Quiet and Living and Watching the Light

Abstract

This collection of poetry explores the quiet topography of autistic childhood and adolescence in rural and small-town Southern Ontario, where stigma often hides in plain sight. The pieces merge Southern Ontario Gothic, a regional subgenre marked by rural decay, memory, silence, and haunting, with lyric explorations of autistic interiority, weaving place-based unease with the sensory and social dissonance of neurodivergent experience. Set in haylofts, graveyards, sandbox borders, and half-forbidden gulleys, the poems trace early sensory and social differences that were misunderstood or pathologized long before the speaker understood them as part of a neurodivergent identity. Without ever needing to name stigma outright, the poems evoke its shape: the pressure to mask, the silence of teachers, the loudness of peers, and the exclusion felt even in proximity to others. Yet these same poems bear witness to self-recognition, subtle resistance, and the sacredness of solitude. By attending to the landscapes and rituals that offered comfort and coherence—from creek beds to empty barns—the speaker resists dominant narratives of disorder and dysfunction, asserting instead a world quietly restructured by neurodivergent perception. In this way, the collection challenges what counts as “normal” belonging and articulates a poetic form of dignity, memory, and care.