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.

That’s Mike with Gus during an earlier visit.

2014 marks the year we inaugurated our “Mondays with Mike” feature on the Safe & Sound blog. My husband Mike Knezovich had been writing guest posts here for years (particularly when I was away training with Seeing Eye dogs), and it was high time to make his posts a regular feature. You blog readers reacted favorably, so to celebrate, today I’m sharing links to my seven favorite “Mondays with Mike” posts from 2014. Those of you who missed them the first time around can read them now, and those of you who liked them when they were originally published can link to them again. Cheers!

• Mike hit the ground running – his initial post was a tribute to troublemakers. We published it when the 2014 celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday came on the heals of Nelson Mandela’s death.
• I especially liked his post about the kindness of strangers and how grateful we are to the people who have helped us get where we are today. Mike wrote this one after a visit with our son Gus in his Wisconsin group home.
• A number of you ordered Boy in the Moon by Ian Brown after reading Mike’s review of that book here. The book, and Mike’s post about it, are two very honest and heartfelt accounts of what it is like to be the father of a son with a disability.
• My mother died earlier this year, and Mike’s post about Flo during her final days was so beautiful that my brother and sisters and I had him read it out loud at her funeral.
• His Thanksgiving post was a tribute to the parents we’ve lost, the work we still need to do to make our country better for everyone, and the babies who give us hope. Mike’s an award-winning photographer, and along with that particular post we published a very cute photo he took of Whitney the Seeing Eye dog with one of our great nieces. We’ve learned that posting photos of dogs and babies always results in a lot of hits!
• We also received lots of positive comments when Mike took you along on his morning commute. We live in Printers Row, a Chicago neighborhood so close to the Loop that Mike walks to work.
• And speaking of lots of hits, as NFL’s regular season draws to a close (thank God) all of us in Chicago look forward to the 2015 baseball season. Take a look back at Mike’s 2014 Time begins on opening day post, and I dare you to claim Mike’s cup is ever half-empty. When it comes to spring and baseball, the man is forever an optimist.

Mike, Whitney and I head off to Union Station for our train ride to Wisconsin later this afternoon – we’ve got a Christmas visit with our son Gus planned. If you want to keep up with what happens afterwards, consider signing up to follow the Safe & Sound blog (enter your email in the box at the upper right of the blog and hit enter to receive email updates anytime we publish a new post). Mike will be back with a new MWM post this Monday. Thanks for reading, everyone, and…happy holidays!

Glass half-empty.

Glass half-full.

Which is it? I’d wager that a lot of my acquaintances would peg me for the former. And for much of my life, I think I have been a half-empty guy. I think it’s partly owed to brain chemistry, and partly to a set of values that I owe to both my parents, but particularly to my mother. She would not allow herself or her children to, for example, take pride in our country without also taking open-eyed stock of its evils — and taking responsibility for them.

As a result, I’ve spent much of my life suspicious of half-full people. The way I saw it, they were not facing some of the ugliness in the world.

You know, I do think some half-full types are actually full of it.

But no longer is that my default stance. It’s not an either or thing, but a both thing. The glass is half-empty and half-full, all at once.

The daily news certainly makes clear the empty part. But if you read carefully, it can also illustrate both. Here are four bits about four people who recognized ugly and also did and are doing something about it.

They’re very different.

One is a retired Naval Officer who has quietly led enormous gains in the fight against malaria. Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer was originally appointed by George W. Bush, and the Obama administration wouldn’t let him leave—they refused his letter of resignation. Ziemer’s a Viet Nam vet with an incredible set of life experiences of his own. It’s a remarkable story worth the read.

Bryan Stevenson is a Harvard educated lawyer, and he is black. A terrifying experience at the hands of a police SWAT team galvanized his thinking and feelings about law enforcement and the justice system in our country, and fixing the system has been his life’s work. He is articulate, he is quietly brilliant, he is committed, he is rationale, and he is dead right. He runs the Equal Justice Project based in Alabama, and he has a book out called Just Mercy. This excerpt and accompanying interview from Fresh Air is worth your time. I promise.

It’s hard to count anything out of the Ferguson, Mo. ordeal as good news. But this piece, about Lt. Jerry Lohr of the St. Louis County Police, comes close. Lohr never wore riot gear, and he did his part to keep constructive communication with community members, one human at a time.

Finally, Scott Bonner is Director of the Ferguson Public Library, and its only full-time librarian. He steadfastly kept the library open during the unrest, providing an oasis of civility in the middle of it all.

None of these stories is wholly rosy. And none result in final triumph. But they do remind that what any of one us does can make some difference, and perhaps an enormous difference, and that half a glass is a start, but shooting for a full one is worth the effort.