Interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Author of Nerve

Following the release of her craft chapbook, Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice, Sarah Fawn Montgomery spoke with Sundress intern Aylli Cortez about recognizing alternatives to traditional creative writing instruction. With incisive clarity, Sarah presents a multitude of possibilities for accessible spaces and work that empowers rather than depletes.

Nerve is part of Sundress Publications’s 2025 Craft Chaps Series.

Aylli Cortez: From discussing the need to unlearn ableist workshop advice, you then provide alternative ways for readers to develop their practice, design their space, and discover forms that truly work for them. What made you decide to organize the book into these sections?

Sarah Fawn Montgomery: I began with unlearning ableist advice because so many disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers are encouraged to believe they are somehow failing because they struggle with the writing instruction they have received. Because so many of us are quick to blame ourselves due to internalized ableism, it’s important to dismantle ableist education, pointing out the ways that this kind of instruction not only hinders our work, but hurts our brains and bodies. 

I wanted to point out ways traditional writing workshops are at odds with the disabled experience, as well as common microaggressions disabled writers encounter as advice, because this is the starting ground for many who have endured abuse in the workshop and are looking for ways to remake their practice entirely. This starting point then allowed me to discuss other important and often overlooked aspects of being a disabled writer. Offering ways to design disabled writing spaces, discover disabled forms and structures, and develop strategies for the practical business of being a writer was essential because many disabled writers operate entirely differently than our abled colleagues, yet this is never discussed in writing workshops or common craft advice.

AC: Not only is this book dedicated to crip kin, it also demonstrates what it means to be crip kin—to, as an author, write with your disabled readers and their varied experiences or symptoms in mind. What were your goals while writing for this audience?

SFM: So often disability is ignored or presented as a burden to accommodate. Most craft books and writing workshops assume a universality of experience, as if every writer utilizes creativity using the same methods, education a one-size-fits-all experience. I’m someone who spent many years in traditional writing workshops, pursuing an MFA then a PhD, and eventually achieving tenure as a creative writing professor. While I was able to write using the conventional methods I was taught, they never seemed authentic to my creativity, and, as I write about in Nerve, they came at great physical and mental costs.

This is a shared experience for many disabled writers, so I wanted to center our experiences in this book, framing them not as deficits, but as abundant sources of inspiration and innovation. This is a book that explores the disabled experience but does not suggest that this experience is universal. Instead, I try to provide many ways of writing the disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent experience, recognizing that what works for one writer may not work for another, and may not even work for the same writer as their bodies and minds shift with symptoms, abilities, and time. Instead, this is a book about modeling disabled perspectives, offering a variety of ways of being and writing in the world, and encouraging writers to listen to their bodies and minds rather than conventional wisdom. Disabled writers are incredibly innovative—we have to be to survive in an ableist world!—and so I wanted this book to center this innovation so that we might learn to trust our intuition and find the ways that foster our success rather than trying to force myself to follow ableist methods do not actually serve us. 

AC: The book’s generative prompts are direct and specific, inviting readers to write from their own lives and resist non-inclusive expectations. Why did you place these prompts at the end of the book?

SFM: Disabled writers experience radical shifts in our abilities on a day-to-day, sometimes moment-to-moment basis, so it was important to structure this book in a way that responded to this reality. Some writers may have the ability to engage with craft advice, while others may be looking for quick prompts to get them started. By sectioning them out this way, disabled writers can reflect on their abilities in the moment and quickly locate what will best serve them.

Similarly, not every writer engages with writing exercises the same way. For example, as an autistic writer, I have always struggled with direct prompts. I prefer a larger list of possibilities to choose from rather than a direct exercise, which can feel prescriptive, and often renders me unable to write. That’s why I model so many possibilities in the book, offering writers many different ways to do something so that they can choose what works for them and hopefully feel unencumbered by the performance of an exercise, as well as providing a list of generative prompts for writers who prefer direct exercises. Many of these prompts come directly from the advice in the book but are worded in a way that is more specific and offer readers and writers a clear task, while still providing the freedom and flexibility to make it their own.

AC: A recurring tip that resonated with me was the act of reframing rest and reflection as integral parts of the writing process, especially as one’s body and sense of time shift. Could you tell us more about the intention behind these themes of replenishment and regulation as opposed to healing?

SFM: Writing and publishing seem to constantly reinforce productivity, but this is exhausting for anyone for whom writing is not a full-time job, let alone disabled people, who are busy instead with the task of living. Capitalistic hustle culture maintains that products are more important than people, and craft books are no exception, focusing on the writing rather than the writer. But we can’t write well if we don’t live well, so I wanted to reframe rest and reflection as part of the writing process because these are essential for writers yet largely absent from conversations around craft.

In addition, it was important for me to write about replenishment and regulation rather than recovery, because for many of us, recovery simply isn’t an option. I can’t recover from my various disabilities, and while I would certainly like to be in less chronic pain, I would not choose to recover from my neurodivergence even if I could. My disabilities and my neurodivergence are essential parts of my being, essential ways that I process the world, essential components of my creative abilities. Rest and reflection are important strategies that allow us to exist in our bodies and brains in ways that can sustain us. We spend enough time and energy trying to live in an ableist world, so by considering replenishment and regulation as necessary to both disabled and writing life, we can start to consider writing as an act of agency rather than capitalistic production. Narrative is an act of empowerment, but we can’t be empowered if we are hurting. Rest and reflection are essential because we deserve to exist in our bodies and brains in ways that respond to pain and encourage pleasure. 

AC: In response to academic and publishing settings that enforce formal constraints on an already constrained group, what formal choices did you have the most fun with while putting this book together?

SFM: As someone who has spent many years in academic and publishing settings, I took a lot of pleasure in dismantling many of the constraints I was taught and have been required to follow throughout my career. First, the length of this book is a direct pushback against the argument that a longer work is inherently more valuable than a shorter one, that hybridity or chapbooks do not hold as much intellectual weight as full-length books. I wanted the length of this book to surprise readers and ask them to reconsider their beliefs about what constitutes a good craft book, what counts as good craft advice, and who gets to decide.

Similarly, this book puts the reader firmly in the role of expert. Most craft books situate the author and various writers included throughout the text as the experts readers must follow if they want to succeed, but disabled people are experts of our experiences, and so we should be taking advice from our own bodies and brains rather than forcing ourselves to follow the ableist advice of others, no matter their résumés. This book is full of reminders to unlearn various ableist advice you may have learned in school in favor of your own intuition and innovation.

Nerve is available to download for free from Sundress Publications

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Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice. She is also the author of Halfway from Home, Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, and three poetry chapbooks. Abbreviate, a short collection of flash nonfiction, is forthcoming. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.

Aylli Cortez is a transmasc Filipino poet and creative writing graduate of Ateneo de Manila University, where he received a DALISAYAN Award in the Arts for Poetry in 2024. His debut chapbook Unabandon was a winner of the Gacha Press Chapbook Contest and will be published in 2025. His work has appeared in VERDANT Journal, en*gendered lit, Bullshit Lit, and HAD, among others. Based in Metro Manila, he is currently a poetry reader for ANMLY and a member of the Ateneo Press Review Crew. Find him online @1159cowboy or visit his website.