Today is “Thank Your Mentor Day” and I want to weigh in on this subject by saying that Lance Mannion has been my mentor both “in” the blogosphere and yes, sometimes in “real life” and I shouldn’t dither about it or dance around this fact. I first met Lance when I was a graduate student working on a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. Those were the “Reagan years” (well before the Americans with Disabilities act or good assistive technology) and as a blind person I was having a devil of a time acquiring trustworthy readers who could reliably read aloud to me the many hoary books that I was forced to read. One day, out of desperation I posted some sad looking xeroxed announcements on the bulletin boards in the university's gloomy "English-Philosophy Building" announcing that "blind grad student needs readers" and I even did that thing where you make pitiable looking pre-scissored "tear off tags" with your phone number as if you're going bankrupt and need to sell your furniture yesterday because you know the "repo man" is on his way over with a bad ass bolt cutter.
You can imagine my gratitude when the phone in my apartment rang and I found that the guy on the other end of the line was a book lover. Even better: he thought that the prospect of reading aloud from the works of Sir Walter Scott offered a splendid artistic opportunity to make an ass of himself. "I've always wanted to sound like a bunch of principled but utterly lost Scottish people" he said, adding, "especially lost and principled Scottish women."
Can you imagine being read to by both John Cleese and Eric Idle of "Monty Python"? Lance's readings from "The Heart of Midlothian" were salty, colorful, funny, and still somehow appreciative of the kernel of whatever is good in Sir Walter's writing. (Everyone do your own joke?) Lance Mannion drank my bad coffee and imitated Jeannie Deans as she gathers her wits and walks the length of Scotland to save a man from execution. As he read one could hear the decency in Scott's characters and that is, I assure you a tender and unexpected pleasure. Not everyone could bring this out while earning poverty wages from the Iowa Commission for the Blind. By God! The man had Scottish soul and that's as rare as Scandinavian sobriety.
That winter and spring, while Lance was reading to me, I began to have serious trouble with some faculty in the English department at the U of Iowa. Like I said above, those were the early eighties and disability advocacy and accommodations for students were still pretty much "hit or miss" even at a notable public university like Iowa. Briefly, a couple of English professors didn't want to give me extra time to hand in writing assignments as an accommodation. When I explained to them that the alternative method of reading I had to use was time consuming one of them said: "Well, you shouldn't be in my class."
Back then there was a fledgling disability services office for students at the university. They weren't very helpful. The fact that I was a graduate student seemed to trouble them. I went to the Dean's office. They said they'd get back to me. The Department Chair called me into his office and told me that in his opinion "I was a whiner". I in turn lost my temper and told him he was grievously uninformed and walked out of his office with a slam of the door.
I was sufficiently outraged that I hired a civil rights attorney to help me put some heat on the university. I dropped my classes. I discovered that other graduate students couldn't really understand what I was experiencing. I talked endlessly about how disability rights and women's rights and the African-American experience in higher education were linked. I made impassioned extemporaneous speeches at grad student parties and in the halls of academic buildings. I discovered that I could make people's eyes glaze over with nothing more than earnestness and principles. I saw first hand just how many future professors of America were disinclined to think about disability as a social or political category.
It was around that time that Lance Mannion said to me, "Hey, you're a writer. You have a graduate degree in poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Just be a poet."
We were sitting in a student eatery called "Simmy's" which I suspect isn't in business anymore. We were eating high class grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. Lance was among other things both an accomplished playwrite and fiction writer. It's funny how a leap in consciousness can happen instantaneously like the breaking of ice on a pond. Lance's common sense was an ice breaker. "Just be a poet." The way he said it, like a Scottish merchant, reasoned, unassuming--it was as if I was a student in Kyoto and Lance was the Zen master with a bit of Sir Walter Scott thrown in. "Just be a poet." Imagine that!
Probably everybody reading this knows that the word "mentor" comes to us from a character in Homer's "Odyssey". In that wonderful tale, Mentor is a king who knew Odysseus long ago and who in turn counsels Odysseus' son, Telemachus. Telemachus wants to know how he may find his father who has been missing for years. Mentor tells Telemachus how to be both patient and wise.
Shortly after Lance and I had our grilled cheese I heard from my attorney that the U of Iowa was going to be cooperative about my need for accommodations. I knew that I had won the victory but that the Ph.D. at Iowa was spoiled. I had a graduate degree and I was ready to follow Lance's advice. I went off into the world to write. Elsewhere on this blog I have given credit to my late friend the poet Deborah Tall for having been a steady influence on my writing. Lance Mannion has been equally important for me and he was a Mentor one day over twenty years ago when I needed deep and appreciative friendship.
It was no surprise to me to discover that in the emerging world of literary blogging my old friend was pioneering a new kind of fettschrift. (That's a fancy pants word for a kind of amalgamated literary anthology that seeks to pay tribute to a subject or person.)
I have always been a writer who likes to keep a notebook. Deborah Tall, David Weiss, and I edited a book that's still in print called The Poet's Notebook in which we reprint the journals of 26 American poets. I like the shy, jaunty, sleep deprived, nutty, reasoned and intemperate voices that turn up in notebooks.
When I discovered Lance's blog I saw how the freshness of the notebook could be put into the public sphere. The notebook is to the blog as the still picture is to movies. I was back in Simmy's with the grilled cheese and tomato soup. Again Lance was my mentor.
Over the years I had tried unsuccessfully to publish a series of editorials about disability and public policy in political journals like "The Nation" and "Harpers" only to be met with polite rejection in every case. The writer Lennard Davis has written succinctly in his book Bending Over Backwards about how the liberal academic left is no better at thinking about disability than any other group. One still sees very little in "The Nation" about the plight of people with disabilities.
The world of the blogosphere has in fact opened important and necessary dialogic spaces in public space and I'm grateful again to have had Lance as my capital "m".
Some day I hope to travel to Scotland with him.
S.K.
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