Writing
Kelsey Maurine Brickl writes across criticism, historical analysis, cultural commentary, disability-rights enforcement, theatre, and longform nonfiction. Her work focuses on institutions under pressure: public morality, historical memory, disability, reputation, coercion disguised as care, and the unstable border between official narrative and lived reality.
SELECTED ESSAYS & NONFICTION
“The Dead Made Easier: The Narrative Laundering of the Holocaust”
The Times of Israel Blogs - A historiographical essay examining how public memory often sanitizes difficult victims, inconvenient resistance, and morally disruptive historical realities, transforming complex lives into simplified narratives that are easier for later generations to commemorate.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-dead-made-easier-the-narrative-laundering-of-the-holocaust/
“Where and What and When is Home?”
The Times of Israel Blogs - A personal essay on disability, migration, family, and belonging, examining how home changes across a lifetime as memory, identity, physical access, and practical realities reshape where a person can safely and meaningfully live.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/where-and-what-and-when-is-home/
“‘Post-Jewish Property’ and the Problem of the Returning Neighbor”
The Times of Israel Blogs - A historical essay examining how postwar legal systems, property regimes, and bureaucratic language obscured the material consequences of the Holocaust, and how questions of restitution, memory, and ownership continue to shape disputes over displacement and return.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/post-jewish-property-and-the-problem-of-the-returning-neighbor/
“The Reputational Economy of Male Harm”
Medium - A feminist cultural essay on how male misconduct is often managed as a problem of reputation, while women who name harm are made to absorb the social, legal, and emotional consequences.
https://medium.com/@kelseybrickl/the-reputational-economy-of-male-harm-f5fdd86b31e5
“Amusez-vous bien avec votre soccer. Moi, j’ai rendez-vous avec la Méditerranée.”
Substack - A comic travel essay about escaping World Cup saturation by fleeing toward France, Burgundy, and the Mediterranean with theatrical gratitude and strategic indifference.
https://asovereignwound.substack.com/p/amusez-vous-bien-avec-votre-soccer
“The Atlantic Remains Smaller Than Before, Or: Micawber and Sellers Explain the Special Relationship While the Furniture Quietly Catches Fire”
Medium - A comic dialogue using Dickens’s Micawber and Twain’s Colonel Sellers to satirize Britain and America as two self-mythologizing cultures joined by language, debt, empire, decline, and spectacular confidence.
https://medium.com/@kelseybrickl/the-atlantic-remains-smaller-than-before-17cae257a567
“Commentary: Disney disability-policy changes narrow options”
Orlando Sentinel - A disability-rights commentary on how Disney’s revised DAS policies turned a previously workable access system into an unsafe, uncertain, and medically untenable arrangement for a disabled parent and child.
“Letters: These riders can’t use Waymo’s driverless cars and are treated like second-class customers”
San Francisco Chronicle - A disability-rights letter arguing that driverless vehicle systems cannot be celebrated as the future of urban transportation while full-time power wheelchair users remain excluded from the basic service.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/letterstotheeditor/article/waymo-wheelchair-disabled-rider-22292039.php
SELECTED THEATRE & CULTURAL CRITICISM
“Do Parasocial Fans Dream of Electric Sheep? Field Notes from Researching Modern Fandom”
Ghost Light Access - A cultural and access-safety essay examining how modern fandom, algorithmic urgency, celebrity proximity, stage-door culture, and convention economies can turn admiration into entitlement, creating boundary, privacy, crowd-management, and duty-of-care concerns for performers, staff, and Disabled patrons.
“The West End Needs More Monsters Like This”
Substack - A theatre review praising Dracula as a technically audacious, darkly funny, and deeply alive reinvention of classic horror for the future of the stage.
https://asovereignwound.substack.com/p/the-west-end-needs-more-monsters
“Grace Pervades, but David Hare Explains Too Much”
Substack - A theatre review arguing that Grace Pervades offers strong performances and lush theatrical pleasures, but is weakened by a script too determined to explain its own ambiguities.
https://asovereignwound.substack.com/publish/post/197370353
“Maybe Happy Ending’s Planned Obsolescence in B Flat Major”
Medium - A theatre review of Maybe Happy Ending as a charming, beautifully designed musical whose sweetness depends on planned impermanence, treating obsolescence as a feature rather than a bug.
“The Fear of 13 on Broadway: Strong Performances Carry a Script at War with Its Uneven Tone”
Substack - A theatre review arguing that despite outstanding performances, The Fear of 13 mishandles victimhood, grief, humor, and legal truth.
https://asovereignwound.substack.com/p/the-fear-of-13-on-broadway
Selected Fiction
Kelsey Maurine Brickl’s fiction moves across historical drama, literary reimagining, regional storytelling, and psychological pressure, with a recurring interest in class, reputation, longing, moral constraint, and the private costs of public identity.
Her published fiction includes The Most Dangerous Dream: Leroux’s Phantom Reimagined, Wolves and Urchins: The Early Life of Inspector Javert, Hardtack: A Civil War Story, Sing for Me: A Chicago Story, Paint, and Risk and Reward.
Across these works, Brickl returns to many of the same preoccupations that shape her criticism and screenwriting: belief systems, social coercion, family control, institutional mythologies, violence, performance, and the stories people tell to survive what history, love, or necessity demands of them.
“When some women felt fear, they covered it with an iron grate of courage, I thought. Men might be dangerous, but they were very often unperceptive. If fear only rumbled through a woman’s soul and glittered through her eyes, then perhaps the man she feared would not be aware it was there at all. He might even think that she was entirely confident, dauntless. He might believe her veneer of bravery.”
— Kelsey Maurine Brickl, Paint
Comedy & Live Performance
Kelsey Maurine Brickl performs live sit-down comedy shaped by disability, theatre culture, public behavior, institutional absurdity, and transatlantic social observation.
Her comic work extends the same concerns visible across her writing: power, access, reputation, systems failure, and the strange rituals through which public life explains itself.
She has developed and performed material in New York and London, with a voice that combines deadpan observation, legal-cultural precision, and a sharply feminine disability perspective.
