Go Read Reckoning Magazine's *A Chorus Divergent*

As many of you know, I do write some poetry. In 2020, I published a book called Acts of Speech that collected devotional and religious poetry together. There’s more information about it on this page if you want to read it. Poetry, dating back to when I first learned how to write verse, was the one way I could express myself and feel like I was understood. My small town had an all-ages poetry competition when I was a kid, and I remember winning a prize of some kind in my age category and feeling uniquely competent.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of my poems was published in Reckoning Magazine, a creative hub for writing related to the climate crisis. It has been reprinted in their A Chorus, Divergent.

A lot has happened in the years since 2020 both at a personal and at a societal level. On a personal level, the cluster of health issues in 2023-2024 and my frustrating and confusing interactions with doctors and health professionals (“frustrating” due to social and proprioception/interoception difficulties) prompted me to get evaluated for autism. I won’t talk much about the diagnosis directly because it still brings up a whirlwind of unproductive emotions and internalized ableism. I have a therapist, and therapy is the correct place to discuss those things. In retrospect, though, the entire book Acts of Speech was somewhat about levels of performance and masking versus unmasking, but I didn’t know that at the time.

The people behind Reckoning put out a call to people who had been published in the magazine about a special compilation of creative work from autistic contributors. I said yes because the comments that RFK Jr. made about poetry were baffling — especially since it’s the format my thoughts coalesce into when everything else feels impossible, and there’s so much space for meaning and saying what things are in the form that there isn’t in prose. For example, I was in a study group with some people when I was in my early 20s on the Delphic Maxims where I submitted all of my reflection assignments as some sort of creative work (usually a poem) because my head just felt blocked by the idea of trudging for hours through sentences and paragraphs. Everything has only intensified since in the public discourse.

So, all of that to say once more that I do encourage you to check out A Chorus, Divergent. My one poem is only a small part of a much wider array of works in a variety of written forms, and I think that this compilation is a great way to push back.