Ready, willing & ABLE

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Author Sarah Yates launches her fouth book, Lucky Lou Gets Game, on March 15. (MIKE.DEAL@FREEPRESS.MB.CA)

A disability doesn't make you a pushover but you might not know that from some of the youth-oriented books featuring handicapped characters. And if anyone understands that, it's Sarah Yates.

The 65-year-old Winnipeg author is the mother of Gemma, who is in a wheelchair coping with cerebral palsy. She got so fed up with the books she was reading her that Yates decided to write one herself.

"In 'disability literature,' as they call it, all the children's books had some disabled hero or heroine, but they were passive," Yates says. "The able-bodied kids ran around and teased them, then by the end of the book the able-bodied kids came around and realized they were the same and the disabled kids said, 'That's OK. We forgive you.' I thought, 'What rubbish.'"

Yates' response was her literary creation Anne, who made her debut in the 1992 book, Can't You Be Still?, aimed at the three- to six-year-old crowd. It was her first attempt at fiction following historical non-fiction books about Toronto, Manitoba and Alberta. Can't You Be Still? found an audience, ringing up sales of 5,000 copies in North America.

She continued the self-published series with two more instalments and added a puppet show element to bring the characters to life.

"I wrote them first in the third person and realized I was objectifying her," says Yates. 'Anne feels terrible.' How did I know that? So I wrote it in the first person. This girl can't speak very well, but she's got lots of words inside her head."

She stopped the series as Gemma got older (today she is a 22-year-old student at the University of Manitoba) but continued working as a freelance journalist for magazines, newspapers (including the Winnipeg Free Press) and catalogues. Yates has written or edited several biographies, wrote three unpublished mystery novels and is the marketing manager for a jewelry store in Manhattan.

Yates, a British expat who moved to Canada when she was six but never lost her accent, got her start writing in a completely different field in the late 1960s for trashy Montreal tabloids like Midnight, National Bulletin and Spotlight where she served as a sex advice columnist, dream interpreter and writer of "true" confessions.

"They found I was no good on blood and gore, which is what they hired me for, and I was moved to soft-core porn, which I was very good at," she says with a laugh.

"We would buy files of dead people from the police (for photos) and the worst thing was sometimes people would turn up and say, 'That was my father.'"

She hasn't returned to the adult writing but she has re-started producing youth-oriented fiction after a 14-year absence.

Tuesday Yates will release Lucky Lou Gets Game, a novel aimed at teenagers. The coming-of-age story is about Louisa Mae Star, 17, who has cerebral palsy but doesn't let that stop her from joining a baseball team and getting her dream boy.

Yates will host a book launch and reading 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Crossways-in-Common at the Young Street United Church. She chose the location to accommodate more wheelchairs than city bookstores have room for.

It was about accommodating her daughter in the mid-1990s that served as the catalyst for Lucky Lou. She began writing it out of frustration with her Osborne Village neighbours who objected to the construction of a ramp in front of her house. City hall denied the permit until the media got a hold of the story and council reversed its decision.

The novel takes place in Winnipeg and includes many local landmarks and cultural references, including lyrics by the Weakerthans.

"I even listened to some Eminem and saw 8 Mile and wrote a rap because there's rap in this," she says. "You need to do your research."

The 332-page book was shortlisted for an Amazon contest last year and reworked with editor David Margoshes for the final version, which has already received interest from a Chicago television station where Yates will be featured on Disability Issues, a segment broadcast on the local ABC affiliate's newscast hosted by deaf reporter Karen Meyer.

rob.williams@freepres.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 15, 2011 D1