This transcript is not verbatim. It’s been slightly modified (primarily removing “ands” before the beginning of sentences) to be more concise.
About Leslie
I just wanted to say “Hello” because I was delighted to have a chance to talk with Erin about some of the things that you’ve all [students in WRA 860: Visual Rhetoric] been doing and are concerned about and thinking about in your class. These are things that I’ve been interested in I think probably all of my life but particularly when I was in college. I became aware of concerns about humanity and being a professional person and certain passions that I had for causes, one of which was mental illness and the concern that I had about how we were treating people. I came at a time in history when there was the Black Panthers and I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the time, which were having uprisings of that groups and others. It helped shape me along with my family experiences into being a person who was very involved in advocacy of all kinds.
That led me to change my initial thought about being a teacher and following an educational path intoSocial Work. That led me further into a field where it was easy to move for one kind of work to another. SoI worked in clinical practice primarily at the beginning and in a variety of settings: hospitals, children services, adoptions, parole, and probation. That led me to work in a psychiatric hospital, and that led me into a number of other things, which I won’t go into necessarily because they’re all combinations of other kinds of things. And that led me to realize that I had a bunch of transferable knowledge left over from education, which served me very well in doing everything that I did.
It led me very much to enjoying a phrase that I learned in Social Work school, which is conscious use of self. And that has guided me long through the variety of jobs that I had culminating in a career that ended with being our state’s liaison with the US Justice Department in a number of court cases which later became laws in our state. [I] made great differences in people’s lives because I went from being a person who went from doing things one-to-one and in small groups to writing policy and being a monitoring court cases at the federal level, and at the federal courts.
So these are some of the things that I’ve learned throughout the course of my life, and how important it was to stay the course, and how important it was to be comfortable in my own skin. Even when I wavered on the inside, was unsure about what I was going to do, maybe where I was going and what I was going to do,which was true very early in my career, I kept thinking I really didn’t know enough and I wasn’t sure, and so on, to being a confident person, who might have been unsure, but who was very curious and was determined and knew I could find the answer and knew I could do something about it. Maybe not easily, or right away, but I knew I could. So just to tell you a little bit about what happened to me in the course of my life, and some things that I think are useful in concept to you.
