Michael J. Sullivan is a New York Times, USA Today, and Washington Post bestselling writer of epic fantasy, who began writing his wildly popular Riyria series in order to help his daughter, Sarah, overcome dyslexia. Michael, his wife Robin, and their daughter Sarah join us to share their perspectives on dyslexia. Michael also shares his insight on creating characters with the kind of challenges SLPs know very well.

— Links —

Michael J. Sullivan’s website

Books on Audible.com

Books on Amazon.com

Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

13 Dyslexia Perspectives

Dan: Welcome to episode 13 of The Mindful SLP podcast. Over the next three podcast episodes, we’re going to be talking a lot about dyslexia. We are kicking off this series with a slightly different perspective. Today, we’re going to bring you an interview with Michael and Robin Sullivan and their daughter Sarah. Sarah was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was in the fifth grade. Their story of those early years is fairly common: long nights struggling with homework, and trying to understand just what was going on. What makes their story unique are the steps Michael went to to try and get Sarah reading. If the name Michael J. Sullivan sounds familiar, you’ve probably read fantasy. Michael is a New York Times best-selling author of the Riyria Revelations, Riyria Chronicles, and most recently The Legends of the First Empire. I’ll put links to all of Michael’s work in the show notes over at SLP pro-advisor dot com slash blog slash 13 for episode 13. You can also find all of Michael’s work, of course, on audible.com, amazon.com and of course at Michael’s very own website, riyria.blogspot.com. That’s R I Y R I A.blogspot.com. After 20 years of writing and getting countless rejection letters, Michael gave up on writing. However it was his desire to write something for Sarah that drove him back to writing.

We reached out to the Sullivans to get the story behind the story of helping their daughter with her dyslexia. To our surprise and delight, Sarah showed up and we were able to sit down with her as well. We hope you enjoy this interview of Sarah’s battle with dyslexia and how Michael writes his engaging characters.

We’re so glad to have you here, but the main reason we want to talk to you today is because of Sarah. As I was reading the bio on Michael. I saw that one of the reasons that he wrote his books is because Sarah is dyslexic and he wrote them with her in mind. And so I want to chat about that because that’s interesting. Michael, why don’t you, uh, just tell us a little bit, how did that start the whole writing process for you?

Michael: I had tried writing for 10 years, 20 years and I quit because I wasn’t getting anywhere. So then what I did was I had started an advertising agency and it was doing fine, but my daughter was having some trouble with schoolwork and seemed to be having trouble with reading.

Now, when I was growing up, I read Lord of the Rings and then I read Watership Down and I thought they were great. So I tried getting her to read the same books and surprisingly enough, when I gave her Watership Down to read and it had been, I don’t know how many years since I read it, I was literally reading it to her and I thought okay. I’m getting bored because it’s, it’s very dense. It’s kind of slow is not exactly the kind of book that’s going to keep your attention. So I was, oh, this is not that much fun. So I thought what I really need is a much simpler story, something that moves a little bit quicker, something that’s going to get you’re entertained and drawn in very quickly.

That’s what I was aiming for. And, uh, at the time I picked up, uh, Harry Potter, and I got it for her because I had heard it was supposed to be a good book. I didn’t know. And as it was sitting there on the, on the coffee table, I don’t think you actually got it or even picked it up, but I read it. And when I read Harry Potter, I’m like, this is just plain fun.

And I’m like, well, maybe I should just try writing something like that. And in addition, if I could write something that was easy to read, and somewhat fast paced. I thought it could possibly get my daughter to read it as well. So with that in mind, I wrote the first book out and I actually wrote two or three of them, I think.

And then I, I gave them to my daughter to read. Do you want to tell him what you did?

Sarah: In manuscript on eight and a half by 11 papers.

Michael: Yes, ’cause I mean, that’s how I put it out.

Sarah: They gave it to me eight by 11 by paper. And I was like, I’m not reading this because I don’t like reading on that, that big of paper. And I don’t like it, nothing bound. And I was, I was, I, at that point I had become an avid reader and I was reading little paperback books.

Michael: Which you literally told me. She says, I can’t read it in this format. You have to get it published. So it’ll be bound, just like a normal book.

Robin: She says can’t you get it like a, like a, like a real book and like, well, that’s not so easy.

Michael: That’s what we did. And I’m sure everyone else would have had the same thing and they would have done the same thing. Cause you know, if their daughter wants them to get published so they can read the book, that’s what you do.

Robin: As I recall, part of your problem was it was just too much white. It was like, this is big and white and the words are just. There’s too many words on a single page. Was that part of the problem?

Sarah: Yeah, 110% honest. I have no idea.

Robin: It was a long time ago, but that’s why, that’s what I remember.

Sarah: That could be a thing. I mean, yeah, it could have been a spacing thing. Cause I don’t like reading double space. I know that.

Robin: Well, and we originally gave it to you as double space too.

Dan: Because that’s part of the manuscript process is making it double-spaced.

Robin: Yup.

Denise: So format is just important to you, how it’s printed out, even if you’re not sure exactly why.

Sarah: Well, I’m just so used to reading smaller and more condensed. And, um, by that time I think it was just, I like, I like having it, like in my hands. I don’t like it so big. And it’s just, it’s a, it’s another step to get, like reading for me is hard. So. The least amount of steps that I not used to just is like another hurdle I have to get over.

Dan: I’m curious. What is the level of your dyslexia?

Sarah: My level, I would say as I have a mild case of dyslexia, when I was young, it was bad. It was really bad. It was really bad. And then when I learn to like reading it got immensely better.

Robin: I think so.

Sarah: I still can’t spell worth a damn. Um, and I…

Dan: We’re not talking to the little kids we’re talking to the speech therapists.

Sarah: Um, so yeah, I, I ca I still can’t spell very well, um, so what I, from what I understand what dyslexia is, which I am not a expert is that dyslexia is a phonics problem. So the reason why you can’t spell is because you do not know what words make what sounds, what letters make, what sounds.

Robin: What are the, when I first started noticing Sarah’s dyslexia, I used to be the one who helped her with homework and her homework took uh, an amazingly long period time, hours. Teachers would assign, quote unquote, an hour of homework. And we would work from like 3:00 PM to like 9:30 PM and we would barely get through it. And, and the thing that I noticed a lot, like, like essay questions are just horrific, but Sarah would spell what I, what I found very interesting is she would spell the same word differently, you know, like when I would going through it, there would be one word misspelled and that same word, would it be somewhere else, but it would be equally misspelled. Cause she’s just trying to find letters that are like kind of close to what she thinks it might be.

And um, and then also when she talks, sometimes you have to she’ll substitute words. Like I remember she used to call, um, tornadoes volcanoes. Do you remember doing that? Yeah, I remember doing that. Yeah. You used to call tornadoes volcanoes. The other thing that Sarah tends to do is she’ll come up with her own words for things, and then once that word is in her head, that’s just the word. So sometimes, I feel like I have to translate her. Like, there’s a, there’s a very large bird, w we’re all burghers, and we found this very large bird in Florida and it was called a Karnaka, (that’s what I call it), and Sarah calls it a Karnaka.

Michael: So it spreads, see Sarah changes words, and then Robin picks them up and they spread.

Robin: So she’ll be talking about like, I saw Karnaka and I’m like, Sarah, no one knows what that is.

Michael: And there, there are professors all around the world looking for our Karnaka, ’cause they said they saw one.

Denise: Um, so, so a

Robin: So a lot of times when she gets a word. In her head, you know, when she’s decided this is the word is just, that’s forever the word. And you know, it just, it never changes around, it’s law. It becomes canon.

Sarah: I don’t even know how I got to the fifth grade because I recall I didn’t do no work. And I didn’t show you guys my report card. And I don’t know how I got to the fifth grade, but I know in the fifth grade I was diagnosed and then, my dad got me into reading and that made it a lot easier. But before then, the only thing I really remember is when we were reading that it was like pulling teeth out. And then when we did homework, it was like pulling teeth out.

It was, it was like, I remember you physically like getting angry and then being, like, and being like, it’s weird though, because like you would shout at me. Like, I wouldn’t say I was scarred by it by any way.

Robin: But do you remember the the other thing that you did that I could never figure out is you wrote so hard with your pencil. Do you remember that? Like, when we were on that island, because she would press down so hard that she would literally tear the paper? Cause she just, I don’t know if that was because that helped her concentrate or whatever, but I mean, like her fingers would hurt ’cause she was putting so much pressure on, on the paper when she was doing writing and so forth.

Dan: Yeah, I did that. My son did that as well. For me. It was a tactile thing. I, I, I, if, because for me letters will spin and flip and I’ve found that if I etched them into the paper, they wouldn’t move.

Robin: Well, what would I, what I find with Sarah, like for, for a long time, Sarah worked in security and one of the things they would have her do is write up a report at the end of the night of like what happened. And again, you know, people just don’t understand dyslexics. So her boss would say, you really have to get better at this. You know, you have lots of spelling errors in your report and she’s like, you know, if I was in a wheelchair, they wouldn’t ask me, can I climb the stairs in a shorter period of time?

Sarah: That’s not really the problem, the problem is she’s like, well, you’ve got spelling errors and, and I wasn’t for lack of effort. No, it wasn’t. I actually wrote very detailed reports, but the thing was is like, she was like, well, you know, this is misspelled. I’m like, well, you know what the word is. So clearly I’m communicating, like if you know, the word is supposed to be, you know, exit, listen, there’s no, there’s no communication error. I don’t know what the problem is. And my supervisor was just a very stickler. She’s like, oh, it looks unprofessional. But like, here’s the other thing nobody’s reading those records. Nobody’s reading those records. They’re just for internal purposes. And it’s just, it’s just busy work that they make you do anyways.

Robin: I don’t know if Sarah remembers this or not, but this, this kind of shows you how, how serious from like, from a surface standpoint. So we were coming in for her IEP, her individualized education program, and I could not let Mike go to them anymore because he was just, it’s not a, it’s not a precise…

Michael: Allow me to preface this story, she’s about to tell you by stating for the fact that what she’s about to tell you about Sarah, I’m pretty sure she got it from me. She did. So it’ll explain when you get to the end of the story, you’ll understand why it was I wasn’t allowed to go. Right.

Robin: And so we were going through the IEP and Sarah was sitting there and you know, the vice-principal was there and the teacher was there and I was there and we’re talking and talking and talking and talking and talking. And you know, like when it got to the end of the session, they said, well, Sarah, you really haven’t said anything. Is there anything that, you know, you would like to contribute to this? And she said, do you remember what you said? Oh, so she turns to the vice principal. She says, yes, I want to know what he’s writing down.

And he says, well, I’m writing down notes of this particular session so I can refer to them beforehand. She says, can I see them? And he says, no, these are just my personal notes. She says, are they about me? And he said, well, yes, they’re about you. She said, well, they’re about me, I think that I get to see what they are, you know?

And she was, she was like, she was like 11 or 12. She was. Yeah. And you know, so that’s what I mean by. You know, different kids are different and you know, she, wasn’t a wilting wilting flower, you know, it’s not like she didn’t have a drive or a, uh, a sense of herself or, you know, whatever it was it was, but the school system is not designed to deal with her.

Sarah: They’re just there’s. I mean, even when I write today, it’s there are just some words that frustrate me to new beyond belief. Like, unfortunately I can never spell it and I can’t go onto Google and try to spell it because I type it in it doesn’t know what it wants. And then there’s rinse. So rinse is a really hard word because nothing in that word sounds like anything.

It doesn’t make, like, I don’t, there are no letters in that where it’s just, it’s just a sound. So anytime I have to write rinse, I have nothing. I think there’s an S in there. I’m sure there’s an R and a W but I, I don’t know. And it just frustrates you and two of those letters are in there. All right. And then you kind of get out of the the space of like, I’m writing a scene, why can’t this one word? You know, why can’t I just move on past this one word?

Denise: Thank you for those insights, Sarah, those are really, really interesting to me as a speech therapist, especially. Let’s segue to the books. Now, Michael, do you want to take a moment and briefly introduce us to your books?

Michael: Legends of the First Empire takes place 3000 years prior to the first series I wrote, I literally pushed back time and I adopted that because most fantasy today, medieval fantasy is well, medieval.

So I wanted to show the background because when I wrote my first series, I lied. I completely lied my way through it. And what I lied about was wherever they came from. So, but it was a myth, there was a myth about how everyone started. And I wrote that in my first series and I knew that readers would actually believe it, but I didn’t want them to, because it was fake and it was fake because it was very sappy, it was a very simplistic concept. I knew that I was lying when I wrote it. So I felt it was necessary to go and actually tell the true story because it would make things seem a lot more believable and add more depth because obviously it was simplified. Uh, but the series it essentially starts, uh, the concept of mankind has moved into an area, they’ve, it’s literally around the period where they’re transitioning from stone age to, uh, agrarian culture. They have no written language. They have, uh, no money. This is a very early time that’s just barter and trade. And they kind of, yeah. Initially I had two groups, a group of Elven fighters who were like this very elite squad and they were going to be one group of characters.

Then I had another group of characters that were going to be supportive of this female chieftain. Uh, but then I realized as I got into the story, I really found the Elven warriors to be really, really boring. Because that has been done and it was not interesting, and the characters were somewhat flat and I was having difficulty trying to come up with a new way to make, you know, these specialists and fighters to be particularly interesting.

But what I found was fascinating was when I started directing my intention to, uh, the normal people, quote unquote, the people who were just average every day, you know, individuals, in fact, less than average, they were actually put upon, uh, they were the people who most society would discount because they were not heroic or would not be expected to be heroic.

Uh, and then when I started looking at those characters, those characters are getting much more depth and much more dimension. I found them much more fun and exciting. So that’s what the story took in that direction.

There’s two characters, I really want to dive into a little bit here, uh, I think there’ll be interesting to speech therapists, Gifford and Roan.

Dan: So Gifford is the town potter, he was born with a severe handicap, doesn’t walk well, hobbles around. Gifford has a speech disorder, uh, can’t say his Rs, and so the question I want to ask about that is when you were designing Gifford. Now I know I’ve heard you say that these people kind of present themselves to you, but why a speech disorder for Gifford?

Michael: What I do is when I write any character, I hear them in my head. Now it helps the reader. I think when, when people read Gifford, I think the fact that he can’t talk properly and the fact that he has a problem with how other people perceive his speech, that the one person in, throughout the entire story, who’s always essentially correcting or translating for him is Roan, uh, who is, becomes his love interest.

And I gotta be very careful what I say because my daughter has only got up to the fourth book in the series. So I had to make sure we don’t go to. But so, so it’s interesting because he becomes very frustrated with the fact that he can’t speak. This is just one of the many more things he cannot do as a human being that everyone else can.

And he has to deal with that and it bothers him. And of course, Roan, uh, is the one person who seems to not even notice. And this is, this is a dynamic which shows their relationship and shows how different she is and why it is in fact, Gifford falls in love with her because she’s different because she doesn’t see, she doesn’t see his mistakes.

She doesn’t see his, his problems. To her, he’s not just an ordinary person. To her, he’s a hero. It’s interesting. What I was playing with was how one person who might appear to be truly great, in real life, but in this situation is actually a cripple and vice versa. If you look at someone, you may think, oh, that person’s so great, they’re just wonderful. And then those people themselves don’t, you always hear about people who are like, who are king of the world. They’re rich, they’re famous. You know, they commit suicide because they’re so upset. And that’s where it is that you’re seeing the person from the inside, even though from the outside, they may be great.

And sometimes you see the exact opposite. You see the person who appears to be a total wreck. It turns out to be a really great person, but you don’t get to see that unless you really get to know them or see what’s inside their head.

Dan: One of the things I really like about your books, the characters are really fascinating. Let’s take a moment to get inside of one of your other character’s heads. Tell me about Roan.

Michael: Okay. Uh, so Roan essentially, as I originally envisioned her, was a woman who was the daughter of a slave and the, her mother was being abused by her owner. And when the mother, uh, passes away, he continues to abuse the daughter. And so this is her whole life and eventually, the master dies. I’m not going to get into exactly how that happened, but so the master dies and Roan is now on her own. And Roan is a person who is therefore been physically and mentally abused. Uh, as a result of that, I just assumed that that would take a heavy toll on an individual psyche.

Uh, she was isolated and she was abused and she was a slave. So she didn’t feel she could seek out anyone else’s help. So she was very isolated. But what this does for her is it creates her ability to concentrate to an extreme degree, because the way she got herself through a number of the problems was essentially to think about something so intently that it allowed to block out other things around her. And what this did, is it gave her a talent to be able to analyze and solve problems. But that’s pretty much what the character was designed or how I laid that out, and it just got developed more and more as I, as I wrote it.

Robin: And she also has an ability to be. Super hyper focused on things. So like, you know, things that other people don’t see, you know, she was, and some of them mean absolutely nothing. Like for instance, uh, there’s a case where they run across these people, and, and there’s some obvious things that you would think about these people and, and Roan says, I know, did you notice how they had an odd number of laces on ones on the right boot and an even number of laces on their left boot? And they’re like, no, that’s not what we were talking about, Roan, we’re talking about something completely different.

Michael: There’s a major crisis going on, but that’s what she finds.

Denise: That is what made me think she was on the autism spectrum. So it’s so interesting to hear that, that you weren’t even going that direction. Because people with autism can hyper-focus, um, they can…

Michael: Interestingly enough, there is a person who wrote me and he’s done a series of YouTube videos and he says he relates to Roan so acutely that he literally uses my books to explain to other people and his parents. They said, if you want to understand me, read this about Roan. And he is not autistic, he has a speech impairment. Interesting. But it causes the way he thinks, he can’t talk, he can’t think the same way that other people do because of his inability to speak properly. And as a result of that, he feels that Roan is, is he’s like she clearly is me and I’m not going, I, I didn’t know that, but…

Robin: I don’t remember exactly what, what his diagnosed condition is, but he says, Rowan is exactly like that.

Michael: But he’s literally taken that book apart sentence by sentence. He’s like, and this sentence right here. And it was, I now, thank God I remembered it. They are working out how to make a wheel and Persephone yells at Roan, and Roan just, just like cowers away says, I’m sorry, I won’t do it.

And Gifford stands up for her. And, and so, so Persephone’s like okay, I’m sorry, Roan, but she’s speaking like this and I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. What was your idea? But still because of the way she speaks, Roan still backs away and she said no, no, that’s fine. And then Persephone stops and says oh, and she takes a… Literally, all I said was she took her breath, she calmed down and she asked again, and he said that sentence was one of the most significant ones in all of my series, because that goes, cause that’s exactly what has to happen is this is what you have to do when speaking to people like me, you can’t, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. If you can just calm down and not make it aggressive. Yeah, I can understand you, but if you do it aggressively, I can’t, I can’t deal with it. And I’m like, wow, little things like that, and I’m just completely oblivious to this, but apparently I got it right.

Denise: Working with kids who have these defenses, that is exactly what you need to do, and I call it mindfulness. You need to be with them in the moment, attuned to how they’re feeling and just let them be. You can’t push, you have to give them space, space to grow, and I have more success with autism, much more than I used to have because of this mindfulness mindset that I have now is just learning to let go of everything else and just think about them and be with them in the moment. And I think that’s what Persephone was doing it was like, oh God, yeah.

Robin: It’s probably not right to say. Um, because it doesn’t, it doesn’t necessarily make Mike seem as, you know, as intelligent. It’s not like he researched this, right. It’s not like he researched this and said, oh, you know, like I discovered this particular aspect about, you know, people with this type of condition that would be great to add to a character. He didn’t even know it existed.

Michael: I think it’s more impressive. Cause I do it with magic.

Robin: Yeah, you do it more intuitively.

Denise: It was just intuitive, I can say you were just intuitive about it.

Robin: Yeah. So like, you know, when your questions came in and it talked about, you know, like being on the autism spectrum, Mike has no idea what the autism spectrum is, but he doesn’t know what that means. I mean, he knows that there is a things such as autism and he knows that some people have a more severe case of it than others, but he has no idea how it manifests.

Michael: When I wrote Gifford, I literally was, was doing research on people had like spinal bifida and other ailments. That was kind of what I was looking for. I was trying to, I basically wanted someone who was physically impaired, but I didn’t know exactly how. So I did some research. Um, but as with anything. I ad lib. I mean, I, in Riyria, it’s a medieval time, people wearing powdered wigs and gloves and they’re on sailing ships with three masts, didn’t exactly happen.

They eat potatoes and drink coffee. You didn’t have that in medieval times, but it’s my world. I get to mess with stuff. So again, I did the same thing with Gifford. I just kinda took some things and I put them together to make this character. It wasn’t until later we actually have met a few people and one I know they’re closely now, uh, who suffers from similar aspects and it’s fascinating because I’m like, oh my God, How did I do, because I know I would hate to think, you know, this is terrible, but he’s either he’s being very polite or he seemed to think I did an okay job with it. So that’s always good to hear.

Robin: You know, Mike comes up with characters and people will see things about themselves in it and identify it within stuff. I think character development is different than other things. If you were dealing with, um, you know, a particular place. Let’s say, uh, an island, and there are certain aspects about island life and, and what that leads to as far as like how water is gathered and how this, you know, he could kind of like do research on that. But when he comes in with characters, it just forms in his mind. He just, he builds a character out of his own imagination and some people identify it. And, you know…

Denise: I think you write characters that are authentic emotionally. And so the other things, just work.

Michael: The one thing I discovered, I had a friend of mine, he came up here and he’s, he’s a writer and he’s like, how do you write women, you guys, because I have such difficulty writing women. I write them like people. Ultimately everyone’s pretty much the same. Yeah. I mean, if you have different physical limitations, like Gifford or a female versus someone who’s like nine feet, you know, a hundred-three hundred pounds. Yeah. Yes, you have to deal with those things, but everyone’s pretty much the same when you get down to it.

It’s just how you react to different stimulus is what makes you a different character from another character. If every time someone challenges you, you get aggressive or you retreat. I mean, these are the things that make different characters, but we all do all of those things. I mean, there’s been times when you know, people attack me and I, and I retaliate with anger there’s times when people attack me and I just kind of coward disappear and it depends, but everyone does the same thing. So if you have empathy for other people and you can actually you know, look at people, occasionally listen to them, which sometimes I do.

I dunno, now you might differ. Um, but if you do that, you can kind of figure out what most people would do. And that’s why if you write something it’s really weird, but I’ve never understood what it was when Hemingway used to talk about, you have to write one true thing, and if you can, then, you know, everything else will follow and it’s true. And what he means by that I suspect is that you write one thing that is true to all humans. It’s a true feeling that you personally have. And if you do, then other people will also have that same instinctual feeling and it will resonate with them. And that’s what makes it special. So aim for that. And hopefully I can hit it.

Denise: Wow, that is like the greatest wrap-up, great way to end. But I just want to ask you one more thing to come back to dyslexia. Um, what advice do you have for parents? Parents still struggle with it today. The school systems still don’t have it quite down. Do you have advice for parents? And Sarah, do you have advice for parents?

Michael: Yeah. Sarah. Wrap it up. Do something really dramatic.

Sarah: So I’ll just say it since we were talking about communication and stuff. So I think that for one thing, dyslexia is a, uh, is a, um, learning disability, but it also is a communication disorder in a sense of a way, because if you can’t, if you can’t spell and you cannot say what you want to say, you know, it frustrates people, I think where a lot of the frustration comes on on any side is the fact that you can not articulate what you were trying to say, and I have, I have experienced that a lot. A lot of times I think that I can never be understood, and I think that is from an inkling of having dyslexia, of being, not be able to spell things, to be assumed that you’re dumb or whatever, because you can’t spell or, you know, just the fact that I know this word, this word would articulate my thoughts better, but I can’t spell it and I’m too frustrated to figure it out. So like all of that, that, all that communication I think is can also be attributed to what you were saying about Gifford and Roan, they have, because they have a problem articulating what they want to be said. So, and it’s a communication problem sometimes. Um, so I think, you know, especially with like us, you know, mom would be like, I don’t, I don’t understand.

And the problem is your kid can’t articulate most of the time because your kid is too young, and they don’t have the epiphanies, or sometimes you just don’t know. So like, I remember this one time, I, I think I watched a documentary about dyslexia where they talk about how you just guess, because you don’t know what something is. And I remember I was at a, I was looking at a street sign and somebody was asking me like, what, what was the name on the street sign. I go, I literally can’t tell you. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t sound out though. I live close to it and I was just, and it was just like, there was nothing, it wasn’t, there was no guesses.

There’s just a void. And I didn’t realize when I was younger, that that’s what was happening. I have the mindfulness now to be like, there’s nothing there. There’s nothing to pull from. It’s not like, because what a lot of connections come to is like, you pick a middle ground. You’re like, well, it’s kind of like, you know, like if you’re talking to me about taste or something, it’s like, well, it kind of tastes like chicken.

And it’s like, well, we all know what chicken tastes like. But when, when somebody has nothing to draw from then they cannot communicate. And so I think that happens with a lot of parents and kids because the kids do not either have the life experience or they don’t. There’s just nothing there to articulate because there’s nothing to draw from.

So I would have to say, probably the best thing you could probably do with your kid is you ask more questions without trying to be as frustrated, because I know when it comes to questions it’s like, especially with your kids, like, why are birds? It’s like, I don’t know why are birds? There are, I just, I don’t understand. But when you, so when you ask questions, you have to get more and more nuanced with the question.

Michael: Also get your kids to read, apparently that helped.

Sarah: You tell that they want to read.

Michael: And get them to read my book. Because my books are the best for that, right?

Dan: All right. Then we’ll give the last word to you. Plug the books.

Michael: It’s not, it’s a multi-generational book. I have a person who is like in her thirties will read the books and love it, give it to their, uh, their, their 13, 12 year old son or daughter, and they love it and they’ll give it to their grandmother who’s 80 and they love it. So it’s not, it’s a multi-generational book that is been, you know, made that way by my sheer accidental choices that I made when I first started writing these things. But it turned out. I was a genius.

Dan: Yes you are. And they’re all available on audible, which is probably the preferred way, I don’t know, for a lot of people, Tim Gerard Reynolds does an amazing job of reading them there, are they available on amazon as well?

Michael: Actually, what I suggest you do is you buy the audio book and the ebook and the print book and the special edition, because that way, what you can do is you can, you can listen to the audio book while reading along in the e-book, but then you can also share out that paper book and you can keep that really good hardcover on your shelf for the future.

Dan: Thank you for listening to The Mindful SLP. We hope you found some simple tools that will have optimal outcomes in your practice. This podcast is sponsored by SLP ProAdvisor. Visit SLP pro-advisor dot com for more tools, including Impossible R Made Possible, Denise’s highly effective course for treating those troublesome Rs.

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