On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood before the 600-odd members of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Central New York and delivered what would become one of his most famous speeches, best known today as “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
— Lithub.com, July 4 – July 10
In Memoriam, Dearest Mum: PEONIES
June 15, 2021 at 2:06 am (Artists and Writers, Dearest Mum, Family, Flowers, Links, Pianos)
Tags: Events, concerts, Mondays, memories, transitions, New York, music, memorial, Cee Neuner
A friend brought these from her garden when she heard about Dearest Mum.
I’m also posting for Cee Neuner’s Flower of the Day (FOTD) Challenge.
Three years after her first appearance in Carnegie Hall, Dearest Mum played there again, for the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concert, Main Hall, 5 January 1952. She was just 16.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
Three So Far 2021
June 10, 2021 at 10:13 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Lists, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: anticipation, book lists, causes, COVID Reading, environment, Events, favorites, novel, reading lists, science fiction, US history
Finished reading Oak Flat: The Fight for Sacred Land in the American West, by Lauren Redniss, early this morning. Wow. Blown away by the polyphonic voices. And by the simple yet so-moving illustrations (by the author herself).
It joins two other books as self’s five-star reads of the 2021 reading year:
- Ice Walker: A Polar Bear’s Journey Through the Frozen Arctic, by James Raffan (nonfiction)
- The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal (science fiction)
Mary Robinette Kowal is one of the authors participating in this year’s SiliCon, which will be happening this August at the San Jose Convention Center. Self rushed out and got her tickets. She can’t waaaaait for August.
Have a great summer, dear blog readers.
The New Jersey City University (NJCU) Center for the Arts Presents
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.
After Parkland
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.
Re-Reading, Re-Discovering Angela Narciso Torres
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,
— from To The Bone, by Angela Narciso Torres (Sundress Publications, 2019)
she pinned brown scapulars under our shirts,
wet stamps that cleaved to our skin.
Short Story of the Day: “Crocodile Teeth” by Donna Lee Miele
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.
Remembering Parkland and March For Our Lives
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?
Editor’s Note, ms. aligned 3
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.
