Launch Week 2: Tutorial with Richard Nash

On Monday, our group assembled with our tentative layouts to talk to Richard about actualizing our publication. As we predicted, we all showed up with vastly different layouts and spreads and fonts, but with works in front of us, the decisions we needed to make to unify the style seemed much more clear.

Victoria was the note-taker during the tutorial

Fonts – In our individual layouts, we all used different fonts. The consensus was that for captions and headers we would use a sans serif font and for larger body text, we would use a serif font. We decided on 10 pt for body text and 8 pt for captions, all left aligned. Teresa had used baskerville as her body font in her original layout spreads, and we as group thought that it looked quite nice. To do captions, she chose a font that paired well. Ricahrd suggested to us a pair of slightly more modern fonts that compared to baskerville.

Headers – We decided that we did not want to have headers/footers reiterating the artist name, as in our text, the name of the artist would be used because our text would be from the first person.

Grids – Richard pointed out that a unifying factor for a publication is a grid, and the more complex the grid, the more flexible it is. Considering that we were using a square a 12 x 12 grid seemed like a reasonable option.

Footers – we were debating between having page numbers or purposely allowing the reader to become disorientated by not knowing when to start. However, with the fact of the matter that we had to indicate a sort of beginning with the placement of our group manifesto and a sort of table of contents. (However, we were considering displaying contents not with page numbers but with corresponding colors for cover pages that would act as dividers between artists.)

Paper – Ideally, what we would have would be a series of cover pages in a slightly thicker stock than the content pages to indicate a demarcation between artists/alternative covers in different colors. For now, we will just digitally indicate these cover pages with colored pages, but we will plan to find a printer to see what is possible for the actual launch.

The biggest conclusion that we had after the tutorial was that we needed to make a blank prototype to understand the confines of our layout. And when we made one, we figured out that we would actually be able to shift in a full circle using 90 degree turns between each artist. We could, physically, but it mean that for at least two of us, the pages would have to be read in a slightly counter-intuitive manner–one would have to be read from right to left and another would have to be read from down to up. We were okay with the idea of shifting orientations in that some people would have vertical spreads and some would have horizontal spreads. However, presenting all four orientations created a larger cost in readibility than for aesthetic game.

A rough prototype for our publication

From this prototype, we were able to extract a general master page layout. We concluded that the publication would only shift 90 degrees to right and 90 degrees to the left so that the reader would be switching between horizontal and vertical spreads. However, they would never have to encounter something that would make you read pages from right to left or down to up. We determined whose work was better suited to a horizontal spread, and made a plan to meet the next day at 11 am in order to further discuss a master-grid, transition pages, and fonts.

Launch Friday Copyshop Workshop 2.0: A Plan Materializes

On Friday, our group got together in order to think more about the physicality of our publication in a session with Richard Nash. In the session, Richard showed us a bunch of different publication options that reflected and complimented diverse personalities of various works.

Following our discussion on Tuesday, our group had a tentative idea for how we thought the design of the publication could reflect this idea of ‘shift.’ We had decided that we could have a 20 cm x 20 cm physical square publication that could flip like a rolodex, but the reader would have to rotate their their perspective as they went through the publication from artist to artist. Thus, reading the table of contents and shifting to my works would require a 90 degree shift. Ideally, the publication would be able to shift 90 degrees to the right between each of the six artists. We could bind the publciation with a spiral so that one could get lost in the publication without a clear starting point. The physical shift would enhance the tonal/color shift from artist to artist. We also made the decision that we did not want to have page numbers in order to enhance this disorienting effect.

We thought that this could also translate well into a digital version to be read on an iOS device rather than a computer. When downloaded via QR code, the publication would become a PDF on the screen, which could be locked in a fixed orientation. Then, the reader would have to turn their device to adjust their perspective between artists.

Victoria’s notes for publication prototypes and Copyshop materials

We understood that the assembly of this publication could be highly complicated, so we planned for an alternative, more traditional publication, bound with string. The process of printing is made especially complicated by the fact of the strike, considering that the group as whole wants to support the strike, as a result, we will not go into the building. Richard also pointed out that coils can be quite aethetically unappealing/give a very corporate look and suggested a variation on the concertina to evoke a similar change in orinetaion. However, when we researched coiled publications on Pinterest, we found some options that we found to be quite aesthetically appealing/fitting to our concept.

With this in mind, we thought that the square publicaiton could be quite successful, so we worked to create a prototypical double spread for a horizontal orientation of this publication. For now, we decided to design for the square shift, ultimately to produce at least a digital publicaiton, and to research printers in London to see if the coiled, physical solution could be realized by the launch event after assessment.

Double spread in process using Teresa’s Images

After we worked to put together a double spread, we realized that the physicality of working with images was something that we all individually had to play with. We resolved to make a plan for us to individually go home and make some prototypical pages with ideal layouts over the weekend. Monday, we would regroup to make sure they seemed harmonious and to make more solid design decisions.

Teresa also created a time-table for us going forward:

Launch: Launch

Here we are in the final project for the RCA Graduate Diploma. We launched the Launch project today, to give us an idea of how to put together our final works in a group publication. The publication is an exciting challenge for me as I ultimately got into visual communication in order to create works that would live in publications. However, this is also slightly challenging as in Realise, I created a Zine. As a result, there is a little bit of a tension as to what I should publish in Launch: prints or a documentation of my zine. At this point, I will probably have images from both or some sort of link to the online zine. In the final critique Kyung Hwa brought this up as well: how could I display my prints as both images in a book as well as standalone wall images? Here I will confront that tension to a degree.

In the project launch, Clare and Julian gave us several ideas for how we could actualize a showcase of our works in a publication. Considering that I have worked with publications before, I feel comfortable in the creation of zine. However, I think that my group will probably seek a slightly more polished final product. I am working with a group of Comms students who include Caio, Theresa, Victoria, Yumeng, and Pingping. All of our work is quite different, so it was important to look at various publications that combine quite the range of works.

After the presentation, we went over to the South Ken library to take a look at some of the journals that they have there for some spread ideas. As our works are in the field of visual communication, I thought first to look at contemporary magazines for a sleek, polished look.

I first went to Wired to get a feel for their juxtaposition of text and image. I liked their use of graphic blocks in combination with the text. This is something that I felt suited my graphic, black and white prints quite well as well as large pops of color which are evident in the works of some of the members from my group. Additionally, they use quite varied layout but because of the blocks of color, it still feels like a unified publication.

However, in another issue of Wired (December 2019) the issue had a much wider variety between spreads and color palettes. I suppose that there was consistency between specific articles within this issue, however, the big contrast from black and white to super-saturated color made them feel, for me, a little less unified as a publication as a whole in this instance. There was a pattern of an unorthodox distribution of text between unequal columns on the different pages that was consistent between different articles, but I found this distracting with too many components.

I also decided to take a look at some more traditional art publications, and I was particularly excited by an illustration publication called 2×2. This publication housed a wide variety of works in quite the range of different templates. However, there was a unified style throughout the publication as there were clear grids using rectangles and a lot of white space with minimal text. Though colors ranged widely through the book, each facing spread seemed to have some sort of color relationship between them. As a result, it felt cohesive. This example seems like a format that we could use to house the diverse body of works that we have in our group.

Though the actual book format may not be feasible in the amount of time that we have with the given works, these page layouts were immensely helpful in diagramming how we could craft a cohesive story between such different artists.

Realise: Printing and Binding

Preparing for the final critique, there were some epic battles with printers. Theoretically, inDesign has a feature which figures out the pages/orientation for a given printer. However, the night before the critique, I could not get them working. There were many a printer fails.

Because so much of my preparation time went into sorting out the printer, I didn’t have much time to think about binding. I knew that for the version of the zine that would be made to distribute for the projected launch date of the Autism Awareness Walk in April, that the printing means would be simple: just paper and something to bind it with.

In the past for zines, I have used folding mechanisms (Manifesto) and string (Artefact), but I wanted to branch out. In a split decision, I asked Anna if she had any safety pins that I could place in my publication. I tried a couple of different iterations, but I liked the ones with the safety pins on the inside center folds the best: they are quick, aesthetically pleasing, and cheap.

The safety pin also added a certain ruggedness to the zines themselves, which feel a bit inherently punk because due to the medium and black and white aesthetic. But also, they suggest a functionality to the zine. Safety pins can be used as tacs to post up posters to spread awarnesss. Thus, the pages have the potential to have a life cycle beyond the first set of hands that they happen toencounter.

In additon to making zines for Austism Awareness Day in New Orleans, I wanted to make a couple of the versions of the zine that were quite precious. (As a result, they were much more difficult to bind.) Having looked at William Kentridge’s book of prints ‘Trace’ I was moved by the way his voice seemed to edit/comment on his own works/other works. A lot of Kentridge’s work, particularly his prints, are created over Pre-existing documents/layered. This is ultimately interesting a it brings about another component to the prints of Kentridge themselves. But, it is ultimately destructive.

Tracing paper allows for the marks to be a part of the piece but to not bury the process/thing that came before. Tracing paper allows the print to move and live on, to reveal as well as hide. As a result, I decided to print some of my images on tracing paper to see how they could layer upon to the existing prints, having made a couple of layouts with this in mind. Though I liked the result, particularly of the spread that hides the ‘Questions I am Afraid to Ask” spread, the assembly was quite difficult with a cover.

It would also not be cost effective in the long run for a zine, as a pack of tracing paper cost about £8. Though I would have liked to have added this component to the prototype zine to be distributed, it would be a difficult workload as well. My process involves cutting, printing, and then scanning, to make the prints accessible/removed digitally. The prints themselves were much more physically satisfying, but by their nature, the prints as image would be difficult to distribute on a large scale. (The ink I used also would get on people’s fingers. I did look into oil based paints/different papers, but they would not be cost effective.) However the tracing paper brought an element of an ephemeral/disappearing nature into the zine itself.

Some spreads with the tracing paper added

This is something that I had hoped to retain in physicality as a nod to the experimental books on clear acetate that I hs created in investigate and with the shattered rooms image. It is something that I also attempted to work into my layout with fragmented pieces of prints distributed throughout. Thus, this zine, or the ones I have produced for this project, are ultimately print works over zines. The prints themselves will have a separate life perhaps.

Researching a Different Story/Narrowing Focus

After looking at the general trajectory of the linocut pieces that I had made, and talking to Cato, it seemed like a more targeted approach/more specific story might be the wisest way forward for the creation of this particular zine.

I was a little stuck on the text of what to do, and considering that that would be half of the layout, it seemed odd that I hadn’t payed it any mind. Though, the linocut prints that I had created seemed to have a similar theme: the house.

After talking to my mom, mining for Matthew stories, lots of memories came up about how difficult it was to find a school for Matthew when we were younger: how there was no infrastructure in the city of New Orleans for him at all because the Charter School system makes it such that schools don’t have to accommodate people on the spectrum. They also take all of the public funding.

My mom and dad tend to be a little sensitive on the subject about what is going to happen when Matthew, my brother, gets older. He is a difficult case for a boy on the autism spectrum: he is non-verbal, he has many phobias, and he can be violent when he gets into a state. We don’t really talk about what will happen when my parents get too old to take care of him. He didn’t respond well to moving houses when hurricane katrina destroyed our childhood home in 2005, and he was 7 then. Now he is 21 and it is unclear whether myself or my siblngs will be the person to ultimately take care of him.

However, my mom said to me, ‘You know, Brooke, at Matthew’s school, we are trying to band a bunch of parents together who are in a similar situation to see if we could build a house through the school.”

This gave me the idea that all of these prints about the house could come together to actually tell a story for a cause: the materials to get the conversation started for building such a house with this school in New Orleans.

With this narrowed focus, I decided that I would start working on prints of more architectural elements as well as images of my brother directly. Too, now I knew what to write about.

A Similar Project in Photography

When I was talking to my older sister to try to excavate stories from her, she sent me an article about an artist undergoing a similar project in photography: https://mymodernmet.com/timothy-archibald-echolilia/?fbclid=IwAR1LcX7DVQ3bPuGc69NmPb5D1oOZKET8N15_J-arldoryA4vf63M4B-4cFo

These works are very beautiful and very personal. Looking at them, they made me realize that I may have cast a net too wide in my original zine focus. What this project shows is a father’s attempt to document and celebrate the atypical behaviors of his son who is on the spectrum using the language that he happens to have for documentation: photography.

Even though I do not practice photography, I think that the relationship here between the person behind the lens and the person depicted in the photograph is embedded in the work. Because it tells such a specific story of two individuals, the compositions hit hard–especially because it feels like their story to tell and told in the voice that Timothy Archibald can speak in.

This has made me reconsider whether I want to cast such a wide net at this stage. Logistically too I have the majority of stories about my own brother. Perhaps focusing on him would pack a harder punch. But then is the main goal just to get a window into his life?

Week 2: Stories and Prints

The meat of week two was dedicated to generating images for the zine in response to the stories I had collected, and to use those stories and images as a measurement to see who else I needed to reach out to.

The stories that I collected so far were a series of my own writing, particularly in relation to my brother’s understanding of object permanence, as well as stories from my family and a few of my friends. I let the prompt be quite loose, so as a result, the stories that I collected were more vignettes than anything else.

The Matthew stories came to me as voice notes, which I have transcribed here:

From my mom:
“So I asked Matt to bring up some toilet paper to put the toilet paper away–it was a big pack. Well, we didn’t hear from him for several hours. We went upstairs and the toilet paper was hanging out everywhere–out the shelves, on the floor, everywhere–thanks Matt! Great job!

When transcribed into words on a page, this story loses quite a bit of flavor. Perhaps if this publication were meant to turn into a collective memory jar/story album, than perhaps it would mean more, but it lay a little flat as was.

From my dad:

“I remember when the Wendy’s ritual first started. It was right around the time when Matthew started school at Chartwell. He never dealt well with change. I guess most people don’t. He developed a particularly funny coping mechanism.”

“I dropped Matthew off at school one mornign on my way to work, and he was in a particularly bad mood that day. Just gettng to cross over the bridge to the West Bank, my phone rang, and it was Chartwell. They were calling me to let me know that Matthew was–well, he was really throwing a fit. [I] turned around, went to pick him up. A couple of minutes into the drive home, he started demanding that we stop at Wendy’s. [My dad sighs.] We pull into the drivethrough, and he always has a particular order: one value fry, one bowl of chili, one natural lemonade, a junior chocolate frosty, two packs of ketchup, and one pack of hot sauce.”

“Once we make the drive back to the house, Matthew gets a ciramic bowl, dumps the chili in it, and then leaves the whole thing untouched. I thought that would just be a one off experience.”

“But then it happened again.”

“And again.”

“It’s funny–it was like an offering to make sure the house still remained [laughs] when he was at school. Matthew was always worried that things would not continues to exist if he didn’t personally watch over them.”

“Sometimes, I run into people who have kids with autism. Sometimes I will be excited, like–hey yeah! Your son or daughter has autism too, right? But here’s the thing. It’s so different. Some kids can talk and go to school just fine–others, like Matthew, are a little less socially functional. If you know one kid with autism, you know one kid with autism.”

This is the story that my dad told to narrate the animation I did about my brother’s anxieties in 2017. We collaborated a bit on the writing, but because it was for a fuller project, it has a fuller arc.

I also got a story from my friend Jenny:

“Hi Brooke! So I want to tell you about a time a few years ago when my brother gave me one of the best presents I will ever receive. I still call him my little brother, even though he’s 28 now and is a good foot taller than me. He’s a very kind soul, very loving (although he wasn’t always so nice to me – when we were wee he used to tell me “you can go now” a few seconds after I stepped into the room…!). He has always loved cartoons, and has become really good at drawing and painting them over the years. He spends hours making amazing gifts for birthdays, Christmas presents, anniversaries, Easter, and as his only sister I have been privileged to receive many items over the years that I would consider among his best works! I’ve had beautifully drawn cards, painted pictures of my favourite cartoons that we have watched together to hang on my walls, a completely handmade 100 piece jigsaw puzzle complete with box, an advent calendar constructed out of cereal boxes, and many more. While they are all very precious to me, there’s one gift in particular that I will always display proudly. For my 25th birthday, he made me a photo frame. The design is an original one, complete with a unique folding mechanism using paperclips to create a hinge. It’s got a picture of Princess Peach, my favoured Mario Kart candidate, laminated and attached to the top of the frame. My favourite part of the whole design is the construction material. As it turned out, I turned 25 in the same year that Magnum ice creams were celebrating their 25th anniversary with promotional packaging, including using ice cream sticks with the number 25 on them. My brother selflessly consumed no less than 32 of these promotional ice creams in order to have enough ice cream sticks to construct my photo frame. Bear in mind that the promotional packs were in the shops a good 8 months before my birthday – he planned this long in advance and kept hold of the sticks all that time. Quoth my dad when I opened it – “we wondered why he was eating so much ice cream!”. Topped off with an excellent choice of photo – the two of us at my graduation – the photo frame puts a smile on my face every time I look at it. I feel lucky to have a brother so thoughtful.”

I love this story, but I thought it might be a bit tricky to illustrate because the visualizations of the words of the story are half of the fun. In this case, I thought that illustration could in fact take away.

In my attempts to collect stories, I started to notice that they all worked really well as spoken anecdotes, but when written down, they didn’t have the same sparkle. Nonetheless, I continued to visually illustrate not one story, but what living with Matthew in New Orleans is like in order that it can fit multiple stories. The difference with these prints is that I am now using the figure.

I use the pictures that I took over the break in order to give a peak into the life of Matthew. Additionally, I have been playing with larger compositions in these sort of comic book prints, as the figure sort of adds a narrative automatically.

I like how striking these graphic images are–how they look like dollhouses. However, the inconsistencies in my prints are a little distracting, so I will have to solve this.

Final Presentation and Feedback

During the final presentation, I presented three(ish) outcomes: linocut illustrations, two books proposals, and digital illustrations:

Matthew Presentation Link Download

The most important feedback that I received was that there was a possibility for a wider reach for this type of project. Perhaps whatever I produced could be workshop or a means of art therapy. Perhaps it could be a book of resources. The whole process was fairly therapeutic for me to put together, so how could I share that? How could I make this more than a story?

Going forward, I want to ask how not to just make educational materials, but how to also make systems for people with special needs.

Printing and Book Assembly

Once I had a series of images, I decided to assemble two ‘books’, one that was just the comprised of linocut prints on the 2mm clear acrylic, and another that involved those prints as well as warped versions of those prints and words.

I took some of the pieces of the writing that I had done and put them into a file that would match the the size of the clear acrylic pages to ultimately print on clear vinyl to then overlay on the acrylic pages. The words would be clear and their background would be black such that the words would be a portal into the fractured spaces themselves when you encountered the book as a whole.

Illustrator document with the text and images to be printed as stickers

I also put pictures of my prints into illustrator in order to create some solid stickers of them. Ultimately I wanted to do this so that I could have some images that I could cut up, so that the rooms could ‘shatter’ on some pages.

Comparison of the regular print and shattered print

In the end, the book prototype ended up being a bit of a failure in a couple of different ways. For the pages that were all text, my stickers were large and difficult to apply. As a result, they left a lot of bubbles when they were applied on the clear acetate. Too the actual ‘pages’ that I printed on directly ended up being a bit sticky because of the fact that my water based ink could not fully dry as it didn’t absorb into the clear acrylic.

As a result, when people flipped through them, they got a lot of ink on their fingers and were less incentivized to read the actual text. Pages stuck together. I also assembled the pages with string, which ended up just falling apart on me.

However, as objects, I thought the books were quite beautiful. They created insecure illusions of spaces, and because of the clear acrylic, they could stand.

Here are some of the images that I captured in the studio:

The shadows ended up creating a beautiful warmed impression of all of the images together, like a watermark that warped with different perspectives. As images, I think they are a successful testament to memory of spaces.

Additionally, to apply these images, I worked with the format of a book, in the idea of a page of a comic to create this sort of ‘all at once’ feature:

I thought both of these attempts to serialize my prints ultimately did something similar: they created semi-physical doll houses of spaces that a ‘reader’ could navigate and populate from room to room. Though these spaces were created to ultimately tell the story of my own brother, I think the way that I displayed them invites the viewing to come in and populate them with their own stories.

Writing and Memory Archiving

I decided that for one of my outcomes for the illustrations in my reflections on my personal relationship with my brother, I should investigate what happened when I put writing on the subject in immediate proximity to the images of the house that I had linocut.

In order to do this, I would have to write. Throughout the project I had been calling my parents to talk about Matthew, but I hadn’t really sat down to archive my own memory. First, I wrote down all of the memories that were associated with the pictures I had unearthed in the iCloud drive and tried to segment memory roughly according to year:

matthew-memories-1 Download

Then, I went through and tried to convey my own thoughts on this process/what I am trying to do by using him as my subject in Investigate:

Last Friday’s Lecture about memory was significant for me because it made me encounter these things. —personal history as a way to encounter storytelling and the brain.

Having a brother like Matthew is probably one of the most important forces in my life. His has been the story that has defined me, but it has been very difficult to tell. Perhaps it isn’t a huge part of my identity when I am not in New Orleans, but I will always be his sister.

It is strange to try and tell the story of what it is to be attached to a brother like Matthew when he is not a part of my story right now. Matthew lives at home in New Orleans, and we have lived apart for some years. There is a narrative guilt to the flavor that he gives my perspective and to the exoticized metaphorical interpretation of how I think his brain works. Am I using him for the story? Capitalizing on him.

The older I get, the more I see the shells of his diagnosis in us, all of us: the members of his family, but that is exactly the problem. In an attempt to tell the story of people with autism, we often end up telling the stories of the people and spaces around them. It is more digestible than the story of the person themselves, and that person becomes a logical reference for the stories that we explain away about ourselves.

It seemed Matthew never quite trusted the notion of object permanence. When things would leave his line of sight, it was never guaranteed that they would come back. He took up a role as a protector of the physical universe, placing the burden on himself to make sure that he would maintain the same routines, so as not to create a ripple in the universe such that everything would fall apart. Occasionally, he would interact with us to reassure his notion of a communal reality of our home. But sometimes, things would fall apart or be washed away. To him, it had the gravity of the actual collapse of the universe.

Matthew was the reason I studied neurobiology. His unique way of thinking was the subject of my college essay. But since making that formal leap into my understanding of his brain, I have spent less time with him. And the only way to know/help Matthew directly is to be with him.

I want to say that I have an emotional connection to Matthew, but I am not sure that is what he cares about. Being close to Matthew requires an attempt to understand how he works, and realizing that signs of what we want for validation of a mutual understanding/love may only be for us. There is a scene in the Curious Case of the Dog in the Nightime in which the protagonist, an autistic boy, runs away from his father’s house and reunites with his mother. The mom wants to hug him, but the boy does not want to be touched. It is much the same with Matthew: there is a call and response nature to the “I love you” and the ‘conversations’ that we have together as a family. He will answer, but he does so strategically. It’s kind of like wearing that Christmas sweater that you hate, but you wear it because your mom really loves it and expects it of you. You want to make her happy, but you will never care about the sweater itself. Maybe you just wear it so she stops bugging you.

Often, my parents will ask Matthew what he did at school. The social conventions of chatter are hard to break, even when you have raised a largely non-verbal boy for 21 years. Sometimes he will fabricate stories based on one word answers:

“Matthew how was school?”
“Great day.”

“What did you do today?”
“Dog treats”
“What did you have for lunch”
“Wrap”

Or sometimes there will be hints of clues

“What did you do at school today?”
“Pig”
“What color was the pig?”
“Purple.”

There is a certain roulette to the conversations that Matthew will have. As his vocabulary expands. He plays trial and error.

The other day, I was talking to my dad, and he was going to take my brother to the zoo. I asked my dad what Matthew’s favorite animal was, and my dad said that he really liked the flamingos.

The favorite animal of the moment was decidedly the flamingo. Matthew was on speaker.

I asked him what color flamingos were and he said “blue.”

there is a certain performance to the way that we interact with Matthew for each other. This made us laugh. My father responded, “NOOOOOO. What color are flamingos?” changing his intonation to convey the ridiculousness of the answer. Like a pantomime.

And then Matthew corrected himself. “Pink.” However, he is 21 year old boy. Of course it is ridiculous that we asked him what color a flamingo was, but he indulged us, and we asked the question because we knew it was one that he could and would verbally answer—to give us a proxy of connection.

He has given our family a unique lexicon of his responses. I read Family Lexicon by _____, which talks about a similar thing. This internal language/catch phrases carve neural grooves of familiarity. It is an in group-out group thing. The life and history we have is broken by trauma that is linked to a place.

There is a closeness to my family which does not involve Matthew directly but which is built around him. My mother, my father, and I talk nearly every day. Because our laws of physics were quite different.

When we all lived in the house together, we all were under this unspoken oath that we operated according to slightly different laws of physics than everyone else. Restaurants, vacations, schools, everything that is a struggle for most families was amplified by a thousand because of Matthew. Having people over always required a story, an explanation, for a while, an apology.

It was a little while after I graduated from high school, and I was back in New Orleans for a winter break, so I was hanging out a lot with some of the people that I grew up with and staying at my parent’s house. My old friends and I would go out to bars quite near mine, and I would offer my parent’s house as a place to stay when we would inevitably come home late and drunk, but I noticed that one of my friends, for whatever reason, didn’t want to stay at my house.

I asked my other friend Ruthie why she didn’t want to say. Ruthie, one of my oldest, best friends, took a sharp breath in, and she said, “Brooke, don’t take this the wrong way…” I looked at her. “What? Just say it.” She continued, “But waking up at your house can be a bit…,” she paused again, “awkward.”

She didn’t say it was because of Matthew. But that is what was implied.

It was weird to go to college out of state and to only have to think about myself.

It’s often weird to think of my parents as people before they were parents—as fun and lighthearted. They are still fun and lighthearted, but there is a guilty sadness to think of what their lives could have been. What worries they wouldn’t have had. Who they would have been.

All of us agree that we would probably suck a lot more if Matthew wasn’t the way he was.

And too, to imagine who and what Matthew would have been. Shimmers of ‘normalcy.’

Would he have been gay? Would he have liked sports? Would he have been a trouble maker?

There is a kindness to Matthew—a self awareness that seems like him and not his autism.

How much is him. And how much is autism.

Does that distinction matter? How much of that autism is Matthew’s autism.

How useful is it to know that story if his case is entirely unique? But then again, if we use diagnosis and categorization to developmental disorders do they become that anyway?

This is the story of a person. Not of autism.

The relationship my parents want me to have with Matthew verses the ones that we actually have. Even today, whenever Matthew is in the car,

Matthew has stores of information in certain people who he trusts. The conversations do not age, though they do shift from time to time.

New information is rarely generated in a conversation with Matthew.

I used to use books as props in a sense as well.

My story of Matthew is biased because I experience I through my own eyes, and I see him as a reflection of myself and as a standard of measurement against which I measure my family. Our stories will also inevitably merge once more.

How glamorous it can be to live as a sister of someone who is severely autistic, but to not have to have the constant burden of what happens when things go wrong.

Matthew is 21 today—he is four years younger than me, but he towers above everyone.

He and my father probably have the most interesting relationship in our family.

I can’t claim to know is internal world, but I can just offer an understanding of it.

The life and history we have is broken by trauma that is linked to a place.

Screaming/crying in the middle of the night. Locks on the doors. Guilt.

A certain pageantry to introducing Matthew to someone for the first time.

One of us had to be at home at all times because Matthew could not be left alone.

Proximal loneliness. Parallel, and so close but not intersecting.

But then there is so much love.

The tandem bike, which is SO embarrassing. The squishy helmet Matthew used to have to wear in the car when he was little because he would bang his head against the seats too often.