Excerpt from Project WebPage: Lucy Like-a-Charm. Please visit this link for full information.
Presenting my latest project…
Lucy Like-a-Charm
– a multimedia, multi-access memoir-fantasy about an Autistic woman and a Greyhound dog on a magical journey towards Becoming – empowered by Love, transformed by Grace.
Video Trailer:
My writer’s residency in Kyoto has concluded. Grateful thanks to Giorgio Biancorosso for this most generous provision of support to “Lucy Like-a-Charm” memoir project. I exited Kyoto on 11 February evening and arrived in Singapore very early in the morning on 12 February. Mission accomplished according to schedule, and the first complete draft of the narrative will be ready by the end of February, bringing Stage 1 of production to an close. Moving onwards to Stage 2, our music arranger, Joao, is at this moment working on the first new arrangement, which will be embedded into the story.
An uplifting spirit of gratitude and a tangible awareness of grace permeated my entire four week sojourn, and I am very much in awe of all that has transpired thus far.
Find out more here:
A new iteration of Clement Space has emerged. This one an impromptu, spontaneous work, emerging from my time at writer’s residency in McCraith House, RMIT University, in December 2025.
Find out more here:
I will be giving a public talk in Melbourne, Australia, on 1 December 2025. Tickets are free. An event organised by Care and Repair: Rethinking Contemporary Curation for Conditions of Crisis – a joint research project between Monash University and RMIT University funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council.
Lucy Like-a-Charm: A multimedia memoir fantasy about an Autistic woman and a Greyhound dog on a magical journey towards Becoming.
Monday 1 December, 4.30pm-5.30pm, at Kaleide Theatre
Come find out all about my current mutli-acces, multimedia memoir-fantasy, named in honour of my beloved Lucy Like-a-Charm. If you are in Melbourne, do please drop by and say hello!
Lucy Like-a-Charm memoir-fantasy project is supported by The John and Lorna Wing Foundation, Ms. Lorinne Kon, and creative collaborator ART:DIS Singapore, with Giorgio Biancorosso, RMIT University, University of Melbourne.
Here is my latest article, for Salzburg Global, about my most recent experience as a Fellow in their programme, Creating Futures: Art of Narratives, in April this year. It was not an autism or disability focused event, but I felt a gentle, un-intrusive and organic sense of inclusion that I had not before in other events, not even in the many events I’d attended centred around autism or disabilities. For a week in the beautiful Schloss Leopoldskron, we were simply a communion of humans from eclectic backgrounds, sharing intense passion and purpose. Thank you, Salzburg Global, so honoured to be a Fellow of this wonderful institution!
Please access it on the Salzburg Global site via this link:
An Autistic Storyteller in Salzburg
This is a casual piece about my views on behaviourism in general, and my own lived-experience of accumulated trauma and vulnerability as a consequence. It is not an academic article, so I have not provided citations, though the reader can easily find supporting evidence using Google to do a search where interested.
My strong objection to programmes like ABA and all those behaviour-focused interventions that try to rigorously train Autistic people into mimicking acceptable normative behaviour, and unquestioning compliance to normative societal systems, is not only because they are generally hideously abusive and de-humanising, but more crucially devastating in practice, in my opinion and lived-experience, is the longterm, far-reaching harm that these programmes do to the organic, intrinsic functionality of the Autistic human at the very core. The Autistic person is violently cut away from their natural, unique instincts, and forced to adopt superficial behaviours that do not support the Autistic in any deeper meaningful way, leaving them incapacitated, quietly languishing, silently roaring, weeping in despair and grappling with hapless rage, captive subaltern inside the nauseating swirl of normative Neurocolonialism. It is therefore not surprising to find that the majority of Autistic persons who have grown up receiving ABA now report symptoms of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Continue readingHello Friends, I just did my civic duty as a past awardee and participated in a short Instagram reel shot by MediaCorp to reach out to people for nominations to the Goh Chok Tong Enable Awards. If you know of any person/s with disability in Singapore who may fit the criteria, please do send in your nominations asap! Deadline 25th June for this year’s 2025 Award.
Everything I have done since 2012, I attribute to Lucy Like-a-Charm and the amazing all-encompassing role she has played in my life. Now, she continues to guide my way ahead. Without her, my 恩人，and without all my other wonderful human allies, mentors and supporters, 貴人， I would not be here today. Deepest gratitude.
Send in those nominations NOW!!!
(See the original post in LinkedIn here.)
One week ago, I made the above post in LinkedIn. This issue has been something I have been trying to address since returning to Singapore in late 2016. Back then, “inclusion” was not the huge buzz-word that it is nowadays. Large Autism forums at the time were being held without a single Autistic person or Autistic researcher present in the room. The voices of persons with disabilities were seldom ever heard at all, although there were beginnings of ‘feel-good’, ‘nice-nice’, ‘be-kind’ videos floating around. Autism “awareness” was only about “lighting it up blue”, and information about autism was the domain of the non-autistic, self-styled ‘experts’ with degrees in psychology but not an iota of lived-experience at all.
Since then, much has changed. Autistic, deaf and disabled voices in Singapore have slowly emerged into the foreground. This is a great thing. I am unsure whether my robust, sometimes blunt and brusque fist-shaking had very much to do with instigating change, but I do know I did play some small part in the churning, swirling, stirring process, alongside a small group of brave and outspoken PWDs and allies from the Disabled People’s Association, other arts practitioners, and allies in the government. From the ground, I know our PWD+allies’ (some almost reckless) outspokenness has opened tiny holes in the thick fog for other younger advocates to step through, and there are many capable disability advocates now doing very well. It was truly a community effort, of which I was merely a tiny spark. I have left the Disabled People’s Association, our entire old Board of Directors stepped down and made way for a brand new team. I am hopeful that new energy will bring better conditions. But we still have a long, long way to go.
Continue readingUpdate:
Our memoir-fantasie has been renamed, “Lucy Like-a-Charm,”
in honour of my beloved Lucy.
Scheherazade’s Sea Website is Active! Please check out our ongoing activities, photos, musings, and works-in-progress at https://scheherazadessea.wordpress.com/ .
Above is one of my favourite photos of Lucy and myself, taken in 2014, in Sydney, Australia. We are cuddling, leaning intimately cheek to cheek, eyes closed in peaceful contentment. I wore a fuchsia pink hoodie and Lucy is wrapped snugly in a red flannel snoodie that I sewed for her. We had just moved into a dilapidated house along William Street, Paddington. It was old, and cold, but we were warm and cosy together, curled up in a small couch with a bright pink throw rug. I created a fantasia image from the original photograph, placing us in the midst of a flurry of large, round peonies, against blue sky and white clouds. The poem, “Wake Up in My Dreams”, which will also be the title of our epic memoir-fantasie, when completed, appears on the right of the image:
Dancing with my shadows,
Whispering, “Good Night!”
Humming silent wishes,
Smiling deep inside.
Dancing with my shadows,
Jarful of moonbeams!
Come, lay down beside me,
Wake up in my dreams.
(©Dawn-joy Leong, 2010)
Lucy Like-a-Charm, love of my life, and a central figure in my journey, left the mortal realm in 2023. Since then, I have begun working on the final chapter of our epic multimodal transdisciplinary autobiography. It has been a bumpy process – churning, swirling, turning, tumbling, weeping, laughing, mourning, rejoicing, flying and falling all at once. I even survived a near-death experience a few months after Lucy departed, which forced me to stop working outside of home for an entire year. Art, with passion and purpose, is never easy. And I know that I signed up for the challenge when I broke away from the Golden Cage of pampered subjugation. There was never a moment that I regretted this concerted decision and action. But after Lucy suddenly left me, I was thrown into a dark vortex, lost in a desolation I had never known before. I simply couldn’t imagine a life without her anymore. Yet, she returned to me, vibrant and resonant inside my grieving spirit, bringing resolution to unanswered questions that I had written and sung about long before her appearance in my life. Lucy continued to be my channel of Divine Grace. And thus, I continued to live, and now, I embrace the honour of a profound Grief, the other side of Lucy’s perfect Love. A grief that did not break me, but instead is holding me up and leading me gently onward, even in the midst of my yearning to be with her again. I now see life and death from a different perspective, it is as if I have entered a whole new paradigm of existence where there is no longer a clear demarcation between the two.
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A thought piece for Autism Month, reposted from Scheherazade’s Sea’s site, original title “Travelogue 4 – Gratitude”.
Thanking the grass. I have begun this new habit, exulting in an enhanced awareness, a practice for which I want to thank Salzburg Global, because this genteel ‘revelation’ emerged from my week long experience immersed in the beauty of the Schloss Leopoldskron, while attending their exciting programme, “Creating Futures: Art of Narrative”.
Gratitude.
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Dawn-joy Leong 