Transcript with the transcript outline

SPEAKERS:

Amy Yuki Vickers, Rachel Thompson

Rachel Thompson:

Welcome Luminous Writers to the **Write, Publish and Shine** podcast. I am your host, author and literary magazine editor Rachel Thompson. This podcast explores how to write and share your brilliant writing with the world. In each episode we delve into specifics on how to polish and prepare your writing for publication and the journey from emerging writer to published author.

Hello Luminous Writers and welcome to my next conversation in this run of episodes on writing with disabilities and limitations. I’m very excited in this episode to sit down with Amy Yuki Vickers, who is a new writer in our community and a recent alum of My Lit Mag-Love course. Amy is the author of the blog and newsletter, The Intentional Hulk and writes short stories, personal essays, and is at work on a memoir. And as she says in her bio, because she’s autistic, she seesaws between intense occupation and recovery. This is just one subject we talk about in our conversation coming up.

You’ll hear in our conversation that Amy’s neurodivergence resonates with my own identity as someone on the autism spectrum, which means I can’t help but commiserate about neon lights when we talk about them and we are careful to point out how experiences differ between autistic folks as it is a spectrum disorder. And this is of course true that experiences differ for all disabilities.

In this episode, Amy also reads her Luminous Words and discusses the noticing that all writers must do, but which is also a strength for writers on the spectrum, who as very sensitive folks generally deeply notice things. Here is our conversation.

So first I want to welcome you, Amy Vickers, to the podcast. Thanks so much for being here.

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Thanks for having me.

Rachel Thompson:

As our listeners know, and as I’ve told you beforehand, this series is focused on writers who write with limitations and writers who write with a disability or identify as disabled, a spoonie, a neurodivergent, or also we’ve added into the mix neurospicy recently through the episode with Shant, who the term that I and other guests said we want to adopt as well. But I’m wondering how do you publicly identify yourself and what’s in your writing bio and how did you come to this identity or way of expressing yourself?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

My bio says that I’m an autistic Japanese American writer. I was diagnosed about a year ago, but I’ve always been autistic. I just didn’t know it. I always knew there was something different about me, but I didn’t have a word for it. I just knew that I struggled in ways that I didn’t think other people struggled, and I didn’t know that for sure either because most of it’s internal. I knew that I had to do things to manage my life and myself that other people didn’t seem to have to do. So I had been living in Japan for about six years and I had set up my life in a way that things largely worked, and then we moved here to the US and all of that stuff that I’d set up for myself no longer existed, and I sort of had to start all over again. And that’s when I realized what I was going through was not the same as what other people were going through.

Rachel Thompson:

And then that’s what called you to seek a diagnosis, right, suspect?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Yeah, so I don’t know what I was googling at the time, but somehow all of a sudden I was getting all these suggestions. The algorithm was saying, Hey, do you think you might be autistic? And I thought, no, probably not. Why would you think that? But then for whatever reason I started looking into it, probably just curiosity. And I realized, Oh, wait, this does actually apply to me. And I started doing research. And that’s when I started seeking a diagnosis. I knew that I have too much imposter syndrome to just not have a diagnosis. So that’s why I went and looked for one. But of course, it’s not easy, right? There’s a huge accessibility issue around getting a diagnosis of autism.

Rachel Thompson:

How has being autistic impacted your writing, both creatively and in practice? And that can include also your life, because you mentioned the things that were challenging in your life as well.

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Well, it’s kind of like asking, how does your brain impact your writing? Or how does your brain impact your life? It impacts it in every way that it can be impacted. And writing puts your brain on display more than anything else, I think, or maybe any other form of art. For me, I tend to process very slowly, especially auditory processing. So I have a hard time with phone calls or any conversation I have to do on the fly. That’s why I sort of need writing, because I need it to slow things down. It has a built-in delay time. It allows me to take my time and really think about what I want to say and how I want to say it. When I don’t have that time, I always end up feeling like what I said was inaccurate, or I end up regretting what I said, or it just sounded really awkward. However, autism also allows me to focus intensely for long periods of time, and I can get really deep into things that I really enjoy. When I set out to write my memoir, I read more than 80 memoirs and maybe 30 books on craft and listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts. And so you couldn’t accuse me of not having done enough research to write that book.

Rachel Thompson:

I feel like there’s something also about noticing. Maybe it’s paying attention to sensory things is, in my experience, anyway, something that I’m very tuned into. And I wondered if you think something like that is impacting your writing from the sensory?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Absolutely. And I have something about that in the thing that I wrote that I’ll read later. It’s about how being autistic means that you have to be a lot more observant than the average person to be on equal footing on a social level. But also, from a sensory perspective, I’m just much more sensitive than other people. Every change in the environment, I notice. And so sometimes it’s positive and sometimes it’s negative, I don’t know. But yeah, I definitely notice a lot more than other people do.

Rachel Thompson:

What has posed challenges in your writing life related to autism or related to limitations and disability, if anything?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

In my opinion, the disadvantage is entirely social. For example, I used to work a corporate job. And there was a fluorescent light right above my cubicle. And I just can’t stand the light that comes from a fluorescent light. It was hindering my ability to do my job. And so I asked my manager, can I just disable this light that’s right above my cubicle because it’s driving me insane? And he told me no. So at some point, the maintenance guy had left a ladder just sitting around. And so I just sneakily grabbed the ladder and used it to disable the light above my cubicle, so I could do my work. Nobody noticed.

It goes to show how there are so many accommodations that could be easily made for us. But people don’t want to make them because our environment is a community decision, the one that we all share. So if there was a siren going off in the office, nobody would think that was okay. But for something like that, which most people think is okay, they assume that you must be okay with it too. And it’s not even clear to be why it’s so hard to make those accommodations when a lot of times, like I said, people don’t even notice.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, that’s so telling. I mean, I’ve known you through the course that you recently took with me and I’m feeling like, we haven’t had like a chat about this, but I’m kind of like fluorescent lights. Yeah, what’s up with that? What’s the terrible? And it is like a siren in my head just to have a fluorescent light over me. So it’s so telling. And that’s such a great explanation of it. It’s like, it’s not noticeable when it’s absent or present to other people, but to you is very noticeable and it was impacting your work.

I’m wondering about how that works in terms of writing communities too, or often, I mean, a lot of times we’re meeting online now, but maybe in person writing communities or is there anything like that that posed a challenge or was something that you noticed in terms of difference, in terms of how you approached it versus other neurotypical folks?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Yeah, I definitely struggle more to find a writing community. And I’ve struggled a lot to find people that I can trade work with or people who are willing to share information with me or it’s not like I’m asking people that’s like, I haven’t been able to find people, make connections in the

same way. I think that neurotypical people do. I also kind of struggle in that a lot of times I’ll have questions that I just don’t find answered online. And a good example of that is you remember when I was asking you about how to write the cover letter. And when you research anything about cover letters or query letters, the advice that you always see is follow the submission guidelines to the letter.

But the submission guidelines often aren’t clear or they’re vague, and they don’t give you enough instruction for you to be able to do that. And because I didn’t have somebody that I could ask, in my mind, it was physically impossible for me to follow those rules, because they’re saying follow the submission guidelines to the letter, but we’re not going to tell you what that is. So it was really painful and difficult for me. I had to just submit without really knowing if it was right. And that’s really hard for me too. I need to have things to be accurate and right, and I couldn’t do that. I was submitting anyway, but it was a difficult experience.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, it’s a catch-22 where it’s saying be very specific, but we’re not going to be specific about

what

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Yes. Yes, exactly. And I get it because they don’t want to discourage people. They want to encourage people to submit and they don’t want people to think, oh, I can’t submit because of this reason or that reason. But it was actually that looseness that was making it hard for me to submit.

Rachel Thompson:

I have a lesson in the lit mag love on the cover letter because it’s a challenging thing for all writers. But also what you’re saying about that is really important to underscore in terms of people who like to follow the rules, raising my hand as well too. It’s like, we want to know what are the rules of the communication? How exactly do you want to receive that communication? So I think that’s really good to note. What are some things that you’ve done to make the work of writing, including submissions and just the broader work of a writer, better fit your abilities and limitations?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

I have a very sensitive and nervous system and I get triggered very easily and sometimes I can’t

get it under control. And so I’ve built my life in a way where I’m not getting triggered too much. And so I don’t keep a strict schedule. I try to be as loose with myself as I can, even though I tend to think very rigidly. But when I do that, I just end up putting more pressure on myself and triggering myself and making myself nervous that I’m dealing with anxiety on top of everything else. So I just do whatever I can to keep that anxiety at bay.

I’ve also had a lot of failures in the last 15 years because I was in autistic burnout and I didn’t know what was wrong with me. But what was happening was that I couldn’t keep my commitments anymore and that was really distressing to me. So I was afraid to make any kind of commitment, even a casual commitment. And prior to that, I was doing pretty well from the outside. It looked like I was doing pretty well. But what was happening was I was just masking really hard to make myself fit in. This past year, I’ve been figuring out what I need to do, just sort of learning where my limits are and learning where I can push myself a little bit more.

And having the diagnosis has made a big difference with that because now I can look to other autistic people and see how they’re doing it. I know exactly what’s going on. So I can address it a little bit more directly instead of it just being trial and error like before. Before my diagnosis, I wouldn’t dare ask for a accommodation for anything. I felt like I was a monster. I was being lazy or selfish. If I asked for any kind of accommodation, now I’m a little bit more okay with it. It just helps to know what’s going on and be able to find resources that directly address what I’m going through.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, and the permission, I suppose, then to go, I’m burnt out right now, I need to recharge in these ways or I need to take these other steps.

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Yeah, suddenly it feels more okay now that I have a diagnosis to make those accommodations for myself or even ask for accommodations, which I wouldn’t have done before. It’s weird, but I feel like before a lot of the things that I was experiencing, like I said, like the sensory problems or anxiety or social anxiety or any of that that I was experiencing, I just thought it was psychosomatic, which really just means that it’s something that’s going on in your brain. And it is still something that’s going on in my brain.

But I think we have this assumption that if something is going on in your brain that somehow you’d have more control over it. That’s why people say, oh, it’s just all in your mind, but you would never tell somebody who has a heart problem. Oh, it’s just all in your heart, or it’s just all your kidneys, whatever. And for some reason, when it’s in your mind, it’s dismissible. But that doesn’t mean that it’s any more under control than if it were in another organ.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, I love that, Amy. Thanks for sharing that. It’s also striking for me because our disabilities overlap. I’m sharing a little bit more, I’m talking a little bit about this too, but most of the anxiety, most of the social challenges that come with being autistic, in my experience and in my reading too, is other people not understanding and accommodating and making environments that are uncomfortable for us and all that.

So I just want to kind of underline that there really are things that people can do to be more accommodating just to listen to what people are asking for when someone tells you that a light, for example, is bothering them than believe them and that it’s impacting their work. But obviously that’s an analogy. So there’s other examples, like be more clear about what you want in your cover letter.

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Absolutely.

Rachel Thompson:

I also want to say that, because this has come up before too, it’s like everyone has different experiences as well too. So it’s not like there’s one way that people experience this particular diagnosis or people experience any kind of disability or impairment.

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Yeah, I think that’s the hard thing about autism is that first that we all experience it differently and we all have different traits. You might not be bothered by lights or you are bothered by lights, you said you were, but you might not be bothered by the same things that I’m bothered by. And I might not be bothered by the same things you’re bothered by. So I’m highly sensitive in almost every realm, except I’m actually hypersensitive when it comes to heat. So I don’t feel heat as well as other people do. So I can sit in a really hot room and not notice that it’s hot. It’s a one place where I feel like I actually have an advantage. But it also goes to show that we’re all a little bit different.

So something that’s bothering me might not be bothering you and that goes back to just how different autism is for different people. But the social aspect of autism, if I’m sitting alone in a room and I have control over everything around me and everything is exactly how I need it to be, I don’t feel autistic at all. Because it’s not announcing itself to me. So I think a lot of people can feel this way too. And we end up having a lot of imposter syndrome saying, Oh, do I really have a disability or don’t I? And then I go outside and I start dealing with other people and I’m like, Oh, yes, yes, I do actually.

Rachel Thompson:

What kind of writing and writing practices excite you these days, are there methods,

genres, forms, and places where you feel momentum and excitement for your writing?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Well, I just finished your lit mag love course. And I really enjoyed it. I got a lot out of it. And I think it’s opened a whole new world to me. I’ve been reading more literary magazines lately, which of course is part of the course. It’s made me feel a lot more connected to other writers and what they’re doing right now, which is welcome after, you know, like I said, I was experiencing a lot of isolation before and feeling like I didn’t have anyone mentoring me or helping me. And this has made a big difference on that. It’s also taught me to be a little bit more free and flexible with my writing before I was very strict or I have been very strict in the past years as a writer, where I would edit things very, very intensely.

And where there was no extraneous words, no extraneous anything, I would edit out anything that I thought could be criticized, thinking that you make something perfect by removing the flaws. And when you do that, you actually end up removing a lot of the beauty too. And so I’m learning to be a little bit more free with it, have a little bit more fun with it, not freak out. If there’s like a little inefficiency of language or something like that, that’s been really exciting for me.

Rachel Thompson:

I love that. What you said about removing the flaws is also removing the beauty because it strikes me, it illustrates what people say sometimes when work that comes into a Lit Mag has been workshoped too much, or it’s been written by committee too much. And I suspect that’s part of what it is too. It’s like it’s so perfect that there’s nothing kind of broken/beautiful about it. So thank you.

Who are some of the writers, artists and people in your life living dead related or not that taught you through their own writing with disability and limitations?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

I have a friend who has MS who’s turned her attention to writing lately and another friend who has chronic kidney pain, who keeps making TikToks. And I know a lot of other people with various disabilities or just difficult circumstances in their lives. And what I’ve learned from that is that it’s a lot harder to avoid creating than it is to create. So we put more energy into telling ourselves that we can’t create for whatever reason than just allowing ourselves to create. And you see people who have limited energy and they use whatever energy that they have to make things.

So what I’m learning from that is that creativity helps us, but it’s also just harder to avoid than it is to do. And the part that makes it difficult is all the stuff that we put on creativity, especially in a capitalist society. We turn it into a competition, which means we try to use objective measures for something that’s inherently subjective. And then we take that and we turn it into rules about who’s allowed to create and who isn’t. So when I say create, I don’t necessarily mean that they’re creating anything traditional. I just mean that they might be creating just a better future for themselves or imagining a better future for themselves.

Rachel Thompson:

What do you wish people with sense or know about writing with disability and limitations?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

I think the main thing is the social issues, like I mentioned before. There’s not much acknowledgment for how connections really make a big difference in your career and any career really, mentorships and other people helping other people out, giving them the right feedback, pointing them in the right direction. And I guess I wish people would be a little bit more understanding that it’s not so easy for everyone to network and find those connections. I went for years without really having any kind of writing community at all. I was just doing it all on my own.

And that’s really, really hard if you don’t have any feedback or the feedback is very minimal or the feedback is not very helpful because you’re getting feedback from people who aren’t very invested in your work. And for me, anything social kind of sucks away the energy I have for writing. Even social media I struggle with, I never got the hang of Twitter. So it’s kind of good that it’s going away now. But I could never figure out how to have a public conversation. And maybe nobody ever figured out how to have a public conversation, which is why it hasn’t gone so well. But yeah, social media is hard for me and it takes energy for me. So I usually avoid it because I want to save that energy for writing.

Rachel Thompson:

I know you mentioned you brought a piece that you published related to neurodivergence. Would you like to read it now?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

So what I have is a written interview I did for a substack called Cave of the Heart. And she asked me to write about how neurodivergence affects my writing. So this is what I have:

“It was a relief to finally have an explanation for why I am the way I am when I was first diagnosed with autism. But it really shook my faith in my own judgment.

I’d only started trusting myself about five years before. And the trust I’d been building in myself was rooted in a faith that I was fundamentally the same as everyone else. I dismissed everything that had previously made me feel alien, like having been selectively mute when I was preschool age.

My environment growing up was extremely unconventional. So I believed my differences were the result of poor socialization and trauma, which I saw as fixable, but my diagnosis undermined all of that.

The most important thing a writer needs to develop is taste so we can edit our own work. This is why I read as much as I can. But now I think about all those words going through my autism filter. And I’m afraid I’ll never really fully understand the neurotypical perspective and therefore never develop the ability to write things that really speak to people.

On the other hand, I read a book by Devon Price called Unmasking Autism where he writes, ‘Neuroscientists have observed that autistic brains continue to develop in areas associated with social skills for far longer than neurotypical brains are believed to. One study found that by age 30, no differences between non-autistic and autistic people were evident’. Price theorizes that we teach ourselves to be consciously aware of things that are subconscious for neurotypicals. This aligns with my experience. I’ve learned to be powerfully observant just to have the same foothold as everyone else and adept observation is the core of good writing.

So maybe I see myself on a path toward self-trust like I was before my diagnosis, but the map has changed. I was only diagnosed a year ago, so I’m still figuring it out.

Also, now that I’m aware of autism, I see evidence of it everywhere. I suspect that many of my favorite writers were autistic. Of course, many are dead now, so there’s no way to know for sure, but it gives me hope”.

Rachel Thompson:

That’s a beautiful thing to you. I kind of felt that way too, where I looked around and was like, oh yeah, all these people that I like are also autistic. That’s why I like that so much, or maybe are not identifying as such, but I’m kind of suspicious in characters too, I think as well, not just people.

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Definitely characters. Yeah, I see it a lot in characters, and so I think, oh, the writer must either know somebody who’s autistic or is autistic themselves, because how else could they possibly have written it that way? Actually, I was just reading the beautiful and damned, isn’t the beautiful and the damned or the beautiful and damned? I can’t remember exactly by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Rachel Thompson:

I’ll put it in the show notes because I don’t recall the title either, but I’ll get it in there.

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Now I can’t even remember the character of the woman in the book. I think her name was Gloria, and she is written in a way that makes her seem sort of frivolous and vapid, but some of the things that she’s struggling with really seem like autism to me when I read it a second time.

Rachel Thompson:

Like certain sensitivities, you think?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Yeah, certain sensitivities and just the way she’s interacting with the world. Yeah, we don’t really

get to know the deep interior of what’s going on with her. We just kind of see her behavior from the outside. Maybe he was writing this from the perspective of somebody who knows someone with autism, but maybe not really knowing what it was that was making them behave that way.

Rachel Thompson:

Amy, what helps you move, rest, heal, grieve, and celebrate your efforts, wins, and losses?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

For the longest time, I got that from my cat when he passed away about two months ago. Since then, I’ve had a hard time feeling like there’s any meaning in what I’m doing, but I’m still doing it anyway, and I’ve been relying very heavily on my routines. I’ve always relied really heavily on my routines, and I think that if you have a routine around something that’s meaningful to you, like I have a lot of routines around writing, then it’s like practicing a sort of faith, your demonstrating faith that whatever you’re doing that has meaning to you also has meaning that’s bigger than you.

And I guess I practice that also by reading a lot of the same books over and over again and watching a lot of the same shows over and over again. I’m trying to expand my list because I need more variety, but a lot of it has to do with routine and faith in my routine, and I’m hoping that it will eventually feel more meaningful than just a faith and routine, but actually a faith and meaning.

Rachel Thompson:

You mean like in the writing itself, what would that look like? I guess I’m wondering switching to that faith in the meaning.

Amy Yuki Vickers:

I think it becomes a little bit hard to explain there because it’s not exactly rational, but it’s this belief that the thing that you’re doing will have a wider impact than just yourself, and I think it becomes meaningful through that because it means more than just you’re doing it for yourself. Maybe it’s you’re doing it for other people, but I think that a lot of these routines almost have there’s something mystical about it in that when I practice it, I feel like I’m connecting to something that’s greater than myself, and that makes it more meaningful, and in that sense makes life a lot more meaningful.

Because if I’m just writing on my own and nobody’s going to read it, or no one’s going to care when they’ve read it, which is when you think about it is probably the most likely outcome for a lot of things that you write, but there’s also that faith there that it’s going to become something that’s a little bit bigger than yourself, or maybe even a lot bigger than yourself, and I don’t necessarily mean having a lot of readers, but just that it’s going to have some kind of like, I don’t know, greater impact, like putting some kind of intention out into the world that maybe moves the energy of how people are interacting with each other in some positive way.

I guess it makes me feel as though whatever is out there to commune with, that’s when I’m communing with it.

Rachel Thompson:

In the writing itself?

Amy Yuki Vickers::

Yeah, in the practice of writing itself.

Rachel Thompson:

I mean, I always think that the people that I work with yourself included and the many writers in our community, we’re all writers looking for connection, and maybe that’s every writer, but that’s always been like a theme word for me is like, this is about connecting. So I just love that description, and I wish that for every writer to feel that they’re communing with something as they’re working and imagining maybe a future reader, but also sometimes I think like ancestors too is like we’re part of a tradition of people putting words on a page and expressing something

that’s very beautiful.

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Yeah, yes, that’s something that’s very meaningful to me too, is this idea that it’s this practice that goes back so, so far. I have no idea how far goes back, but I think that we’ve been telling each other’s stories probably since the beginning of language. So being part of that tradition feels like an honor.

Rachel Thompson:

My last question before our quick lit round is what ****advice do you have for all writers, but especially autistic writers or neurotypical writers on handling feedback both good and bad about writing?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Well, when I listen to writers, or I have been listening to a lot of writers lately, especially in the Lit Mag Love Course, and what I see as the biggest commonality is a lot of self-doubt, and I think that we need to all start looking for ways to be a little bit more okay with ourselves. If we can stop putting resources into self-doubt and then we can maybe put more resources into writing or just I think finding a way to just be a little bit more okay with yourself is probably the best way to move forward because then when you get feedback that isn’t the feedback that you wanted, it doesn’t feel quite so bad, and maybe the stakes don’t feel quite so high, and of course like feedback hurts my feelings too.

Sometimes if I’m getting the feedback I didn’t want to get, and of course like I just have to let those feelings run their course, and what I’ve found is that if I let the feelings run their course, then I can go back and look at the feedback more objectively and decide is this something I want to listen to or isn’t it a lot of times when that happens I go back and look at it and realize that the feedback wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was the first time I read it because at the time my emotions were so high.

And I was so worried about what they were going to say and it kind of cladded my view of what was actually being said, but there have been times where I’ve gotten feedback that was so difficult for me that I couldn’t go back and read it again and what I did was I just asked my husband to read it over and report back and I just said, will you read this and write down anything that’s actionable in this and tell me that part and leave everything else out? That’s helped too.

Rachel Thompson:

Was that feedback from a workshop partner or from an editor?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

That feedback came from a writer’s group when I was very early on as a writer and it was a group that did not only punches it all. Obviously when I get feedback that feels good, that’s the feedback that I wanted. I try to keep that in my heart and my memory as far as long as I can because we need those things to keep going.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, I was just reminded of a practice I used to have. It’s like, I’ll develop these some habits like this that will help and then I’ll forget about them, but I didn’t used to have a practice though. When you get good feedback, save it and savor it and read it more and more. And, you know, this is something I have been encouraging writers to do in my Lit Mag Love course. It’s reminding myself, It’s an important thing to do because it’s so much more sticky in our brains than negative feedback.

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Yeah, it’s just the way we are built, I guess, that we remember the bad things and the good things always feel like, well, that’s good. Okay, let’s just keep moving. That was a mile walker. I’m going to keep going and then the bad stuff is like, oh, no, this is going to change my life.

Rachel Thompson:

So here’s the quick lit where I ask you to finish these sentences. The first is being a writer is?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Fun.

Rachel Thompson:

Literary magazines are?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Mysterious

Rachel Thompson:

Editing requires?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Patience

Rachel Thompson:

And rejection for a writer means?

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Help

Rachel Thompson:

And finally writing community is?

Amy Yuki Vickers::

Fertile ground.

Rachel Thompson:

Well, thank you so much for being part of our writing community. It’s been great getting to know you and thanks for agreeing to do this podcast as well.

Amy Yuki Vickers:

Oh, I’m so happy to have been able to do this. I was really excited when you first asked me and I am excited to do it now. I’m really happy to be on it. Thank you so much.

Rachel Thompson:

That was my interview with the Amy Yuki Vickers. I loved hearing about her experiences as a writer and how she has set up her writing life to work for her. In particular, I appreciated the self-advocacy she does, making sure that her basic needs are met as a writer. As you heard, we both loved looking at characters in writing through the lens of autism, and I haven’t read The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but now I want to to take a look at the character Gloria.

Find a link to Amy’s website and everything we discussed in the show notes for this episode. rachelthompson.co/93

I often muse that the Jean-Paul Sartre phrase has a particular resonance with autistics that hell is other people, as Amy’s example with the neon light illustrates. What was nothing to the neurotypical people she worked with at the time was jarring and disruptive to her. Most environments are created for neurotypical people; creating spaces that do not fry our nervous systems requires community care—when that care isn’t offered, it’s hellish.

Watch this feed for more episodes with brilliant writers who create practices that work for them and their own disabilities and limitations. I hope that you’ll pick up ideas for your practice and how you might work around anything in your life that makes it so you cannot write in the often prescribed formula of writing every day on a set schedule, a wrongheaded and exclusionary prescription.

And I guess I hope also that you create more space for writers in our community and think about things from outside of your own experience and how they might affect people who are writing with limitations and disability. Maybe doing that before they have to tell you, but definitely listening if they do have to tell you.

The Write, Publish, and Shine podcast is brought to you by me, Rachel Thompson. My producer for this episode is Meli Walker. Thank you! Sound Editing by Adam Linder. Transcripts by Diya Jaffery.

You can learn more about my work to help writers write, publish, and shine at rachelthompson.co. When you’re there, sign up for my Writerly Love Digest of bite-sized info including prompts and craft tips, publication news, calls to action, reading lists, and more. They are still sent weekly and filled with support for your writing practice.⁠

If this episode encouraged you to be clear about what you need to write and thrive as a human, I would love to hear all about it. You can always email me at hello@rachelthompson.co.

And tell other luminous writers about this episode. You can do this by sending them to the podcast at rachelthompson.co/podcast or searching for Write, Publish, and Shine wherever they get their podcasts.

Thank you for listening—I encourage you to write in a way that works for you today.

Amy Yuki Vickers spoke to me from what is now Orange County, the northern area of which was originally inhabited by the Tongva, a part of Tovaangar, and the southern area by the Acjachemen.

I’m still here in South Sinai online historically and presently belonging to the El Muzzina Bedouin and I’m really out of things to say about Gaza except that we cannot stop writing and talking about it and drawing attention and deeply noticing and feeling and standing with the people there who are under a terrible occupation and are enduring a genocide.

Transcript Outline

00:01	Introduction to this episode
00:35	Amy’s introduction
01:58	Writing with Limitations and Disability
04:15
06:30	Impact on Creative Writing
Writing with Autism
11:06	Adapting Writing Practices to Fit Limitations
17:05
18:34
20:29
21:52	Finding Writing Momentum
Learning from Disability in Writing
Insights into Writing with Disability and Limitations
Sharing Personal Work
25:37
29:25
32:35	Self-Care and Celebration
Advice for Autistic Writers
Quick Lit Rapid-fire