Position @ UArts
Assistant Professor, Writing for Film and Television, UArts College of Media and Communication

Alma Mater
BA, Franklin and Marshall College
MA, MFA, Temple University

Current Projects
Beat the Air (2006), which he co-wrote and directed, is being released on DVD and will play October 30 at Indie Fest USA in Anaheim, Calif.  This screening marks the sixth festival acceptance for Beat the Air, which Saylor premiered at UArts in January of 2006.  Previous screenings include festivals in Mumbai, India, and La Paz, Mexico.  Among the film’s lead actors is Johnnie Hobbs Jr. of the UArts acting department.

Recent Accomplishment
Steve lived in Mexico for eight months to learn Spanish. “We had two goals.  The first was to immerse ourselves in Spanish, which we'd studied for a year and a half.  The second was to learn more about the Mexican people and their culture.  This second goal was especially interesting to us because we were abroad while much of the U.S. was embroiled in an overheated debate about immigration, as well as during Mexico's presidential campaign.”

How does traveling, in your opinion, make you a better teacher?
“The biggest stumbling block that a teacher faces is staleness, so any change is bound to churn things up for the better.  While in Mexico I taught conversational English and took Spanish classes, and both of those pursuits challenged and enhanced my teaching for what I'd say are obvious reasons.  I also think that considering language from any perspective is helpful in the teaching of writing, and traveling in non-English-speaking places does force one to think about language.”

What was the most amazing thing you saw in Mexico?
“Our most overwhelming experience in Mexico occurred during an earlier trip, when Leah [my wife] and I visited the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza on the Yucatán peninsula.  The site dates to the seventh century, but is remarkably intact, and our guide was a multilingual scholar who placed the grounds in a historic context that made us feel connected to the past.  The pyramid there, which rises about 75 feet, is famous for a stairway designed to cast the shadow of a serpent when the sun strikes from a certain angle.  There are also rooms where Mayan astronomers kept their records and a nearly intact ball court that still bears a pair of stone scoring rings.”

Why did you want to learn Spanish?
“Speaking more than one language, of course, is a practical advantage in a closely knit world, and Spanish is the unofficial second language of the United States.  But for now, I'm just trying to keep up with my practice.  Reading Isabel Allende's collection The Stories of Eva Luna in the original Spanish has been a recent and gratifying milestone for me, but that's really more of a personal accomplishment.” 

What are your current goals?
“My current goals are to improve my Spanish and to make another movie, projects that have little to do with one another and are both, in their own ways, time-consuming, maddening, and invigorating.”