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Years ago, someone asked me who my writing mentor was. When I said I didn’t have one, she exclaimed, “Poor Bubbeleh!” I had never studied writing, and was just beginning to teach in the Goddard Masters in Creative Writing program. I had published a novel, was rewriting a memoir, and could not imagine what a mentor could offer me.
I know better now.
"You have such gifts, that are important...For a long time our minds have told us that maybe we are imagining things, that it's crazy to live according to what you want to give...This isn't crazy...This is how to live."
We do not accept this. We will not play your rigged game. You come up with something better if you want our money, our shopping at your store, our working at your company....
This is what the Occupy movement is saying, should say. No.Because we can live without them.
"If each person in the room promises that the very next day she or he will do at least one outrageous thing in the cause of simple justice, then I promise I will, too. It doesn't matter whether the act is as small as saying, 'Pick it up yourself' or as large as calling a strike. '"Perhaps only a mother knows how outrageous, how life-changing, the words "Pick it up yourself" can be.
I am over rape.
I am over one in three women in the U.S military (Happy Veterans Day!) getting raped by their so-called "comrades."
I am over the fact that after four women came forward with allegations that Herman Cain groped them and grabbed them and humiliated them, he is still running for the President of the United States.
Which reminds me, I am so over the students at Penn State who protested the justice system instead of the alleged rapist pedophile of at least 8 boys, or his boss Joe Paterno, who did nothing to protect those children after knowing what was happening to them.
We need to OCCUPYRAPE in every school, park, radio, TV station, household, office, factory, refugee camp, military base, back room, night club, alleyway, courtroom, UN office. We need people to truly try and imagine -- once and for all -- what it feels like to have your body invaded, your mind splintered, your soul shattered. We need to let our rage and our compassion connect us so we can change the paradigm of global rape.
There are approximately one billion women on the planet who have been violated.
ONE BILLION WOMEN.
The time is now. Prepare for the escalation.
Today it begins, moving toward February 14, 2013, when one billion women will rise to end rape.
Because we are over it.Look for this movement. Start your own. Because the only way we are going to get a safe, healthy, equitable, sustainable, clean and respectful society and world to live in is if we begin by picking it up ourselves.
A. I'm at Zuccotti Park, where I go every day, wearing a sign that says BECAUSE THEY'RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF. Cold rain is blowing sideways and I fight with my umbrella while reading Allen Ginsberg's poem "America." Looking up, I spy a tall young man clad in excellent rain pants, standing a few paces away. He pronounces each line as I do, with such assurance that it's clear he knows the entire poem by heart, all the way to the famous ending ("America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel"). We talk. It turns out he's one of the Occupy Wall Street librarians. "We have a whole Allen Ginsberg section in our library!" he exults. For the rest of the day, I feel more alive, because poetry lives.And she also writes, about an anthology of essays about writing and the writing life, about the "the ragged edges and torn borders that truly invite creative motion":
I'm certainly not saying word artists don't need to spend lots of time alone, wrestling with their materials. Or that we shouldn't be paid. Or that we shouldn't study craft. I'm saying that art is more than the sum of these things, that the central impulse comes from elsewhere, from someplace webby and tentacled. What if the artist's vocation as prophet simply isn't compatible with being a profit center? Although Alchemy of the Word can be put to fine use, it is not a 'useful' book. It's a bountiful array of forking paths leading back into the thicket where one person's imaginative language always reverberates with the languages, purposes, visions of human others.
It is "our offering."
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.”
― Muriel Rukeyser
“The time of maximum danger for a woman who is about to escape a violent household is that moment just before and just after she escapes. She is most likely to be seriously injured or murdered at that moment because she is getting out of control.”
“We are in a time of danger and we need to protect each other. We need to know that. We are about to be free and we are not going to stop.”Keep each other safe. Keep fighting. It is darkest, as they say, just before the dawn.
A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb by Amitava Kumar (Duke University Press Books)
The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America by Mae Ngai (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Hiroshima in the Morning by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto (The Feminist Press at CUNY)
"As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking languages and expressing cultures and religions I could only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming, overflowing Joy. I can’t even explain the insurgence of emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet again that this is not a case about the death penalty, this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice prevail.
"I cannot answer all of your letters but I do read them all, I cannot see you all but I can imagine your faces, I cannot hear you speak but your letters take me to the far reaches of the world, I cannot touch you physically but I feel your warmth everyday I exist.
"So Thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated. There are so many more Troy Davis’. This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.
"I can’t wait to Stand with you, no matter if that is in physical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing,
“I am Troy Davis, and I am free!”
“Are we so naïve as to think that we can bring peace to the world through words? Yes we are. What else do we have?”
- Elie WeiselHiroshima in the Morning has been nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, "the first and only annual U.S. literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace." This year's nominees include Nelson Mandela, Isabel Wilkerson, Kai Bird, and Siddhartha Mukherjee, among many other gifted writers. It's an amazing honor to be nominated, and to be on any list that also has Nelson Mandela on it.
“The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.
“When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.”
“In interviews and public statements, some current and former government officials have admitted that Japanese authorities engaged in a pattern of withholding damaging information and denying facts of the nuclear disaster — in order, some of them said, to limit the size of costly and disruptive evacuations in land-scarce Japan and to avoid public questioning of the politically powerful nuclear industry.”
“Japan’s Parliament passed a law on Wednesday that will allow the use of public funds to shore up the company operating the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and help it pay what is expected to amount to billions of dollars in compensation claims.”
“A 60-minute exposure could kill a man or woman within weeks.”
“Top Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee criticized the federal task force charged with reviewing Japan's nuclear crisis and the safety of U.S. reactors for recommending "more Washington red tape" and called its proposals premature, potentially excessively, expensive and burdensome.”
“Japanese agricultural officials say meat from more than 500 cattle that were likely to have been contaminated with radioactive cesium has made its way to supermarkets and restaurants across Japan in recent weeks….If you eat it every day, it might be a problem,” Goshi Hosono, the minister in charge of the nuclear issue, said last week. “But if you eat just a little, there would be no big effect on your health.”
“Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows. The number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as federal regulators extend the licenses of more and more reactors across the nation…
"You got pipes that have been buried underground for 30 or 40 years, and they've never been inspected,' whistleblower says.”
“Thousands of engineers and labourers have been lured by higher wages and a sense of duty…They include Ariyoshi Rune, a tall, wiry 47-year-old truck driver whose slicked-back hair and sideburns are inspired by his idol, Joe Strummer…For five days a week, Rune is in thrall to the drudgery of life as a "nuclear gypsy", the name writer Kunio Horie gave to contract workers who have traditionally performed the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs for Japan's power utilities. “I have about two months left before I reach my limit, but I'm hoping they will make an exception and let me work for longer," he says.”
“Scientific experts believe Japan's nuclear disaster to be far worse than governments are revealing to the public….We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. "The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl."
“Hisao Nakamura still can't accept that his crisply cut field of deep green tea bushes south of Tokyo has been turned into a radioactive hazard by a crisis far beyond the horizon.
"I was more than shocked," said Nakamura, 74, who, like other tea farmers in Kanagawa has been forced to throw away an early harvest because of radiation being released by the Fukushima Daiichi plant 300 kilometers (180 miles) away…The incomplete data has complicated Japan's response to the disaster and planning for an environmental clean-up expected to take years and cost tens of billions of dollars.
"It has also created a mood of quiet despair in already devastated communities. "I never believe anything I hear any more on radiation," said Shukuko Kuzumi, 63, who lives in Iwaki, about 50 km to the south of Fukushima.
"I want to dig a hole in the ground and scream."”
“According to test results announced Saturday, samples of cow milk from Kawamatacho, Fukushima Prefecture, and spinach from six cities, towns and villages in Ibaraki Prefecture were found to contain radioactive iodine and other radioactive materials in excess of provisional limits, officials said….In Ibaraki Prefecture, radioactive iodine was detected from spinach sampled from farms in Hitachi, Takahagi, Hitachi-Ota and Hitachinaka cities and the town of Daigomachi and the village of Tokaimura. The highest level found was 15,020 Bq, 7.5 times the permissible level…There is no direct risk to human health from the latest radioactivity findings involving cow milk and spinach, according to Prof. Gen Suzuki of the International University of Health and Welfare.”
“If we hear that exposure is “within legal limits” anytime soon, let’s remember this from the Washington Post: “Japan’s Health and Welfare minister had to waive the nation’s standard of radiation exposure, increasing levels of acceptable exposure from 100 millisieverts to 250 – five times the level allowed in the United States.”
"As a writer, I have always been attracted to what is hidden. I write to understand what is not understandable, what is not even acceptable, and to find a deeper truth in what has not been spoken.
"I write war, trauma, history.
"I also write family, without planning to do so. And motherhood. This is the natural consequence of writing who I am. In our culture and our stories, gender is everything. I have learned – not always in the nicest ways – that even when I am sure that my own preoccupations have nothing to do with gender, my readers will still bring their own, gender-based expectations to my work."
- Jack Kornfield, On Forgiveness, excerpted in Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World, edited by Karin Lofthus Carrington and Susan Griffin.
"In the Babemba tribe of South Africa, when a person acts irresponsibly or unjustly, he is placed in the center of the village, alone and unfettered. All work ceases, and every man, woman, and child in the village gathers in a large circle around the accused individual. Then each person in the tribe speaks to the accused, one at a time, recalling the good things the person in the center of the circle has done in his lifetime. Every incident, every experience that can be recalled with any detail and accuracy, is recounted. All his positive attributes, good deeds, strengths, and kindnesses are recited carefully and at length. This tribal ceremony often lasts for several days. At the end, the circle is broken, a joyous celebration takes place, and the person is symbolically and literally welcomed back into the tribe."
"Over the last decade, whether in Palestine or Israel, Mumbai or Pakistan, Baghdad or Kabul, Rwanda or the Sudan, the United States, Spain, or Great Britain, we have witnessed a vicious cycle in which terrorism causes terror and the experience of terror seeds acts of terrorism. And yet, though the human emotions we all share— fear, grief, and loss— are so clearly part of this murderous equation, in delineating and defining this violence rarely does society consider the experience of terror that lies at the heart of terrorism."
"A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnecessary."
Dorothy Canfield Fisher (who, coincidentally, has a dorm at Goddard College named after her).
"Is it that old bugaboo, the welfare mom, raised most recently in connection with Natalie Portman? In defending his comments about the actress, Mike Huckabee claimed, "most single moms are very poor, under-educated, can't get a job, and if it weren't for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death." Not true. In fact, according to the Census Bureau, 80% of single mothers work and less than a quarter receive public assistance. But fighting and accusing and attacking is what captures our attention. How many of us were able to escape Ann Coulter's nationally televised claims that single motherhood is "a recipe to create criminals, strippers, rapists, murderers"? Here is that dire warning about my children being ruined coming back through a bullhorn.
"These are our children she is talking about. Our next generation."
My mother was always there. She was a 1950s housewife, living in the '60s and '70s. Whatever my siblings and I needed, she gave: hand-sewn prom dresses; homemade Christmas ornaments; she pulled up a stool and offered step-by-step advice (through the locked bathroom door I refused to open for, oh, an hour) about how to insert my first tampon. When I confessed to her, as a child, that I had stolen candy bars from a local store, she helped me believe life could go on and be righted, and it was that safety, that lying together in my bed, that ensured I would never steal anything again. When I was 15, and broke my arm falling off a runaway horse, careening straight downhill behind my house in the rain, I didn't cry -- it didn't even hurt -- until I laid eyes on my mother.Read the whole piece here.
On Mother’s Day, her boys will be with her. They will cook pancakes or waffles together. If it’s nice out, they’ll go for a walk through the botanical gardens. “I’m a better mother because I’m not concerned with ‘shoulds’,” she says. “Now that I’m divorced and I have them for specific amounts of time, I can give them my full attention when I have them.”
"Interesting question! Visual media, and especially the sound that comes with it, is absolutely in-your-face. You can’t put up a nice, safe emotional wall between you and what you are seeing. With words, you can. You can put down the book, but you can also engage your brain to accept the story in a more distant way. And of course, the writer is also making decisions about how to tell the story, so the raw material is already being shaped. But image, and sound, go directly into your brain and your emotions before your mind can protect you. I remember, I think it was a Michael Moore documentary, a black screen where you couldn’t see but could only hear the sound of the 9/11 attacks. That was really powerful."
"What is a woman’s place? Why are we so eager to judge mothers, and ourselves, based on a belief that self-sacrifice equals love? Why is the well-being of children paramount, while the well-being of the mother is not important at all?"
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| The Moment I Knew Meetup for the Huffington Post, |
"Two decades together. All of my adult life. Every day of it in relationship, in twinship. In compromise. He wanted to go back to that life; he wanted the last six months erased. And faced with that impossibility, before he could go forward he needed me to define precisely who I now was.
"And that was the problem. Even that. I couldn't say who I wanted to be. I didn't know, and the point was that I didn't want to have to guess and negotiate. I wanted to be allowed to grow, to change, with the assurance that I was still loveable.
"I tried to put that into words."
"The point is not to fix anything. The point is to create anew."I think of this when I watch the radiation leaking into vast swathes of Japan and listen to the excuses, as if to say that, if we can blame this tragedy on incompetence or a freak occurrence or strange foreign ways we do not have to worry about the caged tiger in our own livingroom.
