Jeff Stimpson

Today’s post is by Jeff Stimpson, author of the books Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism.

This will be my seventh year speaking at YAI’s International Conference. I usually cook up some sexy topic loosely connected to parenting a son with autism. Some time ago, I sometimes spoke about what it was like to have a baby in a hospital for the whole first year of his life (it stunk). I like to think I’m an accomplished speaker, and I generally hold this opinion right up until I attend a talk by a real accomplished speaker, then I think about something else.

YAI was one of the first conferences I ever spoke at. The first conference I was ever supposed to speak at I had to cancel because of altitude. It was going to be in the Rockies, and everybody wanted to meet Alex, then a year old, who had just come home from the hospital and for whom we still had to cart around scuba tanks of oxygen. I couldn’t bring myself to risk taking him to the mountains and their thin air, and I cancelled, feeling like my career as a public speaker had blazed its last blah blah blah. Six months later I spoke to about 75 people at the New York Academy of Medicine (topic: It Stunk).

Soon after, I composed my first application to speak at a YAI conference: “Feelings, Frustrations, and Fathers: Tactics for involvement in the life and growth of a special needs child.” (“It’s kind of scary how well you can write like that,” Jill said.)

This will be my seventh YAI conference. I’ve met some nice people. One professor from Oklahoma City came to dinner at my house. One guy who ran a special-needs radio network in Kansas later interviewed me. A sweet woman who teaches education in Westchester County still has me speak to her grad classes, and she still gives me toys and gifts; last year she made me lug home to Manhattan a chafing dish.

Between YAI and other groups I had soon spoken to teachers, social workers, parents, nonprofit execs and others. Before long I realized audiences were kind of like amoeba (no offense), in that you can make them twitch and ripple and react in a variety of ways. Running ahead of my time last year at YAI, I was even cocky enough to break into the story of the time my big brother and I broke my mother’s couch and tried to prop it up and fool her into thinking we hadn’t done anything. I’m unsure what this story lent to the CPE of the conference audience, but when those legs gave way under her and just for an instant mum was airborne, it was it was really funny.

Lose an audience and all you want to do is evaporate. I’ve spoken to classrooms and full houses and to caverns with five people in my session (they invariably sit one in each corner and one in the middle: it’s like talking to a 5 on a die). In an audience of social workers once, one member attacked me for being an irresponsible parent in the hospital, and the other audience members went on her like white on rice.

Before we close here today, let me add that timeslots are key when speaking. I like the earliest morning slots. Once when I had one in front of perinatal nurses, I got off a good intro. “If you’ve come here to sip your coffee and slowly wake up and stare at a guy who has no qualifications to talk to you,” I told them, carefully pausing then, “you’ve come to the right place. I have no real qualifications to talk to you.” I then hammered them with the personal qualifications I did of course have after a year in the hospital. The amoeba twitched.

Learn more about YAI’s International Conference or register for Jeff’s session and choose from more than 300 others!