Kayla Whaley is Writing into the Void

by Michelle Meredith

Kayla Whaley was in her second year of a master’s program in public administration with a focus on nonprofit management, and she was “everybody's favorite.” Let her professors tell it, she was destined to “go on and do great things in the field.” 

And then she decided, actually, no thanks.

“I was just like, ‘I think I’m going to write young adult novels instead . . . I just think that’s what I’m gonna do. Sorry guys!’”

Whaley had always been a reader, but it wasn’t until her friend and classmate Katie suggested she take a writing class as one of her undergraduate electives that she felt drawn into a writing community. 

“Having somebody who was already so passionate about it and so good at it be interested in what I was doing was really a huge motivator,” she tells me during our Zoom call. “It made me want to write outside of class and it gave me a reason beyond grades and impressing my teachers to want to keep going. Because [Katie and I] would trade work back and forth, and I eventually found other people online . . . they were the start of a community.”

Writing as a serious pursuit seemed to come naturally, she says: “I don’t even think it was a conscious choice. It was like, I guess I write now. . . I’d never written a book, or anything really beyond the few things I’d written for class. But I was like, ‘I’m going to focus on this.’”

After she earned her M.P.A. and moved back home with her parents in Marietta, Georgia, Whaley spent time looking for work related to her degree. But, she says, “That was pretty tricky, because of my disability”—Whaley has Spinal Muscular Atrophy III and has used a wheelchair full-time since she was about six years old—“and also there weren’t exactly a lot of nonprofit management positions open in East Cobb . . . It wasn’t very practical.” 

She applied to the notoriously competitive Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop—“completely on a whim,” Whaley says, though the short story writing program isn’t something anyone can just happen into—and was accepted first onto the waitlist, then into the workshop officially.

“That was the first thing,” Whaley says, “that made me feel like, I’m a writer now. It wasn’t just something I was doing for fun anymore. The people around me were very, very serious about it. Everyone who was there had been writing their whole lives, they’d gone to college for this, they’d published stuff before. They had written entire novels—like, multiple—and they had plans about working with this editor at this imprint and winning this award. And I was like, ‘I’ve written exactly two short stories, and they were the ones I applied to this [program] with, nice to meet you!’”

Being taught by writers she revered—“ridiculously exciting people, absolute luminaries in the field”—such as N. K. Jemisin, Catherine Valente, and Jeff VanderMeer, and being surrounded by other students who were “taking it seriously” encouraged Whaley to take her own work, and her own abilities, more seriously, too. 

“To see everybody working so hard at this,” she says, “made me feel like I needed to step it up and not diminish what they were doing by diminishing what I’m doing. I didn’t want to take anything away from everybody else with my own lack of confidence. . . I really buckled down.” 

Whaley has since become a widely revered writer herself, and a powerful voice on disability representation in the writing community. She was senior editor for Disability in Kidlit for several years and went on to get an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction in 2018. She currently has essays in three anthologies: the critically acclaimed Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World, Allies: Real Talk about Showing Up, Screwing Up, and Trying Again, and the forthcoming Body Language: Writers on Identity, Physicality, and Making Space for Ourselves; and her nonfiction has also appeared in several online publications, including Catapult, The Establishment, and The Toast. An adapted version of her essay, “Nobody Catcalls the Woman in the Wheelchair,” was featured on Reese Witherspoon’s How It Is. podcast. She has published stories in a number of young adult (YA) anthologies alongside renowned writers such as V. E. Schwab, Rebecca Roahnhorse, Karen M. McManus, Tiffany D. Jackson, and more. She contributed a chapter to The Grimoire of Grave Fates, a YA fantasy novel told in interconnected points of view, forthcoming from Delacorte Press and We Need Diverse Books. 

‘I don’t even think it was a conscious choice. It was like, I guess I write now. . . I’d never written a book, or anything really beyond the few things I’d written for class. But I was like, ‘I’m going to focus on this.’

So, Kayla Whaley is, inarguably, a writer. She has also lived in the South for essentially her entire life—but, she tells me, she has never really claimed the “Southern” identity. 

“I don’t think of myself as a Southern writer, even though technically I am,” she says. “There’s a joke that everybody in East Cobb is from somewhere else, like nobody is actually from here. Which is not true, but it’s a thing my parents used to say growing up. So I’ve never really felt authentically Southern, I guess? But I also don’t not feel Southern. I’ve lived here my whole life, ninety percent of my memories come from being here, and it’s clearly a big part of the majority of my work . . . it’s just definitely one of the more subconscious parts, I think, which is really funny because it’s such a big part of, especially, my settings.”

Almost every story Whaley has written is set in the South, and every story Whaley has written is a masterclass in locality and place. That’s not by accident: “One of the things that I take the most pride in is my ability to evoke atmosphere and build settings, especially natural settings, and so that’s all extremely pulled from my experiences in the South. It’s so deeply rooted in that.” She continues, laughing, “I tried once to write something that wasn’t set in the South, like it was specifically set in Maine or something, and it was bad. It did not work.” 

I prod Whaley a little more about her relationship with Southern writing, with Southern writers. I’m thinking about all the ways Southern literature has represented and misrepresented the identities of the people who live here—especially people with disabilities, people like Whaley. 

“I definitely have not ever seen myself, like, ‘seen myself’”—she does air quotes—“in any Southern works that I can think of off the top of my head, but that’s not unusual because I also haven’t seen myself in any works, ever,” she says. “So I don’t think that’s a uniquely Southern problem. I’m sure there are more layers to it, and I mean, I know there are. Because the South in particular—for me the reason it’s different is because of how religious especially the Deep South is, and that’s informed a lot of my experiences with being disabled and being queer.”

Whaley is deeply concerned with getting all of this—the reality of living in the South, along with everything that informs this reality—right in her stories. Something she’s conscious of resisting, she tells me, is falling into tired tropes that “gloss over the real weird and real uncomfortable parts of living in the South.” 

“There’s a reason Southern Gothic is a whole genre, and it’s because we live in a messed up place, to be perfectly honest,” she says. “Like, with a really messed up history.”

In her story “In Kind,” published in the YA anthology Vampires Never Get Old, Whaley brings the Southern Gothic, Deep South Christian community into view. The story begins with an article from a local newspaper reporting the murder of Grace, a young girl who uses a wheelchair, at the hands of her caretaker—her father. And it’s clear from the headline alone whose perspective is being given the most attention and care in this community.

“That was the trickiest story in terms of trying to bring that particularly white, Christian, Southern culture into it in a way that didn’t sound either preachy or simplified,” she says. “Part of what was tricky was condensing so many nuances I wanted to tackle. Like, that was a topic to decide I wanted to write about in just one short story. Especially because, in YA, but other categories as well, [caregiver murder] isn’t exactly something that’s been written about a ton. Certainly not from the disabled perspective. So I knew [the story] was going to be entering into this sort of vacuum. There wasn’t going to be, for the average reader, a ton of context to draw on from other literature that they’d read. And if they did have any, it was probably going to be sympathetic toward the murderer. So it was really important to me—and also very difficult—to narrow down what are the most important threads that I want to make sure I pull in? I needed to be very cautious and very purposeful.”

Disabled people being murdered by their caregivers, in particular, isn’t something we typically read about in YA fiction, and as Whaley points out, there’s a lot to unpack. One obvious thread she has pulled into the story is the question of whose voices and perspectives we center when we tell stories.

“The story starts with a very local newspaper article, and then as the story progresses the scope widens. So in the midsection the headline is the AJC [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]—the statewide paper—and then we pull out even further to a national news organization covering the story,” Whaley says. “And so I wanted to show that [the events] did start very localized. Like, this very particular, local response? There’s a reason for it. It’s very rooted in the church and these ideas of community, and what caregiving is, and who deserves care and to what level—all within this specific area and a specific community. But I also wanted to show that a lot of those beliefs are held elsewhere as well. It’s not confined to that space. The lens and the language that is used changes somewhat in the three articles, but the core beliefs and assumptions in those articles and who they’re centering and whose voices are heard—and whose voices are assumed not to exist to even be heard—those stay the same. So it’s extremely local, but it’s extremely universal as well. And that’s where a huge part of the problem is: how do you start to combat these assumptions and beliefs, these stories that we’ve all ingested our entire lives, when there’s so many different levels you have to address it on? But that was one of the biggest things I had to figure out how to deal with in the story.”

By the end of the story, the newspaper headlines are reporting on a video released by Grace herself (spoiler: she’s a vampire now), but Whaley says Grace’s control, her perspective, “is still being filtered through this other, capital O, Other lens. So it’s a start; it’s definitely not the end. And I hope that comes through.” Whaley likes to think the story lands on a satisfying kind of ending, and that it stands alone well. “That’s what the goal was,” she says. “Plus, vampires! Vampires are always fun.”

Addressing the problem of whose voices are being centered and ignored, at local levels and universal levels and everything in between, especially in the publishing industry, is, as Whaley would say, “A lot.” But this problem has been in Whaley’s consciousness, by choice or by necessity, throughout her writing career.  

Most of Whaley’s stories feature wheelchair-using main characters, which is only a stand-out fact because the overwhelming majority of published fiction, especially fiction for young adults and middle grade readers, features an exclusive cast of non-disabled characters. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center reports 3.4% of children’s and YA books published in 2019 were about disability or written by a person who identifies as disabled. Not only does this tiny fraction include stories with inauthentic or harmful representations of disability, but it also includes the entirety of what’s available for all disabilities and all other intersecting identities—a vast, diverse community. In short, the mostly non-disabled publishing community centers mostly non-disabled voices and tells mostly non-disabled stories. These are some of the stories that, as Whaley says, “we’ve all ingested our entire lives.” 

At this, I ask Whaley if she could talk a bit about what it means, to her, to center disabled characters in her stories.

“I feel like if you asked me that question a few years ago,” Whaley responds, “the answer would have been a lot easier. But actually right now, it’s kind of a tricky question.” 

Whaley tells me she has recently started to push back, at first unconsciously, against the idea of writing disabled main characters. This resistance came to the forefront of her consciousness more clearly when she sat down to write a story for Game On, a genre-spanning YA anthology of stories featuring games.

‘There’s a reason Southern Gothic is a whole genre, and it’s because we live in a messed up place, to be perfectly honest.’

“When Laura [Silverman, anthology editor] invited me to it, I was like, oh absolutely. Are you kidding me? I can write a short story about a video game—whatever I want? I’m in,” Whaley says. “And originally it was going to be a story about virtual reality (VR), partially because that was something [Silverman] had wanted in the anthology. We figured it would be a good fit for me, since I was going to write about a video game anyway. I have a lot of thoughts on VR and disability and accessibility and what that’s going to mean for the future of gaming. . . . So I was like, that’s going to be really fun—I want to explore that.”

But when Whaley sat down to tell this story, she felt herself thinking: “I don’t want to write disabled characters anymore.” 

“Which is not true,” she explains, “but it was the only way I could really conceptualize what was happening in my brain. I think. . . I just got really frustrated and sad, I guess? That I knew those [disabled] characters were what was expected of me. And only those characters. I would get invites to anthologies with the expectation of, you are writing a wheelchair-using main character. And I knew that I was going to be the person, the only person probably, in that book, writing a wheelchair-using main character. And I didn’t necessarily begrudge that. I was grateful for all those opportunities, and I still am. But . . . I just wasn’t sure anymore if I was centering disabled voices, or if I was centering abled expectations of me writing disabled voices.”

“So yeah,” she continues, “I’m still trying to work out what centering our voices does mean to me . . . I need to sit with it longer to know what I want it to look like in my own work. Like, what does that centering actually mean to me, not to anybody else, but to me. It means a lot, I just don’t know what.” 

After talking with her editor, Whaley scrapped the VR idea entirely and started in a different direction with an idea that came to her when she first heard about the anthology. Her story, “The Girl with the Teeth,” involves an indie horror video game—a genre Whaley is very passionate about (and, after hearing her talk about it for several minutes during this interview, I am now passionate about as well). It’s her first and so far only story without a wheelchair-using main character. And while the process had its ups and downs, the experience overall was worth it.

“Once I approached [the story] with a fresh mind of, I’m not going to write about disability. I’m going to very aggressively not have a wheelchair-using main character,” she says, “I was expecting it to be a lot easier, but it still was really hard. Which is funny because I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written and I really love it. . . The actual drafting process was not fun at all, but once I got the first draft down, the revising was a lot more fun. Because I was able to dig into the things that I was really interested in, and work on stuff like atmosphere and the horror elements, which I really had a blast doing . . . It was a weird experience, I’m not going to lie, but I’m so proud of it. It’s easily my favorite story I’ve ever written. I think it’s my best work, period.” 

“Hilariously,” she adds, “it ended up being one of the stories most about disability that I’ve ever written, just mental illness instead of physical disability. . . . That [experience] was really important for me because it showed me that I do truly want to talk about disability in my work, like it’s going to come out even when I set out not to do it. I purposely said ‘I’m not writing about disability this time,’ and that’s what came out. So that was really reassuring, that I wasn’t being forced onto this other path that I didn’t actually want. But, it also showed me that I do deserve to maintain my own expectations for my work and not default to what I know others expect of me.”

Outside of her fiction, Whaley’s body of work includes a significant number of critical and personal essays, often centering disability. 

“My poor neglected nonfiction,” she says with a laugh when I ask her about it. She loves writing nonfiction, she explains, even though her fiction has taken priority in recent months. But there was a time in her career, after the Clarion Workshop, when she felt she needed to take her nonfiction further, and she wanted to explore what was possible in essay writing. She decided to look for M.F.A. programs, hoping the instructive environment could give her the boost she needed. 

“It was also,” she explains, “sort of out of spite.”

A while before she decided to pursue an M.F.A. in nonfiction, Whaley had searched for an M.F.A. program for children’s literature—something she was focused on in her fiction. 

“I knew of several programs that were fantastic,” she says. “I had friends who had gone to them and they loved the experience, and I was determined. I was like, I’m going to get into these programs. And one of them, I contacted and I said, ‘Hey, I really want to go to this program, but I would need to do it remotely, because I can’t travel that far.’ And they basically said, ‘That’s not possible. Sorry.’”

Traveling by commercial airline is, for Whaley, not only a logistical nightmare and an uncomfortable, often painful ordeal, but a dangerous one. Traveling to the low-residency program and securing housing for herself and her caregiver just wasn’t possible. But the program attempted no accommodations. “They flat-out said no,” Whaley says. She was crushed. “So I just kind of spitefully was like, well I’m going to find somewhere that I can go. And the program I ended up going to was fantastic . . . and it was close enough that I could go in person. But that rejection was not fun.”

‘I purposely said ‘I’m not writing about disability this time,’ and that’s what came out. So that was really reassuring, that I wasn’t being forced onto this other path that I didn’t actually want. But, it also showed me that I do deserve to maintain my own expectations for my work and not default to what I know others expect of me.’

Whaley remarks, “It was especially not fun when COVID hit and suddenly all of the low-residency programs are remote, and it’s no problem! Suddenly they can work around it, that’s what technology is for, and it’s not a problem at all.”

Whaley’s experience being told she can’t be accommodated is an almost universal experience among writers with disabilities. Inaccessibility is a problem at every level of the publishing and writing industry, even within attempts to make programs or events more inclusive.

“I’m going to get in trouble for saying this, but, whatever,” Whaley continues. “It deserves to be said. A lot of times, in my experience at least, people at programs, events, workshops, whatever, will say they’re going to make it accessible and listen to what you need, and then not only is it not [accessible] a lot of the time—like, just flat-out, you didn’t meet what I needed—but it’s also that they just don’t understand the cost. I’ll give you an example, and this is where I’m going to get in trouble.” 

Whaley goes on to explain that in order to attend the Clarion Writers’ Workshop—that dream-come-true experience that led her into the career she has today—she and her parents had to make enormous financial sacrifices. Not only did the program cost several thousand dollars, but it required all students to stay in UC San Diego housing during the full six weeks. Whaley requires a full-time caregiver, so she had reached out to make sure her dad would be able to come to the program with her. 

“And they told me, absolutely, don’t worry about it, he is fully welcome. But you’re going to have to pay double for your room and board,” Whaley says. “And at the time, I didn’t know how to combat that. Because it feels like they’re being accommodating, but it also cost me double what it cost every single one of my classmates to go.”

I say, “So you were financially penalized—”

“—for being disabled. Yeah,” Whaley continues. “So it’s that kind of thing where, even when things are more accessible, they’re not accessible, and definitely not equally so. And it’s not just a Clarion problem—that’s just the biggest, most obvious example in my own life. I’ve seen it so many other places with so many other people as well, of unintended cost, unexpected costs, financially and otherwise. And then of course . . . there’s the obvious physical logistics for people like me who have physical accessibility needs, but also—and I’m glad to see places have started to expand their understanding of what accessibility means—but it’s not always physical. There’s so much else that needs to be taken into consideration, and I am glad to see a lot of conferences and programs have started being more intentional about that.”

Whaley’s outlook on the state of the larger writing community and publishing industry never comes off as bleak, but it is very aware. During our conversation, she points out a flaw—the industry’s preference for non-disabled writers, the lack of accessibility in writing community events, the dearth of disabled characters in fiction—but before moving on to a different topic, points out where progress has been made—more organizations seeking and using disability consultants for events, agents and editors regularly seeking pitches from writers with disabilities. Whaley knows that many of her stories have the potential to be the first story featuring a wheelchair-using character, or a physically disabled character, or maybe even a character with any sort of disability, that a reader has ever come across. That her work is entering into a “vacuum.” She takes this responsibility seriously and commits herself to making her stories authentic. Sometimes this has meant turning down writing opportunities that didn’t feel right to her.

“I was starting to get a number of invitations . . . to anthologies and stuff,” she says, “And I did not, by any means, want to take up slots that would be better filled by other people just because I’m the one people know. I‘ve been really worried about that. Because yeah, I can absolutely write disability representation. I can write, and I have written, really, really good wheelchair use. But there’s a lot I can’t write. Like, I cannot write a disabled person of color—that’s not an experience I have. And I don’t even know if this was happening, but in my head, I was really worried I was going to become, inadvertently, the one and only disabled writer that people go to, particularly in terms of wheelchair use.”

Whaley has also worked through her inexperience to write stories that feel true to her. In “Old Rifts and Snowdrifts,” published in Up All Night, an anthology of YA stories taking place between sunset and sunrise, an Atlanta snowstorm traps a teenage girl in her friend’s family flower shop overnight with him, giving them a chance to see if their friendship could be something more. The wheelchair-using main character is bisexual, and Whaley struggled to envision what romance might look like for a character like this. I mention how during this interview, we’ve talked about her Southern identity and her identity as a disabled person, but not her sexual identity—something she’s written about in several essays, but which doesn’t show up very much in her fiction. 

“Part of being disabled, in particular very physically disabled like me, is being desexualized my entire life,” Whaley says. “So a lot of that for me is still . . . I understand myself and my relation to disability extremely well, and I understand myself in relation to my queerness very well, but it’s still difficult to find where those overlap, because so much of my life I’ve been told, you don’t get that. Like, you don’t have that. Straight or otherwise.”

Whaley tells me “Old Rifts” was a struggle to write for this reason. “It’s the cutest, fluffiest little rom-com I’ve ever written, but . . . that one probably caused me more emotional distress to write than the caregiver murder story,” she says. “That was really hard for me to write because I could not conceptualize what a romance would look like with a character like me. It was just blank. I had nothing in my head, because I’d never seen it before. So yeah . . . I’m figuring out the two of those things and how they interact. Particularly how they interact in story because, again, I’m just so hyperaware of the vacuum that my work usually enters in. We have so few wheelchair using characters at all in YA at least, and very few of them were like, romantic relationships, and certainly none of them were having queer relationships. Now [they are] moreso, but I’m just always aware of the void that my work is going to be entering into. . . . I don’t have any examples to draw from. Or at least, I didn't have any at the time. . . . But that’s a big reason why you don’t see [romance and queerness] as much in my work as I would like it to be.”

She adds, somewhat cheerfully, “But, hopefully more soon!”

Kayla Whaley is a writer, and she’s writing her stories into a vacancy, a void, that often puts each story under so much pressure it’s caused her to question whether she even wants to write those stories or not. Still, she is writing into this void.

And, of this story, at least, she says, “I’m happy with it being potentially one of the first things a reader might engage with in terms of a disabled romance. If that’s somebody’s first introduction, I feel good about it.”

She concludes, matter-of-factly, “I feel like it’s a good start, which is all I can ask for.”

Kayla Whaley's essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Unbroken, Vampires Never Get Old, Game On, and Allies, as well as in publications like Bustle, Catapult, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from the University of Tampa, and is a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop. Kayla lives outside Atlanta, Georgia where she drinks too much coffee and buys too many books. Find her on Twitter: @PunkinOnWheels and her website: kaylawhaley.com.