December 2010 Archives
Snowed Under . . .
. . . but digging out! Not literally, but from the end-of-semester madness, which included not only grading but five--count 'em--five faculty reappointment files to review. (Academics: you understand.) I will just quickly say that reading The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy Winkle to 25-30 pre-schoolers was the highlight of my week, and I now know what I want to be when I grow up: a grandma or a pre-K teacher.
Then I got wind that the new issue of the journal of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Scholar & Feminist Online, had just pubbed, and it's gorgeous!
Called Polyphonic Feminisms: Acting in Concert, the issue is about all different kinds of feminisms and how they're working now. It's a beautiful, eclectic issue that includes scholarly pieces, personal pieces, pieces on drumming, singing, dancing, parenting. There are videos and artwork next to Sara Ahmed's piece "Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects)" next to Duchess Harris's "The State of Black Women in Politics Under the First Black President." There's a piece on fat, pleasure, and heterofemininity, a piece on women and tattoos--and, as if it weren't cool enough already, the whole journal has a soundtrack. (My contribution to the playlist is Irma Thomas & Galactic's awesome "Heart of Steel," which is great belted out when you're home alone.)
My own piece that's included, "On Becoming Educated," is a personal essay I read part of here at UNL this fall. It's about graduate school and the unsettling cognitive frictions around class, gender, and ethnicity that can occur there. On the whole, I loved my grad school experience, but this piece opens up a few particular moments of weirdness and thinks about what we can do as teachers to make school a welcoming place for everyone.
Then I got wind that the new issue of the journal of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Scholar & Feminist Online, had just pubbed, and it's gorgeous!
Called Polyphonic Feminisms: Acting in Concert, the issue is about all different kinds of feminisms and how they're working now. It's a beautiful, eclectic issue that includes scholarly pieces, personal pieces, pieces on drumming, singing, dancing, parenting. There are videos and artwork next to Sara Ahmed's piece "Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects)" next to Duchess Harris's "The State of Black Women in Politics Under the First Black President." There's a piece on fat, pleasure, and heterofemininity, a piece on women and tattoos--and, as if it weren't cool enough already, the whole journal has a soundtrack. (My contribution to the playlist is Irma Thomas & Galactic's awesome "Heart of Steel," which is great belted out when you're home alone.)
My own piece that's included, "On Becoming Educated," is a personal essay I read part of here at UNL this fall. It's about graduate school and the unsettling cognitive frictions around class, gender, and ethnicity that can occur there. On the whole, I loved my grad school experience, but this piece opens up a few particular moments of weirdness and thinks about what we can do as teachers to make school a welcoming place for everyone.
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Call Me Sonic
When Grey was little, one of his favorite stories to hear--and one of my favorite ones to read--was Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. What could be more charming than a hedgehog who does ironing? Potter based Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, considered to be one of her most positive characters, on her own pet hedgehog and a Scottish washerwoman. Today, my nephew Indigo loves Sonic the Hedgehog--to the extent that when we were last in Texas, he wouldn't answer to his own name. "Call me Sonic," he'd sternly correct us.
And now Muriel Barbery's French novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog is charming grown-ups everywhere. (Thank you, Faye, for the gift!)
I guess hedgehogs just have perennial, irresistible appeal.
So you can see why I'm excited to be reading The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle to children this morning at Indigo Bridge Books--in the company of a real live hedgehog! It's part of the bookstore's indiZoo program, which brings live animals (with an expert handler) into the store, so preschool children can learn about them. This morning's program runs from 10 to 11:30 a.m. (but you can drop in and out), so if you're in Lincoln and have little kids--or are simply a geek for hedgehogs yourself, like I am--please come down to the Creamery Building (isn't that a wonderful address?) and join us!
Here's my quotation du jour, from an interview with filmmaker David O. Russell about his new movie The Fighter. The passage has nothing to do with hedgehogs but everything to do with human interactions (think of your workplace--and maybe your family--and maybe your intimate relationship?):
This passage also has everything to do with creative persistence. Rejection, ego pain, harsh criticism, setbacks, failure: they're part of the game.
You wanted this. You chose it. Get back up.
That's the most beautiful thing that I like about boxing: you can take a punch. The biggest thing about taking a punch is your ego reacts and there's no better spiritual lesson than trying to not pay attention to your ego's reaction. That's what takes people out of the fight half the time. They get hit and half the reaction is your ego is saying, I cannot believe that person just lit me up, how humiliating. And what a fighter has to do . . . is they kind of just go. [He mimes ducking and getting up.]
This passage also has everything to do with creative persistence. Rejection, ego pain, harsh criticism, setbacks, failure: they're part of the game.
You wanted this. You chose it. Get back up.
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Shopping My Values This Season
First, a caveat: Thus spake Suze Orman.The right amount to give is what you can spend today without compromising your own needs. The bottom line: Under no circumstances should you incur debt you can't immediately pay off in order to give a gift. That means no credit card balances rolling into January. I understand the tug of holiday tradition--you always get every niece and nephew a Hanukkah gift. But in this rough economy, you may need to rethink your approach.
For the last few years, the HH and I were in such straitened circumstances PGT (putting Grey through) that we instituted a no-gift-exchange policy with our friends and family. It was embarrassing--and it ran against our grain--but it was necessary. The holidays felt small and pinched, and we felt Scroogey.
This year, Grey's a graduate, and we're grateful and relieved to say that our belts are a little looser. We determined a budget (post-groceries) and decided to invest it at three local places with a global vision:
It was tons of fun supporting publishing, too--a hurting industry--by giving favorite works of literature to our beloved ones: Franny & Zooey and Native Guard to a new sister-in-law, The Professor's House to my bio-mom's husband, The Secret Garden to a niece, Holes and Jackie Woodson's terrific Locomotion to a nephew . . . and we found the cutest, warmest little hat for our nephew Indigo and a scarf for my sister Lisa, both from Tiny Hands International. (Don't worry; none of my family reads this blog. I'm assuming my secrets are safe with you.) Handmade neem soap from India, vegan dark chocolate from Honduras and Ecuador, delicious Six Bean Soup Mix from the Women's Bean Project in Denver . . .Ten Thousand Villages, a fair-trade nonprofit that features handmade gifts from India, Haiti, Ecuador, and around the world--all profits go back to the individual craftspeople
Indigo Bridge Books, an independent bookstore/coffeeshop that specializes in social-justice issues
Licorice International, which is carrying not just licorice but caramels, chocolates, and more for the holidays--their shiny wrappers are going to glitz up our packages.
Okay, so they're not iPods or cashmere sweaters or gift cards to Williams-Sonoma. But it sure was fun. And I'd rather encourage someone to curl up with hot soup or a great book than blast our budget buying electronica and battery-operated toys that are only destined for the landfill anyway. And we didn't have to battle any crazy crowds at Target or Best Buy or the mall. We walked to all three shops and lugged our choices home with human-muscle power (very green).
One year, before Grey was in college and before the recession, we gave our relatives Heifer International "gifts," thinking they'd be thrilled to step off the cycle of overconsumption and give something to someone else. Alas! They were all sort of like, "Um, thanks so much," in this flat, pained way. Oops. A little overzealous with imposing your ethics, young Joy?
I'm hoping that this year will be a happy compromise--that each person will feel thought of, each person cherished. And we can give ourselves the pleasure of helping Heifer, if that's our choice. (Maybe your family's already ready for that!)
How are you shopping your values this season? How do you balance your ethics, your generosity, and your loved ones' desires? I would love to hear your story. If you don't feel like posting publicly, send me an email, because I'd really like to know.
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Loads of Good News & Opportunities
I'm brimming with pride tonight.
Congratulations to the wonderful writer Jim Kennedy, whose piece "End of the Line" has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the editors of Creative Nonfiction, where it appeared. ("One of my sons was snatched by the sea on a day when the water seemed calm. How things happen sometimes does not make sense.") I had the pleasure of working with Jim in the Pine Manor MFA program.
Hats off to the lovely and amazing Laura Madeline Wiseman, whose chapbook Branding Girls is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press this spring. Madeline is a Ph.D. student in creative writing here at UNL.
And huge congratulations to Austen Crowder, whose first book Bait and Switch offers a timely fable about transition. I knew Austen when she was a student at Wabash College. (Double-take? She? Yes. Austen is "one of a handful of female Wabash alumna[e] in the world.")
When your students succeed, you succeed, so you can imagine how grand I'm feeling right about now.
Motivated to get your own work out there? Here are a couple of publishing opportunities you might not have heard of.
Be judged by Junot Díaz, win $300, and get published in Avery. Go here.
If you're a woman and were born in Nebraska, live in Nebraska now, or have lived in Nebraska for not less than 5 years at some point in your life, The Backwaters Press would love to see your poetry. They've shifted the deadline to June 30, 2011 (and revised the Nebraska-affiliation guidelines) for their forthcoming collection, The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets.
Under the heading Being the Change You Want to See in the World, here are two small opportunities to make a big difference.
Throughout the month of December, the staff at my all-time favorite independent bookstore, Indigo Bridge Books, will help you give books as holiday gifts to children at Friendship Home, a domestic violence shelter for women and children here in Lincoln. Drop by, pick up a child's name, pick out a book, and the staff there will wrap it and deliver it in time for the holidays. Let books make a real difference in a child's life.
Last but not least, lots of Tayari Jones fans read this blog, and if you'd like to help her terrific novel Leaving Atlanta hit the big screen, now's your chance--for as little as five bucks.
Now I'm off to an evening lecture by Bradford Morrow, who's not only a dazzling writer and the editor of Conjunctions but also a really nice guy and wonderfully approachable for someone so decorated.
Congratulations to the wonderful writer Jim Kennedy, whose piece "End of the Line" has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the editors of Creative Nonfiction, where it appeared. ("One of my sons was snatched by the sea on a day when the water seemed calm. How things happen sometimes does not make sense.") I had the pleasure of working with Jim in the Pine Manor MFA program.
Hats off to the lovely and amazing Laura Madeline Wiseman, whose chapbook Branding Girls is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press this spring. Madeline is a Ph.D. student in creative writing here at UNL.
And huge congratulations to Austen Crowder, whose first book Bait and Switch offers a timely fable about transition. I knew Austen when she was a student at Wabash College. (Double-take? She? Yes. Austen is "one of a handful of female Wabash alumna[e] in the world.")
When your students succeed, you succeed, so you can imagine how grand I'm feeling right about now.
Motivated to get your own work out there? Here are a couple of publishing opportunities you might not have heard of.
Be judged by Junot Díaz, win $300, and get published in Avery. Go here.
If you're a woman and were born in Nebraska, live in Nebraska now, or have lived in Nebraska for not less than 5 years at some point in your life, The Backwaters Press would love to see your poetry. They've shifted the deadline to June 30, 2011 (and revised the Nebraska-affiliation guidelines) for their forthcoming collection, The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets.
Under the heading Being the Change You Want to See in the World, here are two small opportunities to make a big difference.
Throughout the month of December, the staff at my all-time favorite independent bookstore, Indigo Bridge Books, will help you give books as holiday gifts to children at Friendship Home, a domestic violence shelter for women and children here in Lincoln. Drop by, pick up a child's name, pick out a book, and the staff there will wrap it and deliver it in time for the holidays. Let books make a real difference in a child's life.
Last but not least, lots of Tayari Jones fans read this blog, and if you'd like to help her terrific novel Leaving Atlanta hit the big screen, now's your chance--for as little as five bucks.
Now I'm off to an evening lecture by Bradford Morrow, who's not only a dazzling writer and the editor of Conjunctions but also a really nice guy and wonderfully approachable for someone so decorated.
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