essay acceptance!

My essay "Normal" was just accepted (a day after I sent it!) for the spring 2026 inaugural issue of Sarah Fawn Montgomery's online journal NERVE TO WRITE!

​I've been a big fan of Sarah Fawn's essays and nonfiction for a long time, beginning with her book QUITE MAD: AN AMERICAN PHARMA MEMOIR, an inspiration for THE LUNATICS' BALL. We published one of her nonfiction flash at CRAFT, and when she agreed to judge our Creative Nonfiction Contest, I interviewed her about her new essay collection HALFWAY FROM HOME.

When Sarah Fawn posted a call specifically for hybrid work a couple of days ago, I decided to look at my unpublished flash and essays in THE LUNATICS' BALL, even though I'd decided not to publish more from the project. And I found an essay that I'd set aside as too repetitious of other essays in the collection to include. It went through quite a few drafts several years ago. I took it through another few drafts (I'm up to draft 12) and then sent it off.

Here's Sarah Fawn's description of her new journal. I'm not sure that I feel excluded from ableist publications, but I love the idea of a community like this one. I wasn't going to insert the entire "About" page here, but I didn't know what to cut, as I like it all. A mission statement, really:

Nerve to Write is a space for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers to build the literary community we have long been denied. Often excluded from literary spaces who have the nerve to insist our stories do not matter or to require us to adhere to ableist standards in order to gain acceptance, we face the active erasure of our work. This erasure—which mimics the daily aggression of an ableist world—strikes a painful nerve that damages our stories and spirits.
 
Nerve to Write is a journal for those who have wondered how the ableist writing world has the nerve to deny our work access. This is a journal for writers who have wondered why editors have the nerve to say they have read too many stories about illness, to insist neurodivergent writers are making up or exaggerating the details of their lived experiences, to ask disabled writers to end on recovery. This is a journal for writers who wonder why most of the pieces about disability that appear in journals are written by abled family members or physicians.
 
This is a space dedicated to the rich expression and innovation of disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers. Here writers do not have to write for abled readers or translate their experiences for audiences who may not understand—or even believe—them. This is a space where disabled stories do not need to be cheerful or inspirational but can instead exhibit anger, sadness, sharp humor, and exquisite joy. Here writers do not need to shield readers from their suffering just as they do not need to perform their trauma. And this is a space that welcomes writing that directly addresses the disability experience but also writing that has nothing to do with disability at all, for this is not our only plot and purpose.
 
Sometimes the only thing more painful than disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent lives is trying to navigate ableist expectations, so we invite you to discover the nerve it takes to reject ableist literary spaces in favor of creating an inclusive space of our own. 

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