My Tale Too was built in January 2018 as a campaign in response to the complete lack of disabled women as leads in popular stories. We wanted to change this by asking women with disabilities themselves to shift this narrative and, therefore, the campaign transformed into a programme in 2020. ‘My Tale Too’ was a writing project for women with disabilities to retell fairy tales and popular stories with protagonists who are like them.
A series of 6 virtual workshops were conducted by the award winning and acclaimed published writer and poet, Aditi Rao. The project had 19 women with disabilities who attended the workshops over the course of a few months and then participated in peer feedback and trainer feedback. Each session focused on a different element of storytelling and participants were encouraged to weave in their own experiences through the medium of various writing exercises.
The participants were selected through an open application process and came from India, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
The thirteen completed stories that came out of this process are written by authors from India and Sri Lanka, representing a range of regional contexts and disabilities, including visual, hearing and locomotor disabilities, as well as autism, psychosocial disabilities and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. The completed drafts of the stories they wrote were edited by writer and editor Richa Kaul Padte over 12 months.
These stories were published in an anthology ‘And They Lived… Ever After’ by HarperCollins India in March 2024! It is out now in bookstores for you to read.
You can read more about the book here and order your copy from Amazon here.