Kit Roberts-Johnson - Finding Your Voice: Kit Roberts-Johnson's Memoir Journey

In this episode of We Women Writers, host Jane Jones interviews Kit Roberts-Johnson, a speech language pathologist who shares her unexpected journey into writing her memoir, 'Frozen Voices.' Kit discusses the challenges she faced while writing, the importance of finding her voice, and the therapeutic nature of the writing process during the COVID pandemic. She reflects on the differences between clinical writing and personal storytelling, the evolution of her writing style, and the significance of connecting with others through her experiences. Kit emphasizes the value of having a developmental editor and shares insights on the editing process, ultimately highlighting the fluid nature of writing and personal growth.

Takeaways

• Kit Roberts-Johnson's journey into writing was unexpected and transformative.
• The importance of finding one's voice is a central theme in her writing.
• The contrast between clinical writing and personal storytelling is significant.

Quote:

"I had to learn to look back on my life."

Resources:

Kit Roberts-Johnson Website: https://kitrobertsjohnson.com/about-kit-roberts-johnson/

Frozen Voices: A Speech Therapist’s Alaskan Memoir: https://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Voices-Speech-Therapists-Alaskan/dp/B0CJXCRK16/ref

Chapters

• 0:00 WWW Intro
• 1:57 The Journey to Writing a Memoir
• 3:26 Life as a Speech Language Pathologist in Alaska
• 7:46 The Impact of COVID on Writing
• 10:14 Exploring Personal Challenges and Growth
• 13:27 Childhood Experiences Shaping Professional Path
• 18:28 The First Encounters with Communication Disorders
• 22:34 Transitioning from Clinical to Personal Writing
• 28:35 The Difference Between Clinical Reports and Memoir Writing
• 34:24 Finding Voice in Writing and Personal Growth
• 40:04 Transforming Criticism into Humor
• 42:59 Finding Your Voice
• 45:08 Writing During Isolation
• 49:09 The Evolution of Writing
• 57:21 The Importance of Editing
• 1:08:53 Encouragement for Aspiring Writers

Transcript

Jane Jones (00:27)

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to We Women Writers. I'm Jane, and I'm the host today. And with us, we have Kit Roberts-Johnson, and she is an accomplished speech language pathologist. She spent 31 years of her career honing her profession in Alaska, flying to isolated villages and opening the largest private speech clinic in state history at the time. In her memoir, Frozen Voices: A Speech Therapist's Alaskan Memoir, Kit invites her readers to experience the adventures and challenges she faced in The Last Frontier. Kit explores the theme of the inherent dignity of all life and discovers that we all have been silenced in our own way by trauma. Her writing journey influenced her focus on the people she treated, helping them gain fluency, correct dyslexia, and find ways to speak with a healthy voice. Kit speaks to interested groups about her experiences in helping people find their voice. Kit currently lives in California with her husband, two dogs, and one cat. She has a lovely stepdaughter, and for fun she plays and sings with an all-Ukulele group, and she continues to practice the meditation practice she learned in Alaska. Welcome Kit to the We Women Writers Podcast.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (01:54)

Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here.

Jane Jones (01:57)

Excellent. Thank you. I appreciate you being here. We're going to begin with the request to please tell us about your writing journey.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (02:08)

Well, I never imagined in my life that I would write a book. I had spent my career writing reports. And reports are full of statistics and just the facts, ma'am. And then here's what I'm gonna do to fix this problem. I had never written anything that I had to talk about myself or my life, what happened to me, what happened to the people that I knew, and when I retired, COVID hit. And I had already had in the back of my mind that as a speech language pathologist who started work in the Los Angeles city school district, where I went to college at California State University, Northridge, that's what most, like over 80 % of speech language pathologists do. We work in public schools. And so that's what I did for one year. And then my husband and I decided to move to Seattle, and I worked in their public schools for a year. And then we moved to Vashon Island, which is a little place right outside of Seattle, it's an island. I took the ferry every day to Seattle. But then the school job came open on the island. So, I took the island job, and I was still working in a public school with mostly, you know, sixth-grade and under. And so, my life was going on like a basic normal speech language pathologist. And then suddenly my husband said one day, I want to take a job in Alaska. And I'm like, what? So, we did end up in Alaska, and we moved to Fairbanks, and the one and only job available was taken, so I sent some resumes to Anchorage, which is the big city, and an agency there hired me to go to Nome for one day. And they liked my work to go check some preschool children, screen some children, which is fine. I was very familiar with that. And then they liked me. They liked my work. And the next week they sent me to St. Lawrence Island which is an island off of Nome between Alaska and Russia. And you actually can see Russia from there. And I did see it from there. And thus started the rest of 31 years of my life flying all around the state of Alaska for work and meeting many different cultures. There are over 200 Native Alaskan languages spoken in Alaska. They used to think it was about 20. Now we know there's over 200. And I had to learn about new cultures, how they lived, how they thought. And also, that wasn't the only thing I did, because if they hadn't called me while I was sitting around the house at Anchorage, and by then I thought, you know what, Kit, why don't you open a private practice? Because there was nobody around, there was nobody doing anything. And about 7 % of the population has some kind of a communication disorder. Like there's hearing impairment, there's speech development problems, there are voice disorders, there's people who have laryngectomy because they've had throat cancer, they've taken their voice boxes gone, we teach them how to speak, people who need computer systems to speak like Stephen Hawking and that group of people, the adults weren't being served. So I thought, you know what, I'm gonna open a private practice. So, I did that and I flew to the lower 48, which is what we call the rest of America. And I started taking week-long seminars two a year, I committed to two a year to learn how to work with these different populations. Things that were covered in college, sure, stuttering, voice disorders. But when somebody walks in the door and you actually have to treat them, I needed a plan. I needed to know how to get from A to Z. I wasn't gonna wing it. And so, I am a very like, long ago, I can't help it. I'm organized. So, from there grew into this clinic and I vowed I was never gonna have it employee because I didn't want to mess with it. All the, you know, stuff you had to do with that, the paperwork. And after all was said and done and we moved away, I thought to myself, what an amazing life I have had as a speech language pathologist. Most of us would have been in that public school for their entire life and they would have retired with a nice pension, and they would have helped hundreds of people. So, I, you know, at the time, this was 1976 when we moved there. At the time, I was 26 years old. You can count on one hand how many speech therapists had been to a village because just the year before they passed the bill that mandated that speech therapy had to be covered in the public schools.

So suddenly we were needed. And that's why they were flying me out to the villages, because it was a law now, it was a federal law. And they got money to do it. The federal government gave money for special education and were considered part of the special education umbrella. So, it was just so amazing and so unique that I just had to write it down. COVID came, couldn't do anything else.

I had been singing with a trio at the time before we were pretty busy. The end time trio and that had to ban because you couldn't go anywhere and sing anymore. So that was over. And I sat down to write, and I'm telling you, like they say, it was like going through therapy. Cause I really had to look back, and I was gonna write a memoir about it, of course. And I wrote down, and I, you know, of course, I went to YouTube to find out how to do it. And they said, just start writing, write everything you can think of. And then you go back later and you call. So I wrote over like 104,000 words and I found a developmental editor, and I sent her the book and she politely wrote me back, Janice Harper was her name out of Seattle, that I had four books in there and none of them were a memoir but she would help me to write a memoir. And so, she started working with me, and it was painful day by painful day I went through. She said, Kit, you have to tell about you. What did you go through? See, I'm used to writing the report. Here's the facts, ma'am. I went to Alaska, I flew to this village, I did this there, and then I came home. Then I went to this village and I did this, and then I came home. Okay, those are the facts. What drove me to do that? Nobody was like, see, entrepreneur was a brand new word in the 1970s. And I just came out of college where the second wave of feminism had just come out. We were led to believe we could be anything. And even if unfortunately we would like try a male dominated field, we would find out that they weren't that inviting. They maybe didn't want us in that field. So we weren't treated very well. And which is why we first learned the world words, sexual harassment. And it became a thing, and that you couldn't do it. And there eventually became some laws about it. But I think it probably is still pretty prevalent. But anyway, so she said, you have to have an arc of how you changed over time. What was different about you from when you started your book to the end of your book? We have to see you changing in the book. And I thought, well, I don't wanna have to talk about that stuff. That's like the bad stuff that happened to me. I just wanna talk about how exciting it was and what an adventure it was and how good it made me feel to be able to help people in such remote places versus the people who, you know, got taken to school, had a bus, and all that other stuff down in the lower 48. To me, they had it made. These people, it was harsh. It was harsh, harsh environment they lived in. And they've been there for 10,000 years. So anyway, I had to learn to look back on my life, things that I already knew, things that I thought I dealt with, and see how did they fit into my life? How did they drive me into my career? And how did they shore me up to do what I did even while I felt very sick for most of it because I had to have a hysterectomy when I was 31and I was put on a hormone called Premarin that gave me constant headaches, nausea, stiff muscles, but there was nothing I could do about it. There were no other options given to me. I was threatened if I didn't take it, I would have osteoporosis and heart problems when I got older. Of course, I did take it for 18 years, and I was very ill most of the time, but I had to learn to ignore it.

And that's one thing that I had learned from a very young child. I had three brothers. I was the second oldest. And I learned pretty early on that boys don't like girls, but I thought they just didn't like me personally. I was stunning. Just a few years ago, I heard my older brother say, well, “I just didn't want you to come in my room because I didn't like girls”.

I thought it was because he didn't like me and that my other little brother, the other ones that came along, you know, every two years, they would do things like, you know, get spiders and throw them at me and this kind of stuff, just like, like they could. And of course, what did I do? I just ran and screamed like a girl, of course, had lots of spiders on me. So, I kind of learned early on that men were the boss, and I had to go along to get along. And so if they're out playing army and I'm alone by myself, and I am sad and alone, because I'm the only girl, and I go out to play with them, well, I can be the nurse. Okay. But at least I got to play. But I get bored with that pretty quickly because I didn't particularly like playing army, but it was the only thing I could do with them. So, so I did it and then the other thing, so that is one thing, working with men, getting along with men, I learned how to just be quiet and figure out what I was gonna do my own way. I just have to kind of pretty much go it alone. And then when I was three, my dad got polio. And this really hit me like a ton of bricks. And I realized, this was probably the defining moment for my psychological problems, if you want to call them that, my just psychological being for most of the rest of my life. And I was one of those little girls that was afraid when I went to bed at night, I thought I had wolves under the bed. And so, he would lie down on my bed. I had a headboard, and it had a little lamp. I'd be in bed all tucked in, and he'd lay down on the covers and he would read the newspaper. And I would just lay my arm across his chest, know, nice warm chest, and pretty soon, you know, I was out. And of course, he would just go to his own bed with my mom. And one day he didn't come to bed. He was gone, and I couldn't understand it. I was three and my mother had just had my next brother down and he was just three months old. So here she was with three children, you know, under the age of five, and her husband has polio. He's in the hospital. All the doctors, he had been on a fishing trip the weekend before, and all the doctors in town were in Seattle. We lived in Pasco, Washington, which is on the dry side. All the doctors in town were in Seattle on a polio symposium. He was in an iron lung. They didn't know if he was going to live or die. I found all this out later. Of course, I didn't know that then. All I knew is he was gone. And my mother, bless her heart, of course, she tried to hide it, but her fear, her anxiety, it seeped into me. I was afraid. I was afraid he was gone, that's all I knew. And one day she said, “We're gonna go see daddy, get in the car.” I was ecstatic, and they took us to the hospital, and I thought I was gonna sit on his lap and he was gonna hug me. Oh, everything's gonna be all right now, this is great. But that didn't happen. They wheeled him out on a higher level at the back of the hospital, legs extended, kind of reclining in a wheelchair, and we could see him up there, but we couldn't go near him because at the time, they still weren't sure if it could spread human to human. So I couldn't talk to him. I couldn't sit in his lap. We were outside, Pasco gets very hot. On this asphalt, I was starting to get almost faint. I'm three. In my mind, I'm thinking he doesn't love me. My heart is breaking. I'm going to die, literally, I am going to die. I have to save myself. The only way to save myself is to cut him off. So, in my little three-year-old mind, I literally put a sound bubble around myself. And by the way, speech comes out in a bubble. It's not a sine wave. So, when I'm talking, little bubbles are coming out. I learned that only a few years ago, but I actually had a vision of myself a few years ago when I was processing all of this, and I saw myself standing there with a bubble around me. And after that, like my cries to him could not get out, and his calls to me could not get in. And I had just created my core wound, where I cut off my connection to my inner source of love. I had projected that onto him. He was my source of love. I didn't know that I had my own source of love, and I could do both. I could love me and him. So instead, I just collapsed to a sad little girl, and I did it to myself, and I didn't know. Nobody else knew. We were busy with Daddy. Then he came home. He had to be rehabbed. My mom was a nurse. She was an RN. She stopped working after she had me. But so I remember him falling and fainting in the bathroom one day, I was the only person in the house. And I ran and got a pillow and put it under his head, and ran outside to call my mommy, mommy, know, daddy fell down. I was so worried about him. So I developed this whole worrywart, gotta fix it, gotta help, kind of, but afraid at the same time, gotta get along, stay low. I don't wanna get beat up by my brothers.

You know, I could beat them up if I had to. I would beat them up if I got mad enough. But so, I was looking back at all of that, and what the next thing in my life that I really remembered that stood out was in fourth grade when I was first exposed to two children that had communication disorder. Now I didn't know anything about communication disorders, but I knew when I saw them, something must have clicked in me.

That I had something that they also had. Now, one of them, his name was Stanley, and I sat at the end of row three, he sat at the end of row four, and he was such a nice boy. He wasn't like my brothers, who beat me up and threw spiders at me. He was quiet, he was kind, and when he talked, and he had a little scar right here on his lip, and when he talked, sometimes, like, air would come out of his nose like this a little bit. It's a little nasal-sounding. could kind of hear a little air coming out. Didn't bother me. But the boys didn't like him. They eschewed him. And I was like, why isn't everybody his friend? Like me, everybody should be his friend. So, I was his friend. And I liked Stanley. But he mostly just faded into the wallpaper for everybody else. And then one day at recess, a girl named Rose she was in the third-grade handicapped class. And handicap is what we used to call the kids back then with disabilities. And so, this brick wall of my elementary school, Emerson Elementary, she's pinned against the wall. And there's this crowd of boys around her in this half-circle. And they're taunting her and yelling. I go over to see what's going on, and her face is beet red. She can't talk. I know she can't talk, and she's spitting at them. There's nothing else she can do but spit. And I'm thinking horrified, thinking, why are these boys doing this? Why are they being so mean to her? And then the recess bell rang and everybody went running. And I thought about it later. And I thought, you know, that those boys are so mean. And it reminded me of my brothers, you know, and it's like, I can beat up my brothers. I can beat those guys up. I'm going to help her. If I ever see this happen again on my watch, I am going to get in there and save her. So, what was it about those two kids? Now it turned out, I learned later that she had Down Syndrome. So, she had delayed speech and language development. Maybe she could have said a few words, but she was so terrified, so traumatized.

She couldn't do anything to spit. Stanley had a cleft lip, probably meaning he had also had a cleft palate, and they had been repaired. So, he stayed back in the shadows. She couldn't communicate. She couldn't use communication to tell people to, you know, go jump in the lake, leave me alone.

And I thought now, as an adult looking back with what happened with my dad and my brothers, that I was primed to also keep my mouth shut, fade into the background, not speak up. I wasn't anything anyway. I was basically just a waif, and you know, couldn't stick up for myself, would never say anything. If anybody said anything negative to me, I'd just take it. I wouldn't fight back. If somebody says something nice, I was fine with that. So, there I was, I never heard of a speech therapist in my life. And do you have any questions before I go on to finding my first speech therapist and finding out how it was gonna change my life?

Jane Jones (22:34)

I'm thinking we're going to need to do a few sessions here. I have a lot of questions. Okay, I'm just going to reflect a little bit, and I'm going to stop and ask questions to ask you to explore something a little bit. Early on, you talked about you in academia, and you wrote reports, and those reports were clinical.

I don't think you used that word, but that's the word that popped in my head. And then you were fixing problems. It was nothing to do or had very little reflection on the humanity of yourself or the person in that environment. It was clinical diagnosis, clinical information back and forth.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (23:22)

On the paper, but in the session, that's different. That's the whole reason they were there, their humanity and their suffering, and I have to help them.

Jane Jones (23:24)

On the paper

Okay, so you're going through this experience of that's really helpful is that you've got this person and you're helping them and you're dealing with them. And then what ends up getting written is the clinical stuff.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (23:54)

Because that's all insurance wants to know about. You have to prove there's a disorder so they will pay for it. And you have to prove progress or they will stop paying for it.

Jane Jones (23:57)

Gotcha, right.

Gotcha. And so then...

Kit Roberts-Johnson (24:07)

Plus. I'd have to know. I mean, I have to know what I'm working with, what is the problem. Obviously, I mean, I have to do a full diagnosis, full diagnostic workup, and everything. Right. Just to do my job.

Jane Jones (24:19)

Sure, observing what you're doing over here, that’s got humanity in it and it's all of that. Then we go over here to the writing and the writing is clinical. Valuable, necessary, good, helpful, know, not negative at all, purposeful. Right. There's like a little kind of like a space in between those two things.

Where your experience of these people is, just left in that space in the middle, the space in between.

Could you, would you please explore that experience of moving from the communication and your heart and your who you are, and then moving into the clinical writing? Could you explore that?

Kit Roberts-Johnson (25:08)

And let me explain what else is in the report, which is the history. That is the first section we write. What is the history of this person's problem? And that's where I can write about their humanity and how this speech disorder is affecting them. And that's what I will write. Like ever since this happened, they have been unable to so on and so forth. And so for example, I worked with a flight attendant who had developed vocal nodules because she was the lead attendant and she had to speak, you know, fasten your seat belts, we're getting ready to leave, all this stuff. But she has to compete with a jet engine, several, two jet engines probably. And she's using her voice incorrectly, and she developed nodules and then she couldn't speak at all. So, when I write up the history, so-and-so flight attendant for Alaska Airlines, la la la la la la. And she's unable to do her job. She will be unable to keep her job if she doesn't get this fixed. What they're going through, the suffering of it, what is happening?

Jane Jones (26:23)

Okay, so that's the thing. Yeah, what I'm kind of looking for is this, the you in that experience of her, and now writing it in a clinical way. So, bear with me because it's bouncing around in my head is that I have an experience with a client, I do different work, different work a day world job than yours and I'm dealing with something and I can have a lot of compassion and I can understand their frustration, I get it. And then I have to come over here, and now this is what you have to do. And so, my response, my internal me that is compassionate or frustrated or whatever with that environment and wanting to fix it, like you said earlier about having wanting to fix things, the reports had more about fixing the problem. Your personal response and then the transferring it into those words that are clinical. How could you explore that a little bit? Maybe that's, maybe it's, don't know whether that's even a valid question. If it's not, if there's no difference, I don't know. I just wondered.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (27:43)

Well, for writing a clinical report is, you know, I like, for example, I've learned in writing a memoir, yeah, you might be giving some facts, but it's not something that's calibrated to a specific test, for example, like I might give somebody with dyslexia a reading test and I get a set of scores and the scores tell you, oh, he's reading five years below age level, something like that. This is a profound disorder. Here's the treatment that I recommend, and this is about how long it's going to take. And then versus writing my book, there's no scores. There's just, I'm thinking, what happened to me? What was my arc? Okay, where did I start? Where did I end?

I started as a scared little girl, and I ended up flying around Alaska and all these villages. I mean, come on. That's a huge difference. So, on the clinical reports, I don't know. just, it was just part of the job. had nothing to do with therapy. We never, you know, it got sent to the doctor. It got sent to the insurance company. And then when we get to therapy, we're just two people and I'm showing them things to do and they're making incredible progress and getting better and they're thrilled. I think people send me thank you cards. I had a second-grade teacher who was losing her voice, yelling at her second graders because she didn't know how to place her voice correctly. So, I taught her how to speak correctly. Just a couple months later, she said, I just wanted to thank you again. You know, I'm having no problems and you know, everything's fine. And so yeah, I mean,

Jane Jones (29:32)

Okay.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (29:33)

I don't really, I guess I'm not really understanding the question.

Jane Jones (29:39)

And well, there's a good reason for it is because I'm not framing it very nicely, very clearly. It's the difference between your working and then the reporting. There is a purpose for this writing is clinical.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (29:57)

It's a clinical purpose.

Jane Jones (29:59)

And it's coming out of this, so you're pulling out of the experience, you're pulling out the clinical stuff. 

Kit Roberts-Johnson (30:04)

Knowledge base.

Jane Jones (30:05)

Right, right. And then you get to working with Janice Harper. And now you're looking at... No longer the facts. You now are now in a position where you are now looking at more than the facts. You're who you were before you started and who you are when you ended. And and how does all of those come into this Kit now? Yes. And you're writing about that. This writing is very different from the report writing.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (30:47)

Absolutely.

Jane Jones (30:47)

So, and that's probably the better question is that how is that writing different from the report writing?

Kit Roberts-Johnson (30:57)

It's extremely the opposite because in report writing, my feelings are nowhere to be found. I would never put, “This poor woman; I felt so sorry for her because when I was a little girl, la la la la,” No, that is, my feelings have nothing to do with this report. The client's feelings have something to do with the report. I report their feelings.

But everything that L size, it's just, you know, it's the diagnosis, it's the history, it's the test results, and it's the prognosis and the treatment, you know, advice. Yeah, and in this, in fact, there was one, Annie Medjia, was Submittable. You've probably heard of Submittable. It's a place where you can submit your book to be edited, you can submit poetry. They have a lot of different things that happen in Submittable, but it was only like, was it $40 or something really inexpensive? I could just send them my whole manuscript. This was after I'd gotten it beaten down from 100,000 words to 83,000 words. And they would do a run-through, and they would give you an analysis. They have book competitions, so they're used to reading for competitions.

I thought, well, this would be good because these people, they do this all the time. This is what all they do. And her name was Annie Medjia. And she gave me like three pages of how I had to write feelings, not just facts. She really, and I said, okay, so I wrote this, and I can reply. You can have like one reply back. She's a, here we need some filling here, we need some filling here. And I went back and I wrote a couple, a page or two on each one of those things. How was I reacting? How did I feel? And I sent it back to her, and I said, “Is this what you mean?” And she said, “Yes, that's what I mean.” I didn't even know how to do it. I couldn't figure it out. It was just like.

Jane Jones (33:17)

Except that you did figure it out.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (33:19)

I did, but I needed somebody to really pinpoint, like, okay, like in this scene right here, how did you feel when your ex-husband did this, that, and the other thing? Because I just sort of said what he did and how, you know, I kind of said how I felt, but I figured the reader is going to fill in the blank. I was giving the reader a lot of credit for like, wouldn't that, there was somebody reading this, wouldn't they know that? Do I have to say that?

These were the things that I had trouble with. And I thought, well, I guess no. The answer is no. I have to write it down.

Jane Jones (33:56)

Yes, because the reader isn't always going to pick it up. You write it in such a way that it honors yourself in the situation without sort of spilling everything, but do it in a way that honors you, but allows the reader to go, I know what she's talking about. Perfect. So, when you start writing this way, you talked earlier about

Kit Roberts-Johnson (34:15)

Yeah.

Jane Jones (34:24)

When you you'd learned when you were dealing with Rose and with what's the little boy's Stanley, Rose and Stanley that you had learned too to be quiet the relationship with your brothers and and your dad his illness and everything you learned you said be quiet so when you start writing these things about your feelings after speaking with Annie or interacting with her on the web there did you get did it get loud? Could you have a feeling of loudness in your writing?

Kit Roberts-Johnson (35:02)

Yeah, but I did keep the reins in a little bit, I would say, because I don't want to blacken the name of a speech language pathologists. You know, it was there was I thought enough revealed enough said, you know what I mean? I could have, you know, probably harangued and complained and bitched a lot more, but I thought, what would that point be? I think I have made it plain. Like for example, when I was introduced to the man who ran the hospitals in four states was coming up to Anchorage to visit, and I had just been hired on at this hospital as an on-call speech pathologist.

He was coming up the stairs. I was going down the stairs, and the guy who had just hired me was with me. He goes, you know, John, this is Kit, Kit Roberts, you know, our new speech pathologist. And he took my hand and he, and I just read this book by two women, which I say what it is in the book, who had to write about women and how professional women should act, because we didn't know they had to write a book about it. Should we shake hands? What should we do in this? What should we do? How do we speak? And their recommendation was to always go first, look the person in the eye with just a friendly expression, just a quick, firm handshake, not a floppy thing or like that, and then you're done. Okay, so that's what I did. I went, nice to meet you, like that. And he grabbed my hand with his hand and he, and they also told you how. If they take your hand and put their hand on top like that, that means they have power over you. They are now just getting power over you by going from the side. Yeah. 

Jane Jones (37:06)

They go like this. like that. Yeah.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (37:09)

Hands on the bottom. Okay, that means they have power. Well, he did that right away, and he was squeezing. I mean, my knuckles were like cracking, and he was a really fit man. He was probably like about 40 or something, and I was probably about 30, and he wouldn't let go. He just kept going up and down, and I'm like, is he going to stop? You know, and I couldn't pull out. I mean, you it was weird. Cause also, you know, he was the head of four hospitals. I didn't want to embarrass myself. I didn't want to like, you know, it's the just you hold back, don't, don't make any waves, you know, and then finally stopped and I carried on down and I was like rubbing my hand thinking, what is that man thinking? What is wrong with him? Why did he do that? And now I could have gone on and on and said a few choice swear words about that, but I decided to leave it out of the book. I think that's a place where somebody could fill in, you know.

Jane Jones (38:10)

It is, is. you, there's a, there's a, effect that you want to communicate, what it is you want to communicate. And, and I think just that little bit that you've said, there's a couple of things. One is that, you know, I was, I was quieted again and I was afraid of being embarrassed as opposed to “Excuse me”, you know, and risking the job and risking it and embarrassing him that he's being disrespectful. And so that's the pattern. And that comes out in our writing. And just for the listeners is that there is a place, I think, and maybe asking you too, is there a place for that just kind of bleeding on the page and getting all that out? And all of those words about how you felt, and the guy was a crazy person and what's the matter? What was he thinking? And all of your feelings, and then just choosing not to put it in a book. Is that? 

Kit Roberts-Johnson (39:10)

I actually now, at this age, if somebody did that to me, I'm different now. I'm way different. I don't even follow doctor's orders anymore. I had enough experiences with doctors who left me in the lurch, and basically, it's your problem. Or they would tell me something to do which would actually make me worse, and then I'm supposed to keep doing it. No, I tell every doctor I meet, “I'm a bad patient.” I said, “I'll try your suggestion. But if I have any bad reaction, my body has a reaction to it. I'm not taking it anymore.” And so I have changed. At that time, no, because this was a professional thing, and I had just gotten that job. I didn't wanna jeopardize it. I never would have said to him, or I could have said something jokingly because I thought to myself, now who is really good at taking stuff like that and turning it around and making it ha ha? And it's Dolly Parton. Of all people, she has gotten so many slings and slurs at her just from her appearance and she takes every one of it and she turns it back.

Jane Jones (40:17)

Yes.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (40:31)

And I thought to myself now, earlier I never thought of that. I could have done like, hey, wow, you're like a strong man or wow, aren't you, you're tough, you must be working out or do something like make a joke kind of out of it. Instead of like, why the hell did you squeeze my hand like that?

Jane Jones (40:50)

And draw attention to yourself, yeah. Relative to writing, the opportunity to write about how we feel about those things and get them out and to be aware of other people in the industry, other people in the world who do handle things better and get some tips and figure things out and become... more of who you actually really are as opposed to acquiescing and being this person that you're trained to be because it's possible that that guy was trained to do that too and and and he's just and I'm not making excuses for the guy but you know but we're all sort of living this thing going that we're we're dealing with and and sometimes it's just like you know can't believe that you would do that why would you or or make it funny so

Kit Roberts-Johnson (41:43)

Well, or like, you know, like you're saying, like, it's my responsibility to train him as a man that this is not an appropriate handshake for a woman. You need to be a little lighter. You can't, you should not be squeezing my hand so hard because that hurt, that actually hurt my hand. And at the time, I, I never would have said that. But I still don't even I now I might not even say that just be direct and honest, and like I'm trying to train you, you know. But I think it's one thing to say, “Wow, you know, when you just shook my hand there, that was really tight. You could like lighten up a little bit on that.”x Or even now, if I meet somebody new, I don't like, doesn't happen anymore, really. But I would probably say something.

But back then, you're right, I think I see the younger women and I want to tell them like, don't take that. Don't let that guy do that to you. When he says something like that, you say right back, “I don't appreciate that. And I don't want to hear it again.” Yeah.

Jane Jones (42:51)

Finding your voice again. of finding your voice and in the context of We Women Writers is finding a way to write it down.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (42:59)

And that's where I finally got to. It took me a long time, but I got to the point where I would speak up and tell things to people, like even principals, you know, “You need out in the bush, you need to hire somebody who will come to this village on a regular basis and make the rounds. You've got seven villages here. You need to hire a full-time person. Having me come once a year is not right. You're following the law, but nobody is getting services, and that is not the intent of the law. And that's not right, and I'm not gonna come here anymore. You need to hire somebody full-time.” I finally stopped going to the villages in the 1990s out of protest. And two, the principal out of Nome or the district out of Nome and the district out of Barrow, both hired full-time people. They each had, one had like 11 villages and the other one had like eight villages. And that's enough to keep somebody full-time going around and helping the kids on a regular basis.

I mean, I had one stop. I found a boy at fourth grade who stuttered in a village, and the plane was coming in 20 minutes to take me away. And I had to get the helper out of the kindergarten class who was a high school graduate at least, and to tell her, here's some things I want you to do with them. I have a master's degree plus extra special training in fluency disorders, and who's going to help them? And there was no such thing. I looked into getting telemedicine, it would cost me $10,000 a month. I wasn't making that kind of money. Yeah, I couldn't do that. No. So anyway, there was a lot of frustrations.

Jane Jones (44:41)

Sure. And when you come to writing the book, and you talked about COVID was the opportunity. that there are lots of opportunities that come, but COVID, and with all of its negativity, negative situations, that happens a lot that people like, I'm going to make good use of this time. And so how did you feel about writing and being in that isolation, and how did you explore that a little bit?

Kit Roberts-Johnson (45:14)

Well, I pretty much wrote every day. I put myself on a schedule because I had so much to write about, and I didn't know what I was doing. I would read other, you know, I got like four or five books on how to write a book, you know, the ones, the good ones, theoretically, you know. And so I read about how to do it, but it's not the same as actually doing it.

And you really need somebody to help you. And that's the other, I had actually four different editors that I worked with over that period of time. Janice was one, I had a local one, and Submittable was another one. I can't remember. yeah. And the other one was just a free half-hour phone call that I got, cause I put my name in the hat and I got it. And she's the one who encouraged me to cut it to 80,000 words.

And it made a big, it was a much better book because of it, much better. And, but I'm a very self-disciplined person. To have a private practice, you have to be self-disciplined. You get up and go to work. It's your job. It's your office. You have to keep it going. You you have to be there on time, and you have to be there for your patients. And so I'm already a highly disciplined person, and I would make myself right. mean, my office just looked like a mess. I had to research a lot of things. I had to dig out old materials that I had in the garage, speech therapy materials. I had to build a website.

Jane Jones (46:45)

Hmm, that gets me stopped all the time. Dead in my tracks. I need help.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (46:51)

I found a woman from Canada. built my website. It's beautiful. kitrobertsjohnson.com. It's the most beautiful website I have ever seen. Her name is Caro Begin. She's fabulous. I can recommend her highly.

And so, I had to figure out what I was gonna put up there. I had to write a blog, all that stuff. So anyway, I would just start at the beginning. Sometimes I just wrote a chapter about something. Like, okay, I can just write a chapter about a fluency case. Because I know I'm gonna have a chapter on stuttering. So I would write a chapter on like, what is stuttering, and then I would give an example of somebody who had a stuttering problem and what we did to help. So that's an example. So I had to go back and look on, because I had, you know, professionals come up and train me and my staff, and I had the notes. I had a newspaper article when he was in, Dr. David Daly, he was interviewed in the Anchorage Daily News. It was such a big news that somebody was gonna come up and do a stuttering workshop that had never been done.

And it worked out perfectly. 10 people showed up for the information night. And I had, I bought one of those folding brown long conference tables from Costco. We finally got, we got a Costco in Anchorage, it was so exciting. That was my conference table. And 10 people fit perfectly around this. And he was at one end, you know, and there three speech therapists sitting along the wall listening, but I had his words from the newspaper so I could quote him directly in my book, and remembering what he already told us other things, but I also had that. So, there's this all this research that you do because you want to get it right. I wanted to get it right. So, all of that, I mean, like I have a whole box now in the garage of just the stuff that I use to write that book just to keep it in case I need it. I don't know when I would throw it away, but probably when I'm dead, somebody else throw it away. So anyway, yeah, the original question just, you know, I just organized myself and I sat down and I wrote.

Jane Jones (49:00)

Could you explore just the experience of finding or looking back over the writing or the experience of writing, your experience of discovering or sharing where you were at the beginning and where you were at the end?

Kit Roberts-Johnson (49:30)

Yeah, I think I redid my manuscript about 50 times. I was so sick of it when it was done. Not really the book, just the process of having to read it again, and now again, and now again, because I knew the basics of writing. You need a topic sentence, you put in some information, then you have a little concluding sentence, and then you go to the next one. So, I had all of that stuff but as I went along, I realized that, you know, that sentence doesn't sound right. You know, this should be switched over here. This should be like this, you know, and it would make more sense because I was kind of talk writing like I would talk. And, then I realized that no writing is different from talking because they say, just write down like you talk. But then when you read it, it doesn't really, some of it, like if it's, if I'm, if it's dialogue, that's one thing. But then, in between the dialogue, there's writing.

And I had to learn to put in dialogue. People want dialogue. And looking back, I probably could have had more dialogue. But at the time, I didn't really know that. I think by the end of the book, I had way more dialogue. Like, especially at the end when my husband and I go to counseling, which I wasn't even gonna put in there because that was way too emotional. And I decided, you know what? I'm just gonna put the conversation. I'm not getting even going to write about, you we showed up. And from then on, it's conversation. It's all dialogue. And then we leave. And so, yeah, from the beginning, it was more of a travel log, work experience, amazing Alaska, you know, the beauty of Alaska these, I had to cut like, everything. Just cut, cut, cut. I did just decide to go ahead and give one chapter to Denali because Denali is my boyfriend that doesn't know he's my boyfriend. And I will not be calling it Mount McKinley. I will be calling it Denali, which means the great one. And next to Denali is another beautiful mountain and she is called Sultana, the woman. So, the natives have given, Native Alaskans had given those names many years ago. And it was like the creator put them together. There's the king. He is the king of mountains. know, he's the biggest mountain in America. I'm calling him He. He's got a, I personified him. If you've ever seen Rainier, Rainier would be like a Prince. But he, Denali is the king with his icy crown and his snowy robes, which never melt. He's over 21,000 feet high. And then Sultana the woman. So they're there together. There's a male and female there together. For eons and eons, those mountains are gonna be together. And then you just look like, you know, I go to the villages and there's couples, they're together. You know, and I've got a husband, we're together. There's a male and a female. And so, I don't know when I took the drive on my own from Fairbanks to Anchorage, and you go right through Denali National Park. And I just had to give him his due because Denali had a huge influence on me. He is steadfast. There is nothing he cannot bear. Okay. And that's how I felt. I could do anything. I could go anywhere. Even if I felt bad, even if my stomach hurt. There was nothing I could not bear.

You know, he was strong and immovable. And those are qualities, you know, that I wanted in me. And I wanted to reflect onto me from him. And then I had to give another whole chapter to Prince William Sound because that's another amazing thing. So that's my two kind of travelogue parts that I left in. But otherwise, yeah, I had to tighten everything up. I had to put an emotion. I had to have that arc where I began as a little girl who was afraid to a professional person out in the world starting my own business, which was just a thing that just started even happening before everybody worked for a big company, and they retired after 40 years and got their pension. And also, I had to go into a man's world. There are way more men in the villages, not the villages, but like in the gnomes and the Bethels and the white man hubs, they call them, where there's more white men than native people. But a jet can land there, and they have a restaurant and they have a hotel. And villages are not like that. There's no hotels. There's no restaurants. You sleep on the gym floor or in my, you can, if the teachers sometimes they will do like a little bed and breakfast thing for you, and you give them $25 a night and then you pay for school lunch. So, you got some, at least you have lunch. So anyway, just to describe to people what it was like, but also, you know, how desolate it was, what they had to go through, not just me, how they had to live, how they had to wait to get healthcare. They had no healthcare in the villages. It was late 1990s before they even got, they call it like a village aid, health aid, who was trained to do small wound healing kind of things, or call in a small plane to get somebody to fly them to the Anchorage Native Hospital for very important, disastrous kind of problems. But, yeah, the process, it would took me about 50 50 times through. And I found out like I had one person who was theoretically really great, has done a couple of very, you know, books you would know, but I'm not going to mention. And I paid her a couple thousand dollars to do my copy editing. And it came back, and there's there were mistakes in it. And I'm like,

Jane Jones (56:04)

Yeah.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (56:05)

Really? Okay. And then I paid Book Baby $2,000 to edit my book, copy editing, getting it ready for print. Yeah, and it came back with mistakes that I found. And I'm like, you guys are worse. You know, I just paid you $2,000 and

Jane Jones (56:17)

Yeah, a lot of times they're just using some program to run through it, and it won't catch words. I've there's even some very famous authors, very famous authors and I read their book, and when I read, I read every word. I'm bit laborious that way. I was very persnickety about that, and I'll catch it. I'll catch a mistake in these very famous people's books, you know, like yeah, and it can be very frustrating, very frustrating because they are charging a lot of money, and there's a number of writers who will end up getting very discouraged. Not everybody's got that kind of money. There's a young woman I know that she just, was like all she had, and she gives this thing that comes back with this, all this like blood, and she was so despondent, just so upset.

She just couldn't even talk about it for a few days, because it was so, it was not even done nicely, and not aware at all that this was almost all the money this woman had in the world to give this to this person. Fortunately, she's in a relationship with a bunch of other writers and we're being helpful. And she reflected and realized that it was okay, it was good, she's learning from it, and everything.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (57:36)

Yeah.

Jane Jones (57:51)

But it was just like she expected for that kind of money something more. And so sometimes the expectations of the writer and the editor kind of go like this. It does take a lot of time. It does take a lot of effort. But when you're just doing sort of copy editing, meaning grammar and all that kind of stuff, I have a friend of mine that's a line editor.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (58:15)

Line editing.

Jane Jones (58:20)

And she goes through the whole book. She really does a really good job. And it's a lot of work, but it makes a big difference. that can be very frustrating when you're writing your work, writing, we get to the point where you need an editor and you've got to go with somebody that get a recommendation for sure.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (58:41)

And this is what I found out while calling you for that name when I get to the point because what I find is that after a while, I can't see the errors anymore. Even like I just read, I've already sent this off to my next book. I've already sent it off for just the first go round. And I was looking at the PDF I sent her, and I already found three mistakes. I didn't put say tests with an ‘s’, which is what I wanted. So, I put the ‘s’ on and then they were like, a couple punctuation things, and it's like, God, why didn't I see that? know, because it just after a while you can't see it anymore

Jane Jones (59:16)

One of the things that I try to do, or I do do, is I read it backwards. Okay, just take little bits at a time and you read it backwards because then it does, you'll catch them faster.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (59:30)

You read the word backward or just like a whole paragraph. You read it the regular way, but you start at the last.

Jane Jones (59:37)

No, no, like you would say, say, this, this on page 18, would say, would say instead of writing as the SPLA answered, I would say “due to suppose” I'm what is that? What, what is this? Naturally, so happened had it and write felt it, my self support to income” and I would go backwards. And then it can, this I don't, this isn't my writing.

But if it had been my writing, I would look at that, and that would make perfect sense to me. And if there was a wrong word in that, would go "What?"

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:00:14)

Yeah, exactly.

Jane Jones (1:00:17)

So, you know, there's lots of different tools you can use. I do have a question. you talked about Denali and Prince William. Which chapters, Prince what? Sound, William Sound. Okay, so in the books, the content of this, your book here, this one, which chapters, because I looked it up and then you don't have a chapter called

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:00:26)

Prince William Sound.

Jane Jones (1:00:41)

Denali. So which chapter in these chapters in this book do you go through those?

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:00:47)

Okay, so number five, the great land.

Jane Jones (1:00:51)

Okay, number five is Denali.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:00:54)

As far as I know, now let me just zip over there.

Jane Jones (1:00:57)

Because if somebody's got this, because there's another.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:01:00)

That's not it because it has a it has a photo of Denali in it. Okay. So and it's on the very last page of it. wait, that's later when I was, there it is, it's called the great one, chapter 10.

Jane Jones (1:01:16)

Gotcha. Okay, now Prince William Sound, which chapter is that?

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:01:22)

Let me see here. It's called the Sly Lady. That was the name of our boat.

Jane Jones (1:01:27)

And that is chapter...

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:01:29)

819

Jane Jones (1:01:31)

Eight and 19? 

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:01:33)

No, just 19.

Jane Jones (1:01:34)

Sorry, 19, gotcha. Okay, great. Because the reason, it appears to me that reading a book is one way to get, an important way, valuable way, powerful way. But hearing the writer, the author talk about the book and in this conversation, particularly a conversation like this, is that I've learned more about the book and more about you and more about writing that I can apply in my own life. And the reason it is, it appears to me, and if I'm way off, let me know or to what degree. The arc of writing the book where Janice says, you need to talk about you. So, who you are at the beginning, and who you are at the end. I can read this book and I can find out who you were from this book at the beginning and the end.

After hearing you, the arc of writing the book, the you as a writer, not the story, but as a writer, the arc that you took, the arc of writing the book is actually reflected in the arc of the book.

And I can be, it's gonna take a while for me to articulate all that, but I get that sense that as a writer, what we write about is important because it's a poem or whatever, a limerick. It's telling people about what we're writing, but if I know the experience of the writing, it tells me even more.

And so to encourage you, and it sounds kind of heavy, it sounds very kind of like, my gosh, but it's so simple. If in my head, it's like, well, of course, that you're encouraged to move from a report, which in itself has its value to now telling us about your feelings and telling us more about your history. And so we understand you from the beginning, and it starts off as a child to where you're at the end. But then, when you were writing the book in COVID, there's an experience of that whole process is now embedded in the book.

The end result of you just started writing. You talked about, you just started writing, and you wrote every day and you kept on, and you credited your discipline, your history or is it really the credit in your history or is it the history of being disciplined and being a business owner and everything, feeding into or having an expression here? Because a person can find any kind of discipline, any kind of consistent patterns, and the consistent pattern of being quiet. Even that is a consistency, even that can be called a discipline, finds its way in the book.

I'm intrigued by this experience of knowing you more now, and your writing experience, and hearing your experience of your history and your writing as a speech language therapist.

And just as a writer,s and the book is like part of that.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:05:38)

I think for me, it's like there's a part of me that from early on has craved connection, and that craving to connect, you know, like you say, now that I'm bringing COVID in where we couldn't really connect anymore with people. And I'd already had this in the back of my mind. Like, I've got to get this out just because it was so unusual as a speech therapist. That was all I was thinking.

But it is a way to connect. This book was a way to connect, to try to connect with other speech pathologists, other people who, you know, I would encourage, go if you have a chance, go. Do it, just even if it's a couple of years. Also, to connect with people who have these communication problems and to make them aware that there are people who's calling it is because I believe that is my calling. Speech-language pathology was my calling. And it came to me in the fourth grade in the form of Rose and Stanley. And I think a lot of people have said over the years, figuring it out, that their calling did come to them sometime as a child. They had an interest in this, that, or the other thing, which then they went and became later as an adult. They played doctor or whatever.

They were fascinated with medicine, and then they became a doctor, whatever. I craved connection to help people connect because I had a connecting problem. I had shut myself down. So, I wanted to connect. And I think in that time where we couldn't connect, that was the part. I mean, I was like on a tear. I would sit over eight hours a day, and my husband would go, you need to get up. You need to walk around. You need to go take a walk.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll be there. Yeah, I'll do that. know, this guy, mean, literally, that's how it was. And also, the fact that, you know, I had a lot of fear as a child, that kind of led me to want to correct things that shouldn't be wrong, you know, things shouldn't be wrong. And, and I can this little area, I could fix it. And that would be good for the person, and then that would be good for me because I did something good. So, therefore that made me a worthwhile person and human being, a good person. I wasn't just a nobody who just had to stay in the shadows and keep my mouth shut. In fact, I got a job where I had to talk.

Jane Jones (1:08:24)

Yes, yeah. And now you wrote about

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:08:26)

I never thought of that before.

Jane Jones (1:08:29)

You do speaking and to be supportive of people in this environment, and anybody that's interested, and that's really an important extension of all of that. Do you have any, based on your experience, any ideas, or any thoughts of encouragement or suggestions for the listeners to support them in their writing journey, and what they're if they have something they want to write about.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:08:53)

Well, I'll tell you what, if I had it to do over again, I would have got a developmental editor to begin with. I mean, unless you're already a writer, you know how to write. I didn't know how to write. I read some books. I listened to some podcasts. You know, this is how you write. And I thought, okay, that's enough. I'm smart enough. You know, I should be able to figure this out. I used to write reports. I mean, you know, but I didn't really understand it. I needed a book coach or a book somebody, but I didn't think I did. You know, I thought I could do it myself.

And I think I ended up spending a lot more money and spent a way more time than I needed to because I spent, you know, it's take a lot of time to write 104,000 words versus 80,000 words. So, I could have just written the 80,000 and not had to go clear over here and now come back here and then rearrange this stuff. So, I would say if it's the first time it's going to cost you some money, but it's going to save you money in the end. I probably spent $10,000. I put it out to one publisher who had come to our writers group, just to see, and there wasn't their thing, you know? And I knew that this was such a tiny niche. I didn't think there would be any publisher who would take it. I just planned on publishing it myself. So I did. I wanted the self-publishing, which meant I had to pay for all of everything, you know, and the formatting, and I spent probably over $10,000 writing this book.

Jane Jones (1:10:24)

I see this book as way more than just the speech pathologist’s niche. This is a journey. This is inspirational to me.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:10:38)

Yeah, I'm thinking I might even change the title, which would only mean I would have to get a new ISBN number, and they're only like $45. And I'm going to change the book cover too. Because it's just people are, there's plenty of clicks, but they're not like going for it. You know what I mean? So I think I need a different title. And I'm thinking of changing that a speech therapist, Alaskan memoir.

Jane Jones (1:10:56)

Right, right.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:11:03)

I don't know what to put there other than at least change the memoir. I thought when you, see this is me, because I didn't know. I thought when you wrote a memoir that you had to say memoir on the cover. So, I had to have it somewhere in the title. But now I would at least change that to Journey. But I might even take out, I don't know, I might even take out the speech therapist part. I don't know.

Jane Jones (1:11:25)

Well, the whole thing, we're gonna close, and we're gonna end this conversation a little bit, and we'll carry on a little bit afterwards, but the idea that, what we just finished talking about is that the concept and the experience of writing is fluid, and there is so many variables, and each person gets their own experience at it.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:11:41)

Yes.

Jane Jones (1:11:51)

And grows from it and learns from it and shares it if they do or don't. Other people get an opportunity to grow as a result of it if you share it. And maybe even other people understand because the writer themselves is different, even if they don't share it. You know, there's a lot of variables and there's no, the traditional writer is the cat's out of the bag, you know there's so many different ways to experience this concept, this activity of writing that everybody gets to kind of write their own story about it. So, yeah. Thank you, Kit, very much.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:12:35)

Thank you, I enjoyed it.

Jane Jones (1:12:37)

Yeah, I really appreciate it very much, and we'll look forward to having you back. We'll talk about this new book, and I do have there's some other things about this that we could maybe chat about in terms of writing another time. I would really be thankful if you were available to do that.

Kit Roberts-Johnson (1:12:54)

Great, I definitely would be available.

Jane Jones (1:12:56)

Okay, thank you. All right, everybody, take care, and we'll talk to you again soon.