Friday, April 18, 2003
The Visiting Writer—Stephen Kuusisto
If you’re a lover of books, you know how lucky we are here in Michiana to have the chance to hear creative writers read their work. Many of our bookstores and public libraries host readings – just last week 75 people heard novelist Elizabeth Berg at the annual Open Book Festival sponsored by the South Bend Public Library. Each year the Dogwood Fine Arts Festival in Dowagiac presents writers of national renown, like John Updike and Alice Walker. An independent group, Poets and Other Troubadours, has been holding readings in our area for many years – I had the pleasure of hearing Frances Sherwood launch her lovely novel, The Book of Splendor, at one of their events several months ago. On a smaller scale, local coffee shops and pubs often hold open mike nights that help new and established local writers build an audience for their work. Most of our colleges and universities have long-standing annual literary events or reading series, such as the Sophomore Literary Festival at Notre Dame or IUSB’s Wolfson Awards. If you like to hear writers talk about and perform their work, this is a good place to live.
IUSB is bringing a wonderful writer to town next week for the Wolfson Awards. Stephen Kuusisto is a poet and a commentator for NPR. He’s an advocate for the disabled, but he’s most well-known for his widely-praised memoir called Planet of the Blind. That book tells the story of his struggle with his own blindness, which was caused by the high level of oxygen used in the 1950s in the incubators provided for premature babies. “I am blind in a bittersweet way,” he says. “I see like a person who looks through a kaleidoscope; my impressions of the world are at once beautiful and largely useless...Push Vaseline in your eyes and wander a strange house,” he writes, helping a reader to see what he sees. Kuusisto reminds us of the cruelty of children—“Hey, Blindo,” the grade school bullies taunt before they shove him into the lockers. Yet he learns to ride a bike, and when he falls he dearly hopes that the vague shapes that surround him are trees and not children who will taunt him even more.
His stories of adolescence and young adulthood are sometimes comical and often heartbreaking. One day in college, while jogging across the campus, he comes upon a newly-poured stretch of sidewalk. The construction workers are astounded to see him run and fall into the fresh cement. “There is silence,” Kuusisto writes. “One of the fellows lifts me to my feet, spins me around. He’s talking spitfire cartoon gibberish. ‘What the . . . how the . . . fuckin’ . . . didn’t you . . . waddya BLIND?!’” But the fellow drives him home and urges him to stop pretending he can see. He tells him about getting a guide dog. And a few chapters later, when Kuusisto decides to carry a cane and let himself be seen as blind, the book begins to soar. He imagines himself “walking a city street accompanied by a princely dog, a large, tawny, sinuous lion of a dog.” He’s ready to take new chances and remake his life, and when the guide dog Corky joins him on what the author calls “the definitive blind date,” their first meeting is a playful and affirming counterpoint to so much of what has gone before. They build a working relationship. “Trust,” he writes, “is silent as the windmill . . . Guide dogs and their human partners must each trust the other’s bravery and judgment.” And by the end of the book, he is able to talk about a whole new realm of life: “We are, all of us, ecstatic creatures, capable of joyous mercy to the self and to others.”
When he comes to town next week, I want to hear Stephen Kuusisto tell some of those heart-breaking stories and read some of those wise, triumphant sentences from his life after Corky joined him. He’s giving a talk about human emotion and communication on Friday evening, April 25th, at 7:00 in the Alumni Room of IUSB’s Administration Building, and on Saturday evening, April 26th, he’ll give a reading of his literary works at 7:00 in the auditorium of Wiekamp Hall. Both events are free and open to the public. Maybe I’ll see you there.
A random selection from more than 300 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:
Joe Chaney -- More essays by Joe
Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise
April Lidinsky -- More essays by April
Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan
Jeff Nixa -- More essays by Jeff
Ken Smith -- The Visiting Writer—Stephen Kuusisto / More essays by Ken
Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- More essays by Jeanette
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About the series
Michiana Chronicles is a series of radio essays by Jonathan Nashel, Louise Collins, Joe Chaney, Jeanette Saddler Taylor, Jeff Nixa, April Lidinsky, and Ken Smith.
Michiana is the region of north-central Indiana and southern Michigan roughly centered on South Bend, Indiana.
Michiana Chronicles airs on Fridays at 7:35 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on WVPE (88.1 FM), the home of public radio in Elkhart / South Bend, Indiana.
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Recent pieces
Making Up on the South Shore -- As we’re approaching the Beverly Shores station I glance over and see the woman looking into a pocket mirror. Yes, you’re pretty, sister. Don’t worry about that. Then she reaches into her bag and pulls out a big pink tackle box, sets it on her lap and opens it up, revealing a whole assortment of little tubes and jars. She selects one tube, squirts some stuff onto her fingertips and starts rubbing it onto…her face. Whoa! What are you doing? By Jeff Nixa.
Time Travel in Paris -- I had studied maps of Paris and read French literature and the Parisian works of American expatriates like Stein, Hemingway, Baldwin, and Miller. I had fallen in love, of course, with my French teachers in high school and college. My prior romance with the language, art, stories, and landmarks animated the city. I remember a morning when the sun emerged and lit up the domes and towers across from where my friend and I stood on a right bank quay, and the world itself seemed like a pure gift, a fresh beginning. By Joe Chaney.
Celebrating Magna Charta Day -- Runnymede, the site of the signing of the Magna Charta, loomed right up there in my imagination with Stonehenge: a couple of historical sites that had captured my interest early on. I can still see surly, pimply-faced, bad King John in some old movie being strongly urged, that is coerced, into signing this document where he promised to behave: “The Lion in Winter,” I think. By Jeanette Saddler Taylor.
Life on the Default Setting -- That foam cup will still reside in the county landfill when our great grandchildren are driving their offspring in a nuclear-powered mini-van to gymnastics classes on the moon. "Will you look at those kids jump!" By then the landfill will be the tallest manmade feature in north-central Indiana, visible from earth orbit. Astronauts will steer their sleek ships by the neon glow of all our waste. By Ken Smith.
It’s a Long, Long, Road from May to December -- Over the years Kurt Weill’s music has inspired a legion of devotees who want to be a part of his creepy luster. Some fifty years after Weill’s death Lou Reed took a stab at getting in on this kind of cool. Now, Lou is just about as cool as there is too. In the 1960s he co-founded the rock band, The Velvet Underground, and as the story goes, only a couple of thousand copies of their first album were sold, but everyone who listened to it formed their own band. The man gives new meaning to having no vocal range, and yet conveys everything that needed to be said. By Jonathan Nashel.
Pomp and Happenstance -- Truly, the moments in our lives that really deserve a brass band and velvet robes and a basso profundo voice saying “Something BIG has happened here!” are most often happenstance, unexpected. Maybe you’ve had the experience of reading a novel or seeing a film that shifts you, profoundly, to another axis – that peoples your interior with ideas or characters that become guides – or cautionary figures – for the rest of your life. Or maybe you’ve had a conversation with someone that suddenly made your world slide sideways as you questioned your faith – or gained a new sense of it. Those are moments that warrant pomp and circumstance, but they often pass quietly, despite their transformative legacy. By April Lidinsky.
A Kid and a Rock -- But every night I come home, the kid is hammering on the rock. He’s like a little John Henry. Small stones dislodged and fell to the dirt but then larger ones emerged, and eventually the worst one of all: a granite field stone the size of a pumpkin embedded in there till the end of the world. “This is hard,” he said. “Yeah, it is,” I said, watching the woman glare at me from hell. I left town for vacation. Two weeks. I was carrying an armload of sleeping bags back around the house when I stopped. The concrete monster was gone. Just a circle of rock dust in its place, littered with stones and in the center, the big granite pumpkin. I smiled. He did it. Dang. I’m going to go hug that kid. Buy them both a pizza or something. By Jeff Nixa.
True to Type -- We talk about what we are reading, what we have read, what we’ve read about reading (God bless the Sunday New York Times Book Review section!) and what we are planning to read next. Standing in front of the bookcase, my daughter-in-law, Nancy, and I were having one of those discussions. I think that she was holding Bobbie Ann Mason’s Clear Springs; she flipped to the back and saw the page that tells which font was used in printing the book and a bit of history about that font. Nancy said, “I can’t believe that they waste a page putting that in there. Nobody cares about that!” Danger! A big, evil-mother-in-law-trap just waiting to ensnare me there! Recognizing it in time, I pulled the shreds of my seldom-worn garment of tact around myself and did not blurt out, “Are you nuts! That’s a great thing! I love it when they put that in! It’s like frosting on a cookie; it makes it ever so much better!” By Jeanette Saddler Taylor.
Jump Ball at the Hoosier Primary -- I can’t believe it! At long last, Indiana matters during the national campaign season. We’re in the news every day. We Hoosiers have been crafty, too, not tipping our hand as to whom we favor. We’ve made Indiana a real battleground state, forcing the candidates to pour ad dollars into our communities in a despairing sort of Vegas binge. Here in the second congressional district, we’re a battleground within a battleground. And permit me to announce loudly that I’m an “undecided voter.” You guessed it: a battleground within a battleground within a battleground, the center of a political universe in which not knowing what you want makes you royalty. By Joe Chaney.
Doing Algebra -- I’m doing quite a bit of algebra these days, helping our young mathematician solve homework problems. I last took algebra from Mr. Webb way back in the year 19-mumble-mumble, when President Nixon was still lovingly adding names to his enemies list. My strongest memory from Mr. Webb’s class was that he never learned his students’ names. He called everyone Babe. No matter who you were, he’d say, “Babe, put the next problem on the board. Thanks, Babe.” But he must have been a pretty good teacher, because after a quick refresher I can solve a basic problem. And so for the moment I still have a role to play in our teen’s life. By Ken Smith.
Skirting the Issue -- Now, Land’s End and other sensible clothiers exploit this swimsuit anxiety brilliantly to play on both the intelligence and self-loathing of grown-up women. For one thing, you practically have to have your Ph.D. in Swimsuit-ology to wade through the thick catalogues hitting mailboxes now, with bold headlines promising “Flattering Solutions” – implying every body is a problem. In fact, you can shop by “anxiety zones,” choosing which body part you think most needs to be slimmed, supported, disguised, and, somehow, covered, all while revealing more than most of us care to face in full-length mirrors, fully clothed. By April Lidinsky.
Baby, It’s Cold Inside -- After you see these photos you will probably wonder what we can do to prevent every single last iceberg from melting away and becoming history. Here, I confess, I have no idea. I’ve heard it all before: lower carbon footprints, drive hybrids, recycle with abandon, hate the oil companies, love to read in the dark, you name it. And you know what: none of this is going to bring back these icebergs or grow new ones or do anything to stop our relentless destruction of the earth, let alone quell the naysayers on global warming. I recently heard on NPR that an iceberg the size of Connecticut just broke apart and is melting away. Now, I’ve been in Connecticut many times and I still can’t wrap my head around this little fun fact. What can possibly be the size of a state? By Jonathan Nashel.
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