A Writing the Dawn collaboration, with Helen Edgar of Autistic Realms and More Realms as Creative Community Lead, alongside Barb Melville
Writing the Dawn is a Scotland-based community for nature and science writing, offering workshops, coaching and a Substack where biodiversity, neurodiversity and creativity meet (Writing the Dawn, 2026). It is written for every kind of bodymind, and it is neurodivergent-affirming, anti-racist, LGBTQIA+ affirming and anti-oppressive in the way it is run as well as in what it says.
My part is the creative and community side: writing for the Substack, facilitating our body doubling sessions and helping shape workshops so that people who think, sense and move differently can find a way into writing about the living world.
Where biodiversity and neurodiversity meet
The Substack treats the natural world and neurodivergent experience as companions. A single word often opens a piece, such as fallow, rise or star stuff, and the writing follows it from a field, a forest or the night sky back into questions about rest, attention, belonging and the conditions that let us grow. Fallow fields become a way of thinking about Neurodivergent rest, the meerkat on watch becomes a way into pattern-finding and safety, and foraging becomes a method for moving between different ways of knowing.
That approach sits close to the rest of my work across Autistic Realms and More Realms, where kinship with more-than-human life and an ecological understanding of the bodymind run underneath almost everything I write.
Gather and Write
Gather and Write is our weekly online body doubling session, held on Tuesday mornings (UK time) over Zoom. You can bring your own project or follow a prompt, keep your camera on or off, and ask for writing support in the text chat. Many of us find it easier to begin, and to keep going, when someone else is quietly writing alongside us, and these sessions are built around that.
Workshops and coaching
Writing the Dawn also runs online Creative Nonfiction for Science and Nature workshops, along with one-to-one writing coaching. New workshops are announced on the Substack and on the workshops page, so it is worth keeping an eye on both.
Some pieces to start with
- Fallow Fields and Neurodivergent Rest
- Rise: A Word for the Dawn and Maya Angelou
- Apophenia and Meerkat Mode: Looking for the Patterns That Ground Us
- Metaphoray: Foraging Between Ways of Knowing
- We Are Made of Star Stuff
- Who Holds the Pen When a Story About Autistic Life Gets Written?
- Poetry as a Life-Cherishing Force
Subscribing to the Substack is free, and you are very welcome to join us.
References
Writing the Dawn. (2026). Writing the Dawn [Substack newsletter]. https://writingthedawn.substack.com/