Bookstamp Wren

One of my most treasured possessions is this stamp gifted to me by Hannah some years ago. It’s a wren perched on the words ‘EX LIBRIS David Hartley’ and I use it to stamp the title pages of every book I own that I finish reading. I used it yesterday after closing the last page of Ali Smith’s Winter, book two of her beguiling and fabulous seasons quartet, the one with the disembodied head and the ladies of the Greenham Common protest. I actually saw Smith reading from the book shortly after it was published and was amazed to discover that her writing was right up my street. The covers of her books do not convey the wicked weirdnesses within - quite the opposite. Not only is she one of our finest contemporary writers, she’s superbly skilled at weird fiction, although that might be a genre too far for the literary crowd. Well, let’s not get fall into that pit spikes or you’ll never get me out.

The wren has some special significance for me as it forms part of a nickname for my autistic sister, Jenny. The term ‘Jenny Wren’ seems to be long and deeply rooted in English folktale, snug alongside Robin Redbreast and Tom Tit. Indeed, one tale has the wren married to the robin from back when it was believed that the wren was the female version of the robin, and so became the subject of many a bawdy tale. The wren is actually more populous than the robin, according to the RSPB - in fact, it is the most populous bird in the country, although still remains hard to catch a glimpse of. Think of all those wrens we must pass unseen in various hedgerows while cockier birds caw and tweet from every available branch above our heads. There’s something of the plucky underdog (underbird?) about the wren, nestled away in the shadows, as if waiting for their moment to organise and rise up. I’m tempted to push that autism connection further: what if we think of wrens as autistics and robins as neurotypicals? The former hidden away in the thickets with occasional bursts of song, the latter strutting about like they own the damn place; ooh, look at my big red chest, aren’t I the darnedest? 

Mythologically, the wren is considered sacred, symbolising wisdom. A druid seeking answers to problems would go looking for the wren, and a sighting would signify glad cognitive tidings. But, as with anything raised up to sacred status, the wren has also had something of a rough history, often hunted and persecuted for no particular reason. Biblically, it was blamed for exposing the hiding place of St. Steven, who was subsequently captured and stoned to martyrdom, and, in the twisted manner of the evils of the human being, there developed a ritual of stoning a wren to death on St. Steven’s Day to mark the occasion. St. Steven’s day is now more commonly known as Boxing Day, which I always felt had something of a violent name, if read in a certain way. Mythologies, echoing on. Thankfully, these days I don’t think anyone clears away their Christmas hangover by pelting a defenseless hedge bird with pebbles, so the wren lives on and thrives.

I’m always tuned into birds when I’m out and about, and I’m getting ever better at telling them apart, at least by sight. I know a wren when I see it, and it always puts me in mind of Jenny, with her weird and wonderful ways. Over the past four years, right up until last Tuesday, I’ve been working on a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Manchester where I’ve been writing and researching autism, in terms of both representation and poetics. I’ve written a novel inspired by Jenny which is led by her autistic difference. It is an unashamedly weird book which goes to some strange places in both content and form in order to try and do something different, fresh and new with the ‘autism’ genre, such as it is. There’s a tendency, according to my research, for autism to get situated as an aberration to the normal, as something to be dealt with and coped with. There’s certainly elements of that in my book, but there is so much more to the condition beyond the so-called 'problems' it causes for neurotypical people. There’s a certain magic to it as well or, as philosopher Erin Manning puts it, autism is 'otherworldly' because it leads us to 'an otherness of worlding' (from her book Always More than One, published by Duke University Press). In other words, autism shows the non-autistic that there’s ways of seeing the world differently. The world is bigger: there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in neurotypical philosophies.

So, instead of ignoring the fantastical as mere frivolity, I’ve tried to use it to show that autism extends things beyond rather than closing things down or away. The myth of autism is that it creates lonely, isolated, enclosed, sealed-up people, but nothing could be further from the truth. Autistics are positively bursting with energies and contributions, its just that our culture and society has tended to shove them away into the dark thickets of hedgerows while the neurotypicals prance about in trees and on birdfeeders. Which is not to say that we should be relocating the wrens from the hedges and forcing them to adapt to trees, but, instead, that we need to start looking at hedges as places of rich wonders, rather than boring blocks of green that serve a certain purpose and nothing more. 

Hm, I think my hedge metaphor has run its course and outstayed its welcome. I promise; the metaphors in my book are a little more thought-through, although no less wild. I now pursue the publication of said novel via agents and presses, keeping all appendages crossed for the lucky break. Hopefully, in the not too distant future, I’ll be able to add my own tome to my shelves and stamp the plucky little wren in the white space of my very own title page. Until then, little wren, lend us all your wisdoms, and feel free to show us where the saints are hiding.