Dean Stalham

Bueno Key, a short film written and directed by dyslexics, premiered in July of 2015. The film’s screenwriter Dean Stalham is an award-winning writer whose dyslexia wasn’t diagnosed until he was 40 years old.

The film follows the apparent hopeless life of a drug dealer and how art turned his life around. For Stalham, he wasn’t writing a completely fictitious story. Stalham experienced the drug business and the prison time that came with it as a career path for the first two decades of his adult life. It was only through writing that this dyslexic found his way out of the drug business. As a child, Stalham was coined a creative mind by everyone around him. In a Codpast interview, Stalham admits that it was easy to do well in school early on because he was a creative storyteller and teachers liked that about him. When he was placed into the top academic class at age eleven though, he quickly fell behind and begged to be put down a class. His school’s principal recognized Stalham’s creative mind and urged his parents to place their son in Britain’s School of Art. Furthering an education wasn’t part of the family business though, and Stalham left school at 15 to work for the family construction business.

Stalham didn’t pick up writing again until he found himself in prison as an adult. A cast that came to the prison and put on a play for the inmates brought Stalham back to when he was a creative and imaginative ten year old who was handy with a pencil and paper. That same year, he wrote a play and entered it into a competition—and won. Since then, Stalham has turned his life around and made a living as a success writer. He is also currently the co-director and co-curator of Made Corrections, a source of rehabilitation for prisoners through art and writing. The arts are what helped pull Stalham out of the prison cycle, and Made Corrections allows other prisoners to have a creative outlet and express themselves.

Stalham claims he’s only read four books in his entire life, each taking over a year to get through, but it never once occurred to Stalham that he was a disadvantaged writer because of that. When he was diagnosed with dyslexia, Stalham threw a ‘coming out’ party, a tip of the hat to “all the teachers that made me sit in the back” as he described it. Knowing he is dyslexic didn’t make Stalham feel any less of a writer either. Instead, it gave him the confidence to take more risks and express himself more in his writing because he knew his writing was purely his and without confinements. When asked about the recently premiered Bueno Key, Stalham simply stated that he hopes the film shows that positive changes can happen for seemingly hopeless people— message that plainly complements his own story.

Read more about Bueno Key and Dean Stalham over at The Codpast.