April 2009 Archives
Publishing icon and poet Hilda Raz gave a beautiful--and teacherly--reading last week to celebrate the release of two new books, All Odd and Splendid and What Happens. Hilda has devoted her long and generous career to making sure that other writers, particularly women, see their work in print in Prairie Schooner, so it was lovely to have a chance to hear her own voice. My Little Sister Amara came along, and here's the verdict of a fifteen-year-old (smiling): "Not as bad as I thought."
All you poets might be interested in Tony Hoagland's essay in the just-out Summer/Fall 2009 issue of Gulf Coast, "Litany, Game, and Representation: Charting an Arc from the Old to the New Poetry," with the old poetry being that which believes that "[t]o name is to recognize and endorse material reality, to encourage it, and at the same time to illuminate and spiritualize it" (226), and the new poetry being that which is deeply suspicious of naming's claims to meaning. To give you a sense of the essay's scope, the seven poems Hoagland quotes at length or in toto, in order to illustrate explain this linguistic-epistemological shift, are by the following poets: Rilke, Christopher Smart, Stanley Plumly, Hoagland's pal Dean Young, Jordan Davis, Robert Hass, and Thomas Sayers Ellis. (No women? No.) I was interested to find my own preferences falling sort of midway through the century, represented, according to Hoagland, by poets "from Allen Ginsberg to Adrienne Rich, from Sharon Olds to Phillip Levine" (no writers of color? no):
Having read Hoagland's witty, disjunctive poetry, I didn't expect that the essay would cohere, but it did, and it was helpful to me.
Sharon Olds, by the way, has a new book out. I am a huge fan, but I had to laugh when I saw the title: One Secret Thing. I was surprised that, after a long career of extraordinary confessional candor, she had even one left! The New York Times Book Review was mixed about it, but I'll be checking it out.
If you have the chance to see the Swedish film Everlasting Moments now in theaters, please do. It's based on a daughter's memoir about her mother in the early twentieth-century; the family lives in poverty, but the mother's life is changed when she begins taking photographs of the beauty around her. It's crushing and breathtaking and beautiful. I especially want poet and memoirist Faye Snider to go see it (it must be showing somewhere in Boston!), because some of the material resonates with her project. For you Lincolnites, it's at the Ross now. For trauma survivors, I should add that the (brief) scenes of abuse are very realistic and may trigger stuff for you. But it's a great film if you can stand it.
Something on my mind lately is that my mother, if my addition is right, turns 70 this year--the mother who adopted and raised me. We'd been on rocky footing for many years, but since The Truth Book came out, she has refused contact with me altogether--understandably, I suppose. (She has reconnected with my brother, which is a good thing.) I think of her often with sympathy and warmth, and I sometimes wonder if she misses me. As a mother myself, I can't conceive of her not doing so, but then, we are very different, so it's hard to know.
On the topic of mothers and daughters, I'll end with this poem that Hilda Raz read (from What Happens):
All you poets might be interested in Tony Hoagland's essay in the just-out Summer/Fall 2009 issue of Gulf Coast, "Litany, Game, and Representation: Charting an Arc from the Old to the New Poetry," with the old poetry being that which believes that "[t]o name is to recognize and endorse material reality, to encourage it, and at the same time to illuminate and spiritualize it" (226), and the new poetry being that which is deeply suspicious of naming's claims to meaning. To give you a sense of the essay's scope, the seven poems Hoagland quotes at length or in toto, in order to illustrate explain this linguistic-epistemological shift, are by the following poets: Rilke, Christopher Smart, Stanley Plumly, Hoagland's pal Dean Young, Jordan Davis, Robert Hass, and Thomas Sayers Ellis. (No women? No.) I was interested to find my own preferences falling sort of midway through the century, represented, according to Hoagland, by poets "from Allen Ginsberg to Adrienne Rich, from Sharon Olds to Phillip Levine" (no writers of color? no):
The plain style most trusts language in its spare, forceful incarnations. Like all aesthetics, the plain style made a bargain with the poetry gods: in exchange for the powers of intimacy and clarity, it would forswear the more specialized possibilities of prosody and artifice. (234)Yep: "intimacy and clarity." I'll take those, please.
Having read Hoagland's witty, disjunctive poetry, I didn't expect that the essay would cohere, but it did, and it was helpful to me.
Sharon Olds, by the way, has a new book out. I am a huge fan, but I had to laugh when I saw the title: One Secret Thing. I was surprised that, after a long career of extraordinary confessional candor, she had even one left! The New York Times Book Review was mixed about it, but I'll be checking it out.
If you have the chance to see the Swedish film Everlasting Moments now in theaters, please do. It's based on a daughter's memoir about her mother in the early twentieth-century; the family lives in poverty, but the mother's life is changed when she begins taking photographs of the beauty around her. It's crushing and breathtaking and beautiful. I especially want poet and memoirist Faye Snider to go see it (it must be showing somewhere in Boston!), because some of the material resonates with her project. For you Lincolnites, it's at the Ross now. For trauma survivors, I should add that the (brief) scenes of abuse are very realistic and may trigger stuff for you. But it's a great film if you can stand it.
Something on my mind lately is that my mother, if my addition is right, turns 70 this year--the mother who adopted and raised me. We'd been on rocky footing for many years, but since The Truth Book came out, she has refused contact with me altogether--understandably, I suppose. (She has reconnected with my brother, which is a good thing.) I think of her often with sympathy and warmth, and I sometimes wonder if she misses me. As a mother myself, I can't conceive of her not doing so, but then, we are very different, so it's hard to know.
On the topic of mothers and daughters, I'll end with this poem that Hilda Raz read (from What Happens):
Birthday
You made a small grey dish of clay,
glazed it something purplish
and filled it, years later,
with minute bones, perfectly intact
you delivered with your scalpel thumbnail
from an owl pellet: scapula, mandible,
four perfect teeth the size of seeds,
and pieces of a backbone ladder,
all pure matte white, "from a mouse,"
you said, pushing up your glasses.
We sat looking, forehead to forehead.
The air was steamy. The shaggy residue
went, swept to the floor by an elbow,
but the rest is here where I sit by the window
on my birthday, looking out, missing you
daughter, preserver, maker, eyes.
I stroke the bone dish and write this down.
Categories:
Okay, okay, my prickly friends, before you say, Not me, or begin lambasting me for the erasure of difference and privilege, what I mean is simply this:
We all, at some level, know that the obsession with image and appearance is bullshit. We know, as we sensed intuitively when we were children (before playground politics set in), that kindness, intelligence, and talent don't always come in a societally approved package, that appearances deceive. Our looks are, by and large, a genetic crap shoot.
Our exteriors have no inherent linkage to the decency of our hearts or the interest-value of our thoughts. Only the people lucky enough to be born with the socially desirable appearance--and the wealth to dress it up--can deceive themselves that there's any connection.
Some of us are excluded entirely from the competition by some visibly unacceptable aspect of ourselves, an aspect over which we have utterly no control. We are bald, or the wrong size, or the wrong shade, or we have unusual features. People stare--or flinch and look away--or ignore us entirely, as if we're invisible. We live with it. And it's painful.
Or perhaps there's nothing about us so obviously unacceptable, but we don't want, by virtue of some clothing or grooming error, to be the one that other people are snickering and smirking at, so we try to keep up with the moving target of what's stylish. What Not to Wear! Extreme Makeover! What you are isn't good enough, we're told a thousand times a day (by people eager for our anxiety and dollars).
The public embrace of Susan Boyle suggests that many people--millions of people--are tired of it, exhausted by its falsity, saddened by all the varied beauty and interest it erases. Buying into the myth damages not only those who are excluded. It damages us all.
This is why Susan Boyle is an international phenomenon. Susan Boyle is not model-pretty; she is not young. Her hair is frowsy. But she can sing. And the world is so happy about her.
But why do we need such a dramatic example to remind us? What about all those frowsy folks who cannot sing, who have not been mysteriously blessed with wild gifts? They deserve our respect, too. They deserve everyone's respect. We all deserve our own respect, no matter what the hell we look like.
I remember the outcry when the New York Times Book Review began including author photos with reviews some years ago. Readers feared it would do to contemporary literature what MTV had done to the music world: make looks and sex appeal paramount. Suddenly authors had to be attractive, too.
Now the inclusion of an author photo with a review is routine. The work and the appearance are up for evaluation in one stroke. As a result, writers expend energy on their photos and appearance that they'd rather be spending on their work.
Maybe the Susan Boyle phenomenon speaks to the zeitgeist. Just as some of the delusions of wealth and greed have collapsed with the economy, perhaps the delusion of the worth of physical beauty and style is beginning to be punctured. We are a visual culture now, and internationally so. There's no going back, even if we wanted to. But we can shift our attitudes, our priorities. Wouldn't it be a relief if singers and actors and writers could focus on singing and acting and writing again, instead of on being gorgeous? Wouldn't it be a relief if we could all refocus our attention on things that matter more deeply, things that go beyond form?
We all, at some level, know that the obsession with image and appearance is bullshit. We know, as we sensed intuitively when we were children (before playground politics set in), that kindness, intelligence, and talent don't always come in a societally approved package, that appearances deceive. Our looks are, by and large, a genetic crap shoot.
Our exteriors have no inherent linkage to the decency of our hearts or the interest-value of our thoughts. Only the people lucky enough to be born with the socially desirable appearance--and the wealth to dress it up--can deceive themselves that there's any connection.
Some of us are excluded entirely from the competition by some visibly unacceptable aspect of ourselves, an aspect over which we have utterly no control. We are bald, or the wrong size, or the wrong shade, or we have unusual features. People stare--or flinch and look away--or ignore us entirely, as if we're invisible. We live with it. And it's painful.
Or perhaps there's nothing about us so obviously unacceptable, but we don't want, by virtue of some clothing or grooming error, to be the one that other people are snickering and smirking at, so we try to keep up with the moving target of what's stylish. What Not to Wear! Extreme Makeover! What you are isn't good enough, we're told a thousand times a day (by people eager for our anxiety and dollars).
The public embrace of Susan Boyle suggests that many people--millions of people--are tired of it, exhausted by its falsity, saddened by all the varied beauty and interest it erases. Buying into the myth damages not only those who are excluded. It damages us all.
This is why Susan Boyle is an international phenomenon. Susan Boyle is not model-pretty; she is not young. Her hair is frowsy. But she can sing. And the world is so happy about her.
But why do we need such a dramatic example to remind us? What about all those frowsy folks who cannot sing, who have not been mysteriously blessed with wild gifts? They deserve our respect, too. They deserve everyone's respect. We all deserve our own respect, no matter what the hell we look like.
I remember the outcry when the New York Times Book Review began including author photos with reviews some years ago. Readers feared it would do to contemporary literature what MTV had done to the music world: make looks and sex appeal paramount. Suddenly authors had to be attractive, too.
Now the inclusion of an author photo with a review is routine. The work and the appearance are up for evaluation in one stroke. As a result, writers expend energy on their photos and appearance that they'd rather be spending on their work.
Maybe the Susan Boyle phenomenon speaks to the zeitgeist. Just as some of the delusions of wealth and greed have collapsed with the economy, perhaps the delusion of the worth of physical beauty and style is beginning to be punctured. We are a visual culture now, and internationally so. There's no going back, even if we wanted to. But we can shift our attitudes, our priorities. Wouldn't it be a relief if singers and actors and writers could focus on singing and acting and writing again, instead of on being gorgeous? Wouldn't it be a relief if we could all refocus our attention on things that matter more deeply, things that go beyond form?
Categories:
When my dad and aunts were young, their parents would often travel the
ninety miles back to Cuba to visit relatives. There were even flights
that ran from Key West to Havana. But that era is long over. Almost 50 years have passed since the U.S. initiated its first embargo on Cuba in 1960, claiming that punishing the island nation with isolation would help push a human-rights agenda there and restore capitalist democracy.
Um, as we know, it hasn't quite worked out that way.
The new U.S. administration seems open to revising our relationship with Cuba in ways that will be productive and humane for both countries, and it has already lifted some restrictions for U.S. citizens visiting relatives and/or sending remittances there.
I've never signed a petition that would show up on a sailboat before, but when President Obama attends the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago this weekend with Latin American leaders, international peace organization Avaaz will sail a sailboat with the number of petition-signers painted on its sail. To check out the petition to lift the Cuban embargo and see if you want to sign, go here.
Um, as we know, it hasn't quite worked out that way.
The new U.S. administration seems open to revising our relationship with Cuba in ways that will be productive and humane for both countries, and it has already lifted some restrictions for U.S. citizens visiting relatives and/or sending remittances there.
I've never signed a petition that would show up on a sailboat before, but when President Obama attends the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago this weekend with Latin American leaders, international peace organization Avaaz will sail a sailboat with the number of petition-signers painted on its sail. To check out the petition to lift the Cuban embargo and see if you want to sign, go here.
Categories:
I love it when cool artists go on to do great things for the world. In a recent interview, Peter Gabriel described his human rights nonprofit, Witness, which provides video cameras, training, and exposure to human rights advocacy groups around the world. Referring to torture in Chile, Gabriel explained the origins of the idea:
Gabriel's work, together with examples like this one, suggest that my fond notions about the political efficacy of the written word may be passing quickly into obsolescence. So much for poets' being the unacknowledged legislators of the world; guerrilla filmmakers may have already inherited that mantle. Maybe it's heresy for a writer to say so, but if I were in college today, I'd be trying to get into film school. But my roots and my commitments are in the past and to the page.
One social-justice writer who shook up my world in grad school was Gloria Anzaldúa, and I'm looking forward to attending the upcoming conference El Mundo Zurdo, the first international conference of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, in San Antonio this May. With my friends and UNL colleagues Amelia Montes and Ariana Vigil, I'll be on a panel about teaching Anzaldúa's knockout book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza in the Midwestern classroom. It's a genre-rupturing classic of queer, Latina y Chicana, feminist, working-class studies that melds memoir, poetry, song, history, psychology, myth, and political theory. I love it--my old black grad-school edition still has my gushy cursive on the title page ("The most incredible book I've ever read. It speaks straight to me"). But passages like this one have a tendency to make some folks nervous:
Teaching Borderlands is what Ariana, Amelia, and I will be talking about down in San Anto, and I'm looking forward to hanging out on the UTSA campus again.
What I found especially shocking was that in many cases the abuses were denied despite written reports. But whenever there was video evidence, the issues were kept alive. So we decided to get cameras out to human rights activists.As a writer with social justice concerns, I'm interested in this discrepancy. I was struck recently by the fact that, while Taliban-led violence against women and girls in the Swat Valley has been making international news for months, it was a video of a teenage girl being publicly flogged that made people in Pakistan take to the streets in protest.
Gabriel's work, together with examples like this one, suggest that my fond notions about the political efficacy of the written word may be passing quickly into obsolescence. So much for poets' being the unacknowledged legislators of the world; guerrilla filmmakers may have already inherited that mantle. Maybe it's heresy for a writer to say so, but if I were in college today, I'd be trying to get into film school. But my roots and my commitments are in the past and to the page.
One social-justice writer who shook up my world in grad school was Gloria Anzaldúa, and I'm looking forward to attending the upcoming conference El Mundo Zurdo, the first international conference of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, in San Antonio this May. With my friends and UNL colleagues Amelia Montes and Ariana Vigil, I'll be on a panel about teaching Anzaldúa's knockout book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza in the Midwestern classroom. It's a genre-rupturing classic of queer, Latina y Chicana, feminist, working-class studies that melds memoir, poetry, song, history, psychology, myth, and political theory. I love it--my old black grad-school edition still has my gushy cursive on the title page ("The most incredible book I've ever read. It speaks straight to me"). But passages like this one have a tendency to make some folks nervous:
When other races have given up their tongue, we've kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture. But more than we count the blows, we count the days the weeks the years the centuries the eons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they've created, lie bleached.Yeah, that makes folks nervous, all right, which can make it a tough book to teach. (Try it in an all-male, all-white classroom sometime. Mmm-hmm.)
Teaching Borderlands is what Ariana, Amelia, and I will be talking about down in San Anto, and I'm looking forward to hanging out on the UTSA campus again.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, on an autobiographical story that was "motivated by rage" (it's about a writing workshop gone colonially awry) in her forthcoming collection, The Thing Around Your Neck:
Rage is good fuel: The Thing Around Your Neck is Adichie's third book, and she's 31.
For the whole profile/interview in The Observer, go here. (But oh, William Skideldky, did you need to reassure us that "there is nothing shrill about her tone"?)
This is the result of 200 years of history: we can sit here and be told what our story is.
"For me the story is about the larger question of who determines what an African story is. You have this workshop of African writers, it's completely organised by the British, then this person who has his own ideas ... imposes them on these young, very impressionable people. I remember feeling helpless. You're sitting there thinking, this is the result of 200 years of history: we can sit here and be told what our story is."
Rage is good fuel: The Thing Around Your Neck is Adichie's third book, and she's 31.
For the whole profile/interview in The Observer, go here. (But oh, William Skideldky, did you need to reassure us that "there is nothing shrill about her tone"?)
Categories:
Dear ones,
First, thank you. Thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, thank you for being out there. It's kind of amazing and wonderful to write one's thoughts and know that folks will read them. So mil gracias, my sweet and clever folks.
Second, special thanks to Sonam for this photo of a fabled beach in St. Maarten, which is right next to the airport and which he was describing over dinner the other night:
It sure gives new meaning to the word flyover.
Third, here's a lengthy excerpt from Jennifer Weiner's blog, where (it's good to know) she's on the job and keeping score:
Fourth, I am addicted to this music video and to Joanna Newsom's work generally. Fifth, if you see my Aunt Barb, tell her she owes me a letter.
On Friday night, I was happy to serve on a panel at the local Barnes & Noble with poet, memoirist, and Prairie Schooner editor Hilda Raz, novelists Sean Doolittle and Timothy Schaffert, and poets Anthony Hawley, Grace Bauer, and James Engelhardt. Several distinguished writers were also in the audience, and we got lots of lively questions about writing, publishing, and the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference, in which most of the panelists will be teaching this June.
Some powerhouse folks like Jewell Parker Rhodes, Lauren Cerand, and Curtis Sittenfeld will also be offering classes. (I'll be leading a generative workshop, "Kick-Start Your Memoir: Finding a Focus," on June 13th & 14th. If you're interested, you can still register.)
It was a good, fun panel. (Insert graceful segue here.) I'd been browsing the new releases tables beforehand, and after having given that lecture on the differences between Josefina López's stage play Real Women Have Curves and the screen version, I was happy to run across López's brand-new novel, Hungry Woman in Paris.
Grand Central Publishing seems to be pitching this straight-to-paperback project as chica lit, to wit: Chicana protagonist in crisis ditches her life and goes to Paris, where she attends cooking school. Sensuality ensues.
I want to like it, but after only a few pages, I'm mixed. So are the reviewers. Booklist says, "Lush and sensual, Lopez’s first novel is as rich as a meal at a four-star restaurant," but Publishers Weekly calls the book "choppy and amateurish." Has anyone out there read it yet? What did you think?
In contrast, after devouring two of John Banville's literary thrillers (published under his pseudonym Benjamin Black) as part of my autodidactic read-literary-thrillers project, I sank into The Sea, and I must say, I'm still swooning. I recommend it highly. Maybe it has spoiled me for ordinary prose. (Maybe I'm part of the Weiner-identified problem. Heaven and saints preserve me.)
In totally unrelated news, if you were one of the many meddling Westerners who signed petitions against Afghanistan's new law restricting women's rights, take heart. You've been heard. Keep on meddling. Forced submission to marital rape and restrictions on when women can leave their own houses are not, last I checked, advances in human rights.
With help from colleague Carleen Sanchez and my lovely research assistant Monica Rentfrow, I was able to revise and send out a new essay last week, "'Quién es ese Jimmy Choo?': Latina Mothers Come of Age," written for a collection on Latina mothering due out from York University's Demeter Press. Acceptance isn't guaranteed, so here's hoping the editors like it. I also heard the happy rumor that my story, "Whore for a Day" (about a cubana housewife in 1960s Miami), came out in Vanderbilt's Afro-Hispanic Review, but I've yet to receive copies, so I'm not sure. A short story, "Liking It Rough" (what is it with all these raunchy titles?), came out from Texas Review. Nice.
Mr. James is tearing it up in the next room. That guy can seriously play guitar.
Listen, speaking of Demeter Press, if you're in the mood or market for a ton of poems about mothering, check out their anthology White Ink, edited by the wonderful poet Rishma Dunlop. It's full of the work of fantastic poets like Natasha Trethewey, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, Sharon Olds, and so on.
In the spirit of guerilla publishing, I'll share with you here my own poem from the collection, with thanks to Camille Dungy, who gave me feedback and encouraged me to send it out.
The poem's about living in San Antonio when Grey was a baby, and if you know San Anto, then you might recognize the museum in the poem. I was really excited because I don't generally write poetry, period, and even though it's an autobiographical narrative poem, it's also fairly formal, which is hard for me to do with any success whatsoever.
First, thank you. Thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, thank you for being out there. It's kind of amazing and wonderful to write one's thoughts and know that folks will read them. So mil gracias, my sweet and clever folks.
Second, special thanks to Sonam for this photo of a fabled beach in St. Maarten, which is right next to the airport and which he was describing over dinner the other night:
It sure gives new meaning to the word flyover. Third, here's a lengthy excerpt from Jennifer Weiner's blog, where (it's good to know) she's on the job and keeping score:
Well, the National Book Critics Circle handed out its yearly prizes, and every single winner was a man.Maybe, if we all keep fussing and hollering, by the time we retire. . . .
Best novel? Dude.
Best criticism? Dude.
Best poetry collection? A tie between two dudes.
Best biography? A dude, writing about another dude.
It was shocking!
Okay, it was not shocking at all. When you’ve got an organization whose members flat-out admit that they find the male voice more powerful and persuasive than female one (and, mind you, these are the lady members saying so), what chance does a book like Olive Kittredge, linked stories about the goings-on in a small Maine town with a heroine who’s a grumpy middle-aged schoolteacher, have against Roberto Bolano’s sprawling, bloody 2666? None chance, that’s how much!
In other bookish news, I was glad to see I wasn’t the only one who noticed Times critic Janet Maslin’s strange foray into hot-or-not territory…and that I’m not the only one who’s noticed the Times Book Review’s strange practice of calling female writers by their first names and men by their last. Not that publishing Joan Acocella's letter (which began, marvelously, “I am writing, as I have before…”) means the Times will change its practice, but, you know. Baby steps.
Fourth, I am addicted to this music video and to Joanna Newsom's work generally. Fifth, if you see my Aunt Barb, tell her she owes me a letter.
On Friday night, I was happy to serve on a panel at the local Barnes & Noble with poet, memoirist, and Prairie Schooner editor Hilda Raz, novelists Sean Doolittle and Timothy Schaffert, and poets Anthony Hawley, Grace Bauer, and James Engelhardt. Several distinguished writers were also in the audience, and we got lots of lively questions about writing, publishing, and the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference, in which most of the panelists will be teaching this June.
Some powerhouse folks like Jewell Parker Rhodes, Lauren Cerand, and Curtis Sittenfeld will also be offering classes. (I'll be leading a generative workshop, "Kick-Start Your Memoir: Finding a Focus," on June 13th & 14th. If you're interested, you can still register.)
It was a good, fun panel. (Insert graceful segue here.) I'd been browsing the new releases tables beforehand, and after having given that lecture on the differences between Josefina López's stage play Real Women Have Curves and the screen version, I was happy to run across López's brand-new novel, Hungry Woman in Paris.
Grand Central Publishing seems to be pitching this straight-to-paperback project as chica lit, to wit: Chicana protagonist in crisis ditches her life and goes to Paris, where she attends cooking school. Sensuality ensues.
I want to like it, but after only a few pages, I'm mixed. So are the reviewers. Booklist says, "Lush and sensual, Lopez’s first novel is as rich as a meal at a four-star restaurant," but Publishers Weekly calls the book "choppy and amateurish." Has anyone out there read it yet? What did you think?
In contrast, after devouring two of John Banville's literary thrillers (published under his pseudonym Benjamin Black) as part of my autodidactic read-literary-thrillers project, I sank into The Sea, and I must say, I'm still swooning. I recommend it highly. Maybe it has spoiled me for ordinary prose. (Maybe I'm part of the Weiner-identified problem. Heaven and saints preserve me.)
In totally unrelated news, if you were one of the many meddling Westerners who signed petitions against Afghanistan's new law restricting women's rights, take heart. You've been heard. Keep on meddling. Forced submission to marital rape and restrictions on when women can leave their own houses are not, last I checked, advances in human rights.
With help from colleague Carleen Sanchez and my lovely research assistant Monica Rentfrow, I was able to revise and send out a new essay last week, "'Quién es ese Jimmy Choo?': Latina Mothers Come of Age," written for a collection on Latina mothering due out from York University's Demeter Press. Acceptance isn't guaranteed, so here's hoping the editors like it. I also heard the happy rumor that my story, "Whore for a Day" (about a cubana housewife in 1960s Miami), came out in Vanderbilt's Afro-Hispanic Review, but I've yet to receive copies, so I'm not sure. A short story, "Liking It Rough" (what is it with all these raunchy titles?), came out from Texas Review. Nice.
Mr. James is tearing it up in the next room. That guy can seriously play guitar.
Listen, speaking of Demeter Press, if you're in the mood or market for a ton of poems about mothering, check out their anthology White Ink, edited by the wonderful poet Rishma Dunlop. It's full of the work of fantastic poets like Natasha Trethewey, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, Sharon Olds, and so on.
In the spirit of guerilla publishing, I'll share with you here my own poem from the collection, with thanks to Camille Dungy, who gave me feedback and encouraged me to send it out.
The poem's about living in San Antonio when Grey was a baby, and if you know San Anto, then you might recognize the museum in the poem. I was really excited because I don't generally write poetry, period, and even though it's an autobiographical narrative poem, it's also fairly formal, which is hard for me to do with any success whatsoever.
How We Are Made
The way we lived then wasn't much to see:
a plastic stroller, used, and given free,
pushed thirteen blocks down split concrete. I pushed
beneath the Texas sun, the streets' bleak noise,
the baby's face, though shaded, flushing rose--
those hot and dirty walks the price I paid
to put my boy down onto grass: thick grass,
still gilded silver with the sprinkler's rain,
leaves hushed and luscious to the eye and tongue--
so he could crawl, his soft, uncrafted skin
on bladed earth, flesh pressed to what's unmade
by man.
That strip of tender, tended grass
unspooled between a high brick wall and smooth
sidewalk. Within the wall there rose a blond
brick brewery, transformed (not long before)
into an art museum. Lavish lawns
swirled all around, tricked out with painted steel,
wood, stone: a sculpture garden. We lacked
the dollars to go in. We stayed outside
the rolling lawns, the art-strewn walls. We crawled
along the strip, a spectacle for all
the passers-by, who passed, appalled. The price-
less art inside compelled its pricey fee.
The way we lived then wasn't much to see.
First, apologies to
anyone who was wandering around Bailey Library today looking confused (as I
was) at 3:30 p.m. Bryan Thao Worra's reading had been moved to the
university bookstore, and I hadn't gotten the updated information until it was
too late.
Last night, I got to have a lovely dinner with Naomi Shihab Nye at Magnolia (which, I must say, we both thought was
pretty wow--the food was great, and they handed us roses when we walked in!),
and then we ambled over to Indigo Bridge Books, where owner Kim Coleman had
a huge gift-box full of books and other goodies waiting for Naomi. Super
nice.
Everyone else has been saying it during Naomi's two-week stint at UNL, and I'll
chime in: Naomi's spirit is as beautiful in person as it is on the
page. She's a gem and a delight. It was fun and an honor to spend
time with her. I only wish I could take her workshop! Those
graduate students are cranking out great new work every night.
This Friday morning, Naomi'll be talking at 9:30 a.m. in the Bailey Library
about her choice not to become affiliated with an academic institution
and how she and other writers have put together various kinds of freelance
work. If you're free, do come.
And speaking of Indigo Bridge Books, do you know about their new program,
"the table"? Listen up, all you grad students and other
underfunded geniuses. Monday through Friday, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30
p.m., Indigo Bridge serves soup from Thé Cup and bread from Bread & Cup,
and I quote from their brochure:
there are no prices
at the table. simply donate what you are able, or what you would like to
pay. or "pay it forward" with an hour of service to the
community, either with us or elsewhere.
(They're apparently helping to fund the program with money
saved on capital letters.)
(I say this with affection. I just watch too much Daily Show.)
So go on out and get you some affordable, organic, vegetarian soup, slow-baked
bread, and good company.
Speaking of good company, many thanks to Faye and Jill for their great comments on the earlier post about
adoption. Both comments are definitely worth reading, if you missed
them--and the blog post Jill links to is great, too. On
Jill's point, the issue of the under-heard voices of birthmothers, please let
me recommend a great, moving, overwhelmingly sad book that logs the voices of
hundreds of birthmothers: artist Ann Fessler's outstanding The
Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children
for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. The book
is based on Fessler's staggeringly painful, intimate, honest interviews with
these mothers, who are of my own birthmother's generation, and it was hearing
their voices (in Fessler's art installation, which includes audiotape of the
women speaking) that helped me understand--in a way I'd imagined but never
plumbed--the traumatic, ongoing quality of her pain and loss.
It was this experience with Fessler's work a few years ago and then reading the
book that really shifted my formerly blithe attitude toward today's overseas
adoptions. Fessler, a compassionate and curious adoptee, shares with us
the voices, the agony, of U.S. women, finally being heard decades after the
fact. Can't we extrapolate? Or do we really have to wait decades
before we hear/realize the agony of the women in developing countries whose children
have been and are now being adopted?
But read Faye's comment for a fine
counterpoint. I really appreciate her generosity and honesty in
sharing some of her story with us. This issue is nothing if not
complicated. And painful, on all sides.
Okay: for something completely different, this Friday at 7:00
p.m., a little slew of writers will be talking about writing and publishing on
a panel at the Barnes & Noble on O Street. I don't have the roster in
front of me, but I believe it includes novelists Jonis Agee and Timothy
Schaffert, as well as others (I can't remember!). I'll be
there.
We don't have questions available to us in advance, so I'm not sure what we'll
be saying, but come on out, have a latte, and ask us stuff!
