The Cat, The Mouse And The Sausage, an animation of a Grimm’s Brothers fairy tale by award-winning filmmaker Joel Simon. An affinity with animals and nature can also bring with it an appreciation of the subtler aspects of the senses. Some autistic people have heightened sensory experiences. Rhiannon describes ‘over-responsive’ and ‘under-responsive’ sensory profiles (2020, p28). For example, ‘over-responsive’ individuals might experience an increased sensitivity to senses such as sound or light, while ‘under-responsive’ individuals might seek out sensory experiences like loud noise (p28). While being ‘over-responsive’, or very sensitive, may be uncomfortable or even overwhelming, it can also be seen as a huge strength in a writer, who can then write about things on a more subtle level of detail. Instead, the focus on strengths is more healthy – and more aligned with the natural variability that is central to neurodiversity – when considered at a group level. Neurodiversity brings collective strength to the table, drawn from variability in experience, helping to drive innovation and empathy – two cardinal features of the evolution of humanity. In the classroom, a focus on collective strengths is apparent when the class celebrate their ability to get along together and their willingness to accommodate each other. As a teacher, one might celebrate the variety of ways in which pupils have approached a creative writing task – ‘look at all these amazing poems – everyone has approached the assignment in their own way!’ – rather than selecting the ‘best’ examples based on a set of metrics which not all will meet.

In The Annotated Alice (p56), Alice is disappointed that she cannot go through the looking glass like her fictional counterpart ‘Alice through the looking glass’ (by Lewis Carroll). She asks her mother if she would go into another world if she went through the looking glass: ‘No, she said:/I’d wake up in hospital, being mended,/and I was so disappointed. I never meant/to stay on the nonsense side.’(2017, p56). Please note that the nonsense side here refers to the neurotypical world, and possibly also the adult world. Kate Fox in her collection The Oscillations says that many of her poems in the collection ‘touch on neurodiversity – the idea that, as in biodiversity, there is a strength in the differences of people with conditions such as autism and ADHD who think and experience the world differently’. (2020, p69). In this post, I write with a similar emphasis on some of the perceived strengths and differences of neurodivergent writers. ‘Diagnosing’ autistic writers? Opal Whiteley (1976). The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart. Adapted by Jane Boulton. Tioga Publishing Company. Recommended reading and listening from other neurodivergent writers and artists He continues: “As a first reader, my role is explicitly not to correct anything. My role is to listen and study and glean how they wield patterns. Once I understand [the writer’s] particular modes of languaging, then my role changes from listener to steward. I am simply there to make sure that the process by which their words find readers is consensual, joyful, and minimally limited by any preconceptions regarding what a book is or how it should move.” 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.A considerable added bonus of taking a universal design approach to classroom supports is that undiagnosed pupils can also benefit – a range of techniques and practical supports are suggested in Johnson and Rutherford (2019). For example: 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.”

The Oscillations by Kate Fox was released in 2021. This is a wonderful book of poems, many of which deal with the experience of being autistic, including differences in communication between autistic and neurotypical people. As we have seen, autistic artist Megan Rhiannon’s definition of autism includes differences in how people communicate. Fink, E., Deighton, J., Humphrey, N., & Wolpert, M. (2015). Assessing the bullying and victimisation experiences of children with special educational needs in mainstream schools: Development and validation of the Bullying Behaviour and Experience Scale. Research in developmental disabilities, 36, 611-619. Erin Ekins (2021). Queerly Autistic: The Ultimate Guide For LGBTQIA+ Teens On The Spectrum. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. 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: A film combining poetry and illustration exploring the disabled experience of being in the world during the Covid-19 pandemic. Focused on the act of going to the supermarket, AISLE will open up a discussion about the ways in which disabled people have been forced to relinquish their independence during this time.

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When I read a poetry book, I have Post-It flags at the ready. When I read a poem I like, I mark it with a flag. That way, when I revisit the book later, I can easily find the poems I like and not worry so much about the ones that did not stand out to me. With Pensiero’s collection of poetry, I flagged quite a few poems. However, I feel like a good number went unmarked. I don’t expect every poem in a collection to be a winner. Yet, with this book, I felt like bored while reading some of the poems. When all you have is one theme for a collection of poetry, it gets hard to create poems that are unique enough to stand out. Maybe that is why I did not like more poems in the collection. There definitely were some poems that I felt like I had read earlier in the collection. Furthermore, I noticed a lot of the poems rhymed. Poetry does not have to rhyme, and Pensiero knows that. Not all of her poems rhymed. However, a lot of them were rhyming poems. I felt overwhelmed by rhyme. I wish the poems had explored more than just rhyme. But, I want to be clear; Pensiero is not a bad poet. In fact, she is a darn good poet. I can tell from the poems I enjoyed that she has it in her to write great poetry. I just feel like she limited herself in this collection. Jaclyn, if you are reading this, please keep writing. I want to see what you can do with other themes. Beyond these basic facts, neurodiversity has socio-political implications for education. These implications have largely been described by autistic scholars but are now embraced far more widely. The neurodiversity paradigm has three main components – all consequences of the basic fact of neurodiversity as applied to society.

About: Jon is both a contemporary Artist and researcher. He works in many differing media including sound, drawing and performance, often referencing his autism, synaesthesia and dyslexia, all interwoven with history, science, time and his past experiences. One of the first nonspeaking poets I worked with, Meghana Junnuru, has grown from one word to one poem to one chapbook to co-founding her own advocacy and co-housing non-profit, the Autism Sibs Universe (ASU). Along the way she enlisted her brother Chetan Junnuru, who is also nonspeaking, as her collaborator and co-editor in all things. In writing together, they wield an astounding balance of simplicity and surprise, always expanding my understanding of autistic experience. Meghana and Chetan smell water the way I smell coffee. They revel in the idea of “zero point,” a state where “humans can merge with their infinite presence and live a creatively authentic life.” They harness the alapa–the underlying rhythmic structure of an Indian raga–to reinvent the autistic body as the “alapa body,” a porous mode of “enriched musical patterns suffused with nurturing connections.” In May, Meghana and I will be in San Francisco to be interviewed for The Neurodiversity Project. 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. I know a lot of other poets feel, as I did, that whenever they first encountered the world of poetry, they had found their tribe.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. Another benefit of adoption of a neurodiversity-affirmative approach is the shift in focus away from modification of a person against a norm, and towards cultivation of that individual on their own terms. The potential for damage to wellbeing that comes from approaches which focus on correction is clear. In worst case scenarios – and all too often in our experience – this can lead to mental health crises, exclusion or anxiety-related school non-attendance. In contrast, a focus on combating stigma associated with neurodivergence, and on flourishing, nurtures positive self-regard. This can only support engagement with education and maximise learning potential. The challenge for teachers and schools First, variability between people in how they learn is natural, and indeed this variability is a collective strength for the human race. Second, there is no one better or correct way to be, and all neurotypes are equally valued. In the words of autistic scholar Jim Sinclair: ‘Grant me the dignity of meeting me on my own terms – recognize that we are all equally alien to each other and that my ways of being are not merely damaged versions of yours.’ Third, neurodiversity, just like other dimensions of diversity such as ethnicity, gender or sexuality, is something that needs to be understood in the context of social and interpersonal dynamics. In other words, the lives of neurodivergent people are heavily dictated by the reactions of others; by stigma, prejudice, discrimination and ignorance. The neurodiversity movement is a catch-all term that refers to any efforts to apply these ideas in policy and practice, just as the feminist movement aims to apply and realise the concept of gender equality. Becoming neurodiversity-affirmative

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. 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

The new commissions

The programme was established in a partnership between BBC Arts, Arts Council England, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Arts Council of Wales and Creative Scotland to mark the 25th anniversary of the passing of the Disability Discrimination Act into law, forming part of wider disability programming across the BBC. I don’t really like seeing “autistic” and “inspire” in the same sentence. I’m inspired by good art whoever does it but I don’t want to see autistic people as “inspirational”. It’s allowed me to claim this interest as something beautiful and valuable; something that helped me survive by giving me another world to escape into and something worthy of writing poetry about.