A Little More Naomi & A Panel at Barnes & Noble

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!