Matthew Sillence: We're here on Episode 10, the conclusion of

series one, which is going to be on subject of poetry therapy and

the Academy. And for this episode, we're picking up on

some themes of well being and academic life that we introduced

throughout our first series. And I'm really delighted to have

here Dr Stephanie Aspin, who I've known for a number of

years, since 2005 I think Steph

Stephanie Aspin: or five, yeah.

Matthew Sillence: And that's when I started my PhD at the

University of East Anglia. And Steph, you were, I think, a

researcher, developer at that point. Yeah, that's right. So

we've, we've got a history that's almost 20 years where

we've known each other, yeah, different capacities. So I've

known you initially, when you were actually supporting me with

research training and helping me understand what it was to do a

PhD. And then I've sort of worked with you a bit as an

academic developer as well, so in academic development, and

we'll hear more about that in just a moment. But one of the

big things that I wanted to sort of highlight for this episode is

your new book, which has just come out, and you very kindly

signed it for me, so I've the only one. Well, it's, I very

much enjoyed it. It's been, it's been a pleasure. I've even got a

little smiley face with the signature, which is great. And

it's called poetry and therapy. Why words help. And it's

published by PCCS Books in 2025, so this year it's only been out,

Stephanie Aspin: what couple of months? Yeah, and

Matthew Sillence: I'm probably gonna embarrass you a little

bit, but I'm gonna just just, just look at the blurb on the

back, and it was being described as a and I'm quoting here 'a

rich, intelligent and...', I've underlined this bit, 'deeply

humane offering' I'm blushing now that weaves together the

poetry, the power of poetry, therapeutic insight and

philosophical depth, and we will be picking up on the kind of

content of that book throughout the episode. But also, really, I

think the key thing today is lessons that we can learn from

combining different scholarly and professional interests,

because you are somebody who I think is quite remarkable in

terms of your career, one of the few people I know who's actually

got two PhDs. I don't

Stephanie Aspin: know if I dignify it with the word career,

unless you mean the sort of career in down a hill.

Matthew Sillence: Well, let's listen to your academic origin

story, then your own words and so Steph, welcome to the show

and take it away.

Stephanie Aspin: So my academic origin story. So I started out

doing literature at the University of East Anglia, who I

was very pleased they accepted me with my very poor A levels.

But I've always absolutely loved literature, but exclusively

poetry. And one of the great things about doing the degree

the BA in English Lit at UEA was that it allowed me to specialize

from quite early on. So I've always been very interested in

avant garde poetry, contemporary poetry and poetics, and

alongside that, as well a bit literary theory. As you know, I

developed as student. So that was always, you know, from being

a really small child, a real special interest poetry, how

words work. So there wasn't much choice, really. When it came to

doing degrees, I was just drawn towards it, and then

subsequently went on to do an MA at Sussex, followed by a PhD. So

I started my PhD at the University of Liverpool, and

then transferred with my supervisor to Dundee, but was

based in Norwich. So my husband was doing his PhD in Economics

at the University of East Anglia, and worked here

subsequently. So I've been in Norwich for a long time and

around, excuse me, postgraduate students in Norwich. So that was

so I started teaching after I finished my PhD, part time. As I

said, my career, such as it's been, has been very unplanned.

So I think as many literature PhDs do I was teaching

part-time, was teaching at Brunel and various other places

and moving around the country. A little bit was my husband's job.

I think economists in the main are a bit more employable. But

I'm not undermining the value of the PhD in literature. We have

many skills. So I did that for a while, and then ended up working

at UEA, mainly because I wanted to come back to Norwich. And as

Matthew said, working in research development, which I

absolutely loved, and then subsequently running the MA in

Higher Education Practice, which is the teaching qualification

for staff. So that was absolutely brilliant. I did that

till 2023 but when I started the job at UEA, I was still living

in London and commuting, so I needed to do something my

Wednesday evening. And that turned out to be an evening

class, and the one that was available on a Wednesday evening

was counseling. So again, you know, I wandered into it without

much thought. Like most of the decisions that I make in life, I

tend to go on vibe and what interests me. And it really

interested me, so I did the introductory course, did the

certificate course, then did a full training as an integrative

therapist that was the BSC course at Middlesex, and then

hadn't had enough of it, so I carried on and did a PhD here in

counseling studies focusing on the relationship between poetry,

language and the psyche. So the book itself is a bit different.

It's not. It does contain practical exercises, but it's

not, maybe the sort of book that you might expect in poetry

therapy. It's not focused so much on practice, but it

balances it out with literary theory and poetics, you know,

which is my first love. So it was actually a brilliant project

to do as a PhD around workshops, you know, interview people. Lot

of people really kindly donated, writing work with clients. So it

was really interesting, and that subsequently turned into the

book.

Matthew Sillence: Thank you, Steph, I mean, really came

through the way that you've combined these different

interests in your career. So there's quite a few personal

anecdotes in the book, I think in both in terms of your kind of

therapeutic, your professional background, but I think also in

your life as well. So personal stories about your your your

your experience of dealing with or sometimes quite difficult

subjects and challenging subjects. And I think we're

going to, I guess, get on to looking at poetry in just, in

just a moment. But one of the things that you on your website,

you've, you've kind of defined yourself as, is a neurodivergent

therapist, and in back, in Episode Five on this podcast, we

we were looking at neurodivergence and the PGR

experience, which I think has really sort of started to define

that term a bit more in relation to something like

neurodiversity, yeah. But do you mean maybe just for the benefit

of the listeners, and also me, because I'm not quite sure what

is. What is it to be a neurodivergent therapist in your

in your

Stephanie Aspin: experience? Yes, so my experience, it's not

to be an expert in neurodivergence, although I have

really developed my expertise since finding out I was

neurodivergent, which is another story and part of the PhD

journey, which you may come on to, but it's to be a therapist

that has lived experience working with people with lived

experience, which I think is really important. You know, my

whole approach to neurodiversity, or

neurodivergence rather, is that it is a way of being

systemically marginalized, and I think that it really is helpful

if people that are systemically marginalized in that way have

therapists that have experience of that. So we don't raise our

eyebrows, for example, we don't, I don't think we do tend to

gaslight people by saying, Are you sure you know, because it's

been within our own experience, and it's really important as a

therapist to be able to park your own experience as well.

Every neurodivergent person is different. You know, we

shouldn't bring our experiences and interpret other people's

experiences through our own lens. That said, however, I do

think it is really helpful if you are neurodivergent and you

want therapy to find somebody that is a neurodivergent

therapist is neurodivergent themselves. You know, pretty

much you know, that a black woman will be best served.

Probably by a black woman therapist, because you know of

that experience of systemic marginalized marginalization,

and I'm not comparing the two things racism and disability,

but I do think, you know, we can look at them through the same

lens. I think that is helpful.

Matthew Sillence: Thank you, thanks. I think that's really

helpful to to maybe understand part of the work you do,

although the book itself is not, you know, it's not, not purely a

book about neurodivergence, someone,

Stephanie Aspin: you think I've mentioned it maybe once twice,

yeah.

Matthew Sillence: But it is an aspect of your your professional

life, yeah? And one of the things that you also have

mentioned on your website, and I know you've sent me a great

flyer about about this as well, is, A-Typicats, yeah? Which is a

consultancy that you work with, with training, yeah,

Stephanie Aspin: it's a collective which is really

important to us. So we work. We have a very flat structure.

There's three of us. We're all co founders, and we basically

work with universities in the main we've worked with a couple

of mental health providers as well. But we tend to work with

the universities because we know what it is to be university

Insider. We also know what it is to be neurodivergent, and we run

workshops. We're partnering with the University of London at the

moment, so last year and next semester to run, I suppose,

there's awareness raising sessions for staff and managers,

and they've been absolutely brilliant. Actually, I think

University of London are really ahead of the curve when it comes

to thinking about neurodiversity. But I think it's

particularly important in the he context, because I think so many

academics doctoral candidates are neurodivergent, whether or

not they're identified, because neurodivergence is a very

interesting and nuanced type of disability. So is a disability?

Disability? You know, the things that we can't do and that are

difficult under the medical model, but it's also largely a

disability using the social model of disability, ie, the

world's not set up for us. I think universities used to be

very much set up for us, so special interests, quiet places,

libraries and that kind of thing. But I think as we've

moved to more a business model as a sector, more shared

offices, shared spaces, more administration, I think that's

become maybe quite difficult for a lot of people that may not

have needed a diagnosis or to recognize them when you were

divergent before, because they were working with what they do

best, which is ideas research, You know, in a quiet space.

Matthew Sillence: Yeah. I mean, I certainly recognize that. I

think, I mean, I've had a, probably a much shorter career

in academia than many of my senior colleagues, but I think

over the last 25, 20 odd years, I've definitely seen a rise in

kind of personal administrative duties that happen. And I think

that happens at all levels. It's happening for research students

and students generally. It's happening for, you know,

established academic staff as well. So we will, we'll have a

look at the Academy the sort of third part of our discussion

today, towards the end of the episode, but I thought maybe we

could start off by looking at poetry, which is, yeah, not at

all my specialism, but I was absolutely engrossed by the

ideas that you put forward in that. And I did a full

disclosure. I didn't, I did an English lit a level, and that

was about the kind of the extent of my, my my poetry knowledge.

So, but in on page 16 of the book, so quite early on, and I,

I really, I thought this was really helpful, because

Stephanie Aspin: five and now,

Matthew Sillence: so you talk about, really four functions of

poetry, and I think maybe if we could, sort of like treat each

of one of these in turn, and then hopefully listeners will be

able to see how, or hear how this goes on to to relate to

therapeutic functions as well. So the first one, I guess, is

poetry and telling and symbolizing. So symbolizing is a

big theme of your book. Very briefly, could you explain a bit

about what that's what that's about? What do we mean about

telling and symbolizing, symbolizing?

Stephanie Aspin: So I suppose what I mean is telling. I. This

will be the most basic function you know, to actually speak

about something in therapy that maybe we haven't spoken about

before or haven't spoken about in that way. But part of that

process is finding language that will adequately hold it what

Eliot calls the objective correlative, the the words you

know, the the only words that can hold that experience. And I

think that's why poetry is really important, because you

can't summarize poem and A Level, GCSE, particularly being

asked to do that absolutely rubbish poet, you know, a poem

is extant, you know, is its sounds. It is the shapes of the

words. It is everything about it, which is why translation is

an art, you know, not a science. I forgot where I was going with

this now, yeah, symbolization, so, yeah, finding, finding the

right image. And I think when we find the right image, we're

right at the edge of what we know often that we may not know

why that's the right image, why we're drawn towards it, and you

may have had this experience when you're reading a poem or

encountering a work of art, and that brings us to a place of

curiosity and exploration, which is where we want to be working

as therapists. So people often have experiences of therapy

where they will have years of therapy where they'll go in tell

the same story. We call it rehearsed material, which is,

you know, not to denigrate that, you know, we've all done it, but

it means we're stuck. But I think when we find the right

image, door opens, you know, because that image is bringing

its own associations, associations with men. Will be

aware of associations that are personal in culture, and it

gives us an object, I suppose, to put on the table and to start

turning over to explore.

Matthew Sillence: Thanks, Steph, I like the imagery discussions

that you have in and it was a little bit surprising to me

because I didn't, in my naivety, I didn't understand the idea of

imagery and literature, in a sense, because I came from some

visual arts background through my earlier academic life, and

always had a...

Stephanie Aspin: on the visual arts as well.

Matthew Sillence: And so, yeah, this idea of objects and the

idea of kind of images we're talking about, largely mental

images that are kind of coming into people's minds when they're

reading texts. But you talk a lot as well about this kind of

plasticity of or kind of variety of meaning that comes out of

words chosen for poetry, that there isn't necessarily one kind

of fixed meaning or description that's being used, that there's

actually kind of a range of associations and connotations

that come in. And is that So is that how we're getting into the

symbolism side of things here?

Stephanie Aspin: I think, yeah, I think, I mean, that's what

poetry brings to the table. When you read words in a poem, you

are alerted that there may be multiple meanings. You know,

poetry uses metaphor, motif, symbol, rhythm, all of that, and

it draws our attention to it. So even if you take regular

language, you know, everyday language. I'm looking at a post

that says, switch off the speakers and close the windows

when you leave. You know, in this context, I'm just reading

that as a message, but actually, if I presented that as a poem,

we would then start to dwell on it and be a bit more curious.

And you know, when we start to unpick language, we can see that

words have other associations that aren't active. So I know

what what meanings are active in this context. It's a set of

instructions. But actually, if we broke it down and looked at

the relationships, if we looked at the connotations of words,

the relationships, spatial relationships, even between

words, we would then find out more. It's about being curious.

So I mean words. I mean this is a, I don't want to get too deep

or offend any, anyone that's an expert, but it's, you know,

Lacan talks about the chain of signification. Lacan is a French

or was a French psychoanalyst and theorist who defined himself

as a Freudian, but actually moved the whole Freudian

project, I suppose, the psychoanalytic project, on to

talk about language. And he says that what happens when we grow

up, when we acquire language, we then move into language, and

language is something that exists in the world. So when we

use language, when we pick up a word, we're picking up a whole

chain of meaning. So in the book, I use the example of the

word chair. So in this context, if it said, please, oh, it says,

Here, please return any chairs you've taken. And I didn't, I

didn't put these posters up. Yeah. See, language is

everywhere it is. Yeah, you can kind of paint. Everywhere. So,

you know, I know this is they mean the chairs that we're

sitting on. But actually, you know, think about chair and

culture. You think about chair of a meeting. You might think

personally about, I don't know, the chair that your grandfather

sat in. You might think about a specific chair. So chairs have

lots of meanings, and when we're drawn towards an image, when we

want drawn towards language and poetry, does this, it asks us to

attend, not just to take the surface. And that place of

curiosity, I think, is a place of therapy.

Matthew Sillence: Fantastic. I'm really pleased that we could use

the post of the instructions in the on the wall in front of us

as a good example, example of I'm starting to see actually,

how incredibly poetic these, these instructions are. So

moving on to a couple of other functions that you mentioned. So

there were two more, containment and transformation. I was really

taken with containment? Do you want to sort of unpack that a

bit for listeners as well. What do you mean by that?

Stephanie Aspin: Yeah, it's something that's talked about a

lot in therapy, particularly in relation to trauma. So having

something that will contain an experience. So art therapy is

often used with trauma. Visual Art therapy because it gives a

containing space. You know that you can do a drawing rather than

be in the experience. You've got something outside of you that's

actually holding the emotion and the experience and poetry can

similarly poetic images can act as containers. So we can talk

about, I don't know, you know, if we talked about our I'm

looking at the wall again. We talked about our experiences as,

you know, a machine, for example, I can see restart the

machine. You know that that might be a container to think

about. So what would restarting the machine be? And you could

talk about that image, but in talking about that image, then

we can start to connect to our experience, awaken some of our

experiences. So I mean, you could say, restart the machine

and be a quite a good motif to maybe describe the therapeutic

process.

Matthew Sillence: Yeah, I like that slightly ironic, given that

we had some problems starting the machine in the studio next

door, but yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, I can see how

that would work. So, so it's not, it's an act of giving a

kind of a frame around something that you that the client or

patient can work with to begin to work through the the concern

that they've got the thing that they that they've got a block

with, whether it's a traumatic experience that they're trying

to sort of process, or something, you know, something

else that they brought to The session.

Stephanie Aspin: There's a very good talking about poetry.

People probably familiar for your literature person anyway,

with Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', which I think is just a

perfect, perfect image he talks about, you know, he encounters

this urn with a scene on it in a gallery. He's walking past it,

and then he starts to dwell on the scene, and then he walks

away from it, but he also tells us that's still going on. So

it's almost that image on the urn, you know, it's an image of

containment. It's containing emotion, it's containing action,

it's containing experience. And I think that's perfect image for

what you know, the ways in which artistic images, whether they're

poetic or visual, can contain an experience this

Matthew Sillence: kind of leads us on, I guess, to this idea of

transformation. So what, what does that mean in terms of

poetry? How does, how does poetry transform? It's, I guess.

I'm guessing the people who read it, or people who make it, or a

bit of

Stephanie Aspin: both. Well, on there's two levels. I suppose

there's the more I suppose prosaic level, paradoxically

talking about poetry, but you can find a better image you

know, through poetry, through writing a better way to frame

experience, something that is more comfortable, more

satisfying, more inspiring, and that is a very helpful thing to

do in therapy, I do a lot of Creative Arts Therapy, and a lot

of that work is about finding you know, how we can transform

an experience, find a better way of expressing it and holding it.

But the other bit of that is that I think as humans, and this

is where the book becomes a bit esoteric, in the later chapters,

that we very much go to language to make something happen. So if

you think about magic, if you think about spells. You think

about religion, forms of words are incredibly important. And we

seem to have, as a species, a belief that if we say the right

words in the right order, something will change, and we

can even find that in the everyday, so everyday phrases

like, I don't know, touch wood, or, can't believe, a good one,

but it seems to be an innate thing. We like that. I suppose

the word would be ritual of language. You know, nursery

rhymes and other - children are very drawn towards nursery

rhymes, and they are containers, but also they seem to contain

something that's a little beyond our day to day experience.

Matthew Sillence: I think, I mean, that's really, I think

that's one of the things that really stayed with me when

reading the book, actually, with the idea of ritual. And I think

we've all come on to that towards the end of the program,

and particularly in relation to academic life, because I think,

yeah, there's some interesting loss of rituals to a certain

extent, which, which we can we can talk about. So thank you for

taking us through your kind of poetry functions. The the next

topic in the episode today was actually around therapy, and

we've already started to kind of get there a bit with with your

role and the kind of professional work that you're

doing. And I guess two, there were two processes, therapeutic

processes, that stood out for me. One was the person centered

approach, and the other is psychoanalysis. And I'm pleased

to say I know a little bit about both, normally, in the former,

in an educational context, but through the work of Carl Rogers,

who I'm a big, very big advocate of that approach. The second

psychoanalysis, way back in my art history days, because that

was, you know, psychoanalysis was actually something that was

kind of had enough, an interesting afterlife in

relation to lots of other subject areas, and the visual

arts is one, is no exception, I think, to that. So do you want

to maybe just explain how those two things kind of how you work

with persons at the person centered approach and

psychoanalysis, and what the difference between those two

things?

Stephanie Aspin: In a nutshell, like now, yeah, in a nutshell.

So I'm an intergrative therapist, but my my basic

practice is person centered. So person centered approach is

based on seeing the client's experiences as much as possible

through their eyes, and helping people to take the way they

judge themselves from the outside into the inside, which

is really important in the work that I do with neurodivergent

people, particularly autistic clients, that we very much learn

to judge ourselves from the outside, which is a normal

thing. It's a protective strategy for humans. You know,

we need to fit in with the group to survive. So that's hard

wired. But when you're neurodivergent, you're aware

that you are doing things differently, and that's too

neutral a word. Actually, you're doing things wrong. So you often

criticize. So we modify our behavior based on input from the

outside, and the way in which we do that is to internalize, to

install a version of ourselves, which is very self critical. So

where am I going with that? Yeah, so that's the person

centered bit is to move that evaluation of self from the

outside, what's called an external locus of evaluation in

Rogers, to an internal locus of evaluation, where we can

evaluate our own experiences more accurately based on our own

you Know, registering of it in our being, I suppose, and that

that is the therapeutic process. So that's the the work that I

do, but the way that I do it, I do use a lot like you, you know,

came across psychoanalysis early on studying literature, and

always been really interested in those ideas. So the first PhD I

did, which was on the New York School poet Ted Berrigan, who

was around in the 1970s was about how a self is constructed,

a sense of a self, even when that self is gone, because he

was dead by that point. When you read Berrigan work, you get

sense you're talking to a person. So I think, well, how

does that How is that trick done in language? You know that the

work is very conversational, and you really do when you work.

Those of you who've got the experience of doing a single

author PhD will resonate with this. You know, you feel like

you really know that person. You know, it's my mate, Ted. I even

when. To New York and went to his corner store and had a Pepsi

and a Twinkie, because that's what he did, and that was one of

the peak moments of my life, was having that Pepsi in gem spa in

the East Village. But anyway, I digress. Yeah, so the

psychoanalysis, I think psychoanalysis, it's become

unfashionable, but I think it has really interesting things to

say about imagery. Has interesting things to say about

the self. It focuses very much on the idea of the unconscious.

So coming back to the idea of the image can can make us

curious to step into a space that we're not fully aware of,

that really interests me. You know, not what's rehearsed and

known, but what is unknown that's absent from Rogers. But

Rogers is very much reacting to Freudian orthodoxy. So when he

was training as a psychologist, the psychoanalytic approach was

the norm. So I think there is a lot of this may be controversial

and shout back at me, but I think there's quite a lot in

Rogers that takes from Freud. So for example, the idea of the

external locus of evaluation, you can make some steps to

towards the super ego, which is the moral bit that berates us,

that we, you know, develop in our encounters growing up with

society, again, very pertinent to the work that I do with

autistic people and neurodivergent people more

generally. But yes, I'm quite interested. I was interested in

the theory. So when I first started off as a therapist, the

psychoanalytic interest was very much academic based on the Ph...

So the first PhD I did was looking at language, was looking

at Lacan, who I mentioned earlier. So in that, very much

that psychoanalytic arena, but I never brought that into therapy.

I was always very much a person, centered person. But as I've

trained in Creative Arts Therapy and been working more with

poetry, with painting, it started to spill in because I

think there were really useful, interesting ideas and techniques

that we can take from psychoanalysis. So I'm not a

psychoanalyst by any means. I don't work psychoanalytically,

but I do draw ideas from that space you know, and blend them

with a more person centered approach, which I know would

horrify a lot of Person Centered therapists feel free to scream

at me. I'm not,

Matthew Sillence: I'm not horrified at all. I think, I

mean, I think it's, I think it's really fascinating, because

actually, one of the things we missed off a few moments ago was

the the fourth function of poetry that you introduced in

the book, which is the access to the unconscious. Yeah, and I

think that that certainly around psychoanalysis, I think is a

very useful way of of trying to conceptualize that. I guess you

mentioned, when you were talking about Berrigan, that this, this

issue, this issue with the self and the kind of conversation or

dialog that you enter into. And one of the chapters of your book

deals with how people are working with and through

identity in their poetic works. And you reprint a number of

poems that have been produced by some people who actually are

poets, actually professional poets might be clients that you,

that you've had, I think this was kind of from a workshop

context that you were working with before. But do you, I mean,

maybe say a little bit more about that idea of the self and

identity and how poetry does you know works with that for for for

people. It's

Stephanie Aspin: something I'm thinking about at the moment, so

I don't really know where to start with it, but I think that

all art, you know, including poetry, when you're engaging in

the practice of art, you're engaging in a practice of

exploring the self. You're exploring your experience, and

in doing that, you're laying something down that says

something about your identity, who I am now. And that can even

be art that is quite formal, you know, because we are going

through a process of choosing what to look at, you know,

choosing words, choosing colors, choosing shapes and forms. So

there's something about, you know, when we act, when we move

into this space, that we are acquiring agency, which is

really important. You know, big part of breakdowns is a sense of

a loss of agency, but also, you know, identity, we're actually

seeing ourselves, seeing some process of ourselves made

manifest, you know, whether that is, you know, in a visual form

or in writing, I don't know if that answers your question, and

I think that's always true. There's a mention in the book

that people often split What is poetry written for therapy and

artistic practice, and I understand that, because nobody,

no writer, wants their work to be only read biographically. You

know that is to take away from the artistry. But actually, I do

think there is still this, this encounter with biography,

however you define that, in in all art, because there is this

process of choosing what to represent, how to represent it,

and an exploring of your own experience as an artist.

Matthew Sillence: Thanks. Thanks. Steph, I think that that

sort of exploration that you've been talking about there, it

might sort of take us on neatly to the last bit of our episode

today, our conversation which is, which is around the academy.

Because, as we said at the beginning of the episode, and as

you explained you, you, you do tend to specialize a lot with

higher education as a context, yeah, not exclusively, but

you've had most experience in higher education.

Stephanie Aspin: Yeah. Most of my clients come from he or from

the arts,

Matthew Sillence: and I think that's that's maybe a good sort

of springboard for us to think a bit about, you know, without

obviously disclosing details of those situations and those,

those those client relationships that you have, but maybe some

sort of top level challenges of academic life that might be, you

know, might create space for people to actually use some of

the techniques that you've talked about in the book, and

maybe explore that further through through therapeutic

support, if they seek that So, and you start, you started to

allude to that in, I guess, in relation to neurodivergence a

few minutes ago. So, I mean, what's, what's your kind of

understanding of these common challenges of academic life in

particular that seem to that people bring to therapy. Now,

Stephanie Aspin: I mean the key one the I was talking to some

colleagues who are neurodivergent therapists as

well, and nobody ever comes to see us, for example, to talk

about their autism, it's always to talk about the challenges of

being autistic in the world. So I suppose in academia, the most

common challenge is a misunderstanding of what we call

the spiky profile of autism in particular, but neurodivergence

In general, and that leads to a lot of negative self talks. I

was talking about this, this, in this image, you know, negative

self image that we interject, and that's very much bound up

with shame, because this misunderstanding of the spiky

profile that's been misunderstood our whole lives

feels like our fault. So to give you an example, what I mean by

the spiky profile is, and this, you know, applies, particularly

in academia, is that neurodivergent people can be

really good at something. So a neurodivergent brain, an

autistic brain, for example. And then the terms aren't

interchangeable. Neurodiversity is an umbrella term. Neuro

divergence, rather, is an umbrella term for a whole range

of conditions, but I tend to work with autism, and ADHD

autism in particular. But an autistic brain is incredibly

sensitive. It's incredibly lit up, and the research is really

moving on with autism understanding, you know, it's to

do with genetic differences, it's to do with brain growth,

with the neonate, it's to do with these connections not

shutting down in a way that it does in a neurotypical brain. So

everything's very turned up. We're very sensitive. So that

means that we can often not always, you know, this

superpower narrative I know is very harmful, but often, when

people find themselves in academia, they can do some

things really well, because we're good at pattern spotting.

We're very sensitive, maybe for an artist, you know, our arts

practice might be based on, you know, autistic gifts, I suppose.

But other things, things that seem very ordinary and obvious,

we will really struggle with for various reasons. So parts of the

brain are working overdrive in a neurodivergent brain. Other bits

not so well, to give a really dumbed down explanation. But so

it might be things like, you know my case, when we switched

over to holiday bookings being online, I suddenly was deskilled

Rather than doing a paper booking, because I couldn't

understand. I have trouble when there's too much on the screen.

My brain has trouble sorting it, so I can't fill dates, and I

make very basic mistakes. I'm very bad with diaries, even

paper diaries, so. That if I turn a page, I can't retain what

was on the previous page. I get lost. So when I was working at

one place in London, I couldn't the institution was split into

two bits, with the general office being in one building, my

office being in another building. I couldn't find my

way. So I used to get lost all the time, and I've had that

since I was a child, you know, not being able to find my way,

not I'm not very good at so, for example, I would struggle to fly

somewhere on my own, and that's quite embarrassing as an adult

to say, Yeah, I'd love to come, but actually I'm not going to be

able to get there, because I'm not going to be able to get on

the right plane. So there are lots of things that bring us a

lot of shame as neurodivergent people. So I think in the work

context, in the academic context, you maybe can see how

this would map over so you know, not meeting deadlines, being

late, not being able to read a timetable, not understanding

feedback on your PhD meetings are really draining, so anything

that's back to back, I can't do, and that's really difficult in

academia, because we're all so busy, you know, it's like, oh,

let's talk over lunch, when I actually go, need to go to a

dark room at lunchtime to recover so I can manage the

afternoon. So we always find ourselves making excuses, you

know, finding cubby holes, literally, you'll find

neurodivergent people over universities the whole country

that are in cleaning cupboards for 10 minutes, toilets, quiet

corner, I can tell you every quiet corner of the UEA campus.

You know, every quiet corner if anyone wants to tip bottom of

the lecture theaters, there's a little bench right out of the

way if you need a quiet 10 minutes. But yeah, so it's very

shaming. So you know, we're often seen to be able to do

quite high, you know, highly valuable intellectual things,

but not be able to do something like order lunch, or, you know,

we tend to eat the same food all the time, so you don't like

surprises that can be quite embarrassing. Yeah, does that

kind of answer your question? So it's around admin, I suppose the

spiky profile is so shaming because it's so misunderstood.

Matthew Sillence: Well, thank you, Steph, for sharing your

personal experience of that, because we had Cassia

Hayward-Fitch on, on the podcast a few months ago, who was our

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Ambassador for the

CHASE doctoral training partnership. And she was, she

was talking about reasonable adjustments in institutions and

how, and how, I think universities are now they

started to realize that there's a certain amount of

responsibility there to and to acknowledge and respond to the

more social model of disabling that can happen very often

because The systems and the spaces that we have in

organizations like universities are set up for very particular

profiles of people. So I think that's really, I mean, that's a

really useful way of of understanding, I guess, the the

importance of your work. One, one question that I I had, sort

of, as we sort of draw this to a close, I guess is, is around my

coming, coming back to this idea of ritual, and that has, you

know, whereas there's a space for that. And I this is my own

little observation here. So throwing this in, but I often

hear stories from PhD students, for instance, about the

submission of their thesis. So this is the culmination of

several years of like, you know, really hard work, many of the

challenges you've just described that people might be going

through as well. So there's an extra layer of that, all of sort

of life challenges, admin responsibilities, etc. And there

being a sense of kind of anti climax, a kind of deflation, or

a kind of, yeah, maybe, you know not. There's no sort of marking

of transition from one state to another state. And I was minded

of that because of some of the things that you were talking

about in the book around ritual practices, and particularly

those that kind of relate to things like, you know, sort of

sympathetic magic, and, you know, things that symbolic acts

that are designed to effect change in the world, or rather,

effect change in the psyche, I suppose one of the interesting

examples that happens in Sweden, my wife's from southern Sweden,

and I've heard this in Uppsala and Lund as two, two of the

oldest universities in Sweden, is that they actually nail

copies of the thesis to a wall in a department something called

'Spikning' - brilliant idea. Love that, and it's there's been

all sorts of reasons for why they do this, some of it going

back to sort of Lutheran Protestantism and the nailing of

the Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg. So there's kind - I

got the reference and it's great, yeah? And I like the idea

of sort of driving a nail through a physical copy of a

thesis in writing. I'm not sure that I should recommend people

do it here, but that, to me, is always very much felt like a

symbolic kind of act that's a very physical thing to do, to

sort of mark a transition or a change in identity from somebody

who's kind of doing a PhD to sort of finishing a PhD, and

then also graduation ceremonies, which we had here just a few

weeks

Stephanie Aspin: ago. Incredibly ritualistic, very ritualistic,

Matthew Sillence: you sort of building on that which is very

visible, it's very active. It's very perform, performative, I

suppose, what, what do you see? Kind of, are the uses of poetry,

as you know, playing into ritual in academic life. I mean, is it,

is it possible for you know, somebody in academia right now

to deploy poetry to to facilitate the way that they

they manage the challenges of the academic world, maybe

outside of a therapeutic context?

Stephanie Aspin: That's a big question. Sorry, that was very

Matthew Sillence: long question. Was it realized three questions,

Stephanie Aspin: I suppose. I mean, I can think of, you know,

ways in which you would deploy poetry. I think reading poetry

publicly. I think having a form of words that is said, you know,

if you think about marriage ceremony, for example, is really

important. It makes you feel something, you know, something

is completed, you know. And I love that idea of nailing the

book up. Do you know to to do an act, to let yourself know? But

yeah, I can imagine, you know, that there was maybe something

read when, when the book is handed in, that would be, I

think, probably psychologically helpful. So I can't remember

your question, do you want to refine

Matthew Sillence: it? I guess it's how you know how poetry,

the sort of role of poetry, really? Yeah, everyday academic

life. You know how people might be able to turn to poetry for

ways of making meaning or kind of meeting some of those

challenges in the academy?

Stephanie Aspin: I suppose that what poetry tells us is that

words matter. You know, every word matters. So you know, if

you think about the graduation ceremony, which I've sat through

many on both sides of the fence. You know, they have an opening

format. You know, they hit the drums and they declare it open.

They declare it closed. That's a very poetic act. That's not an

active we know it's open. We can see, we know you're finished.

But actually it's that it's a very ritual, performative, as

you said, way of using language. So that's the way I see, rather

than using particular poems, which I think is another way I

talk about my mum's death in the book. You know, I'm reading

Wordsworth at her funeral was incredibly affecting for me. It

was, it was an act of closure. You know, there's a bit in the

prelude of somebody being, you know, the parties freed and from

prison, imprisonment. And, you know, reading that said more

than I could say, coming back to words, being a container. So I

suppose, yeah, finding forms of words to mark particular points,

would, I think, be really helpful, you know, I could

imagine, you know, you going, I mean, everything's uploaded now,

which I think is, I understand the reason for that, yeah, but

it's kind of, maybe we need something on top of that, yeah,

yeah, you know, maybe there could be, you know, a designated

member of the library team that that says, you know, rings a

bell and says, This is finished. So I think we need to know

psychologically. I think these things are really important. And

if you you know, you look back hundreds of 1000s of years, we

were performing symbolic acts, you know, cave paintings, things

that don't seem to be of any use. Anthropologists think,

Well, this must be ritual, so it's something deep in the

psyche. So, yeah, I think forms of words are really important.

And I think, you know, the more we can bring them into it to

mark these points of transition, I think the better.

Matthew Sillence: Thank Thanks ever so much for those, those

insights. I'm certainly going to be as a result of this reading

your book and this wonderful conversation, I'll be keeping an

eye out for lines of poetry that actually resonate. I think, in a

way, it's actually rather I. Coincidentally, last night my my

wife, told me that she'd found the poem she wants me to read at

her funeral, right? Which I suppose is I feel slightly kind

of ambivalent about that at the moment, but I'm kind of still

trying to work around it. But I need to listen. I do need to

listen to it. I find it quite hard sometimes to listen to

people reading out poetry, reading out prose, but I should

really sit and listen to her read that, and look at it, look

at what, and pay attention to what the words mean, because

Stephanie Aspin: it's something container, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matthew Sillence: Thank you, Steph, thank you. It's been

enjoyed. It it's been joy. It's been joy. It's great to see you

again. Wasn't anything

Stephanie Aspin: like a viva at all.

Matthew Sillence: I didn't I, yeah, I was gonna say I tried to

try to make these conversations un-viva like, yeah. So we'd like

to obviously make sure that listeners can can find you. So

where do people find out about your work and your your

services, I guess, my

Stephanie Aspin: services. So I've got a website, so it's

stephanieaspin.com you can also find me on Instagram. There's

also the A-Typicats website. A-typicats.com we offer

consultancy, training, and also, increasingly, coaching. So if

you're interested in coaching, you can try us there. Where else

am I? Yeah, I suppose, great, not massively over social media,

but I'm a little bit

Matthew Sillence: I yeah, I think, I think you're, I think

you're, very findable, which is always good. And, yeah. And how

can people get hold of your new book? This is poetry and

therapy. Why words help?

Stephanie Aspin: Yeah. So the book's available from the

publisher website, which is PCCS Books on Amazon. It's available

from Waterstones, I think, pretty much anywhere. Really

Matthew Sillence: fantastic. Steph, absolute joy to have to

have this time together. It's been great. Yeah,

Stephanie Aspin: I've really enjoyed it too. But a pleasure

Matthew and I know I think it's your holiday as well. Yes,

August, I keep the academic ritual of August.

Matthew Sillence: Yeah, you've come into the studio today to

record on your holiday so that's August

Stephanie Aspin: means when we say holiday writing, right?

Yeah, that's right.

Matthew Sillence: Great. Well, I wish you all the very best with

your future projects, with the A-Typicats group and collective,

and really do hope we can hear more from from your work in the

future. So thank you. Thank you.