Who I am: This video shows my general approach.

I'm Kathryn Kimiecik Foley, a 65 yo graduate from the State University of New York at Binghamton, and Memorial University of Newfoundland, where I've lived outside of colleges and universities all my life. I've had a diagnosed mental disorder since 1995 and later again in 2000.

My professional life was in project management for cultural programs in New York State and Pennsylvania. Later jobs include retail and personal care support. I've always used my own money to do independent research whenever possible. I'm also a poet and practice ethnopoetics (a strategy for language translation of recorded oral traditions).

For the first time in thirty-two years, I've been accepted by the American Folklore Society to attend and read my paper at this year's annual meeting in Atlanta from October 18-21. I'm excited and honored to have been accepted after all this time. The reality is I never stopped writing an doing research all my life. I was accepted to this conference in 2008 but withdrew due to overwhelming expenses.

My topic is the comparison of Sacred Hospitality between three cultures: Polish-American onion farmers from the Black Dirt region in Orange County, New York, specifically from the Village of Florida in New York State; in-shore fishers in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada; and Highland Maya in Guatemala. I'm a proponent of finding similarities not differences among human beings.

My professional career was in 'public sector folklore', an obscure discipline featured by state arts councils, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for Humanities, the US National Park Service and a non-profit organizations like the Altoona Railroaders Museum in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where I led a team of teachers to write a state-wide, award-winning teacher's guide about railroaders. I also have spent research time in Atlantic Canada with research in Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick.

Folklorists don't stay on campuses. We work on the ground in rural towns and metropolitan areas. We identify cultural regions around the US and across the world. Folklore research heavily contributes to global heritage sites areas that become part of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) heritage designations.

We use research methods like oral history and ethnography (talking with, observing, and participating in traditions is critical to our research with living people, not just with books and periodicals. As a field we compare cultures from around the world both historically and geographically. This kind of research provides new information to create public events like festivals and museum exhibits.

I won't know many people at the conference. I'm not a great traveller so I'm also experiencing some wicked anxiety. If I had some confidence in my own ability to cover these dollar exchanges, I'd be able to concentrate on finishing my final paper.