Disability, Adversity, and Kid Lit: authors Sally J. Pla and Margaret Finnegan discuss disability representation in youth literature

Margaret: I’m excited to have this conversation on the heels of your book The Fire, The Water, and Maudie McGinn winning a 2024 ALA Schneider Family Book Award for its outstanding representation of the disability experience. I think all your works offer such representation. Why is that important to you?

Sally: Thank you so much for those kind words, Margaret! I’m so happy we are having this conversation. I’ve always felt we are kindred kinds of writers, interested in the same sorts of things. 

I do consider it my mission, of sorts, to populate children’s literature with as many nuanced neurodivergent characters as I can, because those characters did not exist when I was young and struggling to understand how to engage with the world. I felt like I was from a different planet. I would have given anything to have “met” a character going  through the same stuff, who could perhaps guide me. I was a voracious reader, but never saw my struggles (let alone any potential solutions) portrayed anywhere. It made me feel like I didn’t quite exist. 

When my own autistic/neurodivergent kids were young, it was the same way for them! Sure, there were some lovely books, in general. But hardly anything with true respectful honest representation of a disability experience. Back then disabled characters were just token nods, autistic characters were comic-relief stereotypes, and disability was often used as “inspiration porn” or blunt, pathologized examples (“This is my brother X_. He has Y_. Here is a list of his symptoms”). It got me wanting to try and to throw open the windows and shine all kinds of light down on honest, for-real, natural representation. I wanted today’s kids to have characters to love, respect, enjoy, admire, learn from, look up to. Character on natural story-adventures, who just happened to be different.

What about you? What led you to care so deeply about disability representation in your work or in general? 

Margaret: Sadly, I only started thinking about disability representation when my eldest was diagnosed with epilepsy, and, later, learning differences, and, later still, autism. With each diagnosis, I re-learned how our culture is oriented around, and caters to, the able. As you say, it’s hard  to find positive representations of people with disabilities. But it’s easy to encounter ableist representations. Recently, I watched the film “Theater Camp.” It starts with a woman being so incapacitated by a photosensitive seizure that she falls into a coma–and it’s played for laughs. My daughter has photosensitive seizures. It’s not funny to us, and it’s ableist.

The point is, my journey was different from yours, but it led me to the same place. I decided to feature characters with disabilities because I wanted my daughter to see her experience represented. I wanted her to see that she had strengths and that she wasn’t alone. I also wanted to highlight how the challenges faced by people with disabilities are often socially constructed. I teach college students, including many who self identify as neurodiverse. They face so many barriers, including loud, crowded classrooms that can overload sensitive sensory systems or just be incredibly distracting. Investing in such classrooms is a choice our society makes about whose strengths to privilege.

But get me off my soap box, already! My kindred writer, Sally. Explain how you do the opposite of what I’ve just done. How do you remain mission driven without sounding pedantic? 

Sally: When I start writing a story, I am not really thinking overtly and consciously about working in a certain kind of representation. It just evolves from the story-problem and the character’s personality. I have an extremely and diversely neurodivergent family-and-friends network, so it’s what I know… I’m not sure I could write a neurotypical character with as much depth – it would feel like “writing the other.” (And by the way, https://writingtheother.com/ is a great resource for learning how to write outside your lived experience respectfully.)

Another thing that helps is that I may be old and creaky on the outside, now, but inside, I still feel really young. I am WAY in touch with my inner twelve year old. I’ve heard it said that part of us stays in arrested-development at the age where something crucial or important happened to us. And maybe that’s true. I’ve also heard it said that children’s authors write to heal their inner child, to rewrite parts of their childhood. 

Is this true, in any sense, for you, Margaret? 

Margaret: Those ideas are new to me, but they resonate. My parents divorced when I was ten. I went from being middle class to getting free school lunches and living in affordable housing. And now my latest book, Sunny Parker is Here To Stay, is about a girl who lives in affordable housing. She isn’t me by any stretch of the imagination, but I related to her, especially her shame at having thrift store clothes. I vividly remember a white thrift-store sweater with gold buttons my mom got me. I was terrified that a peer would say it had once been theirs. 

How about you? Does your latest work connect to the kid you once were? 

Sally: Heavens yes. There is so much of my heart, soul, and life experience in Maudie. And in my new upcoming book, Invisible Isabel, (pubs July 9), I even thanked my elementary school bully in the book’s acknowledgements for inspiring parts of the story! Ha ha. So, yes. I put parts of my life and my heart on the page – but in service of healing, for young readers, and maybe for myself a bit, too.

We have talked privately about some tough stuff we’ve both gone through. Disability certainly complicates childhood. I just want to end by saying that the humans I know who have gone through real adversity in their lives are the most interesting, wise, burnished, compassionate, lovely people I know. It’s like Kintsugi – cracked into pieces, repaired in gold. Or, as the amazing autistic author Matt Haig has said: “It’s okay to be the teacup with the chip in it. That’s the one with a story.” 

Margaret: I love that. Here is to the teacup with the chip in it!

Sally: And here’s to the stories. May they do some good out in the world.

Author Bios:

Margaret Finnegan is the author of the Junior Library Guild Selections Sunny Parker is Here to Stay (JLG Gold Standard), New Kids & Underdogs, Susie B. Won’t Back Down, and We Could be Heroes, all from Atheneum Books for Young Readers. Her work has appeared in FamilyFun, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, and other publications. She live in Pasadena, California, where sh enjoys hanging out with her family, walking her grumpy dog, and baking really good chocolate cakes. Visit her at MargaretFinnegan.com or @FinneganBegin on Instagram. 

Sally J. Pla is the 2024 ALA Schneider-Award-winning author of THE FIRE, THE WATER, AND MAUDIE McGINN, as well as the Dolly Gray Award-winning THE SOMEDAY BIRDS and several other novels and picture books. Her books have starred reviews and appear on many state awards lists and “best books” roundups. Sally, who is neurodivergent, has appeared on television and radio as an author and autism advocate. She also runs the website resource A Novel Mind (anovelmind.com). Sally believes in kindness, respect, and the beauty of different brains. We are all stars shining with different lights! Visit her at www.sallyjpla.com.

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