Divergent Writers

Disability, Illness, Neurodivergence, and Ableism in Creative Writing

Christie Collins, Saul Lemerond

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350501898
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together essays from neurodivergent and disabled writers, and writers with chronic illnesses, this collection explores the impact of these experiences and the struggle against such biases within the field of creative writing. Whilst neuro-divergent and disabled writers publish world-class poetry, prose, and drama that moves readers and wins awards, they face many difficulties accessing these achievements - difficulties which often go unnoticed, unmentioned, and underappreciated. Visibility, insight, alternative approaches, and thorough research are all needed to create more inclusive writing environments. This book confronts these issues head on, calling for diversity in the creative writing field, community, and industry, and more equitable spaces in adjacent arenas from academia to publishing.

Broken into four sections, this anthology focuses on creative writing programs, classrooms, the community, and its people, combining narrative, research and practical contributions to the field to offer a mix of practical strategies, personal and pedagogical interventions, critiques, and craft meditations that explore teaching, transformation, evolution, embodied craft, visibility, belonging, injustice, otherness, and views from the outside. With essays and excerpts written by authors and educators from across seven countries, who are each impacted by a wide range of disabilities, including ADHD, autism, blindness, dyslexia, dyspraxia, stroke aphasia, cerebral palsy, bipolar, fibromyalgia, and rheumatoid arthritis, this collection informs, deconstructs and re-imagines to reform and revolutionize normative structures within writing institutions and communities.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Writer’s Journey: Late Diagnosis, Recovery, and Post-Diagnosis/Post-Recovery Observations on Writing and Teaching
• 1 Aphasia as Form and Discontent: Adaptations of a Post-Stroke Poet and Teacher
• 2 A Martian Poetic Tendency: What I Learned About Writing and Teaching After My Autism Diagnosis
• 3 Why Write?: Reframing Personal Creative Writing Practice in the Light of Changing Diagnoses
• 4 “Me Here—You There”: Writing Contrast without a Self
• 5 Theory of Whose Mind?: A Very Late-Diagnosed Autistic Writer Claps Back
• Part 2 Views from the Inside: Writers Confronting Stigma, Exploitation, and Ableism
• 6 There Is a Charge for the Eyeing of My Scars: Writing the Neurodivergent, Disabled Body for a Dominant Audience
• 7 When Methods Fail: A View from the Perspective of a Dyslexic Writer
• 8 The Breath of the Bird: My Writing Life with Bipolar Disorder
• 9 The Gallery Effect: The Visibly Disabled Writer in the Real World
• 10 What Do You Really Want to Say? A Creative Writing MA Student’s Experience with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD)
• Part 3 Dismantling the Traditional Writing Workshop: Interventions, Reckonings, and Inclusive Alternatives
• 11 Do Away with Writing Workshops: An Anti-Ableist Treatise
• 12 Perfection of the (Care) Work: A Traditional MFA Workshop Experience vs. A Disability-Centric Workshop Experience
• 13 Poem Brut: What the Writing Workshop Can Learn from the Outside World
• 14 Spinning Words: Poetry Creation by Autistic People from Brazil
• Part 4 Ableism in Higher Education, Writing Programs, and Academia: Insights, Pedagogy, and Visibility
• 15 “Reduced to Depraved Animals”: The Need for Faculty and Administrators to Consider Disabled, Neurodivergent, and Chronically Ill Students in Graduate Creative Writing Programs
• 16 Teaching Creative Writing to Neurodivergent Students: A Fairly Friendly FAQ
• 17 The Power of Words: Neurodiversity, Authenticity, and Inclusion in the Creative Writing Classroom
• 18 Embodiment and the Body in Pain: Observations from a Poet in Academia
• 19 Barriers to Inclusion in Creative Writing: Questioning Practice in and Beyond the Writing Classroom
• Index
• Copyright