Remembering Grace Paley

by Lee Conell

We all know about the myth of the writer: He (it’s usually a he in the myth) is a recluse, sitting in his cabin in the woods, contemplating this and that, avoiding other human beings even as he seeks to emulate their problems in prose.

Then there’s Grace Paley.

When the New York writer and activist died on August 24 at the age of 84, the obituaries didn’t just appear in major mainstream publications – The New York Times, The Washington Post – but on websites devoted to feminism, to anarchism, to nonviolent activism. The legacy Paley leaves is not just found between the pages of her books, but in her commitment to being actively involved in major issues in the world today.

Sometimes this involvement showed its face in small, local ways: Every Saturday for years during the ’60s, Paley stood on a street corner near her home in New York City, handing out protest fliers to the passerby.

But Paley’s activism took her out of her neighborhood too. It brought her to Hanoi on a peace mission, and to Moscow for a world peace conference. It took her to Washington D.C., where she was among the “White House Eleven” arrested in 1978 for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn.

The strong female voice in her short stories parallels Paley’s own actions and role as a feminist. In 1972 she signed a petition in Ms. Magazine for women who had abortions in a pre-Roe v. Wade world. She added her name to a similar petition in 2006, the year before she died, as a woman’s right to a safe abortion again came under fire in South Dakota.

Paley did not publish frequently, but the stories she wrote forged her reputation as one of the leading American short story writers of the 20th century. The stories, like Paley herself, often engaged the world and questioned it, too. In the story “An Interest in Life,” the main character Virginia, whose husband has disappeared and left her with four children, decides to go on the gameshow “Strike it Rich.” When her neighbor’s son John finds out about her plan, he is scornful. The people who go on that show, he says, truly “suffer” in ways Virginia can’t understand. Paley revealed that the difficulties women faced were frequently and patronizingly dismissed as nothing more than “little disturbances” in life. Just as Paley handed out fliers to inform, she used her writing to shine a light on these difficulties.

When asked during a 1998 interview with Salon.com if writers have a moral obligation, Paley replied that all human beings do. “So if all human beings have it,” she added, “then writers have some, too. I mean, why should they get off the hook? Whatever your calling is, whether it’s as a plumber or an artist, you have to make sure there’s a little more justice in the world when you leave it than when you found it.”

Through her words, which remain alive and active, Paley will continue to contribute justice to the world. Her unique voice illuminates the lives of women working to maintain their own voices under duress. It is this illumination, as well as Paley’s fearlessness in engaging the world, that guarantees her importance both as a feminist and as a writer.

Lee Connell spends her time drinking coffee, scribbling, and studying literature at SUNY New Paltz.

Mary Moody Emerson: Giving “High Counsels” to Women Still

by Carolyn Lee Boyd

Mary Moody Emerson was a New England philosopher living from 1774 to 1863. Only now is her place as an inventor of American Transcendentalism and model for independent women being acknowledged through such works as Phyllis Cole’s Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. She is also an inspiration to modern women seeking new ways of being and perceiving themselves.

Mary’s biography shows how women of her time functioned effectively in community. When her father died in the American Revolution, Mary was sent to nearby relatives, beginning life in a series of households of women who came together to cope with widowhood, motherhood and raising children, poverty, and illness. Mary raised and tutored children, nursed young and old through serious illnesses, and assisted in raising money through home-based businesses, all in households run by women.

At the same time, she forged for herself an uncommonly independent life. She chose not to marry. She owned a farm, but usually preferred the freedom of living as a boarder elsewhere. She largely ignored decorum and was not always popular for speaking her mind and for her eccentric ways, such as wearing a shroud and sleeping in a coffin-shaped bed to welcome death.

She considered her “home” to be her journals in which she wrote the largely spiritual thoughts used, sometimes word for word, by her nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his Transcendentalist works. In correspondence and conversation she gave what Ralph called “high counsel” to young people, encouraging the girls to as incisive intellectual rigor as the boys. Just as she was part of women’s domestic communities, so she also formed intellectual communities among women through exchanges of journals, letters and meetings.

She was a woman of her time and her thoughts reflect its religious morays. She could be quite traditional and she would most likely disagree with much of current feminist spiritual thought. Yet, the spiritual connection she felt to the Earth and her desire was for a direct relationship between her own sacred soul and the Divine was, in its way, forward-thinking and might seem familiar to today’s women’s spirituality practitioners.

Mary lived in a time of transition between Puritan and Victorian societies as do we as we chart our way towards a 21st century global civilization. Her life gives many concrete lessons for women wishing to live effectively: solve problems through women’s communities, abjure social obligations for greater freedom, and mentor younger women. She also brought the best of the past into the present by creating women’s intellectual communities, as well as envisioning the future through letting her mind roam free to catch the impulse towards Transcendental and modern spiritual thought. But perhaps her best advice for women on untrodden paths is simply to always be true to yourself. Mary deeply influenced those around her and the world for generations to come by knowing who she was and expressing her ideas and values forthrightly in her own way. May we all have the courage to do the same.

Sources:

Battiste, Janice. A Good Aunt Is More than a Patron: Mary Moody Emerson, a Model of Self-Reliance. Women in Life and Literacy Assembly, Vol. 5, Fall, 1996. Available from: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/old-WILLA/fall96/Battiste.html.

Cole, Phyllis. Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Mary Moody Emerson (Eulogy). Paper read before the “Woman’s Club” in Boston in 1869 under the title “Amita.” Available from: http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/mme.html.

Carolyn Lee Boyd writes stories, poems, memoirs, and other pieces for feminist and women’s spirituality publications including SageWoman, The Beltane Papers, Matrifocus, The We’Moon Calendar, and Moondance. Her novel, The Temple of the Subway Goddess, is scheduled for publication by Creatrix Books in the Spring of 2009. You are invited to read more of her writings and keep up with what’s new with her at her blogsite, http://Goddessinateapot.wordpress.com

National Novel Writing Month: One Author’s Journal, Day 26

by Karen Harrington

As of 9:45 pm this past Sunday, I completed the 2007 NaNoWriMo challenge. Coming in at just under 51,000 words, I have a first draft of No Teddy Bears. A first draft I am proud of because I crossed the finish line, I have a story with a beginning, middle and end. And unlike some of my NaNoWriMo colleagues, I think I have something worthy of the editing process. Now, if there’s a one-month editing challenge lurking about somewhere, count me out!

So do I have any lessons to share?

Nothing really revolutionary to the writing process. But this adventure did reinforce several basic writing habits that separate writers from wanna-be writers.

1. Write every day.
• This is a must just to build up one’s writing muscle. Just as a concert pianist must practice for a recital each day, so, too, a writer must practice her skills each day so that when the brilliant idea strikes, her metaphorical pencil is sharpened.

2. Write, don’t tell.
• You cannot talk about your story while you are writing it. Someone told me this years ago and it took a long time to understand why this is a good rule. Why? Because your enthusiasm for the story must flow from your fingers first. If it comes from your mouth first, you have just leached off some of the energy in the talking about it and your passion will want. Write it. Then talk about it. (Of course, I realize I broke this rule for NaNoWriMo somewhat. But I knew you would hold me accountable to the finish and that’s a pretty decent motivator.)

3. Begin with the seed of a scene that fascinates you.
• It’s almost imperative to begin any piece of writing with a scene or idea you cannot wait to write. It’s the imaginary carrot that you get to chase for a month, a year, whatever amount of time. For example, Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, found the genesis of that story in an image of a plane falling from the sky. This was his original idea. The story of who was in the plane, why it was falling and onto what country it was falling all started from that first compelling image.

In much the same way, one seminal image fed my process throughout the NaNoWriMo challenge. It was a simple exchange of dialogue that I heard on an investigative news report between a reporter and a four year old little girl. I was pleased to find that story still exists in cyperspace. Here’s the link.

Read to the end of this feature, and you’ll have some idea about why this was such a powerful inspiration.

Have you read it now? Good. Then there will be no spoilers as I share the following.

I wanted to know about those children. Who they were? What kind of spirit they had to weather such a horrible storm? I wanted to see what kind of moxie was within a little girl who boiled down her abusive foster home experience by saying, “There were no teddy bears.” It’s a cautionary tale about the ideals of childhood. Her foster parents had robbed her of part of her childhood. She interpreted this as an absence of her teddy bear – a symbol of childish innocence. Wonderful. That was my carrot. My quest to get to the end of my story, to be able to flesh out the scene where my little girl, Claire Chaucer, gets to say that line and the cusp of her rescue.

And now I think I will relax. Let the story marinate for a while in its present stew of adverbs, clunky transitions and bad grammar.

Until next time.

Karen Harrington is a former speechwriter and the author of the upcoming Kunati Books release JANEOLOGY. For more info, visit her at www.myspace.com/karenharringtonauthor

The Curse of the Singles Table: A True Story of 1001 Nights Without Sex

by Suzanne Schlosberg
Warner Books, New York, 2004

reviewed by Nicolette Westfall

Although I am not well-known, I share several commonalities with Suzanne Schlosberg and Condoleezza Rice; we’re independent women, over 30, and we’ve all dealt with the publicly crippling label “single.” In Puritanical times, widowed, single, or powerful women, especially as old and obsolete as those in their late 20s or early 30s, were seen as threats to the establishment. The example of Bridget Bishop quickly comes to mind here. She, being an agent of the Devil, managed of her own design to run two thriving taverns and even had the nerve to argue with her various husbands in public (1). While being an independent woman or a woman who encounters prolonged single hood can be quite a freeing experience (reviewer’s personal account), it is not without its modern day backlashes.

Condoleezza Rice is the most recognizable and accomplished female political representative of the United States of America, yet on the international front, she has been reduced through foreign opinion to the only denominator important in a woman’s life (next to motherhood): her marital status. Consider Russian LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s rebuttal against Rice, who criticized Russia’s relations with the Ukraine, “Condoleezza Rice released a coarse anti-Russian statement. This is because she is a single woman who has no children. She loses her reason because of her late single status. Nature takes it all. (2)” Zhirinovsky’s quote at first appears absurd to my modern western woman’s eyes, and yet, as I eagerly dive into Schlosberg’s The Curse, its surreal glow begins to wash away…

What emerges in its place is the horrifying reality that heterosexual women (especially celibate women) do indeed spend an awful lot of time thinking about our marital status and the most important appendage attached to it, the almighty penis. Here I do not profess to claim to know what Rice’s sexual orientation is—nor do I care to, for I am not one of those members of society who demands that people identify themselves according to their sexual preferences (3). Suzanne, however, is like me, admittedly, a woman who enjoys companionship and sex with a man.

There is one overwhelming problem that sticks out like a rusty nail in her otherwise independent and stable life as a professional writer. It runs throughout the book as a nagging theme that digs and cuts and tears at the core of Schlosberg’s very existence—she can’t find the right man to be part of her life and as a result, encounters the temporary demise of her sex life. It doesn’t help that her friends and family harass her endlessly about her shameful singledom. To lighten the burden, she makes jokes a plenty as she spends countless hours looking for Mr. Right (1358 days, to be exact). Her endless search for the man that gives off the right spark is where she and I differ. My “dry spell,” which lasted all of 870 days, was not about searching, longing, or chasing after a man; it was about running as quick and as far as possible in the opposite direction. Where Schlosberg obsessively reloaded match.com, I fanatically avoided all propositions and invitations to end my brutally torturous celibacy streak.

I reached the last dry patch of Schlosberg’s book, when she discusses how visiting Provideniya, Russia finally put an end to her obsession with finding a suitable heart beat with penis attached. I knew that we’d both traveled the waters together; she chasing, I running. Regardless of our approaches, we were both like so many millions of other women out there—saturated by male influence. A man can be present or absent, either way, his affect on the heterosexual female is quite dominating. She suddenly learned to be happy simply by being. In an ironic twist that Zhirinovsky might find insulting, Schlosberg discovers that contentment comes from an inner source, not the search for external joy through finding and latching onto a man.

Of course, in the end, as with all fairy tales, she finds Mr. Right and marries him. As a woman over 30 (4), she ultimately ends up consulting with a fertility specialist and kept a fertility log (5). Finally, she is fulfilled and she can stop searching for what is missing (a man and babies).

The transition from free loving early 20s to the late 20s and nervously sitting at the singles table at weddings to obsessively seeking out the right mate once the 30 benchmark has been reached doesn’t necessarily mean that Schlosberg tosses in the feminist towel. According to a study by Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan (6), having serious heterosexual relationships is something that does not take away from being a feminist—in fact, feminism improves heterosexual relationships (7). Despite such optimistic reconciliation of heterosexuality and feminism, I find therein little consolation, for it is quite disturbing that both sides of the coin have spent most of our spare time and energy focused on men instead of ourselves.

(1) Bishop was executed in 1692. University of Missouri-Kansas, School of Law: “Bridget Bishop” [web page on-line] (U MK Law, accessed 31 October 2007); available from http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SAL_BBIS.HTM: Internet.

(2) Yaroslava Krestovskaya, Pravda. “Condoleezza Rice’s anti-Russian stance based on sexual problems.” [online edition] (Russia, 2006, accessed 31 October 2007); available from http://english.pravda.ru/main/18/88/354/16724_Condoleezza.html: internet.

(3) As someone who is not threatened by other people’s sexuality, I subscribe to Kinsey’s Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale. Visit The Kinsey Institute online for a comprehensive explanation of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/ak-hhscale.html.

(4) For explanation regarding lowered female fertility rates with aging, see Speroff, L. “The effect of aging on Fertility,” Current Opinion in Obstetrics and Gynecology. 1994 April; 6(2) 115-20.

(5) Schlosberg, Suzanne. The Essential Fertility Log: An Organizer and Record-Keeper to Help You Get Pregnant, Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2007.

(6) Rudman LA & Phelan JE (2007). “The interpersonal power of feminism: is feminism good for romantic relationships” Sex Roles (DOI 10.1007/s11199-007-9319-9)

(7) As reported in “Feminists are sexy, study finds.” (World Science, 2007, accessed 15 October 2007); available from http://www.world-science.net/othernews/071015_feminist.htm: internet.

Nicolette Westfall has made it this far, despite being openly guilty of accepting her natural state (womanhood.) She’s been published in various spaces including Bust, Word Riot, and Mississippi Crow.

National Novel Writing Month: One Author’s Journal, Day 18

by Karen Harrington

November 18, 2007

Much as I had anticipated, the fire is burning out in the writing of my NaNoWriMo Dickensian-foster children in peril novel No Teddy Bears. I hit this slump in the middle of last week. A big Oh Well. I’m feeling a tad Eeyorish about, well, how I feel. I want to go on. Press on. But it is getting tougher. Thanksgiving is a mere few days away and I have a giant vat of homemade Zinfandel Cranberry Sauce to make. (It’s Dee-Lish.) And, I have a leak in my roof. (An actual drywall has fallen off the ceiling kind of leak.) Thus, much of last week, my writing time (generally 2-4 each afternoon when my toddlers nap) was usurped by roofing repair folks with clipboards and business cards who have a lot of questions and don’t care that I have a novel to write. They just want to know if I want 20 or 30 year shingles or ones made out of a product called Malarkey. I’m not kidding. Malarkey. He wrote it down. Arghhh!

Well, about two on Saturday afternoon, my burning ember of inspiration shored up into a full fledged crackling fire when my evil character Ms. Vallop suddenly had an epiphany at the Stop N Shop.

…It was at this moment that a strange fate stepped into the life of Ms. Vallop. There, on the break room table, the American Enquirer stared back at her in all its large type print.

Woman In Trailer Park Wins Texas Lottery

For as long as she could remember, her dream had been to live in a trailer park. To her, it seemed like a small paradise. A house that was too small to get really dirty. A house you could drive almost anywhere. And best of all, a house with such a low payment, she would no longer have to work. Yes, her mind began spinning. She saw how she could rent her house on Bellevue Drive. That income plus the $1372 from the SYSTEM would be plenty to live on and not have to work.

She thought it was a most ingenious idea. So she quickly used the rest of her break time rummaging through the classifieds in the newspapers, in search of her new dream house on wheels.

How did this idea come about? I’m not sure, but I can tell you that I was once a grocery store checker. I always spent my breaks eating damaged, discounted Oreeios and reading the worst tabloid papers. They always featured stories about trailer parks or aliens, or both. (This was back in the 80s so the stories are probably different now, right?) All I know is that as soon as I had a dramatic change of location for this novel, I could finally see how my four foster kids were going to beat the odds and survive in their own scheming way. I tell you, they are going to have to go through a few more knocks before they are rescued, but dear reader, they will be rescued and Ms. Vallop is going to get a nice comeuppance.

As of today, No Teddy Bears consists of about 38,000 words. It looks like I’ll cross the finish line by the deadline. That is, if the roof does not fall in first. Fortunately, the weather forecast looks clear.

Until next time.

Karen Harrington is the author of the upcoming novel JANEOLOGY. Visit www.myspace.com/karenharringtonauthor for more information.

Life, Passionately: Reflections on a Japanese Love Nun

by Suzanne Kamata

A few weeks ago, I gave my Japanese university students the assignment of writing about someone they would like to meet. As an example, I told them that my dream was to meet the writer/Buddhist nun Jakucho Setouchi who was born in Tokushima, where I now live, as Harumi Setouchi in 1922. Most of my students, whether local-born or not, are familiar with this figure. Setouchi, with her shaved head and nun’s robes, appears regularly in TV, in print, and at various venues around the country where she gives speeches and sermons. Although celibate since becoming a nun at the age of 50, in her sermons, Setouchi often urges people to be passionate in their love affairs. In an interview with Harumi Ozawa, published in The Japan Times, Setouchi said, “The meaning of life is to love someone – or not just that – to get besotted with someone. You come into life alone and die alone anyway.” This is a rather radical idea in a country where until, recently arranged, marriages were the norm.

Setouchi herself loved passionately. She abandoned her husband and three-year-old child after falling in love with a younger man, an experience that she wrote about in her autobiograhical novel Basho (Places). Natsu no Owari (The End of Summer), one of only two of her many novels to be translated into English is based on her eight-year affair with a married man. (Her other novel translated into English is Beauty in Disarray which was based on the life of the early feminist writer Noe Ito.) Male critics vilified her for writing about sex and passion. One wrote that she must have been masturbating while writing her novel Kashin (Center of a Flower) and she was shunned by publishers for five years thereafter.

Setouchi entered the clergy not because she was repentant for her wild ways, but because even with men and work in her life, she felt that something was missing. “I wanted to pursue something else,” she told Ozawa.

She recently translated the world’s first novel, Genji Monogatari, into modern Japanese, and she continues to write novels and court controversy. She has protested the U.S. bombings of Afghanistan in 2001 and Japan’s involvement in the war in Iraq, and has traveled to that country to bring medical kits to children. She currently corresponds with inmates on death row, and opposes the death penalty.

Setouchi is clearly a courageous and passionate woman, and it is for these reasons that I wanted to meet her.

I’d heard that she was in town for the annual national culture festival, which was held in Tokushima this year. Although I was eager to hear her speak, I was unable to get a ticket to an event at which she was making an appearance. The day of the event, I was having lunch at an Indian restaurant with a friend. While we were enjoying curry and naan, an elderly woman with a shaved head and nun’s attire came into the restaurant.

After eating, I politely approached her. “Are you Jakucho Setouchi?”

“Yes, I am,” she replied in Japanese.

“I live in Tokushima,” I told her. “I am a writer, too. And I am a great admirer of your work.”

I asked if I could interview her at a later date, and she complied. I returned home, feeling somehow blessed, with the memory of her warm hand in mine.

Suzanne Kamata is the author of Losing Kei and the editor of the anthologies The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.

National Novel Writing Month: One Author’s Journal, Day 12

by Karen Harrington

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow

If you are someone who attempts to write a novel in thirty days, this sentiment applies to you. Yours truly is feeling very schizophrenic today.

Why? Because I have multiple good and evil characters competing for space in my brain’s hard drive and I am telling them to speed things up so I can cross the finish line for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) by November 30th.

If you’ve been following the plot of No Teddy Bears, you know I have a story about four orphans whose parents died, leaving them in the foster care system. A former neighbor decides to host the children in her home for a two-week holiday break – but her intentions are anything but charitable. She wants to collect the money from the foster care system to buy presents for herself and her bratty son.

I’ve worked on No Teddy Bears for eleven days and just achieved 25,000 of the required 50,000 words. Not bad considering I’m starting to feel the creep of holiday gift buying pressure and the pull to reorganize my closet.

The initial steam of inspiration petered out a couple of days ago. My inner writer broke a major rule of NaNoWriMo and EDITED. I went back and bulked up a chapter that I thought needed more heft (read: word count). Specifically, a scene in which my four orphan children break into a locked and dark library. Think the 1980s movie The Breakfast Club only with six to eight year olds climbing the bookcases, misusing the copy machine and being as loud as possible just because they can. Until the lights suddenly come on and . . .

Despite these barriers, I learned two important things:

NUMERO UNO
• Writing in the genre of young adult fiction has the interesting benefit of writing few or no internal monologues. This type of writing is a real no-no for some fiction aficionados, despite its proliferation in most novels. And I’m as guilty as anyone by having my characters bow into one too many long reminiscences about how “The yawning sunset made him think about the time he and Mary first kissed. He thought how nice it would be to have that day back again….” BORING!! Okay, maybe that’s good sometimes, but I didn’t realize until this project that I lean into those episodes more than I should. My orphans are putting an end to this habit. You cannot write those types of inner thoughts for young children because they don’t sit and ponder. They wonder. It doesn’t take long before their wondering turns to action or shows up in the questions they ask grown ups.

NUMERO DOS
• I am more conscious about having each chapter filled with conflict so I can have as much of the above mentioned action taking place. I am ending each chapter with the omniscient narrator having knowledge of something foreboding. I don’t know if this builds the tension or not, but it gives this lazy writer a great springboard into the following chapter. (And it’s going to be heck to edit this novel later because, well, character motivations have largely been tossed out the window. If I want them to photocopy their bum, they will photocopy their bum.)

With the steam gone, I am now into the pure, hard, decidedly unfun work of a novelist. Sit down and write. Write anything. Write a lot of crap. Out of 1,000 words, accept that 995 of them will be a mix of crap and adverbs.

Back to it.

—

Karen Harrington is the author of the upcoming novel JANEOLOGY. Visit www.myspace.com/karenharringtonauthor for more information.

Pushcart Prize Nominations

Her Circle Ezine is proud to announce its first ever nominations to the Pushcart Prize. Please join us in congratulating our authors on thier achievement.

Bird Women, a short story by Patty Somlo

Deliverance, poetry by Barbara Reese

Eucalyptus Moonlight, poetry by Julie Ann Shapiro

The Stain, a short story by Beate Sigriddaughter

National Novel Writing Month: One Author’s Journal, Day 7

by Karen Harrington

NaNoWriMo Update – Harry Potter meets Running With Scissors

My progress is going in fits and starts as I approach a major turning point of my story, No Teddy Bears. I’m 12,000 words in and the story set-up is almost complete. The next big turning point is getting the family into their horrible foster home. I hope to hit the 20k word mark by next Monday.

One of the interesting things I am learning from this speed-writing experience is that no event or comment in my own life is off limits to being included. I’m sure God will forgive me for this, but I even clipped a few notes from Pastor Jeff’s sermon in church yesterday. (An anecdote about Gandhi.) This just goes to prove that all things inform a writer’s work, no matter how small or large.

Another observation I’ve made is that I had envisioned more of a This Boy’s Life tone for this story, but the children are taking over and it’s becoming a mix of Harry Potter meets Running With Scissors.

Here’s a short break-down thus far:

- Introduction of the happy Delano Family
- Mother “comes down with cancer” and dies
- Father, a librarian, pays the unkind obnoxious neighbor, Ms. Vallop, to look after the four children after school.
- Children are tormented by Ms. Vallop’s bully son and his two henchmen (what’s the word for a nine-year old henchman?) who demand to have their feet rubbed and to eat all the family snacks. Fearing for the last package of cookies, the children cut off the ends of dog biscuits and sprinkle them with cinnamon and feed them to their oppressors.
- The children visit the library and are questioned by Mr. Goodknuckle, the head librarian and their father’s boss.

The children could see there was something strange about Mr. Goodknuckle.
- Mr. Delano dies of an apparent broken heart on the one-year anniversary of his wife’s death.
- The children are scooped into the SYSTEM in hopes they will be adopted by foster parents.
- While waiting for new parents, the children all live at an RTF (residential treatment facility) where they have a miserable Halloween Party, trick-or-treating from door to door getting candy, but mostly coupons.

“What are we supposed to do with coupons,” shouted Frank Faulkner Fudge as the lines of his cat face scrunched up. “That’s just downright mean!”

“Be grateful for what you get,” said Miss Mallard, the headmistress of the RTF. “Some children have less.”

“How can you have less than a coupon,” Frank Faulkner Fudge cried, looking down at his slip of meaningless paper. “It says it’s for an oil change, too. Ten dollars off. What kind of seven year old needs an oil change?”

- The children have their photos made at the RTF. The photos are to be placed on the Angel Trees in various malls in hopes someone will give them a new, unwrapped toy – or even inquire about being a foster parent.

So, are you wondering who the evil foster parent will be?

Until next time, write on!

Karen Harrington is a former speechwriter and the author of the upcoming Kunati Books release JANEOLOGY. For more info, visit her at www.myspace.com/karenharringtonauthor

Peg Boyers, Author of Honey with Tobacco

by Shannon K. Winston

Peg Boyers’s recent book, Honey with Tobacco, is a refreshing collection of poetry that grapples with what it means to live between multiple cultures, geographical borders, and languages. Unlike her debut publication, Hard Bread, which was narrated through Boyer’s interpretation of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg’s voice, Honey with Tobacco is largely autobiographical. Speaking to us in October, Boyers says that Hard Bread was still a necessary step towards telling a more personal story: “in order for me to reach that personal dimension at that early stage of my writing career I needed a mask, a persona, in whose voice I could comfortably explore many of the themes which I continued to explore in the second book: motherhood, marriage, betrayal, faith.”

Honey with Tobacco thus marks a transition in Boyer’s work. The first section centers on her experience growing up in Cuba and her early love of the Italian language, which she learned as an adolescent living in Italy. While each poem stands alone in the collection, they are all united by a desire to probe different spaces: the geographical distances between the States, Cuba, and Italy, but also the white gaps on the page, as well. In much of her poetry, Boyers artfully incorporates Spanish and Italian words and phrases into her poems. There is also a clear polyvocality and dialogic quality to her work. She explained to me that “the use of foreign languages enabled [her] to project a voice which accurately reflects [her] own mixed up background—the melting pot effect I guess you could all it.” Her use of Spanish and Italian, even for readers who do not speak these languages, gives her writing a sensual, polyphonetic quality, which transports them into the liminal places/spaces she describes. Far from confusing readers, her use of language makes her poems more tangible and immediate. Boyers herself explained: “The words are used for their sound as much as for their meaning. There is no more beautiful sound than the sound of an Italian word, even when that word is an obscenity.” In the first part of Honey with Tobacco, Spanish is especially central to the narrative. She explains: “In a way Spanish is one of the subjects of that section for me, the expression of that part of my psyche, of my identity, that will not stay submerged.”

The poem, “Transition: Inheriting Maps,” is one of the clearest examples of the way in which themes of language and geography figure in this collection. The poem’s speaker attempts “to see without glasses,/ measuring memory against grid,/ matching history with place.” Here, as elsewhere in the collection, Boyers uses her own past to map a larger political and social history. This discussion is inextricably tied to language. The speaker continues: “locating the whereness and the whatness/ of the intransitive was—/without object or home,/ united in the grammar of common/longing.” In her poems, Boyers’s speaker never “successfully” locates her identity. In her own words: “the elements have not really blended. They remain distinct and even at times are at war with one another for dominance.” It is precisely this poetic space—one that embraces distinctions and tensions— that ignites and carries this collection.

Peg Boyers teaches creative writing at Skidmore College. She is also the executive editor of Salmagundi.

To purchase Honey with Tobacco, please visit the following website.

Shannon K. Winston grew up between France and the States. She is currently a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the Comparative Literature Department. She studies 19th - 20th Century Mediterranean Literature (from France, Italy and North Africa.)

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