Chris Cander

Chris Cander’s novel, Whisper Hollow, has just been published by Other Press. Her other published work includes the award-winning novel 11 Stories, and her picture book, The Word Burglar. She co-wrote the screenplay for an animated feature film, Germs!, currently in pre-production, and she has written hundreds of articles for magazines and newspapers on health and fitness and parenting. She teaches creative writing to elementary school students as part of Writers in the Schools. A former fire-fighter, fitness competitor and model, Chris has a 2^nd degree black belt in tae kwon do and is a certified women’s self-defense instructor. She lives in West University with her husband, Harris, and her children, Sasha and Josh.

What’s your story, Chris?

I’ve loved to write my whole life. It's always been a passion for me. I'm an introvert, and although I have become socially comfortable as an adult and have plenty of friends, growing up, I was always very comfortable being alone. I liked to read, I liked to think, I liked to write, and I liked to draw and take pictures. I also chose individual sports like swimming and martial arts, relishing the pursuit of personal challenges rather than competition against other people.

All my life I have I wanted to develop my strengths both literally and figuratively, and that has helped give me the impetus to do things that I had always wanted to do. One of these was to become a firefighter, which I did.

Chris Cander was a featured bodybuilder on an
episode of NBC's Baywatch

I'm pretty small to be a firefighter, and so I got interested in weightlifting and strength training. Around that time I met my husband, Harris, and we actually did much of our courtship working out together at the gym. He taught me the basics of strength training, and I started to see results really quickly. Given my nature to want to compete, not with others but with myself, I took it as a challenge to get into the kind of shape that would allow me to be competitive as a bodybuilder. I entered a fitness competition called the Galaxy, which was 50% athletic, and 50% swimwear, and I did well. In fact, through my involvement in the Galaxy, I was featured as a guest on an episode of Baywatch. It was so much fun, and I’ve just bought the DVD of that episode to show my kids.

After that, I continued to compete but I shifted format to bodybuilding. I'm very dense and I weigh a lot for my size, so I was always competing as a heavyweight but the upper end of heavyweight was limitless. I was up against these enormous, incredibly muscular women, and although I did as well as I could, I soon realized I could not – and didn’t want to – compete with that. But all that experience gave me a start in writing about fitness and nutrition. I became a contributing editor for Oxygen, Maximum Fitness and Clean Eating, and I wrote for many other magazines too.

For several years I combined my freelance writing with a job in software marketing. Though I published some essays in a local newspaper, I didn't really get into fiction until I was laid off from my last position during maternity leave. They reorganized while I was gone, and it turned out to be the best thing for me. I was forced to re-evaluate what I wanted to do, and so I decided to be at home full-time. I continued to write, but it was only when Josh was born that I realized I was ready to start trying longer form fiction, and I started my first novel when he was just a few months old.

That one was called One Last Time Forever, and though it got me my agent, Jane Gelfman of Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents, she wasn't able to sell it. The story is literary with some metaphysical twists, and at that time, editors weren’t sure how to position it, whether it was commercial, literary or something else that didn't have a clear shelf on the library or bookstore. Of course, I was disappointed, but I think of it now as the book through which I learned how to write books.

Once I had finished One Last Time Forever, I started to write Telling Ghost Stories, which eventually became Whisper Hollow, although my first draft was very different from the book that is coming out now.

Whisper Hollow, as it is now, follows the lives of three women through the first half of the last century in a coal mining town in West Virginia. It’s geographically remote, but culturally very diverse, full of immigrant families from Poland, Germany, Italy and other European countries. The people there have a hard life, literally scrabbling to carve out a life and a community for themselves and their families in this new country. I called the town Verra, based on the Latin root for truth, because the book is very much about the truths which these women and the people around them have, those truths that are revealed and those that they choose to bury. Those buried secrets drive so much of what happens to them, and between them, throughout the story.

My other novel, 11 Stories, came about in a very different way. Once my agent started trying to sell the latest redraft of Telling Ghost Stories and publishing houses were not sure, yet again, how it might fit into their lists, I got impatient. So I decided to write something completely commercial. What came out is 11 Stories. Apparently I'm not able to do something completely commercial! I wrote it pretty quickly, in only about eight months, and though it was a real labor of love, I simply fell in love with my characters, particularly Roscoe, the superintendent of the Chicago apartment block which has, of course, eleven stories. Once it was finished, I sent it to my agent. She liked it a lot, but since she was working hard on selling my other manuscript, she didn't want to try to sell 11 Stories at the same time. So she encouraged me to publish it on my own.

It wasn't an easy thing to do. I wanted to print it, not just publish it online, so some friends and I created our own publishing company. It took a tremendous amount of research to find out how to go about it. To be honest, I wanted to mask the fact that it was author-published, and in the end, I was really pleased with the appearance of quality and I've had an amazingly positive response.

11 Stories came out in 2013, and that year was also the year that my picture book, The Word Burglar came out. Since my daughter Sasha was tiny, she has wanted an original story from me every night. Wow, it's a lengthy process to put that kid to bed! When she was nine, she went to sleep-away camp for the first time, so I had the idea that every morning I would get up, make a pot of coffee, and give myself 45 minutes to write her an original story. The camp staff said that if I got it to them by 10am, they would print it out and put it on her bed for her to have at bedtime.

The Word Burglar was one of twenty-one stories that I wrote during those three weeks. I started posting them on Facebook and they were getting a following. This story was passed to Lucy Herring Chambers at Bright Sky Press by a friend, and Lucy decided to buy it. She also gave me the opportunity to have one of my very dearest friends, Katherine Tramonte, as the illustrator. Katherine is a very talented artist, and would send me sketches at five o'clock in the morning. It was so neat to watch her put the book together over the process of about a year.

In the meantime, Jane was working with the latest draft of what had now become Whisper Hollow and when she showed it to the editors at Other Press, they loved it and bought it. Even before publication, Whisper Hollow was getting some incredible interest. I am so blown away. The American Booksellers Association named it one of the Indie Next Picks for April out of the hundreds they could have chosen. And now I'm heading off on a multi-state book tour.

And looking to the future? Well, I’ve just sent my next novel manuscript to my agent, and I’m also working on my first movie. It’s an animated feature called Germs!, and I wrote the screenplay with some great friends. Sarah Blutt, David Eagleman and Tobey Forney. We worked on it every week for about four years. It placed well in a couple of screenplay competitions, and I am so excited that we have recently signed an attachment agreement with Cinesite and Comic Animations. So we have a producer and they are finishing putting together the funding and hiring a director. We’ve even put together a list of our dream cast voices. It’s just amazing to think that all this could actually happen. It's a really fun story for us to tell, and as a foursome, we have become even better friends over the years as a result of doing this.

Why do you do what you do?

Because I'm passionate about it. My son, Josh, asked me the other day, “Mom, if you weren't a writer what would you do?” and I said “I'd be a writer. There's nothing else that I would rather do.” I can legitimately say that I am doing exactly what I want to be doing and I passionately love the way I get to spend my days. I'm incredibly lucky to be able to say that, I know. I really am doing my favorite thing.

I also teach children to write through Writers in the Schools and, although I didn't think I was going to, I love teaching those kids. Before I began, I worried that I wouldn’t know how to break down what I had learned in a way that would make sense to someone else. How could I teach these kids anything meaningful about writing? But then I realized that if teaching the craft steps of writing is not my strength, then perhaps my strength lies in encouraging people to be fearless when they write. So I created a mantra, “I am a fearless writer!” We say that at the beginning of every writing session throughout the whole year. I hope, if nothing else, they'll remember that, so that when they are confronted by a blank page, they will be able to tap into that fearlessness. I have two classes of third graders at Presbyterian School, and I love it there. I have such great support from the administration and the teachers, so I'll keep going back as long as they’ll have me.

What is your Houston story?

I got here as fast as I could. My dad was a commercial airline pilot and he was stationed in Atlanta when I was born, but my parents moved here when I was three months old. I've been here almost since the beginning, so I consider myself native. My mom’s side of the family was from West Virginia, but my dad’s side was all Texas, so I have a lot of family here. My sister’s here, and my parents, and there's lots of cousins and extended family around.

My Texan roots are deep, but I do feel a strong link to West Virginia too because of my grandmother. She lived there for ninety years and that’s what drew me to set Whisper Hollow there. It is such a distinctive place in her history and my childhood, so I wanted to honor that. She lived in the northern part of the state and I set my fictional town in the southern part, somewhere in Raleigh County, where there is a long history of coal mining. Even though I had to move it geographically to be relevant to the occupation in the story, my sense of connection to the setting remains strong.

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your life?

This is such a difficult question because I'm almost 46 years old and I've had incredible influences all along the way, in family, friends, teachers and other writers, but I think it would have to be my children. I had to be a better version of myself to do justice to raising them. They have given me so much, they have taught me how to see the world with wonder again. When we, as adults, see something we automatically filter it through our own histories, without stopping and really trying to wonder about it. So I have loved looking at the world again through a child's eyes. What we writers do is observe and talk about our observations, so for me to be able to slow down and see things stripped of my prejudices and my knowledge and my experiences has been wonderful.

What advice would you give to a young person who wants to become a writer?
Be patient. Write as much as you can, and read even more than that – but also, have a life and create experiences that you can draw from. You must meet people, travel, and taste the world before writing convincingly about it all.

How do you find, or seek to find, balance in your life?

It's a discipline to be balanced and I do actually find it. I like order, so I have a natural system of dividing my day up into pieces There is a piece carved away for writing, when I can be alone and listen to my wind-chimes, and there is a piece that belongs to the kids, a great big piece. Then there's the piece where I can socialize with friends or I can go and work out, because health and fitness is still hugely important to me.

I had done a little martial arts training at college, so when Josh was old enough for pre-K and I suddenly had time to return to it, I did so with great passion. Now I'm a 2^nd degree black belt in tae kwon do, and a certified women's tactical defense instructor. I teach self-defense classes to women and girls, showing them how to be aware of their surroundings, and how to make small changes to what they do to make sure they stay safe.

I don't feel guilty for making that time for myself, to stay fit, to create my art and hone my craft, or to take it to the world. I think so many women feel guilty about the time they take for themselves, but by finding that balance, they are modeling good behavior for their kids and for the community. People should celebrate creative endeavors and legitimize them. What my kids see me do, for my writing and for myself, will inform their future decisions. When they try to undertake something of their own, they will be able to say, “I'm going to do that because it's important to me, and it should be important to the people that care about me too.”

What does Houston mean to you?
It means home, it really does. Houston is such a welcoming place, our arts community is so vibrant, and there is so much that is available and accessible. You don't have to have a lot of money to enjoy some really amazing things here. I feel very comfortable here, and whenever I would go away, like when I studied overseas or when I went to live in Venezuela after college, the place I always wanted to get home to was here. Houston has always made me feel like I can breathe right.

Where is your happy place in Houston?
My home, if that's not a dorky answer. Specifically, my office in my home, where I'm surrounded by books. It's a portal to another world. I love being alone in my office knowing that my family is close by, but that I still have some quiet time. I know that sounds antisocial but it means such a lot to me.

What's your favorite place to eat or drink?
No question about it, Shiva in Rice Village – it’s absolutely amazing. My husband and I went there on our first dinner date, and we've done all our major celebrations there since. The food is wonderful, and it's very sentimental place for us.

What is your Houston secret?

I am as passionate about reading as I am about writing, and I absolutely love Inprint’s Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. Eight times a year, they bring in these incredible writers and we sit in the intimate setting of the Wortham Center to hear them read from their work, answer questions and sign their books. Why doesn't everyone in the whole city take advantage of this? Well, I suppose not everyone loves reading as much as me, but it's one of my favorite things to do, such a cool thing.

If you could change one thing about Houston…

I hate the humidity, it does terrible thing to my hair, and I can't stand the traffic, but really someone needs to figure out the public transportation. I wish there were more opportunities not to use your car, whether it was on a bike or on public transport. Actually I like to walk, but trying to do it in this city, I feel like an interloper. They don't make it easy for you to cross streets and people look at you funny if you aren't in your car.

Who would be your own Inspiring Houston Woman?

There are so many women who inspire me, but in particular, I have two. 

I have always had an incredibly close relationship with my sister, Sara Huffman. She's always been my first reader and my biggest champion. She is an incredibly talented jazz singer, with a couple of albums out, but she’s also a fifth grade teacher at Hunter’s Creek Elementary School. After only three years, they chose her as teacher of the year because she really does an amazing job with her kids.

My other inspiring woman is someone I admire professionally. Robin Reagler is the executive director of Writers in the Schools. She has done so much for literacy in and around Houston, and her work and commitment bring the love of words to children all across the city. I love her spirit. She's a poet and an advocate, but also she's a mother, a wife and a great friend. I'm grateful to know her and I'm grateful to have been working for her the last few years.

For more information about Chris and her new novel, Whisper Hollow, click here.

For more information about Writers in the Schools, click here.

For more information about Inprint’s Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, click here.

Kelly Lyons

Kelly Lyons is a sophomore at Seven Lakes High School in Katy and a keen dancer. At 11 years old, she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease – an auto-immune disease which causes inflammation of the digestive tract. Since then, Kelly has been determined to face her health challenges head-on, and to use to her leadership skills and inspiring story to raise money for Crohn’s research and to extend awareness of the issues which make life so challenging for those suffering from this debilitating disease. She founded her Lucky 15 project in 2012 to raise funds for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America, and in 2014 she became CCFA’s Youth Ambassador. She also serves on the Children’s Patient Advisory Council of Memorial Hermann Hospital.

What’s your story, Kelly?

I'm 16 and a sophomore at Seven Lakes High School. I've always been really interested in school and I always enjoy learning about something different. I've always naturally fallen into a leadership role and though I knew that is what I wanted to do later in life, I wasn't sure how I would come across a leadership role that would really fit with what I wanted to do.

When I was in sixth grade, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, which is an autoimmune disease. How it affects you is a little different for everybody, depending on where the inflammation in your digestive tract occurs. I have it in my stomach and in my intestines, and it prevents me from absorbing nutrition. When I was diagnosed, I only weighed about 50 pounds and I wasn't eating anything because everything hurt when I was digesting it. That meant I wasn't gaining any weight. The doctor told me it was like having mosquito bites on your arm that you just keeping rubbing, except that it was happening inside me as food was trying to pass through. I started on three months of steroids to get me back to a place where I could absorb nutrition. I am now on one of the newer biologics, Remicade, which I've been on for four years now.

I found out great news in December, my Crohn’s is in remission. Unfortunately, I will need to keep up with treatments to keep it there, and those come at the expense of my immune system. At the start of the year, I spent two weeks with pneumonia because Remicade suppresses the immune system. This means that for about four weeks of every eight, I basically have no immunity to infection. I can still go to school but I try not to sit next to people that might be coming down with something, and we always stand up at the doctor’s office. Crohn’s was the first diagnosis that I had, but it was simply the beginning of a long list of other things to follow. I also have dysautonomia and intracranial hypertension. It's hard to point the finger at which condition causes what symptom, but definitely the intense fatigue makes it harder to get up at six and go to bed at ten, and have to do it all over again every day of the week. Unfortunately, this year, I have had to miss several months of school because I couldn’t stay healthy enough, but I am feeling stronger now and am catching up so that I can return in March.

Sixth grade was hard for me, and during seventh grade, I had to be homeschooled for almost the whole year. Because I wasn't able to attend much, school became more precious to me. I started to realize how precious so many things that I took for granted things are. That was when I decided that if I wanted to accept this new life, and also make it less intimidating on a day-to-day basis, I had to find a way to make a positive impact, to find something that would change my life for the better.

That summer, when we were visiting my grandmother in Denver, she let me spend time in her craft room which is full of jewelry-making equipment – beads and wire etc. By the end of the summer, my mom and I were making everything we could think of, cute homemade pieces that my friends and I might wear. That is how I started Lucky 15 as a way of raising funds and awareness at the same time.

At first, Lucky 15 was only going to be jewelry, but it has developed further since then. I was very lucky to be given support by Dr. Medrano, the principal at my middle school, Seven Lakes Junior High. When I went to see her, she immediately asked how the school could get involved. So I worked with my counselor and the principal to promote Lucky 15 within the school. We did pep rallies and spirit nights, we made T-shirts and I sold my jewelry at a holiday booth in December.

All the money that we’ve raised so far through Lucky 15 has gone to the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America, the CCFA, for medical research, educational and support programs, and for Camp Oasis. In our first year, we raised about $4,000 which was way past what I was ever expecting, and so far we have raised more than $15,000.

Why Lucky 15? Well, fifteen is my favorite number and I wear a necklace with a 15 on it.  It also has a turtle to represent us each taking one step at a time. Plus, I like green, so of course the color green had to be in it somehow too. I also like to ask people to think of fifteen things or people or places or times that they are thankful for. When you're struggling or having a hard time, it is helpful to be able to go back to that list. Focusing on the good things really helped me through the first couple of years after being diagnosed. I was grateful that the people who were there at the beginning really believed in the project. When they saw that it was really important to me, the project became special to them as well.

I was fortunate that my junior high and my high school are close. Some of my supporters and their parents helped me continue Lucky 15 at the high school too. It was so cool to watch it develop even further.

Why do you do what you do?

Lucky 15 has not just been about raising money to go towards finding a cure. It is also about educating people. As I started talking to people, I was surprised to hear a lot of, "I have a friend with Crohn's disease."  I have even met other kids who have been diagnosed who were in the same primary school I went to. I am so grateful that I could share my story because knowing that there was someone out there who had the same challenges as I did has allowed us to become friends and it's opened up doors too.

Kelly speaking at the CCFA Winter Ball 2014
photo: Priscilla Dickson

After my first year of running Lucky 15, I started making connections with the walk manager and the executive director of The Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America in Houston.  They asked me to be the youth ambassador for their Winter Ball. That was such a cool experience. I had the opportunity to give a speech to a ballroom full of people. Luckily, because of the stage lighting, when you're up there you can only really see about twenty people so you feel like you're only talking to them. In fact, it was a lot easier than presenting some of my projects to my high school class. After my speech, I got to talk to some of the guests. Of course, I didn't really know who they are, but we had really interesting conversations and it was lovely to meet them. It was only after some guests had walked away that someone asked me if I had been nervous talking to them. It turns out that they were actually really important, one was the head of a major company! That evening was such an amazing experience and it really gave me the confidence to share my story because people wanted to listen. I spoke again at the Houston Walk for CCFA – they called me their Future Hero – and that speech was to about 1,000 people at Discovery Green. Those two events taught me that I love public speaking and made me more confident as a leader.

Looking to the future, I thought I might try to be an architect but since I have had the opportunity to be on the Patient Children's Advisory Council at Memorial Hermann Hospital, my eyes have been opened to some professions in the hospital. They interest me because I know how it feels on the other side of things as a patient. Of course, I don't know if I'm going to be healthy enough to go off to college right away. We've talked about it, and though I’m not sure yet what I want to do, I think it will be something where I can use my patient experiences because they give me insight about how to make the patient experience better for others. Lately I have come to understand that I am passionate about making things better for other hospital patients.

What is your Houston story, or your Greater Houston story, since you live in Katy?

I was born in Houston but moved to Covington in Louisiana as a baby. Then when I was about nine, my dad got a job here in Houston again and we moved back. Although I enjoyed my time in Louisiana, I always felt that Houston was much more like home. Although I live in Katy, I have had quite a lot of experience in Houston because I'm here all the time for doctors’ appointments and medical test and treatments. The CCFA office is here too. I have I connected with Houston as a place that has meaning to me and I am grateful to be here because the medical resources are tremendous..

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your life?

That would have to be my mother, Lisa. We were always close, but when I was homeschooled in seventh grade, she was my school and I spent all my time with her. We would drive to doctors’ appointments or we were at home with each other, so we really became very close and almost like one unit. We would even finish each other sentences. Watching her accept the changes that my diagnosis made to our lives has guided me toward my acceptance of it as well. She approaches everything with determination and perseverance, and maintains a desire for it to be done right. That has really inspired me to find something close to my heart and to go after it.

My mom also understands that I have to find balance. Even though I love my schoolwork and going to school, she knows I can't spend all my time on schoolwork, even if I've missed a day. She knows too that even though I love dance, I can't make dance my only priority. She has also taught me that I can't always be thinking about my health, only focusing on whether I'm sick or on the medications I have to take. She encourages me to find that balance for myself, and make the right choices, even though they are some of the hardest decisions to make.  I think that's one of the biggest gifts that she could have given me.

And how do you find, or seek to find, that balance in your life?

It is definitely a day-to-day thing. I have to ask, what will I feel glad to have accomplished at the end of the hour? Sometimes it's at the end of the week, but sometimes it really is just at the end of each hour. What am I going to be able to do in the next hour that is going to make me make me satisfied and happy with today?

What advice would you give to someone facing a diagnosis of Crohn’s disease?

First, I think that you really have to move in your own time. My GI nurse, Sara Hughes, really helped me when I was first diagnosed. She said, “Here's the website, here is CCFA, and here is a bunch of other resources. When you're ready to go and learn about other people and accept this, you can look into it further. You don't have to do it right now, just when you are ready.” That was one of the best things for me. She didn’t just tell me that I had this challenge and that I had to just move on with my life.  

Also, I would say that you have to find and keep that personal connection to whatever it is that you want to do. Make sure you nurture that passion. Don’t let go of everything that was important to you before, even if it doesn't quite fit into your life now. Evaluate what you want to do. You need to make your own decisions and you need to do it in your own time.

What does Houston mean to you?

I think it's so great to be in a place where there are people from all over, all with so many different goals and passions and interests. That is one of the reasons why I love my high school, which has close to 4,000 students. I love that everybody is just doing whatever they think is going to make them happy in the future. But at the same time, you cannot help but find people with common interests and goals.

Where is your happy place in Houston?

If it isn’t the dance studio, then it must be my high school, Seven Lakes. It surprises even me to say that, but I find that I am always striving to get back to school, especially after I've been home sick for a week, like now, when I’m home for weeks and weeks. I just want to be back there. Even though I end up with a lot of work, I am so glad to get back to school and into a community where I can just enjoy the ordinary stresses of being a sophomore. It will be good for me to get back to normality.

What is your favorite restaurant?

Outback Steakhouse! Having Crohn's disease, not everything sits quite right with me. I want to spend time with my friends and family, but it's not always easy to go out to eat with them. I've always managed to find something at Outback Steakhouse that works for me though. There are some pretty standard things I have to avoid, and that varies from person to person, but one of the universal things is spicy foods. For me personally, it is things with a lot of yeast like cinnamon rolls, or peppermint, which is rather strange. I also can't to drink a lot of milk products. It all depends on where the disease is in your body.

What is your Houston secret?

This must be the Adamson Ballet School in Katy. I've danced for 13 years now and dance has always been something very close to my heart. I mostly do ballet but I've also done tap and jazz, and other styles within jazz too, but ballet is usually the style I come back to and spend the most time and energy with. Dance is so controlled and so disciplined, you always know what to expect, even when you're doing something new. It's a very calculated form of exercise and it keeps me healthy in other ways. I know it keeps me from just wanting to sleep on those hard days.

Adamson Ballet School has become almost a second home to me. Everyone is so encouraging and supportive as I pursue dance even while having these medical challenges. Lately, I’ve had to accept that I cannot go to class regularly. When I’m sick, dancing can be hard, but having people there who don't look at me as if I'm crazy for trying is wonderful.

If you could change one thing about Houston…

I'd have to say the weather. The dysautonomia that I suffer is really impacted by the heat. The heat causes all the blood in my body to go down to my feet and it just sits there. I take medication that makes my body feels like it's cold in order to push the blood back up. So the heat is not my friend, and Texas is totally the wrong place to live! But then, the cold isn't very good for Crohn's disease either, so there are limitations to what I can do outside.

I am always grateful that I picked dance because it’s an indoor activity. I pleaded with my mom to take me to dance when I was three and I don't know if that was fate, but the the fact that I picked something which would not require me to run in the heat is perfect. I could not cope with that at all.

Who would be your own Inspiring Houston Woman?

When I was being diagnosed, I didn't really know any kids with Crohn’s disease, and all the adults that I had heard about were much older and I couldn't really relate to them. I was so fortunate, therefore, to get Jennifer Porter as my eighth grade counselor at Seven Lakes Junior High. When I explained my medical challenges to her and told her that school could really hard for me because I have Crohn's disease, she looked at me and said, “So do I.”

I was her office aid for a whole year, so I really got to know her on a personal level, and she also worked with me on creating Lucky 15. It was really good for me to see that even though she has Crohn’s disease, Ms Porter has a family and children,that she’s been to college and has a job that she really likes. Her mom connected with us too which helped my mom, because she could relate another mother whose daughter had grown up with Crohn's disease. To have a counselor that knows exactly what you're going through was just crazy, but fantastic.

For more information about Lucky 15, visit Kelly’s website.

For more information about the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America in South Texas, visit the Foundation’s website.

A roomful of Inspiring Houston Women at HubDot Houston launch

Through my Inspiring Houston Women blog and because of my love of storytelling, I recently became involved with a new event called HubDot which was about to launch in Houston.

Simona Barbieri,
HubDot's founder

HubDot was founded in London in 2012 by a remarkable Italian lady, Simona Barbieri and it is now spreading across Europe and the US.  The central mission for HubDot is a simple one:

“When we put women together in the same space and put storytelling at the center, incredible things happen.” 

HubDot’s networking events for women of all ages, cultures and backgrounds have one striking difference to the events we have all been to at professional conferences. First, they take place in somewhere women are generally very comfortable – a clothes store – with the beautiful Anthropologie stores joining HubDot to host these events on the shop-floor in their vision, allowing wine, nibbles and shopping to form part of the experience.

Secondly, no one wears a label with her name or her job title or company.  Instead, each woman chooses from a selection of five colored dots (hence the name) which serves as a means of introduction to other guests. For example, if you wear a yellow dot, it means “I have an idea, can anyone help?” or a green dot means “I’m here to be inspired”.  This makes it easier for you to approach someone wearing perhaps a purple dot and ask, “What is your story?” rather than, “What do you do?”  

For those who are really looking for an evening with absolutely no pressure at all, there is even a blue dot for “I am here to socialize and shop”. To get the storytelling between the guests flowing and some ideas sparking, each event also has a handful of speakers, given only one minute to present their story, and also some music, often from a musician who has her own story to tell.  

Leslie Loftis,
Houston Organizer

This week saw the US launch of HubDot here in Houston, organized by a team led by Leslie Loftis, a native Texan who met Simona when they both lived in London and who decided she wanted to share the HubDot philosophy in her home town. 

I was so proud to have been one of the storytellers invited to speak by Simona and Leslie. Because we were only given one minute to share a story we wanted to tell, I focused on the amazing women I have interviewed for InspiringHoustonWomen.com.  

I was delighted too that one of my IHW interviewees, Anita Kruse of PurpleSongs Can Fly at Texas Children’s Hospital, gave one of the most moving speeches of the night.

Anita talked of her work with young cancer patients at TCH, helping them to write and record their own songs during their treatment programs in the Cancer Center.  She had brought along with her Christian Spear, herself a cancer survivor. Christian sang an excerpt from the Purple Songs single No one fights alone (you can watch the full music video here)

Other speakers included Dorothy Gibbons, founder of The Rose, a breast cancer charity which provides mammograms and cancer treatment to women without medical insurance. For every three insured women who have a mammogram at The Rose, they are able to give another mammogram free to a woman who cannot afford one. Dorothy told us, ‘No woman should die of breast cancer because she could not afford $150 for a mammogram.’

Another speaker, Elizabeth Pudwill, told the assembled group of her battle against a series of addictions which led her to time in jail. Determined to put her life back together again, she founded I Know Somebody – Houston, an organization which aims to connect women to each other so that someone in need of something can find help.

Simona opens the storytelling with story of HubDot
at Anthropologie City Center

We also heard from two young chef/entrepreneurs, the founder of a non-profit organization which aims to help those with chronic headaches such as migraines, and from one of the first female fighter pilots in the US Air Force who then became a stay at home mom, and then found her third vocation as a pastor.

I was not surprised to find any number of inspiring women in that room who would be perfect subjects for future interview, and I will be contacting them in the next week or so to invite them to take part.

HubDot will be continuing its events in London, Milan, Naples, Luxembourg and Houston and over the coming months, will also launch HubDot chapters in Oregon and Barcelona, as well as in South Africa and Gambia.

It was a fantastic evening, and even if I say so myself, I rather summed up the general feeling of the gathering in the last ten seconds of my one minutes speech:

“I know that I am preaching to the converted here when I say that this amazing city, and indeed, this room, is full of truly Inspiring Houston Women, so I have a long job ahead of me to talk to them all.”

If you are interested in finding out more about HubDot in Houston, or in one of the other cities above, please visit the website at www.hubdot.com.

Linda McSpadden McNeil

with Mirror by Jaume Plensa

Dr Linda McSpadden McNeil is the Director of the Center for Education at Rice University and a Rice Education professor. A curriculum theorist and analyst of school structure and reform, she has written extensively on teaching and learning in urban schools, on school organization and on education policy and standardization.  Her writings are widely cited scholarly publications and national media. In 1988, she co-founded the Center for Education to support research and teacher enhancement programs to address the persistent problems of inequity and uneven quality in urban schools.  She and her colleagues in the Center for Education have for twenty-five years designed, created, funded, and operated programs to retrain urban teachers in their subject fields and in children’s learning and cultures. She has two daughters.

  

What’s your story, Linda?

I am a teacher, my mother was a teacher, and my grandmother was a teacher in one-room schoolhouses, so teaching is in my bones. Now I teach Rice students to become teachers, but originally I was a high school English teacher and that has led to all my current work. 

I was a high school teacher in a district that had taken twenty years to desegregate its schools. I quickly realized an incredible tension between what they wanted kids to learn and what they didn't want them to know. I thought they had hired me to be the best teacher I could be, to be like the teachers who had inspired me to teach.  A cohort of us in the English department had that same vision for the kids and yet we were being told, “Don't teach Black poetry – that’s political.” I learned then what I've come to call the tension between knowledge access and knowledge control.

When I had the opportunity to pursue a PhD at the University of Wisconsin, I began with the questions I had faced as a teacher: “What counts as school knowledge?  What factors shape the ways schools make knowledge accessible – or inaccessible – to kids? Whose knowledge is of most worth?”  These questions took me into classrooms for long stints of ethnographic research, looking first at the interactions of teachers and kids and then into the school setting itself.  

I observed the dynamic between the teachers and the students, seeing what kinds of questions were being asked, and what was being left out.  This kind of research came naturally to me because I inadvertently became an ethnographer at a very young age.  My dad’s work as an Amoco engineer of the generation that drilled the West Texas oil fields caused us to move frequently.  As the new kid at five different elementary schools, I always began by observing:  who might be a new best friend, which teacher would be kind and interesting.  My experiences, from being a child in some very remote schools to being a teacher who was being told by the administration what not to teach, converged in my doctoral studies and my first book, Contradictions of Control: School Structure and School Knowledge.

I arrived in Houston just as standardization was being imposed on schools, first from the district level, then from the state and, now, nationally.  Suddenly, the curriculum was not being shaped by the teachers in the classroom, but by “the system.”  Teachers were no longer valued as curriculum developers.  Because I was already doing research in classrooms, I was one of the first witnesses to the harm standardization was doing to the quality of schooling.  As multiple-choice standardized tests started to drive what could be taught, I documented huge curricular losses as the tested subjects were watered down into multiple-choice formats, particularly math, reading and writing in those early years. Other subjects were set aside, or their teachers made to replace lessons in the arts, physical fitness and science with test prep drills for math or reading.  Teachers were being forced to dump complex writing assignments, the reading of novels, lab experiments, field trips to arts performances and coastal estuaries, as well as lessons related to the cultures of their students, to drill on the generic content of tests that would be scored by computers.

That was the beginning of twenty years of “school reform” in Texas which has brought us the very top-down, centralized, standardized form of schooling most people look on as a testing system. The testing is really just the tip of the iceberg. The test scores are indicators in a management compliance system that ties everything from students’ graduation to teacher’s pay, administrators’ bonuses and even the closing of a neighborhood school, to scores on a computer-scored test.

I never thought I would be studying standardized testing.  But even as that first wave of testing came in, it became clear that the big investments in “education reform” would not be for perpetually underfunded schools or scholarships to recruit young people into teaching. The financial – and political – investment would be in the testing system. Despite all the research to the contrary, despite reports from teachers and child development experts, none of the arguments on behalf of children could be heard above the domineering voice of the testing industry. Testing companies have lobbyists; third grade children don’t.

I believe, however, that it’s up to all of us to do everything we can to create the professional, political and moral space in which good teachers can make magical things happen every day for the children in their classrooms.  It was this belief that prompted the two strands of work I’ve been doing.

The first was to create the Center for Education, with programs in support of teachers’ development. And the second was to embark on a series of research studies that could inform not only educators, but also parents and policy makers, about the impact of the standardized accountability system on children and schools. 

Even before the testing became so ubiquitous, my colleagues and I were very concerned about the anti-teacher climate in the press and in politics. We were, after all, preparing bright, dedicated Rice students to teach and we wanted them in schools hospitable to knowledgeable, caring teachers.  So Ronald Sass, now an emeritus scientist professor, and I created the Center for Education to be a base for teacher development. We had generous funding and incredibly wise advice from Maconda Brown O’Connor, our first board president.  A trustee of the Brown Foundation, she was a social worker who counseled boys in juvenile detention.  As she helped the boys connect back to their schools, she could see the ways schools could be nurturing or could exclude these youth as “problem kids.”  To Maconda, every child had promise, and her support of our work came from her own sense of urgency that all teachers needed support to be able to help all kids thrive.  She was a “practical visionary” whose lessons continue to teach us.

Our idea was not to give quick Saturday teacher workshops. All of our programs were long-haul, addressing serious deficiencies in the schools. A key example is science.  Very few middle grade science teachers had been science majors in college, and even fewer had ways of connecting with the city’s extraordinary scientists.  We created a teaching laboratory in an urban middle school where teachers came for an intensive year of study and exploration with scientists from Rice and industry, learning how to engage their students in the questions and ‘aha’ moments that make science so powerful.   We had financial support from individuals, corporations, local foundations, the National Science Foundation and ultimately the school district itself.  And now, after so many years, the “Model Lab” science teachers continue to be valued leaders. And out of that original lab, new programs were created first for high school teachers, then elementary teachers, as well as on-line curricular resources for science inquiry across the grades.

The School Writing Project addressed the persistent low quality of children’s writing nationally and locally – a problem made worse by multiple-choice test drills and formulaic writing required by the state.  The School Writing Project brought small groups of teachers together in intimate seminars to work on their own writing as well as the teaching of writing and sharing samples of their students’ work.  Over the years, these seminars branched into specialized discussions of teaching English language learners and of integrating the teaching of writing with the other creative arts.  Many teachers have told us that they have remained in teaching, and remained in urban schools, because of the professional community they found in School Writing Project.

The focus of these programs, and others such as Asia Outreach, created by Rice history professor Richard Smith, and our early childhood programs, has always been on empowering teachers.  We have worked to make teachers more knowledgeable about their own subjects and the many ways children learn, and about the cultures of the children in their classrooms.  We don’t just advocate for “teacher professionalism” in the abstract, but support teachers to make their teaching engaging and their classrooms places of inquiry and equity.  Our research in schools has informed our work with teachers. And, maybe even more important, we have learned from teachers what we should be investigating in our research.

Our research is the other “half” of the Center’s mission:  studying what is taught in schools, who is being well-served or underserved by our schools, and what factors in the community and in the policy arena are shaping children’s education.  When I began studying what is taught – or not taught – in schools,   those were classroom studies with me as the solo researcher.  What I found in classrooms led me to take a hard look at the administrative practices in schools and the policies controlling them.  For these larger studies, I’ve had the great benefit of working with smart colleagues who share my vision of research in the public interest. Our research looks a bit like a set of concentric circles:  from classrooms, to systemic problems such as dropouts, to democratic schooling itself. 

After being in classrooms documenting the curriculum losses – what I think of as the “real learning” – under standardization, we looked at where this was coming from.  This got us into policy analysis. Our next finding was even more disturbing. We discovered that schools were triaging out of school the students they saw as weak, those they saw as putting the school’s scores in danger, and they were doing so in ways that were technically legal. 

It was from teachers and principals we knew well that we learned the real story behind the “drop out problem.”  The myth of the standardized accountability system was that it would raise academic standards and close the racial “achievement gap” in Texas schools.  But as we spent more time in schools, particularly in high poverty, urban high schools, we saw that the huge dropout rate – more than 100,000 kids each year from Texas high schools! – was not a separate problem from the testing system.  The gap, in fact, was widening.

As the state’s system of accountability became ‘high stakes’ for administrators, directly tying their job contracts and pay bonuses to the test scores of the kids in their schools, they began to triage out of school those students whose scores were likely to lower the school’s accountability ratings.  These students came disproportionately from African American, Hispanic, immigrant and high-poverty communities.  Students literally came to be seen as “assets” or “liabilities” to the school ratings, with the “liabilities” triaged out prior to taking the test. 

Many schools were reporting dropout rates as low as 2% or 3%, yet when those same schools had one thousand entering freshmen, with only 350 of those students end up in the senior graduating class, you have to ask questions. My colleagues and I started noticing that the school ratings were higher if the dropout numbers were also up. The greater the number of low-achieving kids dropping out, the higher the school’s test score rating. Frankly, it took us a long time to figure out how to write about this because it shows that our state’s education system actually rewards principals who “lose” kids. 

In the end, we never had to make the accusation that principals were deliberately triaging weaker kids out – the principals did it for us. They told us they felt caught and but felt the system left them little choice.  We designed a study to find out if these schools were exceptions, or if this represented a pattern that could explain the thousands of kids being “lost” from our high schools. We were able to show, by race and grade level, how the “losses” of students enhanced their schools’ ratings—and those bonuses. We published our findings as Avoidable Losses in a peer-reviewed on-line journal.  It has had almost 20,000 hits and been used by parent advocacy groups, teachers, and legislators organizing against the high stakes testing system.

Having documented the losses of both high quality curriculum content and of students under standardized accountability, my research team and I are now studying and writing about the threat this system poses to democratic, public education itself.  The test score numbers generated by the standardized tests mask old inequities and create new ones. Low scores are being used to justify closing neighborhood schools and shifting taxpayer dollars to charter chains and others who would destroy the public’s schools.  There are political and for-profit forces working together to replace this essential democratic institution with a market of privately owned, but tax-payer funded, “schools.”  This push to de-democratize schools is important to understand because the public’s schools are a vital venue for maintaining a voice for democracy itself.   This is the book we are currently working on and we hope it becomes more than just bearing witness to this anti-democratic-schooling movement.  We hope it helps foster an even stronger public discussion already underway about re-claiming the billions of testing dollars for classrooms and high quality instruction in the public’s schools.

My original research question, “What is shaping our kids’ access to knowledge and to ways of learning in schools?” has led me into amazing classrooms where kids are thriving and into the current policy fray that frankly seems hostile to children.  I couldn’t be more grateful for the teachers and colleagues who keep reminding me why we need to keep asking these questions.

What is your Houston story?

I’ve been in Houston for thirty years.  I was born in California and grew up in the oil fields of West Texas before we moved to Tulsa.  Although my dad became Amoco’s international corrosion expert, he was the kind of engineer who was a real craftsman and didn’t easily fit any organization chart. I think I inherited that sense of craft from my dad and from my grandparents, and I carried it into what I think about teaching. 

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your life?

My two daughters – one is a psychiatrist and the other is a veterinarian who does international public health work. They are both just amazing – funny, smart generous, caring – and always inspiring me.

The greatest influence on my work here has to be Maconda Brown O’Connor, who was fierce and more than a little angry about what was happening to children and youth in the justice system and in some of our schools. Maconda’s idea was that if you sit in a place of privilege like this university, with a base from which to work on problems, then you have no excuse not to. And if one thing doesn’t work, try something else.  She helped us create the Center for Education and also created the Greater Houston Collaborative for Children, an organization of advocacy for young children. She was not shy about giving advice, nor hesitant to give support.

Here at Rice, there is Neal Lane.  Neal is a scientist. He was our provost in the early years of our work and one of those rare people who is just so wise. 

I’m also inspired by people whose courage seems to them to be just common sense.  Our friend Joe Elder in Wisconsin, who as a Quaker peace negotiator took desperately needed cardiology equipment to the hospitals in Hanoi while US bombs were dropping on the city.  The young people who ten years ago started No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes to provide relief for immigrants in peril of dying in the Arizona desert.   The Black teachers who were assigned to integrate that white high school where I first taught, and in doing so became my teacher as well.    My professors at UW-Madison who asked important questions about education and power and tolerated my decision to do the messy and inefficient research in classrooms . This question is bringing to mind how many people I am grateful for – people I need to thank more often!

What advice would you give to someone new to the education system?

Find kindred spirits.  Find people who value what you value.  I tell my students to seek out other teachers who care deeply about the kids and who are willing to try things and to share ideas with you.  I’ve given that advice to my students and to my daughters as they start new jobs.  The same holds for kids starting out in a new school – and for parents as they build a common cause with other parents.  Sometimes it might be someone you work with very closely, or it might be colleagues around the country who are struggling with similar issues and situations, as we are now seeing in the movement to undo the harm of standardized schooling and get back to focusing on kids and learning.  Institutions are always in flux and the world is so chaotic right now that kindred spirits both anchor and energize us.

The countryside near Linda's cabin
in New Mexico

How do you find, or seek to find, balance in your life?

Through my daughters and through my friends, particularly those friends who have been in our lives so long that we are a part of each other’s stories.   

In terms of place, we are fortunate to have a small cabin in the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico.  It is in a remote area my parents took us to when I was a little girl.  It’s on a narrow dirt road with few neighbors.  Once we’re up there, it’s all sweatshirts and jeans and rain on the tin roof, hiking, fishing, or just watching the hummingbirds.  It is our family’s spiritual home.  As poet Wendell Berry says, it’s that one place that we have to know over many years and know by a particular tree or shifts in the stream to be fully alive on this earth.

What is your happy place in Houston?

The homes of good friends and my porch swing on a spring evening at dusk, when the night herons and other birds are coming “home.”

The Rothko Chapel and Menil complex are both energizing and restorative.  Think about the time period in which John and Dominique de Menil started bringing all of these things together in one of the most competitive, materialistic cities in the world. They were saying to Houston, “What about human rights?  What about the spirit? How can we bridge our differences?” I had the honor of meeting Mrs de Menil on two occasions. I don’t think she really felt what they were doing was courageous.  Yet they created this extraordinary Chapel so that Houston would not lack a sacred space dedicated to human rights, to social justice, to collective envisioning. Just amazing.  And it was a Rothko Chapel Oscar Romero Human Rights event that introduced me to Dolores Huerta, whom I was honored to host in my home, another of the inspirers in my life.

What is your favorite restaurant?

One of the greatest gifts of Houston is that we don’t have to decide!  It’s wonderful that the fourth largest US city has so much that is local.  We can shop at a locally owned dress shop, and a local hardware store where they can answer every question, and we can eat food from all over the world in restaurants owned by families who brought their grandma’s recipes to our neighborhood.   Just about any local Mexican restaurant is my favorite!

What is your Houston secret?

People who have never been here think that it’s going to be rather desolate but end up surprised at how lovely many parts of the city are – especially the trees.  And although the reputation is oil and gas and real estate, or space and medicine, the real Houston is in the mix of people who are from literally everywhere. And if I have a secret, it’s probably that I eavesdrop to try to improve my Spanish!

What would you change about Houston?

Houston is already a truly international city.  The children of this city and the families coming into the city are the changing face of America.  That makes it even more important for us to get education right, to get children’s health care right. Houston should be competing with Seattle in the race to bump up the minimum wage.

We are now the most diverse city in the US, which is certainly something to celebrate.  But I am concerned that diversity without equity is not progress.  Diversity without equitable political and economic power is not yet democracy. While I love all the international restaurants and hearing all the different languages on the street, I am starting to think that people are looking at diversity as an exotic accessory rather than “This is who we are now.”  Everyone is talking about how fabulous diversity is, but few seem to be thinking aloud about the growing concentrations of wealth and poverty, about what diversity means for the city’s infrastructure, for mass transit into all the parts of the city, cleaning up the superfund pollution sites and creating parks everywhere. The possibilities are endless if diversity can enact a new political imagination.

And in the schools, although diversity should be a great asset to connect all our children with the global community, we still sometimes hear that distinction between educating “our kids,” and “other people’s children,” suggesting that we will not make the same investment in some children’s education. 

Houston has the chance to become a very robust international city because everything here is truly globalized.   We have a chance to gain a real understanding of the world by learning from the human connections within our city’s communities.

Linda was nominated as an Inspiring Houston Woman by Pansy Gee.

For more information about Linda’s work at the Rice Center for Education and for her publications, visit the Center's website.