This seemed like a good week to tie up loose ends from previous blog posts…

My post about driving a 2010 Ford Mustang got more hits than any other post I’ve published here. Now Roger Keeney, the blind man who won the ‘10 Unleashed contest in the first place, is getting some mainstream press, too.

Roger Keeney did some donuts while driving.

Mike was flipping through his favorite motorcycle magazine the other day and ran across Roger’s photo in a Ford Mustang ad. Others have seen Roger’s photo in print ads, too, and one friend emailed that he’d heard the ads discussed on a late-night radio talk show – apparently there is some controversy involved? This post about Roger’s Mustang ride on a blog called Jalopnik: Obsessed With The Cult Of Cars explains:

It’s either especially noble of Ford to arrange this drive or they’re completely desperate for new customers.

The ad includes the address for a youtube video called Speeding While Blind, which shows footage of Roger’s drive, including an appearance by Tommy Kendall. You might recognize Tommy’s name – he’s the pro race driver who was brave enough to sit in the passenger seat when I was behind the wheel.

The post I wrote about Sonia Sotomayor after she was nominated for the Supreme Court pointed out that she has Type 1 diabetes, just like me. Sotomayor’s nomination was approved by the Senate yesterday, and she’ll be sworn in tomorrow — the first Supreme Court Justice with juvenile diabetes!

In a story in the New York Times, White House reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote about the methods Judge Sotomayor uses to control her Type 1 diabetes.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor carries a small black travel pouch, not much larger than a wallet. It contains the implements she needs — a blood sugar testing kit,a needle and insulin — to manage diabetes, a disease she has had for 46 years. Friends say she is not shy about using it. “She’ll be eating Chinese dumplings,” said Xavier Romeu Matta, a former law clerk to the judge, “and she’ll say, ‘Excuse me sweetie,’ and pull out the kitand inject her insulin.”

That no-nonsense attitude, combined with the attention to detail that characterizes her legal opinions, has been a hallmark of Judge Sotomayor’s approach to Type 1 diabetes, according to friends, colleagues and her longtime doctor, Andrew Jay Drexler.

While Judge Sotomayor’s hearings were going on, I heard NPR’s legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg mention they were taking more breaks than usual so that the judge could step out to test her blood sugar. My guess is that everyone at the hearings appreciated the extra breaks. I sure did – they reminded me to test my own blood sugar levels. CONGRATS, Sonia – you’re my hero!

The actress I wrote about who had the Audrey Hepburn part in a theatre production of Wait Until Dark here in Chicago contacted me afterwards to give me some good news – she got a part in another play right after Wait Until Dark closed!

Mike and I went to see Emjoy Gavino in The Arabian nights at Lookingglass Theatre last month, and she was

That's Emjoy Gavino on the left; she visited to research her role in "Wait Until Dark."

fabulous. I had to laugh, though – Emjoy was a slave girl in one scene, and hearing her screaming in fear as she runs away from the bad guy made me think the casting director must have seen her in Wait Until Dark! That girl can sure do “fear”! The show was fantastic and has been extended until August 30 – if you’ll be in Chicago this month, I highly recommend you go see it.

A friend mentioned Gus and me in a post she wrote for her blog at Open Salon. The post is about invisible disabilities, and my friend is a bit invisible herself — she chooses to blog anonymously, so I can’t plug her by name. I can vouch for her writing, though – check out her Hells Bells blog and see for yourself!

Remember the guest blog my young friend Sandra Murillo posted here after she voted for the first time last November? I met Sandra when she was still in high school – I interviewed her for a Chicago Tribune story about how kids who are blind are educated in the public schools.

Sandra's now got her own blog!

Sandra lost her sight when she was three years old, and she uses a white cane to zip around between her house in Chicago’s south suburbs and the community college she attends nearby. In a few weeks she’ll be using that cane at University of Illinois in Urbana – she was accepted into the College of Media there!

Sandra must have caught the “blog bug” after posting here, because now she’s starting her own blog. Link to Sandra the Future Journalist to follow Sandra’s lead as she tap, tap, taps her way around the University of Illinois campus this semester.

A story on All Things Considered last Monday reported that U.S. soldiers are teaching Iraqi security forces how to use bomb-sniffer dogs. The NPR reporter interviewed Army Staff Sgt. Aaron Meier, an American adviser to the Iraqi National Canine Program.

“The greatest tool you have in your inventory when working with dogs is love. A lot of dogs, that’s what they work for, just your affection,” Meier says.

When I heard the story on the radio, I knew exactly what Sgt. Meier meant. I’ve seen – okay, felt—how affection motivates dogs to do a good job. Just like bomb-sniffer dogs, Seeing Eye dogs work for love, too.

Realizing this connection, I contacted Lisa, the blog moderator at The Bark to see if she’d be interested in having me write a guest post about the NPR story. She was!

Lisa is familiar with my writing — The Bark has published a few of my stories in their magazine. It’s a thrill to be connected with a magazine that also publishes stories by the likes of Ann Patchett and Augusten Burroughs. If you’ve never heard of The Bark, here’s a description of the four-color glossy magazine from their web site:

Taking the magazine’s slogan to heart—Dog Is My Co-Pilot—Bark became the first magazine to tap into the exploding phenomena of dog culture and lifestyle, focusing on the growing bond between individuals and their pet companions.

You can read my latest guest blog at The Bark’s site and link to other Bark stories there, too—if you like dogs, trust me, you’ll like The Bark.

Colleen gave me the best audio book I’ve ever heard, “Angela’s Ashes.”

While I was reading Frank McCourt’s obituary in the New York Times, a quote about writing his memoir Angela’s Ashes caught my eye. Or, okay, my ear.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I had to write it anyway. I had to get it out of my system.”

I can relate. When I talk to groups about writing memoir, or when I’m teaching my memoir-writing class for Chicago’s senior citizens, I champion memoir-writing as “cheap therapy.” Writing about losing my sight helped me adjust to the dark. Searching for just the right word to explain my feelings when the retinal specialist told me the surgeries hadn’t worked, or describing in words what it felt like to struggle with simple things like brushing my teeth, well…writing about it helped me sort out what had happened, who I was when I could see, and what might become of me in the future.

The more I wrote, the more my writing improved. A college student was paid to read my rough draft on cassette, and after hearing the story from beginning to end I started thinking maybe, just maybe, someone would be interested in publishing it. My husband Mike and my sister Cheryl helped me send cover letters and manuscripts to agents and publishers. Rejection letters piled up quickly.

It’s no “Angela’s Ashes,” but I’m still proud of it. And thankful for Frank McCourt.

The manuscript was too short. It needed more dialog. It was too long. It lacked professionalism. One letter said they might be interested if I was willing to rewrite the story “so your baby is born healthy.” Maybe these folks were the lucky ones who found James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces instead?! The most disappointing rejection came from an agent who said I had a compelling story, but I wasn’t famous enough to have a memoir published.

And then came Angela’s Ashes. The only way you might have heard of Frank McCourt before his book was published in 1996 was if you drank with him at the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village or had been a student in one of his English classes at Stuyvesant High School.

“Angela’s Ashes,” published by Scribner in 1996, rose to the top of the best-seller lists and stayed there for more than two years, selling four million copies in hardback. The next year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

My friend Colleen had been following my writing progress. She had read the rough draft of my memoir. Up to her eyeballs in student loans for medical school, she dug deep in her pockets to buy a high-priced cassette copy of Angela’s Ashes for me. Colleen and I met as waitresses in high school, and she loves to tell the story of me hiding a paperback copy of Great Expectations in the pile of unfolded cloth napkins at the waitress station. “You’d sneak back there between tables to read Charles Dickens!” she laughs. “I figured you must be really, really smart.” Well, I sure fooled her.

Truth is, though, I have always loved to read. When I could see, I liked putting my own voices to the characters I read about. And I used to love curling up on the couch with a book. Now narrators provide voices for the characters, and lying on a couch with headphones somehow isn’t as romantic as holding a hardcover in my hands.

Unless, that is, the narrator whispering in your ear happens to be Frank McCourt.

Angela’s Ashes, read by the author, remains the best audio book I have ever heard. There is no doubt in my mind that it was better to have listened to this book than to have read it in print. Irish phrases like “I didn’t give a fiddler’s fart” roll off his tongue, and on those nights when his father came home drunk and sang to the children, McCourt actually sings the songs himself. I hear the humor, the love and the forgiveness in his voice. Gorgeous.

Frank McCourt had retired from the New York City school system by the time his memoir came out in 1996, but trust me, he was still teaching. Frank McCourt taught me that listening can be better than reading. Not only that, but the success of Angela’s Ashes inspired me to keep writing. Keep revising. Keep editing. Keep trying. And sure enough, seven years after Angela’s Ashes hit the bookstands, University of Illinois Press published my memoir, Long Time, No See.

I am very sorry that Frank McCourt died. But, boy, am I glad he lived. Thank you, Frank.

A suggestion to anyone trying to lure conventioneers to your trade show booth: Perch yourself at a table between a beautiful dog and a gaggle of enthusiastic women. People will rush over to meet you.

That’s how it worked at the American Library Association convention this week, anyway. My publisher, Blue Marlin Publications, generously donated 80 copies of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound for me to give away there, and I signed books for librarians who visited the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) booth on Sunday, and then again at the booth for the Illinois chapter of the Society of  Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) on Tuesday morning. Hanni’s pawprint was rubber-stamped into each copy, too, and a flyer titled ”Hanni and Beth Love to Travel” was slipped into each book. The flyers gave librarians details on what Hanni and I do during author visits to schools and libraries. Librarians flocked to see Hanni, and the women working both booths were so helpful that I didn’t have to lift a finger. Except to sign books, of course.

Our time at the ASPCA booth on Sunday was especially entertaining — so many people came up to tell the staff how much they love the ASPCA, how they weep when they see the ASPCA commercial with singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan, how they got their own cat/dog/rabbit at a humane shelter, how they named that animal {FILL IN BLANK HERE} and how much they love {FILL IN BLANK HERE}. The staff member would listen appreciatively, then ask, would you like a signed book?” She’d point to our book cover, and then to me. Saving the best for last, the staff member would finally point down at Hanni, nodding off comfortably on the carpet. “We’re asking for a ten dollar donation for each book,” the staff member would say. “The donations will go to PAWS Chicago and Chicago’s Anti-Cruelty Society.” How could they resist?!

Signing books at the ASPCA booth.

Our time slot at the Illinois SCBWI booth on Tuesday was two hours long, the very last two hours of the entire convention. I was afraid everyone there would be sick of books by then! But I was wrong — the time slot turned out to be perfect. There was such a vacuum at that time –no other authors signing, no sessions going on — that Hanni and I were a major draw. Librarians actually stood in line to meet Hanni and have their copies of Safe & Sound signed. Thank goodness my friend Colleen and the SCBWI-Illinois staff were there to help — I was busy the entire two hours, signing books for librarians from the Bronx, Atlanta, New Jersey, even Hawaii! I had time to talk with each librarian one on one, which is what I enjoy most about doing book signings: I love meeting new people. And from a book promoter’s point of view, being last on the docket might have been the best time slot of all. The encounters librarians had with me might have been the very last (and hopefully, the most memorable) one they had with an author during the entire ALA convention.

Hanni and I are signing copies of Safe & Sound at the American Library (ALA) convention in Chicago this week. I swim at a lap pool in a Chicago hotel, and when I went to swim laps today I figured my eavesdropping along the way would tell me that the librarians had arrived. No talk in the lobby about which bobbie pins were best at holding hair back in buns, though. And nothing said in the elevator about which rubber stamp vendor to go to for stamping books at the check-out line. The people in the elevators didn’t all sound old and mousy –- a lot of them were young, and hey –- some of them were men!

From the conversations I heard, there could easily be a technology conference in town this week. Or a business convention. An academic conference. An arts convention. Because, if you think of it, libraries can be all of these things — a place to go for technology, a place of business, somewhere to find books, videos, music. And the professionals who work at these places? They’re as diverse as the libraries, all dedicated to providing information for others.

This is the second ALA convention Hanni and I are privileged enough to attend. Last year my sisters Marilee and Cheryl joined me at the ALA convention in Anaheim. Every day we went to author presentations, visited the exhibit hall, signed up for contests, picked up free pencils, post-it notes, books and catalogs. We made sure Safe & Sound was displayed front and center at any booth that carried this award-winning book. We knew librarians would love our book if they noticed it among the thousands of others featured at the convention! Cheryl couldn’t make it to the convention this year, but Marilee is coming in from Orlando — she’ll be with Hanni and me at our signings, making sure the lines flow quickly and I remember to include author visit descriptions and bookmarks with each book. We’ll be signing at three different locations Sunday, Monday and Tuesday:

• Sunday, July 12, 11 am to noon at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) booth in McCormick Place.
• Monday, July 13, 5:30 to 7:30, ASPCA Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award Ceremony in the St. Gallen Room at the Swissotel on E. Wacker Drive in Chicago. This one is a cocktail reception, and it’s free and open to the public.
• Tuesday, July 14, 11 am to 1 pm, in booth #1626,the Illinois Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators booth, sandwiched right between Scholastic and Charlesbridge – they get lots of traffic, so it’s a great location!

For more details on these signings, check out the schedule on my Web site. Hope to see (okay, hear) you at the convention!