A Writer’s Journey

Written by Community Member, Author Melissa McPherson

 

For the longest time, I wanted to be an artist. I longed to create beautiful things that people all over the world would admire. They would look at it and it would make them feel something, maybe they would like it so much that they would buy it, hang it on a wall, and tell everyone who visited how the art made them feel. Unfortunately, I was not born with much artistic talent, and my art career started and ended with a finger painting featured in my preschool yearbook.

As I got older, I discovered I did have some artistic talent, in the form of words. I found that, through writing, I could express myself the same way an artist could with a painting or a drawing, and on occasion, I could make others feel the things that I was feeling too. It was then, that I decided I would be a writer.

I started out as many do, borderline plagiarism and fan-fiction. I would take my favorite stories and songs and change them just enough to make them my own or take well-known characters on new adventures. But eventually, I started to come up with my own ideas and find my own voice.

The older I got, the more I found myself wanting to write about disability. It was an incredibly personal experience for me, but also something that was so often misunderstood. However, every time I tried to write a story about disability the words would not come. There were not a lot of books featuring people with Cerebral Palsy when I was growing up. Many of the ones that did exist were biographical and couched in both pity and what, today we call inspiration porn. This was not the kind of book I wanted to write. In fact, I realized, I did not want to write about disability at all, instead, I wanted to write about a character who had one. Someone like me and my friends.

I tried for years. The best I came up with were some narrative essays and a couple of angsty poems for my college writing courses that featured a lot of references to smoking, drinking,swearing, and having sex. (Yes, people with disabilities do all those things and the shock value of that fact was important to me.) A fictional story, even a short one, would not come. Life eventually took over and my writing dwindled to maintaining a blog about wedding planning and writing grants. Once I had kids my writing dried up entirely as I poured every ounce of my creativity into raising my children.

Then one night, I was watching The Walking Dead with my husband and he pointed out a zombie in the background that was sitting in a wheelchair. At the time, we were laughing and talking about whether the extra had a real disability or not. Later, I started to wonder, would I be able to survive a zombie apocalypse? I thought it was not likely, I couldn’t run, and I was pretty sure I’d be a crap shot with a gun, but was there another way? Where would I go?

After some time, those questions began to form scenes in my head. I began to write, and the book that would eventually be The Lesser Remain was born. Thirty-two years after I decided to be a writer, and three years after I began writing it, my first novel was published. Did I ever imagine that it would be a book about a zombie apocalypse? Absolutely not. But somehow it was the idea of zombies that allowed me to write the book I had always wanted to write.

The Lesser Remain is a story about a zombie apocalypse, and that is definitely not for everyone; it is also a story about living in a body with a disability. My main character faces many situations that are familiar to those in the disability community; discrimination, access issues, and a body that doesn’t always do what he wants. He uses his wit and ingenuity, not to overcome these issues, but to work through them. He also experiences the same things all humans experience; love, fear, heartbreak, self-doubt, and isolation. His Cerebral Palsy is part of his story but it is not the story.

I can’t tell you whether he survives, that would spoil the ending, but I will tell you that this is the story that I needed to write. I hope that it makes you laugh, I hope that it makes you cry, I hope that it makes you feel something that maybe you didn’t expect. When it does, I hope that you will put it on your shelf and when people come over, I hope that you tell them about it.