POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IN 3 DIFFERENT AUTISM WORLDS – By Donna Williams.

Whilst there are many political roads one can go in the autism world, I see there are at least three quite BASIC ones : Read the rest of this entry »

  Heidi Everett is an awesome performer so it was a great honor to get this review from her.  Enjoy.  Here it is:

“The gig – ‘Rock and Rebuild’ benefit concert for Victoria’s bushfire crisis, was organised and promoted by Kaine Marsh, head of Finbar Production.  The bands – A very eclectic yet thoroughly charismatic line up of artists who have some sort of connection with the towns affected by the fires. The location – Hurstbridge Oval, an iconic picture of pure Aussieness.

Tigger-dog and I had a visual introduction to Rock and Rebuild as the officially on-time Connex rolled into Hurstbridge station. A sun dried brick of a country oval transformed wonderfully into a fruitful orchard of stalls and country folk milling around a flat bed truck pumping out music with a whole lotta heart. As we lounged around in front of the stage, Donna and the Aspinauts sauntered into their first number and had the audience looking up from their snags to see what the hell had hit them front and centre between the eyes and ears.

A-ha! These were no ordinary folk songs to be kum-by-ya’d around the campfire, no way! As the guys in the Aspinauts band changed gear quicker than a red Ferrari, front-woman Donna kept apace brilliantly with her phonetically charged lyrics and mesmerizing hands shaping the melody like an artist at the easel. I watched, captivated like the crowd around me. Each song blurred deliciously into the next with Donna’s spoken word etching out the poetry of human condition, always so very eloquent and astutely connected to the song the band was about to launch into, such a poignant moment when Donna painted the scene of a blackened landscape, burnt by the very fires this benefit concert set to quell.

The set itself was just the right amount of time for Donna and the Aspinauts own musical genre to be smacked firmly into the hearts and minds of the audience. As a muso myself, I intuitively looked around to see the reaction of people who might not have had the chance to experience such a richly flavoured ensemble before, and as a muso, I can confidently say that The Aspinauts had the crowd in the rather elusive ‘palm of the hand’.

I’ve seen this band a few times now and I thoroughly recommend an audience with a Donna and the Aspinauts event if you are ever given the chance. I say event because they are so much more than just a band playing music, each of your five senses will be buzzing before the end of the first song, and by the end of the show, you’ll be definitely Aspi-fied.”

Heidi Everett

http://www.heidieverett.com.au/Home.html

  Last month, with The Aspinauts, I had the honor of playing with a wonderful performer, Heidi Everett.  This is my interview with her. Read the rest of this entry »

  I was asked some questions by Elaine Meyer, a freelance journalist and student at Columbia’s journalism school, who was writing an article about autism as a metaphor in literature.  She explained that a literature professor at Cambridge named Andy Martin recently came out with an article comparing the writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in which he said Sartre’s writing and personality exhibited autistic tendencies and Camus’ exhibited what he considered opposite empathetic tendencies.  She said he cited Simon Baron-Cohen’s work as an influence and asked if she could ask me a few interview questions on the topic.  Here’s our interview: Read the rest of this entry »

This month’s art work is called Coming Out.

Coming Out can mean many things and for me it is an important and valuable concept.  This painting helps me celebrate the importance of coming out and the endurance and challenges it takes for any of us to do so.  Read the rest of this entry »

   OK, so February got lost somewhere in the Victorian bushfires and their chaos and yes, my blog has been so quiet.  But, welcome to the March 2009 poetry challenge.  Who knows, any of you coming to see us at any of the upcoming gigs for Donna and The Aspinauts may actually see some of the poems performed, complete with gestural signing and characterisations.

But right now, you have 30 days to send in your poetry challenges for the March 09 poetry jam.  So off you go – feel free to send me a TITLE or THEME to write to in the comments section and in the next 30 days, you’ll find I’ve responded by posting a poem here addressing it.   Come on, give it a try. Read the rest of this entry »

Katherine Kasper is a reader on the spectrum who read the third book in my autobiographical series, Like Colour To The Blind.  When she emailed me about the book I offered her the opportunity to send me 10 interview questions about it.  Here’s that interview. Read the rest of this entry »

  The world of Synesthesia is broader than you think.  I see musically.  I process the meaning of what I hear through the kinesthetic movement of gestural signing and representational objects.  I sometimes have colors and patterns trigger in my brain in response to touch.  I talk of green smells, bright tastes, crunchy sounds and fluffy, scratchy and hard edged people.    Here I interview hill’s artist and singer-songwriter, Tracey Roberts, on how her own Synesthesia relates to her ARTism.

Donna Williams

http://www.donnawilliams.net

http://www.myspace.com/donnaandtheaspinauts

This month’s art work is The Gadoodleborger.

In  Nobody Nowhere I had thought of the world as having ‘The Worlders’, which were those who were ego driven and geared for appearances and ‘My Worlders’ who were those who valued ‘beingness’, had and valued a world of their own, and for whom image, ego and appearances were only secondary.

Then, in   Somebody Somewhere, in 1994, I first wrote of another category of humans; Gadoodleborgers.   Gadoodleborgers weren’t ‘The Worlders’, nor were they people necessarily on the autism spectrum.  But what was special about Gadoodleborgers was that they were natural translators, bridgekeepers able to cross between worlds, diplomats, anthropologists interested in the wonderment of social difference and diversity.  I wrote a fable about them best captured in the poem, The Gadoodleborger:

GADOODLEBORGER, copyright, Donna Williams, Aug 2008

He spied her in a magic wood, a sensing creature in need of none

And dreamed of how he’d join her there, his partner she would soon become

He lured her back to the place he knew, a world of hierarchy and of power

And there she then began to die, as surely as a wilting flower

His heart began to break inside, he knew only one thing to give

Return her to her sensing world, that she might find the will to live

And there as she began to bloom, she saw something he’d never seen

That he was not of that world either, a Gadoodleborger, he had been.

That he walked between two worlds, he now had finally understood

And so they made their home in neither world, at the edges of the magic wood.

So for me, The Gadoodleborger is a source of faith in humanity, a reason to shun opportunities for reverse prejudice against non-spectrum people, a reason to believe that neurodiversity exists amidst human beings in general and in not reserved for those with diagnostic labels.  I have found Gadoodleborgers in the non-spectrum and autism spectrum populations and many many people in those populations are not Gadoodleborgonian, but I think I just may be rather Gadoodleborgonian and so I share this something with all other Gadoodleborgers throughout human kind, a something which defines me beyond being ‘an autistic’ and something which connects me to personhood more than labels.

The painting, The Gadoodleborger, was painted in Woolongong in 2002, the year my Gadoodleborgonian husband, Chris Samuel (who features in the book Everyday Heaven ), migrated to Australia from his UK homeland, allowing this homesick Aussie to return to live in Australia after almost 13 years away.   In this sense, it is our marriage, that of an autie with an Aspergerian Gadoodleborger, which is captured in this painting, something of the essence of Chris’ inquisitive interpretive mind and world of meaning, and mine as a place of sensing in the reality of someone partially meaning deaf, meaning blind and face blind.

The butterflies in the painting were originally rosella parrots, indicative of the return to Australia.  But they were turned into butterflies a few years later, symbols of change, transition, adaptation, perhaps just as I was changing, transitioning, adapting from a world of autism into a world of ARTism.

The painting was done in acrylics on stretched canvas and the grass is full of rainbows.  The colors capture the summer of Australia, and yet the lush dark green foliage across the water is perhaps the characters memories of the climate of the UK.

I hope you like the painting and feel free to visit my many other paintings in my online gallery at my website.

Warmly,

Donna Williams,

author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter.

http://www.donnawilliams.net

I’ve decided to start a new monthly feature called art work of the month.  I’m going to pick out one of my works and tell you the story behind it and its production.  Hope you come to enjoy the feature and if you are also an artist, feel free to use the comments section to tell people a story about your own ARTism and don’t forget to check out the sites of the many artists listed over at http://www.auties.org.

The art work featured here is called Back to Normality .  It’s part of a series which includes the works Imaginary Friend, Here They Come and The Lunatic. Read the rest of this entry »