International Women's History Month Literary Festival

Looking forward to a March 10th discussion in Baltimore on "the intersection of place, time and culture in literature and in the lives of women" with four amazing women:

Leila Cobo, a Fulbright scholar from Cali, Colombia, novelist, pianist, TV host, and executive editor for Latin content and programming for Billboard. She is considered one of the country's leading experts on Latin music. She is the author of Tell Me Something True. Her second novel, The Second Time We Met (Grand Central Publishing), will be released February 29, 2012. (www.leilacobo.com)

Jacqueline Luckett, author of Searching for Tina Turner and the newly published Passing Love (Grand Central Publishing). She participated in the Voices of Our Nations (VONA) writing workshops and, in 2004, formed the Finish Party along with seven other women writers-of-color. (www.jacquelineluckett.com)

Bernice L. McFadden, author of seven critically acclaimed novels, including Sugar and Glorious. She is a two-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist. In her new novel, Gathering of Waters (Akashic Books), McFadden brings her own vision to the story of Emmett Till and the town of Money, Mississippi. (www.bernicemcfadden.com).

Linda A. Duggins, moderator from the Hachette Book Group.

More details here

A Conversation with Sixers Review

Appearing in Sixers Review today, a brief conversation with Goddard MFA graduate, Shokry Eldaly, who will someday be a literary marvel himself when he gets that half-finished novel done. Here is a sneak peek:

"Are you asking what you do when you are asked to conform? You don't. It's very simple. Why would you? Why would any person ever think that another person, or a structure (like publishing, or banking!), or a cultural assumption, knows what you need and who you are better than you do? You are the expert on you, and you have an urgency in your own preoccupations that is important for the rest of us to hear about. Otherwise, you become a bad copy of a character that someone else has made up."

Read the entire interview and take a look at the journal here.

Free in the New Year

What if there was no penalty for being who you are, and no prize either? If you didn’t have to worry about being judged, shunned, made fun of…what would you allow yourself to do? How would you act? What choices could you make? And what if there was no pressure to do the correct thing either: that you must write the bestseller, win the race, get the promotion, wear the most fashionable shoes? No approval, no praise.

Then everything you do every day, every choice you make, would be want you want to do at that moment, what you feel is right. You would be free to take risks. You would be free to play, and to find joy. You would be free to set your own priorities.

You would be free, free, free.

Happy 2012. Have a brilliant new year.

The Daily Mentor on She Writes

This week, I have the privilege to be the Guest Editor for She Writes, a virtual community, workplace, and emerging marketplace for women who write, with over 15,000 active members from all 50 states and more than 30 countries.  It gives me a chance to bring together two writing communities I love: She Writes and Goddard College, where I teach in the MFA in Creative Writing.  All this week, I will be hosting a feature called the Daily Mentor, with excerpts from essays about the writing life from my Goddard colleagues.  You can find the Daily Mentor on the main page at She Writes all this week, and you can start here for the series.


Here is a taste:

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.  

Love is the Revolution

"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."

This video is perfect.  Check out the website, occupylove.org for more.

One year

Today is the day I must choose different words.  To leave "my mother just passed away" behind and embrace "my mother died one year ago." It is something of a shock.  It is sudden.  Yet, there it is.  A new year.

This is the two of us, when she was the age that I am now.

I don't know what this day is called, the anniversary of a passing.  Today, please keep my family in your thoughts.

The Pen Fall Literary Tasting

Come join me at Westbeth for an evening of readings, conversation and cocktails.

Westbeth

With Henry Chang, Hal Foster, Michael Greenberg, Lev Grossman, Kevin Holohan, Sabina Murray, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Stephen Stark, and other special guests

What should you be reading this season? Hear from Sarah McNally of McNally Jackson Books about the runaway hits, the beloved secrets, and the must-reads of the 2011 fall season. Then wander the halls of Westbeth to attend live readings in the homes of Westbeth residents by some of the most exciting authors writing today. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to explore the oldest and largest artist community located in the heart of bohemian West Village, repurposed by renowned architect Richard Meier into 383 living and working lofts. The evening ends with a reception and cocktails.

When: Thursday, November 17, 2011
Where: Westbeth, 155 Bank St., New York City
What time: 7 p.m.

Tickets: $10. Purchase at ovationtix.com or at the door

No Demands

The genius of the Occupy Wall Street movement is its lack of demands.  Not just because there cannot be one person who speaks, or one set of needs.  Yes, consensus is good.  But the minute something is asked for, we will be told it can't be done.  We give up our power and autonomy because we will depend on someone else to effect this change.  And in the time-honored way of the politics of negativity and exhaustion, any proposal that is made will be shot down, and no other solutions offered, because the powers that be do not want change.  They do not want a solution.  They want us to shut up.

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.

The genius of Occupy Wall Street is that, in the absence of demands, we the people each have to decide what we want to do.  We may not choose to live in a park in the snow.  But we may embrace National Bank Transfer Day and invest in ourselves through credit unions.  And we may join a CSA and become shareholders in a local, organic farm.  Or we may stand up against fracking.  We can turn to each other in community and start a coop or refuse to buy genetically modified food, or refuse to spend hundred of dollars on toxic beauty products.  As individuals, we can decide what we want to occupy in our lives.  What we want to change.   Occupy Wall Street can be this generation's version of Gloria Steinem's proposal, years ago, on outrageous acts:

"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.

Here is something else we can "occupy": rape.

From Eve Ensler (this is highly abridged.  Check the link for the full text):

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.

Words become us. Occupying our words.

On my calendar next week:  Go to Zuccotti Park when Jan Clausen is there.

On Cara Hoffman's blog today Jan writes:

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."

Read her full essay here.
Find the anthology Alchemy of the Word here and here.

Blast from the Past

Here is an interview I did with Rachel Glass for Evergreen Radio/WTBBL in Seattle last year, before the motherhood explosion, when the conversation was really about Japan and the atomic bomb and writing.  It's quite interesting to go back in time.  When Rachel and I sat down, we discovered, of all things, that her parents knew my parents in the old days in Hawaii.  It is, especially in the islands, a very small world.

The MP3 link is here.

A Radical Act

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.”


― Muriel Rukeyser

Twenty years ago, Anita Hill sat in front of a Senate hearing and told her truth at the intersection of race and gender. She was publically pilloried by a panel of white men. This weekend, at Hunter College, Anita Hill was celebrated by a sold-out, star-studded conference, whose participants had a chance to thank her for enduring what she has so that women today could stand on her shoulders.

After a full conference day, the evening was filled with stories, in a hot ticket night of performances curated by Eve Ensler. But throughout the day, there was a clear refrain that will resonate with all women writers. What Anita did, and what we all must continue to do for each other, is to tell our stories. Gloria Steinem quoted an Indian saying: “The loss of memory is a source of oppression.” When we forget, or hide in silence and allow others to forget, we literally lose our ability to speak up for who we are. “We are restoring, supplementing, and extending each others’ memories,” Steinem declared about the conference. For me, a writer who has dedicated herself to unearthing other people’s stories, this was the most powerful reminder in an electrifying day.

At lunch, Hedgebrook, the retreat for women writers on Whidbey Island in Washington state, hosted a conversation about storytelling. “When one woman tells her truth,” Executive Director Amy Wheeler said, “sometimes everyone beside her takes a step back to get out of the way.” When my memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, came out last year and I tried to tell the truth about my motherhood and open a discussion about different forms of happy families and the importance of love, I got my own small taste of the white male panel, which was only interested in shutting me down. Everything I had to say was misrepresented, and at times it seemed like my only options were to accept an invitation from a hostile television show and shout over their slurs (which I decided not to do), or to retreat and be silent.

Hedgebrook was there for me, with their radical hospitality for women writers. The Feminist Press, my publisher, also stood with me. Someone recently asked me, “Was it worth it? What did you gain?” and I have to say that it was worth it to me to get so many emails from women who shared their own stories. From them, I was reminded that we all have similar struggles, though we make different decisions. And if more of us begin to speak up, none of us will have to go it alone.

Twenty years after Anita Hill’s testimony, the immigrant service worker who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault in New York had her case dismissed as her imperfect past was tried in the court of public opinion. It seems that we have not come as far as we want. But as Steinem also pointed out, her courage to tell her story inspired others to tell theirs, and charges of inappropriate sexual behavior and predation continue to haunt the man who now will not be President of France because one story unlocks the next, and the next. Storytelling is a radical act – I know it, and you know it because you are a writer – but I did not expect to hear that truth reflected back to me so often by so many of the conference panelists, whether they were domestic worker organizers, academics, lawyers or performers.

We women writers need to tell the truth about our lives. It’s not a hobby or an indulgent luxury that we sit down to our desks and write. It is a service, a path-showing, a community we create for others. We also need to support each others’ truth by short circuiting the media and structures that would keep us silent and by sharing each other’s work. As Amy Wheeler said, “It’s not about my voice. It’s about my voice, and your voice, and your voice. We are in it together.”

That’s when the world will truly split open. Keep writing!

This post originally appeared on She Writes.

Second half

Part Two of The Open Mind interview with Cecilia Skidmore is now on line.  Download and listen to both here.

The Tipping Country

On Saturday, at the Anita Hill 20 conference, Gloria Steinem observed that our country is getting out of control. And that’s a good thing. “Right now we have turned against two wars; in about 20 minutes we are no longer going to be a majority European American or white country; we have a proud African-American family in the White House; and we are critical of our financial institutions in a way we have never been before.” The resulting backlash – more guns being bought, more racist groups, more virulent violence and violent rhetoric, more legislation against personal and women’s reproductive freedoms – comes from people who, "through no fault of their own, were born into a structure that made them believe they had a right by birth to be in control” and whose identity rests on this control. She gives us this scary, powerful and hopeful metaphor: domestic violence as a microcosm of our political situation:

“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.

Today on the Open Mind

I will be talking with Cecilia Skidmore on The Open Mind on WGVU Radio today and next Sunday. Her program complements a national PBS series called Women, War and Peace. Listen in to the streaming broadcast online, or download the segment at your convenience.

The show airs in Grand Rapids, MI at 7:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. on Sundays.on WGVU-FM 88.5 and 95.3.

Link is here.

Asian American Literary Award Finalist

The finalists for this year's Asian American Literary Award in non-fiction this year are:

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)

Come to the third annual Page Turner Festival, hosted by the Asian American Writers Workshop for a day of readings and panels, and a night of celebration and awards.  Check out the link above for updates!

PAGE TURNER
Saturday, October 29, 2011, 11am - 7pm
POWERHOUSE ARENA, 37 Main Street, Brooklyn
$5 per event / $20  all day pass / $30 all-day pass (w/ AFTERWORD party)

Clemency

Clemency:  a disposition to be merciful.

Letter (excerpt) from Troy Davis, executed last night in Georgia after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene without comment:

"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!”

Off to LA

There have been, in the last weeks, so many things to do: speeches to write, visuals to prepare, plane trips that require me to be patted down and my bags unpacked and gone through by hand because my books and my computer cord in my carry-on are so close together in the x-ray screening that the entire line was nearly shut down to deal with the threat that is me. But now I am on my way to Los Angeles – five airborne hours – with nothing but the present moment. I can read the book I brought – Amy Waldman’s The Submission – for nothing but pleasure. I can daydream. I have been preoccupied with what to say to an audience I cannot yet see and whom I have not met. But to decide so far in advance what I should offer them and what they need to hear is to constrain the future. To predetermine it and make it less than it might otherwise be. I am not an historian, or an expert, or even an advocate. I am an artist, and a witness, and so I have decided to lecture less and engage more. To be in the moment when it comes. Wish me luck.

September 10th at the Japanese American National Museum

This weekend, to mark the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks,  I will be speaking and reading from Hiroshima in the Morning at the Japanese American National Museum.  The program starts at 2 pm.  The museum, if you have never been there, is beautiful and features the names of former internees of the WWII relocation centers - including my mother's, grandparents' and great uncles' - etched in the glass.

Come join me, and please pass the word along! Reservations are apparently encouraged, but that doesn't mean it is too late!

JAPANESE AMERICAN NATIONAL MUSEUM
369 East First Street
Los Angeles, California 90012
phone: 213.625.0414


When making a reservation, e-mail rsvp@janm.org or call 213.625.0414 at least 48 hours prior to the event.

Fishing, Hawaii Style

We (the boys and I) are in Hawaii visiting my Dad as we usually do a couple of times a year.  Yesterday, fishing out of Kona, my oldest caught his first big blue marlin.  Not exactly the Old Man and the Sea; the Tropical Sun is a very luxurious boat.  This fish weighed about 250 pounds - we tagged and released it after walking it along side the boat to make sure it had revived and could swim.  What a thrill for a 130 pound young man who has been fishing the Hawaiian waters all his life (his first fishing trip at age two!).

Dayton Literary Peace Prize

“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 Weisel

Hiroshima 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.

Wish me luck.  Take a look at the list and read the books!