Brian Trapp’s debut novel, Range of Motion, inspired by his life as twin to a brother with severe cerebral palsy, releases October 15 from Acre Books. In this interview, A.D. Carr talks with Trapp about writing characters from disability, the ethics of life writing, the varying affordances of fiction and memoir, and favorite creators and critics engaging with disability in literature.
I met Brian more than fifteen years ago when we were both beginning graduate programs in the English department at the University of Cincinnati. Though we studied on different tracks, we had a handful of classes together, most memorably a creative nonfiction seminar where I became familiar with Brian’s ability to capture comedy and tenderness in the same breath. I have loved and often taught his essays about his brother, and was delighted when he agreed to talk with me about Range of Motion.
A.D. Carr: The novel introduces its twin protagonists, Michael and Sal, as they begin a week of summer camp, from which Sal disappears on his motorized chair in a moment of lapsed attention from Michael. You have remarked elsewhere that this scene mirrors an experience you had as a young man while working at a summer camp for disabled folks, when a camper temporarily escaped in a similar manner. The novel is also, of course, informed and inspired by your own life growing up with and caring for your twin brother, Danny, who was born with cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities. With the usual caveats that Range of Motion is fiction even as it is informed by yours and Danny’s life together, can you share a little bit about how that camp memory became the way into a novel about Michael and Sal and, by extension, about you and your brother? In other words, knowing the task of writing a novel inspired by your life must have felt daunting, what made that moment the moment on which to hang the story?
Brian Trapp: Yes, my camper really did escape from a camp luau in his powerchair and made his way onto a busy highway. He reminded me so much of my twin: He had the same CP and intellectual disabilities, the same sense of humor and bodily choreography, except he wasn’t legally blind and could drive a powerchair. He lived in a facility far away from his family, and they came to visit him at camp for a few days. After they left, he fell into a deep depression. I tried my hardest to cheer him up. I thought the camp, with its songs and cheer, might lift him from his grief. It didn’t work. I gave him some space at the pool party, and he used that space to escape onto a busy road. I didn’t know if he was trying to hurt himself, or go after his family, or play an epic camp prank. He was rescued safely from the road and brought back to camp, and the counselors tried to make it into a joke: “You’re not a car!” It affected me deeply. There was a lot of transference: I so wanted to protect my brother, and here I had let this very similar person put himself in harm’s way.
Some of my earliest writing was about this incident. It became emotionally imprinted on me—the story that wouldn’t go away. I returned to the camp two years later with the intention of writing about it, walking the road he took to the highway. I thought: “I hope this doesn’t take over my life.” It took over my life. I would try to tell this story, off and on, for the next twenty years. Writing this book was a way of honoring him, honoring my brother, and honoring people like them who rarely appear in literature.
From a craft perspective, the escape was an interpretive puzzle. If you believed he wanted to hurt himself, you were an ableist eugenic asshole who thinks that, of course, he must want to end his life. But if you believed he couldn’t want to hurt himself, then you were infantilizing him, not granting him the full menu of complex adult motives. Then again, he could’ve just wanted to leave. Or it could’ve just been a prank. It was a mystery worthy of a novel, and an action that posed a greater mystery: How do you imagine someone else’s mind? It also demanded a genre. Is this action a tragedy? A melodrama? A comedy?
People like that camper, people like my brother, rarely appear in novels, or even in the story of disability rights. They have what disability scholars Mitchell and Snyder call “low-level agency.” They have both impaired speech and impaired control of their own bodies, and are often both spoken for and acted upon. Novels privilege characters with agency, who act upon the world, so it can become a narrative challenge to represent characters with severe disabilities in a way that doesn’t just objectify them. Part of my goal with this novel was to dramatize the surprising ways a character like my brother might show their agency, even if it’s mediated by their family members and caregivers. The action poses a challenge for both Sal’s family and the reader: How do you imagine this mind?
Care to share any false starts left on the cutting room floor?
How much time do you have? I tried to write this story for twenty years! I’ll save you the early juvenilia attempts. In grad school, when I seriously began to write a novel set at the camp, it was in a breezy first-person voice. I drew on memories of caring for my brother at camp, but for the character to enact the dramatic escape, I needed to “cure” the character just a little bit. In life, Danny was legally blind and used a manual chair, so I imagined someone like him with functional vision and the ability to drive a powerchair. That was fun to imagine all the trouble my brother could’ve gotten into driving a chair. But in all other respects, the character shared the same abilities as my actual brother, from his vocalizations to his switch-operated speech device. I got about halfway through before I quit. I hadn’t really discovered yet how to represent the disabled brother’s unique communication on the page.
A year later, to reengage with the characters, I started writing about their early childhood in third person close and found a voice that was much more interesting to me. I started writing in the parents’ POVs as well. I wrote the Halloween story, in which Michael actually hears his brother speaking and then starts to doubt that connection as the plot unfolds. That tension became central to the larger narrative and took over the book.
For a while, I hoped I was writing two different autobiographical books like Edward St. Aubyn’s Melrose series: a coming-of-age linked story collection and a more conventionally plotted novel about the brothers at camp, with the escape as the main event. I ultimately decided to just write one big book. But I didn’t know how to write a novel yet. And one of my characters could only say eight words. I felt like I was writing a novel with one hand tied behind my back. At the same time, I knew that a character like Sal, who has severe CP and intellectual disabilities but was also very funny, hadn’t really been represented before. That feeling of discovery, of writing a dynamic disabled character who needed to exist, kept me going.
One thing that caught my attention while reading was how often the novel both stresses and troubles the certainty of corporeal borders. This happens in two pretty distinct registers, from my perspective, so this is a two-part question. The first register has to do with voice, specifically Sal’s voice. Because Sal has CP, his speech is significantly limited. As a young child, he mostly makes noises that the family interprets: “Eh,” “Eh-eh,” “Ahhh,” etc. Fairly early in the novel, when the boys are five years old, it is suggested that Michael can “hear” his brother, a revelation that blooms in a scene in a grocery store when Sal, via Michael’s close third person point of view, is given the full power of speech on the page. The scene is quite funny—Michael bobsleds on the back of Sal’s wheelchair and crashes into a sauerkraut display—and also, I thought, extraordinarily tender. Though the realist reading is that Michael is imagining Sal’s voice, I felt as a reader that the moment was not mediated via Michael, that is, that the narration was introducing third person Sal. Still, the shadow of Michael lingers. Can you talk about this decision? I’m interested in this from a nuts-and-bolts perspective as well as the broader, metaphorical sense of your thought process when “voicing” Sal.
Early in the writing process, I wondered if I should narrate chapters from Sal’s POV. Some novels narrate from a mostly nonverbal character’s POV, including most famously, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. But one of the greatest mysteries of my life was: “What is my brother thinking?” I didn’t want to falsely solve it with narrative. I wanted to use narrative to deepen and explore that mystery. There is also the problem of “speaking for” someone with a disability, particularly a speech disability. What would someone like my brother sound like to himself? I worried about colonizing his interiority with my able-bodied wish fulfillment. But I realized I was much more interested in dramatizing Sal as a truly interdependent character: you come to know him in profound relation through the other characters and their POVs. In a way, I put the problem of representation on the page.
I landed on narrating Sal through the subjectivities of his family members using a close-third person/free indirect style. Even before I started writing the novel, I realized that each of my family members had a different version of my twin brother in their heads. This sort of projection happens with all families, in all human relationships, but it becomes more pronounced with someone who has a significant communication disability. You co-construct their meanings, supplementing their verbal and nonverbal communication with what you think they mean. I also realized that even though my brother could speak only twelve words, he still had a dynamic language in which he multiplied the meaning of those words with tone, context, body expression, and absence. In writing Sal’s character, I wanted to honor my brother’s dynamic and creative language that was necessarily interdependent. On the page, this translates to using metaphor to interpret Sal’s few words or grunts or facial expressions, and each character might use a different metaphor depending on their mental picture of Sal. With fiction, you get the gift of being inside the character’s head, to see how they construct what Sal means. And the most interesting part? They might be wrong.
Why did I choose to represent Sal with direct speech early on? I think it has to do with tapping into the emotional power of fiction. In my nonfiction, I’ve written: “It was like I knew what my brother was thinking.” But to represent the true bond I felt with my brother, the metaphor falls flat. Fiction lets me literalize the metaphor, to dramatize what it feels like, to erase the boundaries between reality and subjectivity, inside and outside, so that the character actually hears his brother speaking as a secret language. That is closer to the emotional truth of my experience. And it made me really uncomfortable. I consider myself a realist writer. I don’t love fantasy or magical realism and prefer to find the strange within the bounds of conventional reality. But to truly represent the profound bond I felt with my brother, I needed to transgress the boundaries of realism. Yes, Michael hearing Sal can always be reduced to human psychology. That little boy might just be crazy. Yet, the story always keeps open the alternative and more extraordinary possibility: They have a telepathic connection, a secret language, which is a well-documented trope in stories about twins. And, honestly, it sometimes really did feel like Danny and I had a telepathic connection.
The novel’s momentum became dependent on that fantastical conceit. As he grows up, Michael slowly loses the ability to hear his brother, first in dialogue and then as a voice in his head. There are many ways you could interpret that shift. Maybe he’s just growing up, becoming disenchanted with the world. Maybe he’s internalizing ableist ideas about people with intellectual disability. Or maybe he’s becoming less naïve about his ability to truly know his brother, as Sal finds ways to exert his own independence and personhood. I was interested in ways to dramatize that inevitable shift from innocence to experience.
But as Philip Roth says, reality in America often outstrips the fiction writer’s imagination. I recently discovered the podcast The Telepathy Tapes, which makes a startling claim: that some nonverbal autistic people are telepathic. It has been criticized by The Atlantic for using a form of facilitated communication, in which the disabled person can have their typed or spelled messages unintentionally but problematically influenced by non-disabled facilitators or family members. The podcast has over a million downloads, and many Americans are willing to believe in disabled telepathy. I think it speaks to the deep-seated desire for loved ones to connect with and understand their non-verbal family members, and that desire is present in my characters as much as in the real world.
I mentioned two registers in my previous question. The second major way I see the novel stressing and troubling corporeal borders has to do with how the family members either relate to or see themselves as separate from Sal, more specifically Sal’s body. At one point we learn that Gabe repeatedly insists to Michael that he and his brother are not identical, “not from the same egg,” but Michael refuses to believe it; later in the novel Michael suspects that he, too, has brain damage but nobody has noticed. The mother, Hannah, wrestles with what her own pain and suffering means in the context of caring for Sal—this is a point of tension in whether to accept a spot for Sal in a group home; Hannah seems to regard her physical pain as vector for communion with Sal, maybe, a kind of abstract feeling made manifest in her joints and muscles. By contrast, the father, Gabe, spends most of the novel seemingly tuning his own body out, whether by burrowing deep into his own brain in his lab work or nursing his alcohol addiction. He seems really committed to maintaining a kind of distinct separateness from Sal while Hannah and Michael both seem psychically invested in breaking down any separation between themselves and Sal. So, it’s a long question about bodies, and how you think about the bodies in this book, and maybe what your background and teaching in disability studies brings to the equation.
I think that because I am a twin, especially a twin of someone with severe mobility and speech disabilities, I have an inherently different experience with corporeal borders. The philosopher, Helena de Bres, in her excellent book on twins, How to Be Multiple, says this: “Twins and disabled people—and, especially, disabled twins—fascinate and disturb us because they vividly model the breaching of these walls that many of us—consciously or not—strive to erect.” What she means is that in Western culture, we value autonomous individualism, and erect conceptional boundaries between self and other, mind and body, that both twinship and disability trouble.
In the novel, I’m definitely playing with the trope of twin telepathy, which troubles the boundary between one mind and another. And I’m troubling the boundaries between bodies too, just because I’m realistically depicting caregiving for someone who requires “total care.” Sal, like my own brother, needs everything done for him: lifting, showering, diaper changing, feeding. He needs help communicating, whether through his computer or in dialogue with another person. At the same time, he provides a profound sense of play, love, and purpose for his family. If we want to borrow a term from disability studies, the family exists in “interdependence,” in relation, in a dance of mutual care and dependence on one another.
One thing I wanted to do with Michael was trouble the binary that’s often employed with twins when one has a disability: One twin is “the disabled one” and one twin is “the normal one.” Michael senses how thin and shaky that boundary is, with the suspicion that he has brain damage, as you mention, or his worry that his brain might spontaneously bleed. These are both experiences taken from my life. “Normal” is a fiction, an impossible standard to live up to, a performance that we are all bound to fail. Michael is aware of that fact at a very young age, just as I was, and just as many disabled people and their siblings are.
Hannah also troubles corporeal borders. She does most of the caregiving, and also more deeply projects onto Sal though not as much as Michael. It’s interesting that you think of her pain as a vector of communion. She is steeped in Catholicism and often thinks about pain and suffering and meaning-making. But a lot of her physical pain comes from interdependence too. She is the one lifting, changing diapers, battling wheelchair straps and ankle braces, pulling Sal’s stiff arms through his shirt. Ask any mom who does “total care” for fifteen years and they’ll have their share of aches and pains. Because Sal is socially isolated, Hannah feels that isolation too. My own mom struggled with carpal tunnel syndrome and social isolation and said at her most frustrated: “Danny’s disability is disabling me.” I needed to reflect that darker side of interdependence too.
For Gabe, he needs to be separate from Sal partly out of necessity. As with many special needs families in America (including my own), they don’t qualify for any government support. So one of the parents (usually the mom) needs to not work to care for their child. That means that Gabe needs to make all their income. Gabe is not doing much of the caregiving, but he’s also propping up their life and is the reason Sal can live at home. I’m also playing with the tension between overwork as an economic necessity and overwork as a means of escape.
That’s interesting you think he’s tuning out his body. Like many of us in academia, he is conditioned to ignore the body. You aren’t really allowed to get sick or have caregiving duties. The tenure clock is ticking! I was also interested in the parents’ narrative mirroring the twins’ narrative, thinking of marriage as another form of twinship. As the twins become more distant, so do the parents, and Gabe finds ways to enact barriers even while being physical present, like through alcohol. But I also want to defend Gabe. First, I find him the most hilarious character. He has some of the best lines! He is also most troubled by his family’s erasing of mental borders, and I don’t think that’s always a bad thing. He is troubled by Michael speaking for Sal, and most bothered by the power imbalance that Michael would rather pretend doesn’t exist.
This novel draws from but is not an exact retelling of your experience growing up with and caring for Danny. You’ve also written a handful of essays about Danny, and you’re working on a memoir. Can you share a little bit about how you navigate the ethics of writing about others’ lives, even as they intersect with your own? How do you think through those issues in fiction, and what might be different in your nonfiction?
I think writing about others’ lives is always a fraught and uncomfortable process, especially when that life is someone like my brother’s, who is a vulnerable subject and cannot tell his own story. In sharing details about my life with him, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, I also need to think about how an able-bodied audience might read the story, whether I am sensationalizing or exploiting him. The burden of ethical representation can be really heavy and lead to paralyzing perfectionism. At the same time, if caregivers aren’t allowed to tell their own stories, our culture will tell their stories for them, leaning on sentimental or tragic or grotesque narratives. We need more complex stories about caregivers and about people like my brother, not less.
I think my guiding principle, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, is to write with care. That means, first and foremost, writing towards complexity. You risk exploiting the people in your life when you simplify them for your own ends, when you write to enact revenge or air grievances or celebrate your own heroism. Over the course of writing, you need to think what that person’s experience might have been like, what history are they coming from, and even if you can’t offer forgiveness, you can offer understanding. Writing with care also means trying to see around my own character, exploring ways in which I was flawed or mistaken or complicit. As a writer, you can write whatever you want but you also need to live with the consequences, with the real people you represent.
In fiction, if you are basing your characters on real people, you have the tool of imaginative synthesis. This comes from Milan Kundera’s idea that the novel synthesizes forms such as the “ironic essay, novelistic narrative, autobiographical fragment, historical fact, flight of fantasy,” into a unified whole. So I might be drawing on autobiographical fragments and the historical facts of my parents, my brother, and myself but, in the course of writing the novel, I let the characters transcend their source material, escape their molds, to become their own complicated, unpredictable people. I combined other aspects of people I have known, people I have read about, even aspects of myself, so that each becomes their own unique creatures. My mother, for example, doesn’t think Hannah is her, even if I’m borrowing a lot of her experiences and situations. In fiction, you can engage in that alchemy of mixing real “other lives” with other people’s experiences, your own experiences, and imagined experiences, so that those characters are transformed from copies of specific “other lives” into characters that signify into communal truth and truth about human nature, rather than a literal record of other people and their small and large crimes. Letting your characters be their own people is another form of care.
In nonfiction, you work within tighter constraints and must work within “the real.” You need to find dramatic and emotional truth within the material of what actually happened. There is always room for shaping, and for using your imagination to project into what you don’t or cannot know, but at the end of the day, you are writing about real people who have lives off the page. You must be more careful about what you reveal and whether it serves the story.
You’ve been working on a memoir maybe as long as you’ve been working on this novel. To the best of my knowledge, your first essay about life with Danny, “Shower Songs,” was published in 2017 by Brevity. Is that the first piece, fiction included, that you published about Danny? Tell me about your interest in the novelization of this story even if you’ve had a memoir planned/in process? What can you do in one that you can’t do in the other?
I published fiction inspired by my life with Danny before 2017: the germ of the novel (with POVs from Michael, Gabe, and Hannah) was published in Ninth Letter in 2013 and the Catholic confession story, “Eyes and Ears,” was published in the Gettysburg Review (RIP) in 2016.
I think when I started writing I had a snobby preconception that novels were “real literature.” Memoirs were the novel’s less artful cousin. I don’t think that anymore but I do want to defend the power of the novel. Because I think there is great pressure from the publishing industry to push disability stories into the memoir genre.
Memoir has been hugely important for disability representation. The disability studies scholar G. Thomas Couser writes that life writing is vital to disabled people because it can challenge ableist narratives of what it means to be disabled, from the lived experiences of disabled people themselves. Memoir has a greater weight sometimes than fiction, especially when it’s about a marginalized experience. It can bear witness: These are real things that happened to real people. There is more room to be didactic and teach the reader something valuable about life. But there is also a way we speak about memoir as giving immediate access to “real life” or “raw experience” that seems to impoverish the possibilities of literary art, as if there was no craft involved. By restricting disability narratives to memoir, it’s as if we are only allowing them to be anthropology, not art.
I believe in the novel’s power. I believe it its ability to dramatize what it’s like to be in another person’s consciousness, to embody human experience in all its contradictions. As Zadie Smith says, you can “presume” to know what it’s like to be another person, in all its risk and boldness. You can juxtapose different subjectivities and values, create a polyphonic experience for the reader. You can use the great narrative gift of free indirect style. I might start from memory or lived experience but then I can let my imagination or intuition go where the story leads, letting emotional and dramatic truth take precedence. You can also satisfy that itch to vividly show the reader important lived experiences or biographical details. For example, it was vital for Sal to be fundamentally similar to my brother, to have his same communication abilities. I wanted him to be fundamentally recognizable to me. It was fun to write the Whisper Wolf section and dramatize my brother’s real AAC device, and the strangeness of being asked to record my own voice into his computer. But then, as a writer, I allowed myself to heighten and exaggerate some real-life tensions, to invent plot to put pressure on the characters to reveal themselves. I did not, for example, load his computer with offensive speech options for his solo in a choir concert and take along a hunting knife to defend his right to say them, but it was fun and poignant to imagine it.
Sal and his family live in a world where care is challenging to access. When Hannah is not directly caring for Sal on the page, she is in the background navigating Kafkaesque aid systems, and stressing about giving over Sal’s care to anyone, though she eventually learns to rely somewhat on Michael. Range of Motion is being published at a time when Medicaid dollars are being torched, requirements for even receiving aid are becoming more impossible to meet, and when the overall discourse around health, healthcare, bodies, and disability is increasingly tilted toward eugenicist ends. The novel is at once a story about disability and caregiving as much as it is “just a novel” about a family and about twins and about how a family evolves as its individual members grow and change. By that I mean it doesn’t have that “Very Special Episode” feeling; its characters and its story are multidimensional, an obvious counterweight to dominant ways of thinking about disability and caregiving. How much of that was top of mind as you wrote? Can you talk about writing toward a societal conversation without, like, backing yourself into a polemical corner?
I felt a need to realistically represent the joyful rhythm of caregiving but also its deep and difficult work. When one of my childhood friends had a kid with a disability, he immediately thought of my family. He’d spent a lot of time at my house with Danny. He said, “Your house was not a house of sadness. You guys were always joking around. Danny was smiling. It was a house of joy.” Those memories of Danny helped him imagine a future with his own disabled child.
So I wanted to reflect the particular rhythm and pleasure and playfulness of caregiving but I also needed to realistically dramatize how difficult we make caregiving in America, even for a middle class family like my own, and like the Mitchell’s. I grew up watching my mom navigate our failing care system, which was hard for her even with all the resources we had. Like Gabe, my father was a neuroscientist for a hospital system and had great access to healthcare and doctors. And yet, I’ve read all their insurance appeals, begging the insurance company for adaptive equipment that they were initially denied. The care crisis that happens to Sal is very similar to the one my brother endured after he got a feeding tube. It was important to reflect both the joy of caregiving and the struggle of care, which doesn’t come from the so-called “burden” of the disabled child but from our society that refuses to adequately support them and their families. I think the most depressing thing I realized when researching the book is that our social safety net hasn’t really improved since 2002. There are still massive waitlists for Medicaid waivers. Special Education remains unfunded by the federal government. We had a huge opportunity to create a care infrastructure during Biden’s Build Back Better bill and we blew it. And Trump is a disaster for disabled people. Sorry, I’m starting to sound polemical…
What helps the novel not become a “Very Special Episode” is that it’s a comic novel. Whatever else I’m trying to do, I’m also trying to make you laugh, or at least make that little snort I make I read something funny. I cannot be overly didactic or sentimental, both of which depend on simplicity. Comedy is the genre of tonal complexity. Satire might have a hard moral point but most comedy is just exploring how to feel about something. It explores a character’s contradictions and absurdities. They may get on their soapbox but they’ll also eventually trip and fall off of it.
In Range of Motion, there are no clear-cut heroes, and everyone is bumbling in their own way through life. Michael often positions himself as the hero, standing up for his brother, but he often takes things too far, or confuses his own desire for what his brother truly wants. When I’m reading a novel and feel trapped in a lecture, or when a scene feels overly directed by an author to make a point, I get bored. I tried to let the characters drive the story. This is a political novel but I hope it doesn’t have the simple moral calculus of propaganda. I think novels work best by asking questions deeply rather than providing clear answers. They dramatize alternative values through their characters rather than loudly making a point. I can let the characters think in a screed against an ableist incident or a denied insurance claim, but those thoughts belong to them, not me.
I want to ask you about the end of the novel. This may be a spoiler for readers. I asked you already about “voicing,” Sal. Sometimes he speaks in transliterated grunts and moans; other times his voice is mediated via Michael, i.e. “Sal smiled and said ‘Mike-a!’ like You idiot.” A plot development involves Michael literally recording his voice into the “The Whisper Wolf,” Sal’s computer/augmentative communication device. Occasionally, as in the grocery store scene, Sal’s language-having voice is “present” on the page, ostensibly via Michael’s imagination but more real. In the final scene, the family leaves Sal at his group home, his first taste of independence from them. It is the first time in the novel that the narration is wholly Sal’s third person close. The vocalizations he utters cannot be translated, as nobody is there to hear them (save the reader). I found this moment utterly devastating, tender, moving. Can you share a little bit about how you landed there?
I knew early on that after Sal’s escape, Michael would kidnap him in some way but I didn’t know where they were going or what would happen. So much of the novel is set up as a coming-of-age story for Michael. He’s leaving home and leaving Sal for college, conflicted in making a break from his sibling role. But then I realized that with Sal’s escape, Sal actually needed to hijack the coming-of-age narrative and shift the power dynamic a little bit. The story becomes Sal’s coming of age, learning to live without his family. It was an emotional shift that my own brother made when he transitioned to a group home, though it took him a little longer than Sal to make it.
With the three shifting points of view, it made narrative sense to finally shift the POV to Sal. It was a powerful payoff for the reader but also, after being narrated by others for almost 300 pages, the story finally becomes his. But it was still an ethical and technical challenge: to get too close, to specifically imagine what Sal is thinking, would reduce the central mystery of the book. I actually don’t think the final section is in close third or free-indirect-style. I describe what he sees and hears but not exactly what he’s thinking. I’m not borrowing his specific language. There is still a distance. I’d say it more focalizes around Sal, wraps around him, but does not exactly inhabit his head in the same way it does his family members. It was important to maintain that boundary for me. The ending is a little ambiguous. It ends in a moment of privacy for Sal, and his utterances are unadorned by other subjectivities. But it also isn’t really private, because the reader is there, so it also asks the reader to interpret Sal’s speech for themselves. So the narrative both reveals and withholds, asks for empathy but also dramatizes its limits, at the same time. That seemed right to me.
Let’s close it out with some recommendations. You teach creative writing and oversee the disability studies program at the University of Oregon. What are some of your favorite essays, memoirs, novels, or stories to teach to students exploring disability, life writing, comedy writing?
For critics, I love the work of Alice Hall, Michael Bérubé, Tobin Siebers, Sami Schalk, Eva Kittay, Jina B. Kim, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Paul K. Longmore.
For disability literature, there is just so much excellent work. In particular, I love to teach comedy, which really opens students’ eyes about the richness of disability experience and moves them away from the typical reactions of pity. One of my favorite novels is Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom, just reissued by Dalkey Archive, which I’ve written about here. It’s a wild, prescient full-throated critique of sentimentality and our infantilizing attitudes towards the disabled that hasn’t been rivaled since 1985. However, Saou Ichikawa’s Hunchback, which was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, gives him a run for his money. My favorite comic memoir is Greg Marshall’s Leg, which is a hilarious double-coming out story about queerness and disability. I also love to teach stand up and sketch: Hannah Gadsby’s Douglas for their sharp exploration of neurodiversity and disability gain, and Zach Anner’s Workout Wednesday series for his delightful skewering of able-bodied fitness culture.
I love teaching poetry too: Molly McCully Brown’s The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. For documentary, Crip Camp and The Key of G. For creative nonfiction, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, Chloé Cooper Jones’s Easy Beauty, Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind, and Roxane Gay’s Hunger. There are also some excellent memoirs by caregivers, including Heather Lanier’s Raising a Rare Girl and Chris Gabbard’s A Life Beyond Reason.
Brian Trapp is director of disability studies at the University of Oregon, where he also teaches fiction and nonfiction. His work has been published in the Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Longreads, Brevity, and elsewhere. His essays have been listed as Notable in Best American Essays and anthologized in The Best of Brevity. He has received a Steinbeck Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Oregon Arts Fellowship, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Borchardt Scholarship, a Tin House Summer Residency, and a Taft Fellowship from the University of Cincinnati, where he completed his PhD. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, with his twin brother, Danny.
A.D. Carr is associate section editor for Interviews and Craft Essays at CRAFT. Her essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Archetype, CRAFT, and elsewhere. Her essay “Losing Composure” was listed as Notable in Best American Essays. She teaches rhetoric and creative writing at a small college in the Midwest, and she is working on an essay collection.