Novels in Verse and Poetry as Healing
My first autistic meltdown was in Thailand on a missions trip. I loved being in Thailand, but our group was moving so fast. I wanted to take in all the new smells and sights in the market, but we were supposed to rush through so we could “win” the scavenger hunt. At some point I shut down from the overstimulation and stopped speaking. But as the day continued, and the scavenger hunt raced faster through a brand-new culture, I had a full meltdown. I ran away from the group, curled up in fetal position and sobbed. My first thought: I need to write. I scrambled through my backpack for a paper and pen, and wrote out my overstimulation: how I wanted to get to know Chiang Mai at my own pace. How I didn’t understand why no one else was overwhelmed by the pace and the fact we were missing so much by speeding through these new places. I didn’t know I was autistic yet. But I knew verbal words often failed me, and writing was a place of healing where I could communicate and find my voice, especially when the emotions are overwhelming and hard to parse out.
Novels in verse are often described as a form best for material with emotional intensity and introspection. A form that’s rising in popularity in the kidlit world, novels in verse have the narrative spine of a novel but the form and muscles of poems. The power of the novel is a plot, but the power of poetry is the way it can uniquely recreate an emotional landscape and throw us right in the middle of it all. When speaking of musicals, director and choreographer Bob Fosse said: “The time to sing is when your emotional level is just too high to speak anymore, and the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you feel.” Similarly, I would argue in writing, the time for verse is when the emotions are just too strong to write in prose. My pastor once argued that man’s first words in the Bible were poetry—“bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” Adam turned to poetry, he claimed, because bearing witness to the creation of another human was too strong for anything but poetry. Poetry is what we turn to when literal or ordinary language is inadequate.
Because of this power of poetry, novels in verse get the best of both worlds: the emotional strength and tightness of poems, and the compelling narratives of fiction. Being built from a series of poems, novels in verse, as author Caroline Starr Rose describes, tell a story in the same way as “a collection of related photographs grouped together in an album.” What’s so great about this “photo” quality is that it allows the novel to be built up from little snippets. Each poem is short, so they aren’t overwhelming to write. Each poem allows the writer to zoom into one specific moment or place, and really dig into the interesting details: what did it sound like? Smell like? Why is this moment significant? Poetry requires the writer to slow down to find the right word to describe a sensation. How to emphasize the important parts with line breaks, repetition, form, imagery and sound. There is no room for waste in a poem, so every word and image and sound must have purpose and work towards the greater function of the poem. But most importantly, poems demand the writer to answer: so what? What have you as the writer (or the protagonist of the novel in verse) learned from this poem? The poems that stick with me—and that help propel a novel in verse forward—are ones with an “aha” moment, or realization.
This “aha” moment is rarely clear from the start. Through the act of writing, digging, revising, we discover something we didn’t know we needed. As an autistic person, through writing poems, I can work at untangling this bizarre experience of being in a neurotypical world, trying to figure out my own bodily and mental sensations, as well as how to move forward and cope in a place that isn’t always built for me. This is how I discovered Selah, the protagonist of my forthcoming novel in verse GOOD DIFFERENT. One day in COVID, a grocery store visit threw me into overstimulation. I was terrified and angry and exhausted by the world and my inability to escape it. So I turned to poetry. In writing, I began to recall a memory of a girl in grade school who suddenly started braiding my hair, and how this experience upset and confused me. In the moment, I felt helpless, not wanting to be “rude” or knowing how to ask someone to not touch me. But as I wrote, the speaker of the poem transformed. It was no longer me, but this girl who took action, and hit the girl who was braiding her hair. I was shocked—where did that come from? What led to this moment? And what will the fallout of it be?
As I began to write more poems, I had the space to process so many moments in my life where the world has felt too big and strange for me to handle. Feelings I have tried to downplay, insisting that I’m “normal” and that “everyone gets overwhelmed.” That I’m just “sensitive” and “overreacting.” As I wrote, I discovered my “aha” moment: my own fear and perception of powerlessness to ask for help. In writing Selah’s perspective, I realized there are tools that can help me—tools I hope also empower my neurodivergent readers as they navigate the world. Writing a novel in verse was not only cathartic for me, but I hope it can also help my readers see autism in a new light.
While I’ve written prose novels before and poetry collections, writing Selah’s story was a completely unique experience that allowed me to merge what I love about novels and poems together into one book. The novel in verse allowed me to tell a full narrative with a beginning, middle and end, but also to slow down and zoom into the sensations Selah’s feeling. It created the perfect opportunity to explain concepts like overstimulation, autistic burnout and autistic joy to allistic and neurotypical readers. By placing us in Selah’s emotional landscape through poems, readers have expressed being able to better understand elements of an autistic experience, describing that they could “feel” what Selah is feeling. This is the power of poetry!
What I love about the novel in verse is that it doesn’t have to stop at realization. The most transformative poems don’t just recreate. They learn. They transform. They take action. Selah doesn’t just stop at identifying how her autistic brain translates the neurotypical world around her. She uses that knowledge to request accommodations, to resolve conflicts, and stand up for other kids like herself. It’s in that transformation and action that novels in verse go beyond storytelling devices and heal. In exploring this form, who knows what you will discover in the process.
Resources:
https://www.thushanthiponweera.com/1348-2/
Meg Eden Kuyatt is a 2020 Pitch Wars mentee, and teaches creative writing at colleges and writing centers. She is the author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection “Drowning in the Floating World” (Press 53, 2020) and children’s novels, most recently “Good Different,” a JLG Gold Standard selection (Scholastic, 2023). Find her online at https://linktr.ee/medenauthor and watch for her interview with Laura Shovan on diverse verse (coming up in 2 weeks).
