Jen Campbell is a London-based author for children and adults, as well as an editor, book reviewer, and disability advocate. Author Lucy Catchpole is a full-time wheelchair user and has written about disability for the Guardian and the BBC, and on Instagram with her husband, fellow writer James Catchpole. Together, the Catchpoles also run a children’s literary agency in Oxford, England. The trio’s new nonfiction anthology for young readers, Owning It: Our Disabled Childhoods in Our Own Words, features 22 true stories from disabled writers. Here the co-editors reflect on how the collection came together, and the need for more nuanced and authentic representation of disabled children.
Back in that strange pandemic spring of 2021, Owning It was born from a conversation among us, three disabled writers. Jen hosted an online launch for James’s book What Happened to You? and the three of us got to talking.
Disability is so often a very private thing. When we get to have those rare and precious conversations, there can be such a buzz: so much laughter and shared understanding. This is something we didn’t really have as disabled children: that sense of community. Growing up disabled can be isolating, and not just because you might not know other disabled children, but because society more often than not praises disabled children for being “brave,” for “passing” for non-disabled, for not talking about the difficult stuff, for camouflaging yourself and getting on with it.
As disabled children, we might not have had a sense of community with other disabled people, but as adults, that changed—largely because of social media. As adults, we have an online space where we meet other disabled people, where we share jokes and experiences, and where non-disabled audiences find us, too, and have their perspectives altered.
How could we let disabled kids know that all this solidarity, this common understanding, awaits them? What could we do to give them a sense of it now, while they’re still children?
Naturally, we could write a book. We’re authors, after all. And we’ve met so many interesting, engaging disabled people on social media—and some of them are writers, too.
We wanted to harness the wealth of experience of disabled writers to create a book for the disabled children of today. This would be the book we wish we’d had, that could have shown us how others have managed to navigate the hospital appointments, the sports field, the friendships, the laughter, and the hurt. A book-shaped friend that could be carried around in a pocket, or curled up with at bedtime—a book that could help a reader feel seen and heard.
So, we asked disabled writers to join us, and set about creating an anthology.
Owning It is about what it’s really like to grow up with a disability. There have always been disabled characters in children’s books, but generally they haven’t been written by disabled writers. And it shows. These characters—in Peter Pan, in Heidi, and in far more modern books that we won’t name here—are essentially dramatic tools. They exist to embody evilness, or to be saintly, to be healed or to provide an emotional crutch (!) for the non-disabled hero.
We wanted the current generation of children to have a very different book, of true stories by disabled writers. So we asked our writers to tell us a memory from their own childhoods. If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to have one leg, or use a wheelchair, or have dwarfism, or a disfigurement, or to be Blind or Deaf, this book will allow you to walk in the shoes—or shoe!—of someone who does.
A book like this, full of the wisdom of a previous generation, would certainly have helped us as children. And as far as we know, there’s no other anthology like it. We turned to our community and cast the net wide, to find writers with a whole range of different disabilities, and from different countries and walks of life. No net could catch every fish, but we hope all disabled readers will feel in some way seen, in the book’s pages, and may be afforded some idea of how their futures might unfold.
But Owning It isn’t only for disabled children. We also hope it’ll provide a window for non-disabled peers to better understand the experience of disability from the outside. (One thing we know from social media is that people are interested, with disabled creators out there building followings into the millions.) Because stories have an immense power: the power to see the world from someone else’s perspective. And when the perspective is that of a disabled child, readers are being given access to stories that have rarely been told without having been filtered through a non-disabled lens—a lens that seeks to tidy up the uncomfortable realities, to smooth down rough edges, and to camouflage difference.
This is disabled childhood in all its messy, joyful reality, for everyone to see.
Owning It: Our Disabled Childhoods in Our Own Words, edited by Jen Campbell and James and Lucy Catchpole, illus. by Sophie Kamlish. Faber & Faber, $18.95 Aug. 19 ISBN 978-0-571-38002-2
