Ebert’s number one fan

The show will go on at this year’s 15th Annual Ebertfest. Tilda Swinton, Shailene Woodley and Jack Black are among those expected to attend this year’s festival.

Hey, it’s Mike again–I promise I’ll fill you in on Montreal eventually, but the sad event  of yesterday — the death of Roger Ebert — changed my plans. My longtime and dear friend, Brand Fortner, was without question Roger Ebert’s biggest fan. FYI: I met Brand  back in 1990. He was a co-founder of Spyglass, a then tiny startup software company in Champaign, Ill., that was spun off from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. And he hired me. It remains the best and most fulfilling job I’ve ever had — it led to an unforgettable ride during the dot.com days, and the success of Spyglass changed my, Beth’s and our son Gus’s life for the better. Best of all,  Brand and I have remained friends.

I’m like a lot of people — I fully enjoyed Roger Ebert, even when I didn’t agree with him. But no one loved or respected Ebert more than Brand, who has also always attended and supported Ebertfest, a terrific film festival held in Champaign’s historic Virginia Theater each year.

After yesterday’s news, Brand was good enough to share a little essay his daughter Paula had written in college about what it was like to grow up with someone who worshipped at the altar of Roger. Paula—-now an accomplished adult (yikes) in her own right — was good enough to let me share it here on Beth’s blog. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

Roger and Dad

My dad idolizes Roger Ebert. He has Ebert posters hanging on his walls and Ebert movie yearbooks filling his bookcases. Every year, my dad attends Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival and comes back laden with souvenir hats, bags and t-shirts. Above my dad’s desk hangs a signed, framed photo of Roger Ebert shaking his hand. “To Brand, on the occasion of HAL 9000′s birthday,” Roger wrote, adding a quote from HAL’s demise in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey… “Daisy … daisy …”.

When we were younger, my brothers and I needed my dad’s approval before going to the movie theater. My dad never cared about a movie’s rating, violence or explicit content. Rather, he needed to discuss whether Roger would approve of our choice.”You want to see that movie?” he’d ask. “Well, you know what Roger said about it, don’t you?” My brothers and I would look at each other and sigh. My dad would pull up the review and read to us from the holy word of Roger. We almost never made it to the theater by showtime.

My dad has bought nearly every film that Roger liked, and as a result, he owns hundreds of movies. Although my dad has barely seen a quarter of the movies he owns, he knows what Roger thinks of each one. For the movies my dad has seen, his opinion is intertwined with Roger’s. I remember my dad once telling me that he hadn’t enjoyed a movie that Roger rated favorably. After some consideration, my dad decided to watch the movie again to better understand Roger’s opinion.

When I was in high school, my friends would drop by to borrow movies from our massive collection. This pleased my dad to no end. He even made his own video rental cards and checkout slips to facilitate the borrowing process. And he loved spreading the gospel of Roger. If a friend wanted to borrow a particular movie, my dad would sit him down and walk him through Roger’s review. Then my dad would jump up. ”Oh, and if you like this movie, I know at least six more that you’ll love.” My friends always left with their hands full. Even now, I still turn to my dad for movie advice. Whether I’m in the mood for a mindless action flick or a foreign drama, he knows exactly what to recommend. My dad really knows his movies. Or, rather, he really knows his Roger Ebert.

And now a word from a fellow University of Illinois alum”

If you follow this blog, you already know guest blogger Sandra Murillo. Sandra lost her sight when she was three years old. She has always attended regular public schools, and she’s known ever since she was in high school that she wants to be a writer. Her first guest post was about using assistive technology to vote in her first presidential election and was published here four years ago. A lot has happened in Sandra’s life the past four years, and she’s back with another guest post to give you the latest.

Networking to beat the startling odds

by Sandra Murillo

“How’s the job search going?” I’ve heard that question from family and friends many times during the last few months. I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in December with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, and like any recent college graduate, I’m in the process of looking for a job, or, at the very least, an internship.

U of I graduate Sandra Murillo.

I, however, am not your average recent college graduate. I also happen to be blind. This means that finding a job can present some, shall we say, additional hardships. It’s not that I can’t get on the Internet to look for jobs or type resumés and personal statements independently. No, it’s much more complicated than that. Even though legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in the workplace, there are still many misconceptions that prevent many of us from being hired. Sadly, many employers believe that we are not capable of doing a job as efficiently as our sighted counterparts.

According to the American Foundation for the Blind, about 75 percent of blind and visually impaired adults are unemployed in the United States. I find this ironic, given that technology helps us be more productive and independent now more than ever before. I use my talking computer to send and receive Emails, type articles and blog posts and browse the web. The computer’s robotic voice announces each letter as I type and reads out loud what’s on the computer screen. I am bilingual, and my talking computer’s robotic voice even speaks Spanish for me when I want it to!

Journalism involves interviewing people, and I’ve learned to record the interviews with a digital recorder. That way I can make sure I won’t miss a good quote or bit of information. In some ways my blindness allows me to be a better listener during interviews. I can concentrate more on what’s being said rather than the visuals of the person or place. These and other tools have helped me in my job search.

Besides asking friends and family to keep an eye out for job leads, I also go online to sites like monster.com. I was also very fortunate to come across Career Connect, a website developed by the American Foundation for the Blind specifically for blind or visually impaired job seekers. It is full of helpful information on how to write resumés and personal statements, tips on how to make job interviews go smoothly and even information for employers.

I’ve known I wanted to be a journalist since I was a sophomore in high school. I think it’s a great career because I will get to do two of the things I enjoy the most: writing and informing and educating others. I have a particular interest in writing about people with disabilities — I feel we still need to educate the general public about our struggles and capabilities. Maybe that way employers will not be as skeptical about hiring blind and visually impaired people.

Meanwhile, I plan to continue on my job search, and I hope I will not be part of that startling 75 percent of blind and visually impaired people without a job for long.

Better than match.com

Whitney and I had a ball at the Hamilton Branch of the Madison Public Librarylast Friday, and as always, the kids in the audience had some marvelous questions. My favorite one was

Whitney are becoming a good team.

this: “Your book says your Seeing Eye dog goes with you everywhere. Does she go in the shower with you, too?”

We’re heading to Champaign this Thursday To speak to an animal sciences class at the University of Illinois, and it’ll be interesting to find out if the kids in that college class read their texts as carefully as the little girl at that library in Madison did!

I plan on telling the college class what it’s been like transitioning to a new Seeing Eye dog, then going over some of the qualifications necessary to become a guide dog instructor. Most guide dog schools require instructors to have a college degree and then do an apprenticeship, and apprenticeships can last as long as four years. If I do a decent job explaining how complicated it can be to train dogs, train people, and then make a perfect match between the human and canine, the college kids might appreciate why the apprenticeships last so long.

Once apprentices finish their training and become full-time Seeing Eye Instructors, they’re assigned a string (a group) of dogs and given four months to train that string. Throughout the training, instructors pay close attention to each dog’s pace and pull, and they make careful notes about how each dog deals with distractions, what their energy level is, and all sorts of other characteristics. And then? We blind students fly in from all over North America to be matched – and trained — with a new dog.

Seeing Eye instructors have to be as good at evaluating people as they are evaluating dogs. Our instructors review our applications before we arrive on campus and then ask us tons more questions when we get there. Instructors take us on “Juno” walks (they hold the front of the harness to guide us through all sorts of scenarios to get an idea of how fast we like to walk and how strong of a pull we’ll want from our dog) and then combine all of this information with what they know about their string of dogs, talk it over with fellow instructors and the team supervisor, mix in a little bit of gut instinct, and voila! A match is formed.

Each Seeing Eye instructor trains more dogs than they’ll need for a class. If a dog has a pace, pull, or energy level that doesn’t match with a blind person in the current class, that dog remains on campus with daily walks and care, and perhaps more training, until the next class arrives. My first dog was one of those Seeing Eye dogs who went through a second round of training before she was matched with me. Back in 1991, the Seeing Eye knew that the dog they matched me with would be landing in the home of a very unique five-year-old boy named Gus, and that the dog would be in the hands of a woman who had never had a dog before. They must have figured Pandora would need all the extra training she could get!

Hanni was the perfect dog for everything going on during her years with me, Harper took a blow to save me from getting hit by a car on State Street. My fourth dog had big paws to fill, and it’s taken me a while to warm up to Whitney. Lately, though, I’m finally finding myself falling in love again.

My two-year-old Golden/Labrador Retriever cross is a hard worker who loves to play as much as she loves to work. Her curiosity gets her in trouble sometimes, but when she guides me down busy Chicago streets, she is directed, determined, and driven. The only time she lollygags? When she realizes we’re heading back home. She wants to go, go, go

Whitney’s confidence is contagious, and she’s smart enough to know when to bend the rules without getting in trouble. Hmm. Whitney and I just might make a perfect match after all.

Her book is going to be published by McSweeney’s

My friend Audrey Petty has spent years 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 collected oral histories from residents and gathered them in a new book called High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing, and I’m heading to the Chicago Humanities Festival this Sunday to hear her interviewed about the project. From the Chicago Humanities Festival web site:

Narcotics, violence, and the perpetuation of poverty—for many of us, these are the lingering images of the Chicago housing projects Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes. But what was life in the homes actually like? University of Illinois professor Audrey Petty interviewed former residents for their firsthand accounts of Chicago public housing. Her oral history, which also includes such housing complexes as Stateway Gardens and the Henry Horner Homes, offers a revealing collective story of community, displacement, removal, and relocation. Forthcoming in McSweeney’s Voice of Witness book series, High Rise Stories is both a crucial addition to Chicago’s social history and a portal to a meaningful conversation about poverty, housing reform, and urban renewal in the United States.

Audrey and I met more than a decade ago when we all still lived in Urbana, Ill. Audrey was born and raised in Chicago — she returned home to work on the High Rise Stories project, and now

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

Audrey, her husband Maurice Rabb, and their daughter Ella live in a third-floor walkup so close to the Obama family’s Hyde Park house that little Ella has seen the President coming and going on recent visits. A few weeks ago Ella asked Maurice, “Daddy, is Romney real? Ella’s dad assured her that yes, he is. “Well, if Romney is real,” she said, “how come we never see him?”

It’s been a joy having the “Prabbys” back in town, and I’m looking forward to being with Audrey and her family this Sunday. You can come too –
Audrey Petty’s presentation is this Sunday, October 21 from 2 to 3 pm at The University of Chicago Law School’s Glen A. Lloyd Auditorium, 1111 East 60th Street in Chicago, and you can purchase tickets online now.

Designed by Kayla

Whitney and I had a ball at the Youth Literature Festival in Champaign last week, and the highlight of the entire event was meeting Kayla, a delightful second grader at Westview

Whitney and Kayla took to one another…. (Photo by Chryso Mouzourou.)

Elementary School. I usually don’t let kids pet Whitney when she has her harness on, but this was an exception. Kayla is blind, and she’d never been near a guide dog before. The only way for her to see how Whitney’s harness works was to touch it.

This spunky little sprite slid right down to the floor to feel Whitney’s ears, too. And her tail. And her back. And her belly. At one point they were face-to-face. “She’s staring at me!” Kayla exclaimed in delight. “That means she likes me.”

It was true. And really, who wouldn’t like Kayla? The two of us had just met, and already I was learning a lot from her. “That must be why people stare at us sometimes,” I said with a laugh. “They like us, too!”

Before we visited Kayla’s school, Whitney and I had been treated to lunch with faculty, students and staff working on Special Friends, and they explained how the six-week program works to help average kids understand and appreciate children with disabilities.

For all six weeks, kindergarten teachers read stories about children with disabilities to their students three times a week. The Special Friends kindergarteners enjoy a 15- minute learning activity about disabilities three times a week, too. And then, the kids take home one of the books they read in class every week to read and discuss with family members. After this six-week concentration on disabilities, the Special Friends people I had lunch with Friday keep track of the kindergartners to determine the short- and long-term effects of this six-week program.

Westview Elementary, where Kayla goes to school, is one of the schools participating in Special Friends. If Kayla’s confidence and self-assurance is any indication, I’d say the six-week program is an unqualified success. When I complimented Kayla’s mom on what a terrific job she is doing raising her daughter, the mom told me Kayla has visited a couple special education students in college classes to give talks. “She comes in, says she’s blind, shows off her white cane, talks about learning Braille and tells them why they oughta like her,” her mom said with a laugh. “And by the end of the session, they do!”

And that’s when I got the idea. I invited Kayla to help us with our presentation during the festival Community Day. And so there we were the next morning, Kayla in one seat, me in the other, Whitney sandwiched between us. When it came time for me to show the SRO crowd how I use the “outside” command to have Whitney guide me to a door, Kayla whipped out her white cane to demonstrate how she finds doors, too. When we returned to our seats, a boy in the audience asked Kayla if she was going to get a dog.

Kayla didn’t answer right away, so I butted in and explained that you have to be at least 16 years old to train with a Seeing Eye dog. The Seeing Eye believes working with a guide dog demands a certain amount of physical, mental, and emotional maturity.

“In order to work with a Seeing Eye dog, you have to be with the dog all the time. You have to be the one who feeds the dog, grooms the dog, takes the dog to the vet when you need to – not your mom or dad, not your brother or sister or your grandparents – you,” I said, explaining how that’s all part of the bonding, how it helps the dog understand how important it is to keep their blind companion safe. “You guys in elementary school and middle school are busy all day learning stuff,” I continued. “You don’t get enough breaks during school to take your dog out to empty or give them the walks they need.”

Kayla is a good listener. She understood, and she had an answer for the boy’s question now. “When I’m 16, I’m getting one,” she declared.

I read from a Braille version of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound to the audience, and then handed it to Kayla as a gift. ”Thank you!” she gushed, and as she busied herself running her fingertips over the pages, I answered questions and explained tricks I use to do things at home: stretching a rubber band over a bottle of conditioner to distinguish it from shampoo, putting safety pins on the tags of anything I wear that’s black (paper clips for white), choosing dresses and skirts made of unique fabrics and interesting textures so I can use my sense of touch to keep track of what I’m wearing.

And then came my favorite question of the morning. A kid in the back row asked, “Kayla, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

Kayla’s answer: a fashion designer. “I want to design dresses and skirts,” she told the audience. “I’ll give them to all the girls to make them look pretty.”

Special friends

What a great trip to Denver! In-between a baseball game with a puppy-in-training, a one-on-one tour of the 16th Street Mall with the head security cop there (don’t ask!), a nature walk

Waiting for our ride to the airport in sunny Denver.

with an old friend from my days working at the Kane County Cougars and the discovery of a new favorite beer afterwards (90 Shillings Scottish Ale from Odell’s Brewery in Fort Collins), I somehow managed to find enough quiet time at the hotel to make progress on a new book I’m writing, too.

More on that book later.

For now, all you need to know is that we arrived home in Chicago just in time to unpack and re-pack our bags for this Thursday, when Whitney and I head to the Youth Literature Festival put on by the College of Education at the University of Illinois. This year the Youth Literature Festival is partnering with Special Friends (a federally funded project promoting social acceptance and friendships among kindergarteners with and without disabilities)to sponsor our visit to Mrs. Coash’s kindergarten class at Westview School in Champaign.

I’ve known Mary Coash for years – her son Joey had severe and profound disabilities, and he was in self-contained special education classes with our son Gus. Like many other kids Gus introduced us to in his early years, Joey died too young. Joey’s short life inspired his mother to get a degree in education, and the kindergarten class Mary Coash teaches now mixes children with and without disabilities. After Whitney and I visit Mrs. Coash’s kindergartners on Friday, we’ll meet one-on-one with a girl who is blind and graduated from Mrs. Coash’s kindergarten a couple years ago. She’s a big second grader now and enrolled in a class with friends she made in kindergarten.

Whitney and I will be part of the festival’s Community Day on Saturday, October 6, too. Our sessions there are free and open to the public, and the Youth Literature Festival also sent special invitations encouraging parents, caregivers and participants involved in the Special Friends Project to come. I hope they do – I’d love to meet them!

Community Day takes place at the I-Hotel at 1900 S. First Street in Champaign, and our first presentation goes from 10:45 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. Our second session goes from 11:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Both of our sessions meet in the “Excellence Room,” and I gotta admit: that makes me a little nervous. Talk about pressure! If you live anywhere near Champaign, I welcome you to come and see if Whitney and I can live up to our billing…

There’s still time to get passive

Passive House Institute US , the non-profit organization my husband Mike Knezovich works for, is holding it’s 7th Annual North American Passive House conference at the Marriott Hotel in Denver next week, and Whitney and I are going along for the ride.

That’s a home built to the passive house standard in Bethesda, Md.

Passive house is a building energy standard – the most stringent such standard, to be exact. To be certified as a Passive House, a building has to fall below a certain threshold when it comes to the energy required to heat and cool it to comfortable levels. The principles behind passive house  were developed in the 1970s at places like the Small Homes Research Council at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. When interest in conservation waned in the United States in the 1980s, the Germans picked up the ball and developed what in Europe is called the Passivhaus standard and building method.

Katrin Klingenberg — a German-born and trained architect — came to Urbana to build her own passive House  as a proof of concept nearly 10 years ago. Since then, she founded Passive House Institute US and has built a community of folks who are building these high-performance buildings around North America. Several hundred of these folks will be getting together in Denver next week.

I’ll be spinning my wheels to  keep up with all these architects, builders, engineers, policy makers,
and academics in the Mile High City next week – trust me, I’m no Passive House expert! I hear about it often enough to be able to tell you this much, though: Windows on houses that meet passive house energy standards usually face the southern sun, but the passive house goes a lot further. Passive house construction uses thick walls and super-insulation — a wall of a passive house is about three times as thick as a typical building. The buildings are super-tight; they use tape-sealed construction to keep cold out, and heat in, during the winter. Vice-versa during the summer. That means air doesn’t leak in or out through cracks and holes. You can open the windows on nice days if you want, but the air quality inside is still fine when the windows are closed — there is a constant, low level ventilator operating. And it uses a heat exchanger so that exhaust air (already heated) transfers heat energy to the incoming air. Mike told me that some homes are heated with the equivalent of a blow dryer. Most don’t need a conventional furnace — or cooling system.

Mike’s been in a bunch of these houses and he says they’re really comfortable and quiet. He wants to live in one someday, and I like the idea, too.  Sound interesting? Well, then maybe you should join us at the conference to learn more! I happen to know there’s still time to sign up (I have connections). For more information, email conference@passivehouse.us (pssst, email sent to that address goes to Mike).

Missing Matt

One of my best friends from high school, Matt Klir, died of AIDS on September 17, 1992. Another best friend from those days, Laura Gale, wrote this guest post about how much we all still miss him twenty years later.

Crazy about life

by Laura Roy Gale

Modeling, acting, playing music, fun, friends, family, wackiness and more — all fit into the life of a man who was only 32 years old when he died of AIDS. Matt Klir was a ball of fire in high school, clearly more sophisticated than the rest of us. He had blond, classic good looks and dressed impeccably. Even as a teenager, Matt had his own wonderful sense of style — professional photographs of Matt and his sisters taken at modeling shoots by the famed Victor Skrebniski lined the dining room walls of their glorious home. His parents were divorced, he lived with his sisters and a free-spirited mom, and his house essentially had no rules.

We all practically lived in that house during high school, and Matt held his annual Elton John parties there, too. Matt dressed as Elton himself, and insisted that everyone else come in a costume inspired from an Elton John song. No one wanted to miss a party at Matt’s — one girl who worked at a fabric store after school used remnants to dress as “moss” from Your Song, a carrot-topped senior donned Alice Cooper make-up for All the Young Girls Love Alice, and a group of four (with Beth as Dorothy) dressed as Wizard of Oz characters from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Matt and I were good friends, but he never told me he was gay, and I did not know he died of AIDS until well after the fact. We were in high school and college during the 70s, and it still wasn’t openly talked about. I suspect he moved away in order to live his life openly and without the gossip that might have ensued if he stayed in his home town.

While composing this blog post, I started reading Elton John’s new book Love is the Cure: Life, Loss and the End of AIDS. Elton begins by describing the huge impact the life and death of Ryan White had on him, and how it changed his life. As I read this, I thought about Matt Klir and his impact on me.

I still have an intense sadness about the loss of Matt, and I think of him often. He was one of the graduation speakers during our 1977 graduation from York High School in Elmhurst,

That’s Matt addressing the crowd at the York High School graduation in 1977.

and I will always remember Matt as he looks here, full of humor, professionalism, and wisdom beyond his years. His off-beat topic for commencement was “I am a sponge,” and he wowed everyone with his sophisticated outlook.

Our high school years were full of escapades directed by Matt: driving downtown in his mother’s Cadillac convertible to Great Gritzbees Flying Food Show to graze the free appetizer buffet, getting caught by security guards in the stairwell of a Chicago highrise that had a window with a great view of the skyline (how did he find that?), riding his motorcycle — without helmets — of course, sharing a locker which he regularly booby-trapped to play songs I hated (Muskrat Love comes to mind) when I opened it. The list goes on and on.

The two of us went on to the University of Illinois, where Beth had started one year ahead of us. He and I remained close freshman year, and dressed as two of the three musketeers for Halloween our first year. He had to be d’Artagnan, of course.

Matt was wildly successful at U of I, the first freshman to direct a student play (Kismet) at the Assembly Hall. How did I not know he was gay? Naiveté and ignorance on my part, no doubt.

Matt and I drifted apart, and he left U of I without graduating after sophomore year. I lost track of him. Beth did not, and she traveled to Florida with her first SeeingEye dog Dora to be with Matt and his sisters the day he died. Her memories are not as stuck in time as mine.

HIV positive. AIDS. These words do not conjure up a death sentence anymore. Our friend Matt suffered through the disease’s early years and lost his life to what is now a chronic illness and not a death sentence. I could say “I wish…..” or “If only…..” about Matt but I believe life is to be lived for today.

We loved Matt and I think of him often. It is Matt’s life that had a significant influence on my own life, and not his death. He lived fully and gracefully, and I am happy and grateful to have known such an individualist and a guy who was so crazy about life during my formative years. Matt Klir will never be forgotten.

Matt’s partner, who wishes to remain anonymous, sponsors a Ribbons for the Children event every year in memory of Matthew Klir. The event celebrates the great improvements that have been made in the medical care of children and adolescents with HIV/AIDS and benefits children and adolescents with HIV/AIDS who are served by the Children’s Diagnostic & Treatment Center’s in Ft. Lauderdale.

Settling in

White Sox home opener, 2012. Hot dogs, fireworks, Jack Ingram singing the national anthem, cheering, a fly-over. Both pitchers settled in right from the start, but it took Whitney a little longer — it was the fifth inning before she could sit down!

The White Sox put on a great show – Mike and I had a ball. It was one heck of a well-played, entertaining baseball game. If you appreciate the game, you appreciate great defense, and there was a lot of it: a diving catch in left field by Dayan Viciedo, and shortstop Alexei Ramirez started a double play with a terrific play behind second. Jake Peavy, who suffered a horrendous injury (a muscle literally tore off the bone) two years ago pitched great. The Detroit starter, Max Scherzer, was almost as good for most of the game, so the game went quickly.

Whitney doesn’t yet appreciate the game, so I’m afraid her favorite part of the day was trotting down the ramp to leave the park and go home!

Opening Day started a week of firsts for Whitney. It’s Spa Week in Chicago, so I’ll be celebrating Monday, getting my first massage since coming home with Whitney in December. Will she sit quietly for the entire hour? We’ll see.

And then, this Wednesday Whitney takes a train with me to Champaign where she’ll be asked to sit through her first university lecture: I’m giving a talk to an animal sciences class at the University of Illinois. I plan on telling the students what it’s been like transitioning to a new Seeing Eye dog, then going over some of the qualifications necessary to become a guide dog instructor. Most guide dog schools require instructors to have a college degree and then do an apprenticeship, and some apprenticeships last as long as four years.

Considering that guide dog schools are non-profit organizations, I would guess the pay for apprentices and instructors is far below what a lot of today’s college educated people expect to earn. If you’re looking for job satisfaction, though, this kind of work must be pretty dang rewarding – I’m hoping my talk might motivate some of these University of Illinois students to consider it as a career. I’m also hoping Whitney will settle in to her first university lecture a whole lot faster than she did for her first baseball game – there won’t be any fireworks or hot dogs, and everything I’ll be talking about will be old news to her!

Another great-grandchild for Flo: Addie Rose.

We’ll cap off our week of firsts on Friday when Whitney will attend her first birthday party for Flo, who will be 96 years old on April 20. We’ll ride a commuter train to Elmhurst and meet Flo and other family members to celebrate at the wine bar across from the train station. No need to bring presents; Flo says she already got the gift she wanted. Her 20th great-grandchild, a healthy little girl named Addie Rose, was born on Friday. We’ve got a lot to celebrate, and It’s going to be one joyful celebration. Cheers!

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.