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Kathie Giorgio was forty years old when she gave birth to the baby she and her husband, Michael, planned for, hoped for, dreamed of. But Olivia wasn't anyone this veteran mother of three teenagers expected. Olivia cried all the time. She wouldn't eat table food. She wouldn't speak. Her favorite toy was a bucket of hundreds of tiny plastic bears in rainbow colors that she spent hours every day arranging in a long looping line through the house. And finally...she was diagnosed as autistic when she was three years old. Kathie and Michael, both writers, were told that their daughter would never have words, and that she would only see them as "bumps on a log". Yet she smiled at them every day.
Olivia In Five, Seven, Five; Autism In Haiku is the story, in poetic form, of a mother's love for her autistic child, and the way that love could blast through a diagnosis and lift this little girl who smiled. Kathie smiled back.
About the author
Kathie Giorgio is a critically acclaimed author of four novels – The Home for Wayward Clocks (2011), Learning to Tell (A Life)Time (2013), Rise from the River (2015), and In Grace’s Time (2017); two story collections, Enlarged Hearts (2012) and Oddities and Endings; The Collected Stories of Kathie Giorgio (2016); a collection of essays, Today’s Moment of Happiness Despite the News; A Year of Spontaneous Essays (2018); two poetry chapbooks, True Light Falls in Many Forms (2016) and When You Finally Said No (2019), and a full-length collection of poetry, No Matter Which Way You Look, There Is More to See (2020).
She lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin, with her husband, Michael Giorgio, (a mystery writer); her daughter, Olivia, who is writing her first novel; a neurotic dog named after Ursula Le Guin; a fat cat named Edgar Allen Paw, and a tiny cat named Muse. Her life is graced with her three older kids, Christopher, Andy, and Katie, and one dynamite granddaughter, Maya Mae.
