major influences: my children whom I learn from daily and strong women:
Barb
Judy
Starr
Eleanor Roosevelt
Eudora Welty, Donnas, art museums, Van Gogh, the company of libraries and communication with peers on the spectrum
Also Colin, and he doesn't even know it.
Most of all, Al  

Perhaps the biggest achievement of all is to rise every morning, be inside every moment and embrace each day.

Publications to date: UNDER THE BANANA MOON Reborn Through Fire (ghostwritten book) Kaleidoscope March Street Press Curbside Review Planet Vermont Quarterly Hearing Health Thunder Sandwich Voices of Autism The Art of Autism New Spirit Journal and Women From Another Planet also (see excerpts from my writing in:) Girls Under The Umbrella Of Autism Spectrum Disorder

UNDER THE BANANA MOON
Book Description Publication Date: April 11, 2012 To Kim Tucker, solidly in the Asperger's section of the autism spectrum, the colors blue and green and gray are not just colors, but rather whole worlds of iridescent life. Likewise, to say that Under the Banana Moon is full of laughter and love and heartbreak is to only scratch the surface. Growing up, Kim couldn't speak when there was more than one person present, and sometimes even then her words failed her. But she could always write. More comfortable in the company of cats, or passing notes to grandmother, she found peace where she could, and avoided the frightful parts of the world—like anything that was the color green. But school brought whole new worlds of fear: other kids. Their words and feelings were indecipherable. Their touch was toxic. She survived with scars. As a teenager, she felt the same urges as her peers but went about it in extreme ways: when she drank, she went to the hospital; when she dated, she got married. Her husband, Howie, was her high school sweetheart. He was also her best friend and the father of her three children. He took care of her and managed her disability. When he was diagnosed with ALS, their roles reversed, the world collapsed—but they kept going. Some things Kim could never learn (like how to drive a car... without crashing), but some things she could. Like how to help her husband die, and how to live to tell the story. In her book, as in her life, tears and laughter are like a rhyming couplet, similar expressions of the same deep feeling. Only with both can Kim tell her story which is, in the end, about perseverance, and joy, and love beyond lifetime.

Reborn Through Fire
My name appears on the back cover of this book, which Ghostwrote for Tony Yarijanian, the man who saw angels, got a Guinness record for most burns survived on a human body,...Tony the 'miracle man.'

interview with Donna Williams
International bestselling author, songwriter, survivor autist fabulous human and so much more granted me her time for this interview, I hope you will read it. And I hope you will read her other books and blogs too, she is an inspiration in my life, a mentor, a friend in the heart. She wrote my foreword in UNDER THE BANANA MOON and makes a cameo in a chapter of that book.