April 15, 2021 at 9:57 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, Links, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Black writers, essays, Events
A Conversation with Emily Bernard
Author of Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine
Moderated by Edvige Giunta and Meilli Ellis-Tingle
Tuesday, April 20, 6 p.m.
Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Mother’s Time and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio. Black is the Body won the 2020 Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Emily’s previous works include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendship, which was chosen by the New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age; and, with Deborah Willis, Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs, which received a 2010 NAACP Image Award. Her work has appeared in: O the Oprah Magazine, Harper’s, The New Republic, newyorker.com, Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Alphonse A. Fletcher Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Arts Council, and the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. Emily was the James Weldon Johnson Senior Research Fellow in African American Studies at Yale University. She is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont, and a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Emily lives in South Burlington, Vermont with her husband and twin daughters.
Free with RSVP.
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March 23, 2021 at 6:41 pm (Uncategorized)
Tags: causes, complaints, Events, grief, news, politics, Protests, sadness
WILL WE EVER LEARN?
March for Our Lives, March 2108: Courthouse Square, Redwood City, California:
This generation of kids has been through the wringer. How many of them, self wonders, had to start college on zoom?
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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February 17, 2021 at 6:09 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, Family, Filipino Writers, Food and Drink, Links, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Publishers, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, COVID Reading, Events, Literary Magazines, opportunities, poetry, Readings
Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange (Willow Books) and What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books); and winner of the 2019 Yeats Poetry Prize. Her recent work appears in Poetry, Missouri Review, and PANK.
Angela and two other Four Way Books poets, Andrea Cohen and Rodney Terich, are reading tonight online at an event hosted by Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, NY. Reading starts at 7 p.m. EST (that’s 4 p.m. PST) You can find out more from the Canio’s Books Calendar of Events.
SUNDOWNING (An excerpt)
for my mother, Carmen
The sweetest meat clings to the bone,
my mother says, knifing her steak.
Carmen. Silver spade on my tongue.
Mahjong nights, her father and mother gone,
she cried herself to sleep. Blamed in the morning
for her mother’s losing hand. Unlucky tears!
The sweetest meat — she begins
at dinner, tearing off a chicken leg.
What will she recall by morning?
Named for Our Lady of Mount Carmel,
she pinned brown scapulars under our shirts,
wet stamps that cleaved to our skin.
— from To The Bone, by Angela Narciso Torres (Sundress Publications, 2019)
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February 17, 2021 at 12:09 am (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Family, Links, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Asian American Writers, Events, Readings, short story, short story collections
Nine more days till the Redwood City Library online reading for ms. aligned volume 3! (Thursday, Feb. 25, 5:30 p.m. – 6:45 p.m. PST) Much thanks to the library outreach staff, who gave us the slot and prepared beautiful flyers. And much thanks to series editor Pat Matsueda for coming up with the idea of a series focused on women writing about men.
Super-excited. Register here.
One of the readers on Feb. 25 is Donna Lee Miele. Self has just finished re-reading her fantastic story, “Crocodile Teeth.” From her Contributor Bio in ms. aligned 3:
- Donna Lee Miele plays with characters, settings, and conflicts that evoke her mixed heritage and her parents’ experiences of war. While she also writes historical fiction, she finds greater freedom to explore (and greater fun) in stories with less concise settings, which was her intention with “Crocodile Teeth.”
An excerpt:
I was scared of Edward’s sister. After Edward’s parents got lost looking for work upriver, she took over their grandma’s house like she’d just been waiting for the chance. She bullied Edward, she bullied their grandma, and she even bullied the guys that started hanging around, who offered everything from repairs to the wornout old house to actual money for the chance to date her. They thought she’d be easy because she and Edward were orphans. She didn’t even pretend to be nice to them. She had a look so cold she could make the bag shrivel between your legs.
If you were one of those guys, and you tried to come up on her grandma’s veranda, she would stand on its edge, look down on you, and say something like, “Take yourself to the beach and remember me to your family,” meaning Last Beach, though even she wouldn’t say that right out. Last Beach is full of whores of every kind; and every one of them, of course, is someone’s family.
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February 14, 2021 at 7:01 pm (Calls, Recommended, Sundays)
Tags: causes, Events, memorials, Protests
14 students and three teachers probably woke up that Valentine’s Day thinking of chocolates and Valentine cards. Not a single one knowing they’d never get out of that day.
And now we have a person in Congress who’s saying it never happened. And nothing happens to her, the Truth Denier. She even stalks one of the teen-age survivors. Stalks him as he’s leaving class, yells at him as he’s walking along.
An adult is yelling at a teen-ager who survived a school massacre. And gets herself ELECTED TO CONGRESS. What is wrong with this picture?
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February 14, 2021 at 6:06 pm (Holidays, Recommended, Sayings, Sundays)
Tags: causes, Events, politics
So what if Donald Trump got acquitted AGAIN, and Mitch gave the most self-serving speech in the history of self-serving speeches (It’s all Donald’s fault, see? Don’t blame ANY of this on me or the Republican Party!) It’s the beginning of a new Lunar Calendar!
People born in the Year of the Ox are “honest and sincere and don’t want to be the centre of attention nor look for praise. Their recognition comes from their diligent, hard work. They are logical thinkers, too, and so make great world leaders, just what the world needs right now!” (Thank you, Atlantis Bookshop in London for this description!)
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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February 7, 2021 at 11:22 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Publishers, Recommended, short story collections, Sundays, Women Writers)
Tags: causes, essay, Events, Readings, teaching
There’s still almost an hour before the game begins, so self can squeeze in a few more things. Self’s quote of the day is from Rebecca Thomas, Editor of ms. aligned 3: women writing about men. (Published by El Leon Literary Arts of Berkeley and Manoa Books)
For the past nine years, I have been teaching composition at West Virginia University. I primarily teach freshmen, and one of their first papers is a narrative. In so many of the narratives, students — of all genders — explore issues connected to masculinity, in particular the effects of toxic masculinity. I receive papers about abusive relationships in high school, peer pressure to act a certain way, loneliness in emotionally connecting with peers, and the very real risk and fallout from coming out. My students are young, so it’s natural that they write about their childhood, the childhood moments where they begin to construct their identity. In our class discussions and in their reflections, I see so many grappling with the concept of masculinity. How did it shape their life? How will it shape their life as they journey into adulthood?
In this Me Too era, it’s hard not to think about masculinity and how it can be toxic. Working on a college campus, I know that many of my students have been assaulted. I know that many of them are trying to find the space to talk about it, and I know that many of them are starting to test the waters of self-acceptance, to see if it’s safe to be who they are. Since I am the mother of two young boys, toxic masculinity is something that I have to consider constantly: how do we raise our children in this environment? What conversations do I need to have with my kids?
Contributors to ms. aligned 3, and series editor Pat Matsueda, will be on-hand at an online event hosted by Redwood City Library. Register here.
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February 7, 2021 at 11:04 pm (Food and Drink, Sundays, television)
Tags: Chinese food, COVID watching, Events, farmers markets, indulgences
SUPERBOWL! Of course self has to observe the day. All her friends are off watching too, so it’s like a big Superbowl party, only . . . in different countries.
She went to the Belmont Farmers Market early this morning and came back with pork buns, which she’s going to have with cold beer. She bought a big bag of chips yesterday, but she ate the whole bag . . . yesterday.
Anyhoo. GO CHIEFS!
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February 6, 2021 at 1:38 am (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Links, Publishers, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, Events, Fridays, Readings, Redwood City, short story
ms aligned 3 is a collaboration between El Léon Literary Arts (Berkeley, CA) and Manoa Books, Hawai’i. More information can be found here.
Upcoming Online Event: Redwood City Library Reading, Thursday, Feb. 25, 5:30 p.m. – 6:45 p.m. Register here.
“Daniel attempted to lead me; I tried to lead him. We struggled. I pushed him on the shoulder; he pushed me back. I kicked him in the shin. Hunching, he grabbed my right hand in both of his and bit me hard.”
— Excerpt from Angela Nishimoto’s “Sex Education: A Tragicomedy, Part II” in ms aligned 3
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February 3, 2021 at 9:50 pm (Artists and Writers, Calls, Dearest Mum, Links, Lists, plans, Recommended, Relatives, The Economist, Women Writers)
Tags: COVID Reading, Events, Literary Magazines, mysteries, poetry, reading lists, Readings, suspense, thrillers
Self loves this book! From the opening scene — the hero’s having a meltdown in a Bentley because he had to kill, it enraged him, can’t people just behave so he doesn’t have to kill them? — she’s been having a fine time!
There are four corpses (already) in that Bentley, and that’s just in the first paragraph!
Plus self loved learning about the excellence of the double-barreled Purdey & Sons rifle (100,000 GBP each, thank you very much!)
Anyhoo, the first four would-be assassins attempted a break-in at the hero’s re-modeled 1650s Yorkshire mansion (technically, the property of his wife, she’s a member of the English nobility). Our hero drives the Bentley to the Manchester airport, where he leaves it (and the four bodies) in the parking lot and waits for a shuttle to the terminal. Unfortunately, a new set of goons try to kill him before he can get on the shuttle. Since it is only p. 29, we can assume the hero survives, which means these assassins must be off-ed, as well.
A few pages later, our hero faces an existential crisis: how can he get rid of the blood spatter on his clothes before entering the plane (to Sydney)?
Digressing a bit: Self has a book to pick up from the library this afternoon. Then, FaceTime with Dearest Mum in Manila. Tomorrow morning, bright and early (4 p.m. London time), she’s registered for a talk by the woman who writes obituaries for The Economist (such elegant examples of the form, she’s even taught them in creative nonfiction classes). There’s another zoom event tomorrow afternoon, fortunately it’s Central time, not such a big time difference as Manila or London: poets Denise Duhamel and Nin Andrews, hosted by Rain Taxi, and free!
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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