Sarah Fawn Montgomery
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sfmontgomery.bsky.social
Sarah Fawn Montgomery
@sfmontgomery.bsky.social
1.8K followers 1.3K following 270 posts
Author of ABBREVIATE, NERVE, HALFWAY FROM HOME, QUITE MAD, and three poetry chaps. Editor Nerve to Write. Associate Prof. ♿🏳️‍🌈
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sfmontgomery.bsky.social
My very good boy knows over 50 tricks, but the power of disguise might be his best. Where’s Clancy?
A woman in round black glasses and a red and white striped shirt and beanie holds a red miniature poodle wearing the same costume in front of a Where’s Waldo carnival scene background.
October 31, 2025 at 1:15 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
I had such a wonderful homecoming at Fresno State for the Fresno Writers Summit! It was an honor to read from ABBREVIATE alongside writers I admire like @snajmi.bsky.social and Suzanne Lummis.
September 29, 2025 at 4:32 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
Endless gratitude to @onagritz.bsky.social and @wordgathering.bsky.social for this review of my @sundresspub.bsky.social craft book NERVE, which so beautifully describes how I hoped to position my writing advice for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers.
A teal background features the cover of Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice, along with the teal and black Wordgathering logo, teal medication capsules, and purple text reading, “The one book on writing that understands the concept of spoon theory, acknowledges the veracity of crip time, and addresses the reality that not all writers live pain-free lives or have the capacity to sit at a desk, hold a pen, or put in hours of work without causing harm to our bodies or brains.”
September 4, 2025 at 3:13 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
Surprise!!! I’m excited to announce @nervetowrite.bsky.social, a magazine for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers to showcase creative innovation and build crip community. We are officially open for free submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, hybrid writing, and artwork!
A pixie haired woman in clear and gold glasses holds a white mug with a black handle and the black Nerve to Write logo featuring a raspberry-colored neuron.
September 1, 2025 at 2:25 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
Today marks the start of Disability Pride Month and I’m thrilled my @sundresspub.bsky.social NERVE is included in this @clmporg.bsky.social reading list along with so many disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent favorites!
The red CLMP logo sits in the top left corner followed by black text reading “A Reading List for Disability Pride Month 2025,” the cover of “Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice,” and the text “This craft chapbook interrogates privilege within the creative writing classroom, making space for disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence.
July 1, 2025 at 5:40 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
Only a few days left to register for my virtual ABBREVIATE launch reading on June 18 at 6pm ET! Join me on Zoom!

Register here: tinyurl.com/5n863svm
June 13, 2025 at 1:44 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
My study of sexism and smallness just got a big recommendation! Kirkus Reviews says ABBREVIATE is “Intense, unflinching.”
A pink background covered with a pale purple circle features the cover of ABBREVIATE and the words “Kirkus Reviews” followed by the words “Montgomery grapples with the complexities of being a woman in a patriarchal society . . . pulling back the veil to reveal trauma and injustice . . . Intense, unflinching.”
June 10, 2025 at 1:53 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
ABBREVIATE has officially been out for a month! Thanks to everyone who has supported this hybrid study of smallness by reading, requesting from their local library, reviewing on Goodreads and other sites, and sending photos of my small collection out in the big world!
A cardboard box filled with copies of Abbreviate.
June 9, 2025 at 8:43 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
Looking forward to celebrating the launch of ABBREVIATE! Join us for a virtual reading on June 18 at 6:00 PM ET!

Register via Zoom:
tinyurl.com/4dxjte9u
June 4, 2025 at 4:06 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
It always shocks me that caregiving for disabled loved ones is often framed as a burden by abled people when caring for my disabled partner and being cared for in return is the greatest gift of intimacy I’ve ever experienced. Thanks to Crab Orchard Review for publishing my poem about disabled love!
My Partner Bathes Me When I am A Body Too Broken To believe in anything but the flat expanse of diagnosis and a blue pill, cream, scan of the body, of water that promises relief which never emerges despite doctor’s best efforts. He is patient pouring handfuls of Epsom salt to disintegrate under the sobbing tap. He makes me the bitter sea and in return I pain wail and sink to the ocean floor where I hold myself motionless as a fish shaped like a star fallen from some other galaxy. Silently he soaps my severed spine, the places where limbs pulse with damaged nerves like terrible tides. He rinses sick from my hair and health smooths his hands across my face. I rest still as a corpse so the ocean he’s created for me in the bathtub goes quiet all around. Wordless, he lifts me out of my little drowning and into the warm, steaming air.
May 16, 2025 at 1:27 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
I love unboxing videos because there is nothing better than peering into a writer’s living space and witnessing their joy. Here’s me unboxing ABBREVIATE and getting to hold this hybrid study of smallness for the first time!
May 12, 2025 at 1:50 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
There is nothing sweeter on publication day than celebrating with a book cake! ABBREVIATE, my very small collection of very small essays that explores how the violence of girlhood leads women to accept—and even claim—small spaces and stories is out today!
A pixie haired woman in gold round glasses and a pink shirt smiles while holding a large pink cake decorated like a book and featuring the cover of “Abbreviate.”
May 8, 2025 at 2:55 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
In many ways, ABBREVIATE is a love letter to the haunted girls I grew up with. To celebrate them and the release of my book next week, I’m giving away three signed copies. To enter the giveaway, like, leave a comment, or share a photo of teenage you with your friends!
Three girls wearing tattered, bloody prom dresses, homecoming crowns, and ghoulish makeup stare moodily at the camera, backdropped by dead tree branches.
May 2, 2025 at 1:14 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
ABBREVIATE is out next week! Can’t wait for this hybrid study of smallness to be out in the big wide world!
A purple and pink cloud background features the word “Abbreviate” and a glowing girl wearing neon coral standing with her hands held over her head. The back cover copy reads: A small collection of small essays, Abbreviate examines how the injustice and violence of girlhood leads women to accept—and even claim—small spaces and stories. In lyric flash prose, Sarah Fawn Montgomery shares a girlhood shaped by neglect and abuse from adults and saved through the communal care of fierce female friends. The essays in this collection probe the girlhood play of Polly Pocket and planetariums, strobe with a sleepover blacklight illuminating teenage magic, and ricochet with the regret and rage of adult women whose lives have been constellated by harm. Full of stars and scars, Abbreviate examines what happens when girls and women are haunted by hunger and self-erasure, asking us to reconsider the space we make for our secrets, shames, and selves.
April 29, 2025 at 1:04 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
So grateful to the tremendous @taylorbyas.bsky.social for this final blurb for ABBREVIATE, which she says is a “Heavy reminder that victory for women can wear many masks, can come in the form of direct confrontation, quiet escape, or, sometimes, simple survival.”
A pink and purple cloud background features the word “Abbreviate” and a glowing image of a young girl leaning back on her hands. The words "Across each piece in Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s Abbreviate, I found myself tracing one enduring thread, which can be summed up by the opening line of the titular essay—'We are reduced, made as small as the letters that now signify ourselves.’ Repeatedly, young girls and women who have been taught to shrink themselves eventually explode with their knowing. And when they do, they set their surroundings on fire. I fluctuated between helplessness and pent-up rage. I watched these girls and women endure such familiar and painful wrongs. But when I finished, I was left with the heavy reminder that victory for women can wear many masks, can come in the form of direct confrontation, quiet escape, or, sometimes, simple survival." And “Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times” fill the page.
April 23, 2025 at 1:40 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
Thanks to Witness for publishing the most intricately braided essay I’ve written. This essay explores invisible disability, my father’s construction work, my childhood fear of electricity, ghosts and hauntings, my injuries and permanent nerve damage, my father’s death, and the chronic pain of grief.
A wooden table backdrops the new issue of Witness, which features a cover with bright red and orange sun imagery and a black cactus illustration. The red word “Heat” rests in the bottom right corner. The opening paragraph of the essay “Mess with Electric” read: “The electricity begins in the dark. In the middle of night, I wake to a tingling pulse running up and down the lengths of my limbs. It’s like I can feel my heartbeat in my hands, can feel the blood running through the veins in my legs. But it’s different, a throbbing ache, a vibration, a current. Nerve damage, doctors and specialists report over the coming months as I seek an answer to the electricity firing throughout my body. I am numb and stinging, disconnected from the ability to use my hands, a pulsing filter between my feet and the floor. Too much sedentary working time and an undiagnosed neurological disorder have left me with several spinal injuries that will take many years to heal. If healing is even possible. The electrical current of my injured nerves is painful and relentless. It interrupts my thoughts and emotions, severs me from my body so that I feel as though I am inhabited. I try to be patient, try to accept this internal current as something I cannot control or understand. But it haunts me, reminding me I am a series of synapses, a tangle of nerves, my entire existence a series of electrical impulses firing free of my control.”
April 21, 2025 at 1:41 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
Thrilled one of my favorite poets @dorothykchan.bsky.social blurbed my forthcoming collection of “unforgettable bite-sized lyric prose” ABBREVIATE! I wonder what my girlhood self who believed herself only capable of smallness would think of her stories being “a necessary literary immortalization.”
A purple and pink cloud background features the title “Abbreviate” and the glowing image of a girl balancing on one toe, her arms outstretched and her curling snake tail whipping through the air. The words “Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s Abbreviate is a necessary literary immortalization that defies the male gaze through a sharp dissection of societal sexism and feminine self-fashioning. What do popular doll brands, like American Girl and Polly Pocket say about women and young girls? Though the answer is multi-faceted, there’s no denial of the 'blank faces' and formulaic 'Polly hair, Polly smile,' while the subject, the young doll collector may 'shrink.' But what if young women could escape these confines—take up more space—metaphorically dance in the vastness of the skies and galaxies? In unforgettable bite-sized lyric prose, Sarah Fawn Montgomery sincerely and lovingly tackles all the above in this brilliant, intersectional collection. It’s fitting that Montgomery defies traditional gender roles while she defies traditional genre designations” and “Dorothy Chan, author of Return of the Chinese Femme” fill the image.
April 15, 2025 at 1:24 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
Beyond grateful to Julie Marie Wade, a writer whose work I’ve long admired, for this blurb for ABBREVIATE!
A pink and purple cloud background features the words “Abbreviate” and the collage image of a girl wearing black and neon orange above the neon orange words “Coming May Harbor Editions.” Purple text reads “Early in Abbreviate, Sarah Fawn Montgomery conjures an image of gender as an asteroid. It’s startling, brilliant, hard to forget. Her memoir-in-essays goes on to map the complex orbit of female embodiment, its rituals (“we form a circle around our hunger, another empty bowl”), paradoxes (“you are only something because you are nothing,” “the trick to feeling alive is to pretend you’re already dead”), and interminable ironies (“they will interrupt to explain to me what I am already telling them”). When an asteroid breaks free from its orbit and enters the earth’s atmosphere as a meteor, it turns incandescent from the friction it has endured. This is a book about breaking old orbits, swerving with insight and outrage at once. Montgomery’s language gleams in every essay, sharp as a blade and finely serrated.” Underneath in neon orange reads “Julie Marie Wade, author of The Mary Years.”
April 11, 2025 at 1:13 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
ABBREVIATE is out one month from today! To celebrate this countdown to publication day, I’m giving away three signed copies. To enter, just leave a comment on this post and I’ll randomly select winners at the end of the month.
A pink and purple cloud background features purple text reading “Countdown to Abbreviate Giveaway!” and neon orange text reading “Leave a comment for a chance to win one of three signed copies.” To the left of the image is the cover of Abbreviate, which features the title in the upper right corner of a purple and pink mountain background and the black and neon orange figures of five young girls sitting, standing, dancing, and levitating. Under the book cover purple text reads “Coming in May from Small Harbor Publishing.”
April 8, 2025 at 1:24 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
I’m talking a/b my @sundresspub.bsky.social craft book NERVE and ways disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers can unlearn workshop ableism to develop their writing practices with @thewriterscenter.bsky.social on Tuesday, May 13 at 7 pm EDT. This virtual craft talk is free!
At the top of the image a teal banner reads “Nerve Virtual Craft Chat” in black font. The red Writer’s Center logo sits in the right corner. Black font reads “Tuesday, May 13, 2025, 7-8 PM EDT, Zoom.” The teal, blue, and purple cover of Nerve is on the left of the image, next to a teal banner reading “Free.”
April 7, 2025 at 1:24 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
ARCs are here! So happy to hold this very small collection of very small essays exploring how the injustice and violence of girlhood leads women to accept—and even claim—small spaces and stories.
A woman wearing a neon orange hoodie holds out a book to obscure her face. The book cover features the title “Abbreviate” in the upper right corner of a purple and pink mountain background and the black and neon orange figures of five young girls sitting, standing, dancing, and levitating.
April 6, 2025 at 9:46 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
Two more poems from my chronic pain project are in the latest issue of @rowanglassworks.bsky.social!
The poem “Lure” reads: I slow sink beneath the weight of my own existence, spine a line for other fishermen to cast easily into indifferent seas unseen in the depths, tangled as river weeds growing ever curved in the current hooked as a question— like chronic, like cure— as though searching for any foolish creature to fall for the lure where medicine means relief diagnosis the shining bait piercing a glittering throat. The poem “Sever” reads: Slice me wide, splay my meat and mellow fat yellowed to shine across some stranger’s smile, gentle butcher, here are my best bones for your stock, to wet the driest day-old bread, and I promise not to howl my hurt across the dining table like some foolish lamb who tastes best before the body is lean and fear seasoned, instead a mussel without the protection of home a severed body boneless and free, soundless to swallow down.
March 18, 2025 at 12:34 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
For my birthday this year, I had a private zoo visit with this handsome prehensile-tailed porcupine named George. He was an excellent reminder that it is possible to stay soft while still adapting to a harsh world in order to protect yourself.
A pixie haired woman in a pink sweatshirt smiles at the camera while holding her hand out to feed a small black and white porcupine. A small black and white porcupine with a soft pink nose stares into the camera while standing on a log and reaching into a green bowl of food.
March 15, 2025 at 8:57 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
The first day of the last year of my 30s has been delicious!
A pixie haired woman in a cream sweater with a scalloped collar smiles behind a pink cake with pale yellow frosting reading “Happy Birthday Sarah Fawn.”
March 12, 2025 at 8:38 PM
sfmontgomery.bsky.social
Be still, my disabled heart! Many thanks for the congratulations, kind words, and messages about Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice! You can download a free digital or audio copy at @sundresspub.bsky.social.

www.sundresspublications.com/craft-chaps/...
A pixie haired woman wearing clear and gold glasses, a gold necklace, and a purple shirt reading “The Future Is Accessible” in teal and white font smiles at the camera. To the right of the woman is a black tablet displaying the cover of “Nerve” which features purple, teal, and mint retro circular graphics.
March 7, 2025 at 2:37 PM