Steven Murray – Storytelling and Representation

In the latest Middletown Podcast, we speak to Steven Murray - creative, storyteller and Engagement Officer with Aspire Ireland. We discuss his journey through education, his creative life and how he feels about autism representation.   

Transcript

Meeting Stephen Murray

Speaker 1 0:10

Welcome to the Middletown Podcast . I'm Kat Hughes , I'm a researcher at Middletown and I'm also autistic . In this episode I'm talking to Stephen Murray . Stephen is a creator , filmmaker and storyteller . I've known Stephen for years and he's always been so creative in so many different ways . He's also an engagement officer with ASPIRE , the Autism Spectrum Association of Ireland . We chat about Stephen's time in education and how miscommunication and the wrong supports can have a huge impact . We also talk about Stephen's creative life , including social creativity , and his thoughts about autism representation in the media . We take some tangents in this one to what ADHD people are likely to do , but I hope you enjoy our meandering chat . So , stephen , thank you so much for joining us on the podcast . I suppose I wanted to start with a very sort of basic early question . So how would you describe your younger

The "Demon Child": Undiagnosed and Misunderstood

Speaker 1 1:00

self ?

Speaker 2 1:01

I've used the term demon child uh before . But um , no , to be exact , like I , I was um , I was undiagnosed on dhd in the night in the late 80s , early 90s , so it's just support wasn't there , knowledge wasn't there for my parents . So like I don't fault anyone for my upbringing and but yeah , I was pretty wild like I . I think I . I was brought to mass for the first time when I started communion classes for my communion because I would just be up and down the aisles like not keeping me , couldn't keep me seated , had to be moving , like difficulty , staying quiet , that kind of thing . Like all of my literally all of my parents' friends knew that I was obsessed with Transformers as a child because you couldn't get me to leave the house without one in my hand , because it was something I could do .

Speaker 1 2:00

Yeah , yeah , that is very possible .

Speaker 2 2:03

Yeah , like I definitely didn't get the frequent early autistic signal of is a pleasure to have in class . Like the teachers were usually impressed with intelligence . Like I think in first class I read every book my school had and there was this , actually this or my . I was kind of annoyed at my mom because I found out this story about myself last year . That is really interesting that so I switched schools in between junior to senior infants . I actually switched into the I think it was the second educate together school in ireland . But in the like interview with the principal where , like it was my parents and then I was off playing as a child , I would have been four , not no , I would have been five , not six , um , and like one of the questions my parents were asked because I was sitting there reading a mr man book and the teacher was just like , oh , and which of you thought steven had to read ? Um , and and the teacher was just like , oh , and which of you thought Stephen had a read ? And both my parents were dyslexic when and are dyslexic , my mom very profoundly so she learned to read when she was in her teens . She made it through school with her best friend sitting beside her reading . If she was asked to read in class , deirdre would read to her under her breath . So and she would repeat it , oh my goodness . And so then I was six , going into senior entrance . It's like which ? Which of you ? It's like my parents said , oh we , we thought he was taught in school and it's just like they don't teach junior infants how to read . So , like I was from the beginning , obviously like way hyperlexic , um , clearly intelligent kid , um .

Speaker 2 3:55

I found out , apparently the like , when I was first getting assessed . So I got my diagnosis of adhd at about seven and then I got my autism diagnosis when I was 18 . So like it's kind of . It's why , which is one of the reasons why I kind of recommend to people , when you get your first

Creativity and World-Building

Speaker 2 4:15

diagnosis , don't close your mind that that's your only diagnosis . That like very regularly , uh you , there can be other things going on that might also need support or might need different support , like I all through my education , like I went through school on computer from the age of 10 , um , which gave birth to a really interesting point that one of one of my good friends has a master's in english lit , and we were just talking about english and essays and I realized I've never written an essay I couldn't edit , that like , because they've all been typed .

Speaker 2 4:54

Um , if I finished an essay I could go back and do another draft . That like I've never written an essay on paper and pen . I'm like I was just like when I had that light bulb moment . I'm like Jesus , that must be . That's so much harder that I'd never even considered that other people are writing essays on paper with a pen . So yeah , like my like I was the smart . I was the kind of smart , very mouthy and like as a very young child I'd give out to people for smoking because it was bad for them . So why would they do it ? But it's like I I was a three-year-old telling a 40-year-old not to smoke because it was bad for him .

Speaker 1 5:34

Like very sweet in retrospect , possibly not so sweet at the time if it was your uncle in hindsight kind of pretty funny .

Speaker 2 5:45

Like if social media was a thing in the 80s I absolutely would have gone viral . Sadly the tech wasn't around .

Speaker 1 5:54

That's a shame . And then , well , you mentioned the tech . You're obviously very creative , and have you always been creative .

Speaker 2 6:03

I actually thought back on this a couple of years ago that I had taken a workshop on writing again because I was thinking about taking it up during lockdown because I hadn't written anything in a good long while and I realised they gave like a survey of questions of like your inspirations and have you and a question they asked in it that I then realised , oh wow , that was early . They gave like a survey of questions of like your inspirations and have you and I really one a question they they asked in it that I then realized , oh wow , that was early . That was were you the one that came up with games as a child ? Uh , which I was so like with cousins and friends , I always came up with the game we played . We were playing as kids and it's only like as I realized then after doing that survey , like oh yeah , that's world building and it's like casting roles . Uh , I'm like , oh wow , yeah , that's . Yeah , I have always been creative but , like my sister's , very artistic . So I should be careful because this is not as much artistic . My sister's not autistic , she's dyslexic but not autistic , but she's very artistic and like I have a few paintings on my wall that she had painted . But after the .

Speaker 2 7:18

How my secondary school worked is , first year is you just do a module of every subject and then at the end it's going into . Second year is when you choose what you're doing for the junior cert . And at the end of my module of art the teacher told me not to study art , which everyone gets every like , and I'm for the . For the listeners cat had a very shocked reaction there on her face , but lots people always have that kind of reaction to it . Like oh my god , how did ? No , that was good advice . Like I would not have passed the junior search . Or leaving certain like I'm I'm not that kind of creative . Like I wish I could draw , it'd be great .

Speaker 2 7:58

People always said like oh , anyone can draw , you can know . Like I I I've been to film school twice . Like I've studied creative stuff my whole life , I'm just not a drawer . Like my creativity is words , it's not pictures . Well , actually I say it's not pictures . I was a cameraman for 15 years , so it is kind of . But like I'm not a drawer , so that wouldn't have been a thing . But yeah , I've always been creative in kind of different ways . Like I would come up with the games we play . The one that always impresses people

Educational Challenges and Misunderstandings

Speaker 2 8:35

is I managed to not do German homework for a year and a half in senior cycle , secondary school , without my teacher noticing . I just talk my way out of it every time . Um it , it's very rare , like for , as a cheeky a child as I was like , I was very good at talking my way out of things and I could always tell stories , I could always sell it well and I loved acting .

Speaker 1 9:03

Uh , so yeah , always pretty creative that creative , that's a skill to have , and to know how to use it is very impressive .

Speaker 2 9:11

But then I ended up teaching myself Irish for the last , maybe six months of sixth year Because , so , like , I did ordinary level Irish , because I went to the Gaelteach five years in a row so I sat my leaving cert speaking fluent Irish but I could barely read or write it , because the Gaelteach teaches you to speak , it doesn't teach you to read Irish or whatever , and you're learning colloquial Irish rather than book Irish . So I was doing the ordinary level , so I , in that you're given you have to do two activities from a list of six on the book . So it's like a postcard , a conversation , a story , whatever . So the teacher gave us . So six months before the leaving cert , the teacher gave us homework of doing like , okay , tonight , do me a postcard , say , and one of the possibilities is a conversation which I it was looked upon as the hardest because it's basically it's 15 , it's 30 lines , one line like 15 lines for two characters , back and forth .

Speaker 2 10:27

Um , so it's the most . I'd say it's kind of the most difficult if you , if your level of Irish is low , but because my difficulty was reading and writing it , not speaking it . Uh , I , I asked , asked , miss , I'm not going to do the postcard , can I do a co a cora conversation ? Instead ? She kicked me out of the class , told me to go to the library . Uh , I got the second highest mark in that class in irish and the only person that scored higher than me was a person that dropped down .

Speaker 1 10:56

Wow , doesn't it like it just shows you that sort of double empathy piece where you know there's such a misunderstanding in communication where , yeah , she couldn't put herself in your shoes and didn't understand and wasn't willing to understand where you were coming from ?

Speaker 2 11:13

oh , it's like , miss . You're asking me to do an irrelevant task . Can I do a relevant one instead ?

Speaker 1 11:20

get out of my class wow , I want to learn in a different way . Get out yeah well , was there within that time then ? Was there someone who was very kind of , supportive of you and of your , your interests ? Did you find ?

Speaker 2 11:35

My dad was very supportive of me , kind of as a kid and then also as growing up , because he grew up , like I said earlier , he was dyslexic . He had a lot of trouble in school Like he had kind of scars on his knuckles from the rulers Because like he , my dad , my dad would have been in secondary school in the late 50s , early 60s , so that was the . He was just being bold or being whatever . So , um , but I he was always very supportive of me at interests like I was big into .

Speaker 2 12:17

I've always kind of been quite into like I , one of my I always for a while I had difficulty explaining special interest , my special interest , to people because for a good while it was just knowledge , like I just love reading , learning about anything like to this day I can talk . If a person is passionate about a subject I can sit and talk to them for hours about it . And that he , my dad , used to bring me to a bunch of like astronomy ireland meets back in the day he brought me to a bunch of ctyi and gifted children of ireland um meetings and seminars and all that it's so lovely that your dad was that open to kind of feeding your knowledge .

Speaker 1 13:01

That's really gorgeous . And so then

Finding Passion in Filmmaking

Speaker 1 13:05

you went from school to studying sort of filmmaking .

Speaker 2 13:11

Yeah . So it was in . I had , like I had various dream jobs throughout my kind of childhood and teens and then it was in fourth year . We had a film studies module . I just fell in love , like I'd always loved movies , but I'd never considered because like that was , that was before , like there were some movies made in Ireland , but it was before it really became a location for that , so it wasn't . I didn't think of it as like a possibility . It was kind of like Jim Sheridan , like his early work that kind of started , made it a possibility to like then brought international attention to filmmaking in Ireland . So I that's when I felt like oh , this could be an actual thing looked into it .

Speaker 2 13:58

At the time there was only one degree level course in production in Ireland . Trinity had film studies , but that's kind of theory , comprehension , critiquing etc . Which wasn't my thing . I was looking for filmmaking . So I applied to Bally and do like clash of dueling , cluster dueling being my preferred choice , mostly because of location like I'm originally from swords and like body firm it's a lot further than like north side . So and like body firm it's great for animation , but at the time dueling would kind of have more of a so , and like Body Firm , it's great for animation , but at the time Doolig kind of had more of a filmmaking reputation . So , yeah , so I went to Colossus , doolig dropped out halfway through second year , so second year of a two-year course .

Speaker 2 14:49

I regret doing this now in hindsight , but so we got halfway through second year . We had spent half of the year making a three-minute short which we then weren't being graded on , which apparently , like when we were finishing first year , and this is apparently a continuous thing . At the time I'll say this was 2006 . The course may have changed significantly since then , but we were told by the previous second years , like near the end , they'll ask you about the course . Everyone mentioned that you spend half the year working on a short you're not graded on . Like it's insane . So like every year tells the next year to say it , which we did , and I dropped out because it's like this is ridiculous . I think my autistic sense of justice kicked in and so I dropped out , just started . Like I realized I would be at a further point in my career if I didn't do this course and I just got a job at a secondary school . This is where we get , this is where you get kind of get into the meat of it . I I .