Hi everyone and welcome to the first interview for repDISND 2024! Each year, I interview members of the disabled and neurodivergent community about their perspectives on representation. Please join me for my interview with Epistemic Literary Magazine founders Melissa and Kristin. 

Without further ado, I’ll let them tell you more about what they do at Epistemic Literary!

Hi Melissa, please tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m a neurodivergent kidlit author, mother, wife, editor, and former educator and performer. After decades of battling back and neck pain without any answers, I was finally diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis in 2020 with a handful of comorbidities. My disease has progressed very rapidly in the wake of COVID and I am now disabled. Creative pursuits—namely writing, reading, drawing, and crafting—have kept me sane through long days in bed.

 

What type of work do you do?

Along with my co-editor-in-chief Kristin Houlihan, we created Epistemic Literary Magazine in early May 2023 after I replied to a tweet from Kristin (a long COVID sufferer) that she really wanted to curate a beautiful collection of written work, but lacked the spoons (and skills!) to do it alone. We’d had only limited interactions at that point, but I had also been tossing the idea around and so I said, “Let’s do it.” 

Everything fell perfectly into place as we discovered we had identical visions for the magazine. Both of us wanted to create a space for writers that focused on knowledge and community. We sought to bring together a wide variety of voices, cultures, and experiences a few times a year on a particular theme. We also knew that if we were going to be successful, we needed to keep our disabilities at the forefront of any planning. And that is when we knew accessibility had to be a main focus of our endeavor.

 

What can you tell us what you’ve been working on recently at Epistemic Literary Magazine?

We just published Issue 3: Anticipation on June 15, 2024. We opened for submissions on April 1 and closed a month later. Then we begin reading submissions. Kristin is our poetry editor, I work
with short fiction, and we added a third editor to take on creative nonfiction starting with Issue 2:
Happy Place. Usually we aim for a month turn around as a soft deadline for publication, but we don’t set firm deadlines because our disabilities can be so unpredictable. Kristin had a particularly trying month, and so we pushed the date back two weeks. Because our digital presence with our readers and contributors is so personal, we’ve found we receive as much understanding and support as we have tried to provide to our community.

Though it won’t be announced for a couple of months, we’ve set the fourth theme and it’s going to
be amazing.

 

What type of disabled and/or neurodivergent representation is present in your work?

Kristin, in particular, is a very vocal member of the disability and long COVID community on  Twitter/X. Since we don’t separate our personal experiences from the magazine, the writers that gravitated towards us in that initial issue tended to come from those we knew and interacted with online. That has only grown as we have built a reputation for being supportive and inclusive.

In our submission guidelines, we make sure writers know we welcome everyone and don’t get caught up in strict formatting and submission standards:

“We accept submissions from a diverse population of writers as we hope to include the stories and literary perspectives that will expand our communities and bring understanding through the written word. In an attempt to make publication accessible for all, we will never charge a fee for submission and welcome questions. As such, we are a non-paying publication. If there is an obstacle keeping anyone from submitting, we hope you will reach out so we can remove such impediments.”

In every issue we’ve published so far, you will find disabilities, chronic illnesses, and
neurodivergence in our contributors and their work.

What was representation like when you were a child?

At the time I went through school, neurodivergence meant hyperactive boys bouncing around the
classroom and non-verbal autistic students in separate special education classrooms. Media
followed suit. The rest of us were ignored, overlooked, and on our own. There may have been
times disability was represented, but I honestly can’t remember anything beyond a character in a
wheelchair.

 

How do your own experiences shape your work?

As an author, I write mental health and struggles with anxiety and depression into my young characters. Many of them are neurodivergent as well. As an editor, I don’t want any single voice to not feel represented. We don’t shy away from hard topics, personal struggles. We make both our submission opportunities and our digital magazine accessible. And our inbox is always open to ways to improve on this.

In specific ways, I take the things I know my disabled/neurodivergent/chronically ill friends struggle with and consider how I can present our content to them in a way that makes it easiest for them to engage. I have a friend who is bedbound with the same illness I have. The easiest way for her to experience books is through audio, so, I came up with the idea to have our authors record their own pieces (or elect to have an editor record it for them) as a way to bring my magazine to her and others like her. It’s been wildly successful and something our contributors are so thrilled to be a part of. One contributor to this issue actually shared that his father has gone blind and he was excited his father can now hear the poems and stories as they were meant to be read.

 

Can you tell us about some of your favourite examples of disabled and/or neurodivergent
representation?

Hi, Kristin here, and I’m SO excited to answer this question but I’ll try to keep it short. I first started seeing great disability rep (no surprise) in the indie publishing realm but it’s creeping in more and more in traditional publishing. One of my very favorite indie authors is Fiona West—full disclosure, I copy edited several of her books before I got too sick to work but after, I interviewed her for my blog and fell in love with her work. Across her two series, Fiona’s characters are real, their illnesses or neurodivergence or addiction or disability is a part of the story because it’s a part of the character; I find her books real and empowering because encountering her books was the first time I’d seen sick people like me represented as real people worthy of authentic love. I can’t pick a favorite, but she has lots to choose from!

In the traditional publishing world I’m big fan of Talia Hibbert’s Brown Sisters trilogy for chronic illness and neurodivergence rep and Jean Meltzer’s The Matzah Ball (the first trad published main character with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, which I also have). Lillie Lainoff’s young adult novel One For All features a fencing female musketeer with POTS, and Brigit Young has done great things in the middle grade space, particularly with Worth a Thousand Words featuring a middle schooler disabled in a car accident.

I’ll save my favorite nonfiction rec for a later question!

 

Who/what has influenced your work?

This may sound sentimental, but we are most influenced by our contributors. They share pieces of themselves in their writing. I have come to know some of the hardest and best moments of their lives through their words. Everything ranging from child loss, abuse, and suicide to birth, love, and understanding. Writers from all over the world have come to trust us with some of the most personal work I’ve ever read, and we get told regularly that we are chosen specifically for such pieces because of the family dynamic we’ve created.

Do you feel that disabled and/or neurodivergent representation is changing?

We are doing everything we can to create change in the digital literary space by being leaders in accessibility and hope anyone with ideas on how to improve this will reach out! In the greater world, I do see more representation, especially of neurodivergence, but I also see so many talented disabled and neurodivergent writers, with stories that need to be told, struggling to get their voices heard in this chaotic world of publishing. Change is hard and publishing changes at a snail’s pace as its trends are often defined by profitability.

I’d also like to see invisible disabilities find the spotlight. I’ve never seen a character pushing themselves one day and having to rest for the next week in any form of media. But individuals like this, like me, exist in the world and we deserve to be known.

 

What favourite disabled and/or neurodivergent people do you recommend checking out?

Hi, Kristin again! I have met so many wonderful disabled and neurodivergent creators on Twitter/X. Aside from Melissa, of course, I recommend you check out Ryan Rae Harbuck, whose memoir When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Chair has helped me have more confidence in my ability to be Mom while disabled (@ryanraeharbuck, ryanraeharbuck.com).

Other disabled and/or neurodivergent people I respect and enjoy include Dianna Gunn (@diannalgunn), Sally Doherty (@sally_writes), Mark Wright (@markeology), and Lia Pas (@lia_pas), who is also an EpistemicLit contributor. In the litmag space, some unique magazines that are run by or give a voice to disabled or neurodivergent writers include Corporeal (note: NSFW art on site), Voidspace, and the Circus Collective, which recently released an anthology on the bipolar body. There are, of course, SO MANY more—I’m sorry I can’t list everyone!

 

And finally; time for a shameless plug:

Please check out our website EpistemicLit.com to read our issues and fall in love with our contributors like we have. We are also on Twitter/X @EpistemicLit. My middle grade work can be found on my website, or follow me @OnPunsnNeedles on Twitter/X. I have to include a plug for our poetry editor Kristin Houlihan. Her poetry collection, Lift the Mask, focuses on her journey with chronic illness. Kristin’s book can be purchased on Amazon and other online retailers and her new audiobook is available in places like Apple Books/iTunes and Audible. Follow Kristin on Twitter/X @theedifyingword and her website.

Thank you for reading my interview with Melissa and Kristin! Please do take the time to check out the Epistemic Literary Magazine’s website, and the other authors mentioned in this interview.

You can also find all the content for this year’s event at the repDISND 2024 content hub or check out the repDISND information hub to learn more!

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