Wild-Wired: neurodivergent and neuroqueer poetics
Introduction/Invitation. (Call for submissions.)
Dearest readers,
Neurodivergent being is its own kind of wild: an ecology of body-becoming and relation that resists the enclosures of neurotypicality-as-norm, refusing the containments of thought and language imposed by ableism’s judgments, pressures, and constraints. Our neurodivergent, neuroqueer, and neurowild attunements alive us in a wilderness, an open field of differing and ungovernable grammars, intensities, synaesthesias, togethernesses, rhythms and sways, sensory choreographies, unbounded formations and worldings.
Wild-Wired is a new column with ANMLY/Anomalous Press, edited by yours truly. This is a project that has been germinating in me for a while as I have been in a process of study, writing, and conversation with human and more-than-human kindreds about neurodivergence and neuroqueerness — two words abundantly full with our collective and vast differences of experience of body/mind.
Neurodivergence refers to variations in neurological functioning that are different from what is medically or socially considered the norm, or neurotypical. Neuroqueer as a term brings together the politics and frameworks of neurodivergence to intersect with those of queerness. (For a deeper elaboration, see the essay by Nick Walker, “Neuroqueer: An Introduction,” linked here.) I ascribe to the notion circulating within disability justice communities, that we are all neurodivergent, and the ideas of neurodivergence and neurotypicality are social constructions used by dominant culture (colonial culture; capitalist culture; carceral culture; white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, ableist culture) to govern and manage certain groups of people. Saying something is socially constructed does not mean it is not real: we live in a world that is organized to label differences in order to differentially allocate value, resources, and possibilities for life; a world that is, among other things, organized to most benefit those perceived as closest to neurotypical. But for something to be real and to shape our lived experiences does not make it a universal truth and monolithic, static fact, despite what centuries of biological racism, eugenicist thought, and medical and psychiatric imperialism have claimed. To acknowledge this is the first step in refusing the hierarchies operating to oppress us through these categories.
Western culture has also historically insisted on the division between our minds and bodies, which has led many to believe that the neurological is purely about the brain. In contrast, disability justice and queer crip/disabled thought understand that when we speak of the neurological and of neurodiverse experiences, we are referring to the whole embodied-and-minded system. Indeed, “neuro” refers to the nervous system, which runs through the entire body. It is in every synaptic charge and fire in the brain as much as in every limb, every organ; it refers to material and immaterial elements of our being; our bodily matters — motor skills, pain, and physiological capacities, for example — as much as our affective, emotional, intellectual, and psychological wiring. It is as much operating in our present as it is in our past and possible futures, electric and extending us beyond our own skin.
My writing and research on sick/crip/disabled and neurodivergent politics and poetics have emerged out of my own living queerly with chronic illness and its impacts; my pursuit of, and being in community through, trauma healing work; my movement within disability justice, mutual aid, abolitionist, scholarly, and creative writing networks; and my experiences with hyper-empathy, porous subjectivity, and ancestral ways of knowing (psychic dreams, intuitions) that do not align with white, western norms for legitimate knowledge and being. At the intersections of all these things, I have come to articulate, explore, and love my neuroqueerness. And it feels like an especially important act of dissent to carve out space for neurodivergent voices here given the ways that the medical and psychiatric industrial complexes’ have pathologized different kinds of neurodivergence, enacting what Eunjung Kim calls “curative violence,” where conditions of body and mind veering from the norm are treated to be cured at all costs rather than integrated into society as valuable contributions in their difference. These histories of violence, as Chris Martin, JJJJJerome Ellis, and Remi Yergeau explore in their writing, have meant that many neurodivergent people have, in their unique relationship to language and world, been deemed deficient or lacking in coherence, sometimes entirely absent of any (intentional) meaning-making, and certainly not capable of the poetic, of world-making by way of the word.
Despite and through the challenges we face living in a world that so often not only doesn’t know how to love us, but isolates, incarcerates, and kills us again and again — thinking with other neurodivergent folks about what our differences gift us has been vital for me. What beauty and aliveness we make possible together during this blink-of-an-eye existence, this now, this moment. As non-speaking autistic poet Hannah Emerson writes in her poem, “Peripheral”:
Moment moment moment
moment keep in the moment.
This is, I believe, part of the necessary work of social transformation and world-building that language and relationships can do. To keep us in the moment non-linearly together, in the future-now of attuning to and expanding our senses for the otherwheres and otherwhens we yearn for. This is part of what I hope to offer you here as we foreground neurodivergent and neuroqueer writers: what we could maybe call “crip poesis.” That is to say, here in this column, through language and writing, I hope we will take on the liberatory project of, as abolitionist Mariame Kaba calls it, a “million different little experiments” — from our infinitely different little lifeworlds and wild embodied-and-minded wirings, to think and make the world, our collective being and relation, present and future, anew.
Within this freedom dreaming, we seek submissions of poems and poetic prose that sing and stim luminous your wild-wired feeling-with, your ecstasies and visions, griefs and yearnings — philosophical and ecological, surreal and hyperreal, erotic and subversive, perseverating and rearranging, echolalic and visceral, fractal and audacious. We want words that are as much tender as ferociously political, as much howling as embraced in the stillness of silences; words that scry at the intersections of neurodivergence, sexuality, gender, race, class, and nation; deviant syntax and spacetime that discomfort and disconcert neurotypicality’s stasis and monolith.
ANMLY, as a platform that is committed to uplifting under-represented voices and experimentation in the arts as well as “challenging conventions of form and format, of voice and genre” is a literary home I’m grateful to be welcomed into for the purpose of publishing Wild-Wired. Specifically, this column seeks submissions of poems and poetic prose from neurodivergent writers, including but not limited to those who identify with autism, ADHD, PTSD and CPTSD, OCD, sensory processing sensitivities, down syndrome, dyslexia and dyscalculia, stuttering, aphasia, and bipolar disorder, among other medically diagnosed and/or self-realized labels that get used for the vast diversity of our experiences, as well as those who altogether refuse these labels but live with and in the experience of neurodivergence in an ableist and neuronormative world.
We would especially love to receive work from Queer, BIPOC, and working-class neurodivergent writers.
Please submit the following in word .doc or .docx format to: heidi@anomalouspress.org
- ) Up to 5 poems (ideally at least 3, though this is not required) totaling no more than seven pages; or poetic prose/creative nonfiction of up to 3000 words.
2.) An author’s bio of 100–150 words.
3.) (Optional): 2–3 sentences reflecting on how your submission connects to the themes of neurodivergence and neuroqueerness, or what about it is important for us to know when reading your work.
It means so much to me to be able to hold your words.
Submissions are rolling.
With love,
heidi andrea
heidi@anomalouspress.org
Editor bio:
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (they/them) are a queer, neuroqueer, sick/disabled, brown/Colombian, poet, scholar, educator, and cultural worker. Their poetry collection, The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) won the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Their chapbook, Ephemeral, is the 2022 winner of the Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize and is forthcoming with EcoTheo Collective. They are a 2023 recipient of the Creative Capital Award, a VONA alum, and have received poetry fellowships from Zoeglossia, CantoMundo, Radar, and Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Their poetry and creative non-fiction have been published in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Normal School, Waxwing, and Wordgathering, among other places. They currently live in California.
