The Words He Cannot Say

I, Leo Bird (b. 1991, Ames, Iowa) was diagnosed with autism when I was three years old and created the graphic memoir The Words He Cannot Say. In this memoir I show how I overcame alienation and bullying, succeeded in my job search, and learned from mistakes through the patient help of parents, teachers, and classmates. 

From analyzing my past, I learned how I or someone else could have acted differently so the conflict could have had a better outcome. I write and draw to provide commentary on actions that my peers and I took in the past, without being influenced by any book, movie, author, or genre. My work is life becoming art instead of art imitating life. Some parts of The Words He Cannot Say were written objectively enough to allow subjective opinions. Audiences react to it in ways that surprise me and I learn from the audience. My stories inspire audiences to be kind, self aware, courageous, and adventurous and have debunked myths. The artist I draw like is Alex Katz, whom I had not heard of before artists had analyzed my art. I aim to use a color scheme that creates the maximum amount of contrast between adjacent colors using the minimum amount of color.

I got the idea for The Words He Cannot Say an interview in the summer between my junior and senior year of college in 2013. The interviewer suggested I could teach people about autism. I thought I could do that by using the true storytelling techniques I learned in my Writing Short Stories Class. When I shared my stories, I learned that nuerotypicals (people without autism) and even cats and dogs faced the same challenges fitting in as I did and found the topic interesting, so I shifted the focus of The Words He Cannot Say to fitting in, building talent and character and allowed The Words He Cannot Say to lose the autism theme. This discovery motivated me to write about my life.