Tonya R. Taylor
My life has been an adventure. I work at a major U.S. corporation in textile technical services, and hold an M.A. in Folk Studies, but that's just where I am now. I spent the first years of my adult life working with special populations, beginning with an Easter Seals camp where I worked in twelve-day sessions with a variety of different groups from autism, diabetes and epilepsy to moderate and severe physical and mental handicaps. My final internship was at University of Kentucky’s A.B. Chandler’s children’s unit in the Early Childhood Development department, where I truly learned the incredible value of play in not only offsetting pain but in healing. I later went on to manage the Therapeutic Recreation department in two physical and mental rehabilitation hospitals, working with the Speech, Occupational and Physical Therapists using recreation as way to reach physical, mental and social goals. It’s amazing how long a person who has had a stroke can stand if they are doing something they love and how easily the words to a favorite song can come to an aphasic patient.
My patients taught me how to fry potatoes, catch catfish, hang a deer stand, and enjoy playing bingo. They also taught me how to do more than exist, they taught me how to live. I taught them how to adapt their recreational activities to their new situations and how to keep doing those things that matter, as they are the very things that make life worth living.
In healthcare, documentation is king, so I truly understand the importance of record keeping from a funding and legal standpoint as well as goal progress. I have been responsible for many patient charts on a daily basis and have found ways to maintain accurate and concise records in a timely manner while still making time for direct care. I was the sponsor for the first spinal cord injury support group in Bowling Green and obtained funding for a racing chair for one of our athletes. I organized and implemented hospital-wide activities and held community outings every week to help my patients learn to manage outside the institution so that they could have a successful return to their lives. My time managing the volunteers at the hospital was certainly well spent. The challenge of finding the right fit of volunteer, client, and activity was one that I enjoyed. There was a magic that happened as volunteers and patients became friends, each giving something of themselves to the other and receiving something back in kind.
I have had many careers between Therapeutic Recreation and my current life in the corporate world, each teaching me something for the next. My sales experience taught me to listen and to be patient, while being especially careful how I word things so that I could reach a variety of cultural groups. My preservation work taught me to balance my own time with costs to provide my clients a service worth more than they paid; it also taught me to navigate the political waters inherent in any group. My folk studies work has reminded me that people need to tell their stories and that those stories have value beyond the teller.
I am also a preservationist/folklorist--a doer in addition to being a thinker and collector. I believe that people and cultures shape our buildings, villages, towns and cities and are, in turn, shaped by them. For this part of my life, my areas of expertise (if anyone can ever be an expert) are in architectural restoration, architectural history, folk and material culture. I have spent many years studying and repairing buildings and grave markers and have perhaps an unhealthy fascination with objects.
My main area of interest in folk studies is in the people by and for whom the architecture or marker was created. The stories told by and about these objects are invaluable to our future as a people. While it is important to listen to those stories while they exist within living memories, in my opinion, documents, photographs, measurements, and even stories, are poor ersatz for buildings, art, and monuments. Allowed to remain intact, the objects themselves will become important to new generations, creating new places within the spaces and giving new life and meaning to these physical representations of our culture while bridging past, present and future.
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*A term borrowed from Roger Abrahams’ “Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism in Folkloristics.” The explanation he provides for vernacular vigor captures my take on folklore…and life. Here is a look at the term with a little more soil around the root:
“The stuff that folklorists study is human accomplishment. It arises from the creative vernacular response of humans on their most gregarious occasions. It is a way of responding to forces that would otherwise make us into a race of only spectators. A vernacular randomness and even rowdiness stands at the center of the subject—it involves people negotiating with one another by drawing on the practices of the past as a means of addressing the present. Folk culture stands in contrast at every level with the construction of official culture even in those situations in which reigning political ideas are said to derive from das volk, or the common man. Vernacular vigor announces itself from without and within whenever parody, lampoon, or carnivalesque motives enter into cultural production. Here I refer not only to the ways in which political and social humor have entered into the maintenance of spirit while resistance movements have had their way with repressive regimes, but also to the vernacularity implicit in the conservationist mood that seeks to resist consumption and to privilege recycling, remodeling, renovating, repairing, restoring, customizing, and humanizing mass-produced objects and environments.”
Abrahams, Roger. 1993. “Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism in Folkloristics.” Journal of American Folklore 106(419):3-37.
Vernacular Vigor is displayed in this Bunny Sculpture's bikini, placed by the author. I have since become close friends with the Bunny's creator and we still enjoy talking about the way our paths first crossed.