Enmeshing Selves, Words and Media, or Two Life Writers in One Family Talk about Art and Disability: (An Essay in English / Esej w języku angielskim)

David James Savarese; Ralph James Savarese

doi:10.31261/errgo.11693

Published: 2021-12-30

No. 43 (2021)

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

David James Savarese

, Ralph James Savarese

Website: http://www.ralphsavarese.com/

Section: Biographers on Biography - American Perspectives

https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.11693

(An Essay in English / Esej w języku angielskim)

Abstract

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 film. 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. An OSF Human Rights Initiative Youth Fellow (2017-19) 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 five books and co-edited three 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. He teaches at Grinnell College.

Keywords:

life writing , disability , neurocosmopolitanism , narrative ecology , collaboration , documentary , textocentrism

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Savarese, D. J., & Savarese, R. J. (2021). Enmeshing Selves, Words and Media, or Two Life Writers in One Family Talk about Art and Disability: (An Essay in English / Esej w języku angielskim). Er(r)go. Theory - Literature - Culture, (43), 111–129. https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.11693

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References

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David James Savarese

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9546-1170

Affiliation:

Independent Scholar and Writer United States

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

D.J. Savarese is a public speaker, writer, and activist who works to make literacy-based education, communication, and inclusive lives a reality for all nontraditionally speaking people through artful advocacy, teaching, and community organizing. A 2017–19 OSF Human Rights Initiative Youth Fellow alum, he is also the co-producer of the Peabody award-winning, Emmy-nominated documentary Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t be a Lottery, which unearths discrepancies between insider and outsider perspectives of his lived experience as an alternatively-communicating autistic person. D.J. is the author of the chapbook A Doorknob for the Eye and has published poems and prose in The Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Prospect, Bellingham Review, Nine Mile Magazine, Autism in Adulthood, Stone Canoe, and wordgathering.com. “Passive Plants,” a lyric essay published in The Iowa Review, was named a notable essay in the 2018 Best American Essays. Before moving to Iowa City, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Oberlin College in May 2017 with a double major in Anthropology and Creative Writing. (Source: Artful Advocate)

Ralph James Savarese

savarese@grinnell.edu

Affiliation:

Grinnell College United States

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Professor Savarese has been on the faculty at Grinnell for 20 years. He is the author of two books of prose, Reasonable People (memoir) and See It Feelingly (ethnographical literary criticism), and three books of poetry, Republican Fathers, When This Is Over: Pandemic Poems, and Someone Falls Overboard. The third, written with Stephen Kuusisto, is due out in 2021 and is modeled on Marvin Bell’s and William Stafford’s co-authored book, Segues: A Correspondence in Poetry. A chapbook of Ekphrastic poetry, with paintings by Tilly Woodward, will appear in June in Hole in the Head Review. He’s currently working on a fourth book of poetry called Exact Conclusion of Their Hardiness and a book on Herman Melville. With his son, he’s writing a book of letters titled Dear Dad, Dear DJ.

Professor Savarese is also the co-editor of three collections: Papa PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy; "Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity,” a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly; and "The Lyric Body,” a special issue of Seneca Review. A fourth co-edited collection, The Futures of Neurodiversity, is under contract with the Modern Language Association.

Savarese is the recipient of a number of awards: co-winner of the Irene Glascock National Undergraduate Poetry Competition (the judges were Seamus Heaney and Grinnell alum Amy Clampitt); the Hennig Cohen Prize from the Herman Melville Society for an “outstanding contribution to Melville scholarship”; an Independent Publisher’s Gold Medal for Reasonable People in the category of health/medicine/nutrition; a Mellon Foundation “Humanities Writ Large” fellowship, which supported a year-long residency at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences; two “notable essay” distinctions in the Best American Essay series; two Pushcart Prize nominations; and a National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend.

His scholarship, creative work, and opinion pieces have appeared in more than 80 journals, books, and newspapers. (Source: Grinnell College)

No. 43 (2021)
Published: 2021-12-31

ISSN: 1508-6305

eISSN: 2544-3186

10.31261/errgo

Publisher

University of Silesia Press | Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego i Wydawnictwo Naukowe "Śląsk"

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

(An Essay in English / Esej w języku angielskim)

Abstract

Keywords:

David James Savarese

Ralph James Savarese

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