Julia Lee Barclay-Morton

If you know where you are going,
it isn't anywhere new

The earliest photo of me is on the right, though I am not visible, but my mother, age 18, is pregnant with me. She is sandwiched between my father and his parents. The photo on the left is of my mother's mother, with her daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. This is the 1960s. And nothing is as it appears in these photos. Unearthing the nature of our realities, which are always more complicated than their presentation is my life's work, as a writer, workshop leader, coach, editor, artist, theater maker, and now, too, yoga teacher. As William James observed, most things are unadapted to one another, but because we focus on seemingly 'regular' systems, the majority of experience eludes our grasp. The goal of all of my own work as an author, artist, and teacher is to give voice to the unadapted ones: the unknown, the unheard, the unseen, the unloved, within and without. As a workshop leader and coach, I guide writers to trust their own instincts and their own unique voices. As a yoga teacher, I guide students to trust their bodies' own deepest wisdom. I lead writing retreats to offer space for writers on an island in Scotland where the North Sea and Atlantic meet, which includes morning yoga and meditation, a silent house in the day to listen for and write from those still, small voices that need a deep sense of ease to be heard, and a workshop at night where we share our writing with one another. My plays give voice to inner conflicts and conflicting realities. My prose excavates histories real and imagined, tessellating between fact and fiction, as we do most of our waking lives. My personal obsessions are with class (the great unspoken in the US), trauma (collective, personal, multigenerational), and how we do violence by relegating people and even parts of ourselves to "other" when they don't fit our reality dream. And most recently—in 2021 at age 57—I discovered I am autistic, so it appears I have been seeing things sideways for like a while. I am writing about that now, and am so intrigued how having a different neurotype from most people has affected me and the focus of my work since I was a child. In 2022, I reflected on the James quote as it relates to being autistic for HiLoBrow, and a hybrid collection stories, essays and stage texts all came together in a book, The Mortality Shot, which was published by the fabulous Liquid Cat Books; all of my stage texts since 1998 were broadcast Sept 20-21, 2022 and are now archived in a 22-hour show, Shadow/Texts commissioned by Radio Art Zone, created in collaboration with the extraordinary composer, vocal, and sound artist Viv Corringham. I have hosted a number of live Virtual Coffee Chats with wonderful authors who blurbed The Mortality Shot, which are recorded and available on my YouTube channel. 2023-24 has been about working on my researched memoir. For a sneak peak into that, there is an essay Out of Trauma/Out of Time excerpted from the memoir in Autism in Adulthood and an exciting presentation I did for Dawn Prince-Hughes at CASY (Cultural Autism Studies at Yale) in which I read a chapter that focuses on the personal and larger social understory, including new research into surprisingly radical ideas about autism from the 1960s-70s that coincided with the more well-known awful ones. Unfortunately, I have also been dealing with a resurgence of long-haul COVID, so everything has been slowed down as a consequence. Hence the lack of blog posts, etc. as I have to focus my energy carefully. But feel free to get in touch, and I will get back to you.