July 2025 Newsletter: What I’ve Been Up To
Welcome to this month’s newsletter! Each month, I try to share what I’ve been up to, what things I’ve published that month, and exciting news if there’s any to be shared.
News and updates
Happy Disability Pride month! We’ve been working on our next resource hub, Embodied Neurodivergence, which should be available very soon, so keep an eye out for that in the next week or two. A reminder that these hubs are living pages, so if you have a resource you think belongs, reach out to ash@ashtonrosewrites so we can take a look at it!
Additionally, this month I had the pleasure of attending two LGBTQ+ events: a book event with Stephanie Burt and the annual GCLS conference in Albany, NY. More reflections on that might come in the near future.
Blog posts from this month
For Disability Pride month, Ashton was pondering their autistic special interests and how it relates to wellbeing. They went on a deeper dive into the topic, exploring what some research has found about the importance of interests to neurodivergent wellness. Deep Dive: Autistic Special Interests and Wellbeing contains a lot of interesting tidbits on this!
Accessible Design: Queen Sabel and her Chariot
Disability support lessons with my dog continue as Sabel is learning that we can use a wagon to extend our walks. You may recall from January that Sabel is a 13+ German Shepherd/Border Collie mix who has a combination of intervertebral disc disease (IVDD) and arthritis in her spine. She’s also a dog who’s been active, curious and very smart for her whole life.
As her spine disease progresses, she’s having less coordination and strength in her back legs. She can now walk comfortably for a block or two, depending on the weather. But our favorite local park is over two blocks from our house.
In creating accommodations for Sabel (and myself), I often think about two scenarios from Ellen Langer’s book “Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.” Both feature an elderly woman living independently. In the first scenario, she comes home with groceries, puts the bag on her porch, unlocks her door, and then discovers she can’t bend down far enough to pick up the bag again. “Luckily a neighbor happens by to help her, but the problem persists. … Her adult children, fearing for her diminished state, help her move to a nursing home.”
In the second scenario we see the same woman but: “She places the bag on a small shelf outside her door, searches for her key, opens the door, and carries in her grocery bag. In the first case, the woman is considered too frail to care for herself, but not in the latter. The only difference is a small piece of wood serving as a shelf.”
Langer goes on to say, “The external world is socially constructed, but we rarely see it that way. Most things were initially designed to meet the needs of the designer and that person’s conception of the ‘typical’ person. The width of a seat in a theater, the height of a kitchen table …” I’d like to intrude here to add: how low my dishwasher’s bottom shelf is, the angle of most chairs, bucket seats in cars. Returning to Langer: “If our socially constructed environment ceases to work for us, we see it as a fault of ours. It rarely occurs to us to attribute the problem to the environment or change the construction to meet our needs.”
I’m watching that process with myself and Sabel as her needs have been changing – and seeing too many places where I keep trying to do it the old way for longer than we need to. One of the gifts of being in this process with a dog is that she doesn’t have the preconceptions that I do. I may interpret the use of a wagon as a loss of mobility, but it became clear to me the first time we used it that she was experiencing a significant gain in mobility. She doesn’t seem to have a strong opinion about whether she uses her legs or a wagon to go on her walk, she wants to be outside, moving, sniffing, checking out her neighborhood.
(Quick sidebar here, since the most frequent question I get about Sabel is whether she’s in pain: Sabel is on three different arthritis/pain meds and a handful of supplements that help her be pain-free much of the time, plus physical therapy and a lot of loving cuddles.)
With the wagon, we’re now able to go to the park, where I lift her out of the wagon and let her walk around and sniff until her back legs get tired. Then she’s back in the wagon for more rolling around and checking out her favorite spots until I get tired and we head home. She’s also back on duty with one of her primary jobs – keeping me in shape – and I get the sense that she knows she’s working again and loves it.
Stay tuned next month for more blog posts, resources, and another newsletter. Thanks for being a reader!
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