Maya Bernstein-Schalet discusses “Down and Out in Disneyland,” featured in the Summer 2025 issue of Colorado Review, with editorial assistant Gabby Vermeire.
Maya Bernstein-Schalet is a writer from Brooklyn, NY. She is the recipient of the Briar Cliff Review’s 2023 Award for Nonfiction, the 2024 University of Arizona Creative Writing Program Bill Waller Award for Nonfiction, and the 2025 AWP Intro Journals Project Award. Her essay about Walter Benjamin and Alzheimer’s disease was selected as a notable essay in the Best American Essays of 2024. She is a proud member of Jewish Voice for Peace, a coalition of Jews in support of Palestinian liberation.
Gabby Vermeire: The part of “Down and Out in Disneyland” that really subverted my expectations was when the narrator gets to finally experience Disneyland. And, when she does, she sees children genuinely enjoying themselves, and there’s real happiness where she thought there would only be fakeness and consumer culture. Can you speak a bit more about that experience and why you wanted to show both sides to this place?
Maya Bernstein-Schalet: There are two reasons that part turned out the way that it did, one logistical and one that has more to do with craft. During the trip I took to Anaheim to go to Disneyland, I got a call from my pet sitter saying that my cat had been bitten by a rattlesnake. My ticket to Disneyland was for the following day, so I had to call them on a Sunday and ask them to change the ticket because my cat was bit by a rattlesnake; I did the same thing for the hotel reservation, and to change my flight. Those were conversations I’d never thought I’d have before. So, I was only able to go to Disneyland for an hour before my flight and did not have a full day to wander around the park like I had originally intended. I went with my notebook and was just standing there, trying to really find what I needed for this essay and expecting it to be crowded and loud and sticky, but it was actually just kind of fine. Pleasant, not crowded.
The other reason was that, during the initial stages of working on this essay, I had built Disneyland up in my mind as this thing representing the evils of capitalism. Disneyland has had many issues over the decades, but for the purposes of my essay, I realized it had become a foil I needed to understand my loss through.
GV: After reading this essay, I learned that substance abuse and Disneyland actually have a lot in common! Was there a moment when you realized the potential in that comparison?
MBS: Yes, it happened when I was reading the Jean Baudrillard simulacra essay [Simulacra and Simulation], in which he says that Disneyland is a simulation of a simulation. When I was reading it, it occurred to me that it is weirdly similar to the sensation of taking opioids or being high. I also thought about fentanyl, how it’s a synthetic opioid and the high from it is kind of a simulation of the original simulation of being high. Originally, I had a whole section about fentanyl. That didn’t make it into the final version. This was a part of the essay I wanted to be thoughtful about; being high is not the same thing as going to Disneyland. I didn’t want to make an equation between substance abuse or addiction and Disneyland in a literal way. I was more interested in how the discourses around both overlap in the contemporary American sphere, and in particular where there is a linguistic similarity between how people talk about Disneyland and how people talk about drug use. Originally, the list of quotes that made it into the essay was just something I’d been jotting down for myself while I figured out how to make that point. But when I included it in a draft for my MFA workshop, a lot of my peers told me that they loved it, so I kept it in.
GV: How do you think of humor, which in this piece is largely related to absurd observations of Disneyland, as a tool in your writer’s toolbox?
MBS: I’m flattered that you think there is humor in here, because I’ve never thought about it that way. I don’t think of myself as a funny writer. I feel like humor is one of the hardest things to incorporate into creative nonfiction. I think it’s really hard to be funny! You have to understand the dynamics of a social moment and then be able to locate the contradictions within it. It’s also part of the art of storytelling, you really have to hit your beats so the humor lands just right. I guess the one aspect in the essay that I was doing intentionally was accentuating things that are really ridiculous as a way to show the stark dichotomy between abundance and scarcity.
GV: Your piece touches a bit on the challenge (or inevitability) of never being able to show readers the entirety of another person like Kealynd. Do you have any thoughts since publishing this piece on how Kealynd might be received by readers, or on this idea as a whole?
MBS: I’ve actually never heard from a reader about how Kealynd is received, but I would love to know. It is hard to write about people in creative nonfiction who we may want to protect for whatever reason. Or, maybe we’re not comfortable writing about a person who passed away, and we feel like it would be a disservice to them to render them in writing because they’re not around to speak for themselves. For this essay, I just kind of refused to write about him in a way that felt like a disservice to his memory.
My background is in anthropology, so that gave me a lens or a set of critical tools to think about representation. In ethnographies of the past, individuals are frequently used to represent some larger cultural meaning. I am not interested in doing that, especially not with Kealynd in this essay. I think it’s important as writers to be able to practice refusal. I really admire the anthropologist Audra Simpson, who writes about the concept of refusal. She is an Indigenous anthropologist and speaks about refusing to produce meaning for the purposes of a settler-colonial narrative. In terms of my writing, I want to refuse to render people I don’t feel I have the right or confidence to render for the purposes of a narrative, as well as do right by their memory.
GV: Would you ever go back to Disneyland?
MBS: Sure, I would go back. It’s not a place I hate, even though I don’t like theme parks. I mean, I don’t have kids, so there isn’t really a draw, but if a friend asked me to go with their kids, I would. I think sometimes, we need places or people or regions or groups to be a villainous foil so we can make our lives make sense. That’s what happened with Disneyland, for me. But really, every single person, place, or group is as complicated as the rest of us. Disneyland carries a ton of cultural meaning, of course. It has the legacy of racism, of working with Nazis, of stealing animators’ work, all the labor issues, the land use problem. But in terms of the writing, you have to ask yourself, do I really need this place to represent everything bad?
And also, I can’t really afford to go right now. If someone else was paying my way, maybe. But it’s very expensive to buy a Disneyland ticket, let alone pay for the food, merchandise, or special rides.
GV: I like what you said about needing villains in our lives to help them make sense! I’ve always wondered about the purpose of that tendency.
MBS: We all need aspects of narrative and storytelling to make our lives make sense, to put one foot in front of the other. This is really an essay about the grieving process, the initial shock of needing a reason and trying to find blame. Eventually, there’s a part of that process when a loss becomes part of the greater fabric of life, which is living and losing, trying to make sense of it, and doing it all again. In time, we realize we’re never going to find a reason for our grief.
Several years have passed, and I’m no longer in the same place as I was when I was searching for a reason for a tragic death, whether I knew it or not. I don’t remember what the stages of grief are, but one is acceptance, and I felt that shift in myself when I was finishing the essay. It felt like the self writing was no longer the self that started the essay, which I feel like is pretty common for creative nonfiction.
Gabby Vermeire is a writer and climber from Boulder, CO. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University in Fort Collins with a focus in creative nonfiction. She has written satirical and journalistic pieces for Boulder Weekly, Rooster Magazine in Denver and The Comet in Wenatchee, WA. She was the creator and author of Dear Whole Foods Daddy, BW’s monthly satirical advice column that ran for over two years. She runs the popular local humor Instagram account @WholeFoodsDaddy, which she created six years ago.