See it Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor: A Review

Maxfield Sparrow unstrangemind.com [image: cover of the book See It Feelingly, by Ralph Savarese] See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor (Thought in the Act) by Ralph James Savarese Foreword by Stephen Kuusisto Duke University Press Books (October 12, 2018) Reading See it Feelingly took me much longer than I expected, because I wanted to stop to take notes with almost every page turn. Dr. Savarese has produced a masterpiece, simultaneously dense and accessible. His voice moves freely—alternating among lyrical, narrative, and instructive—never losing the flow, never dipping into pedantry, never soaring too far toward the abstract for the reader to follow. Not only is this collection of essays brimming with the most important information and ideas about autism, it is a collaboration of rare beauty. See it Feelingly crosses genres effortlessly. The result is a book rich in the neuroscience of autism,…

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Hoshi and the Red City Circuit: An Excellent Debut by a Neurodivergent Author About Neurodivergent Protagonists

[image: Illustrated cover of the book Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, by Dora M Raymaker, featuring a person in silhouette sitting on the ground fending off rays of power from a pitchfork-wielding person silhouetted in red.] Kelly Israel Introduction Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, the debut work by Dora Raymaker, is first and foremost an excellent page-turning detective story about private investigator Hoshi Archer’s race to discover who murdered three Operators. Operators are a caste of people with disabilities. They are also the only people who have the ability to run the multi-layered, complex technology of the future. It is next a story about Hoshi herself and the many friends, allies, acquaintances, enemies, and lovers she has known and cared for on her way to becoming the person that she is. Hoshi is also a story that grapples with the intellectual and developmental disability (I/DD) community’s ghosts and…

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Takeaways From The 10th Annual UCSF Developmental Disabilities Conference

Shannon Des Roches Rosa www.thinkingautismguide.com www.squidalicious.com I had the good fortune to speak at at well as attend last week’s UCSF Developmental Disabilities Conference, thanks to the networking wizardry of TPGA contributor Laura Shumaker. It was an experience for which I am profoundly grateful — it exemplified The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism’s mission of bringing together parents, professionals, and adults with autism so we can learn from each other, so our community can become stronger and more effective. Though the conference covered more than autism, I am going to focus on a few autism-related takeaways. iPads and Autism Danielle Samson, MA CCC-SLP and Shannon Des Roches Rosa, MA My talk with crackerjack SLP Danielle Samson opened the conference. Danielle covered autism, iPads, and AAC devices from the professional’s perspective, followed by my perspectives as an autism parent, community member, and former educational software producer. It was on most points…