What do neurodiverse/neurodivergent writers need in order to flourish? As teachers, colleagues, and mentors, how can we best support them? And if you identify as neurodiverse/neurodivergent yourself, what strategies can help you cope with the demands of mainstream academic writing?

On April 18, I invited Eirini Tzouma for a lively conversation on "Supporting Neurodiverse Writers".  Eirini Tzouma is an Academic Development Advisor at the University of Durham and the author of a recent guest post in the Thesis Whisperer blog about the many challenges faced by neurodiverse writers in academe. As Eirini reminds us, "Neurodiversity/divergence isn't a problem to be fixed; it's a vital part of the mosaic of who we are."

In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, Eirini and I discussed neurodiversity and neurodivergence in scholarly writing. In the second hour, we led a hands-on workshop for paid subscribers in which we responded to questions from participants and led a brief writing experiment.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

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We all think, learn, and process and perceive information differently from person to person, so neurodiversity is a matter that concerns us all. Traditional approaches to education have not always recognised that diversity; but, thankfully, the tides are beginning to turn with conversations like this one between Helen and Eirini.

Some memorable quotes from this WriteSPACE Special Event:

• “Curiosity and learning are always the best starting place.”

• On terminology: “Neurodiversity can describe the diversity that exists in a room full of people that are ‘neurotypical’ (if such a thing exists) and ‘neurodivergent’… Some people, because they find that this is hard language and can be stigmatizing, prefer the term neurodiverse. Others want to claim it and say ‘Indeed there are neurotypical assumptions, and that’s why we need systematic change’ — these people often prefer the term neurodivergence.”

• “Most senior academics don’t realise that what works for them won’t work for everyone… In fact, life’s a bit like that! Nothing new is going to work for everyone.”

As a teacher, Eirini advocates for encouraging dialogue about neurodiversity/neurodivergence in the classroom or workplace and inviting people to express any specific needs. As students become more articulate about expressing their needs, a teacher may begin to worry that their workload will be weighed down by requests. However, Eirini counters this concern with the Theory of Universal Design, which focuses on improving accessibility for everyone. Overall, it is far more helpful to have students express their concerns directly to you than to fill in the gaps with assumptions and judgments.

Many of the 40 participants at the live event had a direct connection to the topic of writing with neurodiversity and wanted to share their stories. What struck me profoundly was the overwhelming similarity of their experiences. The story often begins with feeling misunderstood or being told you are doing things wrong in your early years. Then you embark on a journey of higher education and stumble across a diagnosis of dyslexia/ADHD/autism/or another form of neurodiversity in your late twenties or even early thirties. You may have been told that ‘you’re just not cut out for academe’, your supervisor may not be equipped with resources to help you, and you find yourself elbows deep in it all. Versions of this experience were repeated many times in our Special Event chat.

This is also the story of my brother, who was diagnosed with ADHD just last year at 26 years old, during the third year of his PhD. My brother struggled with writing in school but now consistently receives grades of A+. I’m always impressed by him — he really has the traits of a successful PhD student: amazing attention to detail, unwavering commitment and passion (aka a kind of beautiful nerdiness for a really niche area), out-of-the-box thinking, and deep creativity.

While there are many positive aspects to neurodivergence, some participants at the Special Event were wary of calling it “a superpower,” a term that can sound dismissive of the very real challenges faced by neurodiverse/neurodivergent writers in mainstream academic environments: skill regression, burnout, juggling many things at once, cycles of re-learning and re-adjusting, and avoiding tangential rabbit warrens in your research, among other things. From the discussion, I concluded that it’s useful to frame neurodiversity, especially ADHD, as neither a gift nor a disability, but rather a condition that requires management in non-stimulating (or specific) contexts. When you’re interested in a task, the ADHD brain will be highly motivated and may hyperfixate, which can keep you writing for hours on end. But if you find the task non-stimulating, your focus withers, writing flow dies up, and procrastination creeps in. By the same token, hyperfixation for long periods can often be overwhelming. Overall, checking in regularly with yourself and your motivation for the topic is key.

Eirini explained that, as yet, relatively few research-based articles have been published about the challenges of helping teachers, colleagues, and mentors support neurodiverse students, and fewer still offer strategies for coping with the demands of mainstream academic writing if you identify as neurodiverse/neurodivergent yourself. But don’t despair! I collected a few gems of wisdom from the Special Event participants, which I added to Eirini’s own reference list to create a writing with neurodiversity toolkit.

Teachers and students alike can benefit from Erini’s strategy “Starting on the Right Foot,” which she developed to help those with neurodiversity/neurodivergence engage in professional writing or working relationships. The strategy involves reflecting on your responsibilities, working style, and expectations, and it encourages you to communicate these openly with your working partner during what Eirini calls the “contractual stage.” Her resource is generously provided below so that you, too, can start on the right foot in conversations about writing with your students or colleagues.

A big thanks to Helen and Eirini for sharing their time, expertise and ideas so generously. If you did not attend or have not yet watched the recording, I hope you’ll make a cup of tea, get comfortable, and enjoy this wonderful discussion.

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can watch the recording of the full two-hour event in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them [. . .]
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

When we stand outside and look up at the stars, we cannot help feeling that we are a part of something much greater than ourselves, a mysterious cosmic dance that cannot be fully captured in human language or explained by the charts of the learned astronomer. At the same time, that “mystical moist night-air” touches our minds and bodies with a kind of astral intimacy, conveying messages that seem intended just for us.

The writing process can feel like that too sometimes: intimate, overwhelming, and altogether too vast and complex to comprehend. Whether we face that process on our own or in the company of others, we are all adventurers making our way in the dark.

Tupaia, the Tahitian celestial navigator who sailed with Captain James Cook on his first voyage to the South Pacific, did not find his way by starlight alone; he also knew how to read the swell of the ocean currents, the drift of the wind, the cries of the seabirds wheeling overhead, the types of fish that the sailors landed in their nets, and the texture of the seaweed that trailed from their bow. Tupaia’s extraordinary knowledge of the locations of surrounding islands—many of them hundreds of miles away—was recorded on a map that subsequent commentators labeled “primitive” because the relational network it conveyed did not employ European conventions of plotting directionality from north to south.

Tupaia’s map of the South Pacific, drawn by Captain Cook and others on board the Endeavor, makes perfect sense if you read it based on a Polynesian worldview .

Similarly, it took European sailors more than two centuries to realize that the intricate rebbelib (stick charts) used by Marshall Islanders as navigational aids are designed to map the intensity of the ocean swells between neighboring islands, not their relative distance or location.

A rebbelib housed at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. (Credit: Cullen328)

Such stories of colonial myopia offer powerful lessons for writers from any culture. To a stranger, our own personal rebbelib might look like a chaotic jumble of sticks and shells. For us, it shows the way home.

Rebbelib drawing by Selina Tusitala Marsh for Writing with Pleasure

Take another look at the collage at the top of this post. What do you see there: a sun, a star, a compass? What other shapes and patterns do you notice when you allow your eyes to soften and linger? Amongst all the straight lines and curved lines, the sunbursts and spirals, what pathways can you trace — real, imagined, or desired?

In nearly two decades of writing about writing, I’ve learned the folly of pointing any writer down a single unidirectional pathway towards meaningful writing: for example, towards productivity or style or community or pleasure. The compass rose of writing offers us not a set of stark choices — north or south or east or west — but a starburst of possibilities, a dynamic creative field.

If you’re an academic or professional writer still trying to find your way, check out my new WriteSPACE Journey Planner. I’ll help you chart a route and itinerary tailored just for you.

Kia pai tō koutou rā (have a great day) – and keep on writing!

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Over the years, I’ve written a lot about writing and risktaking: for example here and here and here. All writing is risky, after all — and as a scholar, mentor, and tireless advocate of stylish academic writing, I see it as my mission to empower writers to face those risks with courage, resilience, and even joy.

Rēinga is a hypermedia poem about creative risktaking that enacts and embodies creative risktaking. Cape Rēinga is the place in the far north of Aotearoa New Zealand where, according to Māori legend, the souls of the dead leap down the roots of an old pōhutukawa tree and start their journey to their ancestral homeland of Hawaiiki. Rēinga variously signifies “the place of leaping,” “the departing place of spirits,” or “the netherworld,” the place where the spirits go.

First published in March 2009 in ka mate ka ora: a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics, Rēinga exists in three different versions in my online poetry collection The Stoneflower Path (2007-2009): as a hypermedia digital poem; as a plain text linear poem; and as an audio recording.

The poem at the top of this post, recorded in March 2024, is clearly different from the one that I recorded back in 2009, not only in terms of my reading pace (slower) and the timbre of my voice (older), but because the words are different. That’s because neither of these recordings fully captures the complexity of the “real” hypermedia poem, which exists in potentially millions of versions.

Do you find the prospect of leaping into a bottomless poem discomforting? Exhausting? Exhilarating? I suspect that your answer to that question will tell you something about your own propensity to take creative risks — or not. Either way, I hope that my guided tour into and through the labyrinthine roots of Rēinga will inspire you to try something new, maybe even something risky, in your own writing.

Enjoy!

The Stoneflower Path

Fifteen years after I first planted The Stoneflower Path in cyberspace, the whizzy website of which I was once so proud now looks as clunky and dated as Bill Clinton’s Blackberry. That’s the risk, I guess, of creating at the cutting edge (or, in my case, at the colorful edge) of technology: everything ages so quickly. An even greater risk, I secretly suspected at the time, was irrelevance. I put in many hours creating those two dozen digital poems using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Audacity, and Flash; but was anyone ever going to read them, engage with them, remember then? Much as I feared, my self-published collection attracted little critical attention and slowly faded into obsolescence. (Only recently has the tide turned; a few months ago I learned that The Stoneflower Path is now considered a digital literary landmark!)

My hypermedia collection deliberately spotlights the risks and rewards of hypertext, the literary genre that The Stoneflower Path at once embodies, critiques, and celebrates. A hypertext is any text that contains hyperlinks: that is, digital links to words, images, or other media in or beyond the text.1 Hyperlinks offer readers a convenient way of accessing information related to what they’re reading, which is why they’ve become such a familiar presence in virtually every text designed to be read online (including this one). But those temptingly highlighted links risk disrupting the linear flow of our reading and directing our attention elsewhere, much as a footnote drags our eyes to the bottom of the printed page.

When planted deliberately to confuse or misdirect, hyperlinks can lead us off the beaten track completely, sending us spinning into a textual maze with no clearly marked exit. That’s how Rēinga works — and that’s why reading the full hypermedia version of the poem requires a willingness to leap into the dark.

At the place of leaping

First conceived of and published before smartphones and touchscreens became ubiquitous, Rēinga is best experienced on your desktop computer or laptop using a mouse or trackpad.

When you enter the poem by clicking on the title, you’ll always be directed to the same static image — a stained glass mosaic depicting a pōhutukawa tree, two sailboats, and a full moon — and the same opening line:

At the place of leaping

From there, however, the poem bifurcates. As you move your mouse around over the tree, the land, the sea, and the sky, you’ll discover two live hyperlinks. This is your first moment of uncertainty, your first leap into the unknown. A click on the lower sailboat takes you to a glowing purple-and-orange image with the line, This is how I want to live:

A click on the upper sailboat takes you to a grayscale image with the line, This is how I want to die:

From there, it’s no longer a matter of leaping off the cliff into life or death so much as swimming in a roiling sea of possibilities. With 20 live hyperlinks per screen (18 pōhutukawa blossoms + 2 sailboats + 1 moon, minus the current link) leading to more than 50 possible image-plus-line combinations (I used every single Photoshop filter!), you can often create a poem of 20 lines, 30 lines, or more without encountering a single repeated line.

The moon delivers only moon-related phrases, and the sailboats always bring you back to the same two choices — this is how I want to live, this is how I want to die — so you can use those three objects to create some structure for your wanderings. For example, to generate a 16-line poem with a similar cadence to my two voice recordings, try the following sequence of clicks:

at the place of leaping
[upper sailboat] this is how I want to die:
[blossom]
[moon]

[lower sailboat] this is how I want to live:
[blossom]
[moon]
[blossom]

[upper sailboat] this is how I want to die:
[blossom]
[moon]
[blossom]

[blossom]
[blossom]
[upper sailboat] this is how I want to die:
[lower sailboat] this is how I want to live:

Then return to the place of leaping (either by using your back button or by closing your browser window) and repeat the sequence without making any effort to follow exactly the same path. You’ll end up with a new poem that sounds and feels similar to the first, yet hauntingly different.

The hypertext of life

Life is a hypertext, full of risky leaps into the unknown. So is writing. So is art — or, for that matter, any form of creative practice.

In a post titled RISK, our #AcWriMoments prompt for the month of March 2024, Margy Thomas and I each recalled a risk that we’ve taken in our own professional lives. I reflected on how, back in 2001, my husband and I decided to move from our comfortable home in the Midwestern United States to a small island nation in the South Pacific with our three kids, all our earthly possessions, and no jobs or likely job prospects in the academic fields we had left behind:

Those first few years were tough, as we struggled to find our feet personally and professionally. But eventually we both reinvented ourselves in new careers that suited us even better than the ones we’d left behind, and our children got to grow up amongst friends and family in one of the most beautiful countries on earth, a place with strong social and community values that we cherish. Not long after we moved here, I experienced an unexpected creative flowering as a poet and artist, like a rose bush blooming more abundantly than ever after a hard pruning, and I shifted from writing about modernist poetry to writing about scholarly writing.

If, back in 2001, I had clicked on the hyperlink that said Stay rather than the one that said Leap, would I be writing this post today? I doubt it. The poems of The Stoneflower Path were among the many products of the creative flowering that I experienced within my first few years in Aotearoa New Zealand — and Rēinga remains one of my favorite blossoms in the bouquet. I still get a thrill from generating a new poem every time I click beyond the opening image, a photo of the stained glass pōhutukawa mosaic that I crafted “in real life” for my mother’s 80th birthday back in 2005. (It now resides on my brother’s mantelpiece in California). And I still love leaping into the unknown to find out what I’ll learn there.

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters. WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $135/year).

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Many years ago, I took part in a cross-disciplinary collaboration called Metonymy, billed by its organizers as an exercise in artistic blind dating:

Each artist will be paired with a poet or writer, and over a period of one month you will work together to create a collaborative multi-disciplinary work.

My “date” was Anne-Sophie Adelys, a visual artist I had never met. Because we lived at opposite ends of our sprawling city and both had hectic work schedules, we decided to collaborate without meeting. Instead, we agreed on a shared theme — “memory / childhood / paths not taken” — and then mailed two notebooks back and forth once a week for four weeks. (That was back in the days before Zoom, and when the mail service still worked).

Below I’ve traced a few of the thematic and imagistic connections that I remember making as the notebooks travelled between us. But time, like memory, creates its own kind of distance — and some of the most resonant meanings may be those that emerge from the blank spaces in between.

Enjoy!

The containers

To kick off the project, Anne-Sophie and I each selected a blank notebook and mailed it to the other person. Mine was a pretty little pocket-sized blank book with flowers on the cover, a recent birthday gift. Here’s how it looks today, filled with the bulky treasures later added by Anne-Sophie:

Her notebook, by contrast, was a plain black Moleskine:

We both had fun decorating the padded envelopes that we sent back and forth. Here’s one from me to Anne-Sophie:

And one from Anne-Sophie to me:

At the end of the experiment, Anne-Sophie kept her original notebook, and I kept mine — so my only record of hers is the digital exhibit that I created way back in 2010 for my poetry website, The Stoneflower Path. Flipping through my little flowered notebook in preparation for writing this post, I discovered several poems and drawings that didn’t make it into our digital exhibit. What forgotten secrets lurk in Anne-Sophie’s black notebook, I wonder now?

Flowers

When I opened “my” notebook on its first journey home from Anne-Sophie’s studio, a cardboard flower popped up:

Inspired by Anne-Sophie’s three-dimensional imagination, I wrote a poem called “My Grandmother’s Garden” and let it ramble through the notebook line by line, page by page, leaf by leaf. Then, having already filled 20 pages of the notebook with lines of hand-written text and tiny cut-out leaves, I copied the whole poem out again on a scroll of tissue paper that unfurled from the book when it was opened:

My Grandmother’s Garden

in that garden with walls
like a chocolate box
or a casket of dreams
I clambered to the top
of the old apple tree
and feathered my nest with
lace scraps from the attic
paper from the bookshelves
darkness from the cellar
until my wings outstretched
my perch and spiralled me
up to gawk from the sun:
at it all: my mansion of
memory no wider
than a widow’s cottage,
the rolling lawn a doll’s
handkerchief, the secret
garden a tangle of
weeds behind the toolshed.

Birds

At the front of Anne-Sophie’s black notebook, I had pasted a manila label hand-lettered with the phrase “a box of birds.” (Or maybe Anne-Sophie glued the label into the book, and I wrote the words on it? I honestly don’t remember!) It’s a New Zealand colloquialism, meaning chirpy or in good spirits, as in “That little girl is a box of birds!”

The following week, in my flowered notebook, I wove the same words into a poem that conflates fuchsias, birds, and little girls in a ballet class:

Fuchsias

four girls in the back
of Mrs. Fleetwood’s station wagon

a box of birds
a basket of flowers

carpooling to Miss Irene’s
Russian ballet school

Ginna, Kimberly,
Helen, Yvonne

an hour in the suburbs
a room with a barre

birds at the window
fuchsias on the lawn

Should I have been surprised when my notebook returned to me two weeks later with a beautiful bird inside, unfurling its gorgeous wings as the book popped open?

Books

I mailed my notebook back to Anne-Sophie with a new poem inside:

The Books

walking home from Pilates I recall
their perfect posture, the graceful way they slid
from their slipcovers like dancers from the barre
at Miss Irene’s, each bending at my will
as my own obstinate body would not,
its pages arcing over my palm:

a balancing act
an opening door
a floating bird

People

Meanwhile, amongst all the birds, books, and flowers travelling back and forth between us, a familial theme was emerging. People I didn’t know, along with other enigmatic hints of family life — a pair of shoes pinned to a clothesline, an old camera with a neck strap — started appearing in Sophie’s notebooks:

It may have been this drawing of two women strolling side by side that inspired me to write about the sister I never had:

Family Tree

in my dream of a sister
our mother sweeps her hair
into a golden whalespout

our father wraps damp sheets
around her burning body
and rocks her fever away

a jolly jolly sixpence
rolls from his pocket
by the light of a jealous moon

and in our separate gardens
the dark birds assemble
on a wire drawn taut between us

Yes, those dark birds from Anne-Sophie’s envelope found their way into the final sequence of my poem — just as my dream of a sister found its way into a sequence of rose-adorned letters that Anne-Sophie drew towards the back of my flowered notebook, spelling out the word S-I-S-T-E-R:

And then there were the brothers: the real ones who once tied their two-year-old sister (me!) to a clothesline and who later threatened to blow her up with a bottle of fake nitroglycerin. But that’s a story for another day! In the meantime, here’s the photo of my two-year-old self, my hair in a golden whalespout, that I glued into Anne-Sophie’s black notebook:

Looking back all these years later at our creative experiment, I can still vividly remember the anticipation that I felt each week as I opened the mailbox to find Anne-Sophie’s latest envelope/artwork inside. I would tear the package open and flip through the notebook to find how she had responded to my latest entry: subtly, obliquely, never in an obvious or literal way. I did my best to respond in kind, not just with poems but also with glued-in photos and cards and scraps of paper, items inspired rather than directly informed by Sophie’s enigmatic line drawings.

And now I’m thinking: What might such an experiment look like if conducted not between a visual artist and a poet but between, say, a creative writer and an academic, or a scientist and a literary scholar, or any two curious human beings who love notebooks, miss the materiality of snail mail, and would love to find out what creative serendipities might be sparked by such an exchange?

If you decide to try it out, I’d love to hear about it!

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

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Lately I've been revisiting some overgrown pathways in my digital archive, cutting back the brambles and sweeping away dead leaves to reveal the moss-covered mosaics underneath. 

One such recently excavated artifact is The Stoneflower Path, a digital poetry website that I built in the heyday of hypermedia hype (c. 2007-2010) using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Flash. Last year, summer scholar Amy Lewis spent the better part of two months pruning away dead links and converting the Flash files to html5 so that the site is now navigable again. 

I've also unearthed an in-depth interview about my digital poetics conducted by poet and book reviewer Paula Green back in 2011. There I explicate some of my favorite digipoems, such as this one: 

In Inspiration, I use mouse-overs to subvert my readers' expectations and to raise questions about the relationship between process and product. The poem is contained within a mosaic frame, a digitized version of an actual mosaic mirror that hangs in my house. Both images (mosaic and frame) have a powerful metaphorical function in the poem, with its themes of fragmentation and reframing.

As you move your mouse around inside the mirror frame, searching for a way into the poem, you'll discover that when you pass over the title, the word "Plagiarism" pops up in front of it.  That's the poem’s secret title, the counterpart to "Inspiration." All poets are plagiarists, in a sense, drawing their ideas and vocabulary from those who have gone before them. My digipoem merely makes that process more transparent. 

When you click in the centre of the mirror, you're granted access to the poem, and the full text appears. It's a meta-poem, a poem about poetry, exploring how language can both trip us up and set us free: "words unfold / like butterflies" even as they "weight the truth."

Making your way through the poem with mouse in hand, you soon discover that behind or within each stanza lies a hidden intertext. For example, when you mouse over the opening stanza – "slanted stars / weight the truth"– up pops the line from Emily Dickinson that in turn inspired mine: "tell all the truth but tell it slant." Additional fragments of poetry are hidden behind the shards of glass and glowing jewels the mirror's frame.

Further down, when you mouse over "not text but texture" in the final stanza, you're treated to a quote from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire: "this  / Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; / Just this, not text, but texture..." For me, Nabokov's line sums up not only this particular poem but my digital poetics in general – indeed, my entire creative process. A digital poem can never consist of text alone. Its meaning also resides in the mosaic frame itself, the mirror, the mouse-overs, the way you read it – not text, but texture.

Barely a dozen years after I created the Stoneflower Path, many of my digipoems already feel clunky and old-fashioned, like walking into your grandma's living room to find the same furniture that was there in your parents' childhood. Conceived before the rise of touchscreens and tablets, these poems work best when viewed on a good-sized computer monitor as you search for hyperlinks and hotspots with mouse in hand. 

But I still remember the joy that I had in creating them, with their giddy interplay of digital disembodiment and material texture, and I've been having fun reappropriating them for different contexts. For example, several Stoneflower Path poems appear as static printed texts in my new book, Writing with Pleasure, accompanied by fanciful line drawings by illustrator Selina Tusitala Marsh.

I absolutely love Selina's artwork for this poem! The butterflies literally bear words on their wings; the minaret-like candle, like my computer, is powered by an electrical cord plugged into the wall; and the hand-drawn border that frames the image drips with melted wax. 

Inspiration, or plagiarism? As whizzy new AI tools such as ChatGPT remind us, all writing – indeed, language itself – has been pieced together from shards of past expression and grouted in place by algorithms: "these fragments I have shored against my ruins," in T. S. Eliot's words.

There's much more material-digital wordplay to be explored along the Stoneflower Path, so I'll revisit my digital poetry archive from time to time in search of old/new insights. I'd love to see you there! 

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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Recently I was asked to say a few words at a poetry reading in memory of a former student who died earlier this year.  

I first met Penny back in 2006, when she planted herself in the front row of "Poetry off the Page," an experimental literature course that I was co-teaching with my colleague Michele Leggott.  Penny was smart, sassy, funny, fearless, creative, questioning, collaborative -- in short, the ideal student. 

Penny turned 70 years old that year.

That was a few years before she started performing her poetry in public, her snow-white hair ceremoniously sprayed with streaks of pink or purple or blue. It was well before she established herself as a popular open-mic Master of Ceremonies at the Thirsty Dog pub on seedy Karangahape Road. And it was nearly a decade before she published her first book of poetry, one year shy of her eightieth birthday.

One audacious adventure at a time, Penny became my model for the kind of poet (and person) that I want to be when I grow up.

And her poems were hilarious! Here's one of my favorites, complete with Penny's original salty language and gender-confused feline:

On making sure that your subject and your verb are close together and your object is as near to the left hand side of your sentence as possible

(with a nod to Sam Leith, author of Write to the Point: A Master Class on the Fundamentals of Writing for Any Purpose)

The cat, a black half Burmese half unknown roistering tom from the neighbourhood, chewing and munching on a dead mouse but leaving the head and tail on the Persian rug I had bought in Iran, eyeing me as I looked at her from my position lying on the sofa after eating too much lunch and drinking two glasses of wine, which I never do these days today being an exception, sat, if you can call it sitting when in fact one leg was lifted in the air as she cleaned her bottom impervious to the disgusted gaze of my visitor who works in a sexual health clinic and finds the fact that cats and dogs clean their bottoms with their tongues very unhygienic to observe in a domestic situation, on the mat.

Even a stickler for syntax like me -- yes, I do generally believe that subjects and verbs should hang out close together, but I also appreciate creative deviations from the rule -- can't help but appreciate Penny's sense of humor, her colorful streaks of irreverence sprayed on the white hair of convention.

Rest in peace, Penny Somervaille. We miss you!

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My new 6-week virtual writing course, the Creativity Catalyst, launched last weekend, and we've been having a great time playing with arts-based techniques for zhuzzing up our writing processes and products.

Here's one of my favorite exercises from the Poetry module, inspired by Glenn Colquhoun's lovely poem "An Explanation of Poetry to my Father," which includes the following lines:
 

• The shape of words
  
  A is the shape of a tin roof on an old church.
  B is the bottom of a fat man. 
  C is a crab scuttling along the beach.
  X is the shape of butterfly wings.
  
                          ***
  orange is the shape of a round fruit hanging from a tree, a young woman reaching out to pick it, a kitten chasing after its own tail, an old woman weeding her garden, a small boy fishing from a pond, the sun setting over a smooth beach. 
  
  smoke is a lazy snake crawling towards the sun, two large clouds billowing, a round mouth coughing, a small bird singing in a tree, the eye of a tired child falling asleep. 
  
  love is one leg planted firmly on the ground, a spare washer for a dripping tap, that beautiful bird flying towards me or away, a broken eggshell opened on the floor.

Take a moment to notice how this poem works, particularly in the final three stanzas.  Each letter of each word -- orange, smoke, love -- evokes an everyday object that not only resembles that letter but also speaks to or illuminates some aspect of the word itself. 

It's easy to follow Colquhoun's example:

1. Choose a word -- not too long -- that represents your current writing project.

2. Write the word vertically, one letter per line, down the left-hand side of a sheet of paper.

3. Now describe what each letter looks like, keeping the whole word in mind as you cycle through the possibilities.

4. Read through your lines and make adjustments as needed.

5. Hey presto -- you've written a research poem!
    

One of our Creativity Catalyst participants, PhD student and prolific bicycle blogger Nina Ginsberg, produced an exuberant riff on the word Bicycles:

• spectacles sliding down noses of poses finally seeing things differently; the face-saving yes agreements and yes non-agreements; the woman bent over the fire, the loom, the field, and the baby; an absent-present seeping delta; the tenuous mark of schoolgirl attendance; the line between the have/nots, ride/nots, care/nots, know/nots, what/nots; the pitcher that carries the water, that carries the sustenance, that carries the girl, that carries a country; the pumping hand moves of sweaty, late-night dancehall dancers.
   

I went with the word WriteSPACE:

• Write is a crooked smile, a scythe cutting through nonsense, a brain-bearing body, a telegraph pole, a spiral of rebirth.
  
  S     Here our winding road begins,
  P     here we plant our flag
  A     atop the highest mountain
  C     wrapped in the wor(l)d's embrace 
  E     pointing forward, forward, forward.

The lines of this poem came to me quickly, but I'm still unpacking their meaning.  Creative activities like this one can help you approach your research from new directions and think more playfully and profoundly about your "serious" writing.  

Sound like fun?  Join us in the Creativity Catalyst! 

I'd love to see you there.

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