Laura Elliott

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I’m a white, thirty-something, disabled woman from Scunthorpe, who moved to Sheffield for university many years ago and now calls the seven hills home. I consider myself queer in the sense of being pan/bisexual and also on the asexual spectrum, although I don’t tend to publicise myself as a queer writer due to the fact I’ve been in a long-term relationship with my male partner for nearly ten years. The politics around publicly-identifying as queer when in a cishet-presenting relationship can get murky and somewhat fraught online, and so while queer characters will always crop up in my work, their sexualities — in the same way that I see my own — are often incidental to their stories.

I’ve worked as a freelance journalist for many years, mostly in the disability, politics and health spaces. My work has been published by The Guardian, ByLine Times, Metro, The i Paper and elsewhere. I used to run the now-defunct podcast Visibility Today, interviewing UK disabled activists,
campaigners and creatives about their work, and I’ve spoken at protests for the Millions Missing post-viral communities a number of times, and worked with campaigns like Taking The PIP to oppose government cuts to disability welfare.

This summer, my debut novel Awakened — a gothic sci-fi dystopia about capitalism, overwork, disability, societal care and Sleepless monsters — was published by Angry Robot Books.

2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B? 
I decided I was going to be an author when I was six years old, and it suddenly occurred to me that someone must have written the books I was so busy devouring! The very first story I typed out, painstakingly on my parents' computer around that time, was an 18pt-font, single-page tale about a
goldfish (very imaginatively named Goldy) who becomes trapped inside a series of stone corridors. When he emerges at the end, he realises that he’s been stuck in the little model castle someone had placed in his goldfish bowl, but that now he can see through the glass to the room outside he’s still, in some way, trapped.

Retrospectively, it does seem like a fairly existential story for a relatively content six year old to write! Although I’ve always been aware that stories and writing were, for me, escapes from the mundane and exercises in imagining something better, and — at least as a child — more exciting than the
everyday. While other children played with dolls, and many as we aged began to dream about marriage and children, I’ve really only ever had two major dreams: to write and to travel. I was fairly certain that if I could achieve both of these things then my life would be a happy and fulfilled one.
The latter aim was killed off by disability in my mid-twenties, but writing and reading remain just as fulfilling for me as they were when I was a child. And perhaps even more so, now that the world has shrunk just a little.

3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
I always find this kind of question difficult to answer, because for as long as I can remember I’ve always had a little “narrator” inside my head who’s constantly scanning for stories. I used to make my dad play certain songs on repeat in the car on the way to school because, internally, I would
be visualising an epic narrative and narrating it silently as I went. The “action” would rise at certain swells in the music and fall again in the quieter moments. I passed many a long car journey in this way, and was relieved when I got my first Walkman and I could be in full control of what was
playing into my ears!

Similarly, I’ve never slept all that well, since I need at least an hour of lying in bed daydreaming and toying with little stories before I can drift off. I’m also a great people observer and I find humans very fascinating. Although becoming mostly housebound for a number of years put a stop
to in-person people watching (after some improvement, I now call myself more house-tethered than bound), social media was a similarly fascinating tool to see how people respond to each other when they don’t feel as though what they’re saying is as “real” as speaking it out loud.

Nowadays, when I write I think I’m mostly interested in power structures, and how people operating within those structures respond to and influence each other — how we miss moments of connection due to being bound up in our own struggles or seeing from only our own perspective.

Awakened in particular grew out of my experience of disability and of living in a world which demanded work at any cost while vilifying those who couldn’t. And I wanted to explore the particular site of horror that medicine can create, both when it disbelieves its patients and denies them care, and when it encroaches upon their bodily autonomy to “standardise” their bodies in line with society’s comfort and desire.

4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
Honestly, a fair amount of frustration at not being able to do as much of it as I’d like! My health means that a lot of my early process is simply daydreaming, scribbling notes and lines of dialogue down while lying in bed or on the sofa. When I feel as though I have a grasp on the characters/themes I begin the first draft, which I write entirely on a typewriter for a number of reasons.

When I first started Awakened, I struggled to read on a screen, so the typewriter began its life as an accessibility tool. Later, I realised that being unable to edit the first draft — and being forced to write forward instead of sculpting what was already there — helped me get to the “end” more
quickly, and there was also a huge psychological benefit to seeing each new page pile up beside me on the desk.
 

The downside to this method is that my body isn’t always capable of sitting at a desk for very long, but the typewriter doesn’t really work for me in bed, so first drafts tend to be the longest part of my process. Now that I can read on a screen again, the later drafts on the laptop usually end
up being worked on mostly in bed/on the armchair, where my back, legs and nervous system are far less angry at me.

5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
Oh, a huge amount. Writing has been a compulsion for me my whole life and I’m almost certain that this was why, despite growing up in a very insular place, I’ve always been interested in rather than threatened by other people’s lives. Writing encourages me to listen to other people’s experiences, to empathise with them, to seek out commonalities and respect differences and to try and understand.
 

I also feel that, having been somewhat removed from society when I became housebound, writing allowed me to process what had happened to me, but also to see the wider systems that had placed me and others like me in that position. I’m more curious about the world because I want to write about it, and I’ve been lucky enough to develop friendships with other writers and with readers along the way. Even at a distance, writing has allowed me to be part of a community and, no matter how unwell I am, that little “narrator” is still busy chattering away inside.

6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
Surprisingly, it hasn’t. I think I’ve seen myself as a writer my entire life and so, while publication is of course validating, it didn’t fundamentally alter how I perceived myself or the value of my own work. My writing has always been important to me and it’s still just as important to me now. The only change is that, since publication, I’m in the very privileged position of occasionally being sent messages by readers who have found that my writing is
important to them too!

Due to my disabilities, it would have been impossible for me to have been both a parent and to have had a creative life as a writer. I suppose, in some way, being able to say that I’m a published author now may make the decision that I’d already made, not to pursue motherhood, more justifiable to people outside of my personal relationships. I don’t think I agree that it’s any more or less understandable though, despite that perception.

Writing was always the thing that gave me joy, the thing that I did both subconsciously and consciously every day, and it would have been just as great a loss to me whether or not I ever became a published author. I don’t think I could have sacrificed it, even if I didn’t ever achieve someone else’s notion of “success”.

7. Tell us about the wider reception that you’ve had to sharing your story - has it changed how others have viewed you and your identity as a non-parent?
I think the non-parent themes in Awakened are, very much like Thea's (the protagonist) sexuality, incidental to the story. For instance, there’s a single line in which Thea says that her past relationships have involved both men and women, but her relationship with Vladimir takes centre stage during the timeline of the novel.

Similarly, Thea writes that even as a child she never quite understood children, preferring the company of adults while wanting children “to be safe and happy in a rather abstract sense”. She also suggests that she wouldn’t be a very “natural” mother whereas she considers that another character, Helen, is. But here her commentary on the subject of children ends.

Within the universe of the story, though, I do think that the different configurations that care and family can take shine through a little more. Thea has been a carer for her disabled mother since she was a child and so, while she doesn’t see herself as possessing the nurturing instinct that she believes is necessary for being a good mother, her ability to care for those she loves has, in fact, shaped most of her life. She’s just simply never had an interest in motherhood.

In many ways, Awakened explores the ways in which our care for each other, whether familial or not, shapes who we are as people, while also exposing the gaps in society’s duty of care to a population. While no-one’s yet commented directly (to me, at least!) on Thea’s certainty and
acceptance of herself as never having wanted children, many people have picked up on the themes of community and interpersonal care.
 

I think these themes are intimately tied to our ideas about the supremacy of the nuclear family as the only “correct” way to make families and, in many ways, also to society’s lack of support for parents alongside its vilification of those who choose not to become them.
 

As for whether it’s changed people’s views of me as a non-parent, I can’t say. I think that becoming disabled in my twenties had already made my decision not to become a parent more understandable and acceptable to wider society than if I’d still been healthy, but I’m not sure that I particularly like the reasons why.

8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?
As literature becomes more diverse generally, I think a natural outgrowth of that is that we’ll gradually see more childless/childfree people represented. I do think it’s still much more common to have a childless man as a protagonist than a childless woman — at least without the text commenting directly on the fact that she’s childless.

I think a lot of queer narratives often deal much better with the concept of “found family” or of different representations of family than most other stories. But it’s been nice to see more people begin to explore the myriad ways there are to care for one another outside of the “traditional” family, and more books in which extended (childless) family members still play a big part in being present and caring for children close to them as well.

9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?
That not everyone longs for parenthood and, as far as female characters go, not every woman grieves its loss. For myself, while becoming more disabled was traumatic for me, I actually felt a kernel of relief that the decision not to be a parent had been taken out of my hands once and for all.

I kept waiting for the grief, since there’s a difference between thinking that you probably won’t have children and being told, definitively, that having your own children would be far too dangerous for your body to handle. But I’m pleased to say that the grief never came, which I think means I was probably right about myself when, even as a child, I thought that motherhood wasn’t something that I needed my life to include. I’d also like to rid all areas of the world of the idea that choosing to be childless means you hate kids! I happen to think that kids are brilliant and I love being an auntie. I just never wanted to be a mother myself.

10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?
Very simply, I’m working on my second book right now and I have my fingers crossed that someone will want to publish it. It’s a witchy, folkloric piece set over a long weekend during a party at an isolated countryside house, and it takes a deep, dark look at the joy and the horror of being a teenage girl growing up in the early noughties. Or, at least, that’s what I hope it will be when I’m done!