The panels I sit on at writing festivals connect me with some pretty cool authors. At the Words & Music Festival in New Orleans I appeared on a panel about memoir writing with Rick Bragg. I had the privilege of sitting on a panel called Dogs and Their People with Sonny Brewer (we’ve both had books published about our beloved dogs) at the Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock. The theme for the panel I sat on last Friday at the Northwestern Summer Writers Conference was Writer’s Point of View: How I Got Published, and one of my co-presenters was Angela Jackson. Her first novel, Where I Must Go, was published last year by Northwestern University Press.

Where I Must Go is the story of Magdalena Grace, a young black woman from an urban working-class neighborhood who attends an elite predominantly white university in the late ’60s. Angela herself entered Northwestern University in 1968 and began making notes for her book when she was still a student. She teaches African-American literature at Kennedy-King College in Chicago now, and her “How I got Published” story Friday taught our audience the value of perseverance. It took Angela forty years to finish all the rewrites of her novel while she was working to put herself through school, then teaching at various places and writing poetry and plays. “I’m not a natural storyteller,” she told them. “I am a poet. That’s different.” From a review in the New York Times:

Ms. Jackson, 58, a poet and playwright here whose collection “Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners” won the 1994 Carl Sandburg Award for poetry, said {that with the novel} she sought to breathe life into the experiences of the first wave of black students into mostly white universities, a story that she said had not been told nearly enough.

“They transformed the nature of American universities because of their activism,” she said of the black students, “which gave us black studies, women’s studies, Asian studies. Not only did we benefit from an elite education, but universities benefited from our being there.”

I had a chance to talk with Angela for just a short bit after our panel was over. Like me, she comes from a big family — five surviving sisters and two brothers. Asked if she’d be able to stay and enjoy the rest of the day at the conference, she said she needed to get home to check on her mother. Angela is single, has never been married, and lives with her mother in the house she grew up in on Chicago’s south side.

She said she wrote her novel using pen and paper, then transferred it all to a computer. She doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter to promote her writing, and said Northwestern University Press has done an excellent job in distributing and promoting her book. And, of course, a favorable review in the New York Times never hurts! Where I Must Go will eventually be part of a trilogy that follows some of the same characters in this, Angela Jackson’s first novel. As soon as I hit the “publish” button on this post I’m going to check if this debut novel is available in audio format yet — I’m eager to read it!

My young friend Sandra Murillo was in a terrible car crash last November. Her father was critically injured in the accident, and her beloved brother and only sibling Chris died at the scene. Sandra walked away with minor injuries. Well, minor physical injuries. The emotional injuries were more serious.

That

Sandra has been blind since she was three. A junior in college now, she publishes a blog called Sandra The Future Journalist that tracks her progress as a journalism student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her posts are helpful to other young people who are blind and considering going to college, and they are entertaining to people (like me) who are curious to know how Sandra manages on a campus overflowing with 43,246 students.

Last November Sandra was managing very well during her first semester at U of I. She’d successfully completed her midterms, and her father and brother came down to Champaign to pick her up for Thanksgiving break. The accident that changed their lives happened on the way home.

Until now Sandra has been understandably reluctant to talk about the accident with outsiders. She published one blog post in January to let people know her father was recovering well and to thank those who had helped her family through the previous two months, then put the blog on hiatus for a while. She returned to campus in January to complete her Fall classes along with her regular Spring course load. Back home for the summer, she’s started blogging again.

Working through grief is unbelievably difficult. Sandra is doing remarkably well, and some people have told her mom that since Sandra is blind she must not have experienced severe trauma from the accident. “After all, Sandra couldn’t see what was going on.”

This attitude bothered me. It bothers Sandra, too. So much, in fact, that she agreed to share some details here on my blog. Sandra told me she was so happy to be with her dad and her brother on the drive home that evening that even getting stuck in traffic didn’t bother them. “My brother and I were in the front seat, we were both talking, you know, chatting, laughing,” she told me. “And all of a sudden there was a huge crash, I felt this huge bang behind me and I heard glass shattering all over.” After that, she says, everything went completely silent. ”I knew right away that my dad was unconscious, and my brother…and all this blood…immediately I knew that they were at least in critical condition, “She said. “They weren’t making any sound, and I might be a little graphic here, but, I felt something warm on my pant leg, on my thigh, it was warm and sticky, and I could smell it. It was blood.” From a CBS2 news story:

A total of eight vehicles, including a semi truck, were involved in the crash, Illinois State Police Joliet District Trooper Jeff Liskh said. Preliminary reports that the semi failed to observe a traffic stop could not be confirmed.

A couple of college kids from another car involved in the crash pulled Sandra out through the windshield and guided her away from the scene. “I was freaking out, not being able to see, I was focusing so much on getting out,” she said. “And I was thinking, what if it explodes, my dad and my brother are trapped in there.”

By the time her mother arrived at the scene, Sandra was in an ambulance on her way to one hospital, and her father was being airlifted to another.

“I just want your readers to know that traumatic incidents like this one affect you the same whether you are blind or sighted,” she told me. “Or if anything, the trauma was worse for me because I’m blind.”

Disabilities can make some people nervous. They feel bad for those of us who have disabilities, and sometimes they do unnecessary cartwheels to make themselves feel better. I suppose that some might get comfort in the belief that Sandra’s blindness spared her from some part of the pain of that November evening. But they shouldn’t. Because she wasn’t spared anything. And what she’s gone through since has been what anyone — sighted, blind, or otherwise — would have gone through. The painful period of bereavement and recovery.

Sandra is doing remarkably well, all things considered. Not because she’s blind, but because she’s a marvelous young woman.

If you have a disability and want to bring your helper parrot, monkey or snake with you in public, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.

That’s the first line of a guest post I wrote for The Bark Magazine’s blog about revisions made to the Department of Justice’s ADA regulations. The DOJ used to define

Dog Is My Co-Pilot

a service animal as “any guide dog, signal dog or other animal individually trained to provide assistance for the benefit of an individual with a disability.” Revised regulations signed by Attorney General Eric Holder last week define a service animal as “any dog that is individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability.”

Notice the specific word “dog” in that sentence. Other species of animals, whether wild or domestic, trained or untrained, no longer qualify as service animals for the purposes of this new definition.

At risk of being labeled a species-ist, I confess I am happy to hear about the changes to the regulations. In my blog post for The Bark, I explained that when you travel everywhere with a dog like Hanni, you get an earful of stories about other service animals.

Helper parrots pecking at shoppers in stores; comfort pigs going crazy in airplanes; a therapeutic rat that quells anxiety in his owner but ends up causing anxiety to others instead.

Seeing Eye pioneers worked long and hard to open the doors and give our dogs public access. Opening ADA legislation to even more animals who may not truly be qualified could possibly ruin the good name our Seeing Eye pioneers have worked so hard to build over the years. My hope is that limiting the number of allowable species will stop erosion of the public’s trust in our well-behaved, helpful—and absolutely necessary—service animals.

The Bark posts blogs on its Facebook page and I’m bracing myself for the onslaught of comments. But hey, bring ‘em on. It’s worth it! The Bark has published a few of my pieces in their magazine before, and it’s a thrill to be connected with a magazine that also publishes stories by the likes of Ann Patchett and Augusten Burroughs. You can read my latest guest blog at The Bark’s site. Do me a favor, though. Be kind with your comments…!

Last month I wrote a post linking to an article in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin about Jocelyn Snower, a woman who was fired after her boss realized she was blind. In the post, I wondered how this could have happened. In the comments, I saw that my blog readers wondered, too. And so, I found Jocelyn’s phone number and gave her a call.

Jocelyn Snower

The lilt of Jocelyn’s voice tells you she smiles a lot. The words she says tells you she thinks a lot. It was easy to understand why the owner of Balance Staffing would want to hire her, and difficult to understand why he’d let her go.

Jocelyn started losing her sight when she was 18. “When it happened, it just changed everything,” she said over the phone. “You lose some of your independence, and you lose your idea of who you are. One day you’re perfect, and then the next day you have – what seemed to me, anyway – a big imperfection.” Jocelyn acknowledged that her visual impairment is a part of who she is now. “But it only impacts my life when I let it, it doesn’t stop me from doing anything I want to do.”

Jocelyn still has enough usable vision to ride a bike, and she doesn’t use a white cane or a guide dog. Her visual impairment was not mentioned during the interview. After hiring her, the business owner communicated with Jocelyn by phone and had no complaints about her work.

But then she was asked to fax him some HR paperwork. Her position as a job recruiter did not require her to drive, but the form asked for a copy of her driver’s license. She used her official State of Illinois ID instead, and the business owner started asking around. When a co-worker confirmed Jocelyn couldn’t see well enough to drive, the business owner fired her.

What. A. Story. The minute I hung up the phone I got right to work writing an op-ed piece about all this to submit to the Chicago Tribune. My hope was that they’d like it enough to run it in tomorrow’s paper: July 26 is the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Op-Ed editor at the Tribune wrote me right back. They’d publish it, alright, but they’d do me one better. A law that sadly still needs to be on the books is in today’s paper. The Sunday Edition. Wayyyyy more people read the Sunday paper than the other ones, which means wayyyyy more people are going to hear about Jocelyn Snower’s story, and that makes me wayyyyy happy today. . I’ll end with a bit from the piece, but I do hope you’ll link to today’s Sunday Chicago Tribune to read it in its entirety:

Snower decided she might be better off working for herself. She runs her own successful job recruiting business now, specializing in finding nannies.

Still, she wanted the business owner to know he’d done the wrong thing when he let her go. So she took her case to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC alleged that the owner revoked Snower’s job offer the minute he found out she was blind, even though she had already been working successfully for him.

Last month a federal judge here in Chicago entered a consent decree requiring Balance Staffing to pay Snower $100,000. The judge’s decision was good news, Snower said. “But really, I felt I’d already won when the EEOC decided to take on my case,” she said. “It meant they believed me. They knew I could work. They knew I’d done a good job.”

Amen. Happy anniversary, ADA!

I like art openings. Wine and cheese is a favorite combo of mine, and art events make for entertaining eavesdropping.

The "Finster Family Picture" clock, from the collection of Glen C. Davies and Sandra Wolf.

Most of what I know about visual art is thanks to Glen C. Davies and Sandy Wolf, our dear next-door neighbors back when we lived in Urbana. Glen is an artist, muralist, lecturer and curator. He got his early training traveling with the circus, and I spent many sweet summer evenings swaying on their porch swing listening to Glen’s stories of those adventures. Glen’s wife Sandy Wolf has been working diligently as a librarian for the University of Illinois’ renowned Graduate School of Library and Information Science since 1984, and last year she won a Distinguished Service Award for her work there. Both Glen and Sandy are art collectors, and it’s a treat to hear them tell stories of how they find their treasures.

This Friday Glen is giving a presentation at the Chicago Cultural Center about a show he’s put together called Stranger in Paradise: The Works of Reverend Howard Finster. From the Explore Chicago web site:

• Friday, July 23, 5:30 pm:

Gallery Talk with Glen Davies, curator of the exhibition

• Friday, July 23, 6-8 pm:

Opening Reception

I’ve gone to a number of openings where Glen’s own artwork is shown, and after each show Glen singles me out, asks me what I thought, what I heard, my overall impression of the event. He knows I can take in a lot by feeling the vibe in the room, listening to what people say, then using my imagination to come up with my own interpretation. Some other artists beat themselves up adapting visual artwork for the blind, curating special tactile art exhibits, creating 3-D renditions of popular pieces of art. It’s all well-meaning, I know, but the simple truth is that the sense of touch is nothing like the sense of sight. Touch is too particular. Whether it be a sculpture, a quilted wall hanging, or a 3-D rendition, I can only touch one tiny bit of the artwork at a time. I mean, I can spread my hands across a piece of artwork to take it all in at one time, but that’s just not the same as glancing at a piece of art. If I want to really and truly examine the artwork by touch, I have to trace it with a finger. My interpretation is limited to a part of the piece that’s just one fingertip wide.

And don’t get me started about those audio art tours. I like to hear what others are saying while I’m taking in art, and I can’t do that with headphones on. Paying to get into a museum, then walking around listening to a monologue doesn’t make sense to me. I could listen at home, lying comfortably on my couch!

Glen Davies has always understood that I have a unique — and valuable — way of experiencing visual art as is. I go to lectures, I read (or in the case of Glen and Sandy, hear

"Flying Angel" by Howard Finster, from the collection of Glen C. Davies and Sandra Wolf.

firsthand) background stories ahead of time. And like so many others who are blind, I have a good imagination! I also learned a ton about the visual arts by listening to teachers talk to their  drawing students during my stint as a nude model. I have Glen Davies to thank, in part, for my decision to give modeling a try.

When I told him I was considering auditioning for the job, Glen explained how important live models are to art students, then talked at length about a favorite model back when he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The model was obese, Glen said, which gave students plenty to draw, so many folds and layers. ” Artists like drawing models with some meat on their bones,” he told me. “They’ll love you!”

A backhanded compliment, to be sure, but Glen’s enthusiasm gave me the courage to give modeling a try. Staying still for 50 minutes at a time gave me lots of time to think about my writing, how to reformulate a lead, how to get across a certain idea. I used that quiet time to put together an essay about my modeling experience. Nude Modeling: Goin’ In Blind was published in alternative newspapers all over the country and launched my writing career.

In one of those full circle-type things, my most recent publication achievement also is thanks to Glen Davies. A year or two ago he emailed me the copy he was writing for the book that goes along with the Howard Finster show. He wanted my opinion, my suggestions. The book Stranger in Paradise: The Works of Reverend Howard Finster was published in March. Glen is listed as the author, and Phyllis Kind, Jim Arient, and N. J. Girardot are credited with contributing as well. And if you look closely at the acknowledgments page, you’ll see my name, too — Glen was kind enough to thank me for my teeny tiny part in editing his original copy. Now in addition to being the only blind woman in America to be honored for sports broadcasting, I bet I am the only blind woman in America to be acknowledged in a book about visual art.

If you live anywhere near Chicago, don’t miss Glen’s gallery talk this Friday, July 23 at 5:30 at the Chicago Cultural Center. Look for us there — I’ll be the one with the dog.