Happy Birthday, Hank Meloy

Galactic Alienologist

As my kids get older, I’m increasingly reluctant to share much about them online. I’m mindful of their privacy. But - OH MY GOD - today is my son Hank’s 18th birthday and all bets are off!

I asked Hank if I could interview him on the occasion of his birthday and share it here and he said, “Maybe.” He is still deciding. In the meantime, here are some things I know he would love you to know about him:

He is proudly queer and proudly autistic. He is an autistic savant, in fact. This designation was given him by a psychologist and it’s rare. Literally one-in-a-million.

I’m pretty sure he has read more books than anyone I know. How has he accomplished this? He learned to read around age two, before - we think - he learned to speak. He is a speed reader who can tear through a novel in thirty minutes, understanding and remembering everything he’s read. And he is always reading. Hank is obsessed with books and has been since he was old enough to turn their pages.

This is just a cute photo. Obviously Hank didn’t read this James Joyce collection when he was one.

But he did read Finnegan’s Wake when he was seven, and liked it.

He’s a hyperliterate critical thinker with a broad range of interests that include activism, politics, horror, psychology, mysticism, mythology, and religion. His grasp of world history is probably better than mine and Colin’s combined. And Colin’s is pretty good.

I don’t often talk about Hank this way publicly because I don’t like to be a mom bragging to the world about how smart her kid is. But it’s his birthday and he deserves to be bragged about. Hank is so smart. He’s hilarious. He has a keen sense of justice. He’s a loving, protective brother. He’s also a person who has overcome a lot of adversity in the past couple of years and I am so proud of him.

While we wait for Hank to decide if he’d like to be interviewed, I thought I would share an old interview with him.

When Hank was eight years old I was invited to participate in a show called The People’s Biennial at the Museum of Fine Art Detroit. The organizers, Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann, asked artists to collaborate with someone operating outside of the art world who they consider visionary. I chose to work with Hank and we created a series of art and audio recordings together.

At the time, Hank identified as an alienologist (an expert in the study of space aliens) and this project was meant to be a sort of field guide. He described a variety of aliens to me - what they look like, where they live, what they eat - and I sketched them and made notes while recording our conversations.

The form the project finally took was an installation in a little shack inside a museum where all the art was on view and the audio played on a loop. A few years later, we restaged a version of this project at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Portland with KSMoCA. They transcribed the audio and published a nice exhibition catalogue. It’s for sale here and the proceeds benefit King School Museum of Contemporary Art (a great program for kids and their community worth supporting).

Below is the interview if you’d like to listen, with accompanying art. There is a lot I could say about this recording - about what was going on in our lives at the time, about Hank’s dawning self-awareness, about motherhood, about autism. But I have never wanted to contextualize it. Because of privacy, for one thing. But also, I never really thought it needed explaining.

Okay, enjoy. And please raise a glass to my amazing kid today.

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