"Writing was a way for me to communicate," says Dara McAnulty, "I didn't like to speak to people. In fact, I spoke to basically nobody outside of close family, and any conversation I had outside of that was incredibly awkward and I hated every second of it. Writing, on the other hand, I found incredibly easy to do. It was something where I could take what was going on in my mind and put it into something a bit more physical, something that I could touch." In this interview with Emergence Magazine, 17-year-old Dara McAnulty--a naturalist, conservationist and author, discusses his identity as an autistic person, his writing, and his conviction that joy is a necessity.
