Accessible Writing Workshops

There was a #CripLit chat the other day about writing workshop accessibility, which was participated in by Clarion UCSD, Clarion West, Lambda Literary, etc. (There’s a Storify here if you want to read all the tweets.) I didn’t tweet during the chat because my thoughts are slow, and are particularly slow when I have a chaos of anger to work through before I can be coherent. But I do have a few coherent thoughts, as it turns out, mostly in the form of advice for people who run writing workshops who are concerned about making their programs accessible.

So, to those people: There are two questions you should be asking yourself.

First, accessible to whom?

Disabled people aren’t a monolith. In fact, disability is significantly more varied than ability is.

Some modifications for some disabilities may be in direct conflict with other modifications for other disabilities. The clearest example of this I can think of is someone with MS who needs to keep her surroundings cool if she can, and then me, who had to drop out of college because it was winter and half my classes were in poorly-heated old buildings and I had to walk through the snow between them. There is no classroom in which she and I will both be maximally comfortable — and there may not be a classroom where she and I are both able to work at the top of our game for even one hour.

So, when you’re talking about access, you shouldn’t be talking about it like all disabled people need the same things. It may not be possible to make your program completely accessible to all people. Like, literally not physically possible. You might have to choose between a classroom that suits a writer with MS, or a classroom that suits a writer like me. You may have to bear the social brunt of that choice.

If that’s hard for you, maybe hire a disabled person to run your PR office, we have a lot of experience with this feeling.

Second, what is it that is accessible?

What, exactly, does a writing workshop provide to the people who attend? There’s what’s advertised: Education in the mechanics of writing, time to write, feedback from peers and a teacher or two, exposure to someone who knows the industry, encouragement and inspiration.

There’s also what isn’t advertised, because it’s a little crass to admit that this is something people are paying for: Networking, career building, a chance for self promotion to the professionals who are paid to come and read your first drafts. The chance to bill yourself as “Clarion West 2015” or “Viable Paradise 2010” or whatever in all your bios. I’ve never been to a writing workshop and still half the author readings I attend, half the social media promo posts I spread, are people who my friends met at workshops, who are part of this network of semi-pro writers who support each others’ work by showing up for each other. And there are so many opportunities for submitting work to places only open to students of this or that workshop, or people who are on Codex, or people who are known by the anthology editor. Workshops open the door to an entire ecosystem of support and promotion and consideration.

If your version of access creates a version of your workshop where some students only get some of that experience, you’re failing at it. Frankly, learning to write wouldn’t even be the main goal of a workshop, for me. I could read Bird by Bird and Steering the Craft and a bunch of novels in my target genre, and learn to write. I could join a local writing group on Meetup and get peer feedback and time to practice writing. Why would I go to your writing workshop and spend all the off hours sitting in a quiet dark room when the networking part of the workshop would be 80% of the point?

What that means is that when you think about making your workshop accessible to people with chronic pain, fatigue, and/or neuro-atypicalities like brain injuries, sensory processing disorders, etc, delete every plan that involves telling us we can rest whenever we’re not in a classroom. “You can take a nap while the rest of the class socializes and builds relationships with Famous Editor” is not an accessibility plan. “You can take this one-day workshop that is much less prestigious and won’t get you career opportunities” is not an accessibility plan.

(“We’ll have this workshop online so no one gets the networking benefits” is a kind of plan in that it levels the playing field, but frankly I’m not any likelier to spend my money on it. And there currently aren’t any online workshops that are as prestigious as the offline ones — every workshop that will get you on Codex, for example, is offline.)

This brings us back to above: it may not be possible to make your workshop accessible to everyone. Writing workshops are writing workshops. You’ve designed a program that works a specific way, that fits a certain amount of content into a certain context. Maybe you can find a building that has very nice elevators and ramps and automatic doors. You will still be excluding some people. People like me, specifically.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t make the effort to find that building that is wheelchair accessible — you should! But you should also be truthful with yourself and with others about who is invited to your party. Because it isn’t everyone.

(And hey, maybe we should all collectively rethink the publishing industry’s reliance on expensive intensive workshops as a primary gatekeeping mechanism…)