Emily:
Hi, I’m Emily Ladau.

Kyle:
And I’m Kyle Khachadurian.

Emily:
And you are listening to another episode of the Accessible Stall.

Kyle:
What are we going to talk about today, Emily?

Emily:
Usually I’m like, “Hold up. First, we have to talk about some other things before I get to what we’re actually going to talk about,” but I’m so excited. We’re going to be talking about one of my favorite websites on the planet today and you know what? Actually, I’m going to make people wait, even though they’re going to know what it is from the title. So what am I even talking about? But okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I think it’s time for a little News You Can Use. What do you think?

Kyle:
I think that sounds great.

Emily:
So I’m pretty excited. Going to shout out a new resource. If you are an outdoorsy person, this is definitely for you. The Disabled Hikers Guide to Western Washington and Oregon… Is it Oregon or Oregon? I get yelled at for that all the time.

Kyle:
I think it’s Oregon, but I don’t really know.

Emily:
Come on, you live on the west coast.

Kyle:
I know, but I don’t know.

Emily:
Anyway, this book with the name of a state that I should have learned to pronounce many years ago by Syren Nagakyrie, it’s the first book of its kind to consider the diverse needs of disabled people in the outdoors. So if you are looking for accessible adventures by car, by wheelchair, on foot, this is a hundred percent the resource for you. It will be available from Falcon Guides in September of 2022. And if you want more info, you can go to disabledhikers.com. So I’m just going to admit right now that I love the outdoors, but I’m a little hesitant to do hiking type stuff, but I also feel like maybe now I’m going to start.

Kyle:
I mean, maybe. The outdoors are very inaccessible to me too.

Emily:
That was the biggest thing you have ever said in your life.

Kyle:
I just mean because of how I walk. It’s differently inaccessible for me and you.

Emily:
That was so much clearer. Thank you for clarifying. Okay, great. Anyway. Okay. I am so, so excited. We have such a cool guest today, so I’m going to turn it over to our special guest to tell us a little bit about himself, but I cannot contain my excitement anymore. He is the creator of the Squeaky Wheel, which I am a hundred percent positive is the funniest website on the internet. I am a little biased, but also not really. So hello, special guest. Can you introduce yourself please?

Steven:
Sure. So my name is Steven Verdile. I created the website, the Squeaky Wheel just over a year ago. Just a couple weeks ago was our one year mark. I’m really excited to be here. I am 25 years old. I have spinal muscular atrophy. I live in New York. I work as a graphic designer during the day and the Squeaky Wheel project is really something that I came up with because I wanted to sort of dabble into writing and comedy. And I wanted to put together a project where other people with disabilities could be funny, laugh together, share some stuff on the internet. And yeah, that’s what I’m here to talk about today.

Emily:
Happy one year anniversary.

Steven:
Thank you.

Emily:
Yeah.

Kyle:
Can you tell us more about how you got your start as a disabled creator? I’m always curious to hear back stories from other creators.

Steven:
Sure. So growing up, I was always sort of an artsy kid. I liked to draw a lot. I liked to do design stuff on the computer. When I was probably 13 or 14, I started taking on these little online design jobs that I could find. And I sort of got a lot of experience really young, so that by the time I went to college, when I was 17… Sorry. When I went to college, I was about 17 and I really had a lot of experience already and was excited to sort go full into graphic design. I also worked at the university newspaper.
I went to school in Queens at St John’s University. And really that path sort of took me to where I am today, where I work in graphic design and sort of the TV and film industry. But really the Squeaky Wheel comes from my experience as a person with disability, someone who’s always really loved comedy and loved writing and sort of put my experiences and my skillset and tried to put all of it together in one big project that I could share with a bunch of other really cool people that were happy to sort of join our team. And that is really how the Squeaky Wheel came to be.

Emily:
So I just have to say you and I actually met in person recently at a Netflix event celebrating Disability Pride Month and accessibility. And I just remember seeing you and immediately being like, “Oh my God, are you just Squeaky Wheel guy? I just love you so much.” So I just want people to know that this is not forced love. This is real love. I think this site is fantastic. I know that you talked a little bit about the origin story, but can you talk about the actual process of creating it because you built this from the ground up. I mean, from scratch. So tell us a little bit more of that backstory and how you made it what it is today.

Steven:
Sure. So I would say it was probably about three years ago that I started really trying to think of a project. I always wanted to sort do something that was disability focused and funny because those are two things that are really important in my life. And I was working on all sorts of different little ideas. I was thinking, “Do I want to try some screenwriting type projects?” “I want to sort of take the YouTube route and make funny videos online.” And I was coming up with all these ideas for videos and jokes and stories. And it started to feel like the voice that I had was mocking the voice of sort of the public state of disability media. There’s a lot of disability media on the news, in sort of the mainstream outlets that to us feels a little bit cringey sometimes or can come across as a little uninformed. It comes across as silly.
And it’s kind of funny when you really look at it. And then as I delved into that a little more, some of my newspaper background today, I was like, “Wait, maybe this could be a satire publication. Maybe it could be sort of the Onion for disability.” And once I sort of came to that idea, I wanted to make sure it was something that really had legs and wasn’t going to fizzle out after five stories. So I made myself a goal that I was going to write 20 of them before I posted any of them. So that was really a sort of, “Put your head down and work,” for probably about a month. I spent writing maybe one or so a day for a few weeks. I wrote all 20 of them. I showed a couple friends. I talked about it with my girlfriend and I asked people’s opinions, what they thought, what the voice was, sort of does it make sense.
Is it funny? How do you think this will be received online? And then the reception was really positive. People really seemed to think it was fine idea, that there wasn’t really something like that out there at the moment. So then I posted all 20 of those stories in one day. I put them on every page online I could think of that had people with disabilities involved, everywhere from Facebook groups, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit. Everywhere you could think of, I was posting new stories.
And then really what surprised me was not how many people were sort of liking and sharing them, but was more so there was an immediate response of, “How do I get involved?” And “How do I write, how do I pitch a headline? How do I become a part of this?” And then from that point, very quickly it became exciting because it was no longer me and my voice. It was sort of this collective voice. I just wanted to speak to my own experiences and they were sort of narrow so it was really exciting once people from different states and different countries with different disabilities and different genders and races and everything came together to really form this complex, but funny perspective on disability.

Kyle:
I mean, I don’t know what I was hoping for, but my God, that reminds me of our origin story actually. When we started this podcast, we recorded, I think, three, which is a lot less than 20 to be sure, but we recorded a whole bunch before we even thought about releasing them. And I have to say, from two disabled creators to another, I feel like I speak for Emily when I say I really, really respect the hustle. Yeah. I was curious, do you have a couple of your favorites either by you or a contributor and what your creative process is like?

Steven:
Sure. So I mean, my favorite story is always newest story. It’s whatever one is the freshest. It’s just over time, I see them come up a lot and then they sort of lose a little bit of that magic. But when they first get posted, it’s always really fun. One that I always chuckle when I think about was the jealchair has arrived, which was this very absurd one that I wrote about an all denim wheelchair that was being released. It was completely absurd. It was not based on anything real at all, but it was just funny. And I thought, “How nice is it that there’s a place where this little joke can live?” Because I think outside of the Squeaky Wheel, there’s no place on the internet that the jealchair could exist. So that was sort of fun, that there was a home for it.
And the process can change. A lot of times, it’s sort of these daily interactions that are a little awkward or a little bit sort of humorous. And then you’re like, “Wait. There might be a story there.” For example, there was one guy I wrote about maybe six months ago and I don’t remember the exact wording, but something along the lines of, “Women who’s trying to open the door is actually blocking the door.” That concept that lots of wheelchair users can relate to. It happens all the time. People don’t realize, and that sort of just came up because it happened that day. And then I went home and wrote the story immediately. And then other times there’s these big public events and news events that spark ideas like the Supreme Court decision regarding the overturning of Roe v. Wade. That immediately became a big conversation in the Squeaky Wheel group chat of, “All right, this big thing happened. We’re not too happy about it. And what is sort of the satirical disability take on that?”

Emily:
I think what I enjoy the most about the Squeaky Wheel is that it’s not afraid to go there with a whole lot of different disability issues. And one of the more recent ones that I know that was getting a ton of traction, which just cracked me up, but also kind of made me want to cry is the one about how a disabled monopoly player panics as assets approach $2,000. And I love that there’s this balance between, “Oh my God, that’s so real that it’s not funny,” but it’s also hilarious. And I just wanted to call attention to the fact that it can be really tough to make jokes on the internet at all, let alone jokes about disability. So can we just talk about that for a second? Have you encountered people who feel like you should not be joking about disability or who just aren’t getting it?

Steven:
Definitely. So first, I definitely want to shout out Nate, who wrote that story. That was definitely one of our favorites and a really funny one. But to your question, I would say almost every story, there’s exactly one or two people who come and they’re like, “I don’t like this. This bothers me.” And it really comes sort of in two different forms. First, you have people that don’t really understand the joke or they don’t realize that it’s satire. They think it’s real. Sometimes they don’t realize it is people with disabilities writing the stories. And I sort of understand that. If I didn’t think there was disabled people writing it, I would be like, “This is weird. Stop doing that.” So it makes sense that without context people are a little upset by it and to those people, I never respond myself. I just let sort of the Squeaky Wheel readers and supporters comment and sort of explain things that need to be explained or sort of defend us if that needs to be the case.
I like the stories to speak for themselves. And then the other sort of feedback that we get, again, rarely but on occasion is, “Oh, actually you might not have realized, but you used a word here that’s a little offensive,” or, “This joke doesn’t seem like at first, but actually it’s sort of rooted in some ableism.” And that type of feedback is important and I’m happy that we get it. And in those cases, we just say thank you. On rare occasion, we’ll edit something if something is really inaccurate or harmful.
And a lot of times we just said, “Oh, thank you for pointing that out. We’re going to note it. We’re not going to use that term again,” or, “We won’t really make that joke again,” if it’s something that we think is valid. Our goal is never to offend people. And I just feel that if really take people’s feedback with respect, then they’ll be understanding of us, that we’re towing a very sensitive line in order to get the funniest jokes possible. And on occasion, we might slip a little bit. So that’s really just the nature of this type of humor is that when you get that close to such a sensitive topic, it’s difficult to navigate and I think our readers are pretty understanding.

Kyle:
Having been in similar situations ourselves occasionally, it definitely is a fine line to toe. I’m curious if you’ve ever had at least the feeling of needing to defend yourself because that happens to us a couple times, where someone will respectfully give us some very creative feedback, very constructive criticism that is totally valid, but that we just don’t agree with. You what I mean? Not in an offensive way, just like, “Oh, we didn’t see that. We didn’t think of it in the way you’re thinking of it. However, we still stand by our point.” Has that ever happened to you? I feel like that would kind maybe be less on a comedy site, but I’m just curious.

Steven:
Yeah. There’s definitely times when people say stuff that comes across as constructive and I might think it’s wrong or I might think I don’t really agree with it. I’m not usually one to respond. The only times that I really respond, I respond privately. I don’t want to be arguing in the comments with people. I don’t think that makes anybody look good. But on occasion, if someone brings something up, more so out of curiosity, I might message them and just say, “I’m not really understanding. Can you explain a little more?” Or, “Is there something we can do that you think would be better?” A lot of times people are quick to flood things that may be inaccessible or difficult, but don’t necessarily offer a solution. And then my question is, “You might be right that there might be things we can do better, but I don’t have the resources or I don’t have the knowledge to do so.” I do, again, very rarely engage with our readers in that way. But for the most part, 99% people are either enjoying it or just swipe by it and don’t respond at all.

Kyle:
Yeah. I feel like that’s the same for us. If we get a piece of well-intentioned, constructive criticism, we at least take it very seriously. And I appreciate you telling us. I think that’s very important as disabled creators on the internet. I hate to cut you off, but right now we do have to take a brief pause for our sponsor, SPEAK.

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Emily:
And now that we’re coming back to the conversation, I have been thinking a lot about what you were both saying about constructive criticism and something that’s coming up for me is that the site I would say is pretty heavily, and you can disagree with me, but left-leaning just by the very nature of the fact that disability issues are so often progressive issues. And we get feedback a lot from people who listen to the Accessible Stall. Or maybe not a lot. That’s probably an exaggeration because people… Yeah, but not a lot. Occasionally, we get feedback from listeners who say, “Hey, you are not representing the conservative point of view.” And our immediate reaction is usually because we are not conservative and disability issues just don’t really align with that. And so I’m kind of wondering if you’ve ever had people come for you in a political sense.

Steven:
It’s definitely something I’ve worried about, but I would say it hasn’t really happened. It hasn’t happened yet, I should say. I’m sure that day will come just because of the nature of our posts. And I think we are sort of left-leaning. We definitely come across that way. It’s not by accident. And most of our writers have a pretty similar sort of sense of values and things that are important to them and things they believe in it. It just tends to be the audience that we attract and the people who want to write for us.
I certainly don’t screen people’s politics. I’m not sort of telling people that they have to sort of believe in one thing or another. In the example I brought up before, of the Roe v. Wade overturning story, that was one that I was curious. I was like, “This is our group chat. I was very upset about it. I assumed most of our writers would be.” And that assumption was correct. And we decided that it was a disability issue for a variety of reasons. And it was something that we felt deserved to be mocked and that we did. And there wasn’t really any pushback to that one.

Emily:
I’m all about bold moves in the face of major political decisions so I really appreciated that specific piece. I’m wondering, because you were talking a little bit about contributors and the group chat and things like that, how can people contribute? I know you have a nifty little group, if you check out the Team page, but is there a way for people to contribute if they want to?

Steven:
Absolutely. So if you go to our Instagram, you can DM me and I will direct you to our sign up, or you can go directly to our website and we have a form you can fill out if you’re interested in becoming a writer. Everything is sort of very flexible. There’s no deadlines, there’s no requirements. There’s no time commitment at all. Everyone who wants to be a writer is free to participate as much or as little as they would like. I think really it’s important for our writers that we’re flexible and that we’re accessible in the way that we work. As of now, we are still entirely running on a $0 volunteer budget, which makes it sort of double important to me that we’re really flexible and easygoing because people have jobs and bills to pay and commitments to their family and responsibilities. So I understand that writing jokes on the internet is not necessarily the biggest priority in their life, but I love to be a platform for people that do want to express their ideas sort of creatively.
And another thing that I really find fun about the Squeaky Wheel is you don’t have to be a professional comedy writer to write stories for us. We have people who sort of work in entirely opposite industries, who have very little writing experience at all and say, “Oh, I just thought of this one joke. Can I just write one story? That would be fun.” That’s totally fine. There’s other people that come to us and say, “I want to be involved, but I don’t really have any ideas yet.” And I’m always happy to sort of sit down and talk to them and hear their stories of their life. And we can usually within minutes find sort of a hundred possible stories just because every disabled person goes through the most insane shit you can possibly imagine. So it’s really not hard to draw stories from real life when writers come to us.

Emily:
That’s totally resonating with me because I was just thinking about it and being disabled is kind of hilarious all the time.

Kyle:
You say it on the show.

Steven:
I had someone come to us and say, “I don’t even know what to write because I have so many disabilities that I forget some of them sometimes, because there’s just so much going on.” And I was like, “That’s it. That’s the story. That’s got to have funny right there.” So plenty of times, people come to us and their life experiences are immediately funny.

Kyle:
That’s something that Emily and I say on the show pretty regularly is that being disabled is funny. And one of the things that I really love about the Squeaky Wheel is that I feel like if people ask us how disability is funny, I can point them to the Squeaky Wheel and then most of the time, they’ll understand. You just frame the humor that is living with a disability in the best way. And so I was kind of curious, what is your reach goal for the Squeaky Wheel? I’m not saying, “Take me through your 10 year plan,” but if you had a genie in a bottle to do something for you with the Squeaky Wheel, what would that be?

Steven:
So I would say the big goal, the overall goal is just to make sure that the Squeaky Wheel is something that is sustainable and that if I’m busy because of work, if I have health problems, if there’s something that takes me away from it, that it can keep functioning on its own and sort of become this living, continuous publication. That’s really my end goal for the Squeaky Wheel and the big obstacle or big step to that is I want our writers to be paid and to be compensated because they’re really talented and skilled and good at what they do. So I’m currently exploring a ton of different ways that we’re going to try and raise some money, possibly sell some merchandise. We might be starting a Patreon soon. We have a lot of ideas in the works. And I think the next step for Squeaky Wheel is sort of to solidify and become more of a sustainable, functioning, every day operation. That way it’s something that isn’t just entirely reliant on a bunch of talented, funny, disabled people doing this out of love.

Emily:
Well, please let us know when we can amplify that because I am ready to shout from the rooftops that people need to sponsor you and also become a patron and also just generally dump a bunch of money into all of your laps so that you can continue to do this because it brings me so much joy. And I’m wondering because you have this insight now of running this site, do you have any advice that you would share with other disabled creators, whether they’re aspiring creators or just getting started? Because building something from the ground up, we had to do that too with the podcast and we did it without funding for quite a while, but it definitely was, as you were talking about, a labor of love. But what wisdom can you impart to people as they’re sort of in that labor of love, building things phase before it starts to gain momentum?

Steven:
I would say, my main advice would just be to make sure the project, the content, the art, whatever it is that you’re making, that needs to be good. If you put your heart and your energy and your time into making something that’s really cool and unique and interesting, everything else will sort of start to fall into place. Like I said, with the Squeaky Wheel, my first goal was to write 20 stories. It was sort of ambitious. It was sort of a big amount of work, but it was something that I put my head down and it was like, “I want to make sure that I prove this concept and that I sort of prove it to myself that this is something that works and something that is funny and something that can take all different angles.”
So I’m really a big believer in focusing on the project first, putting in the work, making the thing, whatever the thing is that you want to share. And then after that, start posting it, start sharing it, start asking for people to get involved. I see on the internet, a lot of times people tend to take the opposite route, where they have an idea and they immediately post their idea and start looking for help and start sort of trying to build an audience while they’re still figuring out what their project is. And I’m a big fan of doing the opposite, of making it, putting your head down, and then going into promotion mode and start spreading it out.

Kyle:
It never even occurred to me that that’s exactly what we did. If you asked us how we started the podcast, I would’ve told you, “Oh, Emily and I just had this idea to record our arguments on the internet.” And that’s the funny answer, but what you’re describing is what we actually did. We put our heads down and did the work and here we are.

Emily:
And I think it’s important, now that I’m thinking about it, to acknowledge the fact that when you’re a disabled person, you’re juggling so much else and being able to put your head down and do that work is in and of itself a privilege and not something that everybody has the time to do, the capability to do, the financial resources to do. So I just feel like before we really wrap things up that I wanted to acknowledge that.

Steven:
Absolutely. I think that’s a whole another reason why I wanted to take that route of doing it first is I didn’t want to start this website and then not have the spoons to keep it going. And I wanted to make sure to myself that I had the energy, that I had the time, that I had the resources. And it was challenging. I did not finish them as quickly as I was planning to. It certainly took me longer than expected. Like I said, I had been working probably for at least a year prior to that on different projects that didn’t take off. And a lot of them was because other obstacles sort of came into my life and things that disrupted it. We went through a good pandemic and that changed a lot of things in terms of the way we worked. But yeah, I certainly understand that it’s ambitious and it’s certainly a privilege to be able to spend that time on a creative project like that.

Kyle:
Yeah, we couldn’t agree more. Thank you for being here by the way. This was cool as hell. Where can people find you?

Steven:
Thank you guys so much for having me. People can find the Squeaky Wheel on Instagram @thesqkywheel. You can also go to our website, the-squeaky-wheel.com and you can learn more about me at my website, stevenverdile.com.

Emily:
Don’t worry. We’re going to put all of these links in the chat and by the chat, I definitely mean the show notes and not the chat. I’d like to think that everyone is in a big old group chat with us, but alas, we have not yet started the Accessible Stall Slack.

Kyle:
That’s a good idea.

Emily:
Although, maybe for another day, but Steven, you are awesome. Thank you so, so much for joining us. Please go on over and check out the Squeaky Wheel if you haven’t already. I guarantee it will make you laugh, it will make your day, or it might make you sob a little bit in recognition of just how ridiculous and absurd it is to be a disabled person. Before we let you go, we have a very special request for all of our listeners, which is help us make the Accessible Stall accessible.

Kyle:
Oh, do you mean with transcripts and stuff?

Emily:
Yeah. That little bit of access.

Kyle:
Oh, well, if you’re interested in doing that, you can go to patreon.com/theaccessiblestall, just $1 a month and choose the current and future episodes of the Accessible Stall, I know the name of our show, remain accessible.

Emily:
I really thought you were going to get through that without messing up. I believed in you.

Kyle:
It was bound to happen sometime. I was on a streak.

Emily:
I think that’s it. May we say you look good today? Steven, you look especially good today. Big fan. 10 out of 10. Thank you for joining us. And we’ll be back next time. Thanks for listening.