Quick as a Hot Flash: Hormonal Haiku

by Diane Saarinen

I was bewildered by my own body. It had happened over and over again in just the past three days. This prickly heat, this sensation of intense warmth, started at my chest and moved up through my throat and into my face and radiated out my head. It even happened when I slept, waking me up so I couldn’t go back to sleep.

Sunday was the worst. I had been roused into consciousness at 4:30 a.m. and spent the sunrise hours staring at my computer. The rest of the morning I was tired and in a bad mood. It dawned on me that I was having hot flashes. What was I doing with hot flashes when — yes, I did have another birthday coming soon – I am closer to 40 than to 50? Just what, I thought, were my ovaries up to?

Googling to try to find an answer, I ended up staring at books with covers like this titled Could It Be Perimenopause? Well, could it? I wondered what caused hot flashes since I had resigned myself to hot flashing for the next ten years or so. I couldn’t find the answer here. Or here. So, in other words, I was finding out that, although as many as 85 percent of women experience hot flashes, the mechanism that causes them has never been discovered!

If men had hot flashes, you know that there would be billions put into research to find the answer.

“More than the Iraq war,” adds Misty, our intrepid Her Circle Ezine Editor-in-Chief.

At least I am keeping a sense of humor – for now. Awake again after another episode, I composed a haiku poem in honor of my hormonal changes.

Insolent hot flash!
Nocturnal, uninvited
I am hot and cold.

Diane Saarinen has written for numerous publications including Women’s eNews Daily and Quiet Mountain: New Feminist Essays as well as What We Think: Gender Roles, Women’s Issues and Feminism in the 21^st Century, a forthcoming anthology.

The Mystery of the Goddess in the Shopping Cart

by Carolyn Lee Boyd

Just as feminism itself may change but will still always move forward, so does the powerful, liberating Sacred Feminine continue to come forth. I see Her emerging not only from the ground as archeologists unearth artifacts of Goddess-worshipping cultures, but turning up also in our toy chests, movie theaters, and bookstores, if we will only look.

Imagine my surprise when I passed a toy store display of Goddess Barbie dolls: a Moon Goddess, Sun Goddess, Grecian Goddess, Goddesses of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Arctic, and of Wisdom, Beauty, and Spring, all looking swell in gorgeous gowns. And recently, Disney began marketing their “fairy line,” featuring Tinkerbell. These not only have baditude (remember Tink’s temper?) but their own inner powers. If only I had had these when I was growing up!

Tia Dalma, though identified as Calypso in The Pirates of the Caribbean movies, clearly is more like the Goddess of Death and Rebirth to my mind. This ubiquitous Goddess, like Hinduism’s Kali, is deeply powerful, fierce and angry, overseeing death, life, and rebirth. Tia, trapped in a human body, is suddenly liberated at the end of the third movie. To watch her suddenly grow to giant-size and stir up a ship-crunching tempest in the land of the dead is to witness the power of this Goddess.

A Hecate-like gatekeeper Goddess seems to be in the book and movie of Bridge to Terabithia. In it, the boy Jess and his free-spirited friend Leslie create a fantasy world, Terabithia, where Jess can escape from his religiously-repressive family and narrow gender confines. Leslie eventually dies crossing to Terabithia over a river and Jess sets a crowned image of her adrift there after her death. To me, this is symbolic not only of her eternal life, but also of her roles as mediator between the everyday and other worlds and guide for Jess in his transformation.

Finally, I adore Fannie Flagg’s poignant and loving descriptions of the lives of ordinary Americans. Who would think you would find God as a woman among her small town hardware stores and old-time radio shows? But, in the novel Standing in the Rainbow, a character dies and meets Diety in the form of Neighbor Dorothy and her husband from the previous novels. Here Deity is both God and Goddess, the Divine with both a female and a male face. And Neighbor Dorothy – kind, nurturing, a parenting expert, everyone’s best friend – was quite recognizable to me even before this as a human version of the compassionate Mother Goddesses like Mary and Kwan Yin.

The mystery is how can these Goddess images emerge in popular culture with almost no one noticing? Perhaps it is because no one expects them to be in these places, and, most likely, the creators of these works were unaware of their resemblance to these ancient Goddesses. Yet, they are there, perhaps positively influencing those who play with, watch, or read them. To me, it is comforting to see these Goddess-like figures, a clue that perhaps my way of being is not so out of touch with the mainstream. But, perhaps they are also a back door to a kind of feminism for women who find it difficult to identify themselves as such. Perhaps they are a special path for some women to begin to think of themselves as spiritually powerful. Goddess does, indeed, work in mysterious ways.

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.

Five Great Sentences

One of novelist Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing is this: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” That’s good advice. Clear prose is not supposed to allow anything to distract the reader from the story, conflict or character. If the reader pauses and notices the author even for a moment, it can break the tension. And when that happens, she might put the book down for good. Many a good tome has suffered this fate.

But on occasion, there are those great sentences that make you dog-ear a page, perhaps for the insight the author offers; perhaps so you can share it with a book-loving friend; or, perhaps so you can tape it to your refrigerator and study it. Leonard might disagree with me, but I think there are writers who can both sustain a novel’s forward motion AND write sentences that insist on being noticed.

Following are five sentences that forced me to dog-ear book pages and pause to consider the author – not for pulling me out of the story, but for giving me writer envy. Yes, when I read the following, I couldn’t help but say, “I wish I’d written that!”

“An incidental discovery was that even legendary success brought little happiness, only redoubled restlessness, gnawing ambition.”
Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

“…..Claire says, turning to the counter to order what sounds like six drinks but turns out to just be a coffee.”
Jonathan Tropper, How To Talk To A Widower

“Until now, Tom and Paula had all their wounds in common. Every hurt was diluted immediately, reduced by half for being shared, reduced again, almost redeemed by the attention that it earned.”
Lynn Hoffman, bang, Bang

“But I was also free, invisible, as if the only evidence of my existence were in the tasks I performed, the services I rendered to others. When I stopped work, I disappeared.”
Rosemary Poole-Carter, The Women of Magdalene

“Now, fifteen years and one mildly gifted son later, they had little to talk about. They were prone to epic silences and kept up their little hostilities like rubbed bronze.”
Dominic Smith, The Beautiful Miscellaneous

What great sentences have you read recently?

Karen Harrington is the author of JANEOLOGY: the story of one man’s attempt to understand his wife and her sudden descent into madness. Follow this new author’s writing journey here at HerCircle Ezine throughout 2008.
www.karenharringtonbooks.com

Blog for Choice Day is January 22nd

Naral Pro-Choice America is committed to a woman’s right to choose, and supports legislation that advances shared values for all Americans, including prevention of unwanted pregnancies. Join us January 22nd for special blogs as we participate in this year’s Blog for Choice Day event.

Interview: Paola Gianturco

In Celebrating Women, photographer Paola Gianturco trains her eye on the world’s most vibrant festivals that honor women. These moving celebrations, idiosyncratic to their indigenous roots, take the form of parades, parties, competitions, and religious ceremonies. Gianturco spent five years photographing seventeen festivals in fifteen countries across five continents. Collected for the first time ever in a single edition, Gianturco provides insightful text describing the specific occasions and detailing their historic and cultural significance, culled from her extensive interviews with musicians, dancers, vendors, mask makers, costume designers, journalists, priests, governors, and spectators—not to mention a princess and a king.

Visit the author online, and join us Saturday, March 8th for an exclusive interview with the author.

Full Circle: A Tribute to the Cultural Diversity of Women’s Art

Studio HCE is proud to host a special online engagement of the juried exhibition, “Full Circle: A Tribute to the Cultural Diversity of Women’s Art” at New York’s Pen and Brush (www.penandbrush.org) studio March 6th - 30th.

Deborah Jack, Juror of Selection and Awards
Deborah Jack is an artist whose work is based in video/sound installation, photography, painting, and text. Her current work deals with trans-cultural existence, memory, the effects of colonialism and mythology through re-memory. Her work was included in the 2007 Brooklyn Museum Exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Art. She has published two poetry collections, The Rainy Season (1997) and skin (2006). Her poetry has appeared in The Caribbean Writer and Calabash and she has recited her work in the Caribbean, United States, South Africa and the Netherlands.

Awards and honors include a Caribbean Writers Institute Fellow, University of Miami, Prince Bernard Culture Fund grants, University of Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship, Photography Institute-National Graduate Seminar Fellow, Lightwork Artist-in-Residence, Syracuse University, CEPA Exhibition Award, New York Foundation of the Arts SOS grant, and a Big Orbit Gallery Summer Residency. Her work has been exhibited in St. Martin, the United States, and Europe. Jack is also a member of art collective the Evolutionary Girls Club. Her work is part of the Lightwork collection, the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University, the collection of the Island Government of St. Martin and several private collections.

Deborah Jack is an Assistant Professor of Art at New Jersey City University.

Pen and Brush Mission Statement
Founded in 1894, the Pen and Brush is a not-for-profit organization of women professionally
active in the literary, visual, and performing arts. Its goals are to promote women in the arts,
to foster high standards of aesthetics and craftsmanship, to develop the professional activities
of its members, and to educate the general public about the significance of art in personal and
community life. Throughout most of the year, exhibitions of paintings, graphic art, mixed me-
dia, photographs, sculpture, and crafts are held in the galleries. Poetry, prose, and play read-
ings, lectures, demonstrations, concerts, and receptions are regularly scheduled. Other activi-
ties include meetings, discussions, contests, and workshops. The Pen and Brush is located in
its own brownstone in the heart of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.

Review: Goodbye Madame Butterfly

by Suzanne Kamata 

When I first heard the title of Sumie Kawakami’s new essay collection – Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex, Marriage, and the Modern Japanese Woman – I assumed it was a volume on the empowerment of Japanese women. Well, it is and it isn’t.

Veteran journalist Kawakami, whose first book, published in Japanese, was on women who commit adultery, was struck by the gap between the highly sexual stereotype of Japanese women – and Japan itself, with its soaplands and strip clubs - and the reports in the media that women weren’t getting any. According to the Global Sex Survey by Durex, the world’s largest condom maker, Japan ranked 41st of 41 countries in terms of sexual activity. Although people had sex an average of 103 times a year, “the Japanese reported having sex an average of forty-five times a year.”

Kawakami was compelled to find out the truth about the sex lives of several Japanese women, including Chami, owner of her own bar, who is mourning the accidental death of her faithless lover; landowner Emi, a polished mother who puts up with her husband’s infidelities; and Mitsuko, a company owner who remained a virgin until the age of 52. Although Mistuko ultimately married a younger man and lost her virginity, her husband went back to his doting mother when he found that Mitsuko was spending more time on her business than taking care of him. In one very interesting essay Kawakami even writes about her own efforts as a divorced single mother trying to break off an affair with a married man after being advised to do so by a Yin Yang Master.

In the West, Kawakami writes, people often turn to therapists to help them with problems. However, in Japan troubled individuals often visit fortune-tellers. “If you say you are going to counseling, it sounds to the Japanese as if you have a mental problem. But if you’re going to have your fortune told or a purification ceremony done, there is no social stigma attached. The Japanese tend to rely on others as they search for a solution. A sense of duty drives them, while issues of responsibility and cause remain vague.”

The Japanese women featured here also seem to be much more pragmatic than their Western counterparts when it comes to men and marriage. When Shoko is forced to choose between two men, she chooses Masanobu, who is destined to become a Shinto priest, over Nobuyuki, whom she loves, because the latter has a weak heart. “I love him,” Shoko says, “so I worried about whether I could bear it if he died or whether I could raise a child alone. It was during these times that I started to realize that love and marriage were two different things.”

For Westerners, who tend to combine the two, these women may appear utterly unromantic. As an American who married for love, I can’t help wondering if in these essays Kawakami has not revealed the truth about a problem in modern Japanese society. Japanese pundits wonder why the birth rate is falling. Perhaps, quite simply, Japanese husbands and wives need to learn how to relate to each other better, and to have more sex.
Kawakami presents a frank portrait of Japanese women today, via these compulsively readable, expertly crafted essays. Further kudos should go to Yuko Enomoto for her seamless translation.

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.

A Prayer for Writers

Acclaimed novelist Christopher Isherwood once wrote the following prayer for writers that is as relevant for 2008 as it was when he penned it in 1940:“Oh source of my inspiration, teach me to extend toward all living that fascinated, unsentimental, loving and all-pardoning interest which I feel for the characters I create. May I become identified with all humanity, as I identify myself with these imaginary persons. May my life become my art and my art my life.”

As this writer embarks on a particularly ambitious year (publication of my first novel and completion of a new novel), I am especially grateful for Isherwood’s inspiring words.

Happy New Year to one and all.

Karen Harrington is the author of the soon-to-be-released novel, JANEOLOGY, the story of one man’s attempt to understand his wife and her sudden descent into madness. Follow this new author’s writing journey here at HerCircle Ezine throughout 2008.

Like a Stepchild

by Diane Saarinen
This past December, well into the holidaze season, my husband and I received tickets to Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline playing at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center here in New York. It is a play of “strange chance,” a romance, and, ultimately, a kind of screwball tragicomedy. Phylicia Rashad rules as a queen and – what else – a wicked stepmother. She is even outfitted in “wicked-looked headgear,” according to a New York Times reviewer, just in case anyone misses this characterization. From Cinderella, who toils away while her stepsisters plan what they will wear to the ball, to the German fairy tale where a poorly-treated stepdaughter serendipitously meets Mother Holle at the bottom of a well, and even to Bob Dylan who complained that “you treat me like a stepchild,” stepmothers have gotten a bad rap. As a stepmother myself, I say “Enough with the stereotypes already. We’ve had enough!”
My stepson Steven (not his real name, as I’ll give him some privacy here) came into my life ten years ago when he was 13. My husband and I had started dating earlier that year; I had heard all about Steven. But it wasn’t until the Christmas holidays that I met him because he lived in Florida with his mother while we lived in New York. Was I nervous meeting him? Not really. And I don’t think he was that nervous, either. Maybe we just knew on some level that we were going to be, well, family.
Even though I don’t have biological children, I somehow missed the Baby Gene. You know, the one that caused some friends of mine to, in their mid-thirties, take the plunge and have children they weren’t necessarily financially prepared for or that the foundations of their relationships didn’t quite support. I thought it was great that my future husband had a son. I felt this was a way that I could be a parent without being, you know, a parent. Maybe I’m just aware of my limitations, but I never felt that motherhood was really a doable option for me.
I once had lunch with a literary agent and, after we had exhausted all my ideas for books, our conversation turned to men. She said, with a great deal of finality, “I will not date a man who has children.” I was surprised at this. I also noted that she was whittling down her chances as well – wasn’t finding a man around her own age, in his 40s or 50s, without children a relatively rare occurrence?
For the record, I love my stepson. I never felt I had to play mom or buy his affection or play any particular role other than myself in relating to him. I hope he sees me as someone older than he is who is helpful, someone who doesn’t particularly care if he remembers me on Mother’s Day because I am not his mother. His mother has done a perfectly good job of raising him into a responsible adult. And though you can’t say his mother and I are friendly, we are not un-friendly. The truth is, she refuses to call my husband on our phone at home and will only call him on the cell phone. I just chalk this up to her issues and not mine, and think of the many potential arguments that this has allowed us to sidestep.
Steven’s relatives must buy into the wicked stepmother bit because, when they meet me, they like to tell me how well Steven speaks of me. Of course he does! I can truthfully say I have never behaved “wickedly” towards him. And Steven continues to live his life in a way that makes me proud to be his stepmother. Could it really be any other way?
Diane Saarinen has written for numerous publications including Women’s eNews Daily and Quiet Mountain: New Feminist Essays.

Technorati Tags: cymbeline, stepchild, stepmother, wicked stepmother

Magnolia Journal coming in 2009

Original works of literature still have a home at Her Circle in the form of Magnolia, a print journal of women’s literature coming in 2009. Submissions for volume one will open in Fall 2008.

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