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I’d never thought of myself as separate from the world I lived in; the Outside I came from was sensory-rich and immersive, there my interactions unfolded organically and overlapped, building intuitively like the scales on a pinecone, rewarding curiosity with wonder.
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“We wanted to give voice to people who are often spoken for.”
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As we go, we are breathlessly held in an in-between state, a limbo, a transition.
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“[I]t is an itch that needs to be scratched. To test. To push. To prove to myself.”
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Light reflects differently off near and faraway objects. It’s all about the light.
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The rage and frustration overwhelmed all rational thought.
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Oliver de la Paz discusses his newest collection, THE BOY IN THE LABYRINTH.
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The child is born of them, yet is other to them; they work on behalf, and yet despite, and also against her.
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Poets Barbara Crooker and Marjorie Maddox discuss their writing.
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Maybe you were whistling before you could talk, too.
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Elizabeth Scanlon discusses her debut full-length collection, Lonesome Gnosis, brains and trains, and poetry as prayer.
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“We need narrative patterns to understand reality.”
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“I wanted to make these characters much more complex than the individual boxes we normally see.”
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I think fresh semen smells like aspirin, which is made from a mold that grows on birch trees, which of course are phallic.
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Kayleb Rae Candrilli discusses their debut collection, What Runs Over, reclaiming memory through poetry, and the political act of being happy.
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Rene Denfeld discusses her latest book, The Child Finder, the ways in which trauma traps us, and the important role of imagination in finding resilience and escape.
...moreCarolyn Parkhurst discusses her latest book, Harmony, writing about your personal life and family in fiction, and her fascination with cults.
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Perhaps part of what prompted me to get clean and sober was the fact I kept making myself uncomfortable.
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In the second installment of The Read Along, Omar Musa shares how airplane delays can lead to productive reading sessions and how easy it is to get sucked into Internet wormholes about geodesic domes.
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It just felt so comfortable to slide back into singing, “She Loves You,” and know for that moment, everything was the same.
...moreElon Green writes about the complicated history of autism research for the Atlantic: But the damage done by Kanner, intentionally or otherwise, is inescapable. For far too long he perpetuated ideas about autistic children that were simply not true. And for too long no one was the wiser. “By burying Asperger in history, Kanner obscured the […]
...moreEven if we already know our identity, proper representation helps us accept that identity. It’s well-established that negative/no representation has awful effects on self-esteem. When we see no one like us—or when we’re only ever the troubled sibling, never the heroic kid —it sends a message. We’re not normal. We’re not welcome. We’re not heroes. […]
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The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Tuesday nights 7-9 p.m. EST in New York City.
...moreIn the vein of Naoki Hagoshida’s The Reason I Jump (and David Mitchell’s Guardian essay), photographer Timothy Archibald created a breathtaking series of portraits of his autistic son Elijah. Archibald originally started taking the photos “so he could show them to behavioral specialists,” but they “became a bonding experience between father and son, and allowed them to create […]
...moreIn an essay for The Guardian, David Mitchell (author of the novels Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, among others) provides a moving and honest account of the experience of raising a son with autism. While the diagnosis came as a shock—and gave way to more difficulties and struggles than he’d imagined—Mitchell writes that he has learned to […]
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