COLLECTING STORIES

Collecting stories is a bit like making snowballs. You start out with something very small, and pretty soon you have something larger than you ever imagined. So it is with the Braille 200 Stories Project, a little idea growing fast.
Only 24 days have passed since our initial announcement started to make its way across Canada. A volunteer committee was soliciting stories from people whose lives have been touched by Braille. We would use the stories in our celebration of Louis Braille’s 200th birthday. I established an email address for story submissions and said I’d be the story coordinator. I expected business to be slow, since blind Canadians are not linked by any formal communication system. They communicate through various list-serves focussing on topics that range from Old Time Radio to recipe swapping to computer program support. Their teachers touch base at conferences.
But business has been brisk. In those first 24 days I have received 24 stories. There’s a grandmother in Moncton learning English and French Braille so she can read out loud to her bilingual grandchildren. An Ottawa woman recalls how she put Braille labels on more than 200 bones of a skeleton so that she could learn their names and locations. A simultaneous language interpreter from Quebec describes how he uses Braille to study documents submitted in advance of conferences. Betty from Vancouver recalls how, as a child she was able to read Braille after the lights were turned out. One morning, at 3:00 AM, her mother found her crying in the bathroom because she was reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin and eva had died. There’s a note from a deafblind teen-ager in Calgary, and another from a boy who came to Canada from Kosovo, speaking only Albanian when he arrived.
I am pretty much humbled at the privilege of holding such a collection in my keeping, and a little frightened about what will happen as the snowball continues to grow. I remember being a kid, pushing and laughing and nursing my snowball, not wanting to stop rolling, even when the ball grew too heavy to lift. Story collecting has become a nightly routine of relationship building, of answering emails and encouraging people to garnish their great ideas with language and detail. . The results of this attention are amazing. I am beginning to think that a writing instructor’s job must at times be very rewarding.
As for Louis Braille, whose 200th birthday is a little more than eleven months away, I think he can count on a pretty good celebration in Canada.