Three-time Saskatchewan Book Award winner Michael Trussler’s latest book, Realia, (Radiant Press, 2024) grapples with the black fire of mental illness, revels in the joy inherent to colours, and probes what it means to be alive at the beginning of the Anthropocene. Perfectly clear, perfectly opaque, Trussler’s poetry implodes the lyric to channel the bright disintegration of our contemporary moment. We’re honoured to have Michael join us for this Power Q & A to speak to his experience of writing as a neurodivergent individual.
Realia by Michael Trussler (Radiant Press, 2024)/
Q: Do you think being neuro-divergent influences your writing?
A: Definitely, though of course for the longest time, I had no idea that I was neuro-divergent. As a child I had no way of knowing that all minds weren’t like mine. I knew that something was off with me, but then again, not fitting in is something most children and many adults face. So, I didn’t give it much thought, didn’t talk about it. Also, I was a child a long time ago and people simply weren’t very aware of the incredible variety in human brains as we are now. However, it turns out that I don’t only have the learning disability but I also have Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). I’ve only learned about this in the past few weeks. The ASD has been here for all my life, but the spectrum is broad. Not all autistics are alike. Because I’ve needed to learn to use words well, my teachers didn’t pay much attention to my other difficulties. Other people have essentially perceived me as being a bit eccentric and quirky. Let me explain it like this: when I did an interview for Accidental Animals, the interviewer noticed that my work is “very optically driven” and my poems combined “surrealism and animism.” He was spot-on, but I didn’t then know that my sensation that non-human objects are sentient isn’t widely shared. Being optically-driven and living in a world of perpetual voices is part of the ASD. To me, things and living beings vibrate, each with their own personality, as it were. The window of my left is alive in a way that the window in front of me and the other on my right isn’t. Every book in this room has an identity apart from the text it holds. This of course goes down to the level of individual words.
Words are objects, and they’re self-aware. I’ve always felt this way, but I’ve had no diagnosis to explain it for almost all of my life. So, yes, it seems that being neuro-divergent has likely been instrumental in how my work functions through associative patterning rather than synthetic, logical thought. I suspect that what drew me to poetry in the first place is that its rhythms felt familiar to the way I repeat nonsensical sounds throughout the day—stimming—and that the sense that many lyric poems have that the world is ablaze and alive, that was familiar too. Here’s an example of what I mean:
Stories are for Children
Yammers the lyric
ice pick with absolutely
zero fear
of surrendering to
memories, meandering creatures
with no capacity
to mate for life. A breadline
roped in and waiting. The migrating
womb of the moral
community, its agile
and disintegrating mind. Each day
an obituary, the psyche composed
of rivals and sends—a birthday party
trampoline, the mescaline flare
of smoked paprika in the wild, the pulse of
unhurry
and the world to come, the world’s soon-to-be
extinct
technique
of info-washing, its disavowal of
endless
scarcity. Heat. Roped in
and what happened
↔
when things happen
The incomparable Michael Trussler.
More about Michael Trussler:
Michael Trussler lives in Regina. He writes poetry and creative non-fiction. Three-time winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award, Trussler’s work has appeared in Canadian and American journals and has been included in domestic and international anthologies. Also a photographer, Trussler has a keen interest in the visual arts and is neuro-divergent. He teaches English at the University of Regina.