Across the Web: A Map of My Work in Words, Places, and Pictures
by Kate Coldrick
When I look back, I can see the shape of my online life like a constellation of scattered points that slowly began to connect. None of it was planned. One site grew from another, sometimes because I needed a new space for a new kind of work, and sometimes because a single thought wouldn’t fit anywhere else. Over time, those fragments began to speak to one another, until they started to form a map.
A Merrier World
It began, years ago, with A Merrier World. I didn’t think of it as a “project” then, just a way of sharing recipes, photos, and stories from my kitchen while my children were small. Those early posts about flour, cake tins, and crumb-covered adventures were my first experiments in shaping words for an unseen audience.
That blog taught me that writing online could be generous. I found a small, passionate community of home bakers who shared advice, failures, and laughter in equal measure. Looking back, I realise that it was also my first exploration of learning: noticing, experimenting, reflecting, and sharing what I’d found.
katecoldrick.com
Years later, that same instinct … to learn and share … became katecoldrick.com. This site is the centre of my professional work as a literacy tutor and educational writer, where I design resources and explore how education can become more inclusive and humane.
If A Merrier World was a kitchen table, this site is the study: filled with notes, lesson plans, and half-formed ideas that eventually make their way into classrooms. It’s the foundation for the teaching and consultancy work I do every day.
Neurodiversity Learning Support Consultancy
As the work expanded, I built Neurodiversity Learning Support Consultancy - a space for collaboration, training, and co-production. It brings together practitioners, parents, and researchers to re-imagine how learning environments can honour difference rather than flatten it.
On the Skyline
On the Skyline explores how women’s voices have been portrayed, distorted, or silenced across myth, literature, and history. It examines figures who stand at the edges of what culture permits … women seen as dangerous, disruptive, or deviant … and asks why their power so often provokes unease.
From Medusa to Morgan le Fay, from Anne Askew to contemporary public figures, these essays trace the recurring narratives that shape how women are read, heard, and remembered. The work isn’t about individual biography so much as the patterns beneath it - how reputation, authority, and legitimacy are constructed and contested.
It also resonates with my professional focus on neurodiversity and voice. Autistic girls have historically been “under the radar,” unseen because their experiences don’t fit the diagnostic assumptions built around autistic boys. What’s often called masking (the pressure to appear “normal”) echoes the silencing of women’s voices across centuries: the demand to conform, to speak in acceptable tones, to hide the intensity of one’s perception and truth.
In that sense, On the Skyline becomes a study not only of mythic and historical women, but of the mechanisms that still determine whose voices are heard and whose are dismissed. Anne Askew, though not diagnosed autistic, embodies this tension most powerfully: her devotion to plain speaking, her refusal to recant, and her unwavering moral clarity all reflect traits we might now recognise as neurodivergent integrity - a deep alignment between inner truth and outer expression.
Elswyth
Elswyth is the quietest of my sites - a photo journal named for an Old English word meaning elf-strong. It began as a series of walks with my camera, recording churches, carvings, and landscapes shaped by centuries of weather and worship.
I think of it as a practice in stillness: attention as a form of devotion. Each photograph is paired with a few words, not to explain, but to notice. In many ways, it reflects what I would describe as an autistic way of seeing: a form of perception grounded in pattern, detail, and sensory nuance.
The world of Elswyth is built on textures and transitions: lichen on stone, the change of light through coloured glass, the hush of wind through old trees. It is a space for the kind of focus that can be both refuge and revelation for a neurodivergent mind … a way of finding calm in a world that often feels too fast, too bright, too loud.
Just as On the Skyline examines how voices are constrained or freed, Elswyth explores how sensory experience shapes belonging. Both are, in different ways, autistic acts of attention: one through analysis and empathy, the other through observation and stillness. Together they extend the same questions that underpin my work in education: how do we make space for difference? how do we honour the ways people truly see, feel, and express?
Across sound and story
Some of these threads cross into voice. On SoundCloud and YouTube I read my essays aloud, turning written work into spoken pieces. Substack, though, feels like the place where everything meets: a bridge between practice and reflection, between classroom and field, between the sound of a word and the silence of a photograph.
Drawing the threads together
Each of these sites began for a different reason, but the same themes run through them all: curiosity, care, attention, and belonging. Whether I’m writing about literacy, photographing old stones, or examining how women’s stories are told and retold, I’m still doing the same thing: looking closely, and trying to make sense of what endures.
If you’ve found me through teaching, through research, or through a photograph of a quiet church somewhere in Devon - welcome. This is where those paths meet.
Kate Coldrick is a UK-based writer, educator, and tutor from Woodbury in Devon, whose work explores literacy, inclusion, and voice. She writes at katecoldrick.com and across related projects including Neurodiversity LSC, On the Skyline, and Elswyth.