It’s here!
A little less than a year since we started, the Loud Hands Project is proud to unveil our first anthology: Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking, now available on Amazon. This is an exciting time for the Loud Hands Project, and we want to share it with you.
Over the last several months, we’ve gathered contributions from a wide variety of sources, more than we could ever afford to print. Some were sent in, unsolicited. Others were pulled from the earliest chapters of the autistic community, with authors kind enough to grant us permission to reprint. Others came from blogs, and still others were solicited from people responding to the following focus paragraph:
The anthology is structured around twin themes of simplicity and voice. Simplicity because autism, for all its diversity, isn’t complicated or scary or hard–it just is. Voice because autistic people have voices, otherwise we wouldn’t be silenced. These two concepts go hand in hand. Autistic brains are different from non-autistic brains–not better or worse, just different. Autistic voices, similarly, can take different forms or styles or express different things through different means than non-autistic voices. These facts are simple and neutral, but regularly obscured and overridden by cultural scripts and fallacies demanding broken, voiceless not-people stranded by huge chasms from the rest of the world in place of everyday autistics. Simplicity and voice are routinely sacrificed for dehumanization and spectacle. That’s not our baggage, but when it’s used to silence our voices and complicated our realities, it becomes our business. The Loud Hands Project is designed as a counter to that, and this anthology is to be our guiding, founding document.
The diversity of voices here is truly incredible. People of all ages, genders, backgrounds, and abilities responded with grace, passion, and clarity, articulating brutally honest accounts of the world as it is and shining visions of what we can make it into. We hope you’ll read it, tell your friends, and spread copies to your libraries, schools, day care centers and service providers and therapists. If you let them, the voices in this book can change the world.
You can view the table of contents here.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for contributing. Thank you for supporting us when we were just starting fundraising, thank you for building the vibrant, resilient community this book comes from, and thank you for spreading it around.
Julia Bascom
Project founder and organizer
The Loud Hands Project
Autistic Self Advocacy Network