Gratitude: Julie Coultas
Today I went to a wake for my friend Julie Coultas, who died on the 3rd of August. It was lovely to have the opportunity to sit with others and hear Julie stories, which has helped crystallize in my mind the things that I owe Julie.
I started to get to know Julie in mid-2000 when I was invited to join a small group of COGS (School of Cognitive & Computing Science at Sussex) women who went out for dinner at the then-modest Brighton institution Food for Friends. (We called the weekly event 'Food for Friends' long after the restaurant went upscale and we relocated to Pizza Express. It was still food for friends.) I was brand-new to England, and those dinners were a huge part of my enculturation. Often, Julie would tell me that she loved my accent. You know, I can't think of another Englishperson who's ever said that to me—certainly not repeatedly. I was pretty self-conscious about being an American teaching about English to the English at that point. The compliment did a lot to stave off homesickness.
Over the next ten or so years, I got to know Julie better—her passion for animals (especially horses), her incisive and excitable mind (and her academic psychological interests), her pride in her children and eventually her besottedness for her grandchildren.
The pictures I have of her from way back then always involve other people. Here are a couple, trimmed down. The one in the cowboy hat is from my 'Metaphorty' 40th birthday party. You had to come as a metaphor you'd been called. Julie came as a maverick, and I was reminded of that as we talked about Julie today. Julie got her PhD after having three children and a lot of life. She never had a full academic post, but she kept doing research, writing and (when possible) teaching. She was thus a bit of an outsider, but (unlike many a PhD) that wasn't a problem for her. She knew her interests were interesting, and she could talk to anyone about them. And so interesting people found her interesting in her maverick way.
This photo is from our wedding. Though it unfortunately has my hand in her face, I like it because it shows Julie listening the way that Julie listened. With excitement. (She was listening to my old friend Jim, whom she'd met at the Metaphorty party—he'd come as a moving target. Of course they hit it off.)
After Grover was born, Julie became "Julie Giraffe" in our household, named after one of her gifts to G. Her playful visits gave us a little taster of what an interesting grandmother she was.
Julie changed my life when, in 2011, she introduced me to the Catalyst Club and encouraged me to follow her good example and to talk to non-academics about my passions. The first 15-minute talk I gave there was called "How America Saved the English Language," and it ended up redirecting my career. Julie's talks there were always great, offering me lessons in how to communicate science. We were on the same bill when she gave her last Catalyst talk in January, where she told the story of her free-spirited youth when, with little preparation, she rode her horse across England from Brighton to New Brighton. She had been working on a book about her life in the 1970s—one that she managed to finish before she had to go.