’s body lying next to mine. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t ready for that yet, but when he asked me to stay with him, I agreed without hesitation.

 

*

 

In the week leading up to our date, I began to worry about what I should wear. He’d told me that his ex-girlfriend had been very thin, painfully thin, and I’d started to imagine her when I sat down to eat, twiggy limbs and pale cheeks. I spent the evenings trying on clothes, watching myself in the mirror, sometimes staring at myself for so long I couldn’t tell if I looked good or bad. I even walked over to my reflection from the other side of the room to inspect the rattle of my thighs. I tried to look at myself the way James might look at me, which made me feel embarrassed, as though I could already sense his discomfort at my attempts to be pretty for him. He’d told me the crazy ex had walked towards him on campus once, waving her hands and calling his name, and he hadn’t recognised her because she was wearing so much fake tan. Honestly, he’d said, it looked terrible, I felt so bad for her. People were staring. I decided on a plain top and skirt that I hadn’t worn for so long the elastic had gone slack, and baggy cotton pants that I only wore when I was on my period.

On the day of James’ arrival I decided not to put any make-up on, and I didn’t pack any either. To some degree I felt liberated, as I would’ve normally spent at least an hour putting on foundation, concealer and powder until my face took on a texture like icing. This is better, I thought, though when I took a final glance in the mirror I saw a tired version of myself that did not equate with  ‘better’. I left the college, lied to my friends, saying that we’d try and see them at some point over the weekend. At the train station, I tried to evoke the same excitement I’d felt when my old boyfriend would visit. Sometimes I’d feel so nervous I couldn’t eat all day, but it was a good kind of nervous, the flustered kind that made the muscles in my stomach clench over and over. As James’ train pulled in I was hit by how strange it was to be meeting him instead. It felt as though my life was happening to someone else, and I was another person watching it from the other side of the platform. I spotted him in the crowd, he was smiling, and I can’t remember if I was smiling too, but it didn’t feel like the moment it was supposed to be. He held out his arms to embrace me, and I pressed myself to him briefly. We started walking, he reached for my hand and I let him carry it along with him, my fingers limp. He started complaining about his journey, how cramped the seats were, how a wheezy man had sat next to him for the last two hours. I couldn’t seem to locate the feelings that I’d thought were developing between us. The urgency in which I had replied to his messages, the way my voice started to speed up when I talked about him to my friends. But now I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t like the way he carried his umbrella, and I was becoming acutely aware of how little I cared about his comments. The wheezy man was disgusting, his cough absolutely foul. I thought of the night ahead and felt my body grow heavy, as though I was wading through water with all my clothes on. We were walking down the hill towards town, and he stopped to look up at the sky. It’s such nice night, he said. Truthfully, it was an okay night, a couple of stars just about visible beneath the cloud, a sliver of moon. It wasn’t warm enough to be out without a jacket. Then he said, I’m so happy to be here and squeezed my hand. His palm felt clammy, but he carried on staring up at the sky with a serene expression, as though everything in his life had slotted into place.

 

*

 

The bed in the hotel room was larger than expected, and there wasn’t much space around it. James started unpacking his bag as soon as we closed the door, lining up his miniature bottles of shampoo and shower gel in a row on the sink in the bathroom. I kicked my bag into the corner where it looked imposing and out of place. We didn’t say much. He folded his T-shirts, too many for a weekend trip, while I picked at the sachets of tea and instant coffee. Then he started telling me a story about a kid he’d been teaching at work and I pretended to listen, laughed when he finished talking, even though it turned out he’d asked me a question. I was uncomfortable, and it was obvious. I stood awkwardly by the bed, worried that it might look too assuming if I sat down. But he remained casual, folding his T-shirts like nothing was out of the ordinary. Then he filled up the little kettle with water and made us each a coffee, and we sat on the huge bed with a gaping distance between us that I did not want to fill. He took a loud sip and said we should get into our pyjamas, to get super comfy. I hadn’t taken my shoes off yet, but I said, sure, why not, and made a clumsy fuss about changing in the bathroom, grabbing my bag and shutting the door without making any eye contact with him.

The light inside was harsh and made my skin look oddly green, and as I inspected my cheeks for blemishes I could hear James taking his clothes off, the hurried clink of his belt unbuckling, a spray of deodorant. I counted to one hundred and took in deep breaths before putting on the old T-shirt and jogging bottoms I’d brought with me. When I came out he was already back on the bed wearing the kind of shorts and T-shirt set teenage boys wear. He seemed jerky, removing his hands from behind his head and folding them in his lap. As I walked to my side of the bed, I started to become very aware of my body and the weight of it, the space it took up when I sat down. I could feel him assessing me, and I started apologising for my pyjamas, they’re hideous, and I laughed even though I’d chosen them specifically for that reason. I asked him some more questions about the school, what it was like now, and as we talked the strangeness of the situation started to fade to a dull noise heard faintly in the background. When we got tired he suggested turning out the light, then we got under the covers and he didn’t huddle up to me or touch me, and I held myself in a rigid ball until he fell asleep. I could hear rain falling outside, and I lay awake listening to the sounds of doors opening and closing elsewhere in the building, counting up all the things I might’ve done wrong.

 

*

 

It was still raining when we woke up in the morning. I asked if he wanted to go and explore the city, but he told me that he’d been to Durham before and had already seen most of it, which surprised me as he hadn’t previously mentioned this. How about a film? I asked. There was a showing of a Russian war film that he’d quite wanted to see, and though I thought it looked pretty bad, I said that it sounded great, and he booked the tickets on his phone and we went out into the rain hunched under his umbrella. We bought food from the supermarket, orange juice and a cold, wet-looking wrap that I pulled apart into little pieces. All I’d eaten was a bowl of cereal the day before. I was hungry, had been hungry all night, but I didn’t want to eat in front of him. I thought that now I’d told him about my problems with food, I would have to somewhat live up to them in case he thought I’d been lying.

My stomach began to cramp in the film. It started with a sharp ache that felt like trapped wind, and I had to keep shifting in my seat to ease the discomfort. I thought about going to the bathroom, but it was too awful to imagine myself squeezing past him. I decided to wait until the end. The film was long and boring and I didn’t think it was very good, but whenever he looked at me with an amazed expression after something mildly interesting happened I nodded back in wild agreement, like it was the best film I’d ever seen. After two and a half hours, the credits began to roll and people started to get up out of their seats. I breathed out, though it had started to hurt to breathe. There was sweat on my back and my legs shook as I stood up. I was wearing a turtleneck and the room was stuffy. My stomach felt bloated, and I began to rub it, unable to concentrate on all the things James was saying as we picked our way through the crowd. He asked me something and I nodded without registering what he’d actually said. It was the opening weekend for a new superhero film, and the lobby was crowded with teenagers and families and big cut-out figures of the characters. We had to push through the people queuing up for the next showing and he walked ahead of me, reaching out his hand for me to take, but it was loud and the pain in my stomach had accelerated so much that I was doubled over and the room began to take on a fuzzy quality. I grabbed his arm to steady myself, and said something like, hey, wait, I’m going to faint, I’m going to faint, but my mouth was very dry, and I remember thinking it was like eating cotton wool. People talk about it but no one really knows. Then I looked up and saw white from the overhead lights and a heaviness descended on me like a big thick blanket, and I felt calm, like I’d been enjoying the best sleep of my life.

I came around to his face hanging above mine, and my immediate reaction was to laugh because it was like I was in a film, and hey, we’re at the cinema! But he looked very scared, and then other people’s faces were hanging over me too and I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t realise that I was on the floor until someone was handing me a plastic cup of water and I sat up and someone said okay, okay, easy now, and there were hands on my shoulders and I could feel the carpet under my fingers, sticky beads of dirt. I remembered that I was wearing a skirt and I didn’t want anyone to see my underwear so I started scrabbling to get up and they all leapt away like I was an animal. James put his arm around me and asked if I was okay, lots of people were asking if I was okay, and I nodded a lot and waved my hands as if this happened to me on a weekly basis. Oh no, I’m fine, I said, and I laughed, my face burning hot. I asked if we could leave, and he started to lead me away through the crowd that had formed. I looked at the floor as we slowly made our way up the stairs and hoped no one I knew had been there to see it.

Outside, we sat on a bench that was wet from all the rain. He said that I needed food, and I agreed. I’d never fainted before. It was scary, but kind of like an achievement. I bit my nails as he stared out at the square. We didn’t say anything for a while, just sat and watched people walking through the high street. When we got up to go to the supermarket, I tried to make light of the situation. I laughed at myself, said something along the lines of, what a great first date, but he didn’t laugh. He shook his head and looked at me with a hard, serious expression. If you don’t mind, he said, I’d rather not talk about it. It was quite a traumatising thing for me to go through, a sharpness that I hadn’t heard him use before. Sorry, I said, I didn’t realise, of course it must’ve been pretty bad for you. We walked in silence for a few moments, and I wondered if we were arguing now. It was, he said, it was really bad for me, and I nodded and looked down at the chewing gum ground into the pavement because I didn’t know where else to look.

At the supermarket we bought a big bag of crisps and a pack of shortbread biscuits. My favourite, he said, and once we were back in the hotel room I tried to be nicer to him, asked him more questions about himself and his life. I told him that he was a good person, and he seemed pleased with this. Thanks, he said, looking up at the ceiling with a contented look on his face, as though it were something that, deep down, he already knew to be true. I held my breath and waited, but he didn’t say anything else.

 

Image © Simone Lovati

The post Selfish Little Thing appeared first on Granta.

Fact-checking has always been an essential part of the reporting, writing and publishing process, but with so much misinformation floating around, it’s more important now than ever to submit and publish accurate information.

Unfortunately, many of us full-time and freelance writers and bloggers don’t have the luxury of hiring a personal fact-checker. Even newsrooms, magazines and digital publications have been forced to cut budgets, squeezing out dedicated fact-checkers and researchers.

That leaves us, the writers, to fact-check our own work. This can be tricky — stepping away from your own work and scrutinizing every detail from a new perspective — but it’s not impossible.

How to fact-check an article you wrote: a 5-step guide

When I was in grad school studying journalism, I spent a good portion of my life fact-checking. Back then, it felt taxing and tedious.

But now I understand the importance of fact-checking, and possessing the skill has pushed me to become a better reporter and writer in not only my full-time role, but also my freelance assignments and side blogging project.

Now, do I do an in-depth fact-check of every single thing I post to the internet? Not necessarily. If I’m writing a listicle for my blog about things I do to sleep better, I won’t go through this entire process. However, if I’m submitting an article for a well-known publication on a fairly divisive or complicated topic, I’ll definitely sink time into fact-checking.

So, in an effort to eliminate misinformation, angry commenters and embarrassing correction notes, here are some steps you can take to fact-check your own work before submitting it to an editor or clicking “publish.”

1. Step away from the keyboard

Fact-checking is a lot like self-editing. When you’re so engrossed in a piece of content, it’s often difficult to step back and spot errors and inconsistencies. You’re too close to the work.

That’s why, if you aren’t working under a tight deadline, it’s ideal to put some time between writing and fact-checking. I’m talking about physically stepping away from your computer.

Go eat lunch, watch an episode of your favorite TV show or, even better, get a good night of sleep. Putting that space between you and your content will help you approach it through the lens of a fact-checker — not a writer.

2. Ctrl+P your article and grab your most colorful pens

If you have access to a printer, print your article before tugging on your fact-checking hat.

This might sound a little old-school (it’s definitely something I learned from newspaper and magazine veterans), but viewing your work through a different medium — AKA not your screen — will help you look at it from a different perspective.

Once you’ve got a hard copy in hand, grab some highlighters and colorful pens because it’s time to get busy. Here’s what I do:

• Highlight each proper noun.
• Underline each fact. If I have facts from multiple sources, I like to use different colors of pens for each. For instance, I’ll use a red pen to underline facts from Source 1, a green pen to underline facts from Source 2 and a blue pen to underline facts from Source 3.
• Circle every number. (Numbers always trip me up, so I like to triple-check these!)

Chances are, your article will quickly become covered in colorful highlights, underlines and circles. That’s perfect. Now it’s time to really dive in.

P.S. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t have a printer. You can still underline and highlight text in a Word or Google doc — you just might have to slightly modify. This is all about finding your own system, so do what works best for you!

3. Verify facts and claims

When fact-checking, it might feel most natural to just start at the top and work your way down. That works just fine. However, if I’ve interviewed or cited multiple sources for an article, sometimes I will fact-check by source. Again, as you do this more and more, you’ll find what works best for you.

To start, I check each proper noun. For a source’s name, I’ll ask them to spell it for me. For other proper nouns I’ll confirm the spelling through reputable online sources. As I confirm the spellings, I put tiny check marks over each letter. This forces me to pay close attention.

Then, I’ll dive into the facts and numbers.

Just a quick sidebar: In the reporting and writing process, you’ll want to make sure you’re citing information from legitimate expert sources. For instance, Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a useful tool, but you might not always find the most qualified or unbiased sources. Really research your sources and cited materials upfront, so you can make sure you don’t have to go back to the drawing board during the fact-checking process.

If you’re fact-checking information from someone you’ve interviewed, follow up with an email or a phone call. To verify their statements, ask them open-ended questions like, “How do you know that?” or “How did you come to that conclusion?” You can also ask them questions to confirm particular details like, “Can you describe the car again?” or “Do you mind explaining the process one more time?” You can also refer back to the interview recording or transcript, if you have it.

If you’re fact-checking information you got online, double-check those sources to ensure what you write is accurate and that the site is reputable. Remember: it’s important to get as close to the original source as possible. If a website cited The New York Times, that’s great, but it’s best to find the original article.

4. Keep a close eye on… 

As you fact-check your work, here are a few things you’ll want to pay close attention to:

• Ages: If you’re including someone’s age, ask if they have a birthday coming up. It could be they’re 32 now, but in two weeks, before your article is published, they’ll turn 33.
• Numbers: Pay close attention to any numbers you cite. Triple-check your math, the database or your sources.
• Superlatives: If someone says something is the “first,” “only” or “top,” that should set off your fact-checking alarm bells. Unless you can absolutely verify this claim, use softer language (e.g. “a well-known restaurant”) or attribute the claim to its source (e.g. “The owner, Earl, says this is the first restaurant of its kind.”).
• Conclusions: If you’re making any sort of conclusion ask yourself: How did I get there? Make sure you didn’t make any jumps. As a writer, when you’re deep in a story, it’s easy to make assumptions, but as a fact-checker, it’s your job to connect all the pieces and ensure they’re accurate.

5. Do a gut check

At the end of the day, if you’re struggling to verify a claim, do a gut check. Does something feel off?

I usually play by the rule, “When in doubt, throw it out.” If you absolutely can’t verify something, it’s better to get rid of it — no matter how enthralling or “clicky” it is — than to risk publishing inaccurate information.

You can also always go back to the drawing board. It’s not ideal, but you can ask your sources who else you should speak with and get second and third opinions. Sure, it’ll take time, but fact-checking your own work will make you a better, more credible writer, freelancer and blogger — and your editors will love you.

Got your own fact-checking strategies? Share them in the comments below!

Photo via Andrey_Popov / Shutterstock 

The post How to Fact-Check an Article You Wrote — Like a Pro appeared first on The Write Life.

In some states the barflies have migrated back to patios and beer gardens, but it’s going to be a long time before a night out feels normal again. If you miss sampling expertly crafted cocktails in elegant lounges, sinking into happy hour conversations with coworkers after the office closes, or playing spirited rounds of pub trivia with your friends, consider turning to one of these ten books set in bars to tide you over until it’s safe to gather at your favorite local watering hole.

Ordinary Hazards by Anna Bruno

Bruno’s debut novel follows Emma, a hedge fund manager and MBA professor with a passion for story structure, as she sits in her local bar in upstate New York, drinking whiskey and descending hour by hour through her grief and guilt about the recent breakdown of her marriage. Why is she here when she has to be up before the markets open, or even upstate at all instead of on Wall Street? Why do her friends keep texting, trying to get her to come over? How far will she go to punish one of her ex’s friends who confronts her at the bar that night, and what will it cost him? How has Emma’s story become so broken?

Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge by Paul Krueger

In Krueger’s light contemporary fantasy, recent college grad Bailey is living with her parents and bartending with her old high school hookup friend while trying to figure out her future. After killing an attacking demon, she discovers a deep history of monster-fighting bartenders and that certain magically mixed cocktails can give her temporary powers of super strength, telekinesis, and the ability to blast elemental energy to fight the demons. Her race to stop a series of gruesome deaths and navigate the shadowy world of bartenders is punctuated with 14 recipes from an ancient book of cocktail lore.

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley’s 1990 debut novel introduces us to reluctant detective Easy Rawlins, a Black World War II vet recently laid off from a defense production plant. When a white mobster hires him to track down a French femme fatale who has disappeared with $30,000, Easy must track her through one bar and jazz club after another in 1948 Los Angeles.

Hysteria by Jessica Gross

The unnamed millennial narrator of Gross’s debut novel lives too close to her parents and can’t seem to escape their shadow. A sex addict, she stumbles drunkenly from one encounter to another, from her psychiatrist’s parents’ colleague to her roommate’s brother. When she encounters a sympathetic bartender at local Pilz Bar who looks just like Sigmund Freud, she imagines them into a client-therapist relationship and begins to sort through her complex feelings for older men. The book is like “if Ottessa Moshfegh and Phoebe Waller-Bridge painted the town red together,” according to Courtney Maum’s front cover endorsement.

The Bar Stories: A Novel After All by Nisa Donnelly

Donnelly’s 1989 collection revolves around lesbian bar Babe’s in Oakland, California, and the many women who cross paths there. After shattering her leg in a roller derby accident, Babe Daniels rescues her partner and her partner’s baby from a shelter for unwed mothers and begins working in the bar she will one day buy. At her bar, we meet a prize-winning photojournalist who left her lover and drove across the country to document the lesbian nation, as well as members of the Dykeball Losers softball team, Babe’s ex, other roller derby players, and more. This collection won a Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction in the second year of the awards.

Smile by Roddy Doyle

After splitting from his beautiful wife Rachel, Ireland’s television sweetheart, Victor Forde moves back to his hometown and spends his nights at Donnelly’s, the local pub. There he runs into an old schoolmate, Fitzpatrick, who seems to know more about him than anyone but Victor has any right to know. Victor can’t seem to remember the man, but their encounters in the pub kick up Victor’s memories of his Christian Brothers school teachers (at least one of whom sexually assaulted him once), his career as a rock critic and political journalist, and finally some shocking revelations about his relationship with Fitzpatrick.

2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino

In Philadelphia, two days before Christmas, a fifth-grader whose mother recently died and whose father has withdrawn into drug-numbed grief dreams of becoming a jazz singer. After her principal, who always resented her mother, unfairly expels her, she sets off across town to find a jazz club called The Cat’s Pajamas. The club’s owner has been threatened by police with a shutdown if there are any more code violations, but he’s promised his talented underage son a chance to play in the house band that night. As the hours progress, the storylines of these and other characters finally converge at The Cat’s Pajamas.

Young Skins by Colin Barrett

Barrett’s debut collection of six short stories and a novella are all set in the fictional town of Glanbeigh in County Mayo, Ireland. The lives of its young men revolve around the local pub, as they sit at the bar over drained pint glasses and recount their failures to one another. The protagonists are often people on the fringes of society whose lives are occasionally punctuated with violence, their stories with world-weary wisdom.

Jazz Moon by Joe Okonkwo

Ben grows up in a poor, rural Black community in Georgia during the Jim Crow era but decides to run away to Harlem. Despite being attracted to boys, he agrees to marry Angeline, a girl he meets on the train north. The two arrive in Harlem and get jobs, but one night in a hot jazz club, Ben falls for another man, an abusive and controlling trumpeter from South Carolina who lures him away to jazz clubs of Paris.

When All is Said by Anne Griffin

In Griffin’s debut novel, octogenarian Maurice plans a night of drinking in a hotel bar in his native County Meath, Ireland. He raises five stout-and-whiskey toasts to four deceased loved ones and a son who has left to work in America. Through his memories of the five, we learn about his boyhood working in the manor house that became this hotel, his later successes in business, and the lasting repercussions of his youthful theft of a valuable coin.

The post 10 Books That Feel Like Going to a Bar appeared first on Electric Literature.

The first time I saw deaf people in mainstream storytelling was in the Freeform family drama Switched at Birth. Switched at Birth is a TV show where two young women learn that, as babies, they went home and grew up with the other’s family. Almost two decades after the switch, they meet their biological families and get to know them. 

One of the women, Daphne, is deaf. When we meet her in the pilot episode, she both signs and speaks, “it’s nice to meet you.” She wears hearing aids.

The show aired in 2011, when I was on the cusp of entering my senior year of high school. I devoured the first season—it was a lifeline for me. I was the only deaf person both in my family and my school district. My deafness felt like a veil between me and everyone else, one I couldn’t tear down. I found solace in the existence of a TV show that featured deaf people, people like me. 

I couldn’t find anything that reflected my real experience. What I found instead was horror and fantasy.

When the second season came around, I wasn’t the only deaf person in school anymore. There were other deaf students at my university, and we’d found each other. My signing had improved. I had learned the difference between Deaf (a cultural label) and deaf (a medical label), and I was starting to claim my Deaf identity and affirm myself under that label, within that community.

I stopped watching Switched at Birth because I was preoccupied with the Deaf people I met in real life. But there was talk about the ninth episode in the second season, “Uprising,” which would be presented in only sign language. We all decided to watch. 

When I watched that all-signed episode, I felt my heart plunge into disappointment. It was no longer the lifeline it was in high school. The signing is stiff, the characters are stereotypical. Apart from the presentation, the episode is standard teenage drama, the plot of a Deaf school’s shutdown buoying romantic conflicts. It felt like a faint shadow of a culture and a community that I now knew was richer than what was on the screen. I was disappointed.

I tried to find a replacement for a show I’d outgrown. I wanted to find representation, something that could comfort and validate me as I move through a world that doesn’t accommodate me. I couldn’t find anything that reflected my real experience.

What I found instead was horror and fantasy.

Instead of real-world dramas like Switched at Birth, I started watching darker fare like Hannibal and Teen Wolf. Even though I couldn’t relate specifically to lycanthropy or hyper-empathy that borders on telepathy, I related with the emotional arcs these shows presented; both shows follow their protagonist trying to find their place in a world that either persecuted them or paid them little attention. I found myself rapt at the way they presented identity and community. Both Hannibal’s blood-soaked surrealism and Teen Wolf’s paranormal fantasy hit harder—and felt more relevant to my experience—than any realistic portrayal of deafness I found.

Paranormal fantasy hit harder—and felt more relevant to my experience—than any realistic portrayal of deafness I found.

Horror and fantasy let me see my struggle when I couldn’t find any other representation. Teen Wolf, in particular, has moments where the protagonist, Scott McCall, struggles with the demands that being a werewolf places on him; he is asked to be responsible, to assimilate, to go through the world without causing trouble. He clings to human friendships and resents the werewolf bonds he builds. He claims his identity as a creature of the night while struggling with a werewolf’s bloodlust. I understood his frustration, because I wanted to be part of a community without losing parts of myself that aren’t directly tied to Deafness. When I watched Teen Wolf, I almost felt like Scott too, part of a community that was both visible and yet hidden to the world at large.

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Whenever I read disabled characters in literary fiction, I feel the same thrill of validation I initially felt with Switched at Birth, often followed by the same kind of disappointment. Often, authors sideline disabled people in literary fiction. Narrators or authority figures see them as unfulfilled, powerless, or saints. They are in need of saving either by God or by another person who might move through society with fewer barriers. This viewpoint upon disabled characters persists in work from decades past to contemporary work today, from novels like Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter to Lara Vapnyar’s story “Deaf and Blind.” Seeing people like me with little agency or autonomy tells me that fiction does not recognize that disabled people can gain, wield, and enact power in a narrative. As a result, I don’t feel represented in those stories, even if the characters are superficially like me.

As someone who wants to write about deafness and disability, reading weak disabled characters frustrates me. It’s a trope that just doesn’t match my experience; I’ve never met a disabled person who hasn’t clawed their way past ableist gatekeepers and barriers alike to get to where they are. When we face ableist barrier after barrier and work harder than our abled counterparts, we don’t deserve to be represented in literature as just weak. 

When I transferred my loyalties from Switched at Birth to Teen Wolf, I already wanted to write disabled characters without this conventional weakness. But writing away from the traditional tropes of disability both excited and scared me. I didn’t know what to write—I only knew what I didn’t want to write. There were more touchstones to avoid than there were destinations to journey toward.

I found a new direction in speculative fiction. I read Karen Russell’s story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” in a fiction workshop, and the story stayed in my consciousness long after I’d moved to other readings. In that story, a group of werewolves are brought to a school to learn how to be human women. The werewolves felt pressure from the human nuns to erase their werewolf selves; the pressure to assimilate from the overseeing class, even as it was wrapped up in metaphor, resonated with me. I had read speculative fiction before, but never stories that negotiated ideas of identity so urgently and efficiently.

Speculative fiction gave me insight on how to write disability in ways that defied the convention of the weak disabled person.

There has been plenty of speculative fiction that shows systematic oppression in all its different forms, or, alternatively, that makes the invisible visible. Modern writers like Rivers Solomon and Helen Oyeyemi have highlighted systemic racism through science-fiction and fairy tales, respectively; Carmen Maria Machado and Leni Zumas have explored gender equality and gender expectations using surrealist and dystopian frameworks. In years past, writers like Octavia Butler and Angela Carter snuck revolutionary ideas and sensibilities about race and gender into science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tales.

When I read those writers, I saw ways to center disability in speculative fiction. I saw frameworks and tropes that could springboard conversations I wanted to have about disability. I felt the same emotional tug to “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” as I did to Teen Wolf years ago. I could connect to these stories because speculative fiction allowed main characters to not only be human beings, but also otherworldly creatures. In speculative fiction, humans and creatures alike are given the same space to feel a wide range of emotions and to struggle against limiting decrees and ideas—instead of being weak or helpless. As with Teen Wolf, the struggles and emotions the werewolves face in Russell’s story were feelings I felt as someone trying to fit in a hearing society. Even today, I struggle with hearing people’s expectations of a Deaf person. Speculative fiction allows me to parallel my experiences in a hearing, ableist society with a werewolf’s struggle to fit in a human world. Speculative fiction gave me insight on how to write disability in ways that defied the convention of the weak disabled person. 

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When I write about disability, I want to show the real experiences of people like me without having to lay out all the societal pressures and oppressions. I want that situation to be accessible to anyone. I don’t want to explain disabled experiences. I want to show them.

If speculative fiction let me, as a reader, overlay Deafness onto werewolf characters, I wondered if the reverse could work as well. Instead of lycanthropy in a human world, we could talk about disability in an ableist society, rendered with the same doubt and uncertainty. Deaf people could be seen as ghosts and aliens, existing outside of our current reality and following a separate kind of logic. 

I don’t want to explain disabled experiences. I want to show them.

By borrowing those genre tropes in my discussion of disability, I could give disabled people power with more efficiency and impact than was possible in realism. I could see disabled people haunting abled people or demanding correspondence with an abled leader. This use of horror and fantasy felt like a way of occupying a disabled experience without exploiting it, without making the disabled characters weak or ashamed. 

Speculative fiction gives me an efficient route in showing disabled frustration and struggle, without lengthy set-up and exposition. When we use speculative fiction to talk about disability, we allow the reader, regardless of their ability status, to feel the frustration a disabled person feels, rather than just intellectually understanding that ableism exists. Instead of explaining, we can go to another world or reality and show how an apparition or an alien can be equivalent to disability and struggle. We can talk about our situations within speculative fiction frameworks with more urgency and efficiency than most realistic situations allow.

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If we can highlight the systems of oppression within speculative fiction, then we should also be highlighting change. We can show disabled characters in our reality, but there is only so much power in showing how ableism wears people down. If there is an acknowledgment of ableism, there should be an undermining of it too. Otherwise, it pushes the abled viewpoint onto us. A story that recreates ableism without undermining it is not a story for disabled people. 

I am not the only writer to have noticed this. In her book Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, Amanda Leduc writes, “[We] support and perpetuate a culture where the emphasis is on the cure rather than societal change—where the aim of the narrative is to eradicate the disabled life rather than change the world so that the disabled life can thrive. The stories we tell need to be different.”

Many writers use literature as an avenue to push for a better way of thinking and being in the world. Speculative fiction allows us to imagine situations not bound to our rules, and the next step in this literature is to take the opportunity to imagine change, whether on a personal level or on a societal level. In speculative fiction, this change doesn’t have to be bound to our rules either.

Speculative fiction gives us space and elasticity to envision or imagine how any one person might move through society.

Speculative fiction gives us space and elasticity to envision or imagine how any one person might move through society. Deaf and disabled people deserve to be seen, acknowledged, and imagined in a space that understands them. Instead of spaces where they are only seen as marginalized and weak, there should be spaces where they have the power to push back. There should be spaces where disabled people can feel safe and where we can thrive, as Leduc says.

I love being represented and seeing Deaf people in literature and media today. I love seeing disabled people take on challenges and overcoming them. But, as a reader, what I love more is people like me being seen as someone full of possibility and full of power. When I am given space to speculate about people like me, it makes me feel included. That kind of inclusion makes me feel proud to be myself.

The post Writing Fantasy Lets Me Show the Whole Truth of Disability appeared first on Electric Literature.