Liz WhiteacrePERSONA AND THE CAMPUS WHEELCHAIR PROJECT*In spring 2015, The Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability published "Pre-Enrollment Considerations of Undergraduate Wheelchair Users and their Post-Enrollment Transitions" by Roger D. Wessel, Darolyn "Lyn" Jones, Christina L. Blanch, and Larry Markle. The researchers were brought together by Jones, an Assistant Professor of English at Ball State University. She was interested in why students who use wheelchairs decide to enroll at Ball State, a four-year, doctoral granting institution in the Midwest enrolling 20,000 undergraduate students. The researchers sought to answer the questions, "How did undergraduate wheelchair users (1) arrive at the decision to attend college and decide which college to attend and (2) transition from high school to college and integrate into academic and social settings in college?" (Wessel et al. 60). They interviewed ten students who used wheelchairs and found the students generally planned to go to college from a young age and the available programs and the campus' accessibility were their deciding factors when selecting a college (Wessel et al. 62-63). Wessel et al. also found varied experiences, both positive and negative, when it came to the students' transitions from high school to college. The students' stories stuck with Jones, especially those stories that did not fit within the framework of the academic article and lay outside the research goals. In January 2016, she invited me to read their transcripts and create persona poems, so that the students' stories would be shared in a medium that could capture each student's voice and explore their experiences. The persona poem, historically, is a dramatic monologue, "an exercise in revealing and withholding information, in imagining and communicating experiences, and in being true to the voice of the poem—which is not the voice of the poet" ("Biographical Persona"). Jones felt transcript-inspired persona poems would allow an audience to engage with the study's participants in a different medium. Jones and I had worked together on an anthology (see Monday Coffee and Other Stories of Mothering Children with Special Needs, INwords Press, 2013), so she knew of my interest in disability literature and was familiar with the poetry I've written. In addition to the Wessel et al. article, I was given focus group notes, and Jones responded to questions I had while writing. I researched the subjects' recorded injuries and diseases, some already known to me, like paralysis and Cerebral Palsy, and others I knew little about, like Friedreich's Ataxia and Spina Bifida. I have written poems about spinal cord injury since 2000, when an accident on a boat dock left me in a wheelchair for a short period (see Hit the Ground, Finishing Line Press, 2013). It took about two years of therapy before I could walk without aid. I felt a strong connection to many of the emotions the students shared when they talked about being wheelchair users. Since I have taught Freshman composition at various schools for the past sixteen years, I also found parallels with my experiences teaching students transitioning from high school to college. As I wrote the persona poems, themes that connected the students' personal experiences and unique voices emerged. As Holler and Keppler discuss in Rethinking Narrative Identity: Persona and Perspective, a story is not a formal sequence or chain of events in which similar elements are added up following the same patter, but a dynamic process in which the selectivity of each event is passed on to the next one. This process leads to an accumulation of more and more improbability. Once caught up in a story, one soon—after a few changes of circumstances or peripeties—reaches a point one would have never considered possible. And still, it is the result of the process of generating meaning. Therefore, narrations provide us with an explanation of reality; they can teach us why things are the way they are. As unlikely as it may seem it is the result of a story that has evolved. (36) Jones' goal—that the students' narratives would be communicated to readers in an intimate way through the genre of the persona poem—is met through the process of both writing and reading the poems. For me, exploring voice, determining narrative excerpts, teasing out connective themes, etc. for poems inspired by the students' transcripts has been transformative, because I must consider experiences and emotions that happen outside of myself. Empathy and sympathy come into play because I wear "a mask" as I compose. For readers, the larger narrative presents unique emotional responses to life on campus in a wheelchair that hopefully will elicit new understanding. Readers are encouraged to focus on the speaker, not on an immediate visual image of a wheelchair when introduced to each persona. This project has been a rewarding one. It is an honor working with the students' transcripts and a challenge to produce poems that present authentic voices. I've been using different methods to create each study participant's voice and narrative, because I'm conscious that each student's experience is unique—they made this clear themselves in their interviews. They are individuals who have experienced life differently than other people on campus, even those who might also be in wheelchairs. Poetry's form allows me to express individuality in different ways than prose, and the persona poem encourages a conversation between the reader, the poet, and the persona. In her essay, "Why We Wear Masks," Jeanine Hall Gailey discusses the persona work of Margaret Atwood, Lucile Clifton, and Louise Glück and concludes, "The different ways that these three women approach writing persona poems embody their own sociopolitical ideologies as well as their individual stylistic choices and their individual heritages and languages." Writing these persona poems, I knew that I would not be absent. In putting on "the mask" of each subject in the study, I am undeniably present. My goal, then, for each persona is to craft poems that embody the emotional currents of the interview transcripts rather than to historically preserve the transcripts, which the academic study has already succeeded in doing. For each persona, I work to develop a form and style that thematically connects to the emotions, as well as the voice, in the interview. Some students had a lot to say to interviewers, and others often responded with just a "yep" or "no" to follow up questions. I made the decision early to develop multiple poems for each persona, which gives me the opportunity to explore each persona's narrative. It's been an interesting process, finding narrative frames that express the emotions and experiences expressed in the transcript; how do you take an academic interview and make it poetic? Tim O'Brien shares in an interview about writing and his novel The Things They Carried, "[the novel is] about writing itself—writing as an effort to pin down with language the truth about a subject." The way O'Brien seeks truth in his work is inspiring. For this project, I am working from an artifact produced by academic researchers. I'm unable to talk to a student myself, ask follow up questions that would help me write a poem or solicit their input on what I've produced. These people are strangers to me. So as the subjects' personas develop in these poems, I work to make decisions consistent with the transcripts and the voice I've devised. I hope that I'm accurately expressing emotion so that a study participant, if they read it, might say, that poem captures the emotions I've gone through. The poems from the project that appeared in the last issue of Wordgathering present the persona of Subject C, a male college student who has Muscular Dystrophy. During his interview, this young man spoke about how his desire to be an engineer was abandoned due to his limited college choices—campus accessibility trumped program offerings when it came time to select his school. This resonates with me, the idea that he had to revise his ambitions because of his physical limitations, and I think many people can relate because doors can close for people in college for many different reasons, leading them down unanticipated life paths (for better or worse). When I wrote Subject C's poems, I found myself considering the construction of each poem, knowing that the part of Subject C that engineering appealed to would influence the way he saw things, even though the career had to be abandoned. Playing with the structure of the poems' visual presentation to create a thematic connection between form and voice for this persona was challenging. In some moments, I took words verbatim from his transcript, and in others, I took thoughts and details from the conversation and weaved them together, using language I felt was representative of the speaker's voice. In order to create a vehicle for an emotion in some poems, I invented details for a specific situation and based them off of other research or personal experience, so some poems are a blending of the subject and myself. I changed names and locations in poems with specific references to further uphold the privacy of Subject C and the people in his life. It is my hope that when Subject C's poems are read as a series that the readers experience the range of emotions that I experience when I read Subject C's transcripts. The beauty of the persona poem for the poet is that in trying to interpret someone else's voice and point of view, the poet must evaluate how she sees the world, then how she sees the world through the persona's filter. It is a learning process. It is a process of growth.
*Whiteacre's companion essay "The Campus Wheelchair Project Poems" containing the poems discussed here can be seen in the June 2016 issue of this journal.
Works Cited "Biographical Persona." Poets.org. The Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 1 Aug. 2016. Gailey, Jeanine Hall. "Why We Wear Masks: Three Contemporary Women Writers and Their Use of the Persona Poem." Poemelelon: A Journal of Poetry. Poemelelon, 2015. Web. 31 May 2016. Holler, Claudia, and Martin Klepper, eds. Rethinking Narrative Identity: Persona and Perspective. Amsterdam, NLD: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 12 July 2016. "Tim O'Brien." The Big Read. Arts Midwest, 2016. Web. 31 May 2016. Wessel, R., Darolyn "Lyn" Jones, Christina Blanch, and Larry Markle. "The Pre-Enrollment Considerations and Post Enrollment Transitions of Wheelchair Users." Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability 28.1 (2015): 57-71. PDF file.
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