Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

My Mind Is A Forest: An Autistic Wandering Through The Language Of Silence And The Poems Of Mary Oliver, Torri Blue

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

The autistic experience has been widely medicalized, pathologized, mischaracterized, and misunderstood. Through this series of essays, I attempt to paint an alternative picture of (an) autistic life—one not defined by deficits, but (at the risk of sounding cliché) differences—by re-storying autism through an Autistic Poetic.

Autistic Poetics, or the poetry of autistic existence, offers to our imagination a new way of relating to the world—alternative pictures of what it means to be human and all the possibilities therein. Autists, as human beings who often express being more at home with the earth-others and more-than-human world, can offer our writings as …