KNEE BRACE PRESS

A place for stories about chronic illness, disability, mental health, and neurodivergence.

nonfiction

  • Three Sets of Ten

    By

    One.  The physical therapist asks if you can describe the pain. You can: The tendons around your knee feel like desert-hot barbed wire. Someone has raised your kneecap like a lid, poured shards of broken glass into it, and sewed the lid up again with Frankenstein stitches. Or like razor-sharp jacks – like, the children’s…

  • The discomfort of the unknown

    By

    Unfortunately, my brick wall has become smaller over the years, or less high, with bricks softer in their sable paper texture, more dissolved overall. Some bricks have hidden, tiny holes the size of my little finger on my left hand, where I let some people in. Some people who get in, without a little struggle…

  • My Stubborn Nerve

    By

    It has been five years since my face collapsed on one side and an emergency room physician diagnosed me with Bell’s palsy.

  • The Good in Goodbye

    By

    I wasn’t ready to say goodbye, but after three years of psychotherapy with Dr. M, it was time to let go.

  • Jesus H. Christ, My Feet Hurt

    By

    I’m stuck at the traffic light on Yale and Colorado and I’m thinking about the size of the nail, the nail the Romans hammered through Jesus’ feet.

  • Plum

    By

    I grew up in the Dark Ages for people with disabilities.

  • Nose

    By

    I’d never thought of my keen sense of smell and adverse reaction to many perfumes as a disability until I went to work in a crowded call center.

  • A Black person with white-rimmed glasses smiles widely with their eyes closed. They are holding their book, DEAR PHILOMENA by Mugabi Byenkya, and are surrounded by a circle of light.

    An interview with Mugabi Byenkya

    By

    Memoirist and magical realism author Mugabi Byenkya writes for themselves. Or, more accurately, the angsty, confused, Black, Ugandan-Rwandan-Nigerian, disabled, queer, polygender, and neurodivergent little human they used to be and still are.

  • A woman with blue eyes, dark-rimmed glasses, and dark pink lipstick smiles with her mouth closed. Her hair is dark with gray in it and she wears a white and black striped shirt and a black jacket. The background is blue.

    An interview with Tiffany Midge

    By

    In her book of essays, Bury My Heart At Chuck E. Cheese’s, author Tiffany Midge uses humor as an act of resistance and reclamation. While humor categories in traditional publishing are dominated by white authors, it’s high time Midge take her place as one of the funniest names in satire.