Woman With Asperger’s Is Closing…Sorta.

First of all, I want to thank everyone who has visited, left comments on, engaged with me at, shared content from, or otherwise has supported the Woman With Asperger’s blog.

It has become apparent over the last few months that I need to move on to a different phase of my life in terms of activism and writing. In the last six months, my understanding of neurodiversity has broadened. More opportunities (thanks be to God) have presented themselves — including editing the Summer 2014 Issue of Red Wolf Journal, pursuing MFA studies (which begin this July), and the genesis of the neurodivergent literary journal Barking Sycamores, which I founded in February 2014 and which my fiancé and I together edit and produce.

With that in mind, I have decided to put Woman With Asperger’s on a semi-permanent hiatus. I am doing this because I no longer have time to devote to maintaining this blog as frequent as in time past. Additionally I have not been able to adequately reply to comments and answer the many questions readers have posed to me in the last year.

I will leave Woman With Asperger’s up and running. I want the blog posts to remain as a testament to my journey, and I will occasionally post here. However, over the next few months there will be several changes:

1. I will be revamping the pages in various ways, including overhauling the language to make it more neurodiversity-friendly.
2. Comments will be closed on older posts.
3. Comments on newer posts (June 2014 and later) will remain open until 30 days after the date of first posting.

 In his poem “The Road Not Taken”, Robert Frost spoke of the need for choices — namely, to decide which road you will travel. And this is sometimes a difficult and painful decision. Like the speaker in his poem, I am “sorry I could not travel both” of the roads before me. My choice is to travel the road of poetry and activism through art.

The journey during which I began to understand what it means to be autistic has been a challenging, rewarding, and at times fun journey over the last four years. And it will not end, my friends. You are welcome to join me over at Raven’s Wing Poetry and to see our baby — the little neurodivergent poetry journal — grow and come of age at Barking Sycamores.

Thank you all, again, for all of your support.

-Nicole

Introducing Barking Sycamores!

Barking Sycamores is a new literary journal that just went live yesterday and will begin publishing on April 1, 2014. We’re accepting submissions now and will be publishing on a continual basis.

What we are: Barking Sycamores is a poetry journal whose primary mission is to publish poems by emerging and established neurodivergent writers . We also seek to add positively to the public discussion about neurodivergence in the form of essays on autism and poetics, with special emphasis on its interplay with the creative process.

For poetry: We seek poems that are breathtakingly beautiful, startling, sparkling, or imbued with color. We like poems that surprise us in some way; poems that perform an act of alchemy — i.e. transforming the ordinary into gold; poems that convey a vision of reality which is different than the expected or commonplace; poems that might cleanse the “doors of perception”, as William Blake put it. We particularly adore poems with a strong voice, a strong narrative, or bold, concrete imagery. We do have a preference for free verse poetry; however, we will accept poetry written in traditional forms.

For autism and poetics essays: We seek work that uses strong facts and/or well-documented observations to support a solid thesis statement. We are particularly interested in essays about:

• how neurologically divergent traits aid in the creation of poetry;
• neurological divergent traits that might cause a poet to break common rules and conventions in poetry (and do this well);
• how a neurological divergent individual might use the creative arts (especially poetry) to express him/her/zirself when ordinary communication means do not suffice;
• how an author’s work might reveal his/her/zir neurological divergence.

Main site: http://barkingsycamores.wordpress.com/
Submission Guidelines: http://barkingsycamores.wordpress.com/submission-guidelines/
About: http://barkingsycamores.wordpress.com/about/