Help Equals Hope

Part II of our spotlight on Karen Harrington, author of Janeology

“There’s a collective denial even when mothers come right and say, “I really shouldn’t be with my kids,” says Nancy Scheper-Hughes, medical anthropologist.

“Prior to a homicide, lots of lay people know these men and women are having difficulty parenting,” says Jill Korbin, child abuse expert.

If these two quotes startle you, you’re not alone.
If they make you weep, you’re not alone.
And if they compel you to action, you join an army of others who are also startled and weeping. But there is hope. A good deal of it, in fact.

One of the most unexpected pathways on my journey with my novel Janeology has been to get involved – if only by gaining an awareness of the issues and deciding what I could do. Now, it seems, being a novelist may be sidelined in favor of being an advocate. I think that’s kind of wonderful. Everyone’s original bliss should somehow lead them to helping others.

So let me tell you about three programs I’m learning about that support not only mothers in distress, but families.

Crisis Nursery Centers

First, crisis nurseries are emerging throughout the U.S. While these nurseries aren’t designed to meet the needs of ‘one’ population, they are available to ANYONE who is at risk of abusing or neglecting their children. And also for anyone who is facing a crisis. The definition of crisis is made by the family, not the crisis center. And they are free of charge. These could aid the mom whose boyfriend just came in and stabbed her while her children watched. She’s in the hospital and has nobody to watch the kids. Or, maybe a woman’s husband just passed away and she has no childcare/help. To utilize these centers, families don’t necessarily need to be in a situation where they will harm their children, but can still get help if the family is facing a huge time of stress and help is needed. The thing about crisis nurseries is there are multiple models offering varying levels of care.

What’s important to note is this: crisis nurseries are not everywhere and they are not federally funding. They were, a little, at one time, but not anymore. They typically run purely off community donations, which is why there are so many models – and sadly, why they open and close down just as quickly. So again, awareness is key right now. You might be able to be involved with one in your community, even in some small way.

Here’s a link to a list of all known centers nationwide. It is not comprehensive as this site is being updated all the time.

The Mothers Act

Next, there is a bill before the U.S. Senate right now, to be voted on this April, that could provide some of the funding for more crisis nurseries – and support new mothers in need.

It’s called the Mom’s Opportunity To Access Help, Education, Research, and Support for Postpartum Depression (MOTHERS) Act
Introduced by Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Richard Durbin (D-IL)

The MOTHERS Act will “ensure that new moms and their families are educated about postpartum depression, screened for symptoms, and provided with essential services. In addition, it will increase research into the causes, diagnoses and treatments for postpartum depression.”

In fairness to the opposition of this act, several grassroots groups believe the Act is being pushed by drug companies that want to increase revenues via the increased distribution of anti-depressant drugs for new mothers. Having read the text of the Act available on-line, I have seen no mandate about drug prescriptions within it.

The MyStuff Bags Foundation

And last, I’d like to share something I’m personally involved with – The MyStuff Bags Foundation.

A few years ago, I wrote and published a children’s book called There’s a Dog in the Doorway for the MyStuff Bag Foundation. The mission of this foundation is to put a bag in the hands of each of the nearly 300,000 children who need one each year. (That’s more than 30 children per hour.) I heard about this program on the radio one day when I was at lunch. The organizers asked listeners to send 100 or more new items a child would need or want. So I thought, I can write a book. And I did. The story is about my own dog, Abby, who always sleeps in our doorway at night. It’s a very protective gesture on her part. So the children’s story features a dog that helps and protects a child. You can find out more about this project on my website www.karenharringtonbooks.com and at the MyStuff Foundation website: http://www.mystuffbags.org/

Spotlight on Karen Harrington

Part I of a two-part spotlight on author and Her Circle blogger Karen Harrington about her writing passions, motherhood and the universal truths behind this role.

First, what is Janeology about?
A college professor struggles after his wife, Jane, snaps and drowns their toddler son. Soon, he finds himself in a legal battle, defending charges that he failed to protect his son from his fragile wife. His legal team proposes a radical defense: one that focuses away from him and on Jane’s strained childhood and potential inherited predisposition to violence.

What inspired you to write about this subject?
Two things, actually. First, I have a passion for genealogy, mostly because I never knew any of my grandparents. I had their pictures and many of their belongings. All my life, I looked at these objects and thought, “What if these pictures could talk? What was she thinking when this photograph was taken?” So I wanted to write about a character from the perspective of her genealogy to unearth all those traits – gifts, talents, diseases or curses – that can be inherited.

Second, as a new mother, I struggled with post-partum depression for a short-time. This made me wonder how mothers of previous generations handled this issue along with the everyday stresses of caretaking. Now I grant that it might be media influence, but as soon as I had my children, my awareness of grim headlines about maternal filicide were springing up to my left and right. I wrote this book, in part, because it seems to me that this is a recurring issue in American society today. In many ways, Janeology is a cautionary tale about one man achieving an understanding about his wife, despite it being too late to reverse her deeds.

You are a new mother. How did the examination of a mother descending into mental illness impact your writing?
Foremost, I don’t think I could have written it as powerfully if I was not a mother. I began writing it right after my mother died and finished it after the birth of my second child – which has all occurred in the last five years. In unexpected ways, her death shed a lot of insight into her as a person, not just a mother. Anyone who has lost a parent knows this experience from going through their parents’ possessions and letters. So I found myself in that life-altering position where you are standing between two generations - wondering how much of you is from your mother and father; how much of you is inside your own child; and just how much does nurture influence an individual. And because all things inform the writer’s life, my questions soon made their way into the fictionalized story of Jane Nelson.

In writing and researching this book, did you learn anything that surprised you?
It’s important to note that Janeology is not based on any one case. Rather, it’s a compilation of things I’ve read, interpreted and then illustrated into a fictional world. What it did bring into focus for me is this: motherhood is not universally natural and all women do not bond to the mothering role in the same way. Here are some startling facts I learned:

• As of 2007, eleven women were on death row in the United States for killing their children
• According to the American Anthropological Association, more than 200 women kill their children in the United States each year.
Link to American Anthropological Association : http://www.aaanet.org/press/motherskillingchildren.htm
• Reports indicate that 10-20 percent of new mothers experience some sort of depression.
Link to reports: http://www.postpartum.net/mothers-act3.html
• Three to five children a day are killed by their parents.
• Homicide is the leading cause of death for children under four.

There are many mothers who struggle early on in this fog and then emerge extremely maternal. There are those who do not. Society has to quit the idea that motherhood comes natural to ALL women. This personal revelation has led me to become a passionate advocate for programs designed to support women, children and families in need.

To read an excerpt of Janeology, visit www.karenharringtonbooks.com

Come back on April 15 for Part II of our spotlight with Karen where she will share more information on the programs she is following, including the Mother’s Act for Post-Partum mothers and families now being debated in the U.S. Senate and the emergence of crisis nursery centers as a resource for overwhelmed mothers and women.

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.)

Interview: Nahid Rachlin

Persian Girls is the memoir of Iranian-American author Nahid Rachlin. Bestowed upon her widowed and childless aunt as a gift at birth, Nahid enjoyed a simple and loving home free from many of the restrictions that pervade a young Iranian girl’s life. But when her father demands Nahid’s return to his home at age nine, everything changes. Suddenly decisions about her life are being made for her, and Nahid's independence is challenged at every turn. Her only comfort is the bond developed with her older sister, Pari. Persian Girls is the story of that bond, and about the price of personal independence and freedom.

Editor M.K. Ericson spoke with the author about this very personal work. Here is what she had to say.

Q: All of the women we meet in Persian Girls live with personal, familial, and cultural expectations for their future. More often than not, these forces are at odds with each other, resulting in strained relationships and personal sacrifice. The focus of Persian Girls is largely on your relationship with your sister, Pari, and your shared desire for a life of your choosing. Your own pursuit of higher education and writing, and Pari’s love of acting were equally frowned upon by family and society, yet you both persevered. Where do you think your resilience and independence in the face such opposition came from?

A: I think the fact that I had my aunt as a mother when I was a child helped me a great deal. It gave me strength and self-confidence because of all the love and praise she lavished on me. Pari had to share our birth mother with all the siblings.

Q: You and Pari also shared a fascination with all things American. From skipping school in afternoons to see the latest film, to your careful observation of the interactions among American children living nearby, you were consumed. What did America symbolize to a young girl in 1960s Iran?

A: Freedom, variety of opportunities, excitement.

Q: This fascination was deepened when your brothers were allowed to travel to the United States to pursue their education. You worked hard to become first in your class, and your father developed a small sense of pride in your own academic achievement. Yet, despite your hopes that he would also allow you to study in America, his initial response was that you expected too much. How did that make you feel?

A: I always felt it was unfair that my father, as with a majority of fathers, thought education was for their sons only, and that their daughters should settle for a life of domesticity with husbands they chose for them. I struggled to get out of that.

Q: Your father did allow you to study in America following the outbreak of the revolution, but when you arrived things were not as you had hoped. What did this experience teach you about your own expectations? Did you ever start to believe that maybe your father was right?

A: The disappointment I felt in the college I went to, with the narrowness of attitudes among the staff and students, didn’t make me disillusioned with my own dreams of pursuing education and independence. It just made me feel I was in the wrong college, not of my own choice, because that was where my father insisted I should go. He wanted me to be in a women’s college, near one of my brothers who had come here before me, and so I had no choice but that one college near him. I knew America was larger than that college.

Q: Sadly, Pari was not allowed to achieve the same level of personal independence that you did. In the years following her arranged marriage she once told you that it was because you were stronger than she was. Do you think that was a fair assessment on her part, or do you feel it had more to do with the circumstances of her being the first daughter, and thus the first in line for marriage?

A: I think her assessment was probably correct. Because she had never known another mother like I had, she was more ambivalent about totally rejecting our parents’ ideals for us and she wasn’t strong enough to fight as I did.

Q: Throughout the book we see your parents consumed with concerns about your actions bringing shame upon the family. What kind of pressure was there on a family raising a daughter in Iran during this time? Has anything changed?

A: My father was afraid that, with all my struggle for independence, my outspokenness, under the oppressive political situation in Iran, would get him into trouble. The SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, was always on the look out for anyone who might write or read something that was against the censorship. Oddly things are similar now, only the censorship is based on different sensitivities, the “moral police” taking the place of the SAVAK.

Q: The bonds of sisterhood play an important role in this story, where you explore not only the relationship shared by you and Pari, but also that with your other sister, Manijeh, and that of your birth mother, Mohtaram, and her sister, Maryam, who raised you. How would you characterize sisterhood in Iranian society? Are the pressures of accepted public behaviors, and the effect of one sister upon another, often a source of consternation as they were with Manijeh? Can the need to attract a suitable marriage partner breed jealousy? Or are most relationships supportive and nurturing like the one between you and Pari?

A: On the whole sisters are close, as members of the same sex generally are in Iran. Because interaction between girls and boys (unless they are blood related) is forbidden, the members of the same sex grow close. Pari’s and my anger at Manijeh mainly stemmed from the fact that, for some mysterious reasons, our mother favored her over all her children. There was little competition over suitors as we had no choice in the matter. The men’s families selected the girls and the girls’ families decided if the men were suitable.

Q: Censorship also plays an important role in this book. Censorship of family, feeling, and ultimately of the self, all emanating from pressures exerted by customs of time and place. How has your experience of growing up in a female-oppressed society affected your approach to raising your own daughter? Do you feel that she is aware of the freedoms afforded her as a woman in America?

A: Yes, my daughter is quite aware that she has a freedom that I never experienced in Iran. I am happy that she is able to exert her own desires the way I wasn’t. I encourage her to think independently.

Q: During your visits back to Iran you witnessed women demonstrating in the streets. Did you ever think “that could be me?” Was there a moment when you regretted your choice or considered returning?

A: I have never really regretted my choice to come to America, pursue my own goals. But I am always aware of a loss, a price to pay for the independence I have gained. I don’t have easy access and closeness to people I love, because of all the distance between us. I envy people who can just get in the car or airplane and go and see their loved ones. For me going back to Iran has always been problematic, not just because of the geographical distance, but for political reasons too that make traveling back and forth difficult. So I have returned only every few years, and I am always longing for more contact with people I have left there.

Q: You speak often of the biographical foundations of many of your earlier fictional works. Given this, was the experience of writing a non-fictional memoir an easy transition for you? How did the experience differ?

A: It wasn’t an easy transition from fiction to memoir, mainly because I was afraid of the reaction I would receive from my family members who can read English. I was exposing so much about my family and I didn’t know how that would strike them. But luckily those family members who have read it have not been offended.

Q: The loss of your sister, Pari, was obviously a painful and emotional experience. How long did it take you to be able to write about her? Has telling her story and paying tribute to her spirit eased the pain of her untimely death?

A: It took me more than a decade to be able to write about it. Telling her story has eased the pain only to some extent, in that she is more alive for me through the book and for those who read it.

Q: In closing the book, you write that your independence came at a price. In retrospect, was the price you paid too high?

A: It is hard to evaluate how high the price has been. I am certainly always divided inside, wishing I could combine my past and present more easily.

Q: You start and end the book with Maryam’s words on destiny, though you suggest that you don’t believe in predetermination. Why bring such prominence to this idea, then? Does the thought of destiny bring you any comfort?

A: The idea of predestination is always on my mind, not in the religious sense that Maryam believed in but in a different way. Though at some level I believe it was my own strength and determination that enabled me to strike out against traditional roles that trapped my sisters and many of my friends, I also believe that some things are determined for us: for instance how we look, the temperament we are born with, all sorts of coincidences, play parts in our future.

Q: What is the most important thing you would like your readers to take away from reading this memoir?

A: In this political climate, when Iran is the target of attack and Iranians are often portrayed as stereotypes, I hope this book enables readers to see Iran and its people with all their diversity and complexities, make them aware that important human emotions, such as love, sorrow, and loss are universal.

Nahid Rachlin was born and raised in Iran, but attended college in the United States, where she has resided since her graduation. In additon to her memoir, she is the author of four novels, Jumping Over Fire (City Lights), Foreigner (W.W. Norton), Married to a Stranger (E.P. Dutton), and The Heart’s Desire (City Lights) as well as the short story collection City Lights. For further information, you may visit her online at www.nahidrachlin.com.

Marilyn French on her new novel, In the Name of Friendship

In 1977 The Women’s Room sparked controversy and forever altered the consciousness of a generation of women. Now, almost thirty years later, Marilyn French brings us In the Name of Friendship. Her Circle Ezine talks with the author about feminism, politics, and friendship in the new millenium.

Q: The book is set in the year 2000. Was there any significance to writing it at the opening of a new millenium?

A: Yes, there was great significance. When I wrote The Women’s Room I wanted to tell the truth about the 1950s. After feminism arose, things changed for women. I wanted to complete that circle, to show that things have changed for, at least, educated women.

Q: In what way have things changed for women?

A: Since feminism, women can befriend each other. Feminism has increased this tendency. When my mother was young, she couldn’t be in public alone without a man—not even to have a cup of coffee. It’s still that way in Russia, though foreigners can have a social life. But for the most part, women today have the freedom to be social with one another.

Q: Do you think the current conservative political climate is a threat to such freedoms? Should we be on guard?

A: I am very concerned—and not just for women, but for men as well. The issue of child bearing is central to women’s freedom, and I do think we are facing the possibility of a reversal of Roe vs. Wade. Women still don’t have control over their bodies. Abortion is our only guarantee.

Q: Some people feel that the current generation of young women is not fully aware of this threat, that a sense of entitlement has led to complacency. Do you think young women are prepared for a fight?

A: I don’t know about that. I do think that girls feel more entitlement than the older generation, particularly that they feel entitled to their sexual experiences, to the experience of pleasure. Popular culture has fostered that. One image that comes to mind is that of a stripper. Some people consider this a powerful image for women, but I don’t agree. Perhaps I am getting too old (laugh). Popular culture views women as objects. I have to wonder, does a woman get real pleasure from that?

Q: Do any of the characters in your book feel entitlement?

A: No, none of the characters feel entitlement.
Q: You said that your goal for this book was to come full circle from the past. How did you go about creating characters to achieve this goal? Were the women modeled off of anyone?

A: They weren’t modeled off of anyone in particular. They are a combination of traits. And I love these women. I loved every day of working on this book. I was almost sad when I finished it. I miss them. They are my children.
Q: Do you consider this latest work is your masterpiece?

A: Well, my friend suggested that it is. But I’m not sure. I really can’t speak to that. I love all of my children.