Janice Fialka is a nationally-recognized lecturer, author, and advocate on issues related to disability, parent-professional partnerships, inclusion, raising a child with disabilities, sibling issues, and post-secondary education. Janice is also a parent, poet, a compelling storyteller, and an award-winning advocate for families and persons with disabilities.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JANICE: My name is Janice Fialka. My husband and I have two adult children, Micah and Emma. I'm a social worker by background and also been an activist for a few decades since the early days of the Woman's Movement and I have grown fonder and fonder of poetry over the years.

ZAK: And you have a belief about poetry.

JANICE: Yeah, I mean poetry lives on the page and many of us, you know, pick up the book or pick up the page and read the poem quietly. And that's one way, but I have found that a way that really...I'm drawn to is to lift the words off the page and read them out loud because it takes a different kind of energy when I'm just reading it from the page silently I sometimes will speed to the punch-line or the last line where as if I'm reading it out loud to myself, it doesn't have to be to anyone else, you know, I linger sort of leisurely on each line. Sometimes repeating the line out loud. So it just has a very different feel for it. There's a call I think of poetry that says I want to be out side just your head and that connects me to taking it beyond sort of the internal. So many times I think it's just for me. I mean for years I was intimidated by poetry. I didn't understand a lot of it and so I found that if I read it out loud or someone read it to me I, I got more of it.

ZAK: Obviously, we have to finish with a poem. This one is from Mary Oliver.

JANICE: It's called Instructions for Living A Life.

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

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