In Front of Us

I recently launched a new website, nooneisbroken.com, in support of my forthcoming memoir No One Is Broken: What a Father Learned when He Tried to Fix His Son. The memoir is my story, but I knew there was more I could say about raising a child on the spectrum and learning to see a world without broken people. Yet how exactly would that be shared I wasn’t sure. For months I delayed going live with the site because I didn’t really know what it was, nor what it would say other than that no one is broken. Then my wife and I began talking about it, and talking about it, and talking about it until she pointed out that I should, essentially, do what I always do.

Meaning, for the last six years I have been writing about writing in this space. Yet any regular reader has no doubt noticed that I rarely write about how to write, only why we write, why it is a journey worth taking, and why we must never be afraid to write what we love. Like Write Within Yourself, this space is in fact an author’s companion, not an author’s guide.

So too with nooneisbroken.com. As Author is a site for writers, No One Is Broken is a site for parents of children on the spectrum, but not a site to teach them how to parent, to tell them whether or not to use omega three oils or vitamins, whether to use drugs or meditation, but rather to help answer those persistent questions that caring for a child on the spectrum raises about the parents themselves. Questions like: Am I failure if they never talk? Have I done enough? Am I a bad person if I periodically hate them? On and on.

That I can do, I thought, because it’s all I ever do. It’s like finally finding the ending to your story. When you find it, you feel as if the ending had been sitting on your desk all along, the thing you kept pushing out of the way so you could see the screen better, until you stopped looking and finally saw.

Write Within Yourself: An Author's Companion. "A book to keep nearby whenever your writer's spirit needs feeding." Deb Caletti.

Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author! You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com