WHEN I WAS a kid, I was obsessed with those cash booth games that I’d see on TV all the time. The participant stands in a clear box while money is blown around them, and they’re tasked with grabbing all the cash they can. I always imagined how I would fare in this challenge – what strategies I might enact to win as much as I could. 

Unfortunately, I now know that I wouldn’t do well. The smallness of the booth would crush me, the sensory overload of the air and the fluttering cash would suffocate me, and the motor control needed to grab anything in this scenario would only exist in the daydreams of my eight-year-old self. But in a way, I play this game every day in every social situation I find myself trapped in: the tight, entrapping booth is my body, the fluttering notes are my thoughts and my poor motor skills represent my tongue’s attempt at articulating those thoughts. 

For me to stand a chance at this game – and not be broken in the process – I need the environment to change. That cash booth is similar to another small yet stressful environment that unfairly benefits some more than others: the arts. How can we make this a less anxiety-inducing space for all those creatives who want to take part?

RECENTLY, I WAS engaged to take part in the second iteration of the Evolving Arts and Disability Residency organised by Arts Access Victoria and DADAA. In 2023, nine Deaf and Disabled leaders in the Australian arts sector were selected from a pool of more than eighty applicants. I was fortunate to be one of these nine. It was a week of discussions and sharing ideas about where we hoped to see Deaf and Disabled artists situated in the future of the Australian arts sector. So many of our experiences of being left behind by our various artistic industries rang familiar to everyone in the room. But by the end of the week, we had hope for a brighter future. 

In early November 2024, we met again, this time with the goal of devising an outcome to help arts leaders, organisations and government bodies understand what could better integrate Deaf and Disabled artists into the sector. Unfortunately, our goal was not to be: although we were a marginalised group of people with somewhat similar needs, we still found ourselves unsure of how to best share our specific and diverse access requirements.

While most people would see our failure to produce an outcome as a deficit, we saw it as a learning moment. The disabled experience is rich with learning moments, and being aware that these are good things is a vital step towards ensuring that our artistic community is inclusive of Australia’s largest minority. 

My key takeaway from this challenging week was how necessary it is to remove the burden of accessibility from disabled creatives and give it to everyone else instead. What this might look like, I’m unsure. Disability is such a diverse experience that it can feel impossible to understand how to make things accessible for everyone. Especially when non-disabled society has had such a large head start – how can we ever begin to catch up?

It’ll be a long process, and it’ll be frustrating – like having a large chocolate mud cake in your fridge and knowing that your roommate will likely devour the whole thing if they get home from work before you. They won’t throw you any cash towards the cake – they never do, nor do they ever buy their own cake to share. Instead, after you discover the cake’s been eaten, you’re left to grumble and trudge your way around the apartment, obviously ticked off but not wanting to ‘make a big deal about it’. Meanwhile, your roommate knows something’s up – the mood is heavy with resentment – but they don’t want to have an awkward conversation. So the two of you feel yucky and weird about everything for a week until it blows over – and then, of course, it happens again. The only way to make things right is to talk about it and work out how to share, because there’s plenty of cake to go around. It’ll be hard, but you both need to power through – for fairness and justice (I still haven’t forgiven you, Brent).

The answer we flirted with during the Evolve residency was hard, too: adopting a person-by-person focus. Yes, it sounds like a long and drawn-out approach, but it invites a diversity of lived experience into the community, and that diversity of experience creates a more interesting outcome. This means it’s up to all of us to educate ourselves about each unique disability – because while society and its able-focused processes are what disable the disabled, it’s the people in those environments who can open the doors of accessibility. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. We must consider each person separately. 

One of the many reasons we make art is to share expressions of our individuality. That’s why we become fans of particular artists, too. So doesn’t it make sense to think about approaching accessibility and inclusion in the same way?

I’VE TAUGHT WRITING to some of the most unique and engaging writers you’ll ever read. Most of them aren’t published. As a neurodivergent (ND) person who writes substantially in that space and openly discusses my own struggles with mental health issues and chronic illnesses, I often attract like-minded folks to my workshops and classes. I hear the same story all the time. It’s one I often tell myself (using the intonation of wrestling legend ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin). When you fall under the disabled umbrella, you become so used to being told ‘no’, being told that you’re not palatable enough, that you become sensitive to rejection, and a single one can stop you in your creative tracks. Even though I’ve had a decent amount of work published, I’m not immune to this experience. When a disabled writing student tells me they won’t submit their work for publication because they fear being rejected for not being enough, I always find myself wishing that the publishing industry had the time and empathy to reply more thoroughly to these marginalised voices and explain why their work can’t be published this time around. 

I’ve been there myself. Hiding in my desk drawer is a completed YA fantasy manuscript that celebrates neurodivergence, which was submitted to a publisher’s callout for disabled voices. After it was rejected, I added it to my large pile of work that the publishing industry considers unpalatable to the neurotypical reader. The feedback I received applauded my representation of neurodivergence, yet requested that I resubmit after making changes to the work – changes that would remove its soul and erase the reasons why it’s such a great example of ND representation. The publisher wanted the kudos for platforming disabled work while not fully understanding the disability being written through, not just about, and then making the author feel confused and stupid for writing authentically. 

The same team still requests work from disabled writers, and I find myself quietly warning young emerging writers of the emotional risks that can come from submitting to an organisation that sees them as a ticked box rather than a writer they can help nurture. They want the public and funding bodies to see their glorious inclusion of disabled writers, but they don’t want to do the work to understand what that inclusion means. 

SO WHAT DOES inclusion mean?

Emphasising individual effort is the seed that can help institutional change grow. For this to happen, the industry needs to engage with disabled creatives in more personal ways: giving considered feedback that addresses our work through the context of our identity and ensuring that we are the gatekeepers of our own platforms. We understand the unique mindsets, accessibility needs and emotional requirements that can help catch up on that head start non-disabled creatives get. For instance, next year, Griffith Review have afforded me the opportunity to be a contributing editor for an edition, so I’ll be commissioning and editing a fellow neurodivergent writer’s piece. While I can say firsthand that the editors at Griffith Review are some of the best and most understanding I’ve worked with,  there’s nothing more affirming than collaborating with someone who can directly relate to your own lived experience. Being able to work with this ND writer on their piece will create space for two validating experiences and lead to an outcome that’ll be inherently full of ND joy and celebration. 

Lifting up disabled voices will probably mean more work for organisations and their staff for a time. But it’ll be worth it for the breadth of audience those organisations will get in return. Because including us in accessible, empathetic ways means welcoming us in – making that booth bigger, turning off the wind machine, letting that violently fluttering cash settle to the floor and giving everyone a fair chance.  

Image credit: My Life Through a Lens, courtesy of Unsplash