How One Woman Fought for the Chance to Become a Better Writer

In a quest to improve her prose, Sandra Gail Lambert constantly had to push aside feedback that tokenized her in order to get criticism that was actually helpful. Here’s how she succeeded.

This piece is the second in our series, The Art of Narrative Storytelling, a special collaboration from Narratively and Creative Nonfiction that explores how writing moves us and changes us in ways we might never expect. You can learn more about this special series and experience the rest of the stories as we publish them here each week throughout June.

Photo courtesy of Sandra Gail Lambert; collage by Yunuen Bonaparte

This is an excerpt from My Withered Legs and Other Essays by Sandra Gail Lambert, which came out on March 1, 2024. Published by the University of Georgia Press. Reproduced by permission.

Early on in my writing life, which for me was in my 40s, I wrote a thinly-disguised-as-fiction piece about a woman who needed to make immense changes in her life and how was she going to have enough courage to live into the consequences. The story explored themes of independence and isolation, of disability and desire. The woman used a wheelchair. She was a lesbian.

It was unusual for me to have feedback from what I thought of as “real” writers. And as I was becoming more serious about writing, this lack of access to knowledge was exasperating. It seemed impossible to make what I wanted to say work on the page. I’d read Dorothy Allison and yearned to write dialogue as effectively. How did Alice Walker structure a story like that? I wanted to twist the reader’s brain like Joanna Russ. And Beloved — it was absurd to think I could ever lift my writing into such rarefied layers of the atmosphere. But I wanted to try. The next move, it seemed to me, was that I had to show my work to people outside of my friendly hometown lesbian writers’ groups. A writer I knew who was a college professor and had actually been published said she would take a look at my story.

This college professor read my piece and told me having a character disabled and a lesbian was too messy, too complex for a short story. She thought that since there was no tension or plot development about being a lesbian, I should leave that part out. And here it was, right during my first foray into a wider (straight) writing world — lesbian erasure. My lesbian-feminist self was outraged. I thought, “Not enough lesbian content, I’ll show you lesbian content.” So I added a part about my character noticing the hands of a waitress at Shoney’s. How strong the fingers were. How competently they handled the heavy plates. The way her thumb gripped into the sweaty glass of ice water. My character made a joke about the waitress’s sensible shoes. I dyked up that story all over the place. I even gave my character a Barbara Stanwyck obsession and had her fantasize about the thick black leather belt Victoria Barkley, power femme personified, wore cinched above her jodhpurs on The Big Valley.

My story became one of those crowd-pleasers. I’d read it at gatherings and get all sorts of laughs and accolades, and I liked that. I didn’t like that my double down defensive reaction to the feedback meant the original story had been derailed. Disability and desire were still there. The exploration of independence versus isolation was gone. Each time I read the story, amid the applause, I mourned. And I knew right then, back then, that there was the loss of something as yet unknown to me.

The author reading during her first residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2005. (Photo courtesy Sandra Gail Lambert)