It was absolutely splendid! Apart from the insects, and they were mostly easy enough to avoid.
I figured there wouldn't be much reading/writing, but I did a bit, including a short (very short) Pros story for the BistoCon zine.
And the cottage owners had left a spectacular basket of books that were a huge cut above the usual crappy paperbacks one usually finds the cabins of northern Ontario. I dug into the first two hundred pages of a book I'd been wanting to read for ages:Far From the Tree. It's a massive book about parents who have children with what he calls "horizontal identities," which is to say conditions or identities that are different from their own. I got through the chapters on parents with deaf children and dwarf children, and they're brilliant. The writer, who is a psychiatry lecturer with his own horizontal identities (he has dyslexia, which his parents were sympathetic in dealing with, and gay, which they weren't), doesn't pathologize the children or parents at all, does very sympathetic interviews with everyone involved, and is compassionate in looking at the various choices that parents and children can make in choosing to navigate their identities and the world that is frequently not very sympathetic to them. The historical overview of the development of sign language and how its acceptance in the greater world ebbs and flows was fascinating. Okay, that was longer than I'd planned, but I really, really liked it and think you might, too!
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Date: 2016-07-21 03:08 pm (UTC)I figured there wouldn't be much reading/writing, but I did a bit, including a short (very short) Pros story for the BistoCon zine.
And the cottage owners had left a spectacular basket of books that were a huge cut above the usual crappy paperbacks one usually finds the cabins of northern Ontario. I dug into the first two hundred pages of a book I'd been wanting to read for ages:Far From the Tree. It's a massive book about parents who have children with what he calls "horizontal identities," which is to say conditions or identities that are different from their own. I got through the chapters on parents with deaf children and dwarf children, and they're brilliant. The writer, who is a psychiatry lecturer with his own horizontal identities (he has dyslexia, which his parents were sympathetic in dealing with, and gay, which they weren't), doesn't pathologize the children or parents at all, does very sympathetic interviews with everyone involved, and is compassionate in looking at the various choices that parents and children can make in choosing to navigate their identities and the world that is frequently not very sympathetic to them. The historical overview of the development of sign language and how its acceptance in the greater world ebbs and flows was fascinating. Okay, that was longer than I'd planned, but I really, really liked it and think you might, too!