A few weeks ago working with another blogger Trish over at Never Less than Everything we wrote a post together titled Full Circle. It was a great success. We both enjoyed the experience immensely and the resultant post was enjoyed by quite a few readers. Personally collaboration is not a strong point, much more of a ferret away on my own and get it done sort of a person. The idea of having to work around other peoples schedules and timelines fills me with trepidation.

This was different. It just worked really well. Since then I have contributed a guest post to Trish’s blog and we have been discussing with some excitement more work together. I had felt this could be good but wasn’t sure how that would take shape. So we chatted over messenger on Facebook and talked about it being a good idea.

Trish came up with a fantastic idea. Well I say that now but when she mentioned it initially I was petrified. Thankfully she has convinced me this is a good idea and it should be a great thing to be a part of. The concept is to do some podcast’s together. Talk about autism/autistic issues.

We have met over Skype and video calls via Facebook and we are excitedly moving forward on this process. We are almost ready to record our first episode. It’s scary and exciting.

We have a name and a list of topics to kick off with. It’s going to be an exciting journey. The concept is not unique, there are people all over the world doing podcasts and vodcasts. What we do have that is maybe a little unique here is a collaboration and ensuing discussion that will be out in the public arena between a proudly autistic man and an autism mom. We will I am sure have alternative positions on issues. I am sure there will be times where the discussion is robust, possibly even tense.

I believe this could be a positive contribution to both the autistic community and the greater autism community. Both of these communities do need to listen to each other and contribute to each other. We often get ourselves tied in knots arguing with each other. It’s not either’s fault it just happens and is furthered by the machinations of groups like Autism Speaks who continue to silence and sideline any autistic voice that attempts to speak to them.

I truly hope when we make this happen that you take the time to give us a view. We plan shortish videos of under 15 minutes with some important topics to kick us off. Just as a teaser we will begin with a discussion about Identity First language and then Functioning Labels.

We have called our venture – Connecting Hemispheres. Trish is from the USA and I am from Australia, so we talk from different hemispheres and we come from different hemispheres of the neurological sense. I think it works.

We are not entirely sure of the final web address to publish our posts but you can keep up with the progress at either our  or our .

There’s not much more to tell at this point except to say we are both brimming with excitement and anticipation. Now it is just to get the timezones to align, the technology to behave, the internet connections to be stable and voila the magic can happen.