I'm fairly new here, but I've been lurking and reading for a bit before I registered. I'm also fairly actively searching out other autism and Asperger's blogs, magazines, discussion forums, etc. One thing that I've started to notice is the preponderance of writing, creative expression, etc. that goes on within the community, but that is relatively unacknowledged. Even here, where there are writing threads that are quite long, I find that there are a lot of writers that start out with questions about whether or not we can effectively write social interactions, other characters, etc.
I'm on the spectrum. I have an MFA in writing, I've staged plays, published short stories, and I'm working on a novel. The idea that we can't write effective social interaction never occurred to me.
What did occur to me is that the characters in my works often had a very, very different Theory of Mind from the characters in the works of my peers. Their writing was littered with statements that didn't push the plot forward, mushy, drawn-out, and ineffective passages with little of interest, and a healthy dose of narcissism. Now, I'm not excusing myself from these vices. The difference is that I noticed that they would defend these passages as their most truthful, most important sections of a given work.
Now, my diagnosis is fairly new. It wasn't until a self-injurious episode in my late 20s caused me to break most of the small bones in my right hand that I even sought out evaluation or help. So a lot of my "differences" I always attributed to style choices. Since I had to come to terms with myself, though, I'm finding that I am more capable of rendering the distorted sensory feed, the confusion, and the alienation that I've always felt in a way that my NT readers--many of them parents and relatives of people on the spectrum--are starting to appreciate.
This brings me around to the discussion part. I think we need a NeurAtypical literature. I think that these poems and stories I see other spectrum types working on need to self-consciously engage with the notion of being "other than" people expect you to be, and I think that they need to consciously expand on the first-person view of this condition. And NOT in the way memoir does.
So what do the other writers here think? If gays, African Americans, Asian Americans, socialists, Star Wars fans, etc. have "their own" literature to express their culture and tell their stories in a way that reflects their shared perspective, why don't we? And would you be willing to engage in both the conversation about "what it is" and in making it?
25 Aug 2011, 5:23 pm
