We recently connected with Effy Redman and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Effy, thanks for joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I have been writing and editing professionally my entire adult life, but decided to study the craft of memoir-writing intensively by doing an MFA in Creative Writing with a focus in memoir. Eight years after I completed my MFA, my first memoir Saving Face–a queer disability coming-of-age narrative–was published by Vine Leaves Press. My learning process was perhaps slower than it could have been because, well, life happened along the way! I don’t think I could have sped up the process of writing and publishing my first book though. I needed those years to incubate my memoir. But I do hope my second book will take less time to reach readers! Rewriting, processing editorial feedback, and eventually detaching from the emotional content of this book were essential to my process. Nonfiction is a vulnerable genre, both for the author and for the real people portrayed on the page; this vulnerability meant that I didn’t always have the creative freedom to explore certain events into their deepest points, at least not in the final draft.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a lesbian author/editor and disability advocate based in upstate New York. I write about the intersection of disability and identity, with an emphasis on embracing the beauty of facial difference. I began my writing career after finishing undergraduate college as a playwright and dramaturge in the off-off Broadway theatre scene in New York City. Around that time, I signed up for a legal proofreading course, indirectly launching my parallel editing career. In graduate college, I worked intensively on my first book, a memoir about my life with Moebius Syndrome, a rare condition of facial paralysis, which features the inability to smile. Whilst working on my book, I also published articles in Vice, Ravishly, and The New York Times focusing on what the smile (or lack thereof) signified to me as a young woman in America. Through my memoir Saving Face, I became involved in the international Facial Difference community. I am most proud of my writing’s capacity to transcend suffering and alienation with resilience. My mission is to give voice to components of disability that might otherwise never be heard in the world. Intersectionality is important to me, too. As a queer woman with a facial difference, a disability, I feel strongly that it is unacceptable to silence our vulnerable minorities. My second memoir is a collection of vignettes and poetry about a year I spent living in a heavily regulated housing program for adults with mental health diagnoses and the inevitable repression of that system. I am searching for a publisher for that now. I also work as an editor for a nonprofit organization supporting individuals with developmental disabilities.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Yes! My creative mission is to raise awareness about facial difference, disability, lgbtq+ identity, and mental health. Writing is a great tool for this mission because there are so many outlets to channel writing into: print, online, social media. I consider myself a part of the disability justice movement. I have a lot of hope and optimism for our future.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I wish I had found queer community for myself much earlier in my creative journey. For many years, especially in my twenties and early thirties, I felt very alone with my queerness. Now, I am part of an extremely supportive lgbtq+ community, which helps me to have the emotional security I need in order to do my work, especially since writing can be such a solitary craft.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.effyredman.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/effyredman38/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/effy.redman
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/effy-redman-7bab2110b/

Image Credits

Photos by Effy Redman and Cindy Swadba