Category Archives: visual moments

Women Authoring Change

my 2012 abode

In the past I wrote about Hedgebrook. (radical hospitality) And I shared about the women who were there when I was. women writers And their cook book (here) is amazing, reminding me of the weight I gained during my residency in 2012. Well now it is time for YOU to apply for a residency. Check it out here! If granted, it is like nothing you will have ever had given to you. One constellation of six who were there when I was are pictured below, representing several nations, multiple genres, and huge heart. Also, throughout the year, they have master’s classes as well. For a weekend or longer, you will have your own little cottage, 5 other writers, solitude, amazing surroundings, and a master teacher. An 2011 article in the Guardian showed that in Britain and the US, male authors are reviewed 3 times more often than women. And guess what? Who do you think the reviewers are? Yes, similar proportions for reviewers: men: women 3:1. VIDA does an annual evaluation. In 2013 the NY Times and The Paris Review made big progress, but check out the tables. We still have a long way to go to have women’s voices heard in print. (VIDA) Hedgebrook supports women writers. In particular it wants to support women authoring change. My three weeks there in 2012 were life altering thanks to the vision of the place, the belief in the work I was/am doing, the amazing nurturing of the staff and the place, the women who were there with me, and the space to be there. Please do check it out: Go there for a master’s class. Apply for a residency. Support them. Go to their events.

Josephine Ensign wrote about Elizabeth Austen, her poetry and the event where she read. (see blogs I follow) Elizabeth is the Washington State Poet in Residence, truly gifted and a Hedgebrook Alum. Check out her blog and her work here. Go to one of her events.

Support women authors! Our voices matter. In the farmhouse at Hedgebrook, where we gather for dinner with our amazing chefs, there is a living room with floor to ceiling and wall to wall (except for the fireplace) bookshelves, all full. Every book in the shelves is by or includes a Hedgebrook alum. Let us work together to publish so much that we must support Hedgebrook building a new building or modifying some of their other buildings to house all the works of the women who pass through there.

Single Story continued

5 Replies

It is the night before Thanksgiving, and here I sit eating potato chips and promising myself a glass of wine when I finish this post (neither of which is good for my blood pressure or my cholesterol, speaking of the choices theme), needing to make stuffing and cranberry sauce tonight, shallots and brussel sprouts tomorrow, one son downstairs viremic, the other just here from SoCal out on the town, and me, trying to sort out what has been swirling in my mind.

What to post? Oh yes, and Allie the aged dog is scratching at my study door. If I let her in, she will whine for attention. If I don’t she will not go downstairs and bug the 25 year old. I could post about how my sons already see me as a daft old woman. NO that is for another day.

Keeping it simple, I’ll stay with the theme of the single story.

I have a lot of friends who are anti military. I don’t agree with many of the actions we have taken in the world either. And I want there to be more than the military as paths towards maturity and upward mobility available to poor, struggling in school, and minority youth. If it were on an equal footing with college, vocational training, being an entrepreneur, and if it did not involve a higher risk of dying, well, I might feel differently. Point is, as I see it, though no country is without a military. So I’m not going to dis its existence; it seems to me it has to be. I have many thoughts about war and its consequences and about our politics that have led us into war, but that too might be for another day. I do accept that we will have a military. Do I want my kids choosing it given the recent decades of engagements? no. Would they have my support if that were their choice? A reluctant yes, because I do not live their lives.

Second point is: how do you see people in the military? Regardless of your political positions, how do you see them? Do you have a story for the soldiers? the marines? the navy? the enlisted vs the officers? the policy makers vs those who follow the orders? How does it break down for you?

I suspect many of us have a single story, whether it is pro or con.

Try to put yourself back to the early 1950s. Picture a navy ship, a destroyer. It’s during the Korean conflict. Many if not most of the sailors on this destroyer are 18-20 years old, their first time away from home. Sure, they had their basic training, but this is really away, three months “at sea.” There is a captain of this ship. His job is to get them to the part of the Pacific where they can do what the Department of Defense tells them to do. It is a war in the eyes of the US Government and the military.

Draw a picture in your mind and start with the story of these young sailors and life on the ship in the middle of battle. Do the same for the guy at the top, the captain. His job is order, following orders, keeping everyone on task and the ship afloat. Maybe jot down your thoughts.

My father was the captain, in his thirties. Fast forward to 1969, and he was in some major position and stationed in Newport RI. I could not drive my car on base (where my parents lived) with my anti-Viet Nam war stickers on my car. People hearing I was raised in the navy often gave me a single story: how I could come from that family? They gave my dad a single story: military brass are authoritarian and militaristic. On the other side, some could not understand the complexity of my beliefs. I was not anti-American The contradictions and the huge space between two absolutes are sometimes so hard for people to handle, when in reality they are what define and embrace us all.

How could my father, this person who was in Pearl Harbor when it was bombed, on the USS Minneapolis when it was torpedoed, losing many men (and limping into a harbor to rebuild the hull out of bamboo and sailing back to mainland) be anything more than a true military man? How could he then go on to serve in both Korea and Viet Nam and not be locked into one view? Both ends of the spectrum would see it that way. Do you inhabit the ends of the spectrum? And how many actually do?

I have many stories that round him out to the complex person he was. He was a true military man who loved his profession, not war, his profession—and he was more. A few years ago, some of those 18 year old sailors, now in their 80s found my sibs and me. One shared a letter that his parents had saved, sent to them back in those Korean War days. It is below and I hope it shifts your lens from the picture you had. If you click on the image, it should enlarge so you can read it. As we approach Thanksgiving, my hope is that we all will be thankful we have the capacity to use our lenses to be wide angled.

If you missed it yesterday, I still recommend the talk by Chimamanda Adichie.

Awakening in the USA

3 Replies

Some ask, what do all my posts, health policy mixed with family, memoir, have to do with moments? We live in them! Moments have content. These current times will be remembered when most national elected officials from both parties share some of history’s lowest approval ratings. Moments, where we live, how conscious and intentional we are, how we use them, are really all we have. Relationships happen within them. Relationships end within them. Both lead to change and either forward or backward movement. I am a generalist and have many domains in play at any given moment. There are many who can attest that I cannot be narrowed: my parents and grandparents, my college advisor, my grad school advisor, the specialists who wanted me to pick their field during med school, and on and on and on. For me the threads connect. My hope is that readers will see what the moments mean when I write (and maybe want to read the book if someone takes it and it moves from manuscript to book, Life Lessons, What Our Patients Teach Us)

Today and this week the press is reminding us of 1863 and 1963. The events they remember were touchstones in my life. 1863 was having its hundredth anniversary in 1963 when many moments were pivotal for me.

There I was, a recent transplant (August 1962) from California to Virginia, sophomore in high school. Me: a pudgy teen with acne and a decent brain in the throes of who am I, though I did not know it. There were existential crises like when I found out my friends would think I was a snob when I did not recognize them because I was too vain to wear my new glasses. I had my first real boyfriend, a congressional page.

My world turned on the events of 1963 in ways that shaped me. I am sure there were the foundations laid by other circumstances in our lives, like having an older brother whose brilliance I accepted and being a young girl in the 60s whose guidance counselor told me, because I was female, that my aspirations should aim at state teachers college “and not higher” or my mothers flight of fury to take on this woman for trying to limit my dreams. I can write more about all of that and my development in those contexts, but tonight is about 1963.

To get there we need to fast forward to 1964. It was the World’s Fair in New York. My brother was off to college. My parents, my two younger sisters, and I boarded a bus to NY to meet my mother’s parents, see New York, and do the World’s Fair. On the bus, I was working on a talk for my “expository speech” in debate club. Titled “Building Bridges,” I called for racial equality and inclusivity. I showed it to my mother. She actually asked if I had written it or copied it from somewhere. I was taken aback, furious, and with a typical 15 year old posture, I cried, “How could you even think that?” silencing those in the seats nearby. This was the most original piece I had ever written. How dare she? Did she know me so little that she could not understand from where this came? She imagined I plagiarized it? Really? It came from her upbringing of me…and 1963. She raised us with “all are equal; we are the same.” The 1963 opened my eyes.

1963

January of 1963 was the 100 anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation (1/1/1863). We were studying the civil war in class. It was on the news.

I was that teen with my first boy friend, that Capitol Hill Page whose dad was a congressman from somewhere. We would go to DC for dinner, me with my fake id, have steaks and wine and cigarettes. There was the luau at LB Johnson’s house, then Vice President, because Lucy Bird was also dating a Page. That made me a grown-up, right?

June of 1963: John F. Kennedy issued a proclamation ordering the Governor Wallace of Alabama to comply with the 1954(!) law of school desegregation. When Wallace blocked the entrance to the University, JFK brought in the National Guard and Wallace stepped aside.

Dulles Airport had been built and sometimes my friends and I would drive out there, all dressed up, just to be in that space, new with driver’s licenses, acting adult.

August of 1963, with the 100 year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation (1/1/1863) and of the Gettysburg Address (11/19/1863), Martin Luther King and 200,000 others marched on Washington.

August of 1963, my brother was leaving for college on the left coast and I was convincing my parents that I could have his room and paint it pink, (which by the way was on a different level, allowing me to both sneak out and smoke cigarettes with the window open and, I thought, be undetected.)

Also in 1963 the Beatles hit the US. They were not on Ed Sullivan until 1964, but as my musically talented brother validated my more visceral very positive response and said: “this is very talented and complex music.”

November of 1963: I was sitting in a class when the announcement came. “The President has been shot.” JFK was dead, just weeks before he could have hoped to have the civil rights bill passed, or would it have been? How did that moment bring history forward with a big tradeoff?

Regardless of that answer, for me it was a year of awakening to a larger world, to the imperfect union we have, to the work we still face, as Lincoln noted in the Gettysburg address. In this week and year 2013, the 150^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address and the 50^th anniversary of JFK’s death, I sit here knowing what the cumulative moments of 1963 did to grow me and they feed me still. And you?