The Bookseller – Comment – “Against this backdrop, I wrote and I wrote”

Did you know that 3rd December is International Day of Persons with Disabilities, which is the mid-point of UK Disability History Month (20th November to 20th December)? Having supported this much underexposed celebration of disability rights, arts and culture since its inception, I often think of my own decades-long journey as a writer.

So, where to begin?

If you go into a bookshop, I wonder whether any excited reader keen to discover a new talent pauses to see if there is a section focusing on stories by disabled people, about disabled people? Would it be next to the LBGTQ+ section? Global Majority? Autobiography, maybe?

Unlikely, though I would love to be proved wrong. My memoir, First in the World Somewhere, came out in 2017. This work of narrative nonfiction follows what the synopsis describes as “a rebellious yet shy and stifled young disabled woman who escapes her small-town isolation to dive into London’s punk and indie underground, where she discovers her voice – and the radical power of words, music, sex and activism”. But where did the average bookseller place it on the shelves?

Sociology. Health.

Friends sent me photos expressing their anger and bafflement. It might be eight years on, but I still feel the pain. And I’m not sure how much has improved. These thoughts take me back to the time I had a battered third-hand electric typewriter. My fingers have never been strong enough to use a manual, save the mini toy one I had as a child. The electric version changed my life, just as the world around me was changing, too. It was the time of Thatcher, the Brixton Riots, the evolving punk scene of the 1980s, all of which led to a proliferation of fanzines and the first glimmers of a way my words could be read. I wrote about discontent and the urge for revolution. And, occasionally, I dared to reveal that I am disabled.

In those days, we lived in a peculiar shadowland of special needs. We were en masse outsiders, others, not the norm. I was told so many times that, in order to be a writer, I could not dare bring in the disability narrative. Disability was negative, impolite. Writing about it upset the “normal people”. In the post-punk era, when equality politics took on a new strength, things began to change, and disabled people – disabled creatives – spoke out louder. We found strength through connection, albeit at a slow pace. And the formation of Disability Arts Forums further expanded the ways our voices began to be heard.

Against this backdrop, I wrote and I wrote. Stories, poems and novels. Occasionally, articles when someone, somewhere, realised it might be quite nice to allow “a disabled” onto their pages now and again. This work was gruelling because, back then, the required focus was always around the tropes of impairment (broadly equated to one’s medical condition), and how you were a “brave and courageous cripple overcoming your afflictions”. The bravery being how I breathe, let alone write, love, fight, fuck, campaign and simply yell.

I became an expert at trying to slip into my work narratives, where my disability as a lived experience reflected gritty, three-dimensional reality, not simply as stories by non-disabled people of that old, tired, triumph over tragedy trope. You could say this sums up the story of my life as a writer. My current Substack is still called Telling the Untold Story, and all disabled writers still come up against such narrowing of our genuine realities. The good, the bad and the everything juicy in between – being human.

But, as the great Leonard Cohen once said, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in”. And, in my case, the crack, and the light, eased into my life through friends once I made the monstrously difficult but ultimately successful move to London in 1985. By this time, I’d had several poems published in fanzines, with the encouragement of various friendly writer folk. Although I was shy, my punk sensibilities made me bold, and via that trusty old typewriter I bashed out letters to many publishers, poets and writers, including the magnificent Rosemary Sutcliff who, for those interested in such coincidental factoids, had the same medical condition as myself (a rare form of childhood arthritis). Rosemary replied with many handwritten notes of encouragement that I still cherish.

“Don’t give up,” she said. And I knew I never would.

A key difference between me and Rosemary is the nature of our work. Born to the rebellious punk generation, I knew I had to put within my writing the disability experience. I have nothing but respect for disabled authors who are able to write outside of disability, but I could not do anything else.

This meant, for some years, while I was successful writing in a more journalistic nature within NGOs and user-led charities, I stayed as tricksy as I could within my fiction. Slipping in the hint, here and there. Occasionally allowed a space to be open – for example, within the magazine Disability Arts in London, one of the first and, over the years, most-read publications of disability arts and culture (now known as Disability Arts Online). Much of my early work was published there in the 1990s, including poetry and stories.

Literature is the poor cousin of other art forms in terms of disability, reflecting the slow and all too often profit-driven nature of the mainstream publishing world

But what about mainstream publishing back then, in the pre-internet age? I’d written three novels, duly parcelled up in fat brown envelopes with the essential SAE to at least hopefully guarantee response from prospective agents and publishers. And those responses were varied, to say the least. My first serious attempt at a novel, called Strangeness and Charm, would these days fall broadly into the genre of speculative fiction. I have always loved soft sci-fi, inspired by the early feminist champions such as Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy and even Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series. I felt this might offer a way to bring the disability narrative into my work that was perhaps more palatable to the mainstream.

But the mainstream was scared. Early on, I had experienced their nervousness at my determination, however subtle, to in some way include disability. In Strangeness and Charm, the key character, KC Speares, is a disabled cultural expert on xenomorphs and alien civilisation. Advanced technology removes many of her barriers as she goes through a typical motif of love, sex, betrayal and the importance of connection and collaboration in a futuristic society. An experienced and published author whom I’d befriended through complex connections loved it, and New York-based publishers DAW came close to commissioning it. They said lovely things about my work, the irony being that the disability aspect didn’t put them off – their reason for not going ahead was that it was “too British”.

Yet if the industry wasn’t scared, it was often rude and downright patronising. One agent declared that I was clearly “handicapped in some way” due to the nature of my signature! Kinder agents praised my writing but would inevitably end with “God knows how we would sell this, or who would want to read it”.

So, three unpublished novels on and a hell of a back catalogue of short stories – including winning a place in the Hemingway Shorts Anthology 2021 – what has changed? Literature is the poor cousin of other art forms in terms of disability, reflecting the slow and all too often profit-driven nature of the mainstream publishing world. Though there are plenty of smaller, independent publishing houses that regularly demonstrate a lesser aversion to risk-taking (despite having far smaller budgets), disabled authors still fall to the lower reaches of literature with the limited exposure of our work.

Disabled members of the Society of Authors developed the ADCI (Authors with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses) Literary Prize, for “authors with a disability and/or chronic illness… [whose novels] include a disabled or chronically ill character or characters”. However, by accepting only published works, many disabled authors are excluded, considering how few who write about disability actually get published, or anywhere near an agent, in the first place.

This piece was commissioned to tie in with this year’s UK Disability History Month. The period, late-November to late-December, was chosen to coincide with UN International Day of Persons with Disabilities (3rd December), and a number of other relevant days including HIV/AIDS Day (1st Dec) and International Human Rights Day (10th Dec).

I wonder how many readers knew these even exist? While other marginalised groups have gained some traction and exposure for stories that need to be told, I fear that our history remains hidden and misunderstood. As I say in my regular Byline Times column, Who Are the Disabled?, yes, indeed, who are they?

This is half the problem. First initiated in 2010, UK Disability History Month (UKDHM) happens thanks to the unstinting dedication of disabled activist and inclusive education reformer Richard Reiser. It aims to celebrate our history and our stories, with a focus on improving exposure. Largely a labour of love, events that evolve from and around this focus rarely attract mainstream coverage. Each year, there’s a new theme around which disabled creatives, activists and allies create events.

I can’t remember how many times I’ve performed at poetry/spoken word events, given talks, read extracts from published and unpublished work, to celebrate UKDHM. And no doubt I will continue to do so, because the work goes on. Rosemary Sutcliff’s words, and the encouragement of others – damn it, even Marmite man Morrissey told me “You write delightfully, a priceless gift” – continue to stoke the passionate belief that still burns within me, that the broadest spectrum of our story deserves to be told. Words by us, about us, full and messy and devoid of homogenised tropes that I know all readers will enjoy – history shows it from other marginalised groups.

I am lucky enough to have an agent who has recently sent out my fourth novel – will it be the one to finally end up in a bookshop, on that joyful shelf of bestselling fiction?

Penny Pepper is a beneficiary of the Royal Literary Fund (RLF), a charity that offers financial support, advice and earning opportunities to writers across the UK. This piece was originally commissioned by the RLF for International Day of Persons with Disabilities on 3rd December.