Autistic Reader Interview: Cinaedh Vik
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Good day! I'm Cina, an engineer whose other interests include photography, music production, painting, and writing. Married parent of two kids who also can't put down books. I live in New England in the US, but I'm originally from California and I have traveled--through work or on my own--to every state and every continent except Antarctica. Yet! My love of reading comes especially from my love of campfire stories and oral improvisation. The two novels I'm working on have a cadence to them inspired by that; they're meant to be read aloud.
Tell me a little bit about yourself. Is there anything you've written or made recently that you'd like other readers to know about? Other than what's in your bio, is there anything about your connection to autism, books, and reading that you'd like to share?
I found out I'm autistic at 26, which explained a lot about my experiences thus far. Decided on a whim to try NaNoWriMo and discovered how much I enjoyed writing stories just as well as reading them. The books I want to write are the books I want to read: featuring outsiders, communication barriers, climate consciousness, and solving things without violence. Also my big love of the sea and the unknown wonders it holds. I'd love to see a lot more books by and for autistic people being talked about, being celebrated, being promoted. We deserve to see ourselves and speak for ourselves.
What are you reading right now? What are you looking forward to reading soon?
I just finished reading The Spear Cuts Through Water, and what an incredible book that was! Author Simon Jimenez knew what he was about and delivered with full force a powerful story that defied convention, refuted prejudice, and burst with epic wonder. Totally recommend that one. What am I reading next? His first book, The Vanished Birds. Because if this was his second novel, I've got to see his first. Amitav Ghosh's book The Hungry Tide was also excellent, another recent read of mine. Powerful, poetic, and very relevant.
What are some of your favorite works of fiction? What makes them your favorites?
Oh this is so hard. But I want to answer it. Ursula K LeGuin is a hero, especially The Dispossessed, a book that examines political systems with nuance. The Left Hand of Darkness, a kind of queer awakening. The Telling, that put awe in the uncommercial, the unsellable elements of humanity. Just a reverence for story. The Word For World Is Forest, which is in every way the superior version of whatever James Cameron is attempting with Avatar. And I can't go without mentioning Earthsea. Rather than a certain other popular author's YA box set, get this one. To say it's far more inclusive is an understatement. China Mieville, especially This Census Taker, an ambitious multi-POV-but-not-exactly tale set in his Bas-Lag universe. I will never forget the image of the lizard in the bottle, too big to have gotten in as an adult. The City and The City, and all we refuse to see. N.K. Jemisen, especially The Broken Earth. Is it fantasy? Is it Sci-Fi? Does it even matter if it's this damned cool? Nnedi Okorafor, especially for Binti and all the tales of interactions with other species. Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun always has a place on my shelf. His work isn't kind to some demographics, but his mastery of prose and narrative sleight-of-hand is second to none. I'm excited to see younger authors achieving this without his biases. Ken Liu slew me with Mono No Aware, and The Dandelion Dynasty. Can't wait to see what he writes next. Rivers Solomon with An Unkindness of Ghosts. Patrick O'Brian's Master & Commander series. Borges' mind games, Proust's desserts on a lazy afternoon, Melville's brimstone and saltwater. Oscar Wilde and his prose that smirks from between the pages. Dumas of course! Philip K Dick's weird worlds. I could go on for pages more. I want to mention a couple games, too, that really left impressions on me. Subnautica, an underwater survival game that's just jaw-dropping beautiful. It was made in the wake of school shootings and so in the game you gain nothing from attacking the marine life. The object of the game is to coexist, not to conquer, and I love that. No guns, just amazing vistas on this world where you're all alone. Horizon Zero Dawn, which hits a lot of the same themes I'm writing about: climate change, technology and human ambition. Beautifully written, gorgeous to look at, and full of great characters. I love that they made sure it's not a future with just white people, too. Shadow of the Colossus, where the story is whatever you wish it to be. There is no dialogue at all. Illusion of Gaia, way way back. Overshadowed by the also-excellent Chrono-Trigger, this game took on a lot of themes that resonated deeply with me.
What are some of the characters in fiction that you find most relatable? Some autistic readers love autistic representation, and others prefer aliens, robots, or characters who they relate to in a subtler way; do you notice any patterns in the kinds of characters that resonate for you?
I love outsiders. The stranger in town. The Different One. People who do not conform to the social norms, as I don't feel that I do as an autistic man. I've grown my hair past my shoulders. The only team sport I follow is Ocean Sailing. I don't care for many of the things the people around me are interested in, so I feel the outsider is my patron character. What I love to see is when the narrative finds the outsider valuable, their differing perspective, their external knowledge and set of experiences being a useful component in resolving conflict or challenges in the book. Together. I'm asking for acceptance, but a step further, too: appreciation. Celebration. Differences make us stronger. I don't particularly resonate with machines, but I do love stories with alien life. It feels like the ultimate outsider. There was a documentary, My Octopus Teacher, I watched last year, that was amazing. They are super smart and it makes me wonder what kinds of epic stories an Octopus could dream up. I'm also face-blind, to some extent, so that's something I would like to see more of. I hardly see any autistic representation written by autistic authors in mainstream media, and even less of face-blindness. It's a cognitive map where I have a hard time remembering faces. Instead, I use other cues to identify people, which can get tricky when they change clothing or hairstyles. Especially since I work in hospitals, the face-masking has made it particularly challenging! Name tags are wonderful things.
What makes a book difficult for you to read? What, if anything, helps make books accessible to you?
I find it really hard to get into books where the prose is plain and serves only to deliver the plot. The word bandied about everywhere now: "Content". Just filling for the pie. Space to be used up. I don't like content. I want to read art. I want to be taken on a journey that I can't get in any other book than the one in front of me. Books that follow a recipe, wherein the story unfolds according to strictly-adhered-to instructions to save a cat or go in a circle or a certain number of acts or boxes. Especially the western, Iowa-style stuff. I remember in school, I had almost quit reading. The assignments didn't interest me; the stories were all about a generation I had no connection to and their emotional conflicts were in economic and social classes that meant nothing to me, or worse, were offensive in their lack of consideration for outsiders to their group. And then they assigned the Chinese classic, Journey to the West. This made waves at the school, and after parents and students wrote to complain, the school pulled it for yet another 20th century bildungsroman I hated, but not before I could devour the whole book in a weekend. The Monkey King saved reading for me. I'd suddenly been struck with the realization that you don't have to follow the tired hero journey, you could have books that do all different exciting and unexpected things. And back to the library I went, renewed with purpose. I sought books that surprised me, books with poetic prose, books that respected their reader and entered into a pact with them. I am not telling you what happened, dear reader, the book would say. I am telling you a story, which is an act you contribute to, and together we can decide what happened, if that's important to you. But the book is an act of conversation, and the joy in it is not the plot nor the conflict but the experience of having past through this place for the first, second, or fifteenth time, and seeing something new. I love unreliable narrators because as an autistic person, everyone around me seems so unreliable! Myself included. We try to communicate, we try to convey ideas but there's always an imperfectness to it. And that's part of who we all are. I love books that embrace this, that use the dialogue and the characters' body language to show reflections of ourselves. I love a book that embraces the truth that a narrative is told by someone to someone else. There's a certain meta-context to stories in knowing the story's being told. By whom? Why? To whom? And why would the author choose this form, for this story? What are they, too, trying to say?
This is why, though I nearly quit reading at age 13, now at age 38 I've written several books and surround myself and my family with more than I can count, and we all love nothing more than a great campfire story told outdoors.
This month at Everything Is True, we’re interviewing a wide variety of autistic readers with questions like these! You can find a schedule with the rest of the interviews here.