The Autistic Me

This fall was a respite of sorts from academia while I concentrated on writing and considered my path ahead. For the last few months, I've been working on a mix of screen and stage projects, while also collaborating on some creative writing projects. As December ends, I'm returning to both academia and corporate life, which will reduce my creative output significantly for at least 2016. I'll be completing my MFA (master of fine arts), something I started before my doctoral studies. If I complete the program, I'll have an MFA in Film and Digital Technologies, which will complement my interest in screenwriting and "transmedia" theatrical productions. At the same time, I'll be doing some corporate consulting to pay for classes and some home renovation projects. My consulting work will be as an ADA compliance expert for Web, application, and new media content. This work aligns wonderfully with my doctoral research and my dissertation. Working on projects...

In response to several queries from friends, a bit more elaboration on my plans. I applied for a number of teaching posts and have now received the standard letters proclaiming an "overwhelming number of highly qualified candidates" for each opening. The decision to not teach part-time as an adjunct, at least for now, was best for me. I'm too tired to drive two hours (or more) to teach one class in the fall for 80 minutes. Also, teaching part-time where I wasn't renewed full-time wasn't going to be comfortable. (The hiring process still angers me.) The pay was fair, but the situation would not have been healthy for me. If I teach again, it will be somewhere more welcoming. My passion remains creative writing, and the rhetoric of stage and screen — followed closely by the visual rhetoric of page design (including digital "pages"). Give me scripts, sets, and camera angles. I'll ponder what makes a great play vs. a great movie, and how both are...

Years ago, when I entered graduate school, I imagined helping students and teachers connect via technology. I wanted to study "writing across the curriculum" and online writing labs. These interests led me to a doctorate… but by the time I completed the degree I recognized that my career was already off my planned course. When I decided that writing about autism and education would be beneficial to someone, beyond myself, part of that decision was based on the (yes, we should admit this) trendiness of disability studies and all things diversity-based. I could do some good, and the topic would be desired by other academic scholars. It was a win-win. Instead, I found myself drifting back and forth between what I love (creative writing and the rhetoric of fiction) and what I believed I had to do to secure a teaching job (something autism-related). Not that I don't care about autism, but it isn't nearly the interest for me that it is for some other autistic scholars...

Since completing my doctorate, I haven't had a compelling reason to read much about the psychology of autism. When I read scholarly articles in psychology, they tend to be connected to economics or politics. You might imagine that economics and policy, so connected to rhetoric and persuasion, would delve into empathy with some depth, but most behavioral economics I read is macro in nature. Even psychology texts about business, including suggestions that traits of sociopathy are common in banking, don't discuss types of empathy in great detail. Recently, though, a comment posted about writing fiction and autism led me search out scholarship on cognitive and affective empathy. The research I located indicates cognitive empathy is impaired among study subjects with autism, and self-cognition is also impaired. Emotional, affective empathy is the same as or more entente than that of control subjects in some studies, too. So here is the challenge with writing that I was t...

My wife and I are from Central California. The region is hard to explain to outsiders, because people assume "California" means L.A. and San Francisco, yet geographically those are little dots within a sea of socially conservative counties. To this day, it feels more like the Deep South (circa 1976) than anywhere else I have been -- and I've been to the South. I wrote the play The Gospel Singer  many years ago, but it wasn't finished and developed until 2013. In a few short weeks, the play will premier in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania... in another region where race, religion, and daily life can seem stuck a couple of decades in the past. We need to keep raising money to get this play and its message heard. News Articles and Context First, it helps to know the Tulare County, Calif., where the play is set, was home to the self-proclaimed "new KKK" of the 1980s and 90s. There were also active "Moral Majority" groups, drawing from the large Evang...

This is why I haven't been blogging a lot this summer. I've been working on several new plays…  A NEW DEATH A World Premiere By C.S. Wyatt Directed By Kaitlin Kerr Assistant Directed By Sarah McPartland Presented by Throughline Theatre Company   July 18 - July 26 The Grey Box Theatre 3595 Butler St, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15201 TICKETS: http://www.throughlinetheatre.org/tickets-and-pricing/   Featuring: Andy Coleman  Chelsea Faber Hazel Carr Leroy Eric Leslie  Tonya Lynn  Sarah McPartland Jared King Rombold  John Henry Steelman