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The “We” of We Are the Scrappy Ones are a rainbow of disabled children and young people, celebrated by author and disability advocate Rebekah Taussig and illustrator Kirbi Fagan.

Roger Sutton: Who did you conceive this book for?

Rebekah Taussig: It was originally a poem that I wrote after I met this group of disabled teenagers. I visited a day camp for an afternoon and hung out with these kids. They reminded me a lot of myself at that age. They were super vibrant, interesting, creative kids, and I noticed that anytime we talked about disability, the way they would talk about it would always be through a medical lens — they would talk about their surgeries or their diagnosis or their mobility aids or when they got fitted with AFOs [ankle-foot orthoses]. And that was so familiar to me. That's exactly how I would have talked about my disability when I was that age — the medical experience. I was in my mid- to late twenties when I first started to explore the idea of disability as an identity and being exposed to disability culture and being a part of a group. I didn't have that when I was younger. So meeting with those amazing kids that afternoon and being reminded of my younger self, I wanted to offer a different narrative, a different script, a different set of words for how to think about and talk about disability when you are young. A lot of times the only way you come to understand it is by talking to doctors and being in those medical spaces. And families often adopt that as well because so often kids are born into families who have no experience or frame of reference for that disability, so they're listening to doctors and physical therapists and that medical world too. So it can take a long time for people to find a sense of rich community and belonging within disability. And that's what I wanted to offer. That's what the poem was, and then the book evolved from there.

RS: How do you talk to your young son about disability?

RT: He’s just getting to an age where we’re having real back-and-forth conversations about it. He just started preschool, and for most of his life up to this school year, it hasn't been something he's been that interested in. He doesn't have the same kinds of questions for me that most kids do. “Why do you use that wheelchair? Why can't you walk? Why don't your legs work? How do you get in the car?” This is a little bit of a side note, but being asked those questions in front of my son is a new experience for me. It started last year when he was three. I would pick him up from daycare, and all the kids in his class had a million questions for me, every day. So thinking about how I want to talk to my son about disability and also how I want to talk about it to other kids, in front of him, has been a shift for me. It used to be, before my son was here, whatever kinds of questions kids had, I would just go into whatever territory they wanted to explore. And sometimes I would even go into a lot of medical details: “I had cancer on my spine.” Tell the whole origin story. But as my son has been watching, I've started to feel like my job is not only to address all of their curiosities but to model something for him and for those other kids. And what I'm striving to model is that disability is just another form of human variance, that there's an infinite variety of shapes and forms and ways that humans appear in this world, and my body is one of those. It's not necessarily my job to satiate everybody’s curiosities about how it works. Maybe, depending on the context. But picking my son up from school is maybe not the time to do that. So now I’m really trying to model the embodiment of an appreciation for the vast range of human bodies that we live in. With the kids that ask questions at my son's school, a lot of times now I'll say something like, “This is the way I move through the world, how do you move through the world?” And then we talk about how they like to run. But a lot of times it ends up shifting into, “Oh and you also use a scooter and you have a bike and you drive in the car. Look at all these different ways that humans move through the world, and wheelchairs are one way they do that.”

My son doesn't have as many questions about wheelchairs, but we had a really good conversation recently about people with limb differences. He is obsessed with spooky things and all things Halloween, and one thing that I've noticed in that world of spooky things is how much disfigurement or limb difference is equated to something spooky or scary…like zombies. So we had this moment where he expressed fear about limb difference, and it turned into this whole conversation about how difference is often scary to us, but that feeling of fear is only because it's different. It's not scary, it's different. So we talked about the different ways people move through the world when they have different limbs — they might have a prosthetic leg or use crutches or a wheelchair. That was a long, rambling answer to say that I hope what I'm instilling in my son and his peers is an appreciation and wonder for the amazing range of human bodies and minds that we are in community with. And acceptance and appreciation for that without a feeling or expectation that the person explain themselves or that the person be the educator in the room. But a general sense and appreciation for all of the variance around us. That’s what I’m going for these days. We’ll see how it evolves.

RS: It’s tough because horror, spookiness, and even humor are so often based on differences.

RT: Just last night my son and I were having a conversation about how you cannot know if someone is good or bad or evil or heroic by looking at them. He had this monster-looking toy, and I picked it up and started creating a new story for that character. How everyone is scared of him, but actually he loves kitties; he takes care of sick kitties. He has a super tender soft heart. And then we picked up a cute panda toy and I was like, “What if this one was actually an evil genius?” I don't know if that answers any questions about how to indulge the spooky — but there is something really spooky about a character that you look at and you think you trust and then you realize that that character actually has devious plans, right? Developmentally it makes sense, but my son is so “good guys and bad guys” right now and organizing who's on what team and “this is the bad team, and this is the good team.” I can't help myself. I'm constantly like, “Oh, but what is the motive of the bad team, and do we know?” Just poking at those binaries, which I imagine will be a long, long conversation over the years for us.

RS: I think it’s lifelong that we do that, right?

RT: Yeah, exactly.

RS: When I was looking at the pictures in We Are the Scrappy Ones I could identify the disabilities some of the kids had, I could identify other kids that clearly had a disability because of some contraption even if I didn’t know what it was, and then I couldn't tell for some. And I thought, Well, really, every kid is in this book.

RT: That's an interesting comment, and I have felt hesitant to define the edges of that. I don't feel like it’s important to me to say, “Well, you have to have this particular set of diagnoses in order to be considered among the scrappy ones.” My sister's a first-grade teacher and has three kids of her own, and when she read the book, that was her impression too. She said, “I think this is all my students, all my kids in some way.” And I'm not opposed to that idea. I think that if you see yourself in the book, if it resonates with you, I suppose that means that you're part of it too. You’d need to have a much more sophisticated, more academic conversation to decide who is in and out of the group of people we consider disabled. There are legal parameters, but even those are blurry. For the book, we created alt text for all the illustrations so that there would be that access for anyone who needed like a description of the illustrations, and as we were going through and editing them it felt really important to me that we not name any diagnoses, that what we're describing is literally what we can see in the illustration.

RS: “There’s a person in a wheelchair.”

RT: Exactly. It goes back to the origin of the poem — it's not a conversation about our medical diagnoses but the spirit of belonging.

RS: I was reading your Substack and noticed that you provided alt text for any illustrations or photographs that you used.

RT: Yeah, I try to do that. I feel motivated to continue to do that after hearing from people who value it and rely on it. But it also has become part of the artwork itself, or the creative expression, to be able to find the words to describe what we're looking at. In some ways it allows me a way to call attention to the things I find significant in the image. It felt like not only a functional service but part of the creation, a creative element.

RS: Even for people like me who don't need that alt text, the fact that it's there reinforces the themes that you're talking about.

RT: Oh, good. Yeah, I think maybe it feels that way to me too. And it’s an opportunity to act on my values or priorities. I like the way that something can be both functional and expressive, part of the artistic process, so I see it as both. Thank you for noticing that, I'm glad.

RS: How do you see your book being read with children? Do you see it as a book a parent or another caregiver reads with children? Do you see it used in classrooms?

RT: When I imagine it, personally, and when I was working on it, I most often imagined the intimacy of a cozy moment at home with a caregiver, reading it together and moving slowly through the pages and maybe talking about some of the ideas in it. Part of my hope is that it would be a framework that would be able to enter into a family system. When I was growing up, my family’s approach was very much in the hopes of ensuring that I always felt like I was just one person in the family, no different from anyone else. The disability was a bit minimized or ignored, and I think part of that was that I did develop a lot of scrappiness and did feel like just another kid in my family, but also that there was a lot of my life experience that I didn't have language for. There was a certain loneliness in that. So part of my hope is that this book will offer something both to the kids who read it and to the parents or siblings or caregivers who are part of that child's life to be able to think about disability in this different way.

Thinking about reading it with a larger group makes me curious about the conversations that it might facilitate. They could be really rich and dimensional conversations — that would be my hope. Like you brought up a little bit ago, “What is it like to talk about who the 'we’ are in this book? How do we conceptualize that?” I love the idea of sharing this book with a larger group of kids and being able to instill a value, a richness, a beauty, in how we conceive of disability collectively. But I would be really curious to see how a whole group of kids would receive the book.

Also, you look at the images and you can see disability running through them, but the word disability doesn't appear in the text. We played with some subtitles, and we tried to play around with different ways of naming disability in the text. But to go back to who counts or who gets to be in this group, a lot of folks who embody different disabilities in the book don't necessarily identify with that word. There are a lot of people in the Deaf community who would not consider themselves disabled, but I would want to include any person who's hard of hearing in that scrappy group. Or a lot of people with neurodivergence wouldn’t pick the word disability to describe themselves, and yet neurodivergence very much seems like the sort of scrappiness that I would be talking about — someone with a mind that is not going to fit easily into the various systems of a traditional classroom.

RS: I appreciate the fact that you include such a spectrum of children in the book. As a fat kid, I remember when a fat kid would be mentioned in something and everyone’s eyes in the classroom would go to me. I’m sure we all have experiences of that. This is very much a “we” book. It’s not pointing at one kid and saying, “You’re the one.”

RT: Yes, I really like the way you brought that out, because I think you’re right. For instance, my son is becoming more himself and experiencing more tensions. He doesn’t have a diagnosis of being neurodivergent yet. He may. But regardless of an official diagnosis, I can see the way that pieces of this book match the way I see him moving through the world and the way I see him learning to cope and pivot and move around situations that are sensory overload for him. I see moments of social misunderstanding with the people around him. I guess I bring that up to say that I see the “we.” I see the way that there are things in this that can apply to the kids I see all around me whether or not they have these diagnoses, or whether or not they have a wheelchair or hearing aids. I see that for sure. I don’t know that I was necessarily thinking of that when I wrote it, but it’s interesting to see it evolve like that and embrace so many different ways of being in the world. I really do believe that a lot of the ways that we built the world and the expectations that we put on humans are not great for most of us. I really do like the idea of this book being able to be expansive in the way it thinks of human embodiment and what it is to live in the world we live in.

RS: How did your disability as a child intersect with your reading as a child?

RT: My overwhelming feeling was that disability really wasn't a part of the world that I read about. It wasn't an experience that was represented or included for the most part. The exception I can think of is Colin in The Secret Garden. But interestingly enough, in that book it almost seems like his disability was in his head, and once he's spent enough time outside with other children, he's cured.

RS: Do you remember Clara learning to walk in Heidi?

RT: Actually, yes. I didn't read Heidi, but I watched the old Shirley Temple movie. I haven’t seen it in so long; I haven’t even thought about it. But yeah, the first, main impression is that disability isn’t really a part of the world, and maybe the second tier of that is it’s part of a really dramatic story. There’s a clear goal or arc — to overcome the disability. And then when I was older, one of the first depictions of disability that I marveled over was in the movie Notting Hill. One of the friends is married to a woman who is in a wheelchair. It is a little bit of a sad sobby story, but mostly she's just...in the world. She just exists and she uses this wheelchair and she's an interesting person and she has a personality. And I remember being so stunned by that — seeing a human similar to me existing in the world in a way that seemed familiar or recognizable to me. But I was probably twenty when Notting Hill came out, so for most of my life I didn't see disability represented. It would be represented in hospital pamphlets, or you might see posters of kids in wheelchairs in a seating clinic. But not in the world, not a part of the world.

RS: When you were young, did you notice?

RT: That is a great question. No, I don't think as a child I would have ever asked why disability wasn’t included in these stories. If I could have articulated the feeling, it would have been, “I'm not a part of the world, and so the fact that disability isn't included in these stories isn't some sort of fumbling or failing from writers and publishing, it's a reflection of the real world.” When I was young — and these are not words I ever would have chosen or known to choose as a kid — I felt like I was a little alien bobbing around in outer space and that there was a world, a planet, full of people who belonged. And I could look at that world at a distance, and they could look up at me at a distance and gawk or marvel. But either way, there was this great chasm between me and the world. I believed that to be a reflection of reality. I do feel like that has changed, and the conversation has changed so much more that I imagine there are kids today who would be able to articulate: “I should be included in the story.” I hope that has changed significantly since I was a kid in the 1990s, when I didn't see the absence of representation or feel criticism of the stories I received. I felt like those stories were a reflection of the truth. It’s kind of sad and there's a little heartbreak to think of that little kid. It's interesting for me to even try to imagine what that little kid would have thought about a book like this. I think it would have been a little shocking to see a book like mine.

RS: We’ve seen such a difference in the way that disabilities are portrayed in children’s books. From saintly little Tiny Tim–kind of figures to the kids with, you know, I'm blind but it's my superpower. What we're seeing now with your book is a reflection of the fact that we are seeing disability as not just being blind, for example, but you as a blind person are part of a larger community of people who have to, as you say, move through the world differently, and that's a larger group. And people have different reasons why they need help of some kind to get through the world, but the fact of that brings you together as a community.

RT: Yeah, and it's only a little bit in the book, but I hope something that is received and taken in is that you're also part of a much larger history. That was very significant for me to learn. When you think about being a part of a group, it's also a group that has fought really hard to make sure that the world would include you. I've been thinking about that so much lately. I don't know how closely you've been following the news. Have you heard about Texas v. Becerra?

RS: I'm not sure.

RT: There is a lawsuit that seventeen states filed, in September of last year, arguing that Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act be considered unconstitutional. And Section 504 was the very first bit of legislation that protected disabled people in the U.S. It's foundational to disability rights, and there's a whole long history and an incredible story of how disability activists staged a sit-in in a federal building for almost a month to get the signatures to make this law. It was a huge fight. And to see in 2025 this threat to disability rights and disability law and this attempt to undermine that law — it makes me feel a sense of urgency that we all know this story. That we all understand this larger story of disability rights. I never learned about the history of disability rights in school at all. I think most of us didn't. And so to think that this history would get lost and that this important piece of legislation could be threatened makes me really want all of these scrappy kids and their families to understand this larger history that we're a part of. That we are a valuable part of our communities and that we've had to fight to be included in our communities, and that that's an important and ongoing fight. So it's really valuing and recognizing the fight that has come before us, the people that have put their bodies on the line to make sure that disabled kids could go to school, that they couldn't be turned away, that they would have accommodations in school, that neighborhood sidewalks would have curb cuts and that crosswalks would have audio signals. All the things that make it easier for us to belong in the world have been fought for. And we're all part of that fight.

RS: Right. They didn’t just happen.

RT: Yeah, and the fight is still going on, and we're a part of it. I think there's a certain amount of pride in seeing what your community has accomplished and the spirit and fight and spunk and scrappiness in that community, and to be a part of that, there's some pride that comes with that, I think, I hope. That's how I experience it, at least.

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