Edmonton Journal from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • 58

The Kdmonton Journal Saturday, January 3, 2009 G2E Loud and Linda Cundy is a passionate advocate for the rights of the deaf Lesley MacDonald is the producerhost of the Woman of Vision series. The stories also run the first Monday of every month on the news hour on Global Edmonton at 6 p.m. i 'A. Deaf since birth, Linda Cundy has never heard the sound of her own voice, and therefore, has never learned to use it. But she has no trouble speaking out about what she believes in.

And she is passionate about the rights of the deaf. "We are the most invisible group," says the feisty, hard-working advocate. "You can't tell by looking at us that we have a hearing loss until you see us signing." Sign Language. On the day of our interview, she speaks through an interpreter. "People tend to look at the deafness first, not the person.

And if they realize I am literate, they think I am a deaf person who happens to be smart. No! No!" She emphasizes by pounding her fist into thepalmofherotherhand. "Thethink- ED KAISER, THE JOURNAL Linda Cundy, the Woman of Vision for January, is a longtime advocate for the rights of the deaf. As a consultant, she helps deaf and hard-of-hearing students attending Edmonton Public Schools, and believes American Sign Language is the best way for deaf children to communicate. who happen to be deaf." Linda is widely known in Alberta's deaf community for her advocacy work locally, nationally and internationally.

From an early age, she didn't see deaf- ness as a handicap. In fact, for many years, she didn't realize there were hear-1 ing people. Her parents are deaf. So are two of her three sisters, her grandparents and several other relatives. She grew up in a language-rich environment.

Her parents read three newspapers a day. I They would share stories with each oth- er about their day, and they were all avid readers. In the summers, Linda and her sisters would ride their bikes to the brary once a week, take out ten books leach, the maximum allowed, and then exchange the 40 books among them- selves. because of that heavy responsibility on them. And that's what impacted me.

I wanted to ensure that none of my three children were ever put in a position of having to interpret for me, and to this day, they rarely do." But Linda struggles with what she sees. Deaf children in a mainstream hearing environment often face linguistic barriers. She believes American Sign Language is the best way for the deaf to access the world. But they are often denied that visual mode of Linda took leadership training at school and at age 15, organized a convention for the deaf for 13 state schools. She went on to get her Masters in Deaf Education at the University of Alberta and then became the first deaf person to be hired by Edmonton Public Schools.

66 People tend to look at the deafness first, not the person. 99 Linda Cundy At the Alberta School for the Deaf, where she taught for 23 years, she was considered a master teacher. She led a movement to have the school accredited to follow the Alberta She cites an example from her work at a Hut-terite colony, where the parents of a three-year-old deaf girl decided she would stop signing, and focus instead on the technology to improve her hearing. "Many parents don't have a clue about their deaf" children's ability to function in the world until they meet me," she says. They see that I'm literate and I hope that eases their concerns about their deaf child." Linda's many accomplishments have earned her two awards of excellence in community service related to the cultural aspects of the deaf and the interpreting communities.

She is passionate in her advocacy to help deaf and hard-of-hearing children compete on an equal footing in the larger society. Her vision is barrier-free communication. "My job now is to empower deaf people to ask for interpreters, to ask for services they need to access. Often, they'll justpatiendy go through it and don't ask. They need to say 'No, I'm not going to proceed until I have an interpreter' and 'I'm not going to write.

I want an "There's a quote from a book I like called Buddhas in Disguise, written by a (woman) who has deaf parents. She traveled to Nepal and took pictures of deaf Nepalese people. The quote is 'Deaf people are put on earth as Buddhas in disguise to test people's Linda's husband is also deaf, so it was a surprise and a blessing when all three oftheir children were bom with hearing. She is now a mentor to deaf parents of hearing children. She was one of the initiators of the Family Vocation Camp for families with deaf children and founded the early intervention program for hearing children of deaf parents at the Association of the Hearing Handicapped, now Connect Society.

"Often, hearing parents are not able to communicate with their deaf children, so they don't communicate values in parenting. And those hearing children probably aren't as successful as they could be. So we set this up to educate deaf adults to be successful parents." Deaf parents rely on Linda's wisdom and experience gained by raising three successful hearing children. Hearingpar-ents of deaf children rely on her lived experience as a successful deaf woman. Lindaandhertwoyoungerdeafsisters attended the same residential school as her parents and grandparents.

Accord-Ting to Linda, the Indiana State School for the Deaf was considered the Harvard of deaf schools. It is still one of the best deaf schools in the U.S. today. "That school was 150 miles from our home," says Linda. "My mother would drive alone on Fridays to bring us home for the weekends.

Even if there was a heavy snowstorm, everyone knew that my mother would never miss coming to get us. She was very committed to us. And in return, we are very committed to our children." school curriculum and set up extracurricular sporting activities such as volleyball and basketball. She also encouraged students to get more involved in student council and leadership training. But the school's population dwindled because of the movement to include deaf students in public schools.

Nine years ago, Linda accepted a challenge to become Edmonton Public School's first deaf consultant, working with deaf and hard-of-hearing students who are main-streamed throughout Alberta. "We need to expose them to a visual language. Once they have that strong language base, then they can work on their speech and auditory skills," says Linda. "People are trying to force them to be able to speak without having language in the first place. And that's mind boggling for us." Another frustration Linda has is with deaf parents who expect their children to interpret for them and facilitate their communication in the hearing world.

"Many CODA's, or Children of Deaf Adults, feel they've had a lost childhood Capturing two still lives, a apart Their daily lives are different Vettese, 33, lives alone, with two miles and for their online collaboration: before noon almost every weekday Visit the site for A Year of Mornings at throughout 2007, each would photograph a scene intended in some way cats, and Barnes, 38, is married, with two children but "we have the same sensibility," Vettese said. "We care for whatwe bring 3191ayearofmornings.com. For the current project, 3191 A Year of Evenings, go to 3191 "matmeydon'trepresentsomethinglovelyandout of reach to the viewer, but instead illuminate what is beautiful at her own breakfast table." Although they had initially imagined a coffee-table format for the book, designer Deb Wood, who'd followed their blog, helped them put together a more intimate work, one that remains truer to the online project. It's a small book you can carry with you in a purse or coat pocket, and the scale of the photos is small, too. The design is clean and spare, like the Meg's was, the mood as quiet and contemplative.

Apart from the foreword and brief introductions from Vettese and Barnes, the book features few words and the photos have no captions. "So much in how a human being relates to an image is really personal," Vettese said. As A Year of Mornings goes into its second printing after just two months in print, Vettese and Barnes have embarked on a new project: a year of evenings, photos taken between 5 and 10 p.m. Because they're morning people, they find these more challenging: they're feeling less creative at the end of the day, for one, and for much of the year there is less natural light. But it forces them to stop and think, to say to themselves things like "mayfoe I need to look at the way the light is coming in through the windows," as Barnes observed.

And that is a good thing. Too often, we don't stop to look and the moment is lost forever. Canwest News Service SUSAN SCHWARTZ Montreal Gazette They both love the early morning, for the promise and possibility they see in it and for its soft light, they revel in being athome and find grace in the small details and quiet rhythms of domestic life spooning yogurt into a bowl, say, instead of eating it straight from the container. Both Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes have areverence forwhat Vettese calls "plain everyday things" plumped pillows or muffins turned out onto a cooling rack, sliced strawberries in a bowl or the way a tea ketde sits on the stove. And both take wonderfully evocative photographs of these simple tableaus, images often suffused with gratitude for the moment.

They live more than 5,000 kilometres apart Vettese in Portland, and Barnes across the country in Portland, Ore. but eachhad admired the work of the other since they'd "met" online when both started craftart blogs in early 2005. They each liked to post personal photographs a few times a week on the website Flickr. One morning in December 2006, both posted similar breakfast still-life shots. Vettese put the two shots side by side, and e-mailed them to Barnes.

look at I said," she recalled in a phone interview, "and 'What do you think of posting for a year And so began 3191, A Year of Mornings, a blog named for the distance between their homes in to document her morn mto our homes and why it is there even down to eating the same foods." The blog is no longer, but their yearlong 2007 exchange is now available in bound form, with colour illustrations, in a gem of a book called Year of Mornings: 3191 Miles Apart (Princeton Architectural Press, Enduring instead of ephemeral is how I'd draw the distinction but here I show my bias. I acknowledge, mind you, that the two women would never have encountered one another if not for cyberspace. The blog, and now the book, "capture the rhythms of everyday life, often surprising the viewer by the sheer beauty of the most quotidian element," Allison Arieff observed last month on the design blog she writes for The New York Times, By Design. of noticing," she writes at the front of the book, ing: eggs in a pot, a crumpled napkin; three pears, jam on toast, a photographer's feet standing reflected in a puddle. The photos were paired and posted together, as a diptych.

And something happened: within weeks of starting to share those peaceful moments of their mornings with the blogosphere, the site had visitors from all over the world 3,000 a day, on average, from as far afield as Japan and Australia. Although Vettese and Barnes didn't know each other well at that point they'd met face-to-face just once and they didn't discuss the pictures they were taking, their images were often so closely linked in composition and colour that it seemed each was thinking the same thing: on a day when a cat figured in Vettese's photograph, for instance, a ball of wool was unravelling down off a tabletop in Barnes'..