MAY TOMORROW BE AWAKE

Intimate portraits of neurodivergence.

Poet and educator Martin draws on more than 20 years of experience with autistic students to offer insights about how best to teach, inspire, and learn from them. Although he describes himself as “a White male who can selectively pass as cis, straight, able, and neurotypical,” in high school, Martin was diagnosed with ADHD, a neurodivergence he shares with his mother. “I have come to foreground neurodivergence in my way of moving through the world,” he writes. The reality of neurodivergence, he has found, contrasts with some commonly held assumptions: for example, that individuals with autism lack empathy or “theory of mind,” the ability to imagine what someone else is thinking or feeling. They “don’t just experience empathy on levels equal to their neurotypical peers,” writes Martin, “but in many cases exceed them.” The author’s approach to teaching is far different from the widely used applied behavior analysis therapy, which involves rewards and punishments for learning certain activities and behaviors. One student, who began ABA therapy at the age of 20 months, by age 3 “appeared to have settled into a form of deep interiority” that lasted for 17 years. Martin’s appreciative portraits of his students—and his close readings of their poems—provide ample evidence of how poetry writing spoke to their needs, abilities, and desires. “Over time,” he writes, “I began to discern how poetry’s patterned structure uniquely serves neurodivergent thinking—and vice versa—something I’d discovered in my own creative investigations.” Poetry’s formalized repetition and sensory detail offered autistic students a fertile linguistic outlet. Martin’s message is not only about unleashing the potential of autistic individuals, but about creating a world where “different modes of movement, of communication, of being and signing and pointing and singing and ticcing and typing” affords all people a new vision “of what it means to be human.”

A sensitive celebration of neuroscientific difference.