How You Climb the Mountain:

Accessibility, Advocacy, and Agency in Writing and Publishing

A Conversation with Amanda Leduc

AMANDA LEDUC

is a writer and disability rights advocate. She is the author of The Centaur’s Wife (Random House Canada, 2021), Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space (Coach House Books, 2020), and The Miracles of Ordinary Men (ECW Press, 2013). Her essays and stories have appeared across Canada, the US, and the UK, and she has spoken across North America on accessibility, inclusion, and disability in storytelling. She has cerebral palsy and lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she serves as the communications and development coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), Canada’s first festival for diverse authors and stories.

She met (virtually) with The Ampersand Review’s managing editor Robyn Read for a conversation about her work in March 2021.

Robyn Read: You published your short story “The Centaur’s Wife” in 2014 in Necessary Fiction. At what point in the process did you realize that there was more to tell, and decide to evolve the story into a novel? What was the first step in starting to expand it?

Amanda Leduc: In the fall of 2015, I pulled together a bunch of short stories that I had written, and “The Centaur’s Wife” was one of those. I remember at the time, I workshopped it with some friends here in Hamilton, one of whom was Liz Harmer (1). At the time, she said, “Oh, I really need to know more about these centaurs. I want to know more about them, this isn’t enough, the short story.” So I expanded the short story and fleshed it out a little bit. By the time the short story collection was ready to send to publishers, “The Centaur’s Wife” had gone from 2,500 words to 20,000 words, so it was more of a novella. And really, at that point, I sort of knew that I wanted to expand it into a novel. By the beginning of 2016, I had a short story collection, and a proposal for a novel based on “The Centaur’s Wife,” which we took to a number of publishers and it was rejected by almost all of them. The only one who said “yes” was Anne Collins (2) at Random House.
When we signed for the book in the spring of 2016, it hadn’t been written yet. Which was a very interesting experience, because suddenly I had this book that hadn’t been written, but I had a contract for it, so it felt like it was more finished than it actually was.
I remember finishing the first draft of The Centaur’s Wife and thinking, “Oh, I have this writing thing down, it’s good to go the way that it is!” And it required three more years of writing. Actually, at the beginning of 2019, I ended up selling Disfigured on proposal as well to Coach House, so I did it again!
There’s a lot more overt rage in the short story. This rage is still there in the novel, but it became much more about grief and the way that rage acts as a cover for grief in some ways. Having to work all of that out and think about the centaurs in particular, and their motivations, and how they’re torn between being half human and half animal—the germ of it was there in the initial short story, but definitely took a while to come out in later drafts of the novel.

RR: I was curious how long it took to get from short story to novel, because the centaurs in the short story are very much in the shadows. Bringing them to the forefront, giving them names, and allowing them to speak and be present in the novel, I imagine that process probably took a while.

AL: Yeah, it really did. One of the things that I really liked in the short story was that rage, and the way that rage and desire can bleed together. It was something that ultimately ended up being a little too unwieldy for the larger book. But that’s where working the disability angle into the book turned out to be very revelatory for me, because there’s a lot of buried rage there. A lot of sublimated rage that Heather has been dealing with her entire life.
I remember when I was in undergrad—so this was like seventeen years ago—studying with Carla Funk (3) at the University of Victoria, she talked about how you should cannibalize your own writing for future projects. The Centaur’s Wife was very much taking something that worked in a very short story format, but needed to be expanded in different ways when it became a novel.

RR: And one of the things you expand upon and explore in the space of the novel is Heather’s story. Do you see Heather’s story challenging norms and expectations of the hero’s journey?

AL: I don’t think Heather is your typical likeable narrator. I like her a great deal, and understand her very well. Sure, she can be bitchy, and she’s kind of rude, and she’s not really friendly to a lot of people, but so are a lot of people we encounter in the world. So are, in particular, I would argue, a lot of disabled people, and they have good reason for being that way. Because there is no reason for someone to be soft and cuddly when the world has not been soft and cuddly to them in return.
For Heather, I think so much of the hero’s journey that’s the traditional hero’s journey we focus on—especially in fairy tales—is about the hero overcoming various challenges so they can fit into society. But society overcoming its own biases and barriers is never part of that hero’s journey. It’s never society that changes, and I talk about this a lot in Disfigured. It’s always the protagonist who has to change in some way. And for Heather, she has fought her whole life against that idea of changing. She wanted to feel supported by her dad, and she never did. She wanted to change so she could be more palatable to him, be the kind of daughter that he wanted, or she felt he wanted her to be, and she wasn’t able to do that, and then she did not feel like she was a part of the city that she grew up in; she didn’t really feel accepted. There are definite walls around her as a result. Walls that definitely work to her detriment.
I also didn’t want to write her as being this kind of…not object of pity, but someone you really feel for because she’s just been wronged every step of the way. I mean, she has been wronged most steps of the way, but also lashes out, and remains walled off in very crucial ways that are her own fault. And I think that it was key—it was important for me to include that in her story in much the same way that Tasha as a character is, in some ways, your typical hero narrator. She sort of comes in and saves the day. But Larissa Lai (4), in her questions at my launch for the book, talked about Tasha being a narcissist. I hadn’t really thought of Tasha that way, necessarily, but she does definitely do some very narcissistic things. It’s all about her trying to save the town. But she’s also centring herself in ways: heroes are supposed to be humble. They’re supposed to do what is asked of them. And in many ways, the characters in The Centaur’s Wife struggle and chafe against what they feel might be asked of them. And that was something that I really wanted to explore in the book. Because the actions that we take toward survival and thriving, in particular, are complicated and multifaceted, and it didn’t make sense to have The Centaur’s Wife be an uncomplicated story of survival, because survival itself is complicated.

RR: You mentioned how Heather understandably does not have a soft approach when it comes to overcoming barriers. Tasha, on the other hand, is criticized by other survivors when she tells them that help is on the way. They accuse her of telling fairy tales, making up stories, and they are not comforted by her assurances. She takes this soft approach, she thinks that she’s comforting them—and they actually really bristle at that. Then Tasha sees Heather’s approach, and she’s puzzled, because she adamantly doesn’t think fear is a good motivator for people. The question that resonated for me so much is when Tasha asks Heather, “What good will stories about monsters do?” I’m really curious, do you think that stories about monsters can do some good?

AL: It’s not helpful if people are always telling stories about monsters and despair and wallowing in grief. Absolutely, that is not a way to move forward. But it’s also not helpful to constantly be like, “It’s okay, we will move through it together, we’re all going to be fine.” I was interviewed by Julie Lalonde (5) about the book a couple weeks ago, and a term that she kept referencing was “toxic positivity,” which was so great, because I hadn’t thought about toxic positivity when I was writing the novel, but it is very much Tasha’s approach. I think that’s part of why people get frustrated with her, and why Heather gets frustrated with her in particular, because it’s so exhausting to just think, “It’s all going to be okay” all the time.
Obviously, I was not thinking about the pandemic when I was writing the book, but it’s been interesting to see the parallels when I look at what’s happening in the world now. Because there is such a push for people—especially now that people are getting the vaccines—to embrace this kind of dogged “we’re going to get back to normal, it’s going to be great!” What so many people are refusing to acknowledge and see is that a) normal was never really great to begin with, but also b) it’s so much more complicated than just going back to normal. There are so many things that will need to happen in order for the world to get back to some semblance of where it was, that really, the world that you inhabit after you’ve gone through the worst of grief and catastrophe is going to be different. You’re never going to go back to the way the world was before. I think that is what Heather is really trying to tell Tasha, because she recognizes Tasha is also working through her own grief.
The Centaur’s Wife ended up, even before I knew it, being very much a novel about grief, which was then impacted because my best friend passed away in December of 2019 after I’d finished writing the book. It was really weird to look back on the book in January 2020 when I was doing copyedits and see the parallels in there: see the ways in which, even now, almost a year and a half after it happened, when I face grief head-on, there is that moment of being like, “No, no, I don’t want to look at it, I want to—I’m going to distract myself, I’m going to look at something else, I’m going to do something else.” And you can’t do that, right?
I mean, you can do it, you can continue to do it, but you’re just continually going in circles.

RR: There’s so much in what you said there, and I want to unpack some of it. But I want to start by saying I’m so sorry for your loss.
Heather accepts that we don’t know what comes next. Tasha, however, distracts herself from her grief by aspiring to seek redemption, to try to make up for a loss by being a hero to others.
There is something about the nature of someone who tries to adamantly seek redemption without taking a break that is, as you said, exhausting. I think the mountain teaches people in the novel how you climb. When you climb the mountain—when Heather and her father climb the mountain—they’re able to climb the mountain because they rest when they need to. I think about your beautiful passages about the doctor climbing the mountain. How she rests and she eats and she sleeps and then she’s able to climb. She’s able to do the climb by resting when she needs to, listening to her body, and taking care of herself.
Elyse is a character in The Centaur’s Wife who is in desperate need of a lung transplant. There could be a comparison drawn between Elyse’s emergency and the plight of those who have had their procedures and operations put on hold during the pandemic.
I’m wondering if you can speak a bit about the many ways the novel explores the agency—or lack of agency—we have over our health and wellness?

AL: See that’s a great question, because one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot over these past weeks since the book has come out is the ways in which the dystopian narrative, and the apocalyptic narrative in particular, have treated the disabled body in very particular, time-worn ways. I think about Station Eleven (6), which I loved as a book. But at the beginning, when that first pandemic starts spreading through the world, there’s a character, Jeevan, who has a disabled brother, Frank, and the disabled brother chooses to stay on his own and die and encourages his brother to go and find his own life, his own way. There are disabled people in the disabled community who pointed out when the book was first published that it was being ableist, but not necessarily with a wider awareness of how it was an ableist narrative: I think about how when we write apocalyptic stories, people follow the same pattern, where it’s sort of understood that the disabled body, the disabled person, is reliant on technology to survive. So, when you take the technology away, there’s nothing you can do. The disabled body just…the person just dies. They have to be left behind so that everybody else can survive. And I think it can be quite radical to think about apocalyptic and dystopian fiction in particular as an area in which writers—disabled and non-disabled alike—have a real responsibility to envision new futures that move beyond that question of technology.
The character Elyse was a really important one for me. She is in danger, in terms of how physically fragile she is. But one of the reasons and one of the ways she survives is because she has this community around her. Which ultimately helps her continue to be alive throughout the course of the book. Elyse her whole life has been told “you can’t climb the mountain because of your lungs,” and the reason that she does climb the mountain at the end is because she has this community of people around her who help her do it. She’s technically not climbing the mountain in her own physical self—she is riding a centaur as they go up—but this is how we envision the disabled body as surviving and thriving in new societies. By means of the community that we build around them; by not leaving them alone.
The people in the novel survive both because they become their own community, but also because as disabled characters—because by the end of the novel, everybody has some sort of physical ailment or some kind of psychological trauma they’re working through, and I consider them all disabled in some way—they’re all surviving because they have learned how to adapt and shift their perspectives in ways that become crucial for survival. The people who don’t survive in the book are people who can’t make that shift. Who can’t change their perspective. Which you need to do, so that you can reach for some kind of hope. You’re not reaching for the bright, shiny, perfect hope. You’re reaching for the imperfect hope, and it’s not a failure to do that. It’s actually the way that you survive.

RR: And certainly Elyse falls into that category of trying to adapt to survive. She’s helping strategize. She’s making choices that are sometimes good and that are sometimes questionable, but she’s making moves. And that is so important that she is not a character just awaiting a future that will not happen, because the future is uncertain. She is still speaking up, and because she is responding, because she is participating, she has agency.
I’d like to talk about the medical notes in your book Disfigured from the consultation between your parents and the neurosurgeon who operated on you as a child: you say in the introduction to the book how including the notes gave you an opportunity to take back the narrative. I’d love to hear you speak a little bit about the enormous potential that Disfigured and The Centaur’s Wife have to reclaim how a narrative can be shared, as books published in all accessible and standard formats at the time of their release.

AL: A lot of people have been saying in discussions about The Centaur’s Wife and Disfigured that they were surprised to hear that books aren’t immediately available to anybody who wants them when they’re published. I think it’s a wider conversation that the Canadian publishing industry—all publishing industries—need to be having, because we assume that stories are available to everybody, but they’re really not, especially in the ways that we package them. There are people who cannot access books in the same way that everybody else can access books. We need to really focus on that and understand that it’s not solely the responsibility of the disability community to advocate for that change. It’s everybody’s responsibility.
I mean this whole question right now with the funding for the Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA) (7) and the National Network for Equitable Library Service (NNELS) (8) having their funding cut—it’s been partially restored now, which is great. But the wider conversation is that the work these organizations do is a huge part of the Canadian literary fabric. We need to be talking more about that. The government has made decisions about the funding because what they want to see is more publishers building accessibility into their books right from the beginning, rather than having organizations like CELA and NNELS retroactively make books accessible. But that leaves out a whole bunch of backlist and international titles that were not made available in accessible formats.
I hope that both The Centaur’s Wife and Disfigured can contribute to the conversation, because advocating for my books to be made accessible was actually really easy for me to do as a writer because I knew the players. I basically just introduced everybody, and they went ahead and did their work. The question of funding is key here, because CELA and NNELS had the resources to work together on my books and they could have them ready for publication. They don’t have the resources available to do that for every single book that’s published in Canada. There is funding available, and I think the government needs to do a better job of advertising that funding and advertising the different initiatives that are available.

RR: When you clarify it can’t just be disability advocates, it has to be part of the conversation that everybody is having, I think about BookNet Canada (9) and what they do for the publishing industry in terms of the data and research and standards they provide. Accessibility was something they drew attention to in their State of Publishing in Canada 2019 report.

AL: And it can’t just be a conversation that publishers are having, either, even though they’re the ones that obviously need to take on the lion’s share of the work of making books accessible. It needs to be a conversation that all writers are having. Ideally, I want all writers to ask their publishers about accessibility when they initially start things. There’s a wonderful writer by the name of Therese Estacion, who has a poetry collection coming out this month with Book*hug Press (10). She’s recording the audiobook herself. She’s a disabled poet, and she was a really good advocate for getting her book available in accessible formats, looking at different avenues to make that happen, and connecting Book*hug with the right opportunities. I want to see other writers who are not disabled doing the same thing, asking the same questions.
Again, it becomes a question of resources. Because when Disfigured was published last year, it was the first book in Canada to be made born accessible (11) in that way. And after it was published, CELA had a flood of requests and questions from writers who wanted to make their books—both backlist and upcoming releases—accessible, and they didn’t have the resources to handle all of those requests. It’s all linked: you have disabled and non-disabled people advocating for this change, which means that there’s an increased demand, which means there needs to be more resources thrown toward the problem. Even though the government is hoping for more books to be made accessible from the publishers, and is making more money available, the publishers then need people who know what they’re doing: it all comes down to people being aware of funding opportunities, because a lot of publishers don’t know what’s available. They don’t understand that making the shift to including accessibility right at the time of publication, while it’s big, is actually less of an overall shift than retroactively turning your entire catalogue accessible.

RR: I think about the blur of the moment for a writer, especially a new or emerging writer, when…your book has been accepted! But when and once a book is accepted for publication, there are so many important questions for the author to ask, just to gain awareness of how it’s going to be produced and marketed. In writing communities, and for us here in our Creative Writing & Publishing program (12), this can be something we inform emerging writers: ask questions during this crucial part of the publishing process.

AL: Especially when you think about traditional publishing, there’s that divide: the writer does their job, and their job is to produce the manuscript, and then the publisher is there to take care of all the other things. And I do think in order to survive, I think it is in a writer’s best interest to educate themselves on how best to help that process along.
There are writers out there who just want to write, and hand their stuff over and aren’t really keen on doing any sort of promotion or things like that. And that’s fine, but I do think you miss out on opportunities by not knowing or learning a little bit more about the cogs of what goes on in the system. Because publishing, historically, has been a huge marginalizer. There have been certain stories that have been prioritized and elevated over other stories. And people who just kind of sign into the publishing system as it has always been done, and don’t question, don’t push or agitate for change in various kinds of ways actually continue to prop up that system. So when I say we all have a responsibility to do these kinds of things and to ask these kinds of questions, that’s where it comes from. I want the system to change in really significant ways. Arguably, you want it to all come crumbling down and then be rebuilt. Is that logistically going to happen? No, but in order for these really kind of crucial changes to happen, everybody needs to be asking the questions, all the time. And to step back and not ask the questions…we can’t all be firing on all cylinders at once and be advocating for all things at once. I do understand that. But I just think you need to ask at least a few questions as a writer. You need to understand your role in the process. Even just for the marketing of your book. Take an active role in getting your book out into the world. I think it’s more enjoyable that way.

RR: It’s about understanding the agency of the author doesn’t end with the completion of the manuscript, that that agency should be ongoing. It’s almost—I’m not sure about the leap I’m going to make here, bear with me—apocalyptic language you’re using to talk about systems you’d change in the publishing industry that have to come crumbling down in order to be rebuilt.
We could talk so much about loss and survival in your novel—how so many of your characters seem to mourn what used to be, and inhabit liminal bodies, spaces, and states of being. And I’m wondering if you can tell me a little more about the foxes.

AL: So, the foxes are interesting, because for me the foxes very much fall in line with the natural world in the book, which has its own kind of agency and its own kind of personality, which is very different from human agency and human personality. I thought about this when I was writing the book, in terms of time, humans are these blips in the universe, they’re kind of there and then gone, but the natural world continues in some way, shape, or form. So, in a weird way, I feel like the natural world doesn’t change in the same way. The foxes feel kind of static to me.
The whole push that they’re giving toward the centaurs is saying “there’s a choice that you have to make.” You have to choose to be part of our natural world or part of the human world. And if you choose to be part of the human world, you can’t come back here.
The things that survive in the natural world and are thriving are the plants. If the mountain had been hit by one of those falling meteors, the mountain would have been destroyed, or it would have been significantly maimed in a very particular kind of way. But it’s the trees and the vines that crawl over things and reclaim their ground. I guess I was thinking about the foxes as luring Heather, in particular, up the mountain, away from her work of survival—keep going, one foot in front of the other. But it’s significant that it’s not that natural world that saves her, it’s the liminal in-between centaurs who save her, because they have one foot—or, you know, two feet as the case may be, two feet in one world and two feet in another. That neither here nor there, that in-between, this goes back to the disabled characters in the book. It’s the disabled characters who are neither fully abled nor completely incapacitated—who survive. They’re the ones who ultimately have agency, and they have agency because together, as a group, they’re taking care of one another.
The foxes, much like the mountain centaurs who also have that kind of detached, nonhuman approach to things, they don’t have that kind of flexibility. Or they view the world in a way that doesn’t have that kind of flexibility, and therefore may survive, but will survive in a very limited kind of way. The mountain—the jealous mountain, whose favourite son is that black horse—wants the horse to stay because the mountain wants the world that the mountain knows to remain the same. To not change. And it can’t accept change, it can’t accept the way that the horse wants to pull away and become something different. And it keeps Heather the same because it recognizes that there is no need to change her, she has always been the thing that she needed to be.
I guess I was playing with all those different things: the ways in which we long to change because we think that we might fit better into something if we are x, y, and z, versus the way that some things don’t change as a method of survival—which is also not necessarily the way to go, right? For me and the novel, it’s the in-between beings and the in-between approach that turns out to be what everyone needs in order to survive. It’s like how Heather says that you can’t survive by thinking that everything is going to be okay.
You have to take a little bit of despair and a little bit of hope at the same time, and somehow braid something out of that, to get you through. Because I think the danger of having too much hope is that when the bottom falls out, when catastrophe happens, when the plants turn on you and people are overwhelmed by their grief, they see no way forward. They give up because they have just been holding on to this bright, shining idea for so long that when it comes time to acknowledge that the bright, shining idea is no longer going to be there, it’s too devastating. There’s no way forward from that. Whereas the people who have dealt with grief and also disability and had to learn how to adapt to a world that maybe was not as bright and wonderful as it once had been—those are the people who survive, because they understand that survival is its own kind of hope, even if that survival doesn’t look like what you might have imagined hope would look like.

RR: You refer to parts of the natural world, the trees and the vines, reclaiming their ground. When I think about a land taking itself back, I envision the sea swallowing the crumbling California coastline. So maybe that’s because climate change is on my mind, or always somewhat on my mind. I’m wondering, hearing you talk about the natural world, was it one of the things foremost in your mind when you wrote the novel? Or can the land simply be, as you say, its own kind of character in a book these days and not also a warning?

AL: I think for me, it is its own kind of character. I don’t have very many survival skills, you know, wilderness survival skills. I could probably learn, if push comes to shove. But I do very much rely on my material comforts of modern-day living. I wasn’t really thinking about The Centaur’s Wife as a climate fiction; I wasn’t thinking about it as a kind of indictment of climate disaster or anything like that. I was thinking about magic, and it was kind of immediately apparent when I was writing about the mountain, in particular, that the mountain would have a certain kind of agency. It was this gnarled, old, jealous thing that loved very deeply and was very, very deeply hurt when abandoned. And then, when things [in the novel] started to grow with such lushness, it made sense to me that is what the natural world would do once humans had been removed from the picture, because that is what it does, right? Indigenous activists have been saying this for years, if not decades. The idea is that we are all interconnected. When we talk about climate change and saving the planet, what we’re really talking about is saving ourselves.
The world will continue on in some way, shape, or form if human beings are not here. The world was here fifty million years ago. Nature was here fifty million years ago in some capacity. And it will continue to be here long after we’re gone. And so, this question about climate and climate change and the work that we’re doing to secure a future is securing our future, as much as it is securing the future of the planet that we know right now.

RR: Then, I suppose my last question is since, try as I might, I’ve never been good at caring for my houseplants—should I be worried they might be plotting revenge?

AL: I mean, you never know, right?

1 | Canadian writer, editor, and teacher Liz Harmer: her speculative novel The Amateurs (Knopf, 2018) was a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award. lizharmer.com.

2 | Award-winning writer and editor Anne Collins is publisher of the Knopf Random Canada Publishing Group. penguinrandomhouse.ca/imprints/RK/knopf-canada.

3 | Canadian writer and educator Carla Funk: her most recent book is her memoir Every Little Scrap and Wonder (Greystone, 2019). carlafunk.com.

4 | Canadian poet and novelist Dr. Larissa Lai: she holds a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, where she directs the Insurgent Architects’ House for Creative Writing. larissalai.com.

5 | Canadian writer, women’s rights advocate, and educator Julie S. Lalonde wrote Resilience Is Futile: The Life and Death and Life of Julie S. Lalonde (Between the Lines; CBC Books Best Canadian Nonfiction, 2020). yellowmanteau.com.

6 | Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel’s award-winning speculative novel about a pandemic, Station Eleven (HarperCollins, 2014). emilymandel.com.

7 | The Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA) is a Canadian accessible library service for readers with print disabilities. celalibrary.ca.

8 | The National Network for Equitable Library Service (NNELS) makes books that are in accessible formats available to Canadian readers with print disabilities. nnels.ca.

9 | BookNet Canada is a non-profit that supports all sectors of the Canadian publishing industry, developing technology and standards, providing research and services, and making sense of the ever-changing book market. booknetcanada.ca.

10 | Inspired by Filipino horror and folk tales, and exploring disability and grief, Therese Estacion’s debut poetry collection is Phatompains (Book*hug Press, 2021). book*hugpress.ca.

11 | Born accessible: when a book is published in accessible formats at the time of its first publication / publishing the book in accessible formats is factored into the original production of the book.

12 | The Honours Bachelor in Creative Writing & Publishing at Sheridan College is the only degree program in Canada that brings together and gives equal balance to the study and development of skills in creative writing and publishing. www.sheridancollege.ca/programs/creative-writing-and-publishing.