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Something that I love about Anya’s work is her deep structural relationship to form and, in particular, how she sequences the unfolding of a piece of writing, much like the artist books she makes. You will see or possibly just feel that nothing gets in the way of the stories she is telling, and that she understands how to bring us close to a moment in a story, but she can also, like a Google map, expand the picture to show us its larger significance to an idea she is presenting and to our own lives. The rhythm of movement from a story to an idea, from a sentence to a paragraph, from a moment to recognition is just right and musically and structurally astute. The patience and stubbornness required to do this is remarkable. Anya has crossed whole territories of wilderness to bring you the insight that includes you. Here is a small example of the negotiations involved in that passage:
“Once again, I was confronted with the problem of explaining the book, in words, to my professor. I’d been reading Donna Williams, and I initially described it in her terms: it was about masking, and the faces you put on to the world to protect yourself from both social judgement and crippling “autistic” isolation. This would have worked well enough for her, but I agonized over the wording—or more specifically, over the word “autistic.” Though I didn’t hate the word itself, I hated saying it. More than anything I hated the image of her sitting across the table from me, measuring out a carefully sympathy.
I excerpt her essay Social Stories here so that you know you look for this skillful craft but also because you are, today, that listener sitting across the table from her.
And finally, I am going to read you two more excerpts to highlight the other thing I love about this project and Anya’s skill as an essayist and a person—her capacity to grow. What follows is another one of the ‘distances’ she crossed as she beheld with her subterranean attentive capacities that in so many ways and mediums make her our instructor. This is a superpower.
From Numbers where her journey begins:
At eighteen years old, I was determined to figure out what was “wrong” with me, and I strongly suspected the numbers in that filing cabinet would be the key to it. I pulled out
every folder, combed through every word on every page. At first, the charts and their visual aids were wildly disconcerting. There was my childhood self, meticulously
dissected and arranged into bullet points like dead butterflies on a pinboard. Everything I’d learned to hate about myself, from the blunt earnestness to the speech issues to the notably awkward body language, had been drained of life and stuck in a chart. I had looked to explain what was wrong with me, and the numbers delivered.
Here is where she arrives after years of labor and striving to name:
I didn’t see the parallel need to make sense of the world (on the part of the doctors) until I realized what they had shared in those stapled files and story books not a set of facts or
arbitrary standards, but the practice of figuring things out by putting them in a physical
form. I had to live with their cold, clinical forms—remake them, find the rhythm in them—to learn that I loved them after all.
Above all, Anya is an explorer on the order of Lewis and Clark. She travels vast territories and beholds, keeps her field notes, and attends until she sees, and then comes back to include us in her understanding.
One of the first books I remember was my favorite, a thick red book with a shiny cover and big white embossed letters: The Big Book Of Knowledge. I was three years old, and like every bad stereotype of an autistic kid, I would make my mother read the encyclopedia to me as a bedtime story. She’d pick a section, whether natural history or technology or ancient cultures, and read a page or two every night. I imagine I learned everything I knew at the time from either hearing or reading from that book, and all but memorizing my favorite sections. I don’t remember a single thing I read now. What I do remember is the musty plastic smell of the paper, and the glossy pages that squeaked between my fingers, and the clean modernist architecture of double-columned spreads with content boxes and bold colored illustrations. It was comforting in the way a well-designed concrete building is comforting; you could live there, sit down, wander around its rooms, and have faith it wouldn’t come crashing down on your head.
I grew up hearing stories of myself, like many people grow up hearing their family histories, stories of relatives who lived long before their time. She would tell me the story of how I wouldn’t talk, and how I would drag people around by the finger to physically point them at what I wanted. She loved it, she would say when she told me the story in my adulthood. I was a “colicky baby” who would only stop screaming when swaddled up so tight I almost lost circulation, or when I was being thoroughly rocked. When my mom wasn’t carrying me in a sling doing laps around the house, she and my dad and I would be in the car, driving around for hours. I liked feeling the ground thump by under the tires. There was a whole laundry list of things that would appear on patient intake forms later on: the anxiety, the rituals, the meltdowns. I couldn’t watch people eat without gagging. I’d line up all my toys on my bed before I could sleep. I could do children’s puzzles in seconds, but couldn’t figure out how to string words together (my talkative baby brother could speak more clearly than I did at that point). My parents were only in their mid-twenties by that point, and neither of them was experienced enough to have any concept of normal childhood development. It wasn’t until I was three years old that my grandmother started to express concerns about me. Then came the panic, and the medical forms, and the speech therapies and psychological evaluations. I don’t remember any of it. As far as my memories of the time were concerned, the doctors and psychologists were as much fixtures of my life then as the view out my bedroom window.
My mother taught me to read at around the same time I started therapy. I had figured it out on my own, sounding out words by the time I was two years old, so she decided to teach me the rules early on so I would have a better understanding of how words work. The “Reading Lesson” book was red too, spine thicker than the width of my hand but surprisingly light for its bulk. I could carry it easily. The paper was thin greyish newsprint and felt more like paper than any other book I had. The rules printed smudgily in block letters on the newsprint taught me the mechanics of language, one lesson at a time, as my mother and I sat on the staircase in our dining room together. Before long I could read the stacks of children’s books in my room, and within a year the glossy encyclopedia I loved to look at as my mom read. I still couldn’t talk in full sentences.
It didn’t take long for my speech therapist to figure out that books were the easiest way to get to me. She was blonde with a gentle even voice and wore a grey skirt suit. She would give me social stories, little booklets that scripted situations I would find myself in, and then have me help her put them together. The hope was that, as I dutifully colored and stapled the pages together, I would absorb their rules for social interaction and learn how to structure my actions properly. She taught my mother how to make them too for the days I wasn’t in school. But instead of using the generic ones printed off by the therapist, my mother would write her own. She drew illustrations of a character from my favorite TV show in Magic markers on fibery colored construction paper, showing her cleaning up and talking at school and playing with friends. I loved those books, and she loved making them.
It made me want to make my own. At first I’d fold my own little booklets from paper, and before long I figured out how to sew pages together with thread and yarn. I’d tear off huge rows of sheets from our big box of dot matrix printer paper in the basement, and tie the pages together through the holes. I was obsessed with ancient history and mythology at that point, so I’d fill up books with stories I found and hieroglyph alphabet codes. My immediate reaction to learning something new was to make a book to put it in. After a year of this my room was swamped with boxes full of papers and drawings and booklets; my parents had to smuggle stacks of them to the attic without me noticing, or before long the floor wouldn’t have been visible.
My second little sibling was born, three years after my mother pulled me out of the school system and the stark white world of psychology to homeschool me. They were born into fluorescents and doctors’ offices too; they had a round of corrective surgery weeks after they were born. To this day they can’t look at needles. They grew up like I was now growing up, like nothing had ever happened. It was the five of us in our old little duplex (my parents rented out half the house), fidgeting at our desks in the unfinished basement day after day, or jumping on the musty floral couch in the white living room, venturing out once a week in a well-choreographed appearance for church. And rarely else. My parents were homebodies by nature, let alone after the ordeal of diagnoses and the sheer, crushing realization that the outside world of parenting and sociability would never relate to them (and least of all to me.) We stayed at home.
My little sibling was perfectly normal according to my parents, as normal as me and as normal as my mother and as normal as my father and grandfather. It was an informed sense of normality at this point, after eight years: a normality that knew where we stood. They would get obsessed with things, even as young as two years old. My obsessions tended to be with systems and stories, ranging from the human body to Egyptian history to world religions to writing systems. Theirs were with objects, and categorization. First it was candles; they were fascinated with the flames, and the smells, and the wax that scraped off under their fingernails. This was something I could work with. I made them a candle book, a little encyclopedia of every candle type and shape in the house, one color illustration on each page: tapered candles, Yankee candles, birthday candles, electric candles, held together with copious amounts of Scotch tape. They liked it to the extent that any two-year-old loves a book; candles were their obsession, not books.
It’s hard to say what happened. It’s not that I stopped, particularly. I’d never really noticed what I was doing, in an un-self-consciousness normal to childhood that was only compounded by my complete obliviousness to the outside world. All I know is that by the time I was in middle school I was reading words more than books. I had discovered the escapism of reading, an escapism that makes your fingers blind to the paper. It’s a whole different thing, letting the words flash by like film as your mind projects a story through them. In school, I learned about writing and structure, and loving words for their sounds and meanings. You weren’t meant to trip over them. It was a craft and an ideal. I wrote essays like buildings, laying sentences like bricks and bracing them through with arguments and counter-arguments. At that point I could talk (and talked a lot), but I couldn’t speak and have emotions at the same time. My brain would lose verbal coordination the second I opened my mouth, and sentences would jumble and skip as they left my tongue. Writing worked out well for me.
The first story I remember falling head-over-heels in love with, like an adult falls in love after years of childhood crushes, was The Book Thief. The writing did what the physical world didn’t do for me anymore, as a teenager with brutally newfound social awareness and neck deep in depression. The main character, Liesel, had a story like mine, but with the parts swapped around a bit: she could speak but not read when she arrived at her foster home. But she was always obsessed with books, charting out her relationship to her world through the physical copies she steals from various places. Within the first thirty pages of the novel, she stole a book from a grave-digger at her brother’s funeral. It became her obsession: a stark black book, thin, with embossed silver letters on the cover. She didn’t rest until she was able to read it cover to cover. Her determination was the only way her foster parents could connect to her; the foster father taught her to read by having her spell words on their basement walls. “Trust me, though,” the narrator of the book assured,” the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain.” It’s ironic in this context that out of all my favorite books, The Book Thief is the only one where I can’t remember the first physical copy I read.
Not much happened for several years after that. I loved my stories without feeling them in my hands. I dragged myself out of depression, then back in, then back out again. I learned to be social, learned to perform, learned to make small talk and joke and smile with my eyes. I graduated high school. I took a drawing class and decided I liked drawing. I shipped off to the tiny college my parents graduated from, the one I swore I’d never attend because it was the tiny college my parents graduated from. I declared an English literature major, then switched to graphic design three weeks before move-in.
The first book of my college career was undramatic. It was a typography class, and for our final we had to go out and find 2,000 words, then design a book spread with them. I decided to make an anthology, and designed twenty wildly different spreads held together with color and type font. It taught me how to see words again. You would fail if you got hung up on reading them; words became shapes, and text blocks became structures with internal bracing and weight and mass. I floundered. I could get the text and the images together, but I couldn’t wrap my head around how they related and interacted with each other. They were floating shapes on a page until, in the moment that irrevocably condemned me to being a sculptor, the nerdy Italian design professor told me to think of the text blocks as fenceposts. It’s hard to even imagine in retrospect how else I would’ve conceptualized it. But in that split second, those spreads opened up into space, and the text blocks became things so physical I could stub my toe on them. I’ve always had a strong sense of what some people would call Feng Shui, and suddenly the pages became rooms, and I could understand design by climbing around in it. I could run my eyes along them and feel their weight in my hands and feet and back. It became immediately obvious where certain ones had so many things stacked up the page was buckling. My professor was a bit startled by the turnaround in my book’s quality over the span of that week. He gave it an A.
Twelve years after I thought I’d seen the last of psychologists, I found myself sitting in a plastic chair blandly watched, once again, by a woman with a clipboard sitting across the room. I was there by choice this time; my intro to psychology class had an assignment, buried in the middle of the syllabus, where each student was required to participate in a psychological study conducted by the campus psychology department. I’d forgotten about it. Three weeks before finals, I ended up frantically emailing my professor, begging for some kind of mercy because I could only participate in one study on such short notice, instead of the two required. (I ended up only getting partial credit).
The study was on cortisol, the stress hormone; the researchers put hapless freshman volunteers through a variety of stressful scenarios, like pretend school application interviews. The interview had worked perfectly for their purposes, as three minutes in I had a panic attack and shut down entirely. I sat rigidly in the chair, white-knuckling the metal seat, jaw clenched as the researcher gently prodded me with talking points. Afterwards she told me the test was intentionally manufactured so the subject would fail. I like to think the cortisol in my saliva sample single-handedly carried their project.
For this test, I had to count. “You have three minutes,” said the researcher as she took her place in a chair opposite mine: “count as high as you can in increments of thirteen. So thirteen, twenty-six, thirty-nine, and so on.” Easy enough. All through my childhood I’d been the dorky kid who would do math for fun outside of class; I could handle counting. “Thirteen, twenty-six, thirty-nine, fifty-two, sixty-five…” I closed my eyes, let the muscles in my shoulders and back and hands relax one by one. The room and its yellowish fluorescent lights were gone by one hundred and sixty-nine, as were the psychologist and her clipboard and the buzzing anxiety hammering at my ears. It could’ve been any psychologist with any clipboard at that point (“two hundred twenty-one, two hundred thirty-four“), all cold and loving in their professional way, always prodding with their puzzles and questions that meant something significant behind their paperwork and neutral faces. I’d forgotten there was a clipboard, or any significance to the numbers they bandied around with my concerned parents. I was three years old again and I liked puzzles.
I’ve always liked numbers; I find them soothing. Consciously or not, I’ve found myself organizing my perception and movements through numbers for most of my life. Like any stereotypical autistic kid, I would count my footsteps and organize everything on my shelves in groups of three or five. I was good at math because I enjoyed untangling the relationships between numbers. Algebra was a game of balance with its comforting structures of x’s and y’s; restoring equilibrium to the equations was deeply satisfying. I was similarly charmed by calculus later on, with the scaffolded formulas you could climb up and down as you charted the movements in complicated graphs. Numbers weren’t always science-oriented and “dry,” though. I also played the piano, and I was taught early on that music was embodied math. The structures of numbers translated into complicated rhythms and harmonies that aligned well with how I experienced numerical relationships. I imagine medical literature would be much more interesting if researchers realized that when neurodivergent kids become “obsessed” with numerical rituals, it feels more like music than anything else.
Once I got to college, not surprisingly, most of my work ended up being thoroughly geometric. In graphic design, I loved organizing text boxes and shapes according to increasingly complicated grid systems, in the same way I would group my toys in neat rows as a kid. This translated extremely well into bookmaking, which added in the external structure of rectangular pages organized in a clean, standardized grid system. It took a year of trial and error to realize that I was more interested in the book structure itself than anything that could possibly “go in” it. The books became about the number of pages, and their precise dimensions, and the ways they sequenced and unfolded, until I was once again lining up materials in tidy rows on my studio floor.
This wasn’t the only place I was rediscovering numbers as an adult. In the filing cabinet in my basement, third drawer down, is a thick stack of dozens of papers, stapled together in various arrangements, each splashed with a different child psychologist’s logo. They contain the first four years of my life in a meticulous documentation of every one of my mannerisms and psychological quirks. There are forms my mother filled out like essay questions in an exam, but the bulk of the stack is evenly split between number charts and guides explaining the number charts. There are IQ assessments, and verbal assessments, and social assessments, all laid out in neat bullet points and sliding scales and percentiles. These numbers are like thin glass test tubes with bits and pieces of my childhood personality carefully metered out into them.
At eighteen years old, I was determined to figure out what was “wrong” with me, and I strongly suspected the numbers in that filing cabinet would be the key to it. I pulled out every folder, combed through every word on every page. At first, the charts and their visual aids were wildly disconcerting. There was my childhood self, meticulously dissected and arranged into bullet points like dead butterflies on a pinboard. Everything I’d learned to hate about myself, from the blunt earnestness to the speech issues to the notably awkward body language, had been drained of life and stuck in a chart. I had looked to explain what was wrong with me, and the numbers delivered. It felt sadistic.
I wondered about the people who had arranged my childhood so precisely by their numbers. The psychologists were nothing if not thorough; the speech assessments went down a list of increasingly complex sentence structures, ranking the use of nouns, then verbs, then pronouns, then abstract meaning, then social reciprocity. They teased out every possible facet of my cognitive functioning, from numerical intelligence to spacial intelligence to verbal intelligence. They divvied up my body language into neatly labeled categories of hyperactivity and self-stimulation and maladjustment. I wanted to imagine they loved the numbers like I did, figuring out how they related and moved in the shape of a person, but the whole thing increasingly felt like a power game. By the fifth page of blandly noted percentiles I was an equation to solve, an off-balance set of numbers that had to be fixed to their standard.
I did make my peace with the numbers, as much as anyone can. I found what was helpful in them and moved on. Slowly but surely they lost their tyranny, and became just another pattern in the numerical rhythms that already organized my life. The people were harder to forgive. They loomed in the back of my memory: a series of figures in suits and skirts, all presenting me with their various tests and puzzles to solve. Though they had only been present for the first four years of my life, now that I had figured out their puzzle I found myself swinging between fascination and resentment at their detachment. After a long time of stewing over this I reopened the filing cabinet, bracing myself for the coldness that had struck me so forcefully when I first found them. It was still there. But what I noticed for the first time was the psychologist’s handwriting, the loopiness of her cursive as she scrawled down her field observations week after week. She wrote my name with a loop on the y’s.
Recently I was showing an old teacher a book I was planning, one structured around the diagnostic numbers I was still grappling with. I had laughed about how unoriginal I was, with my grids and geometry that had become commonplace subject matter four art movements ago. “It’s the most human thing in the world, making grids for things,” she replied. “I mean—” She pointed down at the cutting mat on my desk, gridded into little eighth-inch squares scuffed up from my Exacto knife. Then my calendar, gridded into tidy rows interspersed with my handwriting. People had made those categories—from calendars to rulers to the diagnostic criteria in my book—with their own minds and bodies, to understand both themselves and me. Being the object of such a human inspection was overwhelming, but maybe in retrospect it was strangely flattering.
Maybe the whole thing is pathological. I find the word “pathological” appropriate for the situation, an undisguised splicing of life (patho-) and abstraction (-logic) that would be charming if not for the viscerally negative judgement of the word. Just as my mother and I had made our little social story books to understand and organize my behavior, they had made their structures. They had their patterns and numbers to give their world rhythm, with all their pathology and number charts. I had my own. I didn’t see the parallel need to make sense of the world until I realized what they had shared in those stapled files and story books: not a set of facts or arbitrary standards, but the practice of figuring things out by putting them in a physical form. I had to live with their cold, clinical forms—remake them, find the rhythm in them—to learn that I could love them after all.
A lot has been written about the value of silence, so I won’t write more. But there’s a very real sense in which the world is held together by empty space. Science has said this for a while; when you reduce everything there is, down to the cellular level, down to the atomic level, down even further to their building blocks, even the most solid objects are made up of particles bound by shared forces and miles of empty space. And more recently, when scientists have tried to go down even further, they’ve found there is no substance to begin with, and everything is the potential of nothing to be something.
The thing that makes a good musician is the instinctual understanding of silence. As a kid, I never got the point of the “rests” marked in musical notation. I’d always rush through the allotted silence in a fit of impatience to get to the parts with the “actual song” (and, really, to hurry up and finish piano lessons early so I could pet the teacher’s cat). I didn’t realize, until I knew more about life, that the song is what’s draped on the silence like clothes on a line. There is no song without the empty space that gives it some kind of shape.
I really didn’t play the piano very well until I learned this in another form, in drawing class. Their name for this silence is negative space. Basically, any object you’re focusing on depicting in that moment is the positive space, and the negative space is everything not contained by it. When you define the positive and negative space well enough, the different shapes on your paper click together like puzzle pieces. In other words, everything is defined primarily by what it excludes. I’ve always thought this was a rather depressing view of things.
When you flatten out the space between things, you paradoxically end up driving them further apart. The lines that define them become razor sharp and emphasize even the most subtle distinctions between objects. Nowhere is this more obvious than with human beings, especially when the categories used to sort people become an issue of “normal” versus “wrong.” In that case, those who don’t fit the category of “normal” for whatever reason are defined by their exclusion from that category and, by extension, from humanity. When every person you meet, or read about, or see on TV acts nothing like you, and thinks nothing like you, and feels nothing like you, you can feel the negative space of the whole world closing in around you, flooding your lungs, crushing your body. My solution to this dilemma, as a kid, was simply to become everyone. I’d copy them and mirror their movements, and make sure not to have any stories or words that I hadn’t already heard from them. Selfhood was the rests in the song I’d rush through to get to the actual music. Of course, though, if you encompass everyone you meet, there’s no “you” to be with them, or “them” to be with you. It falls apart pretty quickly, and you’re left even more alone with no way of understanding what happened.
In the drawing class that taught me to play the piano, the teacher started off with that understanding of negative space. However, she didn’t stick with the flattened “puzzle piece” view of space beyond the first two weeks. Instead, she’d have us draw not just outlines, but the angles, and relative sizes, and distances between things. She’d have us work it out straight on the paper, until the blank page was crisscrossed with light lines connecting every object to itself and everything else. Those lines built up the space like a scaffold and laced together those forms that would otherwise have been sharp, flat, and heartbreakingly separate.
And just like that, the art of negative space was opened up to me in a charcoal-smudged paradigm shift. It took dozens of bad drawings to figure out how to drape physicality on this negative space, let alone music and personality. But after a while I couldn’t unsee those lines that had once been exclusions, until the empty space I walked through seemed to be crisscrossed with thick cobwebs of relationality. There’s a home in that negative space after all.
The first time I told any of these stories was in a book. It was a blind book, one structured like a Venetian blind with its book-page slats strung together on a pull-cord that could either hang from the ceiling, or retract the book and tie it closed. The “front” of the blinds, the planes that sloped together and caught the light, were collaged with my psychologists’ field notes, interspersed by geometric number charts and logos—all very new to me at that point. The underside was blue paper with rows of my own handwriting in tiny but heavy graphite letters, a narration of me watching them watching me. Any way the viewer stood around the book as it hung, they could see either their descriptions of me, or my descriptions of them. Never both. But they bled into each other: my name in their reports was censored out in bars of blue paper. And the blue paper on the underside was textured with subtle layers of the front’s warm tones, highlighting my handwriting.
That was the first time I told the story well. The first time I told the book’s story, out loud, in words, was to my professor as I tried to explain what the book would be doing before I got started making it. We met for our independent study in a big room with huge windows and floor-to-ceiling Venetian blinds. I fumbled the words as she turned my scale model around in her hands: “I had a lot of doctors as a kid….” I don’t remember what I actually said as I watched the little gold sailor buttons on her navy-blue blazer and the rings on her fingers (one had flat bands that locked together like puzzle pieces), but I remember it was as little as I could get away with for a basic understanding. She spread the book out flat on the table and looked up with interest. “Tell me more.”
I tried again. I didn’t have any of my words for it yet, no analogies or theories or frames of reference. It’s hard to tell a story without anything but facts. I told her that I didn’t remember much, but I did remember a lady in a suit who came to my preschool, and the pink-and-blue laminate book she gave me, and what I guessed they were trying to do. “I felt kind of like a zoo animal,” I concluded. She said something classically pleasant; it was only a month into the class, and we hadn’t sounded each other out yet. The “sounding” only properly started when I handed her the finished book. She unwound the draw string, then laid it on the table, flipping it over and over, then held it up by the cover to see how it hung. I watched her face through the slats as she read what I wrote on the underside. “It made me sad,” she said.
This was my first independent study; I’d known her for a year at this point. I knew I loved her five minutes into our first ceramics class when she stood up at the board and, upon losing track of her sentence, waved her hands around the exact way I do when the words trip over my tongue. Some people liked her, some people didn’t. She was infamous for her whimsically sardonic humor. Once in ceramics class, the lid on a classmate’s jar (which looked unfortunately like a funerary urn) stuck shut after a glaze firing. When they asked for advice she’d replied “don’t worry, you can just say it’s your dead uncle.” She would make her way around class, giving advice in her pleasantly blunt voice, popping up on her toes when she was excited, kicking her feet when she sat still for too long, occasionally making finger-guns at students she liked. I’d sit in class and watch her almost compulsively, scared she would disappear.
I proposed the study after a short intensive class on “paper processes,” which encompassed traditional papermaking techniques and, for the last two weeks, a crash course on bookmaking. The class met every weekday, from eight in the morning to noon, and we groggily stitched our books as she struggled to stay awake and talked about bookmaking as an art form. Our final project was to write a definition of what a book is, then to make a book that pushed that definition. My project was thoroughly mediocre, as I had pulled an all-nighter, while sick with a cold, to finish it by the eight o’clock due date. My definition was based on sequence, and the spatial organization of information, and my book was a large wood box with windows screened by vellum. There were various autobiographical elements scattered throughout as you opened the box, then navigated the smaller boxes and drawers attached to a bear trap inside. It didn’t work very well, but my professor was intrigued. “I got one hour of sleep so I can’t psychologize it too far,” I told the class. “It’s okay,” she said, “That’s our job.”
I begged for an independent study afterwards. My love for bookmaking took me by surprise; I’d gone into my major expecting to be a draftsperson, then a graphic designer, then a traditional sculptor. She didn’t seem as surprised as me. I cornered her, for the third time, about the independent study after sewing class one afternoon. We had gone over dress measurements that day, and I’d sat stiffly on the table as she wrapped the tape measure around my wrist and bust and waist, taking down the numbers on a neat little chart (I was deemed “very symmetrical”). She smiled more to herself than to me when I handed her my request form.
We sat exactly six feet apart, at opposite ends of two plastic tables shoved together the first few weeks of the study. I made a little practice sketchbook first. I would slide my half-sewn progress across the table, and she would shout her comments so we could hear each other through the masks and the distance. Class lasted about twenty minutes. She said we could chat if we ended too early, but we unfortunately had the same conversational strategy of mirroring the person we were talking to. We watched each other like chess players waiting for an opening to move as she offered the occasional small talk question. She apologized a lot. After a while we mutually agreed that we trusted each other with COVID precautions, and I scooted my chair to her side of the table. Class started lasting half an hour.
We settled into a rhythm, a sort of call and response. I would spend three weeks on a book: drafts, then a progress update, then a final critique. The class after the critique, she would hand me a sheet of printer paper folded in half, with a letter grade and short paragraph of typed commentary. In the meantime, we’d talk. She was one of the first people I’d ever wanted to tell about myself—not about the assorted tragic backstories or bland autobiographical details, but about the things I loved. Occasionally I loosened up enough to say what I was thinking as I thought it. I’d trail off on tangents about ideas, and pictures, and artists I liked, and how these different things worked together. She told me once I should write it all down, and I didn’t. A month in, she lent me one of the books from the bowed bookshelves in her office: a compilation of 500 Handmade Books (Volume Two). I combed through it page by page and returned it the next week with a fan of blue post-it notes sticking out from the margins. “Can you show me?” she bemusedly asked, and we camped out for our allotted half hour, shoulder to shoulder, flutter kicking our feet under the table as I cheerfully explained every bookmark.
I made another book about myself. Previously when I made a book, the concept and materials determined the specific form it would take. This time I came up with the form first: it was a Jacob’s ladder with hollowed-out pages like window frames, so the ribbons were visible from the inside as they strung the pages together. I’d always wondered how Jacob’s ladder toys worked as a kid, and I enjoyed being able to see the delicate mechanics of the ribbons as they threaded through the moving pages. The content didn’t come until I watched my professor play with my maquette. She scooped it up and, instead of letting it drop and unfold, immediately propped it up on its side with its pages fanning out. It became an architectural structure, “like a bridge” she said, and the same ribbons that had made it move now suspended each page in a geometric web.
I decided to run with the architectural associations. I coated the wall-like pages with gypsum-based spackle, and scrubbed down the plaster with graphite and faded writing and makeup the color of my skin. The ribbons became lace that facilitated the book’s movement when unfolded, and kept it in a carefully balanced architecture when displayed. The part that made my professor jump when I first showed her was the glass shards, one suspended in each window by the lace that kept them from touching both the plaster and each other. When the Jacob’s ladder unfolded, the soft thwump of the plaster pages (padded by the layers of lace) harmonized with the tinkling of the glass as it shifted.
Once again, I was confronted with the problem of explaining the book, in words, to my professor. I’d been reading Donna Williams, and I initially described it in her terms: it was about masking, and the faces you put on to the world to protect yourself from both social judgement and crippling “autistic” isolation. This would have worked well enough for her, but I agonized over the wording—or more specifically, over the word “autistic.” Though I didn’t hate the word itself, I hated saying it. More than anything I hated the image of her sitting across the table from me, measuring out a carefully sympathy.
I settled with bland academic terms: it was about the performance of womanhood, and how performance works when one’s personality is ill-suited for it. It was the kind of thing talked about a lot in the art world, so much that it hardly meant anything anymore, but I knew it had similar experiential backing for the both of us. I had seen the way she moved, and I could see where the specific discomfort I titled “performance of womanhood” chafed like a badly fitted dress. She hadn’t been expecting that, she said when I finished my speech. She held it up and let it cascade like a Jacob’s ladder, then she stacked it up and flipped through it as a book, and finally fanned it out into the webbed architecture. “The lace is keeping the glass together with each page, but it’s separating everything too.” She read my own logic back to me. “You can see your face in the broken glass.”
The Big Book of Knowledge, John Fardon
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
Nobody Nowhere, Donna Williams
500 Handmade Books Volume 2, Julie Chen
“Anybody Anywhere” (2020), Anya Benninger
“doubleblind” (2020), Anya Benninger
“Lost & Found” (2018), Anya Benninger
“Patho/logic” (2022), Anya Benninger
anya benninger 