CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

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[Cheerful theme music begins] 
 
This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Some adults struggle to communicate with students who have autism and try to “fix them.” But what if we found a way to help these students use their natural gifts to convey their thoughts and feelings? Chris Martin, an award-winning poet and celebrated educator, works with non-speaking autistic children and adults, teaching them to write poetry. In his latest book, May Tomorrow Be Awake, Chris introduces the techniques he uses in the classroom and celebrates an inspiring group of young neurodiverse thinkers and their electric verse. In this episode, queer, transgender, autistic author and educator Nick Walker has a conversation with Chris about the mind, language, human potential, and the lessons we can learn from one another.  

This episode was recorded during a live online event on August 18th, 2022. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

[Theme music concludes] 

Nick Walker: Chris, hello! 

Chris Martin: Hello, how are you doing? 

Nick: Hello. Welcome, Oh, very good. Well, it has been a long time since you and I got to have a conversation and the last time we had a conversation, neither of us had published a book and now we both have, so that's very exciting. [Chris laughs] Congratulations, first of all, and let's talk a little bit about this book. So, you work teaching poetry, you teach poetry writing and that's mostly what this book is about, your experiences teaching poetry writing, specifically largely to non-speaking autistic writers and so I would just love to start out hearing about that. How did you get started on that?  

Chris: Yeah, I mean it was a long, long process and it began somewhat haphazardly, I would say. When I was a baby poet living in New York, I wanted to teach in the schools and I got a job at an after-school program in South Brooklyn and this is in 2003, I ended up being kind of a utility player there where I was teaching comic book design [Nick: Mmm!] and a class on like rap composition, I coached girls basketball and the when the other teaching artists were having difficulty integrating students into their classes, sometimes the director would just have me hang out with them and my first instinct was to do poetry. I only learned kind of later that they were autistic, and I didn't really know much about autism at the time. So, you know, I feel like in retrospect, that was actually a really good thing because prevailing ideas at the time would have forged, created a real wedge between me and these students because of what I wanted to do with them, what I imagined they were capable of. 

There was one student in particular who was just incredibly passionate about the Planet of the Apes. The original Planet of the Apes movie and so we you know, I tried to engage him with some like traditional forms and it just wasn't working. So finally, I was like okay why don't we write a poem-ization of the film? You tell me about the film and like we can figure it all out and he just went for it and over the period of weeks, he completed his epic Planet of the Apes poem-ization, and I loved it so much. I was so excited about it just on the level of art. So, we decided to bring it to his teachers, his day teachers, the director thought it might be enlightening and so I came early one day and met with them, and we passed it out and I was just kind of glowing you know, and they had this very strange response.  

They were like a little bit befuddled, a little bit awestruck. One teacher was even crying, I was so confused about what was going on and it took me many years to kind of piece together after working with many other students, understanding what their experiences in school had been like. That these teachers were, you know, really taking it in that moment how little they had been able to reach the imaginative breadth of where this student was at and perhaps, even their concept of his humanity had been lacking until that moment.  

But that got me hooked and that's one of the reasons why our organization is called Unrestricted Interest because it was clear that these so-called restrictive interests with abnormal intensity were exactly the perfect place to start and that as poets, we could just take some time to revel in whatever that passion or area of devoted study might be. Then we could kind of move from there and discover new territory.  

But it was only within the last six years that I started working with non-speaking autistic writers and that was kind of like a quantum leap in some ways around what I was finding to be this really amazing reciprocity between poetry, autism and autistic individuals. One of the things I'd begun to notice when I had to explain it to people because when I started the organization of course people were like, “So like this makes no sense to me. First of all, autistic people are only supposed to be good like STEM subjects, right? Then poetry is the most complicated and alienating thing in the world. How does that make sense?” So, you know, it was very much an education for me and how much both of these like in some ways art forms being autistic and writing poetry were just so poorly understood. So, I had to bridge that gap for people, and I would say that in my experience autistic life is deeply patterned, it's sensory rich and for me that's the best kind of poems, like thoughtfully, creatively patterned, carefully patterned, then that sensory, you know, immense sensory detail.  

So when I first started working with not speaking autistic writers, I noticed that was ratcheted up even a little bit more and beyond that their particular approach to language was really as unmasked as it gets and that's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, like just how much we mask our language or maybe aren't even given the opportunity to discover what our language is, how we would use language if given the opportunity. We're just conditioned into these particular modes and a lot of these writers I work with, you know, a lot of them had to wait a long time for the communication supports to express themselves but they developed patterns and particularities with language that are just so startling.  

Nick: Beautiful, beautiful. So in terms of communication supports and this is this is something that I think a lot of people are unaware of that is shifted in a big way in the world over the past, you know, maybe a couple decades because it used to be that when an autistic person couldn't speak they were called nonverbal [Chris: Right.] meaning they can't use words and in retrospect, that seems very ironic because of course when you give the proper communication supports the ability to type and such you know, they can't speak but are often extremely gifted with words. They're highly verbal, it is just not spoken and what we're finding now as the research increases on autism and the neurology of it and such, what we're seeing is often the lack of oral speech is just a motor control issue. For so many decades really, there was this assumption that they were, you know, defective mentally, that if an autistic person couldn’t speak, they must be lacking in intelligence and not capable of understanding language, really not relating to their verbal sphere or the spirit of communication and agency at all. It was very dehumanizing, it was presumption of incompetence and one of the slogans of the Autistic Rights Movement especially among non-talking autistic activists, has been presume competence and we're really seeing that, okay, they're not nonverbal, they're just non-speaking and I still see, I still encounter people using the archaic term nonverbal and you know I generally correct it when I see it.  

But that I guess brings me to the question, I mean part of what's happened is the sort of work that you're doing, bringing the words of non-speaking autistic people out into the world. You know, supporting that offering venues for publication and just in some of that involves advances in technology and that can mean electronic technology or just even technologies in terms of new clever ways to come up with doing things. So, I'd love to hear a little more about that in terms of what sort of communication supports do your students use? What is it? What are the methods and equipment and such that allow a non-speaking, autistic person to get their words out, onto paper and to print.  

Chris: Yeah, I want to thank you for making that distinction with nonverbal and not speaking and that's one of the things I love about your book Neuroqueer Heresies, is that it's such an incredibly, practically, useful resource guide to language and to the importance of distinctions when it comes to language. There's two things there before I talk about communication supports, I think it's a really interesting one and of course, there's a degree of self-selection, when it comes to this, but the writers who I work with who have come to me, because they're interested in poetry, they I would say 95% of them are hyper lexical. So that they not only have a larger vocabulary than I do but they also know multiple languages. So, there's that incredible paradox right? Compared to how we've been taught through that nonverbal lens. But then there's also this thing on top of it which is really extraordinary which is a deep lyricality and I feel like that is something that you know that poetry helps kind of bring that alive for other people.  

I feel like this is a very good crossover with communication supports because I have a lot of writers that I work with whose writing is extremely slow, right? They are in some cases using a letter board and either using their finger or using a pencil backwards to indicate letter by letter, with a laminated letter board held up in front of them or a stencil letter board that they actually go through the letters to make it more clear. You know, you're talking about one letter every couple, five seconds or something like that and then there's sometimes they will hit between, or you know, the whole process can take even for a short poem like a haiku length poem can take 10 or 20 minutes just to- not to think it, just to write it because they usually thought the whole thing beforehand often. But what I love to see is a line can take a very long time and then the second line comes and there's this like an internal rhyme somewhere or there's all this like lyrical information being sustained through all of that sensorimotor challenge and effort. To me that's what's even more exciting or improbable than the hyper lexical nature. Being able to keep the sound of what you want through all of that and it's just remarkable.  

Yeah, I think right now it's just, there's so much more available to non-speaking autistic individuals than there was 10 years ago, that's because methods kind of proliferated, there are several different methods. Some of them are spelling to communicate, we partner with an organization called IASC, the International Association for Spelling as Communication, and we do a monthly open mic on online with non-speaking or unreliably speaking individuals, usually we get like a hundred people in the event and then we get like 20 writers and songwriters sharing stuff and it's amazing. But spelling in the way that I kind of just outlined that’s related to or is a variation in some ways of the rapid prompting method that was kind of famously devised by Soma Mukhopadhyay. I mean in relationship with her son Tito, an amazing non-speaking writer.  

And then there's I think a really interesting kind of spectrum of assisted typing and what I love about, not only having multiple methods, but also having gotten to the point where people can kind of way fare and try to figure out like what actually works for me? What works for me in a sensory motor way and then within that method, how do I make it mine? So that I think, you know, it used to be that methods were kind of airtight because of how much prejudice they were facing. I think now people find a little bit more flexibility so that they can make it their own and can actually find like this is the way for me within this method that works best. And yeah, so it's remarkable. It's remarkable especially when you get in a room of non-speakers who are all utilizing different methods, at different speeds, with different little variations.  It's, its own really amazing, kind of diversity within neurodiversity. 

Nick: Mhm. Yes, lovely. And speaking of neurodiversity, you know, obviously, you know you're you are, you came into this as you said, you know, not really knowing anything about autism.  So, you know, it's a discovery process. It's very different from someone who comes in as someone who's been trained in sort of the mainstream academic and professional discourse on autism and might come in with a lot of terrible preconceptions about autistic limitations.  

And you get to come in, you know, just learning from the reality of the people you're working with, which is beautiful, and you don't come in with any preconceived limitations since you know no sense that, oh these people are going to be limited in this particular way and I think that clearly opened up this beautiful realm of possibility. Now to the best of my knowledge, you're not autistic yourself but you are neurodivergent in some way yes, you're not entirely neurotypical either. So, I'm very curious about that and about what sort of self-knowledge you have gained doing this work?  

Chris: Yeah, I was first diagnosed with ADHD when I was 17 and it was clear throughout my childhood that I was different, and I was what people sometimes called twice exceptional. Although I really love to now challenge that with these non-speaking, autistic writers I work with who are deeply twice exceptional, if you want to go by that rubric. But yeah, I was the kind of kid who did well in school when I was focused but I also would burst out singing in the middle of class without realizing I was doing it and I would get the report cards always like we love Chris but it is very hard to have him in class [both laugh] and yeah, it was interesting because all the hyperactivity kind of dropped out when I went through puberty.  

So, it was much easier for me to mask, and I'd already had gone through some social upheaval where people had- you know, the pain of social relations what that entails. [Nick: Mhm.] And so, I had grown pretty adept at seeming neurotypical and also you know with that diagnosis ADHD at the time where I got it, you’re just told you have a deficit, a disorder and there's no community to receive you, there's no way to think about it at that time, where it felt like, oh, I could really run with this. I love your suggestion of the kinetic cognitive style, or cognitive kinetic style, can’t remember (Nick: Kinetic cognitive, yeah.] I think because that's such a good, I identify with that so strongly. 

Nick: Yeah. Someone just asked me during a talk one time, during the Q&A they were like, is there, is there a non-pathologizing way to talk about ADHD without all these you know, it’s got deficit and disorder in it, such pathologizing language. I just kind of pulled that off the top of my head, you know, kinetic cognitive style, but it's catching on. [laughs]  

Chris: Absolutely and you know, I love how that also dovetails with what we're learning about autism and how much of a sensory motor, how that complexity is so expressive of what an autistic life looks like, feels like, and moves like, so the kinetic part of it I think is so important.   

Then as I got older and got out of college and started to teach, I was glad that I had the diagnosis because I was finding myself so drawn towards these particular students, it helped to know that, you know, we had this degree of fellowship to begin with, right? So, what's been just beyond joyful, and healing is to constantly deepen those relationships with others who are neurodivergent in different ways and then allow that to deepen my own relationship to neuro divergence. I have, you know, Marc Eati, who's one of the main writers I feature in this book, has been in many ways, my greatest mentor along these lines and has been pushing me over the years to think a little harder about the ways in which my neurodivergence might surface. So, I would say that I'm definitely not not autistic and I've gone through some processes that back that up and I'm still trying to kind of figure out what that means to me and how it works for me.  

Now, one of the things that- and that’s actually my next book is thinking through all this stuff. It's called Becoming Otherwise [Nick: Oh, that’s beautiful.] and it's very exciting, I just love it. You know, beyond everything, I just love the community I've found and the kinds of ways in which we can inter- I mean, when I get together with my non-speaking, autistic friends, you know, everything else, just all that weight falls away. You know, all the masking, all the armor, it's just like when we can be with each other, exactly, with all of who we are and that feels so good. I think that one of the other writers that’s featured, Iman Wukayla, she wrote this poem where she talked about tilted thinking and I was immediately like “woah, that has frisson for me, I like that” and so I asked her to kind of talk about it more with me and we both got really excited about this idea of tilted thinkers and as that is kind of a way of like just stepping outside of the language, the medical language and the diagnostic language. How are we going to invent this for ourselves? What does it sound like? What does it look like? So that idea of being a tilted thinker, very strong for me, it's very exciting to build a community around that even just our little kind of set.  

Nick: Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful, I love it. I love it. You talked about artistic lyricality and that really resonates with me, and I see that with just autistic writers in general. You know, there's so much non-speaking autistic poetry and then even the prose writing like Aetna Mukhopadhyay’s prose, so sensory rich and such a beautiful unique distinctive way of relating to language. Really the language has a feel to it, but then also speaking autistics as well. You know, I see because there's this whole emerging genre of autistic speculative fiction too, Dora Raymaker’s books, Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, The Resonance, Ada Hoffman's trilogy, The Outside and the books that follow, and there's this whole real sort of emerging renaissance in autistic speculative fiction, particularly queer autistic speculative fiction, I mean my own writing, my own fiction writing and comic writing is part of that as well and I see that same lyricism there and it looks a little different.  

But there is this way of relating to the beauty of language and the patterns of language and the musicality of it. This search for how do we precisely express sensory experiences that were not shared by the people who developed the language in the first place. [Chris: Yeah.] How do you twist in tilt and play with language to do that and it's just lovely to see it happen and the I think I'm really fascinated by the range there.  

Of course, it's a bit of a cliche to talk about autism as a spectrum. I kind of hate that term in a way, because people use it in a very pathologizing way, but, you know, I hear people use “on the spectrum” as a euphemism because they think it's shameful to say autistic, but, but there is this vast spectrum of experience and yet, these commonalities. I think that's fascinating to me. I'm curious about what common themes you see emerge in the writing of the autistic poets and writers you work with, what are the themes and patterns? What are the things where if you encountered the work of a non-speaking, autistic poet you never encountered before, for instance, what are the things where you get like “I bet this is an autistic poem.” What are those distinctive qualities from your experience? 

Chris: I've never thought about that, I'd be really curious to do that challenge. I remember in grad school, getting an MFA we’d always do one workshop where no one put their names on things and you always just knew who was who for the most part but yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, you're right, the range is astounding. It's one of the reasons I got really excited about this book and about what it might do in the world, because I felt like I was just, you know, every single session I was working with a writer, they would bring out something, just so vibrant and so different than the other person and non-speaking, autistic writers are so used to being the exception of having to represent all non-speaking, autistic writers. People who still wield this outrageous organized prejudice against non-speaking autistic writers, will attack them one at a time, right? One of the things that seems so exciting to me was what if I can bring them all together into this book and do these close readings of their work and people can see, like, oh my goodness, each one of these writers is doing something that I've never seen before and it's utterly different from this other writer. That they are… I would say they're in some ways the only thing that goes across the board would be just breaking the rules, you know, but in many cases disregarding the rules, it's just kind of like that's where it's like most fluid. I think when the writers are just like listen, I'm not really interested in devoting any energy to what rules language has, how I feel it should be used and the patterns I feel like it should. What carries the internal rhythms of my own thought? But there is some interesting subject matter, I will always find these little crossovers where at one point I got really excited because I noticed that almost every writer I work had a poem about volcanoes or like lava.  

Nick: I want to get back to something you talked about earlier about masking, I don't know in case the audience is unfamiliar, I'll say, you know, masking is passing essentially, it's learning to perform neuro typicality. So, for an autistic person or other neurodivergent person to act like they're not autistic to try to imitate the embodiment and social style of non-autistic person, essentially to hide who they are, to be to be in the closet in order to avoid the sort of abuse and exclusion and such that autistic people encounter in the world. You know very much like being a being in the closet, passing, you know so many oppressed minority groups over the years have found some equivalent of like, some of us can hide and find it safer to hide and pass for a member of the dominant majority.  

There's this very interesting division in the autistic community because autistic people who can speak, are pushed relentlessly to mask, they’re pushed relentlessly, you know, subjected to these like behavioral therapies that are extremely abusive and trauma inducing to say force autistic people to mask and it's like to get around in the world, all the job, whatever it's what is expected to mask and hide being autistic and act like a non-autistic person. I write about that in my own work, a lot about unmasking and embracing autistic embodiment and artistic modes of sociality and to drop all of the tension and physical armoring that one has to put on to mask.  

And then the non-speaking autistic people are not pushed to mask in the same way because people give up on them. People decide oh, they're never going to hold a job. They're never going to have friends or just in, you know, in their own little world, disconnected from everyone. They have a very limited intellect or no self-awareness and nobody bothers trying to make the mask because they assume that they'll never be able to participate meaningfully in the non-autistic world at all. And that is you know which is terrible. Of course, in the ableist world you know the non-speaking autistics are called low functioning as if making noises with your mouth is the highest function of a human being. Then there's speaking autistics called high functioning.  

So, I discovered, when I started this process for myself of unmasking and of letting myself move like an autistic person, recovering my autistic embodiment, my autistic style, and just letting myself be flamingly autistic, what I found is that it opened up cognitive capacities and creative capacities that I'd cut myself off from by masking. It was like I couldn't be my full creative self without being my fellow autistic self. So, I am wondering for the non-speaking autistics, who haven't received the same pressure to mask, if you think that's help to leave their creativity unhindered as well? 

Chris: It's a fascinating question and I would say one yes, I mean I feel like it's incalculable how much time those of us, who can, or might pass and actually everyone spends on learning the ways they should be in the world and the ways they should talk, the ways they should write, the ways they should stand and there's just so much energy poured into that. That could be poured into all these other things, it's just mind-blowing to think about.  

So, I think you're right in a very real sense that not speaking autistics who have not gotten caught in the gravity of that because they've been thought uncatchable to some degree. Have put that energy into different things, into different stores of creative output. And what is also really fascinating to me and in writing this new book I've been thinking about it a lot, is how it doesn't mean non-speaking autistic people avoid the capture of all of the normative pressures, right? [Nick: Mhm.] I have a writer that I'm very close with who could never be captured by neurotypicality but the very first poem that they ever wrote with me, had a very like heteronormative vibe to it. I was like, okay, you know, it's age appropriate, I guess that's what's going on. I get it. But even then, it felt a little false to me, a little performative and as we got to know each other at some point, I brought up asexuality and I can't remember what was the context for it. But the writer was like, wait, I could be that? Yeah! Sure, you could be that and they were like, oh yeah. Well, that's what I am. And I was like, wow, that's really interesting because that first poem you wrote, you know, felt really performative in this other direction. They're like, oh yeah, I was just trying to fit in and like to meet expectations.  

And so, you have this person who, in one way avoids the capture, in other ways, is completely captured until they see that there are alternatives, right? So, it's really fascinating to me that none of us is immune. We're all intersectionality being- capture is attempted on intersectional levels all the time and so you may be very free in one sense and then totally closeted in another sense. But I do think that as you do like lean into the liberatory feeling of, you know, of letting go of that armor of letting go of those masks, you do find like, well, maybe it's not just that I’m neurodivergent, maybe I can't really in any good faith, like subscribe to being like straight. What does that even mean to me anymore? Other than I'm going to agree to buy into this system that I know is incredibly like violent and coercive. And so, I do love seeing how all of those things start to kind of blossom and open up together, those questionings. And I think that there's something about autistic experience, thinking, embodiment that really lends itself to that intersectionality liberated thinking and it's something that makes me really excited about the ways in which autistic writers and thinkers can be leaders. As we move into what is hopefully like a new paradigm for all of human culture.  

Nick: Yes, yes. Beautiful, and I certainly have experienced this firsthand, you know, I mean, of course I write about neuroqueering, and this whole idea that you know heteronormativity and sort of compulsory heteronormativity is inextricably entwined with compulsory neuro normativity the performance of heteronormative binary gender roles is really inseparable from the performance of neurotypicality and you know, it's a very high proportion of autistic people are transgender too, compared to non-autistic. 

Chris: Yes, including non-speaking autistic people, I work with several transgender non-speaking autistic people.  

Nick: Yeah, my experience, just generally after like two decades being involved in the autistic community and culture. What I see is autistic people who were like, wildly spectacularly queer, very gender non-conforming queer in all kinds of exciting ways. And then those who are performing heteronormativity in so strongly that it's very clearly a kind of desperate act, you know, something they're doing because you know, they were pressured or abused into it in childhood, which was my experience as well. You know, I'm coming out, came out as trans very late in life. I'm at the very early stages of gender transition. It's, you know, not even visible yet and it's like I'm going to spend my 50s transitioning and it's fascinating. There was this huge gap, you know, there's like a very long gap between me coming out as autistic and coming out as trans. I sort of thought I'd done all the coming out I needed to do. I mean, you know. Okay, I'm queer and autistic and that's like you know that's like I established that really young and then it’s a big surprise and it was very much a result of dropping this ongoing unmasking process of dropping the performance of compulsory neurotypicality, discovering my autistic embodiment like when I got far enough, that process, I had to start dropping the fake masculine embodiment. I'd been, you know, brutally trained to do in childhood and now it's like, well, okay, here I am. Like, oh look, I'm trans as well. 

Chris: And you say, “flamingly autistic,” I feel like that's one thing, and this may feel somewhat like an insignificant word but to me it's really crucial is exuberance. [Nick: Mhm.] There's something about autistic exuberance that really meets queer exuberance, [Nick: Yes.] that really meets trans exuberance, all of those things, disabled exuberance. I think that you know, like maybe if you're a boy, right? You can be exuberant but I'm your man. You're not really allowed to be exuberant and, in that way, you're not allowed to let it bubble up and so you see how those all come together. And then also I think that's where it meets liberatory thinking so strongly because you think about like Tony K Bambara and like we have to make the revolution irresistible. To me that's when the exuberance embodies. It's like yes, I want that, like that person is experiencing joy, that person is like radiating joy. I want some of that, like I feel like there's something about exuberance that has always been… and I think it's drawn me into the work too. It's like I love this person, like this person is bringing so much joy to be around and it's, and it is very contagious. The exuberance. 

Nick: Yeah, no I agree, and joyfulness is revolutionary in a way and the autistic joy of finding joy, you know, language and the sensory experience and the oh! This texture here, and ooo! Volcanoes! And trains and I'll do this gesture and oh! My hand like this feels so good. I think it's revolutionary in the sense that as you say, often we're trained as part of neuro normative and heteronormative performance, not to express joy and exuberance and not to you know, thou shalt not delight in the tactile and the olfactory and such. [Chris: Totally.] But also, it's revolutionary because we're in this consumer society where the sort of the market forces tell us what we should want, what we should desire, what we need to consume. If you can find absolute naked joy, in running your fingers, over particular surfaces, and play with running water. You're pretty hard to market to because you're so easily fond of joy and in the everyday, I think that in such a heavily consumer society, that's revolutionary. I could find all of this joy without buying a product.  

Chris: Totally. Yeah, there's that book How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell, right? A Bay Area writer and that idea of like, you know, the subtitle is like resisting the attention economy, it's like who resists the attention economy better that autistics right and also, that idea, I think attention is so important because the ways in which autistic attention, luckily now I know from personal experience and actually being with people that it's so inclusive of the environment, right, and the more human world. There's lots of stuff like neuroscience to back this up but in just my own experience of it and the writing that these writers do you can tell that their attention is immersed in like natural forms. What Adam Welfonz, one of my favorite writers, calls them atmospheres, you know, and there is a participatory importance, revolutionarily, participatory aspect of that. Right? To say, when I write, I write with the atmospheres. When I dance, I dance with the wind. When I'm outside I hear the language of leaves, as Hannah Emerson writes. You know it's all of these things, just escape the attention economy altogether or reinvent it.  

Nick: Oh, absolutely and that brings me to something I wanted to ask you to riff off of a little bit which is the title of the book, May Tomorrow be Awake because that you were talking about that and that immediately like as you talked about that exuberance and that dancing with the atmospheres and like that I flashed to the title, May Tomorrow be Awake. I want to hear where that title came from and what it means to you. 

Chris: Yeah, I mean so we just had a launch for the book locally a couple days ago and I got to read from the book and share some work from Mark and Mac, who live here locally and then do a Q&A with Mark on the book, May Tomorrow be Awake is from Mark's poem from the third, Mark ever wrote. So, in some ways you could even call it the second poem Mark ever wrote. The first one, we just like established one that we could find something together and two that Mark was ready, was going to go for it.  

So, the first chapter of the book talks about the first like full poem that Mark wrote and then you have to wait until the last chapter to get the second one and the second one is the poem that has may tomorrow be awake in it and this notion, there's a couple different aspects of it. One, of course you can think about the kinds of stupor that proliferate through the attention economy through capitalism, through all these normative forces where we slumber on, what we talk about like the real world like, but that's not the real world. Like the real world, the way we talk about it is actually the world of dreams and stupors and to awaken out of that to what is actually happening in the world. Let's actually live in the world. It is what I think a lot of people are doing right now is the pandemic sped that process up.  

One author I think about a lot is Robin Wall Kimmerer and her book Braiding Sweet Grass that I think has helped so many people realize how to rekindle a relationship to the more than human world. I think that's part of the awakeness of tomorrow, but one of the things that Mark also means when he uses that, is that… is to be awake to each other and that's part of the, you know, the subtitle right Our Neurodiverse Future, which is with speaking with you it's funny because people think about it as like a revolutionary idea and I love that, like, I can always be like, listen, it's neurodiverse whether you want it to be or not, we're living in the neurodiverse present, that term just describes the way that all our brains are.  

Nick: Right. Humanity is neurodiverse because we just are.  

Chris: Right? So that's like I kind of slipped this subtitle in that everyone thinks is like out there but it's really just like no that's we are already there. But Mark is actually really focused on that, and you know, when he and his sibling founded their first nonprofit, what they wanted to do and are continuing to do is create a neurodiverse living community that has all kinds of services. Most of them are artistic and that creates housing for people. Mark has been really insistent on everything being neurodiverse, from the beginning and gets really frustrated when he's in a room with a bunch of other people and they're just like looking to him to kind of ideate everything and/or leaving him completely out of it. It feels like a very black and white thing sometimes and he's like, no we actually have to figure out how to do this together. We need to figure out how to be awake together, not take turns being awake, not like we do it. We just follow the autistic person because that's like the PC way to do it. Not, you know, we followed a neurotypical person because they can navigate the neurotypical world. It's like we have to actually figure out how to do this together and so I think that and what you will find in the book is that Mark’s poem, he edited it with his sibling Max and then they wrote annotations to it, which are really amazing and so you'll see the scope of that vision of May Tomorrow be Awake everything it holds.  

Nick: Oh beautiful. I want to clarify for the audience here, about the terminology, but I want to clarify something for the audience about this word neurodiverse. So, a person who is not neurotypical, who's not performing, you know neuro normativity, a person who's not neurotypical is neurodivergent. So, when we talk about autistic people, kinetic cognitive people, people with down syndrome, we're talking about neurodivergent. Neurodiverse, the human species is neurodiverse the same way it's ethnically diverse and culturally diverse. There's no human being who's not a part of the spectrum of human cultural diversity, right? There's no person who's completely outside of culture, unless they're, you know, feral and raised by wolves or something. Everyone's part of the spectrum of cultural diversity, everyone is part of the spectrum of human neurodiversity. So, we're a neurodiverse species when we talk about a neuro-diverse classroom or a neuro diverse organization, that means an organization that's made up of lots of different people with different bodies, minds, and different neurocognitive styles. So, you know, there's no such thing as a neurodiverse person and that's a misuse of the term that I see a lot in corporate culture these days, it's sort of part of the neoliberal corporate thing of using diverse as a euphemism for marginalized. 

Chris: Right. But what do you think? As we push, we talk about liberatory, one of the things I'm really interested in this next book, if we can start to break down this concept of the individual and kind of show how every person is a composition of forces and selves and identifications, I wonder if neurodiverse then actually becomes appropriate again in this weird way, if you go far enough because the individual is multiple and then couldn't individual be neurodiverse.  

Nick: Well still the individual has one nervous system, but it’s sort of what I'm getting at with the concept of neuroqueering, I think there's this capacity to play with our neuroplasticity. I think it is under explored, the fact that we can and for me, I come to this from a Zen background of experiencing everything, as you know, everything is a flow, everything is a process. It was sort of a sense of the impermanence of things and so in a sense yeah, a person is just a locus of experience and identity and cognition and all of that are ever-shifting. I think that this is why I kind of push back against the idea of neuro types. You know or the idea of I mean autism is has been a useful category for understanding people, but it's important to push back against the tendency to just put people in boxes because I think identity is always fluid, the self is always fluid and we are able to be more free and joyful and creative, if we allow that to happen and don't try to narrow ourselves down, or other people.  

Chris: Yeah, or police the borders, right? 

Nick: Right. Exactly. Yes, beautiful. Well, this brings us kind of perfectly to time here, So 

Chris, I want to thank you. 

Chris: Thank you so much, Nick for your amazing questions.  

Nick: Oh, Chris, it's such a pleasure getting to speak with you. I'm so thrilled by your book and so thrilled to hear you got another one in the works.  

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, and Nikki Roda. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

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