Five minutes with Clem Bastow and Jo Case
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Sick of challenging outdated autism stereotypes? Maybe you’re among the growing wave of women receiving late-life diagnoses? Either way, this book needs to be at the top of your TBR.
New anthology Someone Like Me, showcases 25 Autistic gender-diverse and women writers who explore their experiences – and explode stereotypes. This groundbreaking anthology ranges from sex, living room dance parties and the natural world, to eating disorders, all-encompassing passions and religion.
We took five minutes with the editors Clem Bastow and Jo Case to discuss this refreshing collection, which is out now via UQP.
Book titles are typically hard to decide on, but how did you settle on the apt title ‘Someone Like Me’?
Jo: It was really hard! We had lots of ideas that didn’t work. And then, we were re-reading the book to write the introduction and the phrase “someone like me” jumped out from one of the essays. Yes, we thought – that’s what this whole book is about … hoping other Autistic people will see themselves represented, not necessarily in the whole thing (there are so many ways to be an Autistic person), but in snippets of experience.
Clem: This was all Jo – I’m shocking at titles unless it’s an academic title that goes for three sentences!
We shouldn’t be surprised, but there is such a broad range of lives and experiences in the book — were you pleased/surprised/heartened about this?
Jo: Thank you! This is exactly what we wanted in the book and something we worked towards.
Clem: Absolutely. In an ideal world, the book would be 5000 pages long and contain hundreds of contributors, but we really feel like even just the act of adding a few dozen new and different voices to the conversation around Autism is a huge step forward. As a gender weirdo myself, I’m particularly excited for people to read the stories of gender-diverse Autistic people.
Were there any special considerations or accommodations in editing or working with your contributors?
Clem: Yeah, lots! For example, one contributor submitted drafts in voice notes, which I then transcribed for them. Some of the writers preferred to have their feedback discussed over the phone, rather than just notes on the page. It was really important to me (and to Jo!) to make this process as accessible as possible.
Jo: I’m an editor as my day job, and wherever possible, I like it to be a collaboration; a conversation between author and editor that works its way towards producing the best possible outcome. And this was especially important here. We wanted authors to be invited into the process, which means explaining our edits and suggestions, so inviting conversations where authors might have an alternative way to achieve the same outcome.
You’ve both written your own memoirs, how was the experience of putting together this anthology different?
Jo: It was a completely different thing for me! The memoir was about telling my story, and my son’s. In creating this anthology, my own story was secondary – not just in the space given to it (one essay among 25), but in its centrality to the aim of the book. This book was about bringing together a variety of different Autistic experiences that would speak to each other and likely overlap, but also illuminate different ways to be Autistic. So, it was very much about the collective. Also, this anthology was a joint effort, of course: rather than me writing it at speed in my study, it was me and Clem discussing and negotiating every step of the way.
Clem: It was a walk in the park by comparison – chiefly because it wasn’t all about me! But this project was challenging in its own way: working out the best flow of chapters, and working with the writers to showcase their voices. And then just the simple fact of organising dozens of other writers, and ourselves, when – speaking for myself – organisation can be challenging at the best of times!
You also both have contributions in the anthology. How did you approach your individual pieces? Did you have clear ideas of what you wanted to cover? Were you influenced by the other contributions?
Jo: The very high standard of the essays in the anthology pushed me to want to create something that matched them, or at least wouldn’t seem out of place in their company. I was encouraged by the variety of approaches – it may have given me a certain freedom – though really, mine is quite conventional in form. It’s an essay on my connection to classic “kindred spirits” in literature – Jo March, Anne (with an ‘e’) Shirley, Sybylla Melvyn, Harriet the Spy – who have Autistic traits. And it combines my reading and research into the authors’ lives with slices of memoir that I hope are in conversation with those characters.
Clem: I had wanted to write about pictograms (the little public safety illustrations with the stick figures getting into all types of trouble) for ages, but could never really decide how to approach that, or who would want to publish such a piece. When I realised I could use them as a jumping-off point to discuss “special interests” and information sharing, two of my favourite aspects of Autistic culture, my essay flowed very quickly from there!
What’s something you’ve learnt in the anthologising/editing process and/or from the pieces in the collection?
Jo: I’ve learned a lot from the other essays in this collection! Some of it was recognising echoes of my own experiences with other Autistic people, which was really affirming, in the way I hope readers will respond. One thing I learned was that my relationship with time is an Autistic thing. Not just the fact that I have to be very careful not to run late, or forget about time: if I don’t focus on planning around time, it sort evaporates and I get into trouble. But that my way of being – I am so often thinking about the past and the future and find it extremely difficult to ‘live in the present’, as we’re so often urged – is Autistic. This was via a couple of essays, but particularly Danni Stewart’s ‘Autistic temporalities and adventures in crip time’.
Clem: I’ve learned to trust my instincts and lean further into the “Autistic” style and form of my writing. Having worked as a freelancer, mainly in digital media, for twenty-five years, it’s been hard to unlearn some of the “good” approaches to putting a piece together that I’ve absorbed. When I read some of the other essays in Someone Like Me, which make all sorts of exciting formal and structural choices, it felt like a bit of a challenge to think further and deeper about how I want to write. And about how exciting writing can be when it’s Autistic in form, not just about Autism!
Has anything surprised you in putting the anthology together? Have you learnt anything about yourself?
Jo: I have had many of my instincts or vague knowledges about being Autistic confirmed or given names by reading these essays. I learned the term alexithymia for an inability to identify and articulate emotions. I can be very good at knowing my emotions, but only when I’m focusing on and trying to understand them. When I’m not, I am often ambushed or baffled by them. I also learned the term monotropism, termed by Dr Wenn Lawson, with Dinah Murray: ‘Monotropic minds tend to be deeply engaged with a small number of interests at any given time, leaving fewer resources for other neurological processes.’
I also noticed a surprising proportion of editors in our submissions. I hadn’t thought about it, but it is a job Autistic people would be attracted to: we focus on details, work with rules (and within genres and word counts) and have to get things right according to those rules. There’s also an instinctual side to editing – to do with the feel and flow and voice of a piece – which is perhaps less suited, on the surface. But actually, if you’re good at “masking”, you’re likely to be very tuned into other people’s behaviour, speech rhythms and voices, in order to regulate yourself in reaction. Which works for editing!
One of the editors who made it into the anthology (we couldn’t have all editors!), Ange Crawford, wrote that writing is “a comfort and vocation”, but also a compulsion founded on the way their brain works, one that mirrors the way they process life itself: “I am carefully constructing – editing – / self-editing – editing myself,” they write. “Noticing never felt optional to me.” This resonates.
Any reading/watching/listening recommendations for our readers to dig a bit deeper into these themes?
Clem: I loved the big-screen documentary adaptation of Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump. Locally, the feature-length documentary Because We Have Each Other is also beautiful. And I would encourage readers to read and listen to things created by Autistic people, and particularly Autistic people in conversation – for example, the episode of Blindboy Boatclub’s podcast where he interviews Autistic actor Paddy Considine (House of The Dragon etc).
Jo: One of the books that’s made the biggest impact on me is one I found through Clem, Unmasking Autism by Dr Devon Price. It’s one I urge onto anyone just embarking on a journey of discovery about their own Autism. Though the focus is on masking, it’s also rich with from-the-inside insight into Autistic minds and lives. It’s where, for example, I first read about bottom-up processing: Autistic people process the world from the bottom up, taking in details first, then assembling a big picture to work with, whereas allistic people tend to work in a top-down fashion. (This explained SO MUCH!) UK comedian Fern Brady’s Autism memoir, Strong Female Character, which I discovered via Jon Ronson, is excellent. Fiona Wright’s memoir-essay collection The World Was Whole was written before she was diagnosed as Autistic, but though it never uses the word “Autism”, it is a profoundly Autistic book, and I adored it. Ditto for Naoise Dolan’s brilliant, very funny and moving novel, Exciting Times. (Fiona Wright actually “came out” as Autistic in her review of Exciting Times for Sydney Review of Books.)
I’m also listening to the Autistic Culture podcast, co-hosted by an Autistic writer and an Autistic psychologist, and loving it. It explores everything from Autistic sleep problems, parenting and masking to pop culture characters and shows that are intrinsically Autistic, like Anne of Green Gables and Parks and Recreation.
What’s on your TBRs?
Clem: Too much! I tend to have a bunch of books sitting at 14 per cent on my e-reader rather than a pile, and I often put books down and, uh, forget about them for years (case in point: I finally finished Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me). But currently, I’m making my way through Jordan Prosser’s Big Time, Susan North’s Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England, Jim Moginie’s The Silver River, and Refaat Alareer’s If I Must Die: Poetry And Prose.
Jo: Also too much! If you saw the book piles in my house, you’d be horrified. Here’s just one example: I’m itching to read classic Australian memoir Searching for Charmian by Suzanne Chick, about her adult discovery that her birth mother was iconic writer Charmian Clift (who was famously part of an artist’s colony in Cyprus with Leonard Cohen). Given my day job as a literary editor, I’m often reading with the publication cycle and it’s a treat for me to read older books. Here, I am using the excuse of the book’s 30th anniversary edition, with a foreword by Suzanne’s daughter, Alone Australia winner Gina Chick (who writes in her own memoir that she is likely Autistic).
Feature image: Clem Bastow. Credit: Leah Jing McIntosh.
