Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University

News from UNICEF

Children Receive International Disability Rights Treaty In Braille, Audio And Sign Language
(UNICEF)
June 17, 2011
CETINJE, MONTENEGRO– [Excerpt] Six children with visual and hearing impairments have received the first copies in the Balkans of the child-friendly version of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Braille, audio and sign language.
It is part of the ‘It’s About Ability’ campaign in support of the inclusion of children with disabilities, a UNICEF-supported Government of Montenegro initiative which began in 2010. More than 100 partners have joined the campaign to help change attitudes and practices of the general public towards children with disabilities.
Around 200 senior government officials, Ambassadors, representatives of the media, civil and private sector, school principals, teachers, parents and children from all over the country gathered as President of Montenegro Filip Vujanovic launched the Convention in Braille, audio and sign language at a special event.
The President gave the first copies of the Convention to the six children in the town of Cetinje, while the remaining 500 copies in Braille and 100 copies with audio and sign language versions will be distributed all over Montenegro.
Entire article:
Disability Rights Convention distributed in Braille, audio and sign language in Montenegro
http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/montenegro_58880.html?q=printme

Random Jots

I do not like Henry Kissinger. Like Senor Hitchens I believe Kissinger is a war criminal.
I do not like green eggs and ham, but I like them more than Henry Kissinger.
I do not like powdered milk.
Jeffrey Deaver’s new James Bond novel “Carte Blanche” is a disappointment. One should have known from the title.
David McCullough’s new history of Americans in Paris in the early 19th century is not a disappointment, though it’s a bit baggy.
Sometimes good info saves a book.
Global warming is a disappointment.
The fly in my room is disappointed but he doesn’t know it.
Not knowing you are disappointed is what the church calls grace.
Strictly speaking, grace can be a disappointment. See John the Baptist.
I do not like Herod. He reminds me of Henry Kissinger. I think Kissinger should visit Chile. Right now.
Off to cause ideas to scatter and coalesce. This morning I am a human studies department.

Found Poem by Andrea Scarpino

Overheard in Lincoln, Nebraska
 
Excuse me: what state are we in?
This is my second flight. I used to work
at JC Penney. I was in Wyoming once.
It looked like something I threw-up
in a bar in Spain. That’s about 800 miles
from here. Are you an international student?
As far as I can tell, the Russians
aren’t making licorice. Keep writing!
You are talented! You are all kinds
of sexy. Your language is too gussied up.
I meant that metaphorically.
Here’s a random question for you:
how old do I look? Does that door
just open on its own? And then one girl
said to the other: who put a quarter
in you? And suddenly, that’s weird?
Trust me, white girls are never asked
to dance. That’s why I kept my bouquet
for nearly four decades. The moral
doesn’t have to be comfortable.
There is always something worth
cheering for. JC Penney was fine,
but flying is much better. Can I sit down?
Have you been here before?

 

Why Study Creative Writing?

I am teaching this week at the MFA Writing Program at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. 

Click Here

I've been on the faculty of this "low residency" graduate writing workshop for the past four years and every time I come to Pacific  I'm reminded of what it felt like when I was in my early twenties and in love with poetry for the first time. Maybe I should say "with all of literature for the first time" but I tend to let poetry stand for every literary genre–that's how it is inside my cave of making. 

Voted one of the top five low residency MFA programs in the country by the Atlantic Monthly, the PU workshop earns its stripes because of its riverboat quality–there's a blending here of teaching excellence alongside the life experiences of the students. I could say "the talent of the student body" but you don't get into a graduate program in literary writing without that and, more to the point, it's experience that mulls the hard knocks and unexpected joys of life, thereby giving you something to write about. The students at Pacific have plenty to write about. Most of them have day jobs that would prevent them from going to a residential full time grad program in Iowa City or Gainesville–there are great programs at most major American universities–it's just too hard to leave the adult world entirely behind to study literature. Of course in these steep times one might argue that studying literature is hardly a necessity–why bother, one might ask–why trouble yourself to become what Charles Dickens described as "an ink stained wretch"? 

I can't answer that question, never could. When I was twenty I read a poem by Robert Bly, a short lyric poem from his first book entitled Silence in the Snowy Fields and that was it for me. I was instantly a stolen boy, the one who is taken into the woods by a troll and who, ever after picks the wild lingonberries and drinks a private brand of tea. One fine day the poem takes you across the lake just as a sermon once took your grandfather or a Scottish song, heard by chance, entirely by chance, kept your great grandmother alive. All the words are mysterious, pregnant and weird as isotopes. The word passes through you and nothing is ever the same.

I was a college student when I discovered Robert Bly's work and soon I was reading everything I could get my hands on: Emily Dickinson, James Wright, Robert Lowell, Ann Sexton, Frank O'Hara, Marvin Bell, W.C. Williams, H.D., man I was hooked. I was lucky to be at a liberal arts school where my father was on staff and accordingly I was getting a free education. I didn't feel any guilt for reading poetry all night. I'd been stolen by "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and that was that. Another way to think of this is that I understood early on that there was really nothing I'd rather do in this life than read and write. I also saw that I'd be useless at any other activity. And it goes without saying that being blind might have helped me know this with more certainty than others might–I wasn't going to drive a truck or study astronomy.

But what if I did have a career or a domestic life to fall back on? Would I have taken it, sallied forth onto the highways, had a job to make ends meet, and all the while still have had the brandy colored eyes of Emily Dickinson staring at me in my private moments–always knowing that I was secretly in love with her and not with the corner office or the suburban yard filled with tricycles and garish swing sets?  You see how it is. Not everyone is as lucky as I was–twenty years old and largely certain that poetry was it. Most of us have to make do and put away childish things. Then we talk privately all our lives, whispering to Emily Dickinson that we're sorry, we're really sorry to have left her all alone in her white dress–Emily, half blind herself, standing at the northern window of her bedroom, watching the sun go down with her one clear eye. Emily, we're sorry. But we have to go get the brakes aligned and pick up the kids at daycare and then we have to get the dry cleaning. We're so sorry.

This is of course what I love about teaching the students at Pacific. While some are in their twenties, most are a smidgen older–most have spent their days saying how sorry they are to Emily. I'll argue that the students in low residency MFA programs like the one at PU are alive inside, alive in ways that many Americans are too afraid to uncover. They are people who decided that their secret love is still there, still waiting for them. Criticize me for sentimentality if you wish, but this is true. 

Why study writing? Because it's a pleasure, a romance with ideas. And because much of our national life will steal this from you hour by hour. Because we need more poems and stories, more essays that defend the environment, memoirs and narratives about cultural history, personal history, surprises and safe homecomings. 

 

S.K. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Conditions

 

I wrote my father.

The pencil smelled of turpentine.

It was spring and snowing.

I wrote:

Come visit, 

Come back to Helsinki—

We’ll drink coffee

Between noon and three

In the Café Strindberg.

 

The light of the setting sun 

Played across the curls

Of a woman holding a cigarette. 

She was looking 

With extraordinary fixity 

At some distant point, 

A woman with red hair.

 

The letter sat on my table

Like the others

Then it went underground 

Into the northern marl 

And I think possibly 

The eyes of a cat saw it—

One of those prodigal creatures 

Who see such things 

And nothing means nothing wherever they walk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I'm Sayin'

Judge Rules In Favor Of Letting Autistic Boy Take Service Dog To School
(Los Angeles Times)
June 15, 2011
SANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA– [Excerpt] By the time summer school starts in early July, Caleb will probably walk into class with a golden retriever at his side.
Caleb Ciriacks is a 7-year-old severely autistic boy who for the most part doesn’t speak. He shrieks and paces when he gets anxious, and on occasion he pinches and scratches others. Eddy is Caleb’s service dog, tethered to the boy by a red strap. The dog keeps Caleb from running off into crowds or darting into traffic, and he knows to intervene when the boy starts to feel anxious.
When Caleb entered first grade last year, school officials in Cypress refused to let him take Eddy to school. Caleb’s parents sued in federal court, alleging that the district was discriminating against their son based on his disability.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in Santa Ana ruled that Frank Vessels Elementary School must let Caleb take Eddy to school and that the boy was probably a victim of discrimination. U.S. Department of Justice attorneys filed a “statement of interest” in the case, saying the school district was violating the boy’s civil rights and misinterpreting the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Entire article:
Judge rules in favor of letting autistic boy take service dog to school
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2011/red/0615a.htm