New Mobility magazine’s article The New York Times Disability Series Gives Disabled Writers A Place To Shine gives a great overview of the New York Times series of disability essays.
“The one thing most people do know about being disabled is that they don’t want to be that,” she wrote, making it clear from the beginning that the “Disability” series, as The Times would call it, was going to delve far deeper into the disability experience than mainstream media typically does.
Over the next two years, the series published essays by a mother with dwarfism who reflects on the passing of her disability onto two of her children, an incomplete spinal-cord-injured Rhodes Scholar whose professor suggested that he may have played the pity card to win the prestigious scholarship, and an eighth-grader with muscular dystrophy who authored a children’s book, only to have publishers reject it because the wheelchair-using main character was too happy.
I hope this series can expose unsuspecting readers to the many sides of disability. We’re out here all over the place, but admittedly hard to find.