Turns out I’m in good company when it comes to interviewing people without seeing what they look like. Laura Hillenbrand (award-winning author of Sea Biscuit and Unbroken) and Fresh Air’s Terry Gross were both quoted in a New York Times Sunday Magazine story recently saying they actually prefer interviewing people that way.

The article explains that Hillenbrand has been sick with chronic fatigue syndrome since 1987. She has been mostly confined indoors ever since, and she doesn’t get out to do face-to-face interviews with the people she writes about. The New York Times Sunday Magazine article says most reporters would regard this as a terrible handicap, . “One hallmark of literary nonfiction is its emphasis on personal observation.” More from the article:

Hillenbrand found that telephone interviews do offer certain advantages. No one appreciates this perspective more than the radio host Terry Gross, who performs nearly every interview on her program, “Fresh Air,” by remote.

Terry Gross told the reporter that she began doing this out of necessity: The cost of bringing a guest to her studio in Philadelphia was simply too high. Now she believes there is intimacy in distance. “I find it to be oddly distracting when the person is sitting across from me,” she told the reporter. “It’s much easier to ask somebody a challenging question, or a difficult question, if you’re not looking the person in the eye.”

Hillenbrand never met Louie Zamperini face-to-face but she interviewed him for hundreds of hours over the phone while writing Unbroken, her story about his life. She said that doing the interviews without looking at Zamperini allowed her to visualize Zamperini in the time period of the book. “He became a 17-year-old runner for me, or a 26-year-old bombardier,” she said. “I wasn’t looking at an old man.”

I know what she means. Hearing the life stories of the memoir-writers in my classes every week without looking at them as they read? It has taught me something. Maybe, just maybe, we put too much stock in appearances.

The holiday season is already a blur, but one of the many things Beth and I did over the holiday season stands out clearly: We attended a Christmas Eve service at the 2^nd Presbyterian Church on S. Michigan Avenue. Beth attended Lutheran Christmas services growing up, and because it was a ritual her mother Flo always observed, it was a comfort to uphold that ritual this year in our own way.

I came by my skepticism honestly, from my mom Esther.

I didn’t grow up going to church or having any religious identity. My Italian grandfather ex-communicated the Catholic Church, and by family lore he did so somewhat violently. As legend has it Paolo Latini booted a priest off the stoop after the priest had visited the impoverished Latini residence asking for donations. And that was that. Paolo’s daugher Esther, my mother, though not necessarily an atheist, was thoroughly agnostic. She was suspicious of religious institutions, and as a public school teacher, didn’t have much use for church-run schools. She was a firm believer in separation of church and state as well.

My father grew up in the Serbian Orthodox Church but during my childhood, the nearest such church was a fair distance away in South Chicago. He’d go occasionally, and he’d sometimes ask if my sister and I wanted to go, and we of course said no. Other times, when he wanted to go to church but couldn’t make the trip to the Serbian church, he’d go to a local Presbyterian church (I didn’t go to that one, either).

So as a kid, I was pretty ignorant about religion, and still don’t know as much as I probably should. I remember neighbor kids who went to Catholic school talking one day about how the Jews killed Jesus and I didn’t have the faintest idea what the hubbub was about. To that, I count myself as lucky in a way that I never was instilled with any ideas about one religion compared to another. I kinda think they’re all a little wacky, and I find criticisms and endorsements of any one of them to be valid for all of them.

Still, I have been moved by the relatively few church services I have attended. We’ve been fortunate to be invited to several predominantly African American church services—in Urbana, Ill., Manteo, N.C., and here on the South Side. If a live gospel choir doesn’t lift you up, you’re in trouble. It’s a powerful natural anti-depressant, and an inspiration.

The service this past Christmas Eve was less dramatic but fulfilling just the same. There is a power to coming together at the same time in the same place to light candles, sing, pass the peace, and talk openly about striving to be good. We spend so much time making conscious trade-offs, favoring practicality and self-interest and expediency, doing awful things and excusing them as business decisions, nothing personal you know. Talking openly about striving for what’s really good reminds me that, inside, I know what good is. Finding the courage to do good is another matter, but it starts with recognizing how things should really be, even if that means also recognizing how far away we are from that point.

Still I retain much of my mother’s skepticism about religion. For one, I’ve always been on board with the encouragement to be good to our fellow humans, but never can jibe it with some of the fire and brimstone. And I’ll be honest, some of that hocus pocus stuff—virgin births, arks and such—well, I get the power of story, but being expected to believe literally in that all stops me in my tracks.

Another problem is I’ve seen a ton of: compartmentalizing righteous thinking to an hour or two of every week, and perversely using it as cover for being a scoundrel the rest of the time.

And so I, like everyone else, am left to try to reconcile all these big ideas. I feel a powerful spiritual good in coming together for these services when I do, or the many times people have done remarkably kind and generous things for us at very dark times, or even when I’ve witnessed awesome natural phenomena like pods of dolphins making their way down the seashore.

It’s real. It’s a wonder. And perhaps the trouble starts when we try to define it or call it our own through words and deeds.

I don’t know.

Today, January 4, is the birthday of Louis Braille. He was born in France in 1809, and his father had a leather shop. Note to children: be careful out there! Three-year-old Louis lost his sight after playing with his father’s sharp tools and accidentally poking his eyes.

Louis Braille’s parents did what they could to give their son a normal life. He was the best student in his school, and he became an accomplished organist and cellist. When he was 15, he simplified an idea that had been used in the French army to send messages that soldiers could read in the dark, encoding individual letters rather than sounds. He represented each letter by a different arrangement of six dots packed close enough that each letter could be read by a single fingertip.

Today, reading and writing of Braille is something of a dying art. There are now far more audio versions of books than there are books printed in Braille, and there are software programs to convert written text into audio. Today fewer than 20 percent of blind children in this country learn to read Braille. Technology is cool, but how will these children ever learn to spell correctly? How will they know where to put commas, quotation marks, paragraph breaks and so on? I didn’t lose my sight until I was 26 years old, so I was fortunate to learn all of that when I could still read print. I’m not proficient in Braille now, but the little I know sure comes in handy when I want to confirm what floor I’m on when I get off an elevator or to label CDs, file folders and buttons on electronic devices at home.

You blog readers out there who have a print copy of Hanni And Beth: Safe & Sound on your bookshelf should pat yourself on the back. You know a good children’s book when you see it, and your purchase has helped create more Braille books for children: My publisher, Blue Marlin Publications donates a portion of the proceeds from sales of every print version of Safe & Sound to Seedlings Braille Books for Children, a small non-profit organization in Michigan that provides high quality, low cost Braille books for children.

Over the past seven years, Blue Marlin Publications has donated thousands of dollars to Seedlings.

By producing Braille books for children, Seedlings helps promote “literacy for the blind,” providing visually impaired children equal opportunity to develop a love of reading. Safe & Sound is one of the books available in Braille from Seedlings, which means I’ve been able to read parts of the book aloud at the presentations I’ve been doing since Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound was published in 2007.

To find out how to order a copy of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound in Braille, or to donate to Seedlings to help them create more books in Braille for kids, link to www.seedlings.org. Every ten dollar donation makes another Braille book possible.

That’s Jennifer, undaunted by the rain.

Sharing meals with visual artist Jennifer Lanski during my writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center last year gave me a new appreciation for art and drawing. I was all ears when Jennifer shared ideas for a new time/temperature series, and when I heard That series will be opening as an on-line exhibition tomorrow, I asked the artist to write a guest post to describe what it’s all about.

2014 in 2015

by Jennifer Lanski

Last Wednesday I woke up with an achy body and a sore throat. After a shower and breakfast, seeing that it was grey and the forecast predicted rain, I pulled on all my rain gear and went out to draw.

Why?

• Because I’m crazy?
• Because I’m an artist?

Answer: Because I had drawn every single day this year, and I was not going to wimp out on my project now. At the end of 2013, I decided to draw every day in 2014 as an extension of my time/temperature series. I draw outside with the length of the drawing, in minutes, determined by and equal to the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit at the moment I begin drawing.

I can’t give one overarching reason that I committed to draw outside every day in 2014, but I can list a few motivating factors:

• I wanted to explore my new neighborhood, having moved to Fairfax, Ohio from California only 6 months earlier.
• I wanted to be allowed the time and space to draw; to demand that from my family, myself, and the world.
• I wanted to make myself be outside every day, despite my instinct to huddle inside through the long, cold, grey, winter months.
• I wanted to challenge myself.
• I wanted to see how this daily project would develop.
• I wanted to see how I’d respond to the struggles that would inevitably come from taking on this project.
• I was interested in what it means to be an artist in the world in the 21st century. So I wanted to put myself, as an artist, into the world to find out.

At first, some people stopped to see if I had fallen. Why else would someone be sitting on the sidewalk in the middle of winter? After a few months, some people started to recognize me. One day I heard a man say on his cell phone, “Oh, there’s the painter lady.”

Recently, the Fairfax Police saw me drawing, considered me a “suspicious person,” and demanded my social security number. Later, I thought, really, I’ve been out here drawing every day for months, and this is the first time the police notice?

As 2014 was coming to a close, the question of how to show the work kept nagging me. I had been convinced by other artists that I needed to show every drawing from the project — the good along with the bad. (Yikes!) But how? And where?

One morning I woke up and suddenly had the solution. I would have an online show, but instead of showing all the drawings at once, the show would change daily and run for the entire year of 2015. Thanks to my tech-savvy husband Daniel, this will actually happen. Starting tomorrow, January 1, a new drawing will appear online each day of 2015. The drawing that appears each day will be the one I drew exactly one year earlier.

So of course this means that to see the show in its entirety, one has to visit the website every day in 2015: a neat parallel to my drawing every day in 2014. The project opens tonight after midnight, when my drawing from January 1, 2014 will be available at www.2014in2015.com When the day is over tomorrow, the drawing I did January 2, 2014 will replace the first one – the January 1, 2014 drawing will no longer be available. People who just visit the website once in a while will get a glimpse of the overall project, just like the people who happened to see me drawing now and then over the course of the year.

Anyone can visit the website, no matter where they are geographically. The only drawback is that my work never looks as good digitally as it does in real life. But so far I have no physical space in which to show all the drawings. (I hope that will change.)

I know some of you who follow the Safe & Sound blog are blind or have visual impairments, but maybe there is something you could get out of these drawings, too: along with every day’s image I will print a “transcript” of the small text that appears below each drawing. You’ll discover the place, date, time, description of the weather, the temperature, my clothing, and then sensory and environmental information from the experience of drawing that day. I met poet Evie Shockley at the Vermont Studio Center when I was there again in July, and she said my text was poetry, though I’m not sure I would go that far.

Back to Beth: Jennifer’s first drawing goes up tonight at midnight, and then for the entire year you can go to www.2014in2015.com every day to see/read about a new drawing (the image she drew that same day last year). I’ve made a resolution to visit 2014in2015.com every morning so I can start each day with Jennifer’s poetry. Would love to have some of you blog readers join me, and if you can see, I’d especially appreciate having you weigh in here from time to time to let me know what you think of her drawings and the experience of seeing a new one each day.

Beth’s written here more than once about attempts – some successful some less so – to make visual art accessible to people who are blind or otherwise visually impaired. My take is that working too hard to translate visual phenomena into something Beth can understand in a way that we sighted people hope is some sort of equivalent—well, that’s fruitless. But, every piece of art tells some sort of story, and the creation of every piece of art is a story in itself. And so, perhaps ironically, efforts to make visual art more accessible in general – to tell those stories of creation – to everyone, sighted or unsighted, also work best for the visually impaired.

We’ve been lucky of late to encounter two visual artists who have wonderful stories to tell about their work. I ‘m going to introduce you to one of them—and his story—today. Beth will follow up with another story about another artist on Wednesday. Meantime, thanks for reading, and Happy New Year!

Our friend Steve Wierzbowski has a lot going for him. To start, he’s married to Lora Delestowicz- Wierzbowski (and you thought Knezovich was a mouthful), who’s an extreme White Sox fan and a talented artist in her own right. Steve’s a native Pittsburgher, which in my book buys him bonus points since my parents hailed from Western Pennsylvania and I like anyone who knows what yuns means. And he’s a talented architect who also does these wonderfully distinctive architectural sketches – or maybe he’s a talented visual artist who also happens to design buildings. Either way works.

Steve also loves to ride his bicycle—he lives in our building and I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen him in his cargo shorts, helmet, and satchel—about to embark for a lakefront ride. What we didn’t know is that on many such trips, that backpack carried a sketchbook, and on his rides he’d stop to create some of those lovely drawings I mentioned.

Steve teamed up with a couple other artists – one works in video the other is a musician – and the three of them collaborated on a delightful and an enlightening video about Steve, his bicycle, and the creation of two drawings. I’d say more, but I can’t really do it justice – please use the embedded link below, or go straight to YouTube and give it a watch – you’ll love Two Sketches, I promise.