Josh Weil has always loved the idea of the Wild West. He loves the open space, the freedom, the sense of leaving everything behind.
That feeling shapes his newest novel, “What Came West,” which follows an autistic man named Silas Hall as he heads into the Sierra Nevada in 1849.
Weil grew up in Leverett, Massachusetts, and will read from the book this Thursday, July 30, at 7 p.m. at Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley. The event is free, though you’ll need to register ahead of time.
Living Differently in a Hard World
Silas is not like most people around him. As a boy in a one-room schoolhouse, he is bullied while he flaps his hands to calm himself. He rocks when the world feels too much. Loud, overlapping sounds overwhelm him. His parents do their best to love and protect him, but the mid-1800s offer almost no understanding of minds like his.
Weil made Silas clearly autistic because the story needed someone who would feel the loss of the natural world in a raw, personal way.
Early in the book, young Silas freezes when a favorite elm tree is cut down. That quiet moment says a lot about how deeply he is connected to the land.
Finding Calm Through Drawing
Drawing becomes Silas’s way of surviving. If he can get hold of a scrap of paper and some chalk, he can focus on one simple thing: a ladle, a leaf, and push the rest of the chaos away. The sketches that appear in the novel were drawn by Weil himself with a traditional dip pen and ink. It took him six months, longer than he expected, but he wanted the pictures to feel true to the time.
Silas is a complicated character. The noise of city life becomes too much, and he eventually leaves his family behind to head west alone.
He is not presented as a perfect hero. Weil wanted readers to see both the real struggles of a neurodivergent person and the full, sometimes messy, person he is.
A Fuller View of the Frontier
Weil hopes the novel shows the West as more than just adventure. It includes the damage done to the land and to Indigenous people, while still holding onto the real pull of freedom and open space.
He wrote much of the book in a 1959 camper in Nevada City, California, watching the landscape change outside his window.
Support That Meets People Where They Are
Stories like Silas’s remind us that autistic people have always been part of the world, even when the world had no language for them. Today we have more understanding and more ways to help, but the need for real support remains.
At Nevada Autism Center, we focus on that everyday support. Through personalized ABA therapy, we help autistic children build communication, emotional regulation, safety skills, and confidence so they can move through the world with greater ease and joy.
Autism Support in Las Vegas, NV
If your family is navigating autism and you are looking for understanding and practical help, Nevada Autism is here. We would love to connect and see how we can support your child and your family. Reach out anytime.
