Ten Minutes With: Tiffany Hammond
This week, we catch up with the incredible Tiffany Hammond of @fidgets.and.fries to discuss the excitement around her beautiful new book, A Day With No Words. We touch on her hopes for the Autistic community, the world outside of it, and how she navigated the writing process itself.
You can preorder A Day with No Words right here:
presales are going well, right? this is clearly a book a lot of people wanted!
The preorder sales are blowing my mind right now. I have always felt as though this book was sorely needed, but I underestimated how much others would feel the same. My publisher is definitely hyped about the numbers it's doing. I am in shock, awe, and filled with such overwhelming joy at the response.
My dream is to have this book in every single hand across every single land. I'm excited to see how the next 200 days go with the presales.
if you could wish for something to change within the autistic community what would it be?
I want this community to acknowledge that disability, in this instance, Autism, is an experience that is unique to each and every single individual. I want this community to sit with the truth that we won't all experience this diagnosis in the exact same way. Autism doesn't impact each of us the same and society won't treat us the same.
I want this community to know that a community is made up of individuals, living individual existences, with individual stories, individual circumstances, etc. There's a lot we experience that is the same, but there is so much that is different. We cannot allow our advocacy for this community to be governed by how we would advocate for ourselves. Advocacy involves fighting for someone else, and we cannot fight for another if we don't listen to exactly what it is that they require.
how did you find the writing process as an autistic who also has a lot of other things going on?
the actual process of writing didn't differ from what I already do. I am a writer and most of my content is text. Most of it is stories, highlight reels of my life, and documenting the journey of where I was to where I am. I am always writing. That didn't change. I treated this book as I treated everything I write and incorporated writing it into my schedule as I do all the other things I write with a full schedule.
What changed was the pressure I put on myself to get this book right. This is a book that I wanted to serve as a bridge between this community and the rest of the world. I had to get it right. My sons have to exist in a world outside of this community, I need the world to see my children and treat them better. I need this world to do the same for all of our children. This couldn't just be a book for the Autism community. For so many, this book would be their introduction to the world of disability. This is something I had to get right.
what do you hope one thing people take from this book is?
If someone only took one thing from this book, I would hope that it would be respect for communication styles outside of speech. I would hope they acknowledge the validity in typing on a keyboard, pointing at letters, tapping images on an ipad. I would hope that they walk away from this book a more patient, compassionate human who will be more accommodating to those who have different communication styles.
I would hope that they themselves recognize that they communicate in ways that don't leverage speech and find themselves coming to an understanding that they should not require of another what is not required of themselves.
