Katie the Ceratosaurus
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Like many children, neurotypical and otherwise, I spent a lot of my early childhood obsessed with dinosaurs.
I don't remember how it started. It could have been the movie The Land Before Time. It could have been Dougal Dixon's Dinosaurs or one of the other lavishly illustrated books my parents bought for me to encourage my interests. It might have been Walt Disney's Fantasia, with its primal images of fire and transformation, hunger and disaster and death. (It definitely wasn't Jurassic Park - I was already obsessed before that movie came out.) But I think it was probably earlier than any of those. In first and second grade, I remember trying to turn every school assignment into an opportunity to write my own story about dinosaurs, complete with illustrations, which I made by drawing the same dinosaur shapes with a stencil over and over.
I'm pretty sure my parents still have at least one of my dinosaur drawings on their wall. I had decided to make new dinosaurs by mixing and matching the Greek and Latin roots of existing dinosaurs' names. Stego for roof or plate, like Stegosaurus's plates, and don for tooth made Stegodon, for instance - which I drew as a rather horrifying lizard creature with what looked like extra fractal teeth growing out of its teeth. Somewhere up on the living room wall is a large, yellowing sheet of craft paper with over a dozen of these creatures.
(My parents did not immediately grasp the difference between these fake mix-and-match dinosaurs and real dinosaurs. I was dismayed by their ignorance.)
Much later in life, I learned that there is an actual creature called Stegodon, which was discovered in 1919 and is not a dinosaur, but an early relative of the elephants. It does not have fractal teeth growing out of its teeth. It does have a distinctive ridged molar.
My parents also took me on day trips to Prehistoric World - an outdoor attraction in Morrisburg, Ontario in which life-sized fiberglass statues of dinosaurs and other ancient creatures stand along winding pathways through the woods.
Million-Year Elegies references Prehistoric World in one of its poems, "Baluchitherium," named for the biggest mammal statue in the park, which stood directly over the path and had to be walked under. (Nowadays, this creature is more commonly referred to as Paraceratherium; the relationship between the two names is complicated.) But the first big statue that you see, when entering Prehistoric World, is not a Baluchitherium but a Ceratosaurus - a big meat-eater with a small horn on its nose - towering over the admissions building.
I was so enchanted by the Ceratosaurus - a kind of dinosaur I'd never heard of before - that I decided to become one. Arriving back home after our day trip, I informed my parents that I wasn't Ada - I was Katie the Ceratosaurus. Ada had gone to visit Katie's family, in a kind of cross-species cultural exchange, and would be back at the end of the month.
It's normal for certain kinds of children to spend an afternoon insisting that they're Batman or Dumbo or a mermaid, refusing to answer to their given name because they're so immersed in that fantasy. But I kept the Katie the Ceratosaurus act up faithfully for the whole month. At the end of the month, being Ada again, I ran up to my mother and greeted her as though I hadn't seen her in a month, throwing out my arms and exclaiming how I'd missed her.
(Later, when I was getting assessed for autism, the lead psychologist asked my mother if I had any difficulties with playing pretend. My mother laughed and told her about Katie.)
Autistic people's special interests are sometimes described in a way that makes them sound limiting, as if the autistic person's experience of the world narrows into a monochrome, where only the object of the interest matters. To me it's always been precisely the opposite. My special interests have always had an element of interaction and creation. They've been doorways to imaginary worlds or symbolic palettes or lenses through which the rest of the world begins to look different. They haven't restricted my experience, but have expanded it. When I played around with dinosaurs as a child I wasn't only memorizing dinosaur facts - though there's nothing wrong with memorizing! - but escaping into stories and scenes involving creatures I would never otherwise have encountered, death and violence and new life and transformation, told from the perspective of life forms as exotic as any magical beast from a fantasy novel.
Million-Year Elegies is my return to those perspectives and those lenses as an adult, and in the next few posts I'm going to talk about some of the themes that resonate especially strongly through those lenses. Things that concern me now, as an adult with a job and a house and psychological problems, living in a uniquely trying time. Life simply looks different from the perspective of a creature much older and stranger than we can imagine.