On the air again, and on the road again, too

Sound the trumpets! Here’s something I never dreamed would happen to me: I’ve been awarded a writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts! Mike, Whitney and I take off today for a couple days vacation in Canada, and on Sunday morning Mike will rent a car and drive Whitney and me from Montreal to Johnson, Vermont. Thanks to fellow writer Jeff Flodin, who encouraged me to apply for this fellowship, I’ll be spending the entire month of April with 50 other poets, visual artists and writers at the Vermont Studio Center, where I hope to make some progress on a manuscript I’ve been working on.

That manuscript is about all I’ve learned leading memoir-writing classes for senior citizens here in Chicago, and I got the perfect sendoff yesterday afternoon: Chicago Public Radio aired a piece on All Things Considered featuring the writers in my Wednesday class. WBEZ has been doing a special series on what was going on in people’s lives the year they turned 25: scientific studies have shown that the frontal cortex area—which governs judgment, decision-making and impulse control—doesn’t fully mature until around age 25, which can make that year a transitional one for many people. After hearing a few Chicago celebrities interviewed on WBEZ about their 25th year, I assigned “Being 25” as a topic for my own celebrities, the writers in my classes. From the WBEZ web site:

In this installment of the Year25 series, WBEZ Producer/Reporter Lauren Chooljian visits a memoir writing class for senior citizens at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Their assignment? To write 500 words about where they were at 25.

Lauren stopped by to hear their essays and talk to the students about their stories. She came to find out their teacher, writer Beth Finke, also had quite a story to tell about her 25th year. It was not only the year she was married, but it was the last year she could see. Finke has been completely blind since she was 26 years old.

Wedding day, July 28, 1984, photo by Rick Amodt

If you missed hearing the piece on the radio yesterday, never fear: you can still hear it online. Mike will fly home from Burlington this Sunday after dropping Whitney and me off in Vermont, and he has generously offered to keep up the Safe & Sound blog while I’m away. You’re in good hands.

All for now, folks: we gotta plane to catch!

Race: Out Loud

I published a post here back in March after Chicago Public Radio let me know they wouldn’t be airing pre-recorded essays like the ones I used to do for them. But here’s some good news: reports of my radio-essay death were greatly exaggerated. An essay I wrote aired on WBEZ this morning!

At the WBEZ studios, recording my essay. (Photo by Bill Healy, courtesy WBEZ)

I like working with public radio, so after I got that disappointing note I headed over to the WBEZ studios to meet with the Managing Editor of Public Affairs to see if I had any other options. She told me that in their new format they’d be covering topics in-depth from time to time, and that this summer Aurora Aguilar would be producing pieces on literacy, and Cate Cahan would be focusing on race issues. I told her I’d worked with Aurora and Cate before. She suggested I try pitching ideas to them. I pitched. They responded. I wrote. We recorded.

The piece I did for Aurora hasn’t aired yet. The one that aired today is about how blindness can change the way you look, ahem, at race, and Its part of Cate’s Race: Out Loud series. Here’s how WBEZ describes Race: out Loud on its web site:

We’re asking: What would it sound like if people said what they really think and feel about race, about ethnicity? What if they really talked about how it shapes them, their lives, and attitudes? What would we hear, if we listened?

That part about what we might hear if we listened is what motivated me to pitch my essay. And speaking of blindness, I can read Braille, but I’m painfully slow at it. WBEZ radio producer Joe DeCeault has been recording my essays for years, and the two of us developed a system where he puts me in front of a microphone, asks what the first paragraph in my essay is about, then what the second paragraph is about, and I retell the story paragraph by paragraph in my own words. Essays produced by Joe make me sound like I’m just sitting down talking to you, and we’re both pretty proud of how this works.

Race: Out Loud is a special project, though, so they have a freelancer doing the sound work. Bill Healy consulted with Joe about how to pull this off, but knowing that Cate Cahan and I had gone back and forth via email editing and rewriting the essay, Bill thought we needed to record it exactly how it had been written.

And so, after setting me up at the mike and testing my sound levels, Bill whipped out a printed copy of my essay and began reading it out loud line by line. I parroted what Bill said, and once I’d repeated all my lines, he spliced the sentences together, added sound effects and music, and…voila! When my essay aired on Morning Edition in Chicago today, It sounded like I’d read the whole essay all at once.

If you missed hearing the piece this morning, you can read the transcript and hear it online. Young Bill Healy sure rose to the task. He took photos for the online version and wrote some promotional copy as well. And now he can add “recorded a blind woman reading an essay” to his resume, too.

This mixolydian life

I spent the past four days at a summer Jazz Camp here in Chicago. That was not a typo. I was at Jazz Camp.

This is the fourth year that the Jazz Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago and the Chicago Jazz Ensemble combined to present the camp for adults, but it’s the first year they expanded it to a kind of humanities festival rather than simply a series of classes for amateur musicians. A story in the Chicago Tribune explains:

“We’ve extended it way beyond what it ever was … so that arts educators and anybody interested in jazz can see the connection between the music and other art forms,” says Lauren Deutsch, executive director of the non-profit Jazz Institute of Chicago.

The article quoted Deutsch saying that the idea of the Straight Ahead and Other Directions Jazz Summer Camp this year was “to show how jazz really touches everything.” Lectures on topics ranging from “Jazz and Social Justice” to “Jazz and the Stage/Silver Screen” helped them achieve their goal, and the star of the show was New Orleans saxophone master and Mardi Gras Indian Chief Donald Harrison, Jr., who opened each day with a lecture. I know Donald Harrison from watching him play himself on the HBO TV series “Tremé,” and in a talk about Hurricane Katrina he said it was the “worst and best thing” that could have happened to New Orleans. “It forced people to realize how important the culture here is. People from out of town are making a point to come, they are paying more attention to us, they realize now how important it is to continue with it. And the people from New Orleans who are really interested in keeping the culture alive realized that they could have lost it forever.”

My morning master’s classes were for the rhythm section, and I took an afternoon master’s class on beginning improvisation. Donald Harrison sat in on one of the improvisation classes and reiterated some of the musical terms that by that time were already spinning in my head: octotonic, mixolydian, tonic, dorian, altered. I was the only blind student at camp, and by far the least accomplished musician in the master classes.

But hey, jazz musicians are known for their ability to improvise. When I begged off taking the piano part for one tune, reminding the teacher that I couldn’t see to read the chart, a fellow student jumped in to join me on the piano bench and call out the chords. In-between sessions students offered to read the notes on the whiteboard out loud into my digital recorder, and others would lend an elbow to walk Whitney and me to the elevator to find the next session. I learned as much about jazz from the conversations we had during those walks as I did in class.

One of the photos Bill Healey took during our Thursday morning shoot. (Photo courtesy WBEZ.)

I hadn’t planned it this way, but Jazz Camp landed on my calendar days after my Easter Seals job had given me a new laptop with new software to learn. I’d started teaching a second weekly memoir-writing class the week before camp, too, and returned from a last-minute trip to see my oldest sister and her husband in South Carolina the day before jazz camp started. Add to all that, Chicago Public Radio had asked me to write an record a piece for them the day before I left for South Carolina.

My WBEZ piece is about how blindness can change the way you look at race, and it’s set to air in Chicago this Monday, July 30, during the Morning Edition segment of NPR. It’ll be available online after it airs, and when the producer contacted me this week to ask if they could come out to shoot some photos to use with the online segment, I told them the only time I’d be available was on my walk to jazz camp in the morning. We squeezed the photo session in.

All this activity didn’t leave me much opportunity to practice the piano in-between sessions, but in many ways, the timing was perfect. Figuring out chord structures and listening for changes and working out dorian scales helped balance everything else going on. It’s kind of like George Gershwin once said: “Life is a lot like Jazz… it’s best when you improvise.”

Lost horizon

When you’re born blind, Braille isn’t the only thing you need to learn to be able to read. Children born blind have a harder time comprehending visual words than their sighted peers. So in addition to learning Braille, they also have to memorize the meaning of things they’ll never be able to see.

Take a sentence like this:

The sun peeked out on the horizon through a misty haze over the vast azure and charcoal marbled sea.

Let’s start with “peeked.” Or “horizon.” Try explaining a horizon to someone who has never seen one. Then there is “misty” and “haze” and “azure and charcoal” and even “marbled.” When a person has no point of reference, those words become white noise. The reader loses interest. The story becomes hard to follow.

That’s the handsome and gregarious young Alan Brint.

The work that goes into deciphering sentences like that is just one of many, many topics I discussed a couple of weeks ago during an interview in the studios at Chicago Public Radio with Alan Brint and his father David. Alan was born blind, but other than that he has everything in common with any other 15-year-old boy I’ve ever met: he’s a smart-aleck and a goofball, and he made me laugh. A lot. Unless WBEZ producers decide to edit it out, you’ll be hearing me snort laughing more than once during the interview.

Alan has a sweet side, too. He was tongue-tied when WBEZ project manager Aurora Aguilar told him how handsome he is. “I take that as a compliment,” he finally managed to eek out. You didn’t need to be able to see to know Alan was blushing.

Alan is about to finish his freshman year of high school, and in the interview he credits the itinerant teachers of the visually impaired (or, TVIs) who have been with him since pre-school for helping him build a visual vocabulary that now helps him pass honors physics and Shakespeare at Highland Park High. In addition to teaching spelling, writing, vocabulary and reading skills in Braille, TVIs spend oodles and oodles of time dissecting sentences for students — all in an effort to build up their visual vocabulary and their reading comprehension.

Students can’t always understand the visual concepts described for them, but the TVIs I talked to while researching this story told me they’re pleased to hear their blind students using these visual words anyway. Just like all the other kids, they want to talk about the same things as their peers. In some ways, it’s similar to learning a foreign language, using visual words, and hearing them used, helps with language retention. Family members are extremely important, too, when it comes to helping a child who is born blind build up a visual vocabulary, but God forbid a 15-year-old give his parents and siblings any credit. Especially with his dad and sister Carly sitting right there in the studio with us!

My loyal blog readers might recall a post I wrote here in March after WBEZ let me know they wouldn’t be airing pre-recorded essays like the ones I used to do for them. I met with Sally Eisele, Managing Editor of Public Affairs for WBEZ, after she sent that note, and she encouraged me to pitch story ideas for some of the topics they’d be covering in-depth. This piece about congenital blindness and literacy is the result of an idea I pitched when I heard WBEZ was going to devote a series to literacy issues. I researched the story for weeks, talked to dozens of teachers and parents, and then to both children and adults who were born blind. Two weeks ago we recorded more than an hour’s worth of conversation about all this, and my guess is the finished story will be about three minutes long. I’m eager to see (okay, hear) what makes it past the cutting room floor. WBEZ has hinted the piece will air this week, but I don’t have any more specifics than that. As we say in the biz: stay tuned!

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.

Be careful out there

There's our boy with me at the park just outside our place. Gonna' miss him, but he'll be happy in peaceful surroundings. (Photo by Mary Ivory)

Harper and I head to the Chicago Public Radio studios on Navy Pier tomorrow to record an essay about his early retirement. Plenty of CTA buses go from our neighborhood to Navy Pier, but ever since my Seeing Eye dog was clipped by a car last Spring, he’s afraid to take me across the street to the bus stop. We’ll be taking a cab.

An organization called Transportation for America reports that a pedestrian in America is hit by a vehicle every seven minutes. Our friend Dean Fischer was one of those statistics – he suffered a major shoulder injury after getting hit from behind while crossing at Jackson in downtown Chicago. Staff at Northwestern’s emergency room told Dean that they take care of seven or eight people a day who’ve been hit by cars.

Cell phones weren’t around back in the dark ages (hmm, in my case I probably oughta refer to them as “light” ages…!) when I was still able to get behind the wheel. I can only imagine how tempting it must be to send a quick text or answer a phone call while on the road. I’m hoping that Harper’s story might encourage drivers to think twice about that, though.

Harper moves to his retirement home this weekend. I dread saying goodbye to him, so I focus instead on the trips we’re taking during our last few days together. We’ll have fun in the Chicago Public Radio studio tomorrow, and if any good can come of my gentle sweet two-year-old Yellow Lab’s early retirement, maybe it will be to convince radio listeners who hear it to put their phones away, keep their eyes on the road and prevent one more two-footed or four-footed creature from getting hurt.

Saying goodbye to an old friend

Best. Dog. Ever.

Note: If you link to WBEZ to listen to the piece, it’s a little confusing. Use this link, and then just wait, don’t click anything–the right piece should start playing. Don’t pay attention to the playlist that may appear.

A longer version of this blog post aired on Chicago Public Radio November 24. I don’t cry during the reading, but if you listen closely you’ll hear me get a little choked up. Hanni has given me so, so much to be thankful for. I am really going to miss her.…

My Seeing Eye dog will be 11 years old in February. Walks to the Loop used to invigorate Hanni. Now they wear her out. She takes long naps after our excursions, and she doesn’t wake up from those naps as easily as she used to.

It’s time for Hanni to retire.

Back in 1990, it took two terrifying mishaps in traffic to convince me to switch from a white cane to a guide dog. Now, after ten years of side-by-side travel with Hanni, it’s going to take a lot to convince me I’ll ever love my next Seeing Eye dog as much as I do her.

Blindness dictates practicality, however. For Hanni’s and for my sake, I’ve signed up to return to the Seeing Eye this Saturday. I’ll be there three weeks, training with a new dog.

Dog-loving friends assumed I’d keep Hanni as a pet. Mike would like to keep her. I’m just not sure I can devote myself to a new Seeing Eye dog if Hanni is still around.

I can bring Hanni back with me to the Seeing Eye when I fly there Saturday to train with my new dog. They’ll find her a good home. I’m just afraid I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my new dog knowing Hanni was in the nearby kennel, waiting. The new dog wouldn’t stand a chance!

And so, I’ve decided. I’m giving Hanni to a couple of friends. We visit these friends often, so when I get Hanni pangs, I can always head over there for a hug. These friends don’t have a dog now, so they’ll be able to give Hanni their undivided attention. That’s something she’s used to. Getting attention, I mean.

I’ll get to visit Hanni, but it’s hard to imagine traveling more than a couple feet to hug her. Or trusting a dog other than Hanni to lead me around the city and keep me safe. I can’t think about that now, though. It’s time to take one last walk. With good ol’ Hanni.

The Technical Consultant is on the Air

A comment left on one of my Wait Until Dark posts suggested that my experience at Court Theatre might make for a good radio essay.

Beth, I like your description of how you feel after doing this work, an emotional “hangover.” This seems like the kind of thoughtful topic you would talk about on Chicago Public Radio, especially with the connection to the local theater scene! Is it in the works?

I ran that idea by the folks at Chicago Public Radio, and they agreed to send Joe DeCeault, one of my favorite producers, along with me on one of my visits to a rehersal. Joe was with me there for hours, recording me talking with the director and the actors, then following me around with a microphone while I toured the set.

In the end, though, none of that sound made it on the finished piece. My guess is that Joe ended up with so much sound and background material that it just got too complicated. So he kept it simple – just my voice, telling the story of my fifteen seconds of fame. I was disappointed –I really liked the voices of all the people involved with Wait Until Dark and thought the variety would make for a more interesting piece on the radio.

After giving it a bit more thought, though, I realized Joe’s task as a radio producer is much like mine as a journalist — for some stories you can do hours and hours, days, even weeks of reporting and then have to narrow it down to a 500-word story. A lot ends up on the cutting-room floor.

I’m heading down to Court Theatre with a few friends tonight. I know it’s crazy, I’ve seen the play twice already, but I just want to go again. Plus, the friends coming with me are really fun!

It’ll be interesting to find out if any of the folks at Court heard the piece — it aired this morning on Chicago Public Radio’s 848 show. If you missed it, you can take a listen online to see (okay, hear) what you think. Although it wasn’t exactly what I expected, I hope the radio piece does produce the result I hoped it would. That is, I hope it encourages more people to go out to see Wait Until Dark. They better act fast, though — the show closes this Sunday.

The Deaf Leading the Blind

That’s Wanda helping me as I sign books at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Every Wednesday, Hanni leads me to the Chicago Cultural Center to teach a memoir-writing class for senior citizens.

Eighteen women, great names. Myrna. Sybil. Eldoris. Bea. They’d grown up on the south side, in the suburbs, in Italy, in West Rogers Park. Some have Masters degrees. One finished her undergrad at age 73. Many of them were teachers, a few taught in the Chicago Public Schools. Their stories are fascinating.

Each week I assign these writers a topic, they go home, write 500-word essays, and then bring them back the next week to read aloud. After weeks, months, years of hearing their stories, I’ve come to know a lot of them pretty well.

Wanda is 87 years old and grew up on Chicago’s south side. She has a significant hearing loss, but like so many her age, it went undiagnosed when she was little. In school, Wanda was punished for being rude, or for not listening in class, when she simply couldn’t hear what was being said. Wanda is not a complainer, though – once she sorted things out and got hearing aids, she used her experience to build a career. Her job? She went from public school to public school, testing the kids for, guess what? Hearing loss. Now Wanda sits right next to me during class so she can hear every word. This turns out to be a privilege for me: I get to hear everything Wanda says, too! Today, she said she could tell stories of her upbringing that would “make the hair curl on a bald man’s head.” She often quotes her beloved uncle, Hallie B., who told her, “People who sit and mope with their head in their hands, they never see the good things coming their way.”

The oldest student in class this session is Hannah, age 88. Hannah grew up in Germany. Her family was Jewish. A determined and adventurous woman, Hannah escaped on her own before World War II – she was only 20 years old when she arrived, alone, in the US. Others in her family didn’t make it out in time. “I’ll tell you this,” she says. “I’ve always been very, very lucky.”

Economic news lately prompted me to ask these writers to put something down on paper about the Great Depression. “I’m wondering how it compares to what you see going on now.” Many of them returned with essays about their parents’ view of the Great Depression — Wanda and Hannah were the only ones old enough to have lived through it. The stories the two of them read aloud were so moving that after class I contacted my “connections” at Chicago public Radio, askde them if they’d be interested in recording Hannah and Wanda’s stories.

WBEZ said yes. And though the producer there had only planned on using the stories for a three-or-four-minute bit, he ended up spending more than an hour in the studio with the two ladies. Afterwards he sent me this email:

“Because both stories were so compelling, we just couldn’t cut them TOO short. So, we’re going to air them in two separate parts, on two separate days, as a short “series.” So, Wanda’s will air tomorrow, and we’ll then try to run Hannah’s within a week. I’ll let
you know about that one when we have an air date for that.
So, I hope that’s cool with you and them. They would have been powerful together, but I think they’re just as powerful on their own.

The producer was sooooooo right. Wanda’s interview aired this morning, and she was sensational. Listen yourself and you’ll see what I mean.

I’m so proud to know these women! I can’t wait to hear Hannah’s story on air next week. I’ll link to her story here on the blog once it airs so you can hear it, too. Stay tuned!

Navigating a New Workplace

Every once in a while I record an essay for Chicago Public radio that, for one reason or another, sits and sits before they ever put it on the air. That was the case with the Navigating a New Workplace essay I recorded for WBEZ back in 2006. The piece was about an internship I did at Easter Seals Headquarters in Chicago.

The internship was part of a federal grant called the Technology Opportunities Project. Easter Seals teamed up with Convio, a software company in Austin, to make their web content program accessible. Translation: the program made it possible for blind people to manage and update web sites, even though we can’t see what we’re doing. That internship led to a part-time job for me – I moderate the Easter Seals autism blog now. Navigating a New Workplace finally aired on WBEZ this morning. Here’s the intro:

Starting a new job can be both exciting and intimidating. You have to learn new computer programs and protocols, get used to the office politics and figure out where the bathroom is. And sometimes there are even bigger challenges to face. Chicago writer Beth Finke recently navigated her way around a new workplace.

But oh, that’s just a tease. If you want to hear the entire essay, you’ll have to link to the story on WBEZ!