Hello, Sophia right here!
After a few years of prep, I’ve created a brand new Firefly providing about writing fats characters, and I need to inform you why.
However first, let me take you again.
As a child, I learn the whole lot I might get my fingers on. Books have been the place I felt most myself, and studying late into the evening was my sanctuary.
Working my method by way of Judy Blume’s books felt particularly great — I associated to her characters’ ideas and emotions, which have been angsty and tangled similar to mine.
After which I learn Blubber.
For the primary time, this was a e book a few woman who seemed like me. And he or she was being relentlessly bullied by her classmates for being, properly — “Blubber.” Round this time, the bullying euphemisms had began to pile up in my life too — plump, big-boned, chubby, curvy.
There’s a second within the e book that’s stayed with me for many years. One of many bullies, after losing a few pounds, stands up and says with delight that she will be able to look down and see her ft. She is well known and declared regular.
Once I learn that line, I stood up, seemed down, and couldn’t see my ft.
It hit me like a wave. I used to be Blubber. I deserved to be bullied. My physique was one thing to alter, repair, and conceal. Blubber confirmed what I’d begun to suspect — that fats equals dangerous, eternally rejected, and undeserving.
And, worse, Blubber doesn’t get a contented ending. By the tip of the e book she was nonetheless getting bullied, nonetheless shaky and insecure. Judy Blume didn’t write her a narrative that allow her develop previous that horrible second.
As I moved into maturity, my love of studying continued. My first profession was as a librarian who specialised in serving to libraries purchase their books. In these years, I continued to absorb the messages about what it means when a personality is fats.
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I examine Bombur in The Hobbit, all the time lagging behind, his fatness an issue the opposite extra heroic dwarves needed to handle.
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I learn in regards to the Dursleys in Harry Potter, described with such disgust and the place fatness stood in for cruelty, laziness, and greed.
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I examine Bridget Jones, counting energy and kilos with each web page flip, tying her weight on to her value, her desirability, and her possibilities at love.
After which there have been the various, many, many books the place fats individuals merely didn’t exist. These have been maybe probably the most painful of all. Within the authors’ imaginations, there was no room for physique variety, no future for fats of us.
Like all tales, these wove into my sense of what was potential for me. They instructed me time and again that to be fats was to be much less. Much less courageous. Much less lovable. Much less deserving. Much less heroic.
Fortunately, as writers, we all know that tales might be re-written. Data might be deepened.
The narratives we supply about our bodies and belonging might be reshaped into one thing extra sincere, expansive, and free.
That’s why I created this providing.
That is my small method of supporting writers who need to deliver creativity, intention, and authenticity to portraying fats our bodies, whether or not or not they’re fats themselves.
That is for writers who need to clear the slate and write fats characters who’re life like, advanced, and much much less prone to ship fats readers right into a disgrace spiral. In different phrases — the right way to write fats characters as individuals.
It’s a easy one-off teaching session the place you’ll be able to deliver your works-in-progress, and I can meet you, shame-free, in serving to you evolve your work previous the painful stereotypes and erasures that maintain us from full expression within the literary world.
I’ll ask sincere questions.
I’ll invite your questions.
I’ll be grateful that you simply’re there with me in these questions.
Collectively, we’ll breathe new life into your work in order that it might probably make a contribution in direction of constructing a kinder and extra liberated narrative world for all of your readers.
