In the second audio episode of Writing While Disabled, hosts Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston welcome Farah Mendlesohn, acclaimed SFF scholar and conrunner, to talk all things hearing, dyslexia, and more ADHD adjustments, as well as what fandom could and should be doing better for accessibility at conventions, for both volunteers and attendees.

If you prefer, you can watch the full interview on video with close-caption subtitles below:

Show notes:

• This episode was produced by Kristy Anne Cox, and edited & transcribed by Kat Kourbeti.
• The theme song, "Funky - Upbeat Loop" by ispeakwaves, is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• Want to send us a question? You can do so here!
• Find Farah on her website, farahmendlesohn.com, or follow her on Bluesky @effjayem.bsky.social.
• Pre-order Farah's upcoming book on Joanna Russ's The Female Man on the Luna Press website.
• Find Kristy on her website here.

Don't forget: this year, Strange Horizons is celebrating our 25th birthday!

• Want to leave us a happy 25th birthday message? Click here to record an audio message, and here for video.
• Join our Patreon for early episode access, or donate through PayPal or other means here.

Transcript

Kristy Anne Cox: Welcome to Writing While Disabled. I am Kristy Anne Cox, and with me is Kate Johnston and the fabulous guest for today, Farah Mendlesohn.

I am going to just briefly introduce our guest here. Farah is a retired university professor. She currently works for a small charity. She has won the Hugo and the World Fantasy Award for her scholarship and has a number of scholarly works out, as well as a novel, Spring Flowering, in 2017.

And Kate, would you mind saying your name and introducing yourself?

Kate Johnston: My name is Kate Johnston, and I am an author and an editor who lives in Oakland, California.

Kristy Anne Cox: And Farah is calling in from Scotland. We are doing this interview in Zoom, so there should be a transcript for those of you who want to lip read. There should also be a video. And if you have questions or want to participate with this conversation, you can go to the Strange Horizons website and we have a question form there that you can join in with any questions you have for our guest of honor, or for either of us, or any thoughts you have.

All right. Shall we get go?

Kate Johnston: We shall. Yes, ma'am.

Kristy Anne Cox: All right. I would like Farah to start by asking you the secrets of writing. The writing while disabled.

Farah Mendlesohn: Place bum on seat and start writing. I am a great fan of Anthony Trollop, who, when he used to finish a book, if he finished while he still had time to write that morning, he put a line underneath what he'd written and started the next one.

And I'm not that good. I'm not, but because I have never particularly wanted to write, to me it's always been a job. It's always been a thing I did because this is the thing I needed to do. So waiting around for inspiration isn't a thing I do, because I would wait forever.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. So you're approaching it from a very workman-like standpoint.

Farah Mendlesohn: I realized fairly recently that if I was 30 years younger, I'd be making TikTok videos and TED Talks. I wasn't a good writer at university. I had writer's block for most of it. I didn't start writing until I switched to a keyboard because it actually turns out that I'm dyslexic. In fact, it was switching to a keyboard that got me diagnosed as dyslexic.

I have arthritis in my hands, so using a pen was uncomfortable, and I don't have what I think of as a creative imagination. Most of my friends who are novelists, their happiest time was when a teacher said to them, "we've got a little time. You can write anything you want." And I would panic. I don't think that way.

So I came very late to writing, and I came late to writing because I had to be able to learn to write, in order to say the things I wanted to say in ways that other people would have access to, which is why my comment, if I was much younger, I'm not sure I'd be a writer. I would've found a different way to express things.

One of the things I did was to become assistant editor of the academic journal Foundation. And there's nothing like reading and correcting other people's work to help you understand how it fits together, how an argument is structured, how you add the evidence in what analysis looks like, and to start to think about what you want to achieve with your writing, what writing you admire, what writing you want to emulate.

The two aren't necessarily the same thing. Yeah, I'll leave that question there because I've forgotten what the question was, which is one of my other disabilities. I have very little short term memory these days.

Kristy Anne Cox: I'm working off of ADHD and Kate, you're on team ADHD too, right?

Farah Mendlesohn: And so am I, as we found out.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yes!

Farah Mendlesohn: When I went to the doctor after long Covid and said "I'm struggling, none of my coping mechanisms seem to work anymore." And the doctor looked at me and said, "and coping for what exactly?"

Kate Johnston: Oh, no.

Farah Mendlesohn: And I went, that's a really good question. And he sent me home with a form, and then we had some conversations, particularly about the fact that I have been writing my books in 15 minute intervals my entire life, and walked away with a diagnosis of ADHD. I have the concentration span of a flea. This idea that I am this, I've had people say to me, "oh, you are so disciplined." No. I'm very good about coming back to the thing I'm writing, but I come back to the thing I'm doing over and over again during the day. My partner starts at 9:00 AM and finishes at four. How?

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Farah Mendlesohn: How? And when he's writing, he is writing consistently. He starts at A, he works through to Z. Me, I add a section here, I add a section there. I have an idea that I write down on my phone. Thank you God, for whoever invented Scrivener. Scrivener is just the greatest program if you have ADHD.

And although I do place bum on seat and start writing, and before I had a dog, I actually had a motto of 500 words before breakfast. It's now dog walk before breakfast. That focus is short. That focus is something that is interrupted by everything from cups of tea, using a couple of weights, tidying up some books on the shelves, and long term switching to another article when I got bored.

So I almost always have two projects on the go. It's rare for me to be only working on one thing at a time.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. I think one of the things I get out of this interview series is just so much permission. You have to work the way that you work. And it's exactly what we do in medicine, which is if you're prescribing a medicine that the patient isn't gonna take, don't waste your time.

Farah Mendlesohn: I used to say this to my students, figure out what time of day you normally write, because I spent at least a decade promising myself that I would work when I got home, from whatever home was. I've never done anything when I get home, if I need to extend my day, I have to stay in the office. The moment I leave, we are done.

And I can get up at three in the morning and get you that paper by nine, but I cannot work at 5:00 PM. It's just pointless. And over the years I've come to accept that. I have a close writer friend who used to constantly talk about how they would try to write their book in three months and then he had to take time off. And I finally said, no, this is never going to happen. Stop doing this to yourself. This is not how you work.

So I do think figuring out how you work best, is really the only way to succeed. And for some people that's burning the midnight oil, for some people it's writing 60,000 words in three weeks. Me, if I have a big piece of writing to do, then I will aim for a thousand words every single day. Because although I can write more than that, I can't write more than that every single day. If I go up to 1500, I won't sustain more than about 10 days. If I got up to 2000, I'd only manage three, but a thousand words a day, I can do.

But that's me. That's not other people. So it can often sound as if you're lecturing people as to how they should do that. It doesn't work that way. It really doesn't.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Farah Mendlesohn: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: You said that you do most of your writing in the office. Is that correct?

Farah Mendlesohn: Yes. That's new. When I was younger, it would've been a cafe.

Kristy Anne Cox: Are you in your office right now? Is that what we're looking at?

Farah Mendlesohn: No, you are actually looking at the dining room, but we have books absolutely everywhere. This is just where the wifi is strongest.

Kristy Anne Cox: If I could ask you, could you describe your workspace to us? What does it look like, specifically from an accessibility standpoint?

Farah Mendlesohn: So I should say here that my primary disability is hearing, which means that as far as accessibility at my desk is concerned, that isn't an issue. But I do have joint problems, so I have to have a really good office chair. My last one lasted 20 years, so it's worth spending a lot of money for me on that office chair so that I'm not dealing with backache, I'm not dealing with joint issues all the time.

So here is where the flags going up, going, "you are neurospicy". My office is actually the front room of this flat and it's a very big room, but my office section years ago, I hit lucky, I picked up a long thin library desk in a sale. It's made of oak. It's absolutely beautiful. So you have to imagine that there are bookcases behind me, as there are here, there is my feet, and then there is my desk. And then in front of that is a chest of drawers, which has a lot of my art material in it, and a couple of other drawers. So it creates a small space in the large space. And as long as I can remember, I've needed that sense of coziness. Even as a child, I preferred the small bedroom to a big bedroom. I need to feel hemmed in.

So the shape I've described for you is exactly the way I constructed my office in the previous house. There was a sofa in front of my desk, but it created kind of a wall between me and the rest of the room. And you'd think that would mean that I could work in a small room, but I can't. And I can't because, and this is an accessibility issue, I need huge amounts of daylight.

This is one of those where there's no name for it, but the optician has confirmed, I don't see well in gloom, and I don't see well in bright light. I have a fairly narrow range in which I see. So I spend two thirds of the year in sunglasses and the rest of the year going, "oh, it's too dark for me to function."

So I need the big windows, I need the big space. I have all the lights on when I'm working. I have uplighters to add extra light. I was able to get them when I was working for university, they were willing to accommodate that. So my space is very bright.

Kristy Anne Cox: That sounds lovely.

Farah Mendlesohn: And it doesn't sound like an accessibility issue, but it is.

So I have Celiac, but before I was diagnosed with that, I had chronic migraine, and I had migraine every day of my life. And one of the issues that used to trigger it is that I'm very light sensitive, so get the wrong color light, the wrong kind of fluorescent, and I'd have a migraine within minutes. I can't have blue carpets. Any kind of blue ink, blue carpets, anything like that distorts my ability to read. So some of that is part of the setup.

And I suppose the only other issue is I can't use a mouse because I've got a problem with my shoulder. So I'm on a laptop and I use a track pad. And again, this is something people who aren't disabled don't always quite get, is that if you get your accessibility set up right, you can forget that you've got a disability.

Two jobs ago, they insisted I use a desktop and I knew there was a reason why this was a bad idea, but I could not remember. And it turned out to be because one week with a mouse, I couldn't feel my fingers.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Farah Mendlesohn: But you do forget. You don't think about this. I have to wear orthotics in my shoes and one day I was in a hurry, I slid on some trainers, I walked into town and ended up having to call home for a new pair of shoes. 15 minutes without them. And I remember, do I wear them? Whereas a lot of the time, I don't think twice because it's sorted, it's dealt with.

This is drifting a bit from the writing; I have to have something on the radio because I have tinnitus, so I can't cope with pure silence anymore, which is a shame because I was somebody who prefers silence— well, I prefer the thought of silence, in that I've always liked a certain level of white noise. And that's why when I was younger, I tended to write in cafes a lot. We didn't call that white noise then, but that gentle buzz created the cone of silent space for me that I need, and now the radio does it, but I can't work in complete silence anymore. And that's a bit sad.

Kristy Anne Cox: Methodologies change over our lives. What works for you at one period of time may not be the best thing in the next decade of your life.

Farah Mendlesohn: The tinnitus is definitely a problem, and that came on in my thirties. And this I'm just going to mention to anybody out there who has developing tinnitus, hearing aids improve tinnitus. Nobody quite knows why, but if you have tinnitus, get your ears checked because of the chance you're going deaf, and there is a chance that hearing aids will actively help. And nobody knows why they actively help, but they do.

Kate Johnston: Yeah, I don't think that most people are aware of how important light is and the right kind. I have very dark eyes. My partner has lighter eyes. I like a higher level of light than they do. So they walk into my office, they're like [vampire hiss].

Farah Mendlesohn: I walk in, I go, "how can you see this? There are no lights on."

Kristy Anne Cox: Readers of the transcript: Kate just held her hands up in front of her face as if seeing a vampire. It was a deeply humorous moment for all involved.

Farah, are you using an ergonomic keyboard when you don't use a laptop?

Farah Mendlesohn: No, because I have tiny hands, and ergonomic keyboards are made for men. So I take an American five and a half in a shoe, and I have hands to match. Yeah, I'll hold them up. I have very small hands. You can't tell on the screen, but I, yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Readers, Farah is holding up delightfully small hands, and all of us are very appreciative.

Farah Mendlesohn: So the complication is, I was taught to type when I was about five. My mother trained to teach art and drama and they couldn't find her a school, 'cause in those days they used to place training teachers, and they said, "oh, but you used to be a secretary. We desperately need commerce and typing teachers."

Now my mother had actually slightly lied about her qualifications and she had to figure out how to teach typing very quickly, so she practiced on her 5-year-old, which is partially how nobody noticed I was dyslexic. Because I learned to read partially through learning to type.

What I was getting to here is, I learned to type on a manual and my mother always promised me that when I was older I'd be able to reach the A key, and I never was. Ever, on a manual. Hands just not big enough.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: Piano lessons were not your forte.

Kristy Anne Cox: Kate, I don't wanna monopolize all the questions, but I have another question. Feel free to interrupt me and jump in whenever you want.

Kate Johnston: I am waiting till we get to the con part, so.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. So I have two more questions about your method, if that's okay, Farah.

Farah Mendlesohn: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: You mentioned that you are really good at coming back after interruptions. How do you do that? That sounds like witchcraft to me.

Farah Mendlesohn: Because I get bored by the interruption. It's just that I'm bored of an interest, bored of an interest, bored of an interest. It's that simple.

When I was first starting out, a lecturer called Joanna de Groot told me that the biggest problem of getting a PhD is boredom, and that you have to find a way not to be bored.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Farah Mendlesohn: It was possibly the only really useful piece of advice anybody ever gave me. And I watched as colleagues fell by the wayside because they got bored with their PhDs. I got bored by my PhD, so I went and wrote an article on something totally different, and then I got bored with that. So I went back to the PhD.

So right now, book number one is out with readers. I am currently finishing off some bits of admin writing an overview book report, et cetera. And while the book is out with readers, I'll move back to book two, and by the time book one comes back, I will be desperate for the distraction because book two will be boring me.

And the same is true in miniature, I get distracted, I go move some books, and then I finish moving some books. By that point, I'm ready to go back to work again. And it is really just a cycle of boredom, distraction, boredom, distraction, all the way through. It looks like deep commitment. That's not what's going on.

Kate Johnston: Yeah, I've heard that before. Somebody said the other day that they have to have one thing that they're working on, so that they can procrastinate from that by writing the other thing. And when they write the other thing, then they procrastinate, they go back. And I was just like, if I would've known this 20 years ago, I would've been a much more prolific writer by now.

Farah Mendlesohn: This is how the house stays clean.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yes.

Farah Mendlesohn: Because I get bored. I notice the carpet needs scraping 'cause we have pets. So I do that, by which time I'm ready to go back and write a bit.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Farah Mendlesohn: And then I'm bored again, so I go wipe a table. But I'm never interested enough or committed enough to the housework for that to become like a total distraction.

The only thing I think I really focus on is possibly cooking, which I love. But even then, I don't tend to cook anything that requires focused attention in any kind of delicate way, because that's asking for trouble. I'm a good cook and I'm a decent baker, but I couldn't make sweets or anything that required you to be stirring a lot. I would get distracted. I do get distracted. Wander off and it starts burning.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: What happens if you are taking a break and you're cleaning something, it's gonna take you like five minutes, and someone starts talking to you. What do you do?

Farah Mendlesohn: Snarl at them. That one's easy. Snarl. My partner has mastered the art of placing the cup of coffee on my desk at 10:30, and I don't even notice him. It appears like magic, because when I am focused, I've got the hyper focus. If you break my hyper focus, I'm not very nice. I'm really not very nice. It's just something that people have had to accept. Oh, and complicated by the fact that if you really do break my focus and I haven't heard you come in, I'll jump sky high because I can't hear you come in.

I listen to a lot of audio books, so that kind of helps as well. I started listening to audio books during a period of really difficult depression. I'd had a very bad breakup and I wasn't functioning, but it became a way of training my ability to listen. And one of my books, the Diana Wynne Jones book, was very profoundly affected by listening to the books rather than just reading them, because I read too fast, and listening to them forced me to slow right down.

I say I use audio books, but I actually use audio books as a way of teaching myself to listen, as well as to listen to the thing. And even then, half the time I have to go back and re-listen to something I've just missed. I'm listening to Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, which is superb, but I'm going to have to restart the chapter tomorrow morning because I got distracted.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Yeah.

Farah Mendlesohn: Ada Palmer clearly has exactly the same kind of mind. I thought I was bad. One minute she's talking about Florence, and the next she's talking about Iceland. Fine. You go for it, Ada.

Kristy Anne Cox: One of the issues I run into in alternating between hyperfocus and distractibility, is I forget what I wanted to come back to. So instead of alternating between two things, I'm alternating between 25 things, and none of them get done.

Do either of you experience that?

Farah Mendlesohn: One of the things I notice is I do a kind of circuit, and it's interesting the degree to which I've set things up without even thinking about it, so that I will do the washing up, I'll move to the thing I'm chopping, I will clean a bit of the fridge, I'll turn—there will be that sense of moving in a circle. And everything that I function around has a kind of circular structure to it.

But the forgetting what it was you were doing, the biggie: I leave notes to myself everywhere. And when I do leave a piece of writing, I will often write down what I want to do next.

Kate Johnston: Yep.

Farah Mendlesohn: So I will write a line so I know where I'm coming in, depending on the kind of work I'm doing.

So I have two kinds of work. One is the rhetoric for fantasy kind of work, which is very thinking through things line by line. But the other is the much more historical work, where I'm often throwing things down on paper. I will often spend a bit of time before I finish a writing session, writing the outline of the next chunk. Not because I will follow that outline, but because it would at least remind me what I was thinking of.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Farah Mendlesohn: Not least because there's always that thing: is the person you're going to be tomorrow, going to write the thing that the person you are today would've written. And sometimes I get a bit stressed about that, trying to maintain that.

That one's really affecting me at the moment, because I am completing books that were supposed to be written in 2020, and I was very ill in 2020, the short version for your listeners, as I managed to get surgery, covid and cancer all in six months. And it's taken a long time to recover, and part of the recovery was having to relearn to write, because I had basically brain damage from the covid. And the book I have just finished or just sent off to readers, probably isn't the book I would've written in 2020, and that's a bit of a struggle to accept.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Farah Mendlesohn: And I don't mean, it's worse or better or anything like that. I just mean it's not the same book.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. I hear you on that. I feel that way about finishing a draft that I've walked away from for a long time. There's kind of a grief over what the old story could have been or the old piece could have been, but I also am excited about the new thing. It's just not the same thing.

Farah Mendlesohn: I'm gonna introduce our guest for, for our sensory folks. Freddy loves absolutely everybody.

Kristy Anne Cox: Can I just briefly describe Freddy for our readers? Freddy is amazing. Imagine the cutest cat you've seen, and double it.

Farah Mendlesohn: So Freddy is a gray point Siamese cat, he has blue eyes, he's very delicate. A cat show judge once described him as, and you'll have to imagine the Belgian accent, "a perfect piece of art."

He is also a nasty, horrible, murdering boss boy kitty who kills all the mice. A mouse a day helps you work, rest, and play. But he's also the most social cat I have ever had in my life. He spent his days playing with the Siamese kitten at the back of the house called Rhea, and he pops into everybody's houses to say hello. He's got more friends on the block than I do.

Kristy Anne Cox: Our next podcast, Kate, we should do just the cats of science fiction writers, because—

Kate Johnston: Absolutely.

Farah Mendlesohn: I did once do a fundraising calendar called the Cats of Science Fiction, but unfortunately the Science Fiction Foundation Board said no.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh.

Farah Mendlesohn: Thought we would've made quite a lot of money.

Kristy Anne Cox: You can fundraise for us with cats. That's fine.

Kate Johnston: Although, Farah does have a bi-pet household, and so I don't know that it would be fair to ignore Phryne completely.

Kristy Anne Cox: That's true. Wouldn't it be a tri-pet household? Are we saying dog versus cat? Yeah. Tri-pet, bi-species.

Farah Mendlesohn: Yes. There's the Orange Major who is wandering around, and he is Major Thomas WSFS, because he had a Hugo Rocket on his nose, and asleep on the sofa in the other room is my bassett hound, Phryne. Yeah. Miss Phryne Bassett, that has a morbid taste for bones, which some of your readers will understand.

Kristy Anne Cox: I think a lot of them will. We have a lot of zombies in our audience, I'm pretty sure.

All right. This is my last accessibility question for you. You said Scrivener is great for ADHD. Why? Tell us about that.

Farah Mendlesohn: Okay, so with Scrivener, you can open up lots of files, and you can stick whatever you are thinking about down on the file. It stays there when you want it. You can come get it. If you discover that your structure isn't working, you can use Scrivener to divide it up, move things around, and stick them back together again.

I don't use it for everything, but I use it for anything longer than 1500 words. Basically it allows you to cut and paste without doing what I did back in the 1990s, which was to print out, cut up, and move around on the desk. It's wonderful. It's really helpful.

However, I do know some people with the ADHD who find it overwhelming, so it's not for everybody, but if you are the kind of person for whom structure really matters, but you tend to get distracted within what you are writing, so you find yourself writing aside that you know you're going to want later, Scrivener is brilliant because you can hold onto that material, and you can navigate within the material.

Oh, and also with Word, when you get above a certain amount, Word just collapses. Scrivener doesn't, Scrivener can hold an entire book.

Kate Johnston: Good to know. Thank you.

Kristy Anne Cox: Part two is, Kate is gonna run part two with another set of questions. So readers, listeners, if you have any thoughts about our methodology or any compliments to give to all of us, please put them on the Strange Horizons website and we will read them.

Now, Kate, please lead us into the next section.

Kate Johnston: Ah. One of the things that we do as science fiction people, most of us, is go to a con every so often, and that is where we meet the rest of our family and hang out. However, there are some issues that as disabled people are very common to all cons, that have to do with the built environment. And then there's a bunch of things that each different disability is going to need out of that built environment that we are often not getting.

Now one of the things that I want to ask Farah is like, who volunteers? And I wanna preface that with "how does that overdetermine the services that you get and the insights you get out of that?"

Farah Mendlesohn: We should probably back up a little bit and just say, I'm a con-runner. Because I don't think we've actually said that. And although I didn't always work on accessibility, I've been drawn further and further into it, initially because I got involved in accessibility at work as a lecturer, supporting students, and students came to me because they knew I had a disability, and I am really out about being deaf, and I'm out about being deaf because my mother couldn't be. I realized that being able to say I was deaf, actually made it easier to do my job because I could get accommodation. And by that I don't mean that my workplace gave me accommodation, 'cause that's a mixed bag, but just that I wasn't trying to function as a hearing person.

So I got into con-running, and one of the shifts that was happening as I got into con-running, was a move from creating labels for disability and saying, "if you have this disability, you will need this, and if you have this disability, you will need this," and actually starting to ask people what they needed.

My first real encounter with this was in fact at work, because we used to get a list of the students in our class who had disabilities, and one year I got a list that said, you have three blind students. No, you have three students with visual impairments. And I went, "okay, what do they need?" Oh, we don't know. We know they have visual impairments. It turned out I had one student who needed braille, I had one student who needed large print, and one student who needed audio. These three students had nothing in common. Nothing.

And that really started to get me thinking about the way we were doing disability support in conventions, which was very much, you need a ramp because you've got wheelchairs. You need a large enough elevator. You need large print. You need sign language, except we hadn't got that far yet. And I was finding this unhelpful. And I also had a couple of experiences, not actually with con runners, but with con hotels, of abled people telling me that they knew what I needed and that was just infuriating.

So one of my little wrinkles is that I can walk upstairs very easily, but I find walking downstairs really painful. So there is a venue I go to for work where there's only one escalator, and you can guarantee it's going the wrong way for me. Okay. So things like that where somebody would say, oh, it's perfectly accessible because.

So I got involved with that and discovered, top of the list is that, to come back to your question, the people who volunteer in accessibility are overwhelmingly people with accessibility issues. The remaining people are people who, whether at work or at home, support somebody with accessibility issues, if that makes sense. There's always a connection. And I do think this isn't actually understood very well.

One of the reasons why I wanted to have this chat with you, is because we've had incidents at conventions where the person seeking support has not recognized that the person on the other side of the desk may also have their issues, which can vary.

But let's just say there is not a lot of point. You shouldn't be yelling at the access people anyway, but you are really not going to get a lot of help from the access person if the person you are talking to has autism. At that point they're gonna just shut down on you. That's failure to recognize that, but at the same time, those are the people we want, because that big shift where we stopped using labels was a real move to respecting lived experience.

And that the phrase, I'm sure you've all heard, "nothing about us without us."

Kristy Anne Cox: Yes.

Farah Mendlesohn: Which is essential. And one of the people I've been working with on this is Karen Fishwick, who is running World Fantasy this year. And I worked for Meredith Peruzzi for WorldCon in Glasgow, she was head of access. And all of us were very much, rather than just having forms where you tick what you need, or we have some of those because it's a shortcut for some things, are actually saying to people, tell us what you need, because that's our best way of supporting you.

But that means when you are recruiting people for access, you are very much looking for people with that mindset that goes, tell us what you need, and hopefully we will try and do it, but not the—and I'm not trying to put anybody down because I'm very much part of this—not the service sector mentality of "this is what we're providing, this is what we have."

Does that make sense?

Kate Johnston: It does. How does that change your people management?

Farah Mendlesohn: To start with, it does mean that everybody I'm working with has their own access needs. We tend to keep the shifts relatively short. They're not usually much longer than two hours, because the people doing the shifts are often people who tire easily.

We try to make sure that people are doing the role that suits their personality type; there's no point putting somebody who does not handle stress well in that first morning of everybody picking up their mobile scooters. But somebody who's really good at checking things off and really methodical, which by the way I'm not, is ideal for that, if they have somebody else to support them.

It also means that we want to create a space that's very comfortable to hang out in, because a lot of the ways we get our volunteers is people who have been helped early in the convention. So we often start with quite a small pool and by the end, people who've received support come back and do a few hours. And that's really nice 'cause it tells you you're doing it right.

The other thing I think is, quite a lot of my people turn up looking uncomfortable and nervous to volunteer, because they're used to being turned down and excluded. Now, I'm not talking about conventions here, and I can't speak for America, but there's a wrinkle in discrimination law in the UK.

Discrimination law in the UK doesn't apply to voluntary organizations. And I had one experience where I offered to help out at a literary festival, and the second they heard that I can't stand—and again, not something people will notice 'cause I just keep moving, but I can't stand, it hurts—they drop me.

We wouldn't do that. We would find a role for somebody. But quite a few people who come to us have had that experience of being rejected because of their disabilities, rather than being thought of in terms of "this is a person with abilities, how do we find them the right role? How we find 'em a role that uses their abilities, and supports them to maybe stretch it a bit." Because lots of us find that we can do things if we get enough support.

I mean, and I realize this is gonna sound funny, but I am extremely shy and extremely introverted. But it turns out if you put a desk between me and people, or give me a stage, I'm good. Okay? So one of the things I need to be doing in an event is having a role. Otherwise I start to get panic attacks, basically. And I still do, I'm 56 and I still have panic attacks. Anything like that is something you can support people with.

Does that answer your question, Kate? I feel like I've wandered off a little.

Kate Johnston: No, that is exactly what I wanted to get to.

Kristy Anne Cox: Can I jump in on that for a second? Yeah.

So I don't know what the law is here in the US, but I have certainly been turned down from volunteering by tons of organizations, because of explicitly disability reasons. And they will tell you straight up, we don't need people who can't do those things. So volunteering at pet shelters, volunteering at animal rescues or rehabilitation, volunteering at museums or even the local library, they will often say you have to be able to stand up, carry X number of pounds. You have to be able to do every task on this list, instead of focusing on the one task you can do.

And so I was speaking to someone on the phone from a local animal rescue and she asked me, what can we do to encourage disabled volunteers? And I said, what if you let them tell you what they're good at doing and what they think they could do to help? Because maybe this person could come in five hours a week, and describe the animal that you rescued, and put together the copy. Or maybe this person is going to be able to come in as a drop-in volunteer, and feed baby squirrels. That's all they can do. Maybe this person can come in and trim the fingernails of kittens you're trying to adopt.

There are ways to make space for people. And I always remember this story that was in the newspaper about this elderly man in his nineties, and he lived right next to a cat shelter, and he went over there in person and took a nap on the couch, and all the cats came and sat on him. And that was his job. He came in every day, and he took a three hour nap on that couch with as many cats as wanted to sit on him. And that socialized those cats and made them more optimal.

Farah Mendlesohn: But this is the way that we really try to think, and I don't see it outside in the world so much. I did a charity management conversion course, and was sent to work for a charity I won't name, but at the end, I said to them, "I don't see anybody in this office with the disability that you are supposed to be supporting." They'd not even thought about it. It wasn't even the question that they gave me excuses, they had not even considered the fact that they had a very top down model.

I think that's changing, but it's changed a lot in the con running world and to the better. But our motto has always been, "we will find a job for you." It may not be a very interesting one, but we will find you something. And I do think it terribly important.

I mean, the other thing I would say in terms of management though, is again, I have sometimes hit the thing where somebody is quite focused on their own disability, and loses sight of the fact that everybody they're working with has issues as well. As long as everybody is acknowledging that everybody has issues, we're good. But this mentality I sometimes see that I am disabled, therefore you aren't, and I don't quite know where it comes from, but it is something I would like to see disappear.

It's difficult to tell within the community. I asked Glasgow for their stats, and they had only 5% of people identifying as needing accessibility support at Glasgow. But we all know that if disability is something that comes to you, it can take quite a long time for you to start thinking of it as disability. And my guess is that the actual numbers are much, much higher than that.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Yeah. And that's something we've talked about on the podcast before too. I feel like, in general, people massively underestimate the amount of people that either have disabilities but don't identify that way, or who have disabilities and don't understand it from that framework, or who just have impairments, or who—the stigma, they will not identify that way.

So it's like, what percentage of con-goers are in a group that's likely to have age related disabilities? It's best just to assume a large proportion of them are going to have impairments.

Farah Mendlesohn: 40% of the population experience hearing loss in old age. 40%. But of course, until relatively recently, the stigma was so bad that people just wouldn't admit it. I personally would like to have pink sparkly hearing aids, thank you very much. I want people to see them. It's an absolute nuisance to have to constantly tell people I'm deaf, but stigma means the emphasis being on designing hearing aids which are invisible.

And one thing we've not talked about is self identification, because there are different takes on this. Some people want to be able to make their disabilities visible, some people don't. And we need to be able to support people who don't want to make their disabilities visible as graciously as possible. So one thing we do as a community, and I think we do quite well, is that we are constantly lifting our standards of accessibility.

One of the things, again, I often have to explain to people, is every time you make a space a bit more accessible, it's not just that the people for whom that works will turn up, it's that the people on the edge of that will turn up. Because they will think, "if they're doing this, maybe I'll be able to cope."

So a very obvious example is, we now have wheelchair accessible toilets everywhere. Because we have wheelchair accessible toilets everywhere, we have a growing demand for people who need hoists in those wheelchair accessible toilets. And it's not that those people didn't exist before, it's that until we had wheelchair accessible toilets, there was no point them asking for a hoist because there was nowhere to put one. So, everything you do will extend the next thing you are going to need to do. And I think that's sometimes a little tricky to get through.

It comes up a lot in education. People would ask me, "why do we have so many disabled students now? What's going on? Why do so many students need support?" And I'd say, well, when I was a kid, I just didn't attend school 'cause I was so sick. Nobody bothered. Nobody sent any work home. The fact that I did as well as I did is mostly to do with my cultural support, and the passion for a particular subject. I've not been quite so dedicated to one subject. So kids like me often didn't finish school.

And then we got to the point where they got the support to finish school, and then they got the support to do their A levels, and then they started getting support in the form of note takers or whatever else they needed to go to university. And now they're in our graduate schools, they need support. And far from this being some kind of hand wringing students these days, this is wonderful.

It means we're getting it better. I don't wanna say we're getting it right, but we're getting it more right. You know, we are keeping kids in school, and now we're dealing with long covid. We do have a better sense of how to keep kids engaged. How to understand that losing six months at school is not the disaster people used to think it was. You can catch up, you've gotta focus on things.

But that's all part of that con-running experience as well. I think I have to say for me, that supporting students with disabilities and supporting con-runners with disabilities constantly fed in that something I learnt in one aspect of the environment, would feed into the other and back again. And that's been enormously valuable.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. I keep running into this in every aspect of everything, of just that the siloing of information or people or disciplines or whatever, that is never a good thing.

Farah Mendlesohn: No, never. And the people you have contributing, which is the other reason why recruiting accessibility people with experiences of disability is so important, because it's always going to be something that you miss, that you don't think of.

For WorldCon in 2014—I wasn't actually running access, I was running the exhibits hall—but we'd had a very funny incident at work the previous summer in 2013. The system of point scoring for the exams our students take to get into university had changed, and somebody in the office had produced this absolutely brilliant cheat sheet, which would tell us what the new things were worth according to the old points, so that we could figure out what we were doing, 'cause it was still very new. And they handed it out to everybody.

The problem was it had almost certainly been done by somebody in their twenties, and they'd done it in eight point font to get it on the paper. And at break time, I walked to the nearest pharmacy and bought every pair of magnifying spectacles they'd got, because all the people doing the acceptances on the phone were over 40. Over 40, everybody needs reading glasses, everybody. And it told me something. So for Worldcon in 2014 for the exhibit hall, I went out and I bought 10 flat magnifying glasses. And people could come and borrow them, and at any given point, at least eight were out on loan. And I wouldn't have even thought of it, had I not had that experience.

But also, and on the other way round, one of the things I learned from convention running, is that anything you wish to display you never do in less than 18 point font. I still go to academic conferences where they've got badges in 12 point font. Nobody can read them. Pointless. So the things feed into each other all the time.

We've talked a lot about physical access, but there are other issues. And by that I don't mean neurodivergence in the sense of physical access. As our communities have diversified, some of our traditions have had to bend.

So in the UK, it has always been traditional that science fiction meetings take place in pubs. We are now more aware of and responsive to the numbers of fans who do not feel comfortable in pubs for religious reasons, for medical reasons, for social personal reasons, whatever. And this one is proving a big problem, because we don't have much in the way of alternative provision. You can get the pub room for free. A village hall costs a couple of hundred quid we don't have, a library room can cost as much as 400.

Now the advent of Zoom has created a view full of accessibility, and increasingly, I think one of the things people are thinking of is, we can't make one event accessible in all ways, but we can treat this as a buffet, in which we have many events and we set them up in different environments. We use different technology. We have different participation approaches, which means that nobody's cut out of the community, but we can't always guarantee that they can get to a particular event.

And I have seen one or two comments that goes, oh, we should find the perfect convention site. We don't have that kind of money. We can't build an entire convention center for WorldCon. And by the way, even if we did, remember what I said about accessibility being a movable line. So I went to university at the University of York, but when it was built in the 1960s, it was considered a model of accessibility, an absolute model. And by the 2000s, people were saying, yes, but I can't get my Moby up that ramp. There weren't any Moby in 1960. So whatever you do, something is going to come along that improves accessibility, but that for some reason you don't quite know how to use, or you have to think about how to adapt to. It's all part of that change.

I'm terribly excited about going online. The reason I'm a retired professor is I can no longer teach to hear in a classroom. My hearing distance is 1.5 meters. I have no directional hearing at all, which makes me really unsafe around bicycles, by the way. Just, I guess a lot of "what are you deaf?" as they skim past me. Yes, I am actually.

But on Zoom, I can lipread you all, I can turn captions on. That is fantastic. But in addition, we can set up a call across time zones. That is a form of accessibility. We can talk to people in countries where travel is really difficult. That's a form of accessibility. So I am really keen on maintaining internet capability for our conventions.

I have mixed feelings about hybrid. Actually, that takes us back to volunteers. Hybrid is really expensive. You need a lot of personal power, you need a lot of volunteers, and it's expensive to put cameras in rooms, but online, parallel online sessions, dirt cheap to run. And suddenly a whole load of people who, for whatever reason, cannot get to the convention in person, have access. And the way it helped me in an extra way is I suddenly realized if I was really struggling in a panel, I could actually turn the online streaming onto my phone and hear it through my hearing aids.

Kristy Anne Cox: Brilliant.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Farah Mendlesohn: Yes. And that's one of those which we didn't plan for, and I know I'm not the only one doing it. There's all sorts of exciting things we can do, but we only have access to them if the people doing them say, "Hey, I've got this cool new thing I can do, how can we incorporate it?" And that allows somebody else in.

Kate Johnston: Yeah, I think the advent of the US being completely unsafe for nearly everyone is going to push a lot of that online content because no, you're not gonna be able to go out to some other place. And if you do go there, you may not ever go back. So stay home and go virtually.

Farah Mendlesohn: And I also think it's gonna help us support—I'm trying to think of the right word for this. The phrase I'm thinking of is "minority interest", that's not really what I mean. Those interests which don't attract large numbers of people. I've been to several online conferences that could not have run in person because they only attract 30 people. But that doesn't make them less important. And by taking them online, your costs plummet, and you can have this really engaged event. In fact, the small online conferences work better than big online conferences.

So for me, it's been liberating. It's fantastic. We're talking here because I'm not gonna see you next week. That's my regret, but I'm seeing you here.

Kristy Anne Cox: We will weep the entire time, but we will think of you.

Kate Johnston: My wrap up question is, and I'm asking you this because I have seen so many people say this, and it does not seem to be landing, so I'm giving you the opportunity here to do this. Tell me in great detail... why Just Yelling is not a solution for hearing impaired audience members.

Farah Mendlesohn: So there are several things people need to understand about hearing impairment. The first is that not all hearing impairment is even about volume. When I first started going deaf, I had no volume loss at all. If anything, I was actually oversensitive to sound, because I'm autistic. It's a common thing.

But even when it is, when you yell the sound distorts. Very few people are trained to project. So as it happens, I'm one of the few who am, I trained as an opera singer. I can throw my voice across two halls in a convention and I have done so. Okay? But the people who could hear me could not hear what I was saying, because as the voice opens up, you lose the edges of the consonants.

And there's quite a lot of studies about whether people hear P or B, T or D. The further you're away, the softer it becomes. So the sound becomes blurred, and that's to start with. The louder you are, the more blurred it is. But then there is the additional factor that for anybody wearing hearing aids, any electronic sound is a million times clearer than analog sound, and it's astonishing the difference.

So I am wearing hearing aids. Somebody decides to talk very loudly to me because they think that will work. I take a step back. I have two processing disorders, one of which is the autism, one of which is what's wrong with my hearing, 'cause it for me, it's nerve damage. I have no clue what they've just said to me. I know they've spoken really loud, but I still don't know.

The microphone tightens the sound. It makes it much crisper, much clearer. It also regularizes the harmonics and the pitches, and quite a lot of us have hearing loss in specific pitches. Now I'm unusual and I have a low frequency deafness, which boiled down to: the more I got promoted and the more I worked with men, the less I could hear. I can't hear a bass voice unless it's through a microphone, and even then I'm gonna struggle.

So, not only should you use the microphone—and this is where I really get really quite angry with people—do not say, "does anybody mind if I don't use the microphone?" Because there are people in that audience you are forcing to out themselves. There is a lot of stigma around deafness, particularly in the teaching professions. You cannot make somebody put their hand up and tell their employer that they are struggling.

So it isn't just that you must use the microphone, but please drop that phrase, just drop it.

While I'm on the subject, don't ask people if they mind carrying on another 15 minutes through lunch. Again, it's that phrase, you're forcing them to not express their needs. Just say, " we've got lunch coming. I will finish in 15 minutes. I'm done." But I've actually heard somebody say, "does anybody mind", three times running. At which point I finally said, "actually, yes, I do a lot", and got a round of applause. It's a nature of the question as well. So it's not just why you should use the mic, it's the passive aggressive coercive question which makes it really difficult for somebody to say, "I need that access support."

I will say here, I watched my mom go deaf and struggle, but I also come from the Jewish tradition, we don't really do shy and retiring. Expressing your needs is part of the culture, but lots of people don't come from those cultures. They come from cultures where you have to be ladylike, where you don't expect your needs to be met, where you feel you are lucky to be in this space because this is privileged space, and you are not privileged.

There are so many reasons why people don't feel they can express any need. Rant over.

Kristy Anne Cox: Thank you. That was really good.

My wrap up question for you. Do you have any thoughts in general about the topics we've discussed that you wanna say a little more about?

Farah Mendlesohn: The takeaway I'd like people to have from the con-running discussion is that person you are asking for support, also has support needs. Don't look at them and think "this is an able-bodied person who doesn't understand where I'm coming from, this is an able bodied person who has it easy." This is somebody who is also dealing with their own issues. They will do their best for you, and they will help you, but it's peer support. It's not service support, and there is a very real difference. You are working with each other on this one. We need to be collaborative.

Kate Johnston: Lovely.

Kristy Anne Cox: That's excellent. Kate, did you have any closing thoughts or...?

Kate Johnston: I didn't. That was fantastic though. I think that a lot of the things that got said are things that needed to be said, and need to be heard more widely. So I am so glad, and thank you Farah so much for coming.

Kristy Anne Cox: This was a lovely conversation.

Farah Mendlesohn: Thank you. It's been lovely talking to you both.

Kristy Anne Cox: Readers, I am going to boost Farah's work. The book that I'm holding up right now is called The Rhetorics of Fantasy. I am describing, it's gray and earth tones on the cover with water, and the back and the binder are green, blue. This is an academic text that I was introduced to in grad school, and it goes through the ways that fantasy works to do the work that fantasy does. Would you say that's accurate?

Farah Mendlesohn: I think that's fair enough. That's a good way of putting it.

Kristy Anne Cox: It's a very excellent read, so you can pick that up at your favorite bookseller of choice. And of course, Farah has many other things as well that you can look for. Please check out her website.

And if you have questions or want to join the conversation, you can use the hashtag #WritingWhileDisabled or hashtag #StrangeHorizons. And we have a form on the website now for your questions and feedback, but we'll also check you out on social media if you tag us.

Farah Mendlesohn: But before we go, can I mention my next book? Because—

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh, please.

Farah Mendlesohn: —it has finally gone to readers! So the book that has just gone to readers will be coming up from Luna Press in 2026, and it'll be reasonably priced, which is why it's coming up from Luna Press. Bless them.

And I don't yet have a firm title, but the book is about Joanna Russ's book, The Female Man. It's only 45,000 words long, and if you like Rhetorics of Fantasy, it's that kind of book. It's a book about how I see The Female Man working as a book on a line by line basis.

And as The Female Man is one of my very favorite books, this has been a real labor of love. 2026, from Luna Press, probably called something very straightforward, like Reading The Female Man, because I don't like fancy titles.

Kristy Anne Cox: And if you're not familiar with The Female Man, audience, this is a foundational text of science fiction and fantasy literary criticism, feminism, it's an important and influential piece, so I'm excited to see your new take on it.

Thank you. Thank you Farah and Kate. I'm gonna wrap us up.

Farah Mendlesohn: So lovely.