May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future

by Chris Martin

Overview

An author and educator’s pioneering approach to helping autistic students find their voices through poetry—a powerful and uplifting story that shows us how to better communicate with people on the spectrum and explores how we use language to express our seemingly limitless interior lives.

Adults often find it difficult to communicate with autistic students and try to “fix” them. But what if we found a way to help these kids use their natural gifts to convey their thoughts and feelings? What if the traditional structure of language prevents them from communicating the full depth of their experiences? What if the most effective and most immediate way for people on the spectrum to express themselves is through verse, which mirrors their sensory-rich experiences and patterned thoughts?

May Tomorrow Be Awake explores these questions and opens our eyes to a world of possibility. It is the inspiring story of one educator’s journey to understand and communicate with his students—and the profound lessons he learned. Chris Martin, an award-winning poet and celebrated educator, works with non-verbal children and adults on the spectrum, teaching them to write poetry. The results have been nothing short of staggering for both these students and their teacher. Through his student’s breathtaking poems, Martin discovered what it means to be fully human.

Martin introduces the techniques he uses in the classroom and celebrates an inspiring group of young autistic thinkers—Mark, Christophe, Zach, and Wallace—and their electric verse, which is as artistically dazzling as it is stereotype-shattering. In telling each of their stories, Martin illuminates the diverse range of autism and illustrates how each so-called “deficit” can be transformed into an asset when writing poems. Meeting these remarkable students offers new insight into disability advocacy and reaffirms the depth of our shared humanity. 

Martin is a teacher and a lifelong learner, May Tomorrow Be Awake is written from a desire to teach and to learn—about the mind, about language, about human potential—and the lessons we have to share with one other. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063020153
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/09/2022
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	1,087,627
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

CHRIS MARTIN is this very moment endeavoring to become himself, a somemany and tilted thinking animal who sways, hags, loves, trees, lights, listens, and arrives. He is a poet who teaches and learns in mutual measure, as the connective hub of Unrestricted Interest/TILT and the curator of Multiverse, a series of neurodivergent writing from Milkweed Editions. His most recent book of poems is Things to Do in Hell (Coffee House, 2020) and he lives on the edge of Bde Maka Ska in Minneapolis, among the bur oaks and mulberries, with Mary Austin Speaker and their two bewildering creatures. 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Keepers of the Light 1

1 Like Water I Am Eager 23

2 A Place Where the Islands Touch 51

3 The Moon Is Especially Full 78

4 The Listening World 93

5 A Brand New Outfit 115

6 I Can Be My Real Self 132

7 Becoming Rainbow Man 138

8 Living in a State of Hell 156

9 Calm-Arriving to a Wanting Safe World 177

10 The How of Autism 196

11 May Today Be Awake 222

Coda: Full Spiral 242

Afterword: Belonging to the Future 245

Anthology of Poems 255

Acknowledgments 301

Notes 307

Editorial Reviews

06/20/2022

Poet and educator Martin (Things to Do in Hell) braids contemporary neurological research and literary theory in this eloquent reflection on his experience teaching poetry to neurodiverse students. Through his students’ poems and endearing anecdotes, Martin, himself a neurodiverse person, seeks to help readers dismantle their conceptions of being “normal”—“to let fall away like the oppressive husk it really is”—and to open their minds to other ways of being and interacting with the world. He gives readers glimpses into his nearly 20 years of sessions with a dozen students, most of them nonspeaking teenagers with autism, to explain how a neurodiverse student’s initial reluctance to engage with poetry can lead to gracefully patterned writing. As he analyzes his students’ work—highlighting often technically impressive and emotionally poignant poems—he lucidly examines the ways in which they confront societal perceptions of and challenges related to neurodiversity (for one student, “the most difficult aspect of writing is falling into the concentrated physical stillness necessary to type”), as well as broader issues like gender, race, and, most recently, surviving the changes wrought by the pandemic. Martin’s narration is empathetic and charming, and his students’ writings combine to offer moving, intelligent, and insightful pathways for understanding different minds. The result brilliantly proves that nonverbal doesn’t always mean voiceless. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

May Tomorrow Be Awake is stark and touchable portrait of tenderness that doesn’t treat living and loving as a challenge, even when it might be challenging. From sinking into this book, I learned how to be a better and more thoughtful steward of the world and the people closest to me. There is no greater gift than this one, to depart from a text with a cleaner, more generous view of living.” — Hanif Adurraqib, poet and author of A Little Devil in America and A Fortune for Your Disaster

"By forming meaningful connections with non-speaking autistic poets and coming to understand the distinctive ways they employ the architecture of language to express themselves, Chris Martin has returned poetry to its primordial function — as a domain of soul-making that can transform society." — Steve Silberman, author, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

"A wondrous exploration of autistic creativity, and the mutual learning that becomes possible when we let go of ’normal’ and aim for authentic connection.” — Nick Walker, PhD, author of Neuroqueer Heresies

"Every poem is deep with philosophical intuition from productive minds. I am so glad the poets have found an outlet in this book to be heard."   — Tito Mukhopadhyay, poet and author of Teaching Myself to See and How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move

“A sensitive celebration of neuroscientific difference. Martin’s message is not only about unleashing the potential of autistic individuals, but creating a world where ‘different modes of movement, of communication, of being and signing and pointing and singing and ticcing and typing’ affords all people a new vision ‘of what it means to be human.’” — Kirkus

“Martin braids contemporary neurological research and literary theory in this eloquent reflection on his experience teaching poetry to neurodiverse students. . . . [His] narration is empathetic and charming, and his students’ writings combine to offer moving, intelligent, insightful pathways for understanding different minds. The result brilliantly proves that nonverbal doesn’t mean voiceless.” — Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

"By forming meaningful connections with non-speaking autistic poets and coming to understand the distinctive ways they employ the architecture of language to express themselves, Chris Martin has returned poetry to its primordial function — as a domain of soul-making that can transform society."

Steve Silberman

"Every poem is deep with philosophical intuition from productive minds. I am so glad the poets have found an outlet in this book to be heard."  

Tito Mukhopadhyay

2022-06-08
Intimate portraits of neurodivergence.

Poet and educator Martin draws on more than 20 years of experience with autistic students to offer insights about how best to teach, inspire, and learn from them. Although he describes himself as “a White male who can selectively pass as cis, straight, able, and neurotypical,” in high school, Martin was diagnosed with ADHD, a neurodivergence he shares with his mother. “I have come to foreground neurodivergence in my way of moving through the world,” he writes. The reality of neurodivergence, he has found, contrasts with some commonly held assumptions: for example, that individuals with autism lack empathy or “theory of mind,” the ability to imagine what someone else is thinking or feeling. They “don’t just experience empathy on levels equal to their neurotypical peers,” writes Martin, “but in many cases exceed them.” The author’s approach to teaching is far different from the widely used applied behavior analysis therapy, which involves rewards and punishments for learning certain activities and behaviors. One student, who began ABA therapy at the age of 20 months, by age 3 “appeared to have settled into a form of deep interiority” that lasted for 17 years. Martin’s appreciative portraits of his students—and his close readings of their poems—provide ample evidence of how poetry writing spoke to their needs, abilities, and desires. “Over time,” he writes, “I began to discern how poetry’s patterned structure uniquely serves neurodivergent thinking—and vice versa—something I’d discovered in my own creative investigations.” Poetry’s formalized repetition and sensory detail offered autistic students a fertile linguistic outlet. Martin’s message is not only about unleashing the potential of autistic individuals, but about creating a world where “different modes of movement, of communication, of being and signing and pointing and singing and ticcing and typing” affords all people a new vision “of what it means to be human.”

A sensitive celebration of neuroscientific difference.

Kirkus Reviews