Enmeshing Selves, Words, and Media, or Two Life Writers in One Family Talk about Art and Disability

Two life writers in the same family—one neurotypical, one autistic—converse about the mountain of material they've produced: poems, memoir, essays, scholarship, and documentary films. Preferring to conceive of their work as interdependent and enmeshed, not bound by the strictures of identity politics and thus separate or conflicting, they advance a neurocosmopolitan and rhizomatous understanding of the self in words. David James ("DJ") Savarese is an artful activist, writer, teacher, and Co-Chair of The Alliance for Citizen-Directed Supports, where he directs The Lives in Progress Collective. An OSF Human Rights Initiative Youth Fellow (2017–2019) and co-producer, narrator, and star of the Peabody Award-winning documentary Deej: Inclusion Shouldn't Be a Lottery , he publishes poems, creative nonfiction, and scholarly essays. Ralph James Savarese has authored seven books and co-edited four collections, including the first on neurodiversity. He has received awards from the Herman Melville Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation, which funded a neurohumanities fellowship at Duke University's Institute for Brain Sciences.