Sometimes in this strange little life you get to meet people that change absolutely everything. They don’t erase what you were before them, but they make you somehow forget there was a time before them at all. They just become an extension of your soul, of your brief and beautiful time here. For me, that is Ash Raymond James.
Artist, author, poet, thinker, spoken-word performer, community builder, outside-the-box-thinker, and fellow Autistic, he is one of the best friends I have ever had, and I love him with all I am. He runs the amazing Woofenberry Writers Club here on Substack, and has created the Yellow Lamp Poetry in New Zealand, that host the most spectacular live shows, events, lit mags, and workshops. Basically, he’s a genius.
He’s so unique, so brilliant, I decided it’d be time that the wider world once again gets reminded of his existence, that they get to bask in the unbelievable shine of his spirit like I get to. That you, all of you reading this, get to find someone else to know, to adore, and to let change your life too.
We conducted a full hour long interview, and honestly if you have the time, I highly suggest you watch the whole thing. The wisdom he spills out is breathtaking, and beyond valuable. As I did with Kate Belew’s Word Witch interview, I put a few of the questions and answers below, but again, the full thing is an hour long so I couldn’t put it all here.
Here are a few amazing answers to my questions, highly concised down (is concised a word?) for your reading pleasure, and to get you to listen to the rest, because it’s magical:
Q1 — You recently years ago moved from Wales to New Zealand I want to know has that geographical shift influenced your imagery or your rhythm or even the themes and things that are present in the things you’re writing now and in what way?
Ash: “Do you know what what’s strange, is me and you talk about a lot is algorithm. So when I was in the UK I was into a rhythm of the algorithm right, like post this here post this then yeah and then it’s kind of like okay if I don’t do that then no one’s gonna see my stuff and there was a pressure to it. Whereas here it kind of feels impossible to post at any good time which which sounds negative on the forefront but it kind of just became this thing where was like “Oh I don’t actually care now,” which is kind of a positive thing where I’m just kind of, I’m just gonna put out what I want to put out when I want to put it out. And I feel like it kind of relieved the pressure for me subconsciously. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been doing Yellow Lamp, which is my poetry show, which we’ll get into later, but because of that, I like stage more. And I get to be like, hey, come see the show. I’ll read you the whole poem.”
Q2 — When you read your work aloud, what is a specific feeling or thought that you hope that the audience gleans from it or feels it or connects to? Is there an overarching thing that you hope that the audience feels or connects to?
Ash: See this is this is this has evolved too because again if you asked me this probably a couple years ago the answer would have been different, but so many people like to just read a poem I’ve kind of stopped doing as many open mics because I hate reading one poem I feel like it’s not enough. I feel at minimum I need free poems now because I want to give you something that’s a range I don’t want to just go like hey here’s a sad poem have a sad day I want to have like here’s a sad poem, here’s a funny poem, here’s a gentle poem right like you got three different you got for these three different things that you’re giving out to somebody so what you take away from it is our poetry is so ranged. Because it’s also like my job we had a lamb to like kind of promote poets right it’s absolutely so poetry is kind of my job so I got to show people the range of it yep the whole thing on is like which I take on as a job. So when I do a set, I like to try and show people that it can be fun, because that’s the most vital part, I feel.
Tyler: Well, yeah, because your job is almost like the big top ringmaster, where your job is to show, look, we have strongmen, and then we have people riding on horses, and then elephants, and then we have trapeze artists. We have the whole range of it.
Ash: I’d love someone to just come back on a horse, read your poem, I feel like.
Tyler: That’s why you need to move to Montana. We know people with a lot of horses.
Ash: That’s my specialty when I move to Montana. They’re like, “Have you seen the poet horseman? He’s around here somewhere.” Oh my God. I would love that. People would come and hunt me down and be like, “Read me a poem.”
Tyler: Well, you don’t know that that can’t happen until you just finally move here.
Ash: Yeah, I got really distracted by the horse now. I’ve forgotten the questions, so we should go to the next one.
Q3 — Is there a poem either of yours or anybody else's that you feel like more than anything else kind of encapsulates or sums up what it feels like to be an artist who lives with autism rather than just a neurotypical person? Have you written one yet, or have you read one that you're like, holy shit, that's it — that's what it feels like?
Ash: I got a book on that, which I am put out — it’s called 14,000 Ducks — and it’s just a load of like… oh God, we’re gonna get weird with it. So I created this guy and his name is Jared Roy, and I imagined him after Zane Lowe, you know, on Apple Music. But he interviews me in this book, and then I answer with poetry and quotes, I feel like, because I did feel like I could — because there’s too many sides to autism, yeah, there is, to get it in one poem. I feel like I have a poem called I Have Autism and that gets pretty close, I feel, yeah, but the whole picture was this fake interviewer interviewing me and then I just answer with poems and drawings. It’s kind of a strange book, and no one likes the format, I keep putting it forward to people, and people keep saying, “We won’t publish this without changing the format. I’m like, “No, I don’t want that.” If you want it, you have to have the format. But I think people are a bit scared by it because it’s so weird. So this guy’s just interviewing me, and there’s fun poems in there.
I think it’s important to note that I think it’s dying down a little bit, but we went through a very big phase of autism where it got traction on TikTok. And the negative sides of autism became more mainstreamed. And then the good parts about it were buried.
Tyler: Unless you were like Young Sheldon who has a weird scientific or mathematical ability, or you’re some weird genius that can… it was like the only positive thing in pop culture about being autistic was like, you can remember a city after a helicopter ride and then you can draw it, or you know what I mean? It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t anything that we had, like people who you’d actually go meet. It was like the 1% of the 1% that had savantism.
Ash: Watch me throw this bag of rice on the floor and tell you how many grains there are exactly.
Tyler: No, yeah — it was either that or people rocking back and forth in the corner and drooling, you know. There was not the middle ground.
Ash: No one talks about the gentle goods, you know?
Tyler: No, that’s a perfect way of putting it.
Ash: Yeah, and that’s what we need — the gentle goods that are like… it’s not even big or negative. There’s a middle ground.
Tyler: And that’s where you and I live.
Ash: Yeah, that’s where we live.
Tyler: And I feel like that’s what we need more content on.
Ash: I don’t know if we need more content necessarily on like, “Hey, this is why it’s hard.” I think that’s an important poem to write, especially for yourself and processing. Yeah, I think what we really need is we need to know like, “Hey man, what’s your weird thing that you’re obsessed with?”
The gentle goods.
What a stunning way of saying this, saying what he and I have felt for so long but until he said it in that way, I don’t think I ever realized was this. The Gentle Goods. Not the debilitating aspects of Autism, not the over-the-top savant tendencies pop culture shows.
Another answer he gives is stunning too, and I want you to watch it to find it. He speaks of the immense creative risk of choosing yourself. I love it. Please go find it.
This video ends with me telling him quite simply that I love him with all my heart, and he feels the same. To share a planet with a man like this, to share a friendship, a love, is something I really treasure, and so I really do hope you’ll not only watch or listen to the whole interview, but go follow him everywhere you can.
Ash, thank you. For you.
Tune in, watch it all, learn. What a beautiful man.
I love you all.
Be good.
I think they got lost,
or maybe just forgotten.
All the gentle goods.
