Here I begin a series of occasional posts about my attempts to gather my thoughts, photographs and writing into a coherent narrative about my relationship with my older autistic brother and my family. Facing such a task can be overwhelming: Thoughts can be muddled, photography skills may not be up to par; even the statement of purpose can be most difficult to devise. Given all these problems, I thought that “Writing in the Dark” would be a good working title.

Writing in the dark

There was a period in my life where I would write down my dreams. I was fairly disciplined about it but there were two problems: 1) turning on a light seemed to erase any memory of my dream; 2) writing in my journal on my back, upside down would cause the ink in the pen to run away from the writing tip, thus rendering my intricate half-hour of groggy writing nothing more than pages and pages of scratches from an inkless stylus. Fortunately I solved them by: 1) writing in the dark; 2) using a pressurized pen, the same kind that astronauts use.

Book cover

Eyes are important. My first book cover, shown below, uses images of the eyes of my brothers and me. I liked the idea the rough look of brown craft paper and the distressed photographs.

“Rough” was where I was coming from.