♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their time
and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,.
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Tamar Bresge, an artist,
writer, and educator from Toronto, currently in the Creative Writing Program
at California Institute of the Arts.
You can find the resources mentioned by Tamar Bresge during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
Hi.
My name is Tamar Bresge.
I am 28.
I am born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, and I use she/her pronouns.
I am an artist, writer, and educator.
My practice is rooted in exploring the intersection of text,
literature, language, and image.
And in addition to that, and in complement to it, I am
hearing impaired and vision impaired.
I have something called Usher's syndrome, which is a form of retinitis pigmentosa.
It causes degenerative hearing and vision loss.
And I think this has informed my spirit
to be very enthusiastic and passionate about
taking in as much of the world as I can.
So I'm very curious by nature.
I like to say when I'm teaching to my students and also to myself that
I think the best way to approach the world is not by looking for answers, but
by always looking to ask better questions.
So given my very playful and curious nature, I, of course, had to do a playful
and curious project for this program.
So for my Capstone, I undertook a very big poetry endeavor,
which is a blackout poetry.
It's a form of poetry where you erase from a given text
to create something new out of something existing.
So I decided to take the text "A Room with a View," which is a novel by E. M. Forster.
It's one of my favorite novels, and it's also just chockablock
full of really rich beautiful language about looking, seeing, art, and the sublime.
So I left EM Forster's name, and then also carved my own in a gesture
of co-authorship as I created this new
big project of poetry out of his novel.
So I take the existing text and I carve out a new piece.
So I like to think of each page existing as its own individual piece, but also
the whole collection having a logical form and flow,
but not necessarily needing to be read from start to finish.
I think each page is something you can happen upon.
And then I'm really curious about the page of text as a canvas in itself,
that there's such a sonic quality to the silence
of the negative space of the page.
There's a very visual aspect to the sporadic nature, the freckling
of words and punctuation that is determined to be left
across the page really intentionally.
So this final page reads, I think I interfere.
Never forgive me.
I wish to be a nuisance.
Which is quite true.
So I have finished with this text at this time, and I'm looking forward to trying
to shop it around for a publication.
You can find more about me, Tamar Bresge, at my website, which is tamarbresge.com.
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I am with Tamar Bresge, who is a multi-talented artist and writer
from Toronto, and she's currently in the Creative Writing Program
at California Institute of the Arts.
Welcome, Tamar.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm so excited to be here.
I am excited, too.
I met Tamar thanks to an organization called AccessNow.
They are in Toronto, and they defend the digital rights of people.
They are famous for their work in assessing places and creating
a map with this information collected during these assessments.
They work for a few years now.
Recently, they started a new program for young people with disabilities
to be mentored by peers of professionals
who have already faced some of
the situations that the participants of the program might face later.
The aim was really to accompany them and talk with them
during a six weeks program.
I was paired with Tamar.
I was her mentor.
Not only did Tamar a fantastic job during the program, but I also
discovered her work as an artist and her multiple activities in the arts,
so I invited her to talk about it.
Very exciting. Yes.
So my name is Tamar Bresge.
I use she series pronouns, and
I am an artist, writer, and educator.
I hold a Master's in Studio Art
from the School of Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston.
After finishing that master's, I taught at Tufts University
in the Experimental College for a bit, which was really exciting.
And before that, I went I went to OCAD University in Toronto.
I majored in sculpture installation, and I'm in creative writing.
And so here I am now doing another Master's in creative writing
at California Institute of the Arts.
So I'm speaking from my apartment in Southern California, where it's
like 40 degrees here every day.
Definitely the most hand I've ever been in my life, I guess.
Is the air conditioning working well?
Yes. Thank you for asking.
My air conditioning wasn't working for almost two weeks in this heat wave.
So I went a little heat-fever delusional, but I'm much better now.
Thank you for asking.
Okay. So I was wondering what brought you to the arts?
Did you have a family that was particularly attracted to the arts world,
or did you one day discover that yourself and say,
That's what I want to do when I grow up?
Yeah, I love this question because I don't have a super simple answer for it.
And I think this is something that anybody who knows me will probably know
I can't ever give a one simple directive answer for anything.
But I think one of the most important pieces in my interest in the arts
is my grandmother, my father's mother, who passed away last year.
She was just so passionate about culture
and exchanging culture and reading,
going to museums, going to plays.
She would take me to all of these experiences from a really young age.
And at the same time, I was really lucky to travel as a child.
And my mom likes art.
My dad likes art.
Neither of them work necessarily in the arts.
But we would go to the museums that you're supposed to go to on our trips
and enjoy those experiences.
And I don't even think I understood as a child how
lucky I was to be so immersed in art and culture,
which I'm deeply appreciative for now and also a little envious of my younger self
that she maybe could have paid a little bit more attention,
but I always really enjoyed the arts from that perspective.
I was really into film and writing in high school.
I had really formative experiences in one of my high school writing classes,
and I was really timid to be an artist.
I didn't really think that it was a title that I deserved
because I wasn't good at technically drawing the way that
my second grade art teacher pointed to my best friend and was like,
you can draw a representation of a real object,
so you're a good artist, whereas I could not draw
a representation of something.
So I inherently was not a good artist.
It took a long time for me to let myself, I think, be brave to just really try
and make art and not worry as much about the labels, about what I was.
And yeah, I actually went to university for something completely different for one year,
wasn't enjoying it, took a year off to work, applied to art school.
And I've been an artist ever since.
I say artist in quotation marks because
even now I find it's a strange word.
Maybe it comes with a lot of baggage, a lot of presumptions
about what that means to be an artist.
But I definitely think I'm an artist.
Long answer.
You are.
[Laughs.]
Yeah... so...
Did you have an aha moment?
This aha moment that says, Okay, I'm going to stop what I was doing
in whatever I was doing before and go to an arts university.
Yeah. Again, it's not the one moment.
I had an aha stretch of time where I actually think I had to be...
And I don't want to romanticize this tortured artist narrative
because I really don't like it.
But I got so unhappy with what I was doing.
And I feel like I got to a point where I was like, there's one thing
that I think will feed my soul.
There's one thing that brings me light and brings me joy
and makes me really happy to be alive.
And why am I not doing it?
So, yeah, it was...
I guess it became pretty clear that at a pretty tough time, there was really just
one thing that was making me so happy.
And it was looking at art, making art, engaging with the arts.
At that time, it was photography that I was really, really curious about because
as I didn't say in my introduction, I I have a blinding eye disease.
So I have, for listeners who are familiar or not, I have retinitis pigmentosa,
and I have a very specific form of it, which is Usher's syndrome.
So together, this means that I have degenerative
vision loss and hearing loss.
So I have tunnel vision, which means that my visual field
just gets narrower and narrower.
You can imagine looking through binoculars or
even as extreme as looking through straws.
If you hold straws up to your eyes and just
try and see through a very narrow field.
This also means I have very, very, very little night vision, which is one
of the first ways I knew something was wrong with my vision was
going up the steps in the movie theater.
If we came five minutes late to the movie, it was very difficult for me as a kid.
And then I also wear hearing aids for my low hearing.
So photography, I think allowing myself to really work
in photography and embrace visual art, I do think part of why I was so hesitant
and afraid to work in it is that when I was 15 and I was diagnosed
with this disease, the doctor, the first thing she said to me is,
Plan for your future.
Plan a career that you won't be able to see, basically.
I mean, what was I supposed to do with that?
It made me feel like immediately something that I love so much was
not allowed and off limits and taboo and wrong.
There was a concrete wall, six feet wide between me and
the possibility of working in the arts.
It took a lot of work for me to, I think, just overcome, and I still work on it,
to overcome that mental blockade of what I think I can and can't do
because of words like blindness and because of words like artists.
Those things don't often go together in the same sentence.
But that's what I find so exciting now is smushing those two things together
and seeing what can happen.
Photography is how I got my start because I really like the idea of
trying to capture an entire lifetime of feeling
in one single image, one single moment.
And that was the original assignment for me as an artist.
Yeah, that was photography, but then you went through so many different streams.
I would say you were a poet
who works with words and put that
in a visual and audio and everything.
I guess it ties to photography,
too, because what was your process
when we were trying to take pictures of something with your tunnel vision?
There's the technical aspect, and then there's the artistic aspect.
From a technical aspect, looking through the lens finder of a camera
is actually very liberating because it's this tiny piece.
It actually really complements having tunnel vision because you
put your eye up to this tiny hole.
But because of the shape of the lens, you actually see so much more.
So I feel like by looking through the camera body, I do think it
invites access to a lot more visual information, which is exciting.
Even talking about it makes me feel hungry in this creative way.
I want it. I crave it.
I need it.
So there's that piece of it.
And then artistically, I actually was using text
in most of my early photography.
I remember in my first film class, which was really scary and challenging
because I was developing film in a dark room,
where a dark room is hard for anybody. I have almost no vision, right?
So I'm literally developing film almost completely blind,
like really, really little vision.
And My first really exciting project where I knew I was shooting on film,
I did this series of photos that just said the phrase, It is what it is.
And I scratched it into the skin of a banana.
I wrote it on a mirror and like, lipstick.
I made a latte, and you know,
you can do our latte art on the top.
I use cinnamon sprinkle to write, It is what it is, very delicately.
Yeah, thinking about
the opportunity to bring aphoristic text, like an aphorism,
a phrase as small as possible with maximum impact, minimal text,
is how I tried to, I guess, fuse writing and photography right from the get-go.
Also traveling.
You did that during traveling.
Yeah, I did with the -
"I miss places that never existed."
It's my... I don't know.
It's like my...
A motto, maybe?
It's a little piece of text art that I just make again and again
and again in many different ways.
So I put it on a T-shirt and stood in front of Michelangelo's David
in Florence and set up a very particular self-portrait to stand in space and time
with this very old, very acclaimed statue,
which is in this really grand
museum, which it also wasn't even built for that space.
So there's this collision of the time that Michelangelo made the David.
There's the time of a few hundred years later when it was placed in the building it's in now.
And then there's the time of me coming in in 2018, wearing this shirt I made,
I miss places that never existed.
But also taking the photo on a vintage camera
instead of on a contemporary digital camera.
Having that shot on film and this anachronistic play with time and space.
This all feels like very...
I think Play is the most important word for my practice.
I really try to be playful and sometimes with levity,
but also with serious curiosity and
contemplation, and, dare I say, philosophy.
I'm very curious about
my relationship to myself, my relationship to the landscape,
and my relationship to other, everyone else, everything else.
So I do take the -
I take the poetry into space and I take myself through space, I guess.
Speaking of poetry, there is a specific project that I know of
because I followed the different steps of this project.
And can you talk a little bit about what you did during the mentorship program?
Yes, I'd be so happy to talk about this.
It is still at the very forefront of my mind.
So in my poetic practice, one of the ways that I really like to work is
through erasure poetry, which is when you take an existing text and redact from it,
remove from it, erase from it.
There are different visual ways to do it.
I've done work where I use a Sharpie and really black out, and then
leaving those black lines feels really intentional.
For this work, I digitally erased around words from every page of a book
to make a whole collection of new poems.
So I wanted to work with the book, A Room with a View, which is
one of my favorite books, also very tied to Florence, which has felt very
tied to my artistic practice.
So I took A Room with a View by E. M. Forrester,
and every single page I treated like a canvas, I guess,
an existing canvas,
and I just erased and carved a new poem
out of every single individual page to a total of, I think it's 206 pages
in six weeks, which was definitely my most ambitious poetry project
in scale and in just duration.
It was so exciting to finish it.
As you know, I feel like, Diane, every week I was like, I'm not going to finish it in time.
Okay, I'm going to finish it in time.
Okay, no, there's no way I'm going to finish it in time.
And then I somehow pulled it off, which I'm really proud of.
And yeah, I'm sitting on this manuscript now.
A very big, very intentional poetry collection that I guess
the most important piece of it for me is the book is literally called A Room with a View,
which I've retitled The View.
And there's just so much language about
looking, about vision, but particularly about something I'm so
interested in, which is the language that we use for looking and seeing as this
language that we use for knowledge and affirmation of the self.
I've said this before in public speaking,
but we use the words "to see you,"
like "I see you," as though we're saying, I know you.
I know you deeply. I know you intimately.
I know you on this spiritual or
ethereal level that you can know someone.
So there's so much rich language of looking and seeing and art
and humor in that text that it just seemed like the perfect block of marble,
if you will for me to carve from.
And I was also very impressed by the text itself, the result
of the poetry that comes through it.
And when I was reading it, because I come from music,
I could hear some level of music.
With poetry, you already have that.
With poetry, you have the music of the - the musicality of the poem itself
and the rhythm and the words.
Everyone can have a different music version of this poetry.
I was having mine when I was reading your text and I was like,
that would be really...
I would hear that and that things, that background behind.
I could see the pose being here hear and feel that.
And that was very impressive because you did that with how many pages?
Over 200, like 206, 210, maybe.
Thank you.
Thank you for bringing up music because that's actually such an important part
of the work to me, which I completely missed addressing,
that I often speak about this work as being like sheet music and
a musical notation of a breath and sound and
the body as an instrument through reading.
I leave really intentional punctuation.
Some pages get no punctuation.
Some pages can be almost only punctuation.
Where punctuation gets left in terms of negative space, I really think of this
as beats, notes, rest stops, signatures.
So it's really gratifying from a musician to hear from you
that that comes through on the page.
Yes, and I would...
If one day you go further with it and you record it,
I would love to participate in that.
Yes, please.
I would love that as well.
Okay. Thank you for that.
I was also curious.
So we talked about the poetry of words, the photography.
Are you also painting?
I love painting.
I think it's my least talented area, but I enjoy it incredibly.
And I think maybe because I don't think I'm an excellent painter,
maybe it's the only medium where I really let myself take off the pressure,
do whatever I want, mix, hit the canvas with that brush, see what happens.
Maybe it's my my most experimental just because I'm so not trying to impress myself,
because I never impress myself, but I just I get to enjoy it.
I do paint. I love it.
With this diversity of activities and everything
accessibility related, it's is also something, right?
You have your own access needs that go to your arts.
I was wondering, what for you is accessibility in the arts?
What does it mean for you?
I love this question, and I struggle with this question.
It brings me back to my hesitancy to say anything means one thing to me
because I think everything means many things.
It's at the core of who I am as a person.
But I mean, number one, accessibility means a seat at the table for everybody.
Accessibility means that you're not an exception.
You're an equal, insignificant participant to anybody else.
I don't think there should have to be this feeling of feeling, this feeling
of needing, that you're needing more than someone else.
I struggled with this so much when I was in both of my visual arts programs,
my undergrad and my master's, of feeling like I'm difficult, I'm needing.
I'm needing so much more than the people in my cohorts that I'm afraid to vocalize it
or I'm vocalizing it, and I'm afraid that people will think I'm difficult.
My younger sister said to me, she's so wise, when I was struggling,
I guess, pretty openly, emotionally with trying to navigate how much I wanted
to share about my disability in my previous education, she said to me,
Accommodation doesn't take away from anyone.
It only gives. It only opens up space.
No one loses by an accommodation being made.
And she doesn't have a disability.
And she just said it so simply to me.
She could see that where I was carrying
years of feeling a burden,
feeling so much burdenship on the inside that I wouldn't even ask to see if people
would make me feel like I was a burden.
It was so internalized.
The biggest thing that I'd like to see, and I think the most realistic step
in making change, is opening up communication.
I teach undergrads, I teach first years who are
at the first time in the university level classroom, learning who they want to be,
what they want to do, most importantly, how they want to write, how they want
to communicate themselves to the world.
And I try my darndest teach with radical honesty.
I try to be radically honest with my students about my body
appropriately, what I was - I was going to say suffer with,
but I hate that word because I don't suffer, about how my body works in a way
that helps me help them, and helps them help me in space.
On my first day of introductions, I say who I am, what I'm doing, what I'm studying,
a bit of professional history.
And then I tell them that I'm low vision, I'm low hearing.
This is how it manifestsests in the classroom.
These are things that I've done with students in the past that have helped me.
If you notice that I'm not seeing you and your hand is up,
I'm not ignoring you, I'm not seeing you.
So if you guys can help each other,
if you see that I'm missing something, please let me know.
I think starting from the baseline of making those conversations,
not only okay, but encouraged, welcome, comfortable, easy,
something like I'm at a point now where it's basically a script to me.
There's very little emotional cost to say that
because I'm comfortable at this point.
But the first time I said that to a room of students,
not only was it my first time teaching, but it was my first time
telling a group of students I had a disability and worrying what that would mean.
So that's extremely emotionally expensive.
And I can appreciate how that's emotionally expensive
for other people to get started.
So all I can say is, again, radical honesty, trying to use,
I don't know, the thick skin I built up over the years to
hopefully lead by example and make that a more comfortable, inviting and
elevating space for students with any disability or otherness to feel
comfortable, and the very least, sharing with me about it and sharing them
their needs, but hopefully sharing with their peers as well.
And I have to say, it's been a really, really rewarding experience so far.
I do feel like I've had really incredible classroom environments
that I'm really appreciative for.
And I think that as an educator, I'm focusing on
the classroom environment for accessibility.
But I think these are lessons that we take outside the classroom
every single moment.
Classroom is a space to play and to experiment with safety because there are
rules in place to protect students as they try to learn who they are.
Starting on groundwork, talking, talking about who we are
and making it okay to be who you are out loud.
We were talking about that communication as a means for education
for people who don't know what...
In your case, you have some invisible disabilities.
When we meet you, we don't necessarily know that you have tunnel vision
or hearing loss.
We had this conversation with someone who
tried to implement some accommodations,
but in a way, didn't discuss with the people in the classroom, or didn't
discuss with the parents, or didn't discuss with the administration.
It needs to be a real team effort.
The students are receptive to what you're saying, and they learn from
But then you learn from them because they will give you some feedback.
It's the same with trying to
talk about a disability in front of people
who don't know anything about disability.
But then there's this little - It goes with the storytelling for me.
It goes with the way you are communicating things and say, Well, it's fine, but
just know that I don't see you if you're here.
But it's fine.
If you go here, then I see you.
Yeah, and they forget all the time.
I probably say once a week, I have to say to my students,
Please remember to speak up. I'm hard of hearing.
And I just repeat and I repeat and I repeat.
I think because it's an invisible disability, it requires
maybe more repetition.
But it's a double-edged sword because I think that there are a lot of things that
people who don't have - who have visible disabilities experience very different things than me.
I have my cane literally right here.
It's weird in the background.
It sits on my desk.
I don't really use it because it's a very different experience
of being in the world for me.
It gives me so much,
but it makes me feel, like, emotionally insecure.
Maybe it makes me feel more vulnerable. It's difficult.
So I tend to only use my identifiers
in the airport, where where on the one hand,
it's really busy, so it's really helpful.
But also, airports are such transitional spaces that I'm like, well,
I'll never seeing any of these people again.
It doesn't feel like it matters so much.
But even as I say this, it doesn't matter ever.
I can hear my own internal struggle
with wanting to lead by example,
by being the best, most confident, comfortable, disabled person I can be.
But it's not so easy.
It's not easy, but I'm working on it.
Do you know Alex Bulmer, the playwright?
Yes
So her work is entirely into...
Her recent play is called "Perceptual Archaeology or How to Travel Blind."
She did a lot of things about trying to explore space in her own poetry
of what she can imagine instead of based on her memories of something
she was seeing and doesn't see anymore,
but on her own imagination of the space.
That's great.
She has no...
I mean, sometimes she travels with a dog, sometimes she is with a cane,
sometimes she goes wild and she says, I'm going to go and travel
kilometers and kilometers and go to another country or do the Camino.
Okay, let's do it.
It doesn't matter.
What you say just reminded me
of this conversation I had with her about
adapting to spaces, but also because people see you in a way
doing something, like trying to navigate or explore or talk.
Then make them think. It's never totally...
Even if you're students - you have to repeat some things,
at a certain point, they're like, Oh, yeah.
When you say, Oh, please, I remind you that there's this,
then they say, Oh, yeah.
Inside their head, they said, oh, yeah, I forgot that.
And you can see the light bulb going off.
Which is such a normal part of being a human being.
We make mistakes like that all the time.
You call somebody by the wrong name because you've only met them once.
Or I don't know, you are 10 minutes late to a meeting
because you went to the second floor instead of the third.
Those 'oops' moments, they happen all the time.
It's very normal. It's very human.
I think the significant consequence is...
It's a lot of work to feel like
you're teaching people to treat you
like a normal person sometimes.
I have a lot of patience for it, especially in the classroom.
But one in 25 interactions, I'll be like,
I just don't feel like being your teacher today
about disability, not about...
I always feel like teaching my students, but I don't feel like teaching you
how to speak to me as a disabled person.
That's a very particular flavor that
disabled people get to taste I think.
True, yes.
And you're teaching what?
You told me you're teaching communication?
Is that right?
I'm teaching first year writing, so essay writing.
Yeah.
Well, the students are in a lecture on...
It's really interesting.
It's about intimacy and technology, but it's in the critical studies department,
which is to basically get them to learn how to write essays, how to communicate.
But it's so cool because I'm teaching it in an art school
where they're very encouraged to...
I mean, at least I really like to encourage...
I'm a creative writer. I like to experiment with my writing.
I like to encourage them to communicate clearly, but to think about
how they can incorporate their own artistic practices into their writing.
That should be encouraged.
I think we're at such a moment of every moment, more and more
intersectionality in the arts, but also just in identity at large.
So I really like to bring that into the classroom, which again,
circles back to if there's a disability that's part of your intersectionality,
bring that into the writing and bring it into the creativity.
I don't know. I wish I had
had access to that when I was younger.
I wish I had had the confidence and the comfort and the knowledge
of knowing that that was an option for me because I feel like it saved my life.
It saves my life every day.
I'm really happy in my life right now.
And my relationship to my art and writing practice is fundamental to that.
That's the biggest part of who I am.
My disability is an important identifier to me because it got me here.
It's a really important part of my creative practice.
But I think my creative practice is my biggest identifier.
It's so tied to who I am as a person, and I need the disability to be part of that.
I love and cherish and appreciate and coddle my disability.
It's such an important part of me, and I'm very proud of it.
I'm proud of myself for being in a place in my life where I can love it
because it wasn't always like that.
Who were your supports and your
inspirations or the people who made you
realize that you were a valuable artist?
If you had some people to think of, teachers or people in your family
or people, or artists, who really showed you a way, who would it be and why?
I have the just clearest
answer for this question, which is a sad one
because my graduate advisor from my undergraduate program.
Her name is Danielle Abrams.
She changed me.
She changed me in so many ways.
She just...
Hardly knowing me, even from our first conversation, before I even accepted to
be a candidate in that program.
I think when I talk about the language of saying to somebody,
I see you means I know you, I think I've never felt so seen by somebody until I spoke to her.
She just had that magical quality, I think, to make
so many people feel like that.
And she very sadly passed away right before I finished that program,
which was just terrible and still is terrible.
I think there was a really beautiful experience that came
right after she passed away.
The outpouring of so many people
who said the exact same thing as me.
She made me feel special.
She made me feel seen.
She made me feel like I could do anything. I was like, wait a second.
I thought I was a special one.
But I think it's so beautiful because I think
she was so special that she could really just see and connect with people,
lift people up, make people feel seen, make every person feel valuable,
regardless of who they are, where they're coming from, where they're going.
That's my biggest inspiration as an educator.
That's the person that I want to be.
I want to be able to not just open doors for students in the world,
but open doors within themselves.
Danielle gave me the gift of believing
that what I had to say wasn't just worthy
of being heard, but that it was important and something we're fighting for.
She such a beautiful person, one of the most important people
that I've ever encountered in my life.
And my family give me incredible support.
I literally couldn't be here.
I have two sisters and my parents.
I'm so lucky to have all of them.
My grandfather, my grandmother, who I miss dearly, I dreamed about last night.
I have a really beautiful family.
I'm one of 10 grandchildren, and I just grew up at least once a week,
but usually more having family dinners.
with my grandparents, two aunts, two uncles, my parents, myself, my sisters,
and then all those first cousins.
And I think having this built in network
of love and security
to be my weirdest self at least once a week with those cousins to be the weirdest.
I was such a weird kid.
I'm 29, and I still feel like I'm a weird kid.
But getting that space to have the safety to be as weird as you want to be
and still feel loved, that's one of the greatest gifts a person could have.
And every day of my life, as I get older and older,
I appreciate that more and more.
But Danielle, I just think about...
I think about Danielle all the time, Danielle and my grandmother, Sarah Bresge,
are probably the two biggest ones for me.
Well, thank you so much for sharing your story with us and all your experience.
I guess by listening to this podcast or visioning this podcast,
sometimes you have one person who say, That's exactly how I feel.
I want to do that.
And so you might have inspired someone who's listening today.
I hope so. I'm crossing my fingers.
I really hope so.
Please let me know if that has been the case for you.
Okay, thank you so much.
And I'm sure we will talk to each other again soon.
For sure.
Okay, thank you so much, Diane.
And thank you for being the best mentor in the program.
Literally the best of the best.
Speaking of people who inspire me, you're sitting right here
in the Zoom room with me.
Thank you for sharing your time with me.
It was a pleasure, really.
When the process of pairing the mentors and the mentees -
For us, at least, they did a very good job because
when I received your documents,
I was already, Wow, that's great.
I really want to meet her.
I had the exact the same experience on my end.
Even before we were officially paired, just when I was having
the conversations about...
They asked me what I'm looking for in a mentor.
As soon as I described, they were like, Oh, I've got someone in mind.
And just the way that there was so much certainty, I was like,
It's going to be good. And I was like...
Thank you again.
You're welcome. Okay.
Have a great one. And talk soon.
Thank you. Okay.
Thanks, Diane. Bye-bye.
Bye.
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