Episode 101

Interview between Speaker 1 (Meg Ferrell) and Speaker 2 (Emily Zimmer)
Episode 101

[Introductory music]
Welcome to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast, a place where we explore research, amplify Autistic voices, and change the way we think about autism in life and in our professional therapy practices. I’m Meg Ferrell, former lead Meg Proctor, from learnplaythrive.com, broadcasting to you today from unceded Tsalagi territory.

Meg:
Welcome back! We’ve missed y’all, and we are back with a bright, glittery, colorful, and inclusive dose of hope for your professional practices, and I know we all need to hear a bright and hopeful inspiring story right now. Before we dive in, I just want to remind you that we have all of your affirming continuing education courses available at the Learn Play Thrive Education Hub at learnplaythrive.com/trainings, and we have newly launched parent courses and resources available at parents.learnplaythrive.com. So, please share with your colleagues and with the families you support because the trainings we are hosting in both places are truly transformative.

So, I want to tell you how I met Emily Zimmer. Recently, we shared a post about green flags for your SLP or something like that, and I got a comment that said, “Wow, that sounds like my wife.” And this touched me. So, I said, “Tell me about your wife.” And after I got the reply, I was immediately like, okay, can you please connect me with your wife? And that person was Emily Zimmer.

I’ll tell you about Emily Zimmer. She is a queer, neurodiversity-affirming speech-language therapist and artist living on Dakota land in Minneapolis. On the weekdays, she works with kids from zero to three. On evenings and weekends, she runs a niche private practice offering strengths-centered speech-language therapy for gestalt language processors and gender-affirming voice services.

And one of the things I’m really excited to share with you in this episode is how Emily infuses art into her work as a speech-language therapist and in the community. Alongside Tim McCarren, as part of the Unsalted Stutter Project, she facilitates theatrical improvisation workshops to amplify confidence and creativity with Friends, The National Association of Young People Who Stutter.

Emily brings awareness of diverse communication styles and strategies to her performing practice with Drag Story Hour Minneapolis, which we will talk so much about in this episode, including how she brings in a non-speaking character that uses AAC into their puppet work. In addition to taking numerous speech-language therapy trainings, Emily studied the Art of Clowning in Switzerland and completed an apprenticeship at the Bread & Puppet Theater last summer.

Emily is so fun and creative; and in this conversation, she shares how we can all bring more joy, art, fun, creativity, and inclusivity into our work, too. Here’s the conversation with Emily Zimmer.

Hey, Emily! Welcome to the podcast.

Emily:
I am delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Meg:
I’m excited to sit down and talk with you. I feel like this is the exact conversation that I need right now in this time today and in this time in history. I wanna start with your story. What kind of projects are you involved in, and how did you arrive here?

Emily:
I am always involved in many projects. That seems to be my personality. And the one that connected me to Two Sides of the Spectrum is Drag Story Hour Minnesota — Drag Story Hour MN — which is one of the great joys of my life. I perform as a character called Old Man Zimmer, alongside Doña Pepa and DJ Sid Sity. And Drag Story Hours have been in the news more recently. So, a lot of people might be able to picture drag artists reading stories to children, and that is what we do.

We were inspired by the work of Michelle Tea, who created Drag Story Hour in the Bay Area years ago, and we brought it to Minneapolis because we thought it was needed here. And I’m also a speech-language therapist, so I try to incorporate some of the work that I do in that work and then bring the arts back into my practice as a clinician. So, that’s the start of the story.

Meg:
That is so cool. I wanna send everybody, like, immediately to the show notes so they can picture what we’re talking about. It’s at learnplaythrive.com/podcast. I am, as you talk, looking at pictures of your show on stage and it is so beautiful, so big, and joyful, and sparkly. It looks incredibly engaging. What are the sort of themes that you explore through the Drag Story Hour?

Emily:
There are many themes we explore. I grew up in a town with zero queer role models, and so part of it is just having beautiful role models center stage that kids can connect to. We definitely use ourselves as material, too, and let our real interests inspire the shows. But we have covered a lot of ground. I think we’ve been going strong since around 2016 or 2017. So, we try to do things that resonate with us and resonate with kids, like, being yourself, working through big feelings.

So — and hot tip, if you’re working on modeling or exploring regulation strategies, drag queens are really fun for this. We have a ‘No shushing’ policy at our story times. The wall between the actors and audience is very thin, so we put characters on stage and ask the audience for suggestions about how to change energy states a lot. We explore diversity. That’s a big thing for us. We all have different backgrounds and we bring ourselves. We explore code switching with theatrical flare. Like in a recent show, we incorporated use of an AAC device, a speech generating iPad. We’ve also used fantasy to explore different communication styles.

We’re all really interested in dragons and a dragon roar was a metaphorical example of a different communication style in a show. We find books for kids, picture books that are about things like consent. We love environmental themes. We’ve often found too, when we’re looking for picture books that relate to our lives, a lot of picture books — when we started anyway — that included LGBTQIA2S+ themes had similar plot lines. And, like, somebody would be different in the book, they would have some feelings about it, or there was a conflict related to this difference, and then it would get explored and resolved.

And that is an important storyline. But we want kids to have access to more. So, we often end up writing our own books. We’ve explored immigration and migration, what we’re thinking about, what our community’s thinking about. Living in Minnesota, we’re really connected to the boundary waters; that was a recent theme. And we live in a reality where smoke from wildfires is drifting south from the north.

So, we think about how we find helpers in nature, which means sometimes we look at things like mushrooms when we look for the helpers, because they’re not plants or animals, they’re their own kingdom. They communicate through underground networks. When we are open, there are so many models of diversity in nature that relate to the work we do as even as clinicians, and also make great stories. That’s a long answer. We explore a lot of things

Meg:
I think I could listen to you talk about that for the rest of the interview. That’s such a beautiful answer. And what I was imagining as I was listening that was that this sounds therapeutic for adults, too. Honestly, as we all navigate through this world, like, I would love to be sitting there exploring that through play, and creativity, and storytelling.

One of the things that really stood out to me was you talking about taking audience suggestions for changing one of the characters energy states or accessing regulation or whatever it is that they needed in that moment. That might be the coolest example of Ross Greene’s work of — I always get it wrong since the name has changed — Collaborative and Proactive Solutions that used to be Collaborative Problem Solving.

Emily:
Yeah, I know it’s CPS.

Meg:
I think everybody always forgets the new acronym, but that is just one of the coolest examples I’ve heard of that because when we’re having fun — all of us, adults and kids — we can access our thinking brain better, right? Everyone’s relaxed and lighthearted and engaged, and I imagine you get some really interesting ideas from the audience when that happens.

Emily:
Oh, most definitely. Yeah. We sometimes say Drag Story Hour makes kids laugh and it makes adults cry because, hopefully, it is that open space that some people probably had when they were kids and some people were probably looking for. So, yeah, kids always have great ideas. And I have a background in clowning. I studied the Art of Clowning in Switzerland with Pierre Byland, and that’s all about exploring being in the mud, being stuck and letting the audience see you be stuck and letting the audience be the experts.

And for us, it’s always re-imagining that power dynamic between performer and audience and letting kids be the experts and letting them see us working through problems. And of course, drag queens are absolutely great for that. And drag artists in general. I think that’s another theme we get to, too, is advocacy and self-advocacy are very important to all the artists involved.

Meg:
I am looking at one of the pictures you sent, I think it’s of your AAC user character. I see the — projected on the screen there is the pictures from their talker of all of the different choices they might make. Tell me about this character.

Emily:
Yeah. So, I think we’ve been kicking around an idea that we would have a phoenix in our show for a while. I live in Minneapolis and, like I said, we think about how wildfire smoke is sometimes a part of our life. We live in a city. I live two stoplights away from George Floyd Square, too. And I think kids are processing a lot of the things that have happened in our city, the uprising. And we were thinking about a phoenix as a creature that half emerges from fire. And so, we had created a show — we’re in the process of creating a show.

We kind of did it in three parts where we found a phoenix egg in the boundary waters which hatched. And in one episode, the characters were all getting to know the Phoenix, and we all projected something we thought the phoenix was onto the phoenix. For example, Doña Pepa thought the phoenix was a loon. Sid Sity loves dragons, thought the phoenix was a dragon. Old Man Zimmer thought the phoenix was a giraffe. So, we read a book with a giraffe in it, which happened to be ‘Eddie the Elephant has Something to Say’, which is a book by Alison Johns that features a character, an elephant, that uses an AAC device to communicate.

The elephant learns really fast in the story, but it really does a great job of getting at some of the big ideas about speech generating iPad, being able to use symbols to express an idea, being able to press a symbol and have it make a word, and help make ideas more clear. And I love that book because it also highlights other ways we communicate, like with pointing, with facial expressions, using our bodies. And so, when we read that book, the young phoenix learned from the book and then used the AAC to tell us who they were, which was a really beautiful moment.

And I remember one kiddo in my life telling the story of watching that phoenix use the talker to communicate afterwards, and they remembered exactly how the phoenix had pressed the buttons on the talker because we had also tried to think about what that’s like when you’re beginning to use it. And that the phoenix pressed ‘I, I, I’ and then took some time to navigate to a new page to press ‘Phoenix, Phoenix, Phoenix’.

And when this child was telling the story, they said it exactly that way, which I felt so warm about. And then, as the phoenix grows, we literally have a bigger puppet come in to represent the phoenix, and we wanted to — because we are in a theatrical space, we have a little bit of freedom. So, we were able to project the pages with picture symbols from the iPad onto a big giant screen so our audience could see the picture symbols and come to understand how a speech-generating device looks to the user, and how it works. And I really loved that theatrical image.

I’ve been a part of a lot of performances in my life, but I think that was one to see, like, a drag queen with a dress spread out on the floor with a giant puppet on her back, the AAC device right on stage, and then the image right behind everyone giving a little bit more information felt like a really beautiful moment in my life. It felt like two worlds coming together, and it was beautiful for me.

Meg:
It’s remarkable. It is beautiful. And I think it was a description of this scene that connected me with you via your spouse on Instagram. And I was doing a post that was like a shout out to all the amazing speech-language therapists out there. And they were like, “That’s my wife!” and I just loved that. And I went and looked at their page and they were like always saying nice things about you and shouting you out. And then, they described your drag show and your different characters and I was like, please connect me with Emily right now. So, it was such a wonderful point of connection. I wanna talk a little bit about your work as a speech-language therapist. How does inclusion show up for you in your work doing speech-language therapy?

Emily:
Well, I hope that I keep that very central. I have spent time working in schools and I currently work with very early learners, kids between age birth and three, in their family system. So, that’s where like inclusion maybe feels very natural because we’re inside a family system. Hopefully, the child is still the center of the work and the support system. But I’m right there so I can blend into activities that kiddos are involved in with their lives. And then, in schools, too, I think it was always a conscious piece for me, I think.

I think about what stories and texts I bring into a therapy room. I know in schools we use a lot of books. That’s a huge part of it. I think about what materials I find to help me, and I would always make sure that as I was teaching things like pronouns, like, there are actually like a lot of really great resources, and there are some that are still maybe doing things the old way and stuck in a binary place. So, I just always made sure that I found materials that reflected the kids — which are gonna be diverse, I think, anywhere we go — and explicitly included all the pronouns and et cetera.

I think for me, like, my queerness has helped bring me to a consciously neurodiversity-affirming place. As a clinician, we know there’s just so much overlap between the Autistic community and the queer community. And as I started to learn about things like masking Autistic traits to fit in or avoid harm, that really resonated a lot with me really quickly. And I like to trace things back to their roots. And sometimes that’s complicated, too.

Like, as I started learning more about the roots of some kind of, some behavioral approaches. I learned that like, for example, Dr. Ivar Lovaas, he — I’m not gonna bring any of the things he said about Autistic kids into this podcast because it was not affirming at all. But then, on the side, he was also involved in something called the Feminine Boy Project, which was a strand of conversion therapy for boys the researchers didn’t feel were masculine enough. And it really looked at the way kids played and said what was right or wrong?

And I think for me, that just translated so quickly — that helped me ground myself in neurodiversity-affirming practices as well as gender-affirming practices because those things have been related all along. Kind of like looking at different kinds of play and having opinions about it instead of getting curious about it, which I think is the approach that works for me. And I know we end up collaborating with all kinds of practitioners and practices that grow and change, but I think it’s awareness that’s worth holding onto in any therapeutic work.

Meg:
Yeah, that history is very poignant. It really is. Yes. I appreciate you tying that back in, and thank you for sharing all the ways that inclusion shows up for you. It’s when you sort of lay it out, it feels really simple, really accessible, and really foundational, right? Like, we should all be doing this and we can all be doing this. What about the arts? You’re such a creative person. How do you weave the arts into your work as a speech-language therapist?

Emily:
In so many ways! Thanks for asking. Coming from a background in theater, I had thought maybe because I spent a career going into classrooms and helping kids speak loudly and clearly, and share who they are using stories and plays, I thought it would be more related to articulation. But honestly, it’s a big, huge part of theater, which is cliché but true, is the concept of ‘Yes, and’. How, like in improv, if somebody makes a suggestion or says, “I have a parrot on my shoulder,” if you just say, “No, there’s no parrot,” the scene’s over. If you say, “Yes, and I have a little pet penguin,” the scene goes on.

And I think that’s a cornerstone. That’s also about inclusivity, too, is that we can really say ‘Yes, and’ to whatever we meet in the room, come in with flexibility and collaboration. And a huge thing for me is puppets, which I feel like is a pretty accessible way to bring arts into a therapy room or a classroom or any kind of learning space. That’s what really helped me get through the time when I was a really early clinician. I just brought in paper bags and googly eyes and markers. It takes two minutes to make a puppet, and then kids really have a strong impulse to bring that puppet into relationship with whoever else is in the room, usually sometimes by talking or sometimes by acting out actions and gestures. So, it was very clear to me puppets are a great way to build connection with Autistic kids in particular, too.

And I looked into it from a research perspective, and there is research to show, too, that Autistic kids do respond really well to puppets. Now, I don’t think we always need the research to be like ‘This brings joy’ and there’s no part of me that needs to push it on a kid who wouldn’t be interested. But as I pilfered through the research in the Journal of Autism Research, there’s a study that was completed at the Yale School of Medicine in collaboration with Cheryl Henson, the daughter of Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets that was about how Autistic kids reacted to puppets. And I would say the article is a good start. The language is not all affirming, but some of the big ideas I found useful.

For example, if you need research to show why it’s a good idea to bring puppets into your clinical practice, that’s a good starting point. And one of the things the article says is that Autistic kids respond to puppets with a lot of attention, which makes some sense to me. ‘Cause their facial expressions are pretty steady and predictable and they’re designed to be cute, and fun, and playful, and looked at. But if I understand what the whole study says, it says it’s also true for allistic kids, too, that kids who are Autistic and kids who are not Autistic show great attention to puppet faces too, which feels significant to me.

And so, that’s one reason that I use puppets in my therapy practice with all ages, and I use puppets as a way to advocate and bring more visibility for the whole school system that I worked in, too, or at least the school that I worked in.

Meg:
That is so interesting. What a specific and accessible and fun answer. I think a lot of us probably have never thought about bringing puppets into our work. In my house, my kids are sort of into making board games. And they’re pretty simple board games, right? But there’s often a spot that says ‘Do a short puppet show’ and I, out of nowhere, that was my idea to add initially. Now, they are always added in.

And even as an adult, like, I am so captivated by these little one- to two-minute puppet shows put on by 5- to 8-year-old children. They just come to life and are so playful and so fun. So, that, I can really imagine all of the versatile ways that that could be joyful, interesting, therapeutic, all of the things in your sessions. So, thank you for sharing that.

So, on that note, we aren’t all as creative and talented as you — speaking for myself here — but many of us wanna bring this energy of creativity and inclusion into our work. So, what else can any practitioner do in their work to bring more art, more playfulness, and really importantly, more inclusion to the things that we do day-to-day?

Emily:
Well, I suspect you are creative and talented, and if you have ideas like let’s put a one-minute puppet show in a board game, like, chef’s kiss to that, that seems important and related. And as I mentioned before, just bring in some googly eyes along or there are rolls of stickers with little cartoon eyes on them that are like $5 for hundreds and hundreds of stickers.

And I feel like just starting small, if it’s intimidating, you can put googly eyes on anything and voila, it’s a puppet. But really just the paper bag, it’s a great place to start. I also actually like to intentionally use materials from my recycling. If I make a sample puppet for kiddos in a setting, I try to keep it really simple to start because I find that if I don’t have all the ideas, the kids really do and they can really take it and run really quickly.

And also, some kids really love to repeat activities and build onto ideas. They’re really natural innovators. So, I follow kids’ leads. I’m great at dumping the recycling bin and sometimes just letting kids go into it. And I think, you know, we think about collaborative problem solving and reimagining how one thing can be turned into another is a skill kids are gonna need for their whole lives in this world that we live in.

And I think it can be a great way to do it, just, you know, making some junk puppets. And I’m also all about getting kids moving because we know the research supports that too. So, just taking a second to embody a story or a tiny piece of a story, a character from a story, things like that, or things that come to mind really quickly. I think there are a lot of ways to start and I can really talk about that for a long time, too.

Meg:
For folks who are OT practitioners who are listening, we have a free OT tool share with The Occuplaytional Therapist. They share a lot of ways that we can bring in these types of creative materials and what’s in their OT tool bag to lend to this sort of creative play. I definitely think a sticker roll of cartoon eyes should go on that list — I love that so much — where there’s like giant dice, and fun Sharpies, and all the different kinds of things that can facilitate this kind of creative play. So, that’s at learnplaythrive.com/share. It’s free if folks wanna check it out, and definitely keep your ears out for them coming on the podcast cast to talk more about play soon.

On a little bit of a more serious note, Emily. It’s 2025; it’s July when we’re recording this. Who knows what’s going to change between now and when we put this episode out? But right now and in the spring that we just went through, things have gotten more confusing about what we are allowed to or not allowed to do in our work in the schools especially. Do you have any advice for folks navigating this?

Emily:
Yeah, and I think you’ve had some people speak about this in some of the work that you’ve done, which I would reaffirm what I just heard you quote a while ago from AC Goldberg that we don’t need to comply in advance. It can be a strategy to be made to feel afraid when we feel like there are all these rules coming to us or on the edges of us. And one thing I try to keep in mind is what’s happening right now, right here.

And that said, I think as neuro-affirming caregivers and providers, we are good at following the children’s lead. And that’s what comes to my mind first, is to take cues from kids about where they are, what supports they might need, and listen to how they are advocating for themselves, how they’re speaking about themselves, and the younger folks always seem to have really good ideas about how to meet the moment, I think.

And we wanna keep kids at the center, and kids’ safety as the center, and their long-term wellbeing is what should always come first for me. And I see a lot of models about how to care for each other from the queer community, too, because there have been, of course, many times and places it was not safe to be out and queer in certain ways, and community adapts.

So, we learn. We learn how to code switch; we learn how to make new codes. So, I totally recommend looking back and reading and learning about queer culture and queer history to find those guiding stars. I still do things like I walk into the room with a rainbow lanyard and try to make sure I have visual cues around to signal safety and signal or offer clues about who I am. I grew up in the eighties where there were terrible stereotypes about queer people, and I still carry those with me when I walk into a space. So, I’m always looking for those things, too. I’m listening to the way other people speak and listening for those little clues that somebody is an affirming educator or practitioner.

My spouse wears his ‘Protect Trans Kids’ shirt like a uniform wherever we go, which is, I think, one way to be. And you can also find out what policies are in place in your district because we know those rules are literally changing. But sometimes, I think when you know exactly what’s there, you’ll find protections. And connecting with unions I think can be great. Just knowing who in your space might be an ally.

One thing I think about sometimes are statistics because I think if you find yourself in a conversation with somebody who has a very different view, you might not be able to change their whole heart or mind in that moment. But The Trevor Project has some research-backed statistics that I think can be really useful because we know LGBTQ+ youth with at least one supportive adult in their lives have significantly reduced rates of self-harm. Now, that is a very low bar. We want young people to thrive, not just stay alive, but if you’re in a conversation where there are not shared values about inclusion, at the very least, most adults can agree we want some of the same things for our youth. So, that’s a mouthful, but some ideas.

Meg:
That’s a very grounding answer. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. Is there anything that I missed or anything you wanna bring us back to before we wrap up?

Emily:
Well, just thinking about a couple of projects, I would love to tell you a little bit about some of the puppet projects that I worked on as a clinician, if that’s okay?

Meg:
Yes!

Emily:

I think one project I’d like to highlight is ‘Robot Stealing Books’, and that is a puppet film that I made with some of my students because I had a lot of connections to the arts community, I had some very dear friends come into my office and work with kids to make a little puppet film featuring the voices of students that it was a little neurodiversity-affirming gem, a story about a school being taken over by robots where an Autistic student used his special interest in robotics to save the day.

And that’s just one example of a puppet project that was great fun to make with my friends. My friends, Maria Asp, and Autistic artist, Matt Jenson, helped write the piece and it was a lot of fun to make it. I know the lead character came in and read his character description and was like, “Oh, my gosh, that sounds just like me.” And then, I had this puppet film that had backdrops that were literal pictures of different locations in the school that I was able to use in my office for several weeks, and that the kids were able to share with the whole school so that it could be a place where, like, during — it was actually during April, during when we’re all thinking about autism together that we were able to share that film as something really highlighting the strengths of a lot of Autistic students and helping everyone understand a little bit more about how special interests can be a strength. And it was puppets at the center of it. And those kid voices are so fun to listen to, too. So, that’s definitely something we can link in show notes if that’s possible.

Meg:
Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing about those. Emily, what are you working on now and where can we find you online?

Emily:
Oh, yeah, you can find Drag Story Hour MN at @DragStoryHourMN on Instagram and et cetera. My private practice is at Resonant Speech and I’m working on some really fun projects right now. I’m continuing to consult with my friend, Matt Jenson, who is writing a book called Daisy and Fawn, featuring and centering to Autistic characters who come from a fantasy world and letters that he wrote to his Autistic readers, really centering those readers, but also inviting everyone else along for the journey to think about how autism can be centered in a story, and a story that is created for Autistic readers, but also including others. He’s making a puppet show of that story, too, so I’m consulting on that and very excited for that to be out in the world.

We’re gonna continue developing ‘Love Rising’ with Drag Story Hour MN, which is our show with the AAC. And my understanding of one type of neurodiversity is informed by a lot of other kinds of neurodiversity. And I am currently working with a group called Unsalted Stutter, started by Tim McCarren, a really wonderful local SLP, and we are developing strategies to use improv to say ‘Yes, and’ to stuttering and build confidence in creativity, or amplify the confidence in creativity. We’re gonna be at the Friends Conference this summer. I’m really excited about that. We’ve done a couple of these workshops, but we wanna make these strategies and the theater games more available. So, coming soon will be some links with more information about that at Unsalted Stutter.

So, like I said, there’s always a lot going on. I never run out of projects to talk about; pick your favorites. And I’m always interested in connecting with people who connect to those different niche interests. I seem to have a lot of niche interests all over the place, and it’s always fine to say, “Hi” and be like, “Hey, I overlap with this niche interest. Let’s talk about it.” So, happy to hear from anyone who’s interested in any of those things.

Meg:
Oh, I love that, Emily. I can’t wait to see what comes of that. So, this, more than others, is a show notes you don’t wanna miss. So, go to learnplathrive.com/podcast, and we’ll link everything that Emily is involved in and has talked about, and these beautiful pictures. Thank you so much, Emily, for sharing your story, and your heart, and your creative ideas, and helping us relaunch the podcast.

Emily:
Yeah, very happy to be here.

[Ending note]
Thanks for listening to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a minute to rate us on your podcast app and share the episode on your social media. This helps us reach more people and create even more change. And if you’re looking for more, visit learnplaythrive.com for a neurodiversity quiz, free masterclasses, and in-depth continuing education courses. Join us back here next time where we will keep diving deep into autism.