Alaina Leary

It’s helpful if you talk to your disabled loved ones to see what works for them. My family and friends have always been great at figuring out accessibility.

In the aftermath of my rape, I became an activist for ending rape culture. And I quickly found that even in feminist circles, disability was often left out of the conversation completely.

"Writing about trauma or difficult experiences doesn’t repair that trauma,” said Melanie. “It doesn’t make it go away. But I kept hearing what a transformative thing it was for [the memoirists] to shape these stories into something that they could be proud of.”

September, for the first time in many years, wasn’t the start of any new beginnings. I’ve been in some form of school — general education in public schools, then an undergraduate degree, and then a graduate degree — since I was in preschool.

Diverse genre fiction shares a lot in common with diverse literature, in that a lot of the challenges are the same. We still have to ask a lot of questions about who gets to tell what stories, what kinds of books and authors are published, what it means to get it right, and who is on staff at the publishing houses that produce genre fiction.

I told Winnie that I was queer before I told anyone human—late at night, in my room, after writing it down in my journal. “You won’t stop loving me if I’m gay, will you?” I asked him. He replied with his signature loud meow.

All I wanted, most days, was a cute apartment with big windows, sheer curtains billowing in the breeze, where I could sit comfortably and read a book.