Episode 166: Music, theater and autistic communities – with Madge Woollard

The episode transcript is below.

Carolyn Kiel: Welcome to Beyond 6 Seconds, the podcast that goes beyond the six second first impression to share the extraordinary stories of neurodivergent people. I’m your host, Carolyn Kiel.

On today’s episode I’m excited to be speaking to a fellow musician. Her name is Madge Woollard. She’s a late-diagnosed autistic, nonbinary person who teaches piano and keyboard. We talk about how she and her wife both got their autism diagnoses later in life, her passion for music, and why she started her own teaching business. You’ll also get to hear about a few of the autistic and other neurodiverse communities she’s been involved with. Towards the end, she shares some of the interesting intersections between autism, sexuality and gender that’s she been learning about.

If you’re interested in stories about neurodiversity like this one, then be sure to subscribe to Beyond 6 Seconds in your favorite podcast app, or visit beyond6seconds.net to hear all my episodes! I’ve got a newsletter too, where you can subscribe and be the first to hear my new episodes before they’re released.

And if you’d like to help support this podcast, now you can virtually “buy me a coffee” at buymeacoffee.com/beyond6seconds. I’ll put that link in the show notes. Give any amount and I’ll give you a shout-out on a future episode! Every little bit helps the show grow and gets these important stories out to the world. In fact, I’d like to give a shout out right now to my friend Ginger. Thank you Ginger – I really appreciate your support and I’m so glad you’re enjoying the show!

Another note: My sound connection with Madge on this episode had some minor issues, so I appreciate you being patient with the sound on this one! This is probably also a good time to let you know that I also have written transcripts of this episode, and my other episodes, on my website. I’ll drop the link in the show notes.

And now, it’s time for my interview with Madge! Madge Woollard has run her own business teaching piano and keyboard since 1994. A graduate of Cambridge University, she teaches children and adults, privately and in schools, and is keen to specialise in working with neurodivergent students.

Madge was diagnosed autistic in 2016 at the age of 44. Since then, she has taken part in a lot of autism research, and is a member of Spectrum Theatre company. She lives in Sheffield UK with her wife Jo who is also late-diagnosed autistic. Madge, welcome to the podcast!

Madge Woollard: Hello, Carolyn. Thank you. I’m very excited to be here.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. So excited to talk with you today. Like me, you’re also late diagnosed autistic. So when did you realize that you are autistic?

Madge Woollard: Probably about eight years ago, I started thinking about it. It was actually my wife, Jo, who suggested it, and she works as a counselor and she is also autistic herself, but she found out later than me. So at the time she thought that she wasn’t autistic and I was! It was really funny that she ended up later getting a diagnosis herself, but she suggested that it would help our relationship if I got it checked out to see if I was or not. And, and so I went to my GP and the way it works in the UK is that you can, um, you can get an assessment on the national health service through, through your doctor. And, but there is a long waiting list for it. But that’s what I did. And so, yeah, that’s how it happened.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh, wow. So did it surprise you to get a diagnosis of autism?

Madge Woollard: Well I started reading about it and I started seeing things that fitted with me and I believed I had some of the traits, but when I went to the diagnosis, for my assessment, I did actually get assessed quite quickly. She said, oh, yes you tick all the boxes and I’m a hundred percent sure. So I was, I was surprised at how quickly she diagnosed me.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh, wow. And it’s funny. Okay. So, so your wife who didn’t know at the time that she was autistic, they just did this for you. So then how, if I might ask, how did that come about that she wound up getting her diagnosis after you got yours?

Madge Woollard: Well, both of us read a lot after I’d got mine. Stuff about female autism is becoming a lot more in the news and there’s a lot more being written and researched about it now. And so it’s easier to spot the signs I think.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. Yeah. I guess my own preconceptions about autism, the symptoms as you see them in little boys. So when I started also reading about autism in girls and women, I’m like, oh, I actually, I recognize a lot of this. And I never thought that this was actually what autism, how it presented. So yeah, totally relate to that. Oh, that’s so interesting.

Now that you know that you are, or have always been autistic, what was it like growing up as an undiagnosed autistic child? Like what was school like, what was life like?

Madge Woollard: I was a pretty happy child, I think, at least up to the age of 12. I loved school. I was very happy at my primary school. I was a very odd child, I think from an early age. I didn’t play with other children. I preferred to be on my own in the playground because of just the noise of the other children and the physicality of them, and they liked to play running around games and I’m terribly coordinated. I can’t catch balls or stuff like that. I felt more comfortable being on my own and making up imaginary friends at play time. So if I was at school now, I would probably get an autism diagnosis, age five, if you just see me in the school playground at that age. But at that time in the late seventies, they just thought I was odd and a bit antisocial. And because I was doing fine academically, nobody, nobody suspected anything.

Carolyn Kiel: And you’re a musician now, but did you find your musical passions, like early in your childhood and was that part of your childhood too?

Madge Woollard: Yeah, I started piano lessons at the age of five, and I remember skipping around the playground on Wednesday nights. That was piano lesson night, and I was so happy to be going to my lessons. So it excited me from an early age. And my mum told me that the first chair I ever climbed onto was the piano chair at home when I was two. I was desperate to start playing, but it wasn’t until I was 11 that I really discovered my passion. My secondary school that I went to had a special music program that you could audition to get on. And I was very lucky. I got on to that age 11, which meant I had a lots of extra music tuition throughout my secondary school. And had I not had that, I probably wouldn’t be doing the job that I do now.

Carolyn Kiel: That’s fantastic. So was it through the school, like extra lessons or activities that you had?

Madge Woollard: Yeah, I got piano and clarinet lessons. I was part of the choir. I was part of the wind band, musicianship lessons, and that there were 15 people in every year who got picked for this extra program. So it was quite a small number of us really, but we got a lot of top class tuition. And so I was extremely lucky with that.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh, that’s awesome. Wow. And then you went to Cambridge University. Did you go there to study music as well?

Madge Woollard: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And I also got an organ scholarship because by that time I’d started learning the church organ and playing for church services and, and that meant I got to play the services at Cambridge at my college chapel and run the chapel choir and extra responsibilities like that, so that was pretty exciting.

Carolyn Kiel: That’s awesome. So what was the college experience like? Was it different for you than like secondary school or how was that?

Madge Woollard: Yeah, it was very different. I was at Peter House, which is the smallest college in Cambridge, and it’s only just started admitting women five years before I was there. So we were, the women were vastly outnumbered by men. But it was nice that it was a small college and I got on well doing the chapel choir. And then to do the actual music degree, we met with people from other colleges who were studying music and yeah, it was good overall.

But at the school I went to, uh, before I went to Cambridge, it wasn’t a private school or anything. It was very much a comprehensive school despite this extra music program. So when I got to Cambridge, there were lots of privately educated people who were very upper class. I wouldn’t call myself upper class at all. So I didn’t really fit in with the whole class structure of it. And socially, it was really a bit of a disaster for me, to be fair.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh yeah. Yeah. I know college is so very different because yeah, you’ve got a whole new group of people from all different backgrounds and it can be hard socially. Wow.

Did you know at that point, or even before that, that you wanted to teach music or did you want to perform or both?

Madge Woollard: I definitely never wanted to perform. I just thought, oh music is what I’m good at. I suppose that’s what I’ll carry on doing, but I didn’t really have an idea at all. And then I thought I would be a classroom teacher, junior school. That was what I intended to do when I left Cambridge. So I did a PGCE, which is a years course after you’ve graduated to then go on and be a primary school teacher. But when I’d done that, I applied for probably about 60 jobs and went for several interviews, but I never once got past the interview stage, I think because of the way I present in interviews. I’m not very good at selling myself and I was even worse at that time in my twenties. And they always picked someone else above me, even though I had a good CV and my tutors at college had written good things about me. But because of how I presented, they just never gave me a job.

So after that I had to have a plan B and I thought, oh, what can I do now? I can play the piano. So I suppose I can teach it. And I just started putting out some adverts and people sort of saw my card in post office windows. This was pre-internet days. And it just sort of blossomed from there.

I’ve been doing it nearly 28 years now. I can’t believe it.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow. That’s amazing. And you know, during the pandemic you’ve been offering like a hybrid model of lessons, so some online, some in-person. So what was it like kind of switching to that model, like and how has that worked out for you as a teacher?

Madge Woollard: Yeah, it was hard at first because I’d never done any online teaching before March, 2020. And when we got locked down, I had to switch pretty quickly because people couldn’t come to in-person lessons at that time. But I actually joined a professional group called the Curious Piano Teachers, which is a group of about 600 teachers with an online presence. But through that group, they taught me a lot about running online lessons. So I’m very, very fortunate that I found that group, which meant I could set up pretty quickly and get going online. And so during the full lockdowns, I taught completely online.

But it wasn’t easy at all, because as you can imagine the sound of the piano, it sounds pretty tinny. And some people were doing it over their phones with terrible microphone quality. And so I could either see their hands or see their face, but not both. Sometimes I couldn’t see either. So it was, it was really quite difficult. But now, now I’m back teaching mostly face-to-face, but some people have opted to stay online for various reasons. And for some of them it can work very well, if they have a good setup.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, that’s gotta be challenging. I know a couple of people who did, or tried to do music lessons or music groups online, and yeah, the, the technology makes it still challenging. Like I know you can’t really be playing like at exactly the same time.

Madge Woollard: That’s right. Can’t do duets or anything, which is something I love to do in face-to-face lessons.

Carolyn Kiel: So, yeah, it’s quite an adjustment. It sounds like it’s a lot easier or more, or just more rewarding or just basically easier to teach in-person.

Madge Woollard: Definitely. Yeah.

Carolyn Kiel: I think I heard in another podcast interview that you teach some autistic students, you know, as well as non autistic students in your piano lessons. What’s it like teaching autistic students?

Madge Woollard: I taught several autistic students before I even knew I was autistic myself. And I’ll tell you the story of one student who I taught. He came to me age nine. He’d already been to three other teachers, and they’d all refused to teach him because of his style of learning. He learns exclusively by ear, and at that point he was almost non-verbal, and other teachers didn’t feel able to teach him, but I said, oh, yes, I’ll have a go. And he stayed with me for up to the age of about 21. And then he went on to music college to study music. If it hadn’t been for the lessons he’d had with me, he might not have gone on to study music. And he’s an incredible musician, plays everything by ear. You know, incredible memory. Perfect pitch, which I don’t have, by the way, I just have very good relative pitch. So I felt like it was him teaching me rather than the other way round. But I think the reason why he felt comfortable with me is because he probably picked up something that I didn’t even know about myself at that time!

Carolyn Kiel: And I think it’s great that you were able to adapt to his learning style when so many other teachers couldn’t or weren’t willing. Yeah. Do you have to just sort of adapt your teaching style to someone who learns by ear versus reading sheet music?

Madge Woollard: Yeah. Well, what I did with him is I just played a few bars and he copied it and then remembered it forever. It was quite amazing.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh, that’s really cool. Wow. So, now that you know you’re autistic, do you talk about that as part of your business or not really?

Madge Woollard: Um, not really yet.. I’m still quite nervous about talking about it because, because there’s so much stigma around autism still. And I think some people wouldn’t want to have an autistic teacher. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t be willing to try it.

Carolyn Kiel: And it’s challenging because so many people probably have had autistic teachers, you know, especially people our age growing up without a diagnosis. It’s like, oh, you know, you’ve actually worked with probably a lot of autistic people and had autistic teachers.

It sounds like you’re mostly coming back to in-person lessons and you know, you’ve been running your business for 20 something almost 30 years. What’s the biggest challenge that you have in running your business these days?

Madge Woollard: I guess communication, really, because I’m not a natural communicator. I have to communicate with all sorts of people. In the course of a day, I might have 15 different people and from children age six, up to older adults, and beginners up to grade eight, all just in one day.

So just swapping between them and having to give them all energy, listen to them and it can be very tiring. Getting tired is probably one of my biggest challenges.

Carolyn Kiel: How many lessons do you usually do? Like a day or a week?

Madge Woollard: Well, I work in two schools and in the schools they have 20 minute lessons, which is very fast. It’s sometimes in out, in out. But my private lessons are half an hour long, so yeah, I can have up to 15 in a day.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh yeah, that’s exhausting.

Madge Woollard: It is, yeah. It’s holidays this week. I don’t know if you have half terms in America, but mid semester, do you call it? I don’t know if you have a week off in the middle of your term, but that’s what we have here and that’s what this week is. So I’m glad about that. No teaching this week.

Carolyn Kiel: Do you have to take breaks, like over the weekend? Like a couple of days to just kind of decompress?

Madge Woollard: Oh yeah, definitely. I just have to chill out at the weekends. Very important. Recharge the batteries.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, definitely.

Where’s the most interesting place that you’ve ever played?

Madge Woollard: Well, I’ll tell you about my, my favorite singer songwriter, who’s called Heather Peace, and I’ve actually supported her at one of her gigs at, down in Brighton. I’m part of her fan club and one of the fan club weekends that we had, I’d just written a song for her baby daughter who’d just been born. And I said, would I be able to play it as part of this gig that Heather was doing? And she said, oh yes, would you like to be my support act and play three songs? So that’s probably my favorite place I’ve ever played. That was quite amazing.

Carolyn Kiel: That’s great. Yeah. Just be able to play with musicians that you really admire and respect. Yeah. So cool.

Not only are you a musician, you’re also now involved in theater as well through the Spectrum Theater Company. Tell me about like how you came to be involved with that group and what kind of work you do there.

Madge Woollard: Oh, the Spectrum Theater is a group in Sheffield for neurodivergent and other people. We’re not all on the spectrum, but the majority of us are. And we actually rehearse just at the end of my road, which is really handy. It’s something I found out about just after my diagnosis. Um, I, I was in a musical theater company before that, but I never really fitted in with them, because they were, they were very neurotypical and I always felt a bit strange. When I heard about the Spectrum Theater, I thought, oh, I’ll go along and see what that’s like. And I’ve got very involved with them in the last four years.

One of the signature show that we do is called In Someone Else’s Shoes. And it’s a show that’s been written about our experiences on the autistic spectrum. And several of us in the group have had input into that. And we’ve performed that in several places and it’s also been filmed and it’s going to go out to schools to help schools learn more about autism.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow. That’s really cool.

Madge Woollard: Yeah. And we do other things as well. Our director writes lots of scripts for us and he writes songs as well, him and this other guy. So we’ve done musicals. We did a version of the Christmas Carol by Dickens that was updated and set in Sheffield in the 21st century. And, we did a musical about the miners strike, which was in Yorkshire in the 1980’s, with Margaret Thatcher prime minister. That was quite, quite funny to do. And yeah, we have a lot of fun. And it’s a really good group of people to be involved with. And we’re all ages from, I think our youngest is 17, 18, and then several people in their sixties and seventies as well. Not all autistic. Some of those are just friends of, of our director, who’s neurotypical, but we all get on brilliantly. I’m very pleased I found that group.

Carolyn Kiel: That’s great. And how has your experience with that theater group different from say other theater groups that you’ve been a part of?

Madge Woollard: I just feel very comfortable there. I feel like I can be myself. I find that going into groups of autistic people, I don’t feel weird or like an alien, even if they’re not like me at all, some of the people. So there’s a lot of younger males in our group who’ve had very different experiences to me. People who’ve been diagnosed in childhood and been to special schools and quite different to me, but I feel very comfortable with them.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, that’s really great. Are there differences in like the ways you rehearse or learn lines, or is it just giving space for each other and relating to each other in a different way?

Madge Woollard: Yeah, that sort of thing. And if somebody does get stressed during a rehearsal and needs to leave, for instance, there’s no shame about that. If you need to stand outside the room and have some space and quiet, which some of us do at times. Nobody says, oh, what’s going on? And everybody just lets people get on with that sort of thing.

Carolyn Kiel: That’s a great group and really convenient that it rehearses at the end of your road.

Madge Woollard: Definitely.

Carolyn Kiel: So when you first reached out to me, you had mentioned that you’re actually very interested in the intersections between autism, sexuality and gender. So I’m just curious, is that a topic that you’ve studied or research or just started learning about? Because I’m curious to learn what, what you found out so far.

Madge Woollard: Well just because I’m LGBT and I also identify as non binary, which is something that I started to read about after my autism diagnosis. The word nonbinary has not been around for many years. It wasn’t a concept. That’s how I thought about when I was younger, but then I thought I don’t really feel like a woman. I feel like somewhere between. I definitely don’t feel like a man. I don’t feel like I’m transgender. I don’t want to change any elements of my body. But I don’t feel like a woman, although I’m comfortable in my woman’s body. That makes sense. So I thought, oh, nonbinary fits really well. And I started to read that a lot of autistic female born people feel like we are non binary and my wife also identifies that way. So there’s two of us in the house, which is very handy. There’s a big link between autism and gender and sexuality.

Something else I’ve done is I’ve been to a conference called Autscape. I don’t know if you’ve heard about that. It’s an annual conference of about 200 people. I’ve been three times face to face, and then the last couple of years we’ve had them online. And so this conference is just for any autistic people to get together and, we have workshops and speakers and the whole thing is run by autistic people. So there’s no neurotypical involvement at all. So it’s, it’s a really special environment. And going there, we had an LGBT group there and just about half the participants of the conference attended the LGBT group. So that just shows you the kind of crossover there is. There are the kind of intersections, that many of us identify as something other than straight.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. I’ve heard that as well from the readings that I’ve done, that there is a large percentage of the autistic population who are part of the LGBTQ+ community. Yeah. Oh, that’s interesting. And that’s great that there’s a conference. Is it a small conference?

Madge Woollard: Well, that’s about 200 people, but I think that the last couple of years when we’ve had it online, there’d be more like 400 because people can obviously join from anywhere in the world when it’s online. But hopefully this year it’s going back to being in person again. And I hope it doesn’t get too much bigger because it’s better having it small, but it’s is a wonderful environment for, that that was great for me when I first got diagnosed as well, meeting autistic people there.

Carolyn Kiel: That’s great that you’re able to meet like a lot of autistic people, like in real life. Cause I know for me getting diagnosed during the pandemic, I mean, fortunately I have a podcast, so I get to talk one-on-one with a lot of autistic people, but yeah, I can’t say I’ve ever really been in a room with a lot of autistic people. I think it would be really cool to do someday.

What are your goals going forward for your business? Do you want to like grow and expand it or are you just kind of happy with the size and the number of students that you have now or anything new you want to do with it?

Madge Woollard: Um, yeah, pretty happy with how it is now, but I would like to teach more neurodivergent students definitely going forward. And I’ve got a chapter in a book coming out in April. This is something very exciting. It’s called “Learning from Autistic Teachers: How to Be a Neurodiversity-Inclusive School.” Each chapter in it is written by different people who work in schools who are all autistic ourselves. It’s going to be published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. It’s a pretty big book. It’s going to be quite groundbreaking, I think, because lots of people think that autistic people can’t be any kind of teacher because, because maybe we lack empathy or something, which as you know is absolutely rubbish. And so a book written by us is going to be really groundbreaking. So I’m really excited about this coming out in April.

Carolyn Kiel: That’s awesome. Yeah, probably by the time this interview airs, that book might even be out. So I’ll get a link to the book and I’ll make sure it’s in the show notes. That’s really exciting. Now is it all kinds of teachers, obviously, not just of music, but all topics?

Madge Woollard: Yeah. I mean, I haven’t read the other chapters yet. I’m very much looking forward to reading it. My chapter is called Life on the Margins, a Peripatetic Perspective. A peripatetic means a teacher that visits different schools like I do with my music.

Carolyn Kiel: That’s awesome. How did you find out about that opportunity to contribute the chapter to the book?

Madge Woollard: Oh, that was through Twitter as well. It’s amazing what you can find out through social media.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh, that’s so exciting. Yeah. I’m looking forward to reading that and seeing that when that comes out. So cool!

Madge, thank you so much for talking with me today. How can people get in touch with you?

Madge Woollard: Um, well, I have a website for my music lessons, which is mwoollard.Webs.com or you can follow me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is funkiepiano. That’s funk I E, and then piano. Or you can find me on LinkedIn and Facebook. I’m on those as well.

Carolyn Kiel: All right, fantastic. Yeah, I’ll put links to those in the show notes as well. Awesome. Well, Madge, thank you so much for telling me about your experiences as a musician and as an autistic music teacher and just all the things that you’ve learned, and the community that you have with other autistic people.

Madge Woollard: Thanks very much, Carolyn. I think it’s really important doing these sorts of podcasts and for people to watch them and find out that there is a bigger community out there.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Thanks again for being on my show today.

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