The Folding Chairs Were Outside: Disabled Authors and the Books Industry's Failure of Welcome
There is a particular quality to the air in a bookshop just before a reading begins — the arrangement of folding chairs, the smell of paper, the nervous clearing of a reader's throat. This is the ritual of literary culture, its most intimate and most public face. What it has never quite been, in many places, is open.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, autistic, neurodivergent, and chronically ill, author of ten books including The Way Disabled People Love Each Other, conducted a ten-city spring tour asking for what should, in 2026, be standard: ASL interpreters, real-time captions, wheelchair access, masking. Half the bookstores contacted could not provide interpreters or captions. All offered wheelchair access. 'It's not just for me,' she said. 'I want disabled people to come to my readings.' The sentence should not need saying. And yet.
Gaelynn Lea, who has brittle bone disease and whose memoir It Wasn't Meant to Be Perfect arrived on shelves this year, converted her events into theater performances — and personally funded ASL interpretation at each one. Personally. The most basic act of welcome became a private expense.
I find myself returning, in moments like this, to something Tove Jansson understood about solitude and belonging: that community is never simply given, only built, and that the building requires more than goodwill. It requires the material fact of a ramp, a caption, a clean sightline. Nordic literature has never been sentimental about bodies — there is a quality in those northern prose traditions, from Strindberg onward, of treating the body as the site of the most unmediated experience, the place where the social order presses hardest. Isaac Rosenberg's selected poetry, written from the mud of the First World War, has that same quality: a body in conditions it was not designed for, finding language anyway, despite everything. Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience understood this duality long before either of them: that experience — the real kind, the kind that marks — is precisely what the innocent world keeps arranging itself to exclude.
This is not a comparison between war and disability. It is an observation about whose discomfort literary culture has historically treated as legitimate, and whose it has simply not thought about. The question is not whether disabled writers deserve access to readings. That is not the question. The question is why the industry that publishes their work has not resolved it as a structural matter — administratively, contractually, as a condition of the event itself. And perhaps the more uncomfortable question beneath that: who has the literary world imagined its audience to be, all along?
Some of the most important readers in the world have been sitting outside, in the cold, in the noise, in the inaccessible street, waiting for a door that was never quite wide enough. It is a strange kind of failure for an industry built on the premise that words should reach everyone.
