Outlook on Radio Western

In preschool, her teachers noticed she wasn’t hearing and she soon got hearing aids, but it wasn’t until she was in her teens that our guest on Outlook this week had to face that she was losing vision as well.

Natalie Shearer is with us, for one of our final interviews of 2024, to discuss her position as an advocate, with her diagnosis of Usher syndrome. She’s telling us about what eventually caught her attention and made her sit up straight, seriously thinking about the necessity of learning to use a white cane, facing blindness head on.

From Two Canes Consulting, job as Head of Accessibility and Operations at Lotus (wearable assistive tech), to her position as Usher Syndrome Canadian Coalition’s Ambassador. So with her lifelong experiences with both disability and chronic illness, Natalie Shearer is eager to get back to accessibility and community.

And community is built through connections, one of which led to Natalie coming on our show in the first place. Thanks to Anne Mok (Purpose In View) for the intro.

Check out the wearable ring Lotus Natalie speaks about in this episode:

https://getlotus.com

Words like “childless” and “blindness” are both too harsh for some ears, often diluted by using other words or terms. These are conversations we on Outlook seek to take on and not hide from every day because we’re living it.

November 5th is the official North American release of Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children by writer and translator Nicole Louie and this week sister/co-host Kerry is taking a deeply personal dive into the book’s themes.

Kerry and Nicole met online six years ago when Louie Was on the end of a years-long search for others like her, in the sense that they were not mothers, could not be, chose not to be in her pursuit to write a book about a subject often shied away from.

There are plenty of misconceptions around “childlessness” in society and how we’re less vital to the world because we’re not reproducing for the next generation, but Nicole has pushed back on that message in OLM and in the work she does surrounding the topic. On this episode we hear from Nicole Louie about her first book and why she wanted to have the conversation to begin with, the over-decade long road to publication, and her and Kerry share about the growth of their friendship and collaboration during the writing process, including the book club discussion Kerry was lucky to get to join, at a special spot in Dublin, as one of the featured women appearing within its pages.

Nicole shares about things like the research process, her on-the-ground time when she visited Kerry in Canada and when Kerry then visited her in Ireland, and the audiobook narration experience she had in studio, as she comes into Kerry’s virtual Outlook studio for a chat.

This is not an anti-natalist position book, but rather the further opening of a discussion on the rights and freedoms of women and a dialogue between women and their partners, families, and communities on a choice for a life, a path different from what we’re taught, as girls, about our sole job being to grow up, get pregnant, and become mothers.

Kerry is very glad this book is out, after so long, and she wanted to use her platform with this show to talk about this intersectionality, of the lives of many others, that’s not always easy or painless or certain, but just that her friendship with Nicole and her own search to find community have brought her to where she is and she wants girls and women to know they have options for different paths in life.

It’s a book, by one woman, interspersed with the stories of fourteen more including Kerry’s story. To check out more about Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children go to the North American publisher’s website for more information:

https://houseofanansi.com/products/others-like-me

While Kerry is still in Ireland and away from the mic, this week there’s a special spot filler in her seat. We’re talking magic and monsters on what we’ve coined our Monster Mixed Bag show.

This week on Outlook, the Fab Four return, including sister/co-host Kerry and boyfriend Barry in Northern Ireland and brother Brian and friend Nefertiti Matos Olivares, visiting from New York City, in studio after her first appearance as our guest back in July and the show where we visited Perkins School for The Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts as a group.

Nef is visiting Ontario and Brian has been showing her around its capital, around London, and even Kerry’s house (without Kerry herself being present). The four of us discuss the adventures Brian and Nef have been having, including tours of Toronto and its Islands, an accessible art gallery experience at Tangled Art + Disability, and a proper Kijewski immersion around the Woodstock area.

While Kerry and Barry share about watching two wildly different retellings of Dracula (both audio described) and tell tales of a spooky ghost bus excursion, in Dublin, along with their awesome hotel find at an historic spot included on said spooky tour during their pre-Halloween visit to Bram Stoker’s Dublin.

Sharp and stabby, flaming hot like the fiery depths of hell, this is Halloween on Outlook as Kerry experiences the holiday, Irish style (including trying monster themed snacks) and tells all on the show on this final episode of October.

Learn more about Tangled Art + Disability:

https://tangledarts.org

Listen to the four of us back in July on Nef’s first Outlook appearance:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/outlook-2024-07-15-scars-the-oscars-the-voice/id1527876739?i=1000664231625

And us four exploring Perkins School for the Blind:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/outlook-2024-09-23-our-field-trip-to-perkins-school/id1527876739?i=1000671209448

Frogs and toads, rubber ducks, and loons - oh my!

It’s time for Part Two - this week on Outlook we share the second half of our audio scrapbook of our week in Mount Vernon, Maine this summer for Drama Club Camp.

Last week we heard from several of the others in attendance and this week we continue hearing from those from our "cast of characters,” as our host called it.

Host Scott spoke with us last time about his philosophy of “one step, two step, three” and this week we further explore the bonds of friendship and collaboration in working toward a theatre piece featuring the blind aesthetic, along with loons on a lake and six blind people jumping in to swim with them.

We hear from Scott’s partner, in work and in life, Shannen about his hopes for their inn and artist retreat, plus we hear from Chef Jeanelle and cross-disability friend and collaborator Regan. It’s a fun-filled dive into the week that was.

This episode features interviews with Regan Linton, Jeanelle Krawchuk, and Shannon Morrison.

It is dedicated to Brian’s longtime friend and drummer Andrew McIntyre (1978-2024). RIP.

The clip from “Frog and Toad Aren't Friends” found in this episode is taken from Meaning No Harm by Fowler featuring drums by Andrew. Find it here:

https://fowlercanada.bandcamp.com/album/meaning-no-harm

And learn more about Scott and Shannon at:

https://www.dramaclubproductions.com

“This morning, when I woke up, I felt good because the sun was shining. I felt good because I was a frog. And I felt good because I have you as a friend.”

Arnold Lobel, “Days with Frog and Toad”

We used to do tours of the hotel rooms we stayed in as a family, as kids, and now we’re going to give you a tour of the inn we were invited to this summer, in Mount Vernon, Maine, for an artist retreat.

This week on Outlook we’re taking you along on our trip with us, from back in July, as we made new friends, connections, relationships formed with friends we’ve never met and those we’ve known virtually for a while.

This episode is part one of two parts, an audio scrapbook of sorts, our guest book entry for our experience at Drama Club Camp.

Through interviews we did with the other participants, to a tour of the 100-year-old inn we were hosted at, to the boat rides on the pond/lake, we were there to create something from a blindness lived perspective, with others from the blindness community, disability cross solidarity community, and the broader community of those who’ve experienced feeling like they didn’t fit in - we’re exploring the bonds of friendship and the art made when we’re given the room to explore our imaginations and feel accepted by others.

From the hugging area to the community kitchen, we’re hearing from the others in attendance as to what the week ended up meaning to them and sharing what it meant to us too.

The themes from the “Frog and Toad” books kept coming up during the week, plus much much more, all of which will be showcased in this two-parter special Outlook.

This episode features interviews with Dr. H. May, Dr. M. Leona Godin, Matthew Shifrin, John, and Scott Ihrig.

Check out our friend Matthew Shifrin’s Bricks for the Blind:

https://bricksfortheblind.org

And learn more about Scott and Shannon at:

https://www.dramaclubproductions.com

We’re continuing our education series during October, Blindness Awareness Month - BAM!

A lot has changed since the summer of 2020, but not the focus and hard work of returning guest and ally, Caroline Karbowski, who joins us this week from the home of Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, Mass. There she will soon be celebrating October 15th (White Cane Day) with blind and deaf-blind students who she’s having a hand in teaching things such as tactile literacy and self advocacy skills.

Returning friend of Outlook, Caroline, has been working with the students of this historic educational campus for blind and deaf-blind children for months now. After catching up with Caroline, and for our listeners on her company See3D which produces 3D models for tactile learners, we could have used more than an hour’s time to find out all the work she’s been doing since we first met her. Like the international outreach Perkins does, as we found out on the tour of the school we took in July, Caroline shares about the international outreach See3D is now working to offer through the mission of the organization she herself started back in 2017 as a high school student. Now she contributes, through her own biology background, to making the STEM fields more accessible and inclusive while finding new ways of making the braille she learned, as a sighted person, even more relevant for herself and her students.

Since her time in Ohio, from certified braille transcriber to orientation and mobility specialist, Karbowski left her schooling and her work in her home state and moved to Boston, where she’s been experiencing life at the school with the children during the summer camp offerings and now is beginning a new school year on the Perkins grounds.

She tells us about the vast array of resources and assistive devices for multi-sensory teaching techniques available to her there and about some of the adventures she’s been on with the kids over the summer, what the year ahead is shaping up to be for her in Watertown where we just visited ourselves, and her continued educational and entrepreneurial goals within various inclusion spaces. Plus, she shares about coming across more “braille in the wild” and shares about A Cubed Design and its ideas for how to make electronic braille machines more able to withstand wear and tear when in use.

So from the art and experimentation of tactile map making and the range of communication and teaching tools she’s both making and making use of there in Boston to the continued work back there in Ohio where she’s utilising interns, grants, and other funding and fundraising strategies to continue with 3D printing, Caroline and helpers have been working on making everything from weather guides, to lightening, to the life cycle of a butterfly accessible.

And not only is she driven toward all we’ve so far listed, Caroline also tells us about the ballroom dancing she enjoys and how The Terminator showed up for his interest in the activity.

From her now going on to attend U Mass, to Perkins, to growing work with C3D, Caroline Karbowski shares it all with us. She is one sighted ally we’ll have back on with us again, but just try to listen to this educational themed episode and not feel inspired to learn something new and be of service to the younger generation. Undoubtedly, as the list of necessary and innovative work she does grows as it has in the years since Covid turned Outlook from strictly a radio show to now a broadcast and a podcast both, we’re glad we met her and, this second time around, we’re sure you will be too.

Learn more about A Cubed Design, a startup for braille literacy that is developing a low-cost and customizable braille display:

https://www.acubed.design

And listen back to her previous appearance on the show:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/outlook-2020-08-31-interview-with-ceo-of-see3d/id1527876739?i=1000489673485

DISABILITY WITH POSSIBILITY

This week on Outlook we’re starting, along with our mission on this show toward recognising intersectionalities and identity, we begin this episode by talking about the date this one originally airs: September 30th.

In Canada, the last day of September is known as Orange Shirt Day since 2013 and now Canada’s National Day For Truth and Reconciliation since 2021. We emphasise, during a time of the year when school is generally back in session for local students, how the government and church run residential schools for Indigenous children were less like schools and more like concentration camps. We acknowledge these things while remembering all the innocent children made to suffer within that so-called educational (more like colonial) system.

Yet also, we celebrate joy in community and culture, while sharing too about the acts of community and solidarity between Indigenous and non Indigenous people with a story from an Ontario school for the blind and a current act of sharing it participated in bringing together the land and Stewards of both the W Ross Macdonald School for the Blind and Mohawk Institute Residential School now known as Woodland Cultural Centre.

In the second half we replay some audio of a recent Disability Without Poverty town hall community meeting put on locally in London we were invited to attend. We keep wanting to become a bit more involved in the things happening close to home and with this set of audio clips, we split up in the group to meet others in the community, we heard so many personal stories of the lives of people living with disability and those who love and advocate for and with them, as we play what we said that day when it was our turn as this country heads toward a promised Canadian Disability Benefit, as imperfect and even minuscule as it might be.

It’s the DISABILITY WITH POSSIBILITY edition of a Mixed Bag show.

Check out award-winning Indigenous Hip-Hop artist, producer, writer, and multi-instrumentalist Mattmac and their song Still Got Love featured on this episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cD0qVjYoeE

Show your support for Woodland Cultural Centre:

https://woodlandculturalcentre.ca/support-us/

Disability Without Poverty has a new podcast. Check out Disability With Possibility:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/disability-with-possibility/id1770063176

And for more on the kinds of things Disability Without Poverty are up to or how you can help:

https://www.disabilitywithoutpoverty.ca

Over the summer, we visited Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, outside of Boston.

It’s September and back-to-school is on people’s minds so we bring you a special Outlook…into this historic educational environment for blind and deafblind children.

What brought us all there together?” Our tour guide asks us.

Well, sister/co-host Kerry has known about Perkins for most of her life, which is down to her history with Helen Keller (this episode including a bit of the backstory on the history of Perkins). She wanted to see the place and finally, found herself in the Boston area in July. So she talked her brother/boyfriend/new friend to join her and an adventure they’d never forget.

They all had fun in the end, from the playground to the museum, we even came across a giant globe.

Of course, the whole museum was so much more accessible and inclusive than most other museums, and the Brailler museum station is the highlight, the machine we used growing up named from the school. Or the tactile map station of the entire campus. It was a specialised learning experience and some of us could have been there all day. You certainly needed it to see and read it all.

We wanted to share the highlights of our tour of Perkins School for the Blind - to let listeners know what this place is, what it’s stood for all these years, and what it now means to all of us who were there that day. So come along as we take you back to Perkins with us.

Bonus material (Not on original radio broadcast): our farewell to Boston with our friend, State Trooper Steve.

Learn more about Perkins online:

https://www.perkins.org

Richard Marion knows that: with the political climate threatening inclusivity of society in some ways, it’s even more important, out there, that he only wants people identifying themselves, being proud of their identities.

Going with our September theme, we’re beginning this one by talking education for the blind, for our guest. This week on Outlook we’re speaking with first-time guest on the show, Richard Marion, from Richmond, British Columbia, but he wasn’t always living in Metro Vancouver.

We hear from Richard about the culture shock of going from the third grade at the school for the blind to a much bigger classroom environment in his local, mainstream school for grade four. He shares about bullying, the white cane and braille skills he was given, while trying to make use of his residual sight.

Richard shares about his intersectionalities which include disability, coming out as a part of the 2SLGBTQQAI+ community, and discovering his Metis heritage.

We talk audio description not transferring across the border. Marion was the one who got the Vancouver Pride Society to have live audio description for the Pride Parade and then would pass the baton to VocalEye.

He applied for Metis Citizenship, in 2019 receiving his Metis Nation British Columbia status card, after childhood summers going back to the Manitoba he was born into. Since he’s gone on to be hired to audit the accessibility of the Assembly of First Nations national general meetings.

Finally he talks about his touring with a group of musicians and his recent bucket list train travel from Vancouver to Toronto, sharing about the friendliness of the Via Rail staff along the way.

Every year, when our anniversary for starting rolls around, we like to invite guests on with us who listen to the show. This time, we’ve invited longtime listener and friend Nancy Gill to join us live on air.

It’s our Six Mix this week on Outlook with Nancy, all phone troubles aside, and we couldn’t have found a better person to be with us for this one.

Nancy has a routine, every Monday morning (as it starts at 8 AM on the west coast where she’s located) Gill gets up, gets coffee, and crawls back into bed in her pyjamas to tune in.

So for this one we look back on the last six years, with massive amounts of help from Nancy, as she remembers so many of the guests and topics we’ve hosted and covered and she gives examples better than we ever could.

We’re so glad, it’s why we do this show, that listeners like Nancy find what we bring to the program helpful and that Outlook can be a place people can feel at home.

So it’s a special Mixed Bag episode, with Nancy Gill, to celebrate six years doing this radio show/podcast, for ourselves and for anyone out there with a perspective (an Outlook) to share.

And this isn’t our first time speaking with Nancy on Outlook. Check out her previous appearance here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/outlook-2022-04-25-national-volunteer-week-with-first/id1527876739?i=1000558793185