Puffin Land.

Change of lanes for one New Jersey native.

Puffin land

I was in the queue for the security at Newark Airport on my way back to the UK via Iceland and got chatting with a youngish woman who seemed to be as bewildered by the organisation of the lines as I was.

The conversation was fitful and mundane but the queue was not going anywhere quickly so there arose many a pause where it felt like at least one of us should say or ask another thing. So little gobbets of information seeped out as the line got shorter.

I’d been in Texas. She’s a mom of three. I’m an actor. Oh, my kids have just done a play. This sort of thing. I needed to wonder when she said that she’d just seen the kids in the play, what, at 6pm, she was doing on her way to Reykjavik. It didn’t quite fit my travel-frazzled mind’s idea of a post kid’s play Sunday evening venue. Work, she said. And me. Going home. It was perfunctory. A way to pass the time.

So we waited some more and wondered at the sloppiness of Newark’s house style. But after a couple of minutes it felt like another question was  due. I asked the obvious one. What are you working on in Iceland? Her answer really surprised and thrilled me.

“I’m a freelance writer and I’ve been commissioned to write a piece on puffins”! You could have given me several hundred guesses and I wouldn’t have got THERE! So that took care of conversation for the next half hour or so.

She turned out to have a really interesting story. She’d junked a “boring” accountancy job to take up writing and is currently enjoying a very successful run placing pieces in all sorts of interesting and up-scale outlets and publications (see below).

It turns out the puffins is a bit of a departure from form, as her bread and butter area of writing is disability and accessibility. She has a severely physically challenged son who is quadriplegic as a result of a virus during her pregnancy with him.

When she left her nine-to-five, she attended many a writing workshop and it became obvious to one of her tutors that her subject around her son’s disability might be particularly apt for the times, as it was at around the period of the Covid pandemic that she had made the switch from number-crunching to scribing.

We swapped details and she managed to delight me in her New Jersey tones with those words I love-“Get outta here!” on finding out that I was a Feldenkrais practitioner. Her son had been working with a therapist who uses Feldenkrais’ methods and so she was familiar with what I do in that domain.

This woman is clearly driven and passionate about rights and access for people with disabilities and is creating opportunities for her handicapped son (and I know that’s an old-fashioned term but it seem to fit here). She is using her writing and the interesting people she meets through it to to gain information and goods, like bits of equipment or clothing etc to help her son whilst keeping her brain whirling and making, by the sound of it, a good income from her passion.

What an inspirational woman! I am so glad we struck up conversation, even it was sludgy to start with. One of the last things she said was gratifying and also a prod to my conscience. It was that the theatre community, in her experience, is very open to collaboration with those who have physical disabilities and access issues. Sports, not so much. But the theatre lot in her neck of New Jersey are flying a flag for inclusion. Great to hear and I know many in the UK, like Kelly Hunter’s Flute
Theatre, who are doing amazing work in this area.

I am not using this platform to promote things on the whole but I would like to put you in the way of this inspirational woman and maybe we call all read her article on puffins in Iceland!

https://jaclyngreenberg.weebly.com