poems of the neurodivergent experience

Product Information

Silent World, a short music film by Deaf musician Signkid, using rap, spoken word and Signkid’s innovative ‘sign-slang’ to creatively explore how living in a silent world has intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic. 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. Iain Munro, CEO, Creative Scotland, comments: "Creative Scotland is thrilled to support this incredible range of talented artists and inspiring commissions as part of our partnership with BBC Arts and The Space, bringing the work of talented D/deaf, neurodivergent and disabled artists to BBC platforms. We celebrate the way diversity of thought and a diversity of experience feeds innovation and creativity and are delighted that thanks to National lottery players, audiences will enjoy and be inspired by the wide range of stories, perspectives and experiences supported through this initiative."

Though sharing identities shaped by autism and or ADHD, the writers in Making a Difference are very diverse indeed, in both poetic terms and in terms of individual perspectives on – and approaches to – their unique personal experiences. It’s an eye-opening and engaging anthology which, rather than looking at the ‘issue’ of neurodivergence, speaks from points within lived experience and it’s been immensely rewarding to work with this mix of established and new writers. Johnson, M. and Rutherford, L. (2019). An Autism Evidence Based Practice Toolkit for use with the SCERTS™ Assessment and Planning Framework . I recently enjoyed ‘Letters to My Weird Sisters’ by Joanne Limburg because it’s intelligent, analytical and thought provoking. As well as sharing experiences that I relate to, it looks more widely. I’m looking forward to reading more by her. And I’m enjoying Katherine May’s ‘The Electricity of Every Living Thing’, so will read more of her too.Poetry, too, is good for us. Both reading it and writing it have been shown in many studies to benefit us, not only psychologically, but even physically. The latter will take someone with a very different area of expertise than mine to explain, but the former has something to do with the rhythms to which we respond from birth. I suspect it’s also because poetry allows us to push language beyond its everyday usage and, if it’s not too grandiose a claim, begin to communicate things that words alone can’t convey.

Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, Autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press 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. God, it’s the same as my relationship with breathing. I am autistic, and my creative practice is inextricable from my own self – how could it not be? I absolutely despise person-first descriptions (“with autism”, etc.), talking about me like I carry this extra element of self round in a little suitcase, as an accompaniment to an already-whole person. I am a whole person and “autistic” is a value-neutral descriptor of that. I write and perform as an act of self-realisation and self-advocacy, speaking my reality into the sights of a world that was not built to recognise or accommodate it. It’s a beacon to people like me, it’s a call to arms for everyone who would support us, it’s a guilt trip for everyone who should know better, and it’s a warning to the boots trying to stamp us down. I didn’t receive my autism diagnosis until age 36, but it’s significant to note that from an early age, the absence of linguistic language to describe my differences in sensory perception led me deeper into my body, and more specifically, led me to develop a somatic language; an artistic practice whereby my body was the primary material and mode of communicating.

Help and support

Ford, T., John, A., & Gunnell, D. (2021). Mental health of children and young people during pandemic. British Medical Journal, 372. Writing is my safe space. As my brain doesn’t make enough dopamine, I get bored easily, but creating fictional worlds is far from that! Growing up, when things happened (or failed to), writing took the clamour out of my head and kept it above water. I re-wrote upsetting things, invented better scenarios, gave myself happier endings. 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. Pellicano, E., & den Houting, J. (2022). Annual Research Review: Shifting from ‘normal science’to neurodiversity in autism science. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 63(4), 381-396.

I asked the following writers and artists to answer two questions: ‘Are there any neurodivergent or Now, with its new Multiverse series, Milkweed pushes even further into territory largely unexplored by traditional corporate publishers: neurodivergence. The series is devoted to publishing books that explore “different ways of languaging,” all written by neurodivergent authors. The series’ first book, The Kissing of Kissing, a collection by nonspeaking autistic poet Hannah Emerson, came out in March. It will be followed in November by nonspeaking autistic poet Adam Wolfond’s The Wanting Way, and, later, Aster of Ceremonies, by disabled artist and stutterer JJJJJerome Ellis.

Customer reviews

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. Trawling through the Internet in search of autistic writers, I found it really hard to come across people I didn’t know already, especially autistic poets. So, after the wonderful interview with Karl Knights ( here) and the thought-provoking mini-interviews from six neurodivergent artists, writers and performers ( here), this is the third and final post in the series about neurodivergent writers. In this post, I write about some of my favourite writers, in the context of some of the strengths and differences in their writing, which I associate with their neurodivergence. The film and audio works commissioned include performance dramas, dance, comedy, spoken word poetry and animation, with the majority of artists highlighting aspects of the disabled experience of living through the pandemic.

A neurodiversity literate school can create an environment that affirms both the existence of neurodiversity and the tenets of the neurodiversity paradigm, to the benefit of pupils and staff. School staff who confidently understand neurodiversity can be empowered to respect their own expertise as educators in recognising the support needs of pupils in their class. Neurodiversity-affirmative classrooms will be characterised by universal design features and flexibility, with teachers adopting and iterating small changes with the potential to benefit everyone. Those same teachers will find ways to focus on the complementary contributions made by the range of people in the class, and shift away from a constant focus on individual achievement, measured against narrow standards. Pupils in such schools will become accomplished self-advocates, who understand their needs, and feel no shame in asking for help. These benefits will radiate out to family networks, as the constant battle for support for their child dissipates. Engagement with the neurodiversity paradigm thus provides a pathway to realise the long-held ambitions of inclusive education, fostering an environment where each pupil can thrive on their own terms. Like Limburg, Whiteley describes the mismatch of understanding between the autistic child and the (probably neurotypical) adult, contrasting with the child’s extraordinary affinity with animals, which extends to understanding their language. Next steps Yet, as soon as we stop thinking of poetry as something monumental and ‘over there’, we realise that we’ve been carrying it around all our lives and bringing it out at key events such as weddings, funerals, celebrations, and occasions of collective grief. It leaps up on us unbidden: I’m going for a weekend away shortly and even though it’ll be October, I can guarantee that Wordsworth’s daffodils will ambush me at least once. Poetry does this. It gets into our lives and even if we don’t think about it often, it’s there when it knows we need it. With this suggestion in mind, a poetry anthology seemed an ideal way of bridging the gap in understanding of neurodivergent people’s experiences in a way that complements more conventional presentation of information. Rhiannon Oliver, the Co-production Coordinator of the Review, believes it can “offer insight into the social, emotional and sensory experiences of neurodivergent people through the universal language of poetry, whilst simultaneously celebrating the creativity that so often goes hand in hand with neurodivergence.”

About us

Victoria Gray has developed a difficult-to-define, embodied thinking in her performance practice. Gray finds ways to go underneath appearances, connecting to a less appreciated level of existence.” Using the terminology of neurodiversity, we can describe the biggest group of people as neurotypical. They tend to flourish fairly easily in our education system and beyond – because they are in the majority, these systems were often built by people like them, for people like them. Neurodivergent people (also referred to as neuro-atypical, or neuro-minorities) can struggle in these systems because of the mismatch between the way their brains process information and the way the system implicitly expects them to operate. I started to judge myself for these responses and wished that I was different or more ‘normal’. But through writing poetry, I’ve learned to – at times – love how finely tuned and sensitive my senses are. This is where poetry comes in. Poetry, when we talk about it in isolation, can bring up images of something remote or even forbidding. It may be the stuff we had to write essays on at school, even though we didn’t really understand it; or it could be the stuff that some people study at university, though we’re not sure why, or what they do with it.