Imagine

Since Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound is a picture book, some schools figure the older kids won’t be interested in what we can show them. But guess what? Older kids are as curious about what it’s like to be blind as the younger ones are. And hey, they like dogs, too!

Fourth graders (and up) were a great audience.

And so, talking with the 4th, 5th and 6th graders during our visit to St. Mary of the Lake School last week was a treat. During the Q&A part of our presentation to the older kids, one boy asked, “Is it boring, not being able to see TV?”

After giving the question some consideration, I told him I guess I’ve gotten used to it, and no, it isn’t boring. Not at all. “It’s kind of like reading a chapter book all the time,” I said. “Without any pictures, I always have to imagine what the stuff in my story looks like.”

A New York Times story I read after visiting St. Mary’s reported that in addition to stimulating the “classical” language regions of our brain, reading fiction also activates a whole bunch of other parts:

Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.

The piece quoted similar research about the sense of touch – when people read descriptions involving texture, say, “hands like leather” or “hair like silk” the part of the brain responsible for perceiving texture through touch was activated. Another study explained that words describing motion activated the part of the brain that coordinates the body’s movements, but there was no mention of any study showing that vivid descriptions of visual images might activate the part of the brain that has, in my case, been dormant for so long. If it turns out that it does, I guess I have something new to worry about: my visual cortex might be over-stimulated!

Stay tuned

Seems like anytime an employer goes out of the way to thank you, you can bet on it: you’re being let go. Last week I got an email from WBEZ thanking me for the essays I’ve recorded for them over the years. The note went on to say WBEZ is reorganizing their local programming to emphasize live shows. They hope their new formatting will encourage listeners to comment on social media or phone in live and in person. Translation: they will no longer be airing pre-recorded essays like the ones I used to write for them.

Let’s be honest. I’m pretty lucky that WBEZ took me on to write essays in the first place. It sure felt cool to jump into a cab with Hanni or Harper and ask the driver to take me to Chicago Public Radio. So many times the driver was listening to WBEZ as we drove — one of them even asked for my autograph!

And what a kick it was to have someone call or stop me on the street after one of my essays aired. “I heard you on NPR!” they’d say. Or, “I thought the voice sounded familiar, and when I, like, waited until the end, they said it was. It was, like, you!” It was a very, very good run, and I’m sorry to seehear it come to an end.

The WBEZ arts editor did write to ask me to come and meet with her personally to see what this shift might mean for me, so I’m heading over to the WBEZ studio with Whitney tomorrow. Will it be my very last trip there? I hope not. Gee, guess we’ll all have to, ahem, stay tuned to find out.

I Am Curious (Red)

Whitney and I visited Hendricks and St. Mary of the Lake Elementary schools in Chicago this week, and the kids at both schools had tons of terrific questions.

Whit and I had a great time at St. Mary of the Lake (pictured here) and Hendricks.

For some reason the first and second graders at St. Mary’s seemed particularly interested in color blindness. When one of them asked me if it’s true that dogs can only see black and white, I explained that dogs do see some colors, but they can’t tell the difference between red and green. “If we’re at an intersection with a stoplight, it’s my job to judge when it might be safe to cross.” I described the way I stand up straight, concentrate, and listen for the rush of cars. When it sounds like the traffic is going the direction I want to go, I take a guess the light is green and command Whitney to go forward. Whitney’s ears perk up, she listens for traffic and looks left and right to confirm it’s safe before pulling me across.

The students seemed satisfied with that answer and went on with other questions. Are you blind all of the time? When you were at the Seeing Eye school, what was your teacher’s name? Does Whitney like to lick a lot? What do you and Whitney do to have fun? Their thoughts eventually returned to colors, though.

“Do you just see the color black?” one girl asked. “Or do you just see the color white?” Another girl told me that the school uniforms they wear are red. “But does Whitney think they’re green? I gave that question some thought, and realized I couldn’t answer it. I remember writing a story for Dog Fancy magazine years ago about dogs and vision, so when I got home I looked it up:

Dogs see colors, but not the same way humans do. People can see variations of violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Dogs can only see blue, violet, yellow, and some shades of gray.

I checked my source list, and the information for that Dog Fancy story came from an article in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association called Vision in Dogs, written by P.E. Miller and C.J. Murphy. A credible source, but not sure it answers this sweet first grader’s question. If dogs can’t see the color red, what do they see instead? Blue? Violet? Yellow? If any of you blog followers have an answer, by all means leave a comment. I’m curious to know now, too!

The Circle Is Unbroken

As Whitney and I prepare for our trip to Hendricks Elementary School this morning, my husband Mike Knezovich weighs in with a guest post:

Beth listens to the radio a lot, and she listens with more attention than most. Last week she heard about a special show at a very special place: Levon

That's The Old Town School's new logo.

Helm and his current Grammy-winning band (not The Band of yore) playing a benefit for the Old Town School of Folk Music. With special guest Donald Fagen of Steely Dan. And warmup Shawn Mullins.

That’s a lot of goodness in one place, so we made an impulse buy. And on the night of St. Patrick’s Day, we traveled to Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood for the benefit.

That's the inside of Maurer Hall, the performance space at The Old Town School.

The Old Town School of Folk Music is a music venue, but more important, it’s a part of the fabric of Chicago. Thousands of kids and adults from all over Chicago take lessons there every week. Who knows how many have picked up a guitar or mandolin or cello or whatever since the school opened in 1957. Beth and I have a half-dozen friends who’ve taken up instruments and taken music lessons there. And they all speak glowingly of their experience.

Before the performance Saturday night, we browsed the silent auction. Instead of sports memorabilia or luxury cruises, this one had lots of concert posters and handwritten playlists and other music memorabilia. One photo froze me in my tracks. There he was, a baby-faced John Prine, probably in his 20s, strumming his guitar while sitting next to the fairly ramshackle registration desk at the original Old Town School location. Hello in There.

There were photos of — and music by — Steve Goodman, the writer of The City of New Orleans. Like Prine, he was an Old Town School icon, but Steve Goodman died way too young. Everywhere I turned, I saw artifacts. Performers from Bob Dylan to Peter, Paul and Mary to Pete Seeger to Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Levon can still drum. And he even sang a little.

The performance? Well, I’m still buzzing. Levon took his place at the drum set, aided by a second drummer. There was a trombone, two saxes, a trumpet, a Hammond B3, a bassist, two guitarists, and two terrific backup singers (though the term backup doesn’t do these women justice) including Levon Helm’s daughter Amy. And Donald Fagen at the electric piano with ultra-cool jazzman sunglasses. The band broke from lots of rootsy numbers into a couple Fagen/Steely Dan tunes, including “Black Friday,” and they did it perfectly. All the musicians were superb. None of the crowd was fiddling with their cell phones, all were enrapt.

Levon, who’s in his 70s now and has survived cancer, looked scrawny and a little frail, yet somehow he seemed to look exactly as he always has. I remember seeing him in The Last Waltz at The Lans Theater in my hometown — Lansing, Ill, in 1974. It was a film of The Band’s farewell performance – directed by Martin Scorscese. Even then, Levon Helm looked old and wise. I was all of 17.

But Saturday night, ages and dates and numbers didn’t matter. I didn’t feel old. I didn’t feel young. I just felt great. Here’s to Levon Helm and to the Old Town School.

Missing: 30 million words

As a kid, spending three days with a bunch of schoolteachers would have sounded like the ultimate form of punishment. I guess wisdom really does come with age — when the Illinois Reading Council contacted me last Fall to see if I’d be interested in coming to their annual conference and spend time with thousands of teachers from across the state, I considered it a privilege.

That's me at the SCBWI booth. Whitney's under the table. (Photo by Cheryl May.)

My sisters Cheryl and Marilee accompanied Whitney and me on the trip from Chicago, and when we stepped off the train in Springfield, our driver Brian was there with a sign. “It says your name!” they exclaimed, describing the B-E-T-H F-I-N-K-E in bold lettering. I felt like a star.

The star treatment continued throughout this well-organized and well-attended three-day conference. Award-winning author Esther Hershenhorn had published an extremely flattering post about Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound just days before the conference started. Attention from Esther’s Teaching Authors blog brought a lot of teachers to the Illinois Society of Childrens Book Authors and Illustrators (SCBWI) booth to meet new Seeing Eye dog Whitney and me. I Brailled out words for the teachers to take home to their students along with a bookmark of the Braille alphabet. I could almost hear the wheels spinning in the teachers heads, conjuring up ways to use Braille to encourage their students back home to read print.

I gave a presentation, enjoyed time with the seven lively teachers at my table as one of the featured guests at the author luncheon, and attended a few sessions, too. Everywhere I went I heard dedicated teachers asking questions, looking for suggestions, sharing ideas, all of them oh so eager to learn tnew techniques and methods to motivate their students.

My Chicago neighbor Margaret MacGregor is one of those dedicated teachers, and so is my sister Marilee Amodt. Margaret teaches in the Chicago Public Schools, and Marilee teaches in the Orlando Public Schools. The two of them teamed up to lead a session about teaching vocabulary to students from lower-income families, and on our train back to Chicago Margaret mentioned how important it is for kids to learn a lot of vocabulary words before they start school.

“Books have a lot of words in them that kids don’t hear spoken out loud,” Margaret said. In fact, children’s books use twice as many words as kids hear

That's Margaret on the left, with Marilee, before their presentation. (Photo by Cheryl May.)

on regular TV. And even, get this, twice as many, like, words, like than, like, college students like, use when they are, like, talking to each other.

Margaret told me about the Hart-Risley Study, which says low-income children hear, on average, 30 million fewer words spoken than their more affluent peers before they turn four. Margaret was not misspeaking, and that is not a typo. I looked it up when we got home. 30 million fewer words.

It seemed particularly fitting to be listening to Margaret and Marilee’s presentation the weekend before Whitney and I head to Hendricks Elementary School on Chicago’s Southside. Hendricks is one of the Chicago Public Schools participating in the Sit Stay Read! (SSR) program I volunteer for. In order for a school to participate in Sit Stay Read!, 95 percent or more of the students enrolled must qualify for the National School Breakfast program. The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Center for Literacy helped Sit Stay Read! design the program to coordinate with school curriculum — it’s meant to improve children’s reading fluency, encourage them to become successful readers, inspire them to explore the world through books, and help them learn to respect people and animals. A Chicago Tribune story by Rick Kogan explains:

SSR’s mission is fueled by sad statistics: On average, a child growing up in a middle-class family will have the benefit of as many as 1,700 hours of one-on-one picture-book reading before he or she enters school, while the child in a low-income family will have 25 hours.

Sit Stay Read! uses dogs and volunteers in all sorts of clever ways: children read aloud to specially trained therapy dogs, human volunteers visit as “book buddies” to help individual kids, and people like me come as guest readers – the books we read to the kids always have something to do with, guess what? Dogs!

Guest readers also teach the kids about possible careers – when members of Chicago’s Lyric Opera visit, they read The Dog Who Sang at the Opera to the kids. Firefighters read Firehouse Dog during visits, and visiting police officers read about police dogs. I was asked to come with Whitney and talk about being a writer.

I’m looking forward to visiting Hendricks Monday. It’ll be Whitney’s first experience as a Sit Stay Read! dog, and I hope my stories of learning new ways to read and write after losing my sight might encourage the students at Hendricks to keep trying, too.

Puppy love

On Monday morning Whitney and I caught a commuter train to Easter Seals DuPage and the Fox Valley Region to visit the Lily Garden Child Care Center, a preschool and child care program that mixes classes up with kids with and without disabilities. The center is working on a new project this year that features guest authors who come to read to the kids. They thought it would be especially appropriate for me to read from a Braille version of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound, and they were right. Our son Gus was in a program like this when he was three and four years old, so I felt right at home with the students. and, hey, I work part-time for Easter Seals, so I’m familiar with the work they do.

I’m the Interactive Community Coordinator at Easter Seals Headquarters in downtown Chicago. That’s a fancy-schmancy title that means I moderate the Easter Seals and Autism Blog. I keep my ear open for articles and events involving autism, then ask spokespeople at Easter Seals affiliates across the country to write blog posts about those things. They email the posts to me, I edit them and add html code, and, presto! Their posts get published on the Easter Seals blog.

Come to think of it, You have Easter Seals to thank — or blame — for this Safe & Sound blog — it was at Easter Seals that I learned to use the blogging tools. I wrote about our trip to the child development center Monday for a post on the Easter Seals and Autism blog — thought you all might like to read an excerpt from that post here, too:

I’m sure some of the kids at the Lily Garden Child Care Center had autism, but truth is, without being able to see them, I couldn’t tell. Some were scared of Whitney, some couldn’t stop petting her, others gave her kisses. Some seemed shy, others went on and on and on and on and on and on about their own dog at home. Which were symptoms of autism, and which were symptoms of … well … childhood? Who knew? All we did know is that something different was happening in the room today, and that we were all having fun.

A big thank you to the folks at Easter Seals DuPage and the Fox Valley Region for inviting Whitney and me out to their child development center on Monday. We had a ball!

Hardly a hayseed

Back in the early 90’s, when I was working with my first Seeing Eye dog Dora, three different blind people using guide dogs died after falling into subway tracks. A 1993 NY Times story reported that in one accident at the midtown subway stop, “witnesses said Ms. Schneider got up and tried to find the edge of the platform with her hands as a southbound No. 3 express train roared into the station with its horn blasting.”

I’m not afraid of much, but I am afraid of getting onto subways alone with a Seeing Eye dog. I always enlist a friend to come along as a sighted guide.

Plenty of people who use guide dogs take the subway safely back and forth to work every day, and my friend Karen Keninger is about to join those brave souls. Here’s her guest post about learning the DC Metro system with her new Seeing Eye dog Jimi.

That's Karen.

Have any tips? Bring them on

by Karen Keninger

I am an Iowa girl. I make no apology. We don’t have Metros here. We have some busses, but no subways. So my experience of the subways is limited to going with friends while I’ve been in D.C. and a couple excursions in New York. This weekend we passed through eight or nine Metro stations learning how to get from point A to point Z via points D J and Q. I’m confident that in a month or two the Metro will be old hat and no big deal, but this weekend it was not.

Every station is laid out differently. Although they are clean, well lit, well patrolled, safe, and loaded with excellent signage, it’s going to be a challenge figuring out where to go at each point. For example, there is a talking and Brailled machine to buy your fare cards out of–very easy to use. But how do you know which gates are open to go in and which only go out? They all look the same, and the pattern is not consistent from station to station. Jimi got pretty good at the escalators, but once you get on the platform, how do you know whether it’s a blue train or an orange one? Oh, and how do you know whether it’s the train going out of the city or into it? And it matters!

They’re announcing it, and there are speakers on the outside of the trains, but they’ve said it so often that it’s a monosyllabic grunt most of the time in a particular accent that I’m not used to. The only thing that is easy to understand is the ubiquitous announcements that blare out from the speakers on the posts telling you not to run on the platform, to hold your child’s hand, and to stand back to let passengers off the train. Of course these announcements mask anything you might otherwise have been able to understand from the train conductor announcements.

I have received two specific pieces of advice from people living in D.C. regarding the metro. One is “Don’t live on the green line.” The other is “Pick a commute where you won’t have to change trains.” Excellent advice, but impossible to follow. NLS is on the green line.

For those of you who, like me, are not used to subways, let me see if I can describe them from my point of view. (You cosmopolitan types can skip this part!) First there is an escalator that takes you down from the street. This escalator may or may not be operating depending on who knows what. You prefer to walk down rather than up, and some of them are really, really long escalators. Then there is a row of gates with an attendant’s kiosk in the middle of the row. You don’t know which way the gates are going if you can’t see the lights, because each one can go either in or out depending on I don’t know what. You put your fare card into a slot on your side of the gate. The slot has Braille on it, but you don’t really have time to read “insert card here,” and they all say the same thing. It is sucked away and pops up on top maybe 18 inches away. You pull it out and the gate opens. This way the system knows where you entered.

After the gates may be another set of escalators, shorter this time, taking you down to the platform. Or you might be on the platform. Or you might be on one platform, with another one down below–at which point it is useful to know where you are going lest you end up somewhere else. Sometimes the platform is between two tracks, and you pick the train going your direction of the proper color. (There are red, green, yellow, orange and blue trains, and soon to be silver as well.) Sometimes the two tracks are next to each other and the platforms are on the outside of the trains, so if you start on the wrong side you have to go over a bridge to get to the other side. Sometimes the trains at one level go one way and the trains on the other level go the other way. Sometimes trains of different colors use the same track, alternating blue and orange for instance. Sometimes the trains on the upper level go east and west and the ones on the lower level go north and south. (Please note that cardinal directions are meaningless and used only for illustrative purposes here. The inside of the station has as far as I could tell no relevance whatsoever to the real world.)

Your only hope of survival seems to be to memorize each station as a unique and unduplicated space and forget everything you thought about stations in general. Nothing applies. Except that at each station at least one escalator is likely to be out of service. You will note, however, one safety feature that you may come to appreciate–truncated domes on the edge of the platform. Jimi is supposed to be afraid of empty subway tracks. He isn’t. but when I feel those truncated domes (little bumps) under my feet, I know to move him over. Don’t worry, Mom, I’m not going to fall in. So assuming that you find the right train, you wait for the doors to open. This part is easy, and Jimi bolts for the open door. He loves trains! You stride on with confidence and reach for a pole. You hope you find the pole before you find a body, because groping people is not your plan. You hang on because the car is going to start with a jerk and knock you on your tush if you’re not holding on or sitting down.
The next challenge is to know when to get off. Again, the conductor may be your friend, but may not. I think they’re supposed to announce each stop, but I don’t think they always do it in English. At any rate you need to keep track. I find counting on my fingers is the only way I can remember whether we passed Foggy Bottom or not. I’ll have to transfer from the orange train to the green train to get to work. L’Enfant Plaza had my head swimming on Saturday. We tried it again on Sunday and it made more sense. I just hope I don’t get lost my first day of work!!

And then, if you’re lucky, you get off at the right station–and wonder which way is out! Again, the possibilities seem to be endless. First of all, it matters which part of the train you’re on–front? Back? Middle? Did you remember to pay any attention to this little detail? Finding the escalators will be easier if you know how far up the platform you are. Then there are the gates again. You put your fare card in the slot again on the way out and the system knows how much to charge you for the trip. And then some stations have multiple exits. Am I on Georgia going north, or Georgia going south? How can I tell? H’m!!

The metro gets you places in a hurry–it’s just a matter of getting where you want to go. I haven’t experienced rush hour yet–I’m sure that will be a totally different experience from Saturday and Sunday! I’m going to go back through my audio notes and write it all down and with luck I’ll get to work the first day without getting lost!

Now, I know that those of you reading this who live in Boston, or Chicago, or New York, or San Francisco think,”What a rube!! What a hayseed! It’s not that big a deal!!” So if you have tips and tricks, bring them on!!

My old favorites: an update

Here’s guest blogger Mike Knezovich with a status report on some old friends:

Whit is right at home in the city, including on the subway.

So, in case there was any doubt, Whitney’s definitely my new favorite. Though she has brain cramps (children and certain other dogs make her forget herself momentarily), she’s game for the city buzz, she responds to Beth’s corrections, and she will play — infinitely — catch and fetch for as long as a human can. Gotta’ watch her teeth, though — she’s actually shredded a couple Kong toys and even destroyed a Lacrosse ball.

Meanwhile, my old favorites are thriving. Hanni, the eternal star, enjoys a rich life in Urbana with Nancy and Steven. She’s slowed down, for sure — she doesn’t always leap up to greet you every time you enter the room. But she still thumps her tail on the floor at the first hint that you might give her a pet, a scratch, or even just a look. And at 12 years old, she still gets around. Nancy and Steven regularly take her for long walks at Urbana’s Meadowbrook Park or at Homer Lake, which is a forest preserve just outside town.

On one such walk, Hanni showed she’s still got spunk, too. Nancy reports that on a recent walk, a couple dogs got off leash and started a mad dash

Hanni, in retirement repose.

toward her and Hanni. Hanni is typically the most submissive dog I’ve ever seen. If even a tiny dog approaches, she rolls on her back and goes into the “how low can you go” routine to signal her un-aggressive intentions. Which is what she did as the dogs approached, according to Nancy. This time, though, when one of the approaching dogs bared its teeth, Hanni sprung to her feet and let out an authoritative WOOF that sent the would-be bullies packing in the other direction. I always knew she had it in her, and am happy she never really had to use it.

And then there’s Harper, the retired gentle hero. We still miss him, his giant head, his soft ears, and his generally sweet and peaceful disposition. Well, mostly peaceful, it seems. Chris and Larry, who took Harper in when it was clear he couldn’t work any more, have patiently helped him build his confidence and nerve. You may recall that after his and Beth’s traffic near-miss, he refused to venture more than a block or so from our apartment. He was the same in the suburbs, too. But gradually, walking backward while coaxing him to keep walking, Chris and Larry have gotten Harper to walk all the way around the block — and beyond! He regularly plays with the Collie across the street, and he’s even gotten cocky enough to…chase a squirrel into the neighbor’s yard and tree it.

Harper hangin' with his Collie buddy Beau.

OK, OK, we don’t want him terrorizing squirrels. But my heart swells at the thought that Harper is shaking off the trauma that used to freeze him in his tracks. And I’ll admit it — I’m kinda’ proud of the guy.

And grateful to our friends Steven and Nancy and Chris and Larry and before them Randy Cox — who took in Pandora (who lived to 17), Beth’s first guide dog. All-time favorites, all of them.

Betsy blogs

It happened, literally, in the blink of an eye. Betsy Folwell was at her magazine job, squinting at her computer screen, when all of a sudden her visual field filled up with gray. The diagnosis: nonarteritic ischemic optic neuropathy. She was blind.

That's Betsy with her Bear -- her Newfie mix -- and her guide dog Oakley.

I met Betsy five years ago when Bark magazine asked me to write a piece about in-home guide dog training. Most people with disabilities attend three-to-four-week sessions at training centers to work with a new service dog. “But I couldn’t see leaving home and losing my independence for even a month,” Betsy told me in the interview. “Especially at a time when I was struggling to learn my limits.” She taught her own dog Bear to lead her to the local post office, but when she realized the Newfy mix would be too big to get on trains and planes with her when she traveled, she used her reporting skills to find an “in-community” program to bring an instructor and guide dog to her home.

Oakley, a two-year-old Labrador Retriever, leapt from his crate and covered Betsy with kisses when the Upstate Guide Dog Association van arrived at her door. The duo was up at seven every morning to meet their trainer and worked nonstop until six each evening, focusing on routes Betsy and Oakley would take on a regular basis. After two weeks, the trainer left Betsy with her new guide and took off for another town and another dog and client.

Betsy said the program was perfect for her, but she won’t be training that way again when it comes time for a new dog. “Upstate Guide Dogs went belly up,” she told me with a shrug. “Lack of funds.”

The sad Truth is, one instructor for one student can be costly. The good news? Oakley is still a strong worker. Betsy is, too: Adirondack Lifemagazine kept her on after she lost her sight. She’s the creative director there now, and she uses a talking laptop like mine to write stories. From an article about Betsy Folwell in a Vermont publication called Seven Days:

A ruddy, spry redhead with a dry wit, she is generous to a fault with her time. And her blindness is barely apparent to a casual observer. Folwell doesn’t use a cane and, on this reporter’s recent visit to her office, her yellow Lab guide dog, Oakley, was sleeping on the job, perhaps chasing chipmunks in his dreams.

Adirondack Life has a circulation of 50,000 and comes out eight times yearly (six bimonthlies and two special issues). Betsy wrote yesterday touting the magazine’s new web site and letting me know she’s started blogging there, too: she writes the outdoor rec blog every week and posts on Park Life as well. “I’ve got one in the pipeline about winterizing your dog’s paws for snow,” she said, using that spry wit of hers to acknowledge the unusually mild winter we’ve had in Chicago. “That’s still a concern here!”

No one ever asked me what I thought about all that

Margaret Atwood is in Chicago to give the keynote at the 2012 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference. Aleksandar Hemon is here, too. So is Isabel Wilkerson. And Ha Jin. The list of writers giving presentations is overwhelming, but the one author I am following most? My friend Audrey Petty.

That's Audrey, in a shot taken by her daughter Ella.

Audrey Petty is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
I met Audrey when we still lived in Urbana, and we took to each other the minute we met. Audrey was born and raised in Chicago. She returned here to work on an oral history book project gathering stories from residents of Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes, Robert Taylor Homes, Stateway Gardens and Cabrini-Green — all publicly-funded buildings that no longer exist. Audrey’s oral interpretations of the residents she’s interviewed is called High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing and will be published by Voice of Witness, the nonprofit division of McSweeney’s Books.

Whitney sat quietly at my feet yesterday as my friend Linda and I heard Audrey on a panel called “Creative Writers as Oral Historians.” Kelli Simpkins also appeared on this panel — she’s one of the original creators and performers of The Laramie Project. I was fortunate enough to see The Laramie Project performed here in Chicago years ago, and it’s a play I’ll never forget. If you haven’t seen The Laramie Project yet, rent or stream it. Kelly is in town to work with Steppenwolf Theatre, author Miles Harvey and his undergraduate and graduate students at DePaul University to collect oral histories about youth violence across Chicago.

Miles Harvey moderated yesterday’s panel, and he gave accounts of his students visiting gang members in rough Chicago neighborhoods and in prisons to collect stories. He told us that one young gang-banger asked the college student to play the tape back when the interview was over. “Which part?” the student asked. “The whole thing,” the gang member answered. Miles said these two young people sat together to listen again to every word of the interview, and when it was done the gang member thanked the student. “No one ever asked me what I thought about all that.” He said.

These oral histories about youth violence in Chicago will be made into a theatre piece that will play in libraries across the city, and with Kelly Simpkins and Miles Harvey involved, I know the productions will be high-quality. Miles Harvey is someone I’ve known since college — both of us wrote for the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois. He is the author of national and international bestseller The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, and I was delighted when he accepted a position at DePaul University. It meant he’d be staying here in Chicago, and I knew he would serve as a terrific mentor to hundreds of writing students. His generosity of spirit encourages many a writer, including me, to keep at it.

Most of the panelists yesterday were in the midst of their projects, and they agreed it can be difficult to know when to stop the research. Kelly Simpkins said that in the end they had 400 hours of interviews to narrow down to the two-hour play that became the Laramie Project. I just did the math. That’s 17 days of interviews.

Yikes.

I attended that panel yesterday to cheer on my friend Audrey Petty, but there was some self-interest involved, too. I was curious about oral interpretation as a medium. It seemed a natural for a writer like me, someone who can’t see. But if I learned one thing from yesterday’s panel, it’s this: avoid taking on any oral history projects! I know I’d like doing the interviews, and the work could be rewarding, but oh, all that transcribing. And then the decision-making, the editing, the cuts. I admire these folks for putting their hearts and souls into getting these important stories out there. I look forward to reading Audrey’s new book, and to attending one of the performances Kelly, Steppenwolf Theatre, Miles and his Depaul students come up with after reviewing their hours and days and weeks of interviews.