Saturday, July 24, 2010

An Arresting Story

Coming back to the US from my first trip abroad alone, I was let off at the airport in Stockholm. I was fairly heavily laden with luggage, and pushing my wheelchair was slower going than usual.

Two young men, who appeared to be about 16, and were dressed in blue berets and short blue slacks, came over to me, their faces wreathed in smiles. "Can we help you?" they asked.

"Yes, please. I need to find my airline," I replied, showing them my ticket, and wondering who they were.

Off we set, me holding the luggage and the two of them in back. Some of the passers-by gave me sidelong, skeptical glances, but I attributed those to my wheelchair. As my benefactors and I progressed through the airport, I decided that I really needed to know who they were.

"Are you with Traveler's Aid?" I asked, somewhat tentatively.

"Oh, no," they chortled. "We're the police!"

Thursday, July 22, 2010

A Publications Slice of Life

By Carolyn Davis

A Role Made to Order
My role as a researcher and author of various aspects of disability can be said to have begun in childhood, since I was born physically disabled.
The treatments and understanding of the human body in the 1960s were fairly primitive by twenty-first century standards, to a considerable degree because technology had not advanced enough to enable people to observe as much of the function of living bodies as they do today. However, attitudes regarding the practice of rehabilitative treatments were changing. Particularly notable to me in the early seventies was the vast improvement in 1970s New York from 1960s Rhode Island. That was a prerequisite for the tidal wave of information, new treatments, patient participation, and the multitude of possibilities that were to manifest during the next thirty years and beyond. People wanted to read first-hand, realistic accounts about living and working with disabilities. A market that had been small and “sanitized,” with “super humans” accomplishing much by endless work and fortitude, was simultaneously opening up and growing up. The laws and policies that had begun to develop at the demand of the World War II veterans obliged the public to hear truth and facts regarding the significant integration of people with disabilities into education, housing and employment. People who were and are disabled have been telling their stories in writing. Librarians who are disabled and want to inform colleagues and others of situations that we have experienced, observed, and researched have niche markets for which to write.
Some of my publications that have my disability as one of their subjects include to date:
How to Write Persuasively Today. Greenwood Press/ABC-CLIO Publishers. Santa Barbara, CA 2010

"Jumping In Tandem," Contemporary American Women: Our Defining Passages. All Things That Matter Press. 2009. Carol Smallwood and Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, Collectors.
“The Mobile Librarian,” Thinking Outside the Book:
Essays for Innovative Librarians. McFarland Publishers, Inc. Jefferson, NC 2008. Carol Smallwood, Editor.
“Combining Careers in Research,” Info Career Trends.

vol. 2, no. 3. May, 2001.

"The International Graduate Summer School in England and Wales," Technicalities. vol. 16, no. 2. February, 1996.
"Some Experiences of an Internet Researcher," The Audio Visual Librarian. vol. 22, no.2. May, 1996.
Carolyn Davis and Rebecca Barton, Access Guide. accessguidecardiff-online.blog.com. As the facilitator of this project, I co-researched and co-authored this physical access guide to Cardiff.
Four of these publications tell of my work abroad.


My Role in Jamaica
I conducted research on agencies that provided services to people with disabilities while a Peace Corps Volunteer in Jamaica in 1997 to ’99. The national newspaper The Jamaica Gleaner published an article about The Jamaica Council for Persons with Disabilities, where I worked, and the research results to that time. The article, entitled, “For Love of the Disabled,” appeared in March of 1998 and led to a meeting between Dr. Marigold Thorburn and myself. Dr. Thorburn was a powerhouse who had developed national programs and agencies from scratch. We felt that the development of a national coalition would answer the needs of the then-competing agencies. We began to develop forums to discuss this possibility with agency directors across the country.
In its newsletter entitled “Hearing Hands,” published by the Jamaica Association for the Deaf (JAD) www.jamdeaf.org.jm/hearing-hands, Iris Soutar, who is the Director of the Association, cited the importance of the Coalition. The Jamaica Coalition is considered to be one of the most effective of its kind, thanks to the work of the agency directors and personnel who have shaped and currently maintain it.

My Role in Wales
After my term of service in Jamaica ended I moved to Wales to conduct research in medieval Welsh history. A friend and I also began to look at physical and psychological access to public places in Cardiff for people with disabilities. I published our results on a blog at: accessguidecardiff-online.blog.com, by Carolyn Davis and Rebecca Barton (now defunct).

How to Get Published
As stated above, there are niche markets both for research in the field of disabilities and for the life experiences of people with disabilities. Since librarians have basic training in research and reference methods, we have access to professions or sub-specialties in research in a variety of fields; particularly librarians who have qualifications and experience in additional fields. I have found that the best way to begin to have my work published in Library Science, whether or not my disability was to be part of the story, was both to approach and be approached by editors of journals and anthologies. Among the people with and for whom I have worked are: Professor Anthony Hugh Thompson of Aberystwyth, Wales, who was the editor-in-chief of The Audio-Visual Librarian; Sheila Intner and her successor Peggy Johnson for Technicalities; the multi-connected Rachel Singer Gordon at www.lisjobs.com and Carol Smallwood and Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, the latter at encirclepub.com, for their growing list of anthologies.
Additionally, there are many general listservs that provide access to work and publication. Check out mediabistro.com for an abundance of information.
These projects can have an impact on the quality of others’ lives. I strongly encourage anyone who is a librarian with a physical challenge to share her or his experiences with others in our profession.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Moments

Betty Davis savored moments and vignettes. She remembered in detail pertinent moments of larger situations, and would mention them in tones that ranged from toss-away to profound. One story is about Betty's life as a grandmother.
In response to an eighteen-months-old girl’s repeated, tearful plea for a “H-A-A-A-MB-U-U-U-RGER,” Mom feigned ignorance and exclaimed, “Yes!” while clapping her hands together. She then looked at the child’s twenty-year-old aunt and followed up singing, “There are such things!” amid peals of laughter from the two women. The little girl had been fed, but felt that there was always room for McDonald’s. At that age, she was similarly devoted to the Muppets, pronouncing “Mup!” with passion.
Betty (who was my mother, so I'll call her "Mom" from now on) loved watching her grandchildren and enjoyed their personalities and motivations.
One grandson was a gourmet who at a very early age enjoyed watching the preparation of food as well as its consumption. Mom and I showed him ingredients as he reached to stir them and enjoy the result.
Mom exclaimed over another grandson's photograph prior to a trip to Disney World, "Look at his eyes; he is all set to go!"
One of Mom's strengths was observation. She could read people fairly accurately, and knew a good deal about people's strengths and weaknesses.

Found In A Bookstore

Leave aside closets that lead to Narnia and cyclones that carry passengers to Oz. Some of the greatest emotional and spiritual revelations for me have happened in bookstores, especially when Christmas shopping. There have been many times that are common to bibliophiles: finding a new author, finding a subject that hits the spot -- the first book that I truly related to was a children's story of a string that went through various stages of relaxation and tension. In my young teens there were the Jeeves stories by P.G. Wodehouse; a touching platonic love story by Ray Bradbury; the discoveries that John Steinbeck and Shirley Jackson had written humorous stories about their families; everything I could find about the history of flight, which led to Anne Morrow Lindbergh's writing, which made me feel (at ages fourteen to seventeen) that I wasn't unique or as solitary as I thought -- also a revelation to an adolescent. Mrs. Lindbergh had had a complex relationship with her husband, but she had an infinitely better spatial sense than I had. Her phrase about the sun "buttering" the leaves, from one of her collections of Diaries and Letters, impressed me for months.
Once, while selecting gifts for relatives, I looked up into the serious face of a young man in a photograph on a book cover that contained the first volume of George Kennan's Memoirs. Whoosh -- that was a life-changing event. I bought volumes one and two, gobbled them up greedily at home, and I haven't been the same since.
The most interesting discovery was, as Chris Rock said it in Everybody Hates Chris, "... finding a needle in a needle stack."
My mother had bought a Vietnam POW/MIA bracelet in the early 1970s. The officer’s name and rank were Lt. Col. Lawrence Guarino. He was listed as “Missing In Action” since 1967.
As groups of former POWs came home after the war, Mom and I checked the lists for Col. Guarino, but did not see his name. Eventually, we assumed that he had died. Years later, we were Christmas shopping in a Providence bookstore. We were in separate aisles, and I was seated next to a pile of books. Peripherally I saw photographs, and red-and-gray colors. I looked down and saw the title, A POW's Story: 2801 Days in Hanoi by Col. Larry Guarino. I picked up one book, but put it down quickly. Col. Guarino’s photograph showed him at about half of his healthy weight. I was appalled and tremendously excited.
“I’ve found the man on my mother’s POW bracelet!” I cried to the people near me. No doubt they were bewildered. “Mom, I’ve found Lawrence Guarino!” Mom walked to the pile of books and exclaimed over them. She picked up one and thumbed through it, her face a picture of intense concentration.
“Well, I don’t really want to read it,” she mused, commenting on her abhorrence of descriptions of torture.
Although unable to read his story, after eight years we knew that Col. Guarino was alive and had been able to write a book about his experiences. We felt that we had found a missing person, and the feeling was extraordinary.