New year’s eve at midnight. We just got home from delivering food downtown, tagging the kids along with us. Downtown is a place called Eastwood, a “township” as they call it of glitzy condominium and office buildings around malls and manicured outdoor spaces. After two pandemic Christmas seasons when Eastwood…

When colonialism taints modern breastfeeding narratives — Breastmilk is liquid gold, not just for its superior content that no milk formula can ever match. It’s golden for the sometimes brutal process of keeping up the milk supply. It binds the mother’s entire life around the breastfeeding schedule. Lapsing doesn’t just mean hungry infant. For the mother, it…

Meditations on the mysteries of language — My autistic son is not yet speaking at three years old. As much as I’m hopeful that he may eventually gain speech, I’m just as prepared to accept that he may not gain speech at all. There’s an unsettled debate going on around the use of the term “nonverbal” when…

Transitioning to a post-academic life — With Z-Library taken down (though I think it’ll spring back up elsewhere or in some other form — because the need for it persists, and taking it down does nothing to address the need), I rummaged in my drives to collect in one folder all the mostly scholarly books I’ve…

How we happily survived Halloween — I’ve been hearing a lot about how parents of autistic children had painstakingly hand-made a costume that their kid refused to wear because: 1) the kid had sensory issues with the material; 2) the kid didn’t want to go out of routine; or 3) a myriad of reasons specific to…

The opening scene metafictionally frames Mike Flanagan’s TV adaptation of Christopher Pike’s 90s YA novel, The Midnight Club. Ilonka, graduating from high school at the top of her class, is rehearsing a speech: We are the authors of our own stories. Sure, we can’t always control the plot, but we…

A constellation of four flash fictions — Memory of a Meteor On arriving back home from a long and harrowing trip to her parents’ house in the mountains, where she’d spent a good deal of her childhood, Jenny unloaded her haul of damp and yellowing books. She’d rescued them from the humidity in the house, and from oblivion. Jenny was no…

On the reunion of Michael J. Fox with Christopher Lloyd at the New York Comic Con — I confess that prior to my toddling son’s autism diagnosis, I knew next to nothing about autism except what is stereotypically going around. And that is embarrassing for me, a literature professor who has cursorily read disability studies as part of my job. Of course, what I wasn’t aware about…