Indie author Greg Grant believes the moment you doubt whether you can, you cease to strive at getting better.
Greg Grant is a 45-year-old man with cerebral palsy who, despite his disability, lives his life as a productive member of society. He loves to write poetry and has published two books in the last five years. He also likes to ride horses.
These are the simple facts, but being diagnosed with a debilitating condition is anything but simple. For people with cerebral palsy, barriers can be more frequent that makes it extremely difficult to function normally. We are no strangers to the reality that people sometimes stereotype those with disabilities, assuming they have miserable lives or that they are unhealthy because of their motor, hearing, learning, visual, or speech impairments.
Yet, in a remarkable turn of events, Greg has broken those barriers, proving that disability is not an obstacle to success. When he was 16 in the middle of a mental breakdown, he wrote his first poem he called “I Am” that sent a message of equality among disabled people and normal folks. At the suggestion of his caregivers and concerned people around him, he wrote more poems as a way to pep himself up while he recovered from the breakdown. What began as a simple act of therapy resulted in a collection of poetry that he later self-published into a book titled Let’s Fly.
“We got feelings. Don’t be scared because everyone else got feelings. Don’t listen to the negative things people say about you,” Greg says about the general message of his 2015 book. “The poems [in there] will always be relevant,” he adds, likely looking back with a high sense of gratitude for making it this far. If he hadn’t picked up that pen and paper and tried his hand at writing, who knows where the mental breakdown would’ve taken him. Anyhow, he’s glad he was brave enough to embark on something new: “You won’t know if you don’t try, so give it a go.”
And that is what life is all about, trying new things. Just imagine if Mexico’s most famous artist Frida Kahlo – who was born with the condition spina bifida – didn’t try painting while recovering from a bus accident. What if wheelchair-bound physicist Stephen Hawking, a genius of the modern age, didn’t pursue winning a scholarship at Natural Sciences at age 17? What if the blind and deaf Helen Keller and Anne Mansfield Sullivan didn’t become inseparable as student and teacher? Stepping outside of your comfort zone is the only way to truly learn. By keeping your mind open to things that spark even just a tiny interest in you, you very well may discover a new hobby, passion, friendship, or even career path – just as Greg did 29 years ago when he wrote the first lines of “I Am”.
Writing has come so naturally for him that in 2019 – just four years after his debut work came out – he released his second book Case of The Missing Dog through the Stampa Global platform. In his usual style, he kept the characters close to home: Jake is the namesake of a dog he owned, while Grego is a stylized character of himself. The story, meanwhile, revolves around the dog getting kidnapped and the owner embarking on a ‘round-the-world adventure to find him.
Such clever storyline from a challenged writer who gets creative inspiration from attending church and listening to the radio. He also reads books once in a while, his favorite are those about horses, which he thinks are some of the most under-appreciated book subgenres. As to why – “Because not too many people know about it,” he claims.
Although he dreams of breaking into mainstream media if given a chance, he has always chosen to publish independently and has no regrets doing so. Creative control is the power of self-publishing and Greg’s main reason for going that path. It gives the author the opportunity to see the whole process – the edit, cover design, production, and marketing. When you take your turn in the driver’s seat, you become more confident – of your person and of your product (the book). “I have not changed my opinion about self-publishing and never will. Stampa has been very easy to work with, I will go with them again [for upcoming projects],” he declares with certainty.
He is particularly a believer of word-of-mouth marketing which, for him, is still the most effective marketing strategy. To a certain degree, he is right. A 2018 Nielsen study finds that people are 83% more likely to trust recommendations from friends and family.
When you invest on freebies (a.k.a. complimentary copies), you get select people to read your book, then have them talk about it with friends and on social media. You rely not only on word-of-mouth referrals as your means of promotion, but on influencers as well. It is an active strategy where the goal is to create brand ambassadors for your works.
Greg’s works are – to say the least – uncomplicated but compassionate recreations of human frailty and strength that brings a crucial and rarely-discussed subject of physical and mental disability out of the box.
His energy for writing and his zest for life are infectious and touch the people around him. In many ways, he is like a bird, the kind described in Stephen King’s Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: A Story from Different Seasons. It says, “Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go.”
You let them fly.
