Light-Roasted Spider-Fems is a speculative fantasy novel about a disabled woman sent flying through a coffee mug after a gas explosion into an apocalyptic world filled with coffee. Together with another human who has visited this world once before, she must navigate hostile lands crawling with giant humanoid spiders and colonies of sorcerous ants towards the Sea Green Mountain. It is there that a fluorescent dragon is rumored to have the power to bring them home, if only they can meet her price.
Light-Roasted Spider Fems is a re-imagining and expansion of a fantasy novella I wrote and published on a limited-run of approximately 100 copies more than ten years ago about a boy who falls into a coffee mug. I wrote the novella while living in Accra, Ghana in 2014 learning about disability activism. Rereading it in 2025, I expected to be embarrassed by the quality of my early writing and the ways it lacked the greater nuance and sensitivity that I now bring to social justice and disability issues (and I was). But I was also confronted with a raw, stream of consciousness snapshot of my 20-year-old self processing my disabled, neurodivergent, and queer identities while grappling with trauma related to the Boston Marathon bombings. I also found myself exploring my emerging awareness of the intersections between ableism, capitalism, and other types of social injustice and how I relate to movements working to dismantle them and to envision new realities. Approaching this novella with fresh curiosity, I decided it would be interesting to revisit that same world with a new story that explores internalized ableism, disabled identity development, learning and unlearning, saviorism, and the emotional aftermath of an explosion. In doing so, I hope to honor the story's original intent in a reflexive and thoughtful way by writing disabled characters and using the profits from any sales to advance projects aligned with disability justice in Ghana and other settings in the Global South through the Lyra McMahon Social Justice & Political Solidarity Fund.
I have written elsewhere about the cultural heritage of Anansi spider tales in Ghana and my personal connection to them over the years. While this re-write will not be a true Anansi story, I am intentionally referencing this story-telling tradition in the new title for this work.
As a first step in the re-writing process (which I aim to complete before the end of 2027), I wrote an article entitled "Sixty Quotes From the World Inside a Coffee Mug: What My 2014 Novella Is Teaching Me Today."
