Author: Joy Murray

I'm a 60 year old artist in Memphis, Tennessee. I spend my life trying to catch stories, give them form, color and light, then send back out into the world.

Some Notes on Grand Jury Duty

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When I started my month of grand jury duty, the spring allergy season was fully upon us.  The jury room was stocked with utilitarian boxes of tissues that were thin and hard to pull out of the box.  They were grainy and flimsy.  After using them for a few days I got a chapped nose.
Seven of us started our jury service to county courthouse on a Wednesday.  We heard a lot of identity theft and car theft cases.  Then we heard a few difficult testimonies where victims cried – a slight woman with translucent skin whose husband beat her.  A homeless rape victim told her story in a hardened smoky voice.  I could hardly bear to watch them struggle with the damned tissue box only to dry their eyes with scratchy paper. 
When I went to get my medicine at the pharmacy that week-end, I bought two boxes of super soft luxury tissues.  I never buy that.  I’m happy with what I get at the Dollar Tree, and even that was better than what was in the jury room.  The ones I bought were labeled soothing and healing.  They released easily and felt velvety against my skin.  One of the allergy sufferers in the room practically danced with delight when I’d brought them in.
I put together this journal entry during jury service to help keep in tact my sense of balance and compassion.  Toni Bernhad writes beautifully about dealing with chronic illness, and while I served I got the feeling that the whole world has a chronic illness .
Each morning I saw the chaotic entry way, where everyone had to take off jewelry, belts and shoes.  I got a pass to get in without being searched.  I use a wheelchair, though, so I had to go in through the back accessible entrance way.  It was also the prisoner entrance.  If a prisoner was being taken in or out of the courthouse, I had to stand aside while armed sheriff’s deputies came out and stopped pedestrian traffic. 
Once a woman walking by was so lost in thought that the deputy had to stand directly in front of her and wave his arms in her face.  She seemed irritated that something blocked her path.  She argued with the deputy for a while, but eventually waited like the rest of us while the shackled man was transported from the sheriff’s car to the courthouse.
The sidewalk traffic went back to normal, as if nothing happened, and I waited for the courthouse security guard to let me in the building.
It’s an older building.  Many tears have been shed in the somber halls and courtrooms.  In the grand jury, you don’t hear a full case, only what the prosecutor presents.  I heard from police on the scene, witnesses, and victims.  We had to decide if there was enough evidence to indict the person arrested for the crime.  Then they’d start the process for either a plea bargain or a trial. 
We heard one rape case with a juvenile victim.  She was shaky and cried a lot.  She wiped her face over and over, then worried the tissue in her hands, knotting and rolling it as she testified. 
It made no real difference that I’d bought good tissues, but it was the one piece of the process I could soften.  For myself, too.  I can’t watch the victims cry and not cry myself.  
I thought about the thin tissue layer between a blessed day and a cursed one — how one cursed day changes the course of your life.
But we have to breathe, even when there are irritants in the air. 
Often we don’t see them, but they make our eyes water nonetheless. 
~~~
All of my notes became part of the court record and I wasn’t allowed to doodle on those, but I kept a small 3.5 x 5 inch sketch book to keep track of the case numbers and got to doodle a bit on those.  Ii couldn’t sketch any of the people that testified or the jury members, so I stuck to borders and a few quick sketches of things in the jury room.

Our break area

Vehicle code tome

On the last day we had the world’s most boring Skype testimony
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The 12 Lessons for Greatness

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January of last year, I was invited to join the YuhuHugsteam and help create a series of stories and essays that would help kids deal with tough situations successfully.  YuhuHugs is an innovative, international team that created the Dreamhut, an interactive indoor-playhouse designed to awaken a child’s creativity.  Their motto is “Play more, be more.”  I love that!
During the planning for the Dreamhut, they worked with their children, getting ideas from them on what would make a perfect play environment.  Both parents and children on this team knew the power of stories.  Soon, two storybook children arrived in their collective imagination, young Yuhu and Hugs, who came to spark dreams and adventures. 
That’s where I came in.  I wrote stories about Yuhu and Hugs, and essays about the 12 values for parents.  What’s resulted is the 12 Lessons For Greatness.
The project was so successful, the team decided to offer the books to everyone and not just to those who bought the Dreamhut.  Now the books are available both as ebooks and print editions. 

Yuhu and Hugs are neighbors and best friends.  Young Hugs and his dog, Lucky, are naturally optimistic, while Yuhu has a harder time seeing hope when she’s faced with challenges.  This is not helped by her rather pessimistic cat, Jinx.  But Yuhu is excited by life, she just can’t keep still.  Even her name is a little celebration – woo-hoo Yuhu!  Life is too short to waste even a minute without some sort of activity going on.  Obviously this leaves little time for mundane tasks like picking up and organizing.  Yuhu’s dad drives a truck all over the country.  Her mom is a writer.
Hugs on the other hand, loves to keep everything in its place.  Hugs loves to hug people.  He’s a natural pacifist, has a way with animals, and wants to travel all over the world, into outer space, and even to the bottom of the ocean.  His father is a doctor and his mother is a pet psychologist.
Both families have grandparents, uncles, and aunts to deal with.  Their families are multicultural and sometimes things can get confusing for the kids.  Yuhu and Hugs learn new things everyday – and with a little magic, wonder, and optimism, they learn life’s most valuable lessons.
I live in an intergenerational community called BridgeMeadows, set up to support families with children adopted out of the foster care system.  I mentor children in art, reading, and writing.  I spent a lot of time while working on the 12 Lessons for Greatness talking with the children at Bridge Meadows about values.  I was interested in what they thought of each story and any insights they had.  They had plenty!  I think they made the stories better. 

In the stories, there are surprising characters:  a grandmother who works with monkeys, a grandfather who plays wheelchair basketball.  There are talking animals, trips back in time, and flights into outer space. 
In the series, they learn about:
  •    OPTIMISM
  •   CURIOSITY
  •   IMAGINATION
  •   PATIENCE
  •   COURAGE
  •   ENTHUSIASM
  •   HONESTY
  •  SENSE OF HUMOR
  •   ADAPTABILITY
  •   IDEALISM
  •   KNOWLEDGE
  •   COMMUNICATION


This sounds like a lot of heavy information to teach a child but Yuhu and Hugs make the lessons delightful.  They have fantastic adventures but they also have to deal with everyday situations.
If you’d like to get more familiar with the ideas behind the 12 Lessons for Greatness, look at the Play More Be More website.  You can order the books there, too.
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Beautiful Passage of the Week: Girl in the Dark

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This passage is from the book Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey, 2015, a memoir of a woman with such extreme light sensitivity that she must stay in absolute darkness most of the time or she suffers from extreme pain.  She developed it later in life, just as she was developing a new relationship.  It’s a story of chronic illness, and a bit of a love story, too.  This short passage is a reflection on lost friendships:

“Friendship plants itself as a small unobtrusive seed; over time, it grows thick roots that wrap around your heart.  When a love affair ends, the tree is torn out quickly, the operation painful but clean.  Friendship withers quietly, there is always hope of revival.  Only after time has passed do you recognize that it is dead, and you are left, for years afterwards, pulling dry brown fibers from your chest.”

If you’d like to see more of it, here’s a link to NPR’s first read. http://www.npr.org/2015/02/17/386953005/exclusive-first-read-anna-lyndseys-girl-in-the-dark

Emotional Calculous: How to Be Human By Florida Frenz

Posted in creston books, diary, How to be Human by Florida Frenz, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, illustrated book, illustrated diary1 Comment
“Emotions can be broken down into logical pieces most of the time, but what’s hard to grasp is the cause and effect relationship that comes with the emotion.  When a person is sad (the cause), they might cry, listen to slow soft music, contact friends as an effect of the sadness.  It’s a bit more complicated than simply subtracting two, isn’t it?   Still, there are even more complicated situations than that such as looking at an effect and guessing what emotion caused it.  Then, there’s the ability to do that for the feelings of others.  Honestly, don’t you think all those normal people do emotional calculous every day without realizing it?”   
~Florida Frenz
How to Be Human: Diary of an Autistic Girl, by Florida Frenz (a pseudonym), is an extraordinary look into the life of a 15 year old girl with autism.  Although her diagnosis was pretty grim at age 3, the work she did with her parents and her therapist, Shelah Moss, helped Florida become more comfortable in what she came to understand as an alien world.  She explains herself this way:
Though Florida was diagnosed with autism and “mental retardation,” her family and support team were able to break down and address each of her learning and socializing issues.  They tackled each problem as it arose.  When at age 8, Florida realized what it meant to have autism and how different she was from other children, she began working to overcome those parts of her autism that kept her isolated from the rest of the world.  How to Be Human is the result of that process.  Moss says, “She is a gifted artist and writer so using art seemed like an obvious tool to help her work through understanding what, to her, were foreign concepts.  Each picture represents hours where we discussed or read about or role-played different scenarios.  The pictures represent eight years of growth.”
Florida generously shares her hard earned lessons:
I still have trouble figuring out faces.

This is a wonderful introduction to what it’s like to have autism, but even more so, it’s re-introduction to how hard it is to be human.
We all have trouble with bullying ourselves
You can see there’s lots of humor and insight in Florida’s writing.  It humanizes her.  She has autism, she feels like an alien, but she’s a unique and lively girl, too.  I’ve read her book to 6 and 7 year old girls, and have had a 12 year old girl read it.  All of them could identify with the struggles Florida has with the calculous of human emotions.  The art is funny, inviting and inspiring to them.  I’m using it now in a class on journaling for adults to show what a powerful means of expression drawing can be.
All of us struggle with how to figure out when someone is being truthful.  Florida’s insights about bullies, cliques and true friendship are touching.  There’s a rare honesty and authenticity in this slim primer.
If you want to understand what it’s like to have autism, this books takes you right to the heart of the matter.  Of if just you feel you might have accidentally wound up on the wrong planet, it might help you feel like you belong here after all.   
The book is beautifully bound and fits nicely into your hands.  Creston Books is a small independent press publishing beautiful and innovative books for children of all ages.  They’re having their books printed in the United States, so that’s pretty cool.  You can see their catalog by clicking here. 

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