Parker and Ifama are perfect for each other in every way, from their sense of humor and their love of cuddles to the way deafness and situational mutism left them last picked come time for group projects. What isn’t perfect was the fact that Parker is moving to the next state over for college.
Parker has never seen a long distance relationship that lasted, and she’s scared of what the future holds. But Ifama will stop at nothing to prove that if they have anything in the world, it’s each other.
We spoke to Bryanna Bond, author of When We Jump, about romance tropes, mutism, and writing challenges.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Last time we interviewed you, we talked about your queer cheerleader romance, Imani and Aaliyah’s Fashion Bible. I’d love to hear about the commonalities and differences between the Imani and Aaliyah’s Fashion Bible and When We Jump in terms of characters, relationships, neurodivergence, and disability.
I would say that When We Jump and Imani and Aaliyah’s Fashion Bible are probably more different than they are similar because the cores of the stories are almost opposite of each other. Imani and Aaliyah was a novel about falling in love and learning to accommodate one another. When We Jump is a short story that not only follows an already established couple, but also two girls that have disabilities that both call for alternative forms of communication. Because of that, the story spends more time displaying the synergy and patterns the girls have and ends up being a place where their disabilities are things that just exist and not puzzle pieces that need to be explained, understood, and tended to.
The last time we spoke, I don’t think I asked, what got you into writing in the first place?
I genuinely can’t remember a time in my life where I wasn’t writing stories and that’s probably because I was a hyper-literate child. I was reading The Chronicles of Narnia by kindergarten. Somewhere, there’s even pictures of me reading to my class for story time because I was able to read and the teacher wanted me to work on reading aloud (which I am not good at). I think with that background, I was bound to be interested in storytelling. I did, though, get into publishing and sharing my books for a specific reason.
I spent most of my life struggling with my mental health and a lot of depictions of mental health at the time were incredibly sanitized and toxicly positive to the point of making me feel even worse. While I was working on my very first novel back in high school, I started posting the chapters to MissLiterati.com (RIP) about depression and suicide and I got three comments that stuck with me. “I don’t feel so alone.” “I feels like I finally have words describe what’s going on with me.” “I feel like I can better understand what my loved one’s going through.”
Writing will always be a part of my life. But those three things are why I will always share my work and why I feel so compelled to engage in mental health spaces.
What would you say has been the greatest challenge in the process of creating When We Jump?
I had two major challenges with When We Jump.
One, I am long winded. To be the type of person to lean toward writing a series because I typically have very long reaching ideas and then force myself to write something far more contained has been difficult? Challenge.
Two was a bit more complicated. It is a thing I’ve seen around of people upset that “sad” stories are treated as more artistic than “happy” ones. I feel like something missed in those discussions is the emotional dynamics that the audience experiences. If a person has a relatively happy emotional baseline, then a story that makes them feel sad is going to give them a more dynamic emotional experience than one that remains at their baseline. Even more so, in a genre like romance, where the average, mainstream romance doesn’t have super suspenseful stakes because we kind of know everything’s gonna work out. When We Jump is a story of mine that doesn’t really go into “sadder” places so I really wanted to focus on pushing emotional dynamics within a higher baseline. And that was a very fulfilling challenge to take with this story.
Based on your own experiences, you’ve written multiple books that have protagonists with situational mutism. What advice would you give other writers that want to write about situational mutism that may not have experience? Are there damaging stereotypes and misinformation to to avoid?
I could probably write an essay on the topic of writing mutist characters when you’re not one. Not because I feel like an expert on mutism, even my own. But I do feel very passionately about learning about marginalizations you’re writing about but aren’t a part of to do my best at creating meaningful characters at every step and not just making a character a check mark on some diversity list. I have a folder of research I did on deafness and the deaf community for this story. It’s thirty pages long.
Thinking about what people should know if they’re not a mutist but trying to write a character that is, I feel like there are so many things to unpack first. I mean, mutism is referred to as being “dumb”, and there are so many aspects in which not being able to communicate in the dominant fashion is seen as an “intelligence” issue and a place to access value. And frankly, intelligence as a concept and value defining feature itself is probably a concept to unpack at the start.
From there, I think it’d be important to learn about how concepts like “proper” english and grammar are used as tools of oppression against non-native english speakers (including it’s use to justify colonization), English speakers of different dialects (Black folk, southerners, etc), people experiencing systemic education barriers, and disabled folk. (and keep in mind how intersectionality with other groups mentioned comes into play).
Next, I’d say learn about fully mute people and autistics. There is a wealth of accounts of mutists expressing the experience of being treated as if “there’s nothing going on up there” and how it felt to be processing their world with no way of communicating and how others interacted with them because of it. Then, learn from and listen to specifically situationally mute people (also referred to as selective mustism, but that’s a different debate on its own).
And when creating your character from there, consider the why and what contexts the mutism comes out (for example, my mutism tends to come up most in social situations, likely because I endured a lot of trauma from people close to me, so my brain shuts down at the idea of trying to make close, trusting relationships).
In terms of harmful pitfalls, don’t portray mutism (particularly in the context of an argument or high pressure conversation) as a sign of weakness or another negative value assessments.
And just like with other disabilities, don’t treat the erasing or disappearance of the mutism as the happy ending.
When We Jump is also a romance story. One of my favorite questions to ask romance writers is what are some of the romance tropes they love? Or/also, what are romance tropes they like to avoid? What tropes are and aren’t your taste?
I’d say fake dating, enemies to lovers, and friends to lovers are fun romance tropes. I like that these can often create a space where the character is not only in denial that they’re falling in love, but is also annoyed at the feelings of falling in love, which is just a funny dynamic to watch. I wouldn’t say that I would peg any particular romance trope as being not my taste, because I feel like I could picture them being handled well with the right people. I will say, a thing I can think of that I would describe as a romance turn-off is when the story doesn’t follow through on the characterization of the tropes promised. A big one is calling a story enemies to lovers but never hitting the point of “enemies”.
Anything else you would like to say?
The last thing I’ll add is that I think now, more than ever, is a great time for people to invest in places like smashwords and Itchio. Spaces that help decentralized media flourish instead of competing to recreate the system we have in new colors.