Failure to Comply: An Evening with Cavar

A Room of One's Own is excited to be joined by author Cavar and conversation partner Helen Rottier in celebration of their brand new genre defying book Failure to Comply.

This is an in-person event at A Room of One's Own.

About the Book

Cavar's Failure to Comply is an abolitionist text concerned with trans, disabled, and Mad liberation as a speculative art…

Every story has its fugitives. “I,” a deviant self-hacker with three arms, two stomachs, and no name, is on the run from RSCH, a high-tech, authoritarian government that mandates wellness and carves the contours of truth itself. When I is kidnapped at axe-point to be mined for forbidden memories, they must struggle against RSCH’s medical abuse to recapture their history, reunite with their lover, and rewrite their future—or risk remaining Patient forever.

I crosses an epistolary, time-flipped dreamscape as they recollect their memories from RSCH’s hungry archive, and, in the process, write the story of their liberation.

[sarah] Cavar is the author of Failure to Comply (featherproof books, 2024). Cavar is editor-in-chief of manywor(l)ds.place, and their work can be found in Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. A PhD candidate in Cultural Studies, they teach bicostally and live on the internet. Find them at www.cavar.club, @cavarsarah on twitter, and at librarycard.substack.com. 

Helen Rottier is a white, queer, mad, disabled scholar. She is currently a PhD candidate in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago and the Program Coordinator for the Disability Cultural Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives with her husband on the ancestral land of the Ho-Chunk people known as Teejop.