The Challenges of Bringing Your Narrator into the Broadest (and Most Magical) Places on Earth
By Margaret Anne Mary Moore
It was the section of my memoir that I was simultaneously excited and apprehensive about writing—the trip to Disney World.
My rationale for including this part was clear. My debut memoir narrates my childhood experiences growing up with a physical disability, Cerebral Palsy, relying on a wheelchair, walker, and speech device, losing my father to cancer, and being raised with two brothers by a single mother who enabled my pursuit of education, athletics, and extracurricular activities. Its intended purpose is to teach others living with disabilities or adverse circumstances that they, too, can persevere and thrive in ordinary and extraordinary endeavors. The Florida trip presented opportunities to delve deeply into both the disability and single-parent family experiences.
The lead-up to our vacation was easy to align with the book’s purpose. This layered narrative discusses my mother’s desire for us to visit her brother’s family and to fulfill the dream she and my father had of giving us a childhood experience at Disney—an ambition that had to remain on the bucket list when my father’s final decline left him too sick to travel. It also details my mom’s intent for the trip to be a much-needed respite following a twelve-year period in which she was caring for a family member—my maternal grandfather, my father, then my maternal grandmother—during their lives’ final stages and how she gradually saved for and made the road trip from Connecticut as cost-efficient as possible.
A lifelong Disney fanatic, I looked forward to spending several writing sessions depicting our experiences there. Yet, as a writer mindful of creative nonfiction craft, writing about the parks concerned me. The narrative had the potential of wandering in too many directions, and its purpose would easily get lost.
Lots of narratives about people’s Disney adventures exist, I thought. What makes mine unique?
To address this, I needed to center on the physical and emotional sensations of moving with a disabled body at the parks and the accommodations enabling my narrator to go on rides.
Having a child narrator on an inaugural Disney trip, I sensed that my first priority should be to depict her excitement before turning the narrative into a discussion about accessibility. The best scene to open with seemed to be one in which my narrator passes through Magic Kingdom’s gates, buzzing with elation while looking around at the mascots greeting visitors. This part is very measured, showing just enough to convey the depth of her enthrallment.
The focus then shifts to her mother, who suggests that they first find the guest services office to pick up the accessibility pass. The disability experience claims center stage here, beginning with an explanation of how my narrator’s disability qualified her for a line cutter pass—a ticket permitting handicapped persons and their families to bypass lines at rides to avoid having medical equipment or impaired limbs collide with crowds. This segment tapers into the scene of my narrator’s first time on a ride, It’s a Small World —a boat tour past singing Audio-Animatronics figures in scenes of countries across the globe.
As the disability experience is described most deeply in this scene, it becomes the Disney narrative’s main fixture. Through embodied writing techniques, I highlight my narrator’s physical and emotional sensations and the procedures that must be followed as she embarks on the ride. Embodied writing mandates the use of granular levels of detail to illustrate the narrator’s physical, emotional, psychological, and sensory experiences. My scene gives a step-by-step narration of the process—the movements, the sensations of her body making contact with the equipment, and how her relatives guide her—that my narrator uses to rise from her wheelchair and take a seat in the boat. My prose delves into the family’s need to put an arm around her shoulders to aid her in keeping her body upright during the ride. The rest of the scene balances between describing the physical sensations encountered and her emotional reactions. This depth of description works to emphasize the distinction between the able-bodied and disability experiences—that enjoying the ride involves a process more complex than the average park visitor’s. It also shows how the narrator’s family devised a system to enable her to go on rides while balancing her physical needs.
After writing this scene, I realized the book only needed one of its kind. Had I employed this step-by-step description to depict more than one ride, my prose would become redundant, explaining the same process of leaving the wheelchair and being supported by family. To avoid this, the scene includes a line stating that this process was used for each ride.
Being a narrative about Disney, though, I couldn’t just include one ride scene. I wanted—and needed—to show what attractions enthused my narrator. To uphold the memoir’s purpose, I knew the disability theme had to remain at the center. In considering how my physical impairments affected my experience on other rides, I found a direction for my prose. Immediately following the It’s a Small World scene, I explain that, because of my narrator’s weak trunk control, rides with sudden twists, turns, and jolts were not feasible. This served as a great segue into sections on her favorite aspects of Disney World. Noting that, with the extensive offerings of rides, character meet-and-greets, and other activities, the narrator hardly noticed the restrictions affecting her ride selection, I was able to briefly describe favorite attractions and interactions with characters. The explicit disability discussion temporarily recedes but still anchors these descriptions.
The key to having a narrator navigate the broadest of places without offsetting a memoir’s purpose is simple: Focus on characteristics that distinguish their experiences from the norm. Find your Small World scene, use it as a centerpiece, and surround it with less-pertinent details to provide a comprehensive picture.
The Disney trip was the memoir section that I was simultaneously excited and apprehensive about writing. Now it is perhaps one of the book’s strongest depictions of navigating life’s extraordinary endeavors with a disability.
___ Margaret Anne Mary Moore is a summer 2022 graduate of Fairfield University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program, where she earned a degree in creative nonfiction and poetry. She is an editor and the marketing coordinator at Woodhall Press and an ambassador for PRC-Saltillo. Her debut memoir Bold, Brave, and Breathless: Reveling in Childhood’s Splendiferous Glories While Facing Disability and Loss will be released in October. Margaret’s writing has appeared in Brevity ’s Nonfiction Blog, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy, Independent Catholic News, Positive Writer, Two Drops of Ink: A Literary Blog, and How We Are among other publications. Find her on Twitter: @mooreofawriter
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