poems of the neurodivergent experience

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Perhaps one of the most important aspects of writing poetry for me is the way it allows me to look forward. Only after working with neurodivergent learners for several years did I fully realize the special reciprocity between poetry and autism. I had been conditioned to expect a connection between autism and STEM subjects, but being a poet I was eager to experiment. Five years ago I co-founded Unrestricted Interest, an organization dedicated to helping neurodivergent learners transform their lives through writing. The results have been staggering. Not only do autistic writers have a unique penchant for poetic language, but many of them, especially the minimally speaking and nonspeaking among them, possess their own intrinsic idiolects and choose poetry as their central means of expression. How To Thrive In 2050! 8 Tentacular Workouts For A Tantalising Future! Film by artist Kai Syng Tan. A call for action for a more creative, equitable and neuro-fantastic future by a ‘human-octopussy’.

However, it would be unfair and perhaps enraging to suggest this is an easy utopia to create. It’s easy to worry that permitting – or rather, encouraging – children to self-advocate and offering support on a universal-design basis without clinical diagnosis would make your classroom into a free-for-all. Crucially though, we just don’t know much about what a classroom that really delivered on the principles of the neurodiversity paradigm would look like. How much of the difficult behaviour teachers struggle with in class right now is motivated by children trying to hide their difficulties, or push adults away because they don’t feel they can be trusted? As for the ‘Alice’ of the Alice books, she could be seen (as some have) as an autistic child with a logical approach to life and a tenacious insistence on what is right and appropriate, who must navigate an unpredictable and capricious neurotypical world. Julie Brown (2010). Writers on the Spectrum: How Autism and Asperger Syndrome have Influenced Literary Writing. Jessica Kingsley Publisher.Creative work: Earlier this year, Penny Kiley was longlisted for the Spread the Word life writing prize. The piece, ‘How To Watch Your Mother Die’, is in the anthology here. It’s a story about grief viewed through the lens of autism. Here’s an extract: People often assume that poetry is always autobiographical or confessional but there’s fiction in poetry too. In my notebooks, my imagination can run wild in support of a neurodivergent world.

Hen Night, a short film by award-winning theatre and screen writer/director Vici Wreford-Sinnott, inspired by the writing of award-winning journalist Frances Ryan. Jessica has just had her hen night - a last night of freedom but not in the ways she, or any of us, might have imagined. Hall, A., Meyer, A. and Rose, D. (2012). Universal Design for Learning in the Classroom NY. The Guildford Press. References My teachers used to tell me (based on school/university essays) that I was good at “saying a lot in a few words”. I think I developed this approach to communication generally, because I was always afraid of not being heard, so had to get the words out as succinctly as possible before people stopped listening. This is probably why I have been drawn to poetry and “writing short” in general. Poetry becomes not only somewhere to escape but somewhere to create and imagine different possibilities. I ask myself how could things look different, and question what are the things that I barely dare to dream about.

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A manifesto by a ‘human-octopussy’ of a more creative and equitable future. Blending discourse with mythology, interview with autobiography, geomancy with geopolitics, the intimate and the celestial, this essay is a retort to our troubled moment of multiple crises, and call to imagine and act on how things could become. Prepared to be disorientated, surprised, provoked, and re-energised.