I wrote a short story of 100 words exactly that includes the 7 banned words the government forbid the Center for Disease Control to use. It takes place in the future:
Rosie felt vulnerable. She thought her maternity care coverage was paid for with her $3,000 monthly insurance fee, but President T. Rump had signed away this entitlement by executive order. Only white Christian women in heterosexual marriages who owned property could access care for their fetus and themselves, justified by an “evidence-based” study of racial superiority. The other pregnant American women were subject to a diversity of exclusions. Transgender folks had to choose between child-bearing and identity. Despite science-based conclusions of their excellent parenting, lesbians like Rosie were forbidden access to IVF or adoption. Luckily, her partner was a midwife.
It would be my dad's 100th birthday today. In his honor, I have written 100 words about him, about learning to drive, about how complicated family relationships are.
My ex-trucker dad taught me how to drive in 1964 in his black ’53 Ford with the red seats. I practiced his technique of how to mount a hill, using the clutch to deal with intersections, but I chickened out towards the top. As I ran the stop sign, I crashed into the side of a police cruiser. The cops leaped out. “Sauly!” they cried when they saw him. “Your kid? Never mind. We’ll take care of it.” My dad was a Pittsburgh lifer and everyone – especially me – adored him. So why didn’t he stop his wife from beating me?
The NY Times had a 13-Word Love Story Contest in honor of 13 years of their Modern Love column. I submitted a story. Last night they published a bunch of winners (out of 10,000 submissions). Once I read through them - so middle class, so granola - I realized that mine was WAY outside of their point of view. Compare it to the ones they liked - full of "BMW" and "craft beer" and "organic mac and cheese.
"Here's mine.
The start? Her twinkling nose stud. The end? The revolver under her pillow.
Despite the excited buzz everywhere about the new documentary “Obit,” centering on the obituary journalists of the New York Times, I am sorry to say that the film killed itself today. A gaggle of white men dug the grave for a trickle of elite white men over whom a selection of white men gave eulogies.
I have written many letters to many editors over the years in which I say, “Whew. It seems that only white men die in your world.” I scan with rare success for the odd mention of the life of a person of color or a white woman in the hallowed pages of our premiere newspapers. But when you see the film “Obit” you understand why. White editors sit around assigning obituaries to white male journalists and none of them notice that something is awry.
The solitary woman on the obit team, Margalit Fox, is the only one in the film to touch on the subject, and she does so with a couple of incomprehensible sentences about how the people dying now were raised 60+ years ago and so times were different and it will take another generation for people of color and women to be making enough of a mark to rate a place in their paper. (!) Clumsy and convoluted and plain wrong.
A whole film on obituaries and there isn’t a single serious discussion of how and why subjects are selected or how the race and gender of the selectors might just be impacting the list of those whose lives are written about.
The only Black NYT employee we see – and that for just a few seconds – is during footage of a NYT editorial meeting. At that table is a Black man who, I discover in the credits, is Earl Wilson, an editorial desk assistant. We are shown celebrity subjects of color receiving obituaries, such as Michael Jackson and Prince and Whitney, but not scientists, politicians, or even athletes. The unexplained, unconnected photos of MLK edited into the visuals are bewildering as there is no narrative about any obit for him. The film is more excluding than the NYT itself.
As for women subjects, why the very first one named by “Obit” is the highly accomplished Candy Barr, a stripper who died in 2005. Thanks for highlighting our sheros. Nothing against Candy Barr (who has an interesting back story the film does not mention: she is also known, according to Wikipedia, for “shooting her estranged second husband; and being arrested and sentenced to a prison term for drug possession”), but the film might have mentioned anyone from Fannie Lou Hamer to Shirley Chisholm to Adrienne Rich.
The longest segment about a single obit subject focuses on John Fairfax, some white British adventurer who rowed across oceans and died in 2012. Why was he the film’s highlight? Why not others who died that same year (Etta James, Eve Arnold, Earl Scruggs – to name three)?
There were some scenes in the “morgue” – where clippings and drafts of obituaries for the still-living are stored in a chaotic crypt that one awkward white man works alone. He seems overwhelmed and startled when he opens random file drawers.
At the end of the film – after we’ve been subjected to talking head followed by talking head, everyone one of them a white man except for Fox – we are assaulted with a rapid-fire montage of images of life – random unidentified children playing, people ambulating, others laughing, jumping from era to era with no explanation or justification. My impression is that this was done to demonstrate inclusiveness, as not a few of this hodgepodge of images involves all those who are not at the NYT obituary-writing table. Sorry “Obit”: Not enough.
My final verdict. “Obit” is a lost opportunity. It is peculiar, but not in a pleasant or especially informative way. And it says soooooo much that we already knew about the New York Times.
So, my dear friend who works in a stationary shop across the country offered to buy me a 2017 planner for my birthday, but even with photos, I couldn’t really pick one out from a distance. Same with the Internet. I need to feel the heft, to make sure the essential spiral binding works smoothly, to check if the cover is hardy enough to withstand going from my desk to bag to suitcase, to being taken out and put back a gazillion times over the year. Hopefully the paper doesn’t bleed through and it is light enough not to ruin my back when I’m carrying it.
Last year I got my 2016 planner from Ocean State Job Lots for $2 and it worked well for me until about September when it started feeling overworked, shabby, not so neat. Pages curled, the cover got wrinkled. It is really looking forward to retirement at the end of the year.
I do everything online except for my Planner. It’s my daily anchor: my appointments, my to-do list, my phone notes, my deadlines, my reminders. I’ve used one all of my adult life and know exactly which kind suits me.
I tried an independent bookstore first. They had well over a dozen, all of them arty, with one page full of an image on their theme (women authors or cats or birds or meditation sayings) and the facing page squeezing the week into tight horizontal slots. Half the weight and half the space is taken up by the kind of pretty pictures you could Google for.
I went to the big drug store but either those planners were too floppy or the cover was hard and awkward. I bought one but returned it when I realized how heavy it was.
Then I looked online at Target and saw what a big selection they had. I drove many miles to the largest Target within an hour’s drive. They had plenty of choice for weekly planners, but most of them were attractively designed to be difficult. One had the dates written in gold – I could only read them by holding them under the light and twisting the book this way or that to catch the glare. Another had everything in script that look all very calligraphy but impossible to decipher in a glance. In the end I bought one that is plain, not an ounce of decoration, but with a strong enough font that I can actually tell what’s written on it.
One more beef. Every 12 month planner should be 13 months at least and include the December of the previous year so that we can make a smooth transition without lugging two volumes. If they want to be extravagant, designers could include January of the following year as well.
Those designers who waste the majority of each page’s space on baubles and fireworks clearly don’t depend on planners like I do. I want a workhorse. The essential thing is that it gets the job done, although I do wish this one were prettier. If you have a sticker I’d love to slap on the front, send it my way!
I need a new office chair. I’m a writer, so I’m in my computer chair about 12 hours a day. The last one I inherited from a friend who died. Now 6 or 7 years later, I suddenly realize there is no seat left. I’m just sitting on the metal under-structure.
The only place that sells decent chairs for under $500 seems to be Staples. Despite my pressing need, I have visited three different Staples branches to try their chairs again and again, without buying one. Why? Because apparently the chair manufacturers have not been informed that women ever sit down. And because they think every man is 6’ tall.
There are at least three results from the fact that the designers and engineers are probably all men:
1) Out of 20 chairs that I tried in Staples, 13 did not lower low enough for me to really plant my feet on the ground. Some of them didn’t lower enough for me to touch anything but my toes to the ground. I’m now 5’2” – that is not so far out of human range to be excluded from a seat.
2) The seats in over half of the chairs are too big, especially from back to knee. If I sit all the way back, my legs don’t bend over the edge.
3) The arm rests are built for arms that hang down from shoulders that are much wider than mine. So the most I can do is rest my forearms on the inner edge of the arm rests, which is very uncomfortable.
All I want is to find something small, compact, comfortable, and healthy. I’ve got my credit card ready. I want to buy. And yet, I have still not found a fitting place to deposit my butt.
Murder Under the Bridge is a compelling and unique murder mystery. Written by Kate Jessica Raphael, an American with intimate knowledge of Palestine under Israeli occupation, this novel provides a glimpse behind the Wall dividing Palestine from the rest of the world. The action begins when Rania, a Palestinian woman police detective, discovers the body of a woman stranger on the outskirts of her village. The magic is not only in the message, but in the medium as well: a detective thriller is a palatable and effective way to reveal the minutia of the lives that the Conflict distorts. The author delves into the intricacies of relationships across genders, ethnicities, nationalities, generations, and most of all, the Occupiers and the Occupied.
The richness of the book is in the details, from the taxi system in Israel and Palestine, to the checkpoints that inflict daily humiliation on the residents of the West Bank. Raphael explores the subtleties by which trust and community are solidified or dismantled. By interjecting snippets of Arabic and Hebrew (immediately translated, but a glossary is included at the back of the book), we get insight into how knowledge of these two languages, along with English, plays out in the power struggles under Occupation. For example, Rania does not let on that she understands Hebrew, giving her a slight edge in conversations with her Israeli counterparts.
Prison is an ever-present and defining fact of life in Palestine, generation after generation. One prisoner Fareed, when accepting coffee from a jailer, “tried not to hate himself for his weakness. He had grown up on the stories of his father’s interrogations.” Betrayal and manipulation compound the struggle of people, especially women, to live their lives. Raphael manages to convey all of this without, for one second, lecturing. It flows from the action and the graphic descriptions.
Kate Jessica Raphael’s political and creative life changed after she spent eighteen months between 2002 and 2005 volunteering in Palestine through the International Women's Peace Service. During the writing of this, her first novel, she augmented her closely observed impressions with, she says, “the work of Israeli feminist and labor groups … and a detailed map of the area.” Raphael’s tasks as a volunteer included documenting human rights violations and accompanying Palestinians in their daily chores, using her international status to protect them. Out of Raphael’s intimacy with the Palestinian community comes this illuminating, exciting detective thriller that opens with a Murder Under the Bridge.
May I brag? I got this email from the kind and communicative Managing Editor of the only academic journal I ever published in: “The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture,” from the large publisher Taylor & Francis, which publishes scads of academic journals. He wrote:
“We've recently compiled our publication data over the past seven years and thought you might be interested in the positive results. We're happy to report that your article, "Women’s Liberation Explosion At Boston University (1969–70)," published in our 2014, 7.1 edition remains very popular and was one of our top ten most downloaded articles from Taylor & Francis in 2014… We're very happy to see the popularity of the article, and hope you will be as well. Thanks so much for your contribution to the Journal!”
But here’s what I’m really proud of. Academic journals and book publishers offer the most appalling contracts to writers of almost all publications. The journals don’t pay. They ask you to indemnify them against any legal challenges. They demand to hold the copyright of your work. And then they put your essay behind a paywall which means that it is only read by students and faculty of the universities that pay them for access.
I was approached by one of the editors about using my piece and was pretty happy about the idea of being included in the ivory tower for once – until, that is, I saw the contract. Since a contract is something that is negotiated between two parties – despite publications telling you “this is our standard document” – I started negotiating with them (with some support from my union's brilliant contract advisers.)
I told them that I would only indemnify them up to the amount they paid me: zero. I told them they could not own the copyright unless they were buying the piece outright, which wasn’t happening. I told them that I refuse to have my (unpaid) writing, about building a revolutionary movement, no less, behind a paywall.
To their credit, they agreed to all of it, every single counter-request, and the result is that people can actually get to my essay and read it. I know that the stakes are higher for people who make their living in the academic realm, but writers be advised: If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
You may have already read my piece, but if not, feel free – literally – to click here.
I’ve had a number of things published recently, but those of you who aren’t on Facebook probably don’t know about them. In case you’re interested, here’s where to check them out:
My piece on my complicated reaction to the Supreme Court marriage decision was published on lgbtsr.org. It’s called “Susie and the Supreme Court” and you can read it here.
Check out my flash fiction (VERY short story) entitled “If Only” that was published on a literary site called Brilliant Flash Fiction. Read it here.
This is a regular length short story. The editor of Blotter accepted it unusually fast, saying that he was glad he liked the story, because I already had him at the title. It’s called “The Cold Butch and the Carpetbagger." Read it here.
Finally, writer/editor Stephanie Shroeder interviewed me about Lillian’s Last Affair for an online magazine called “50 is the new 50.” Read it here.
I only recently heard about the writer Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958), a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. She was mentioned by Kay Bourne in one of the events she and her collaborator, the photographer Craig Bailey, are doing around the Boston area about the local history of Black artists. Kay mentioned Angelina Weld Grimké at a celebration of LGBT Black theater people in honor of The Theater Offensive.
Grimké wrote with gut-wrenching intensity about lynching and racism and Black families. Her famous play Rachel (1916) was Grimké’s response to the call by the NAACP for work that would counter the racism of D. W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation (1915).
I read her amazing short story “The Closing Door,” in the thick collection Black like us: a century of lesbian, gay and bisexual African American fiction, edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A. McBride, and Donald Weise. This story knocked me on my ass. The characters are drawn with a humanity that makes them seem present in the room, not the least Agnes, the anchor of everyone else’s feelings. When one of her brothers arrives from the South with desperate news of another brother, Agnes is catapulted into a terrifying depression. The range of perspectives inside this one home is monumental. And the ending is a weighty comment on the bittersweet complexity of motherhood within an oppressive Jim Crow environment.
Because I have not yet read much of her work, this post will necessarily be short. I write to share in the off chance that, like me, Angelina Weld Grimké is missing from your shelves. Work of such power and import may be something you want to experience.
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