The AutSide Podcast

I supply the life; others claim the authority to explain it. Across womanhood, autism, language, and queerness, I carry the work of correction—and ask what future my children inherit when who we are is treated as up for debate. I supply the life; someone else is granted the authority to explain it. This Sunday morning, I am thinking about how often that relationship returns across my life—my body,...

I speak frankly about pain, bullying, identity, and the effort behind the words. My life existed before recognition; my needs persist when I can speak. A personal account of what has been happening behind the recent writing. I have not had many good days lately, and I wanted to speak about what has been happening before the effort of making a polished account became another thing I could not manag...

Cathy and I ask whose testimony counts as evidence. Autistic people describe the load, pain, and preparation behind observable behaviour—yet our accounts are too often dismissed before they enter the record. Today, Cathy and I returned to a question that runs beneath so much of the argument about autism and gestalt processing: what counts as evidence, and who gets to decide? I can describe what ha...

What does ‘gestalt’ mean across fields, and what evidence supports each use? This video introduces my developing paper’s floor-and-sense map. Subscribers are invited to examine the draft and help refine its distinctions. An explanation can sound settled long before the argument it explains is ready. That is one reason I generate these video explainers during research: I want to hear what happens w...

My developing paper traces over a century of ‘gestalt’ across fields, asking how its different senses can support a shared language for research and practice. Read the draft and help refine it through critical review. Sometimes I need to hear my argument returned to me before I can hear where it has become vulnerable—where a distinction I thought I had established remains exposed to another readin...

After weeks apart, Cathy and I returned to a question at the heart of my work: how does meaning become language? We followed its history across disciplines, brought it back to my classroom, and celebrated a sold-out webinar. It was good to speak with Cathy again after several weeks apart. She returned with a deceptively simple question: what is gestalt , and where does a definition begin? That gav...

Belonging is more than entering a room. In this video, I consider literacy, gestalt processing, visible strategy, and the structures that must change when every learner is fully understood as having belonged there all along. This morning, I recorded a video about belonging from the ordinary room where much of my writing happens—in my home office and library, surrounded by books, papers, old techno...

This episode is an experiment: I fed the last several months of reference tracing, the Kazakh and Soviet lineage behind gestalt language processing, into Gemini Notebook and let it generate a conversation between two AI hosts. What comes back is not a paper. It is something closer to a century of Eurasian scholarship compressed into a single breathless walk-and-talk, and it holds up far better tha...

At the end of two converging series, the question changes: meaning does not overflow into language. Safety, stability, access, and meaning time allow a superpositional field to resolve. The word is only the trace. This is the epilogue to What Has to Happen for Meaning to Become Language? —and it arrives as the simultaneous series on Sensual Residue is also reaching into questions of field, dimensi...

Pain, questions, medical trauma, a former name, and one effortless she. What happens when a hospital demands sequential answers from an autistic gestalt processor experiencing the whole field at once? This was supposed to be another Sunday Mornings with Jaime & Cathy . Instead, I became quite ill, missed the timing for our conversation, and spent part of the week moving through urgent care and hos...

A new school year means new students, new relationships, and a Script Garden filling with meaning. But how does any of it become usable language? I’m starting with the question between Stage 0 and Stage 1. It is the beginning of another school year, which means I am back in the Script Garden . New students on my caseload. New students in the Maths classes I support. New teachers, new classroom dyn...

What if reducing workload is not about doing less? This episode explores Quantity, Concurrency, and Content—and how real support can give unfinished information somewhere else to wait. I put yesterday’s AutSide piece into Gemini Notebook because I wanted to hear what happened when the argument was handed back to me in another form. The resulting conversation begins with the deceptively simple arit...

Cathy and I begin with workload and signal-to-noise, then arrive somewhere deeper: if meaning is already present before words are available, what conditions allow us to step out of the Script Garden with language? This week, Cathy and I began with workload—specifically, what we actually mean when we reduce it. There is a tendency in education to treat workload as quantity : fewer questions, fewer...

I do not use Gemini Notebook because I need it to think for me. I use it because too much thought remains alive at once. Essay, timeline, infographic, podcast—different doors into the same relational whole. I keep returning to Gemini Notebook because it does something I genuinely need—not because I need it to think for me, but because I need support moving through the world of words once too many...

Cathy and I ask what counts as evidence in gestalt language processing—and who gets believed. Across lived experience, families, clinicians, and research, perhaps the evidence was never absent. We were looking for the wrong thing. Cathy and I began this week with a question that has been following much of my recent writing: what do we actually mean when we say evidence? Not simply whether evidence...

A new school year has left me tending new script gardens. Grammar does not make language context-free. What looks like fluent independence may rest upon scripts, routines, relationships, and a field built first. Going back to school this year has made something visible to me that competence usually hides. My Learning Centre is gone. I no longer have that stable place where relationships, routines,...

The first days of school build more than routines. They build the relational field that determines who feels safe, what meaning can accumulate, whether an IEP can travel, and what students and teachers can access. This week’s Sunday Mornings with Jaime & Cathy begins with something apparently mundane: my iPhone informing me that school has started because I am suddenly walking 2.8 miles a day and...

What if autistic capacity does not reside entirely inside the person? A conversation about gestalt processing, language, relationship, assessment, employment, and the conditions that make what we can do available. I have spent much of this summer following what initially appeared to be several different questions. On AutSide , The Absent Field became an inquiry into the conditions surrounding auti...

What happens when a gestalt processor loses access not to capacity, but to the conditions that make it available—and partners, clinicians, and educators interpret that fracture through frameworks unable to see it? Over the past several days I’ve been writing The Architecture of Fracture over at Sensual Residue —a series that began as a deeply personal exploration of what it feels like when languag...

Why do so many gestalt processors struggle with paragraphs despite having ideas, words, and original sentences? The answer isn't practice alone. It lies in the architecture that allows thoughts to belong together. This week’s Sunday Mornings is a little different. Cathy is enjoying a well-earned holiday, so this morning it is just me. One of the questions I hear from parents more than almost any o...

A conversation about flat affect, language access, relational safety, and the tools that let thought cross—asking what changes when support begins not with demands for words, but with a world in which words are not required. This morning’s conversation with Cathy kept returning to one central recognition: what is often described as autistic “flat affect” may not be an absence of feeling at all, bu...

Adoption, conflicting histories, autism, queerness, and language arriving late all converged in one unexpected courtroom hearing. This is the story of how coherence finally became something the law could acknowledge. Yesterday wasn’t the beginning of my story. It was the moment nearly forty years of searching finally became coherent in the eyes of the law. What began as an adopted child trying to...

A spoken poem about living for decades at Stage 3—building a career, raising children, and carrying a whole life through one dependable word at a time—until friendship made language inhabitable. For most of my life, I lived at what Marge Blanc’s Natural Language Acquisition framework would describe as Stage 3 . That sentence is almost impossible for many people to hear because Stage 3 has become a...

A conversation with Cathy about attention, ecology, trust, routines, and the scripts adults build before language appears—asking what classrooms and clinics uphold, and whether they make a child’s own meaning fully possible. Today’s conversation with Cathy felt less like revisiting Thursday’s GLP conference presentation and more like distilling the principles that seem to sit underneath almost eve...

Looking back at Holistic Language Instruction, I don't see mistakes so much as quarter turns still waiting to happen. Every book becomes a conversation with the person who wrote it—and the person still becoming. When I began this series, I thought I was responding to a small moment of embarrassment. By the end, I found myself returning to one of my own books, Holistic Language Instruction , and re...