Back on the mics again at last with our second Mixed Bag show of February 2023, to finish off the shortest month of the year.

In the first half, Kerry shares more about her recently revealed consulting website, Kay Consulting, which ties in to the recent announcement, by Puffin Books in the UK, regarding updates made to the language in many of Roald Dahl’s children’s stories, in order to make them more inclusive for these times. So we discuss the authenticity consulting services on Kerry’s KC and how the work relates with the questions some have with changing a book’s language vs doing better in the current moment when writing new stories and how authors like Dahl was then and the responsibility of writers now. How does Kerry handle these matters on her new site?

Also, she’s working on the earliest concept and draft of a book idea all about living with a prosthetic eye since age twelve. During some reading lately for a feminist horror literature and creative writing class, one of the books on the syllabus was Beloved by Toni Morrison. During Black History Month, she began doing research on the ways in which people have lost eyes, specifically when black people have lost eyes or their vision (both eyes or one or the other) do to systemic violence through the years. This includes civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and a decorated World War II veteran in the 1940s.

And in the second half of the show, Brian shares details of his latest local London music scene night out, along with some audio from a 2017 trip to Iceland with an old friend, in order to illustrate the point of an article Kerry came across.

It’s an article by writer Jennifer Stavros about the benefits of recording sound, instead of the more common act of taking photos when traveling. They talk over the existing impact Covid has had, when lockdowns were keeping us all at home and how we (as blind people and sighted alike) can come to experience the joys of life once more and learn to step back out into the world again (shaking hands again), all things opening wider as the virus slips more and more into the background of our lives with every passing day, week, and month.

How to foster greater inclusion and how far to go, going beyond the “culture wars” as war of any kind becomes destructive, and wrapping up this Mixed Bag discussion with the merits of “echoic memory” which you can find more on in this BBC article, “Why We Should Record Travel Moments” referenced in our second half:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230209-why-we-should-record-travel-moments