tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5516952926492560852024-03-20T04:48:34.807-07:00Destiny Kinal's BlogDestinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-61302807419355254212014-02-18T09:50:00.000-08:002014-02-18T09:50:00.053-08:00 Confessions of a Bottle-Sick Novelist Bottlesickness. "<i>A temporary condition (often caused by shaking a bottle) that interferes with a wine's fruit flavors,...alleviated with a few days rest.</i>" <a href="http://wine.com/">Wine.com </a><br />
Dateline: Taos, New Mexico.<br />
<br />
One week from completing my six-week fellowship at Wurlitzer Foundation, I woke assailed by doubts and confronted by a severely bottle-sick novel.<br />
<br />
And hadn't I been so cocky, just days earlier, burning all the drafts of the manuscript I had brought with me, the husks of friends' readings of my manuscript, their comments in blue and red ink. My fellows and I had decided to celebrate the void of the moon, in the fashion of Taosenos in this season, by lining our adobe wall with farolitos (luminaria to the Anglo world) and roasting a lamb. Feeding backcopies of the manuscript to the sacrificial fires seemed right. <br />
<br />
<br />
Six or seven years had passed in writing this novel. (Who's counting? A beloved nephew, grown from eight to fourteen years old, had stopped asking how it was coming.) To my dismay, I found that I write novels like a painter, adding layers with each successive revision, slowly building up setting, character development, plot and theme. Very slowly...by contrast with my expository writing, which flies off my first longhand drafts into the computer, and after a couple revisions, to publication. Surely a six week fellowship would be sufficient to complete a novel this long in gestation?<br />
<br />
To my astonishment, at the end of the first week, under the heady influence of the powerhouse Taos Mountain, I had completed the novel. I announced it to my fellows, to writer friends and family. Of course there was still a lot of cleaning up and revision to do, and yet the novel was complete: dramatic arc, complex characters, beginning, middle and finally, a fitting ending.<br />
<br />
Perhaps you can glimpse my own brand of hubris. A self-avowed ritual junky, I am given to the dramatic moment. "Overreaching." Words straight out of Sophocles.<br />
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Shortly before Halloween, I had driven from Berkeley to this six week Taos fellowship, making my way through Navajo and Hopi homelands enlivened by daily ingestion of majoom, an invention from the 60's with authentic antecedents in Central Asia. The lightly sauteed sinsemilla, mixed with chopped nuts and fruit comfit and stuffed into medjool dates, produces a sense of euphoria and a momentous certainty of being synchronous. On time. <br />
<br />
<br />
Leaving the Grand Canyon in the middle of the night, I drove through forest fires flickering on each side of the road. Stopping at an overlook in a moonless night, I leaned out to feel that yawning space. On the rocks above Moenkopi on the Hopi First Mesa at dawn, I sat looking down at the peaceful village and orderly fields, chimneys sending up fragrant pinon smoke. Everywhere I travelled, local native women fed me chile verde wrapped in fry bread doled out from the back of their cars. <br />
<br />
"Where are you going?" <br />
"To Taos, to finish my book."<br />
<br />
Clusters of cottonwood marked places where water can be found, their autumn leaves bright as marigold juice, oases laid against this naked landscape, bones of mountains and ruddy skin of mesas exposed to the eye. Can I sustain this charged yet simple existence, I asked myself, translate it into the body of my novel? <br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
I carried my manuscript with me, together with comments from my first editor, Lois Gilbert, who lives in Santa Fe. After interviewing three editors from the back of Poets and Writers, I had chosen Lois for the same mixed bag of reasons one might choose a horse at the races: at $3 a page, her price was right. And intuition. Reviewing her comments after her first read, I knew that my hunch had found me a winner.<br />
<br />
After arriving in Taos, and with the keys to my casita in hand, I thanked Michael Knight, director of Wurlitzer Foundation, which owns eighteen acres just blocks from the plaza. Surrounded by eight casitas filled with other writers, composers, and artists, I locked myself up in my little adobe house to write.<br />
<br />
<br />
The main room of my casita was dominated by a baby grand and a corner fireplace. My candelabra of five candles which burn while I write from the middle of the night through the morning, images of The Mother on my hearth, strings of chilis swinging from my portico--all my writing fetishes were settled into their places. Ready to work, I hefted my worktable over to the generous window facing north, toward Taos Mountain. <br />
<br />
I picked uncomfortably at the first thread, the judgment of a fellow writer who had found my male characters sufficiently flawed and compelling and my female characters relatively featureless. My editor Lois Gilbert concurred: my protagonist Catherine Duladier, an earthy woman drawing on her devotion to the Black Madonna and her work in the silk, was too good to be true. Go back to first principles of creating protagonists, she advised, urging me to make Catherine seduce her best friend Regina, an attraction I had toyed with. "Let them be bad," Lois opined. "Let them stray from husbands and vows. Let all this subterranean sexual tension erupt into action."<br />
<br />
Compelling characters must yearn for something out of reach; desire can define a character. Yes, the advice that Lois distilled rang true to me: Catherine must "be spurred into action by her desire, even if it's self-destructive action." I knew it must be done, but how?--I was as much of a coward as my protagonist Catherine! In this emotional minefield, I chose the time-honored retreat: I announced that the two women had become lovers, offstage, Euripedes'-style.<br />
<br />
<br />
Drawing on her quaking heart as well as her superior store of millennial silk wisdom, Catherine laid down rules for her new lover. They must observe the taboo against sexual congress during their month working together in the pressurecooker of the new silkworm operation.<br />
<br />
Within days of their beginning work, the magnanerie (the place where silkworms are raised) becomes a hell on earth, as the Black Madonna tests her new maitresse with nightmares, with unbounded lust, with the violent death of part of her brood of silkworms. This trying condition--I reassured my readers--was not occasioned by Catherine and Regina's illicit lovemaking, which honored their earthy if sometimes destructive patroness, the Black Madonna, but from an imbalance. Disharmony sourcing from...what? <br />
<br />
Ask the universe a question; get an answer. During that first week of my fellowship, Pax Christi hosted a talk by Daniel Berrigan's wife Liz McAllister, during which she handed me my character development tool: "Love and truth must go together; love without truth is violence." Within hours, I had Regina confront Catherine with the revelation that she couldn't thrive while lying about their love. They wrestled with it and with each other. Conveniently, as the worms spun themselves into their cocoons, Regina died, neatly sidestepping their moment of truth. I really didn't want to complete my book in the aftermath of their revealing themselves as lovers to their nineteenth century community!<br />
<br />
With my protagonist's tragic flaw firmly in hand-- a coward in love, she lies to herself first about everything that matters--I flew through the revision, bolstered by the energy from the mountain that makes Taos a power center. I sent off my crowing email: I've completed the novel. After one week.<br />
<br />
Do we hear the faint strains of a parallel between the author and her protagonist, that breath of hubris? Avoiding the recognition of emotional cowardice with trumpeting fanfare? <br />
***<br />
Thanksgiving and I sent off another check for a second read along with my revised manuscript to Lois before boarding a plane back to Berkeley. We were aligned: Lois would hand off her comments on the manuscript to me in Santa Fe, on my way back to Taos and the final two weeks of my fellowship. Plenty of time to polish the novel, before sending out letters to prospective agents.<br />
<br />
My brother Brian, a lifetime editor in journalism, advised me to write jacket copy, an exercise he recommends before pitching agents. Channeling Lois, I shot this email back to him: "I can't write jacket copy or a letter to agents, until I know what my novel is about."<br />
<br />
I've completed the novel but I don't know yet what it's about? I know a lot!...Catherine, silvery cool and slender, bites her nails and obsesses about details while missing the big picture: she is slightly nearsighted. Regina, red-haired and voluptuous, passionate about abetting escaping slaves, has a deep belly laugh that can be heard across an acre of pasture. Catherine smokes a clay pipe, sighs a little too loudly when her husband plays the fiddle, and tosses in bed at night, thinking about Regina.<br />
<br />
Naturally people ask me what the novel is about; I'm becoming confounded. Is it really about a group of Huguenot silkworkers who come to Bucks County in the late l830's to transplant their reputation for producing fine silk to the new world? I mulled over the questions that inspired me to start this book. Can I dramatize how the women of both native American and native European cultures lose power they previously possessed, a loss that will persist for a century and a half? How can I anatomize this nursery of highminded ideals and unbridled greed that will come to characterize our grown-up nation? Can I pull these themes through the scaffolding of story without becoming a haranguing fishwife?<br />
<br />
Lois and I met on Canyon Road, a road of galleries and restaurants that was still unpaved when I lived here with my Jules-and-Jim menage in l968. Lois, a slender woman in her early fifties, is chiefly notable for a certain glint in her eye. Lois socked it to me: she sees no scar in Catherine, no loss, no initiation in pain at the beginning of the book. I have to wound my protagonist while she's young and innocent: she has to suffer. Bad things have to happen that haunt her through the book, so she can be healed.<br />
<br />
Further, she easily persuaded me, the seduction between Regina and Catherine has to be written, in detail on the page, to parallel a sex scene with that "touch of the barnyard" that Lois admired, one between Catherine and her husband Philip towards the end of the book. <br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Returning to my casita, I wrote the seduction scene, ending Catherine and Regina's prolonged flirtation. Now I had to admit something profoundly embarrassing for a writer who fancies herself a woman of the world. Aside from some girls' school adolescent fantasy-fumbles and some heartbreaking crushes on camp counsellors, I had never made love with a woman. Well, I reasoned, I have made love to myself.<br />
<br />
Thus armed against charges of fraud, I turned to face the challenge of giving my young protagonist a serious sexual wound. I couldn't see the maiden Catherine willingly submitting to sex with two men from the prestigious parfumerie in Grasse, who had engaged her to help them pursue the early science of pheromones. Lois and I concurred: it would have to involve drugs. This is her first sexual experience, after all; though she's self-described as "overripe," she's not loose. Yet. <br />
<br />
After enjoying her, the two fragrance scientists should dismiss her with contempt. A double wounding. Moreover, wouldn't she enjoy much of it herself? She has not been raped and victimized as much as initiated sexually, a gift from the bloody Black Madonna. A violent and ritualized initiation, yes, but she has been awakened and set on the path of the hero's quest for self-discovery. The cost to her has been high, creating the opportunity for a triple wounding. The family's investor has lost significant money as a consequence of her time in Grasse. Word goes out of the "appearance of impropriety."<br />
<br />
***<br />
Life goes on, as it does: her family stands behind her, and several years later, with Catherine at the helm, the family immigrates to launch their new venture. And yet her reputation is "besmirched", her spirit shamed and humiliated. Feeling that "she brought it on herself," she hides the wound and lives the lie. Until Regina arrives to heal her. <br />
<br />
That night, as I lay in a light sleep, turning over the possibilities of inflicting this wound on my eighteen year old protagonist, I am jolted awake repeatedly by sharp violent orgasms, the natural result of this or that scene I am imagining, a night that does nothing to relieve the growing lust that continues to build during my long sessions concocting this brew. <br />
<br />
"December 4, 2005," my journal reads. "I rise at three o'clock this morning and write the "wounding" scene in longhand, then coax myself back to sleep the only way possible at this point--with my vibrator. All this writing, writing about sex, about wounds. I can't wait to be done with this book; it's making me sick...getting up at 3 or 4 am, writing until 8 or 9 at night, with one break during the day for a walk, some socializing, a meal." <br />
<br />
Reluctantly, I concur with Lois: too many subplots distract from the central thrust of the novel. I slash many vibrant well-written scenes, ruthless with my body/my self, ruthless with the manuscript.<br />
<br />
"It hurts," I write. "This stuff is important to me. What about all the fine writing I worked over, honing the language with the tools of poetry? My cursor and delete button run over pages of scenes cutting, cutting. The novel is bottlesick; I am bottlesick. So much of it torn and blasted...introductions to characters lost, text disjointed. And so much of the writing raw and new, another overlay on the body of my novel. I'm close to exhausted with it. And fearful of what people--my family!--will think. I can't give interviews," I rave to myself. "If I do, I'll have to refuse to talk about the sex scenes or let anyone get personal."<br />
<br />
Where would we be, trapped in a purgatory of our devising, without our journals? "I finish my writing day, after reviewing and revising the sex, the yearning, the wounding, and I am ill and agitated and horny in such a base way, I have to take myself to bed and make love to myself yet again, and hope that I can be gentle when I am feeling so savage. The writing is pulling things out of me that sicken and exhaust me. <br />
<br />
"I'm too old for this," I tell myself.<br />
"No, you're not," I answer.<br />
I turn to put out the light, perchance to sleep. "What are those two carrots doing on my bedstand?" I ask.<br />
"What do you think?" I answer, one eyebrow cocked.<br />
With a sigh, I take the carrots one by one and stroke them with Astrolube. Jerking my casita curtains closed, I shake my head and settle back on the pillows, while the writer--ever the voyeur--clocks each sensation for tomorrow's session with the computer. <br />
<br />
My youngest daughter calls me. I tell her what Lois has said, Lois the imperious leatherclad editor. "Are you sure what you're doing is right?" my daughter, also a writer, asks. "Yes." We both agree: it does feel right. "You're killing your darlings," she observes soberly.<br />
<br />
I write Lois a short email report.<br />
"The novel is so bottle-sick right now I don't think I can work on it anymore. (What if I've killed it?) "<br />
<br />
Lois shoots back:<br />
"Over and over on the way home from Canyon Road I wailed at myself, 'Why couldn't you keep your mouth shut??!!'"<br />
<br />
"Because your manuscript is so good I fall in love with my own hunches about how it should be, that's why, and the characters come alive in me and I want to steer them around and make them talk and do terrible things to each other and then wake from their own miseries and find forgiveness, and new life.<br />
<br />
You make me trespass all my editorial boundaries, and I'm deeply apologetic about that and yet the whole process made me feel energized, too, so I'm not really sorry at all."<br />
<br />
"As for the book," she prophesizes, "it's amazing, how UN-effortful writing can be, and how the most knotty problems can be resolved when we leave them alone. You haven't killed it. It will clarify. All it needs is rest, and time." <br />
***<br />
<br />
The cottonwood leaves are down, crunching underfoot, as I stuff my hands into my full-length red coat and stride towards Taos Mountain. The sky is a marvel of filtered light and depth of atmosphere, the brightness of the day belying the freezing temperature. Taos Mountain, She of the Uncompromising Stare, is dusted with snow. The tang of pinon smoke curling up from the chimneys sharpens my senses.<br />
<br />
I walk, as if through an invisible labyrinth, not-thinking, the rhythm of the cold air going in and out of my lungs, the crunch of the hard dirt under my feet, the rasp of a raven rowing through the sky above my head. <br />
<br />
After sunset, I sink into the blessing of being in Taos, eat chili rellenos, munch biscochitos, join the throng around bonfires at the lighting of Le Doux street. I run into old friends I had been hoping to see, their dear faces lit by ferolitos, luminous lines punctuating walls and curbs, celebrating the coming Winter Solstice.<br />
<br />
Bouyant as a bubble, rising up from the sediment and yeast inside me that's been stirred, comes clarity. Though this novel may not be the one I thought I was writing, I am ready to write that jacket copy.<br />
<br />
Finally, I know: I'm writing a novel about a woman who draws on the power of the feminine divine, to forgive herself for the wounds of her past in the balm of a healing love. And more: Burning Silk is not only a book about the healing power of the Black Madonna or lesbian love but also a more unconventional story. In the same fires that test the women, Catherine's husband Philip has grown, becoming their equal in emotional honesty and capacity to love.<br />
<br />
On the threshold of leaving Taos and the hermetic seal of my writing fellowship, I comb through the manuscript, sunk into that final meditation I've heard other novelists describe: reading scenes aloud to hear the resonance of each word, tightening characterizations, recalibrating dialogue to "true."<br />
<br />
I have earned being the author of Burning Silk, submitting myself to the same forge and anvil that have made my characters' hearts malleable. We walk together at a human pace, breath and heartbeat, pulse and drum.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-34533397094737622442014-02-17T09:32:00.000-08:002014-02-17T10:00:27.247-08:00On ShapeshiftingOn Shapeshifting: <br />
cost/benefit and peril<br />
<br />
In 1976, I got divorced, left the Digger community I had lived and worked among, abandoned my life in Aspen Colorado, and took my girls home to southern Ohio where my mother lived.<br />
<br />
Those condensed facts hold volumes of history. We often laugh at how every quarter of a year held an intense chapter of living during our twenties, one of the humorous aspects of aging together with a group of cohorts.<br />
<br />
For those of you who don't know, "Digger" was the name people who lived in the Haight-Ashbury in the mid-60's called ourselves. Digger meant a host of wildly intangible things like being anarchists and leaderless, but it also meant some very specific approaches to the practicalities of life: free food was not only served in the parks but was also delivered from the produce markets to certain households of people living in community. <br />
<br />
Together with being from Buffalo NY, famous for its spicy chicken wings, living in the Haight-Ashbury gave me my lifelong fondness for the architecture of a plate of wings. The airlines wouldn't send them into the air--that would have been in such poor taste!--thus squid at 25 cents a pound from Chinatown and wings formed an important part of my daily diet. Habits like these don't die easily.<br />
<br />
At Digger Free stores, people could find clothing for themselves and their children or simply a costume for the next Human Be-In. Of immense value was the Free Clinic where an actual MD could diagnose and prescribe medicine for an unfortunate case of the clap or a child's croup.<br />
<br />
Although a ceremonial Death of the Digger held as a parade down the middle of the streets marked a watershed, other key events like the National Guard's occupation of the Haight-Ashbury and Time Magazine's discovery of the new lifestyle--call it hippy, Digger, flower child, biker, or countercultural, it wasn't homogenized--the end of living in the Haight Ashbury had arrived. <br />
The leaders of this leaderless group restyled themselves as The Free Family and either moved out of the Haight into farflung communes...or took to house trucks visiting settled communes and reporting their progress to the entire network of folks living the countercultural life.<br />
<br />
And what did that mean? We learned to do the essential things for ourselves. Had our babies at home. Grew our own food. Continued to view the world through a lens of political analysis. Learned herbal medicine. Through a lot of painful trial and error, we began to mature. I recall a moment when I went to bed with my then-husband on my thirtieth birthday and he STILL hadn't discovered that I had a clitoris. We would be married today in spite of the drugs and alcohol, philandering, and sexism--all ubiquitous among activist groups in the Sixties--if he hadn't also been violent. Violence at home I could not abide for either my two daughters or myself, and so, in debt from having to hire three lawyers in three states to defend my right to shared custody, I took stock of my prospects from the safe house of my mother's home. <br />
<br />
I did a hard analysis of what talents I had at 33 to build a career that would support the girls as a single mom. I came up with only one: I was a writer.<br />
<br />
Meditating on beginning a career straight out of my countercultural life, I realized I had nurtured a longstanding attraction to shapeshifting. <br />
<br />
The life of a shapeshifter was spelled out in a book I had read while living in the Haight Ashbury. A shapeshifter, more than a simple quick-change artist, could walk into any group she pleased and subvert or defend it, without anyone really noticing. A shapeshifter could be invisible even while present. A natural saboteur/life actor, I realized then that the most important goal in my life--aside from being a good mother and sharpening my skills as a writer--was to explore the chemical industry and see if I could discover how to pull the plug.<br />
<br />
Through some tenuous family connections, I got an interview with an established regional advertising agency. When the owner asked me how much I wanted, I said I thought I would need $1000/month to live. Before I could say "after tax dollars", he hired me at $12,000/year, condemning me and the girls to a life of poverty before I even started. I was on the "fast track" only because I said so.<br />
<br />
I worked at Alberto Culver in Chicago for a year, home of products based on chemicals. Think FDS, Feminine Deodorant Spray. Hair products that only changed their positioning rather than the product formulation. Last year's Thicker Fuller Hair became this year's Shiny Hair. Static Guard. Artificial Sweeteners like saccharine. A colleague said, "A year at Alberto Culver is worth ten years anywhere else." I took the measure of the Enemy; they all played golf together every Wednesday afternoon, had drinks at the Water Tower after work. I couldn't complain, much; in one year, they gave me my first real packaged goods experience, the gold standard in product management. <br />
<br />
<br />
When I finally landed a job in the food industry, working as a product manager in the heart of my family's western New York homeland with Welch Foods, in their soft drinks department, I felt like a pig in a wallow. "If you wanted to live in western New York where your family is, why didn't you just call us and ask for a job, instead of making us pay a headhunter's fee," my bosses exclaimed in frustration when they discovered that I had landed on my feet in my own homeland.<br />
<br />
I had the privilege of introducing the first 10% juice soft drink to the market. I should have been forewarned when--after spending a small fortune with Landor Package design, developing advertising to introduce the product, and investing in groundbreaking product development--top management cancelled our 10% juice product for fear of bringing down the wrath of the FDA. 'Let some others introduce this product; being the first brings down fire from the FDA, attention we don't want,' they said. They gave me high marks for classic product management in bringing the first 10% Juice Drink to the brink of introduction, then turned their attention to a situation in Texas, a big market, where soft drinks had been banned from schools. Two weeks later, they fired me.<br />
<br />
While my bosses were on the road, the product development team called me down to test the drink that management was planning on putting in vending machines in Texas schools. These product development guys were my fans and allies; I couldn't figure out why marketing treated them like natural enemies. We stood in a circle, tasting cups in hand and sipped. I couldn't hide my expression; the product was pure chemicals. We all nodded. What could I say? I agreed to send around a memo saying that the product would be ruinous for the Welch brand.<br />
<br />
When my bosses returned, I was called into their office on April Fools Day, 1980, and given the sack. No appeal. "You've been warned," the chief executive told me when I went in to say goodbye. I had been? Warned of what? They had sniffed me out.<br />
<br />
Being fired was inarguably one of the worst times of my life. <br />
There would be no court of appeal for the first woman executive Welch had ever hired. <br />
I would be treated just like a man, they had asserted.<br />
I had failed to see the flaw in that line of reasoning at the time.<br />
Other companies hiring their first women promised to protect them from the male majority with mediators and mentors.<br />
<br />
No one in Chautauqua County had heard of whistleblowing at that time. It was widely assumed that--since the corporation had not given a reason for firing me--it had to be for sexual misconduct. The corporate wives were the worst. Oddly, I had been chaste as a priest during this tenure in the corporate world (yes we can all smile at that simile now.) But it was painful. The corporate lawyer told me that if I blew the whistle, I would never work in the industry again.<br />
<br />
I lay on my couch for a month or more, grieving.<br />
Until my hash settled, my younger daughter would go to live with her father in the New Jersey suburbs. my older daughter, who had been to three high schools while I was on the fast track, got a scholarship to a boarding school north of New York City on the Hudson.<br />
My family life was over, just like that.<br />
<br />
My heart was broken but I was too young to know that it's precisely this kind of event that can signal the most creative part of your career. By now, just four years out of Aspen and my divorce, I had the start of a career.<br />
<br />
And so I took myself to New York City where, on a bulletin board in the e.s.t. office--remember Werner Ehrhard and est?) I saw an ad for a senior position at a market research firm run by two women Carol Hyatt and June Esserman. Thus began the most fascinating part of my career as a shapeshifter. The means of operating as "who I was" rather than having to dissemble was handed to me.<br />
<br />
It was during this period of time, on a warm Saint Patrick's Day on Madison and 48th in New York City, that two Digger friends, Peter Berg who had just founded the bioregional organization Planet Drum and George Tukel, one of the earliest applications specialists of GPS (global positioning systems) to environmental planning, paid a visit to my office. <br />
<br />
Berg and Tukel put their feet up on my desk, lit a joint and held forth, swinging beer bottles, declaiming, as co-workers slid by my door staring in with fascination. The fumes of the corned beef and cabbage I had brought in for the office party color the scene with their fragrance in retrospect. The sound of bands playing in the St. Paddy's Day Parade, cymbals and tubas, drift in the window. <br />
<br />
I was almost all the way out now, like a snail and her soft horns. June Esserman, former partner of Daniel Yankelovitch, decided she wanted to focus on segmentation systems to sell to the big consumer goods companies. She brought in SRI from Stanford who wanted to introduce their Values and Lifestyle System to the corporate world. I had cut my teeth in graduate school on multivariate analysis and--closeted data jock as well as shapeshifter--loved what I heard from the SRI group. <br />
<br />
Our generation, the academics told us, had spawned a new value system, one qualitatively different from our parents. SRI had the data to prove to the corporations that this market--now only 20% of the market--was destined to grow and prosper, equalling their parents' buying power inside of a decade. My SRI colleagues boldly lit up joints after lunch in fancy New York restaurants while I seriously considered risking bolder behavior, not being such a little chickenshit, the byproduct of a lifetime of shapeshifting.<br />
<br />
But first the corporate new product development teams of the packaged goods giants<br />
-Coke, GM, General Foods, Polaroid--had to understand a few things about this new market and I had been chosen to deliver the message and sign them up. The "Inner-Directed" SRI dubbed us, as opposed to our parents, the Outer Directed. We--this new market opportunity--were skeptical of the big corporations, with good reason. We didn't buy their claims, scrutinized labels. Wanted natural products, no harmful chemicals.<br />
<br />
So we put SRI's algorithm together with a company's product usage data and other demographic information and voila!--a powerhouse that drove dramatic changes on every supermarket aisle. That was the late 80's and the 90's. We take that world for granted today.<br />
<br />
After, I was asked to do a private study on the longevity of the claim "natural." I called two dozen heads of product development at the big fragrance and flavor companies.<br />
The findings? No one could see an end to the "natural" trend. It looked big, possibly endless.<br />
<br />
Later, I was asked to do a study for a group who were building a fermentation machine, which would take stock like whey and turn it into any chemical under the sun. Calcium propionate, the preservative to "retard spoilage" could be listed on the bread package as "whey."<br />
<br />
Just short of 40, I fell in love and married for the third and final time in my life.<br />
After bucking my parents wish that I marry a doctor or at least a prominent man, <br />
running from that ignominious fate, insisting on my rights to determine my own destiny by dropping out and doing my own thing in the 60's and 70's, I fell in love with a song-and-dance man in the 80's...who also happened to be a doctor. <br />
<br />
I folded up my marketing consultancy when we moved to the country, three hours from New York City, on the NY/PA border, on the Susquehanna River, just south of the Finger Lakes. As we moved into the recession of 1989-90, I realized it was time to begin my career as a creative writer, something I had always known I would do.<br />
<br />
It was gradually dawning on me that I could give up my shapeshifting and be myself again.<br />
<br />
I got rid of all my business clothing except for one black suit, held in reserve for meetings with bankers and mortgage brokers. Twenty five years later, I have never worn it once. Now I could dress as an artist, be a writer again. Colors, head scarves, pants under dresses--these all came out of the baskets. Like a muscle that had been unused for a long time, I began flexing my creativity as a writer. My mother-in-law offered to pay for my MFA at the avant-garde Bennington College. <br />
<br />
I fought the MFA like a wild mustang but I recognized--even if ruefully--that I simply didn't write well enough to write the kinds of books I read and respected. Thus they pruned and even espaliered me, to carry the metaphor further. I went to work on a trilogy of novels with female protagonists, an exploration of the nineteenth century inspired by hero Milan Kundera, who observed that our culture had left critical values behind in the past, "in that vast cemetery of forgetting" which could be retrieved, rehydrated, reinhabited. Hadn't we found ourselves at the end of the Petroleum Age, with a world that had been entirely shaped by Petroleum including the chemicals that were killing us and our planet?<br />
<br />
How did we leave behind our guilds, our lifestyles that had us feeding and clothing ourselves in harmony with our watershed? Why couldn't we have listened to our own prophets who asked us to consider stopping short, to consciously halt at the sustainable rather than flinging ourselves headlong at the illusion of progress, the pact with technology, with petroleum and all that has spun out of it? How did we wed ourselves to the factory and the soul-killing mass production line, turn away from the trolley and embrace the private automobile? Turn away from friendship with the native people whose homelands we invaded, out of greed disguised as high-mindedness, progress the natural course of history?<br />
<br />
It was slowly dawning on me that writing was not going to be enough; I had to keep my hand in social action, community organizing, that I had started in graduate school with Johnson's War on Poverty, classic Saul Alinsky.<br />
<br />
Somehow, miraculously, I had earned a karmic reprieve after decades as a single mom. My husband's salary meant that I could devote my days and nights to working on my novels and community organizing in the not-for-profit and foundation worlds. My need to make a living for my daughters and myself had built me a career and an enviable resume, together with some results I could be justifiably proud of. I had not only supported my children as a single mom but I had also helped transform whole categories of consumer goods into healthier more natural products on the shelf.<br />
<br />
But shapeshifting exacts payment. Just as collecting welfare checks and grifting in my countercultural life exacted a price--we were coopted from our revolutionary goals and it took me a long time to get my finances into the black--so too had my years hiding out in the corporate world presented a bill that had to be paid. The shadow begins to color the substance.<br />
<br />
Although taking LSD had made me aware of chemicals and how they were invading our body tissue, my years both in the corporate world and as a high-paid consultant to the corporate powers-that-be did NOT afford me any insights into how to disentangle food, beverages and chemicals. I was beginning to conclude that only consumer education and enlightenment could begin to redress what Rachel Carson had brought to our attention with Silent Spring, then Karen Silkwood's death following Marie Curie's death from radiation, and finally the revelations of the Love Canal. Our waterways, air, soil and flesh were colonized by chemicals.<br />
<br />
My decade in the foundation world showed us GMO's early enough that we were able to call for the application of the precautionary principle before it was too late. But it was already too late: All the power behind the Ford Foundation and their ilk could not slow the dissemination of GMO's long enough to be tested. Nothing was to stop that juggernaut, just as nothing will stop the development of any market that can produce billions of dollars, be it natural gas, fast fashion, drones...<br />
<br />
We are a gullible, fearful and perhaps gluttonous people. Easily manipulated.<br />
<br />
Is this what made me think I had to disguise myself to infiltrate the corporate world, the straight world, the corridors of power? Fear for my own survival if I were discovered?<br />
I WAS discovered and survived it, narrowly. I had found that working as a high paid consultant to say the unpopular thing, the thing no insider could say without offending the corporate culture, was a powerful place to be and to make a difference.<br />
<br />
But the question remains: During my decade and a half of shapeshifting had I been co opted, bought? Had I sold out? During my years in disguise, working inside the Belly of the Beast, hiding who I really am and what I really thought, did the habit become ingrained? <br />
<br />
In fact it did: I am not terribly forthcoming about myself. Perhaps a natural reserve; more likely the need for camophlage, the instinct for survival by becoming invisible. Particularly now that I am an elder woman, I find that I have to be re-introduced to certain men--those who discount elder women--every time I meet them. For this reason, I enjoy the company of matrilineal tribal people, most tribes in the east, because in their eyes, I hold the highest position in culture, being both a woman and an elder. <br />
<br />
A Digger girlfriend, Phyllis Wilner, sent me this benediction, this permission slip to be the person that I am (for no one else can be that person with my unique voice) by Dorothy Sayers: <br />
"Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, <br />
but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force."<br />
<br />
And so, did I sell out in my years of shapeshifting? Apparently not. I am still here thinking and writing and questioning and feeling fellowship with my fallible fellow inmates. At last, at long last, I am out of the closet as who I am, willing to speak up, to live my life out loud, to speak my truth.<br />
<br />
Though it took me all my life to get here, I am grateful to be free.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-65206716305396120432014-02-07T22:54:00.002-08:002014-02-07T22:57:40.948-08:00MatrilinealityWhen you've grown up in a patrilineal tribe--where are family name comes from the father and ancestry is traced back through your father's fathers, it's difficult to imagine another way. Before the progenitors of the sky gods of three major religions, Muslim, Christian and Jewish conquered the Druids throughout the Roman Empire, supplanting the ancient tribal modes that covered most of today's Europe, evidence shows that those people practiced a different form of counting ancestry resulting in a different relationship between the genders.<br />
<br />
Matrilineality has been practiced by native Americans in the Eastern U.S. for millennia and still is practiced today. Many tribes on the rest of the continent still practice their ancestral matrilineal form of culture.<br />
<br />
Matrilineality is NOT the reverse of patrilineality, where women rule and men are subservient. In matrilineal cultures today and historically, the relationship between men and women is finely balanced, resulting in true gender equity. Haudenausaunee/Iroquois and Lenape are two large nations of Original People who have lived a matrilineal culture for literally thousands of years. And still do today.<br />
<br />
It's difficult for those of us raised in a patrilineal tradition to imagine a tribal culture where one's ancestry is counted through generations of mothers, where not only your name comes from your maternal line, but also your clan, your property, your heirlooms, ceremonies and regalia, and stories. This contemplation leads me to sympathize with friends who come from slavery and thus call themselves Miriam X and Malcolm X. Sometime in the hoary past, before the Roman conquest cut down our sacred groves and drove our governance underground, those of us from European stock had clans. We knew both our maternal and our paternal lines. And no, I don't know how the Druids calculated family lines, whether through the paternal or maternal. I only know that Celtic forms of governance gave women power that patrilineal systems do not. Do I need to state the obvious?: women have been chattel under those three religions named above. One of my early poems begins: "I will never stand in public again and pray to He Who..." Thus I have been a practicing pagan for decades, drawing on the worship of the Mother passed down through my maternal lines, after I tossed the dross of Catholicism aside.<br />
<br />
I am struck by the courage of my native American friends in the west engaged in the process of restoring their language and cultural practices after near-term histories of loss and trauma through massacre, rape, disease, and bounties on renegades, and children being fostered in white institutions. Those of us from European and continental traditions have to use inductive reasoning to discover cultural truths, like clans, lying buried in our genetic codes for so long.<br />
<br />
Inductive reasoning moves from specific observations to broader generalizations and theories. This is sometimes called a “bottom up” approach. The researcher begins with specific observations and measures, begins to then detect patterns and regularities, formulate some tentative hypotheses to explore, and finally ends up developing some general conclusions or theories.<br />
<br />
Vision quests and a lifetime of inductive reasoning--working from results ("Here is what I have, what does this imply?"), sifting through assorted facts and pieces to work toward that a-ha moment: I know what my family clan used to be (still is) because I have done the work, collected evidence, and am arriving at certainty first about myself, and then about other family members.<br />
<br />
"Do you know whether your people are matrilineal or patrilineal?" I asked one clanmother of a tribe from Northern California. (The term "clanmother" might not even be applicable to western tribes, for instance, being a term used among eastern native tribes.)She paused. "I think matrilineal," she said. Probably someone in the university knows. Or an answer lies in anthropological recoreds. When I look at the structure of the hunting and gathering tribes from the Bay Area, I see the hallmarks of gender equity: division of labor, shared decisionmaking. It is possible that a third alternative exists to patrilineality and matrilineality perfected by hunter-gathering tribes.<br />
<br />
I simply can't wait any more time to publish this inquiry; my first acquaintance with the term came from a graduate school reading of Frederich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State with its chapter on the Iroquois matrilineal system. It hit me in the solar plexus; I have been collecting evidence since then and I turned 70 this year. Let this statement attract more information.<br />
How does matrilineality work in terms of governance? The influence of white men and the chauvinism of patrilineality has shifted the original structures somewhat. I suspect both men and women among the Lenape and Haudenausaunee have had to defend and fortify their ancestral ways against the corporate influence of the BIA and Federal Government.<br />
<br />
I know that wellmeaning Quaker men in the nineteenth century did a world of harm to the matrilineal Lenape and Haudenausaunee when they tried to make these people over into their own likeness, to make them more acceptable to the powers in Washington who held both the purse strings and treaties. As a condition of being liaisons to Washington, they insisted that native men farm, when the entire system of matrilineality is based on women's relationship to the land. That is to say, both farming and wildcrafting were entirely women's province. The farming that was done was as noninvasive a way as tradition had long prescribed, with mounds for growing the Three Sisters of corn, beans and squash. They tended the wild to harvest nuts, herbs, roots and berries. They carefuly managed the material world for optimal sustainable results for basketmaking and pottery. Artifacts like decorated fancy dress regalia and moccasins for dances and ceremony as well as cradle boards are handed down through the generations through the maternal line.<br />
<br />
The Quakers used their influence and power to insist that men do the actual farming in straight rows and with iron plows and thus, unintentionally broke the culture at its very source, violating women's elemental relationship to the land and men's role within that as Chiefs and hunters.<br />
If our European ancestors thought they were adapting the Iroquois Confederacy for framing the US Constitution, as we were taught in elementary school, they had it wrong too. All women and men are created equal in a matrilineal society.<br />
<br />
Chiefs represent the interests of the tribe to the outside world. Chiefs are elected and removed from office by the Women's Council elders, the clanmothers. Men sit in their Council and Women in theirs. Each Council deliberates until consensus is reached...which can take a long time, but if you are planning for eight generations out, time is relative. "We discuss an issue three times," my friend Hitakonanolax says. "If we still can't come to consensus after the third time, we bury it."<br />
<br />
You don't have to imagine European women's chagrin on understanding the lofty position of respect and power women hold in a matrilineal society. In her book Sisters in Spirit, my friend Sally Roesch-Wagner has documented the influence Haudenausaunee clanmothers had on early feminists which lead directly to The Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls. European women may have hoped for more independence when they crossed the ocean with their husbands and worked beside them to create a new life of opportunity, at considerable cost to them: the loss of their homeland, ancestral ties, identity, language.<br />
<br />
European women could be beaten by their husbands with impunity. They couldn't own land. If a man died or divorced his wife, she had no rights to their children. Wealth a woman brought into the family from her family became her husband's. <br />
<br />
Today, a native woman can divorce her husband by putting his shoes outside the door. A man who would beat, abuse or humiliate a woman would be severely reprimanded or--in the case of recidivism--put out of the tribe or in older days, put to death. If he were a chief (and this still happens today) he would be removed from office by the clanmothers, the matrons, and possibly the Grand Council of Chiefs as a mark of their support for the Women's Council decision, though--so far as I know--the Councils of Chiefs have no veto power over the Women's Council and the clanmothers.<br />
<br />
"Why is this so important to you?" a friend of mine who is both native American and Hispanic asked.<br />
<br />
By mindlessly adopting a partrilineal model of tribalism in the 1960's, radicals with their sights set on social change doomed their outcomes from the beginning. In the Black Power movement, Digger and other anarchistic movements, and the American Indian Movement (depending on whether the tribes involved were matrilineal or patrilineal!)-each of which invested in communal living and shared dcisionmaking--women's memoirs of those time record similar results: men spoke with the loudest voices, men who were abusive of girls and women were not brought into line, women were rarely given positions of power, even AFTER the gender equity of SDS, and women were often subtly silenced, all the air being sucked out the room when they rose to speak.<br />
<br />
Native groups who came from a matrilineal tradition fared better in the Sixties; men and women worked together on the barricades in Akwesasne/Mohawk battles and, I am told, at Pine Ridge for instance.<br />
<br />
I love being in the company of my Lenape tribesmen and women. As an elder woman, I am among the most honored people in the tribe or band. Young men jump to their feet to offer me a seat. They listen carefully to what I have to say. I am among the company of my elder sisters to be first in the food line. Contrast that to the value of a woman past childbearing age in a western patrilineal culture where I am the least valued member of the community, so nearly invisible that I have to reintroduce myself repeatedly to men in my age group everytime we meet, and identify myself as the mother of one of my daughters, for instance, or the wife of my husband, though I have advanced degrees, books and credits to my own name.<br />
<br />
Recent research into the "grandmother factor" which shows that children around the world raised in a household with the close proximity of a maternal (not paternal, interestingly) grandmother are more likely to survive their childhood has brought this question of the value of a woman elder back into public discourse in the mainstream culture.<br />
<br />
But I don't want to have to argue my rights and value at this point in my life. Why should I? It's been a couple decades since I was adopted into the Big Horn Lenape Band. Using inductive reasoning, I am concluding that I cannot say whether I carry native American bloodlines: the focus of my intellectual curiosity and comfort level with my native brothers and sisters, the subject of my books, my value system, the proximity of my own homelands and roots in European countries where my families are still the aboriginal people, the inductive way I came to conclude that I have Jewish bloodlines. All these lines of inquiry lead me to assert that anyone who has a family tree in this country from before the US Civil War must be agnostic on this question whether one has native American bloodlines. The frequency of European men marrying native women, the long history of those alliance particularly between the French and Dutch with the Eastern tribes, the propensity of families to "bury" their knowledge of native women in the family tree, and finally our patrilineal way of accounting for lineage, all lead me to be agnostic on the question of whether I have native American blood. Finally, even if I never find the entrypoint of native bloodlines into my family tree, I refuse to dishonor that (possibly) woman who enriched my bloodlines with hers by categorically denying that I have native blood. <br />
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<br />Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-38833776840366080592014-01-30T23:21:00.001-08:002014-02-04T19:40:26.416-08:00Humanifesto #3"Misinterpretation of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calendar">Mesoamerican Long Count calendar</a> was the basis for a popular belief that a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon">cataclysm would take place on December 21, 2012</a>. December 21, 2012 was simply the day that the calendar went to the next <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baktun">b'ak'tun</a>, at Long Count 13.0.0.0.0. The date on which the calendar will go to the next <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calendar#Piktuns_and_higher_orders">piktun</a> (a complete series of 20 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baktun">b'ak'tuns</a>), at Long Count 1.0.0.0.0.0, will be on October 13, 4772." Wikipedia <br />
The next b'ak'tun will be complete in 134 years on 2146 when our great great grandchildren will be elders. <br />
<br />
Doing the math: Destiny Kinal<br />
<br />
<br />
The redistribution of wealth--or rebalancing of abundance--happens best at the local level. Each planning and action group has to decide for themselves what their area of influence is. This geography or sphere usually defines itself: local, regional, watershed, or common ground, the "fit" has to be right, with a commonality of mutual identification that makes sense to all those in the group, along a spectrum from those who resist sharing, through those who have more than enough and are willing to share, to those who don't have enough, to those who are barely surviving.<br />
<br />
Diggers in the Sixties had Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco as their immediate sphere of influence for action. Everyone living in the Haight self-identified as a Digger. In that overripe consumer culture coming out of the Fifties, Diggers found their mission moving food being thrown away as less-than-ideal in the Produce Markets at the docks to the parks adjacent to The Haight. These gratifying actions led easily to free stores, free medical clinics, job banks. A flat leadership structure was idealized and realized, where leaders had no visibility (except among themselves). Their hearing--perhaps made keen by political acumen (SDS, YSL, SNCC, Black Panthers, AIM)--was pitch perfect, their ears tuned to what was thought on the streets. Until Time Magazine commodified what was occurring, a melange of people--skewed to the young but including older politicos and beatniks, across socioeconomic and racial divides--converged to experience and invent the countercultural.<br />
<br />
Perhaps too much is made of the fact that this was all bathed in the friendly light of psychedelics until the harder drugs of speed and heroin made inroads. it was going to take quite a lot, it turns out, to unplug all the wiring of the industrial revolution and the economic polarization that began to occur with the loss of common lands and the guilds, and the rise of pernicious entitled capitalism.<br />
<br />
The U.S Civil War put paid to any decent alternatives that we had evolved as an agricultural craftspeople. The real experiment in counterculturalism began in the later Sixties when people moved out of the cities into the countryside, organizing themselves in small clusters, or common points of reference flung across the country, usually around at-scale watersheds, to invent what came next.<br />
<br />
Fast forward to the turn of the Millennium and--only recently--a new Mayan calendar cycle. Pernicious capitalism has become toxic globalization, though this western value of limitless profit has always been toxic to indigenous people.<br />
<br />
Forget the "precautionary principle," capital only needs to show the potential size of a market to get the green light on any number of destructive products, masquerading as necessary and desirable social contributions, from GMO's, to drones, to smart fabrics, to petroleum-based poisons, to continuous war, to interplanetary mining operations. The exploitation of resources--including indigenous people and the minerals resting in the soil of their reservations--make anything and anyone fair game.<br />
<br />
Luckily, countercultural principles are still operating in their yeasty semi-invisible way at the local, regional, food and fibershed grassroots level.<br />
<br />
Take a group here in the East Bay across from San Francisco. Planting Justice has trained themselves in permaculture, adapting ancient principles of gardening and growing food that are not very labor intensive once the structures are set in place. Permaculturists bring fertile "food forests" and the commons back into our lives. Planting Justice charges reasonable rates to plan and plant food forest in yards to people who can afford it, then use that money to teach inner-city kids how to plan, plant and maintain food forests in schools, social clubs, and community gardens. <br />
<br />
Of course the Bay Area has been blessed with the vision of Alice Waters, the grandmere of the paradigm-tipping la nouvelle cuisine and more recently Edible School Yards. A scant decade after Alice's contributions of influence, capital, and hands-on involvement, every school in the greater Bay Area has both a school garden and a cooking curriculum.<br />
<br />
Like articulating our ancient relationship to our watershed which defines us as a culture (Berg, Dasmann, House et al), bioregionalism spread quickly across the country and now across the world. Alice Waters' rehydration of local seasonal food, simply prepared, and her message that spawned the Edible School Yard movement is sweeping our continent even in areas not blessed with California's twelve month growing season.<br />
<br />
Now watch it happen with Fibersheds. Taking back our millennial relationships to fiber, to cloth ourselves in a non-toxic way, Fibershed (Burgess, Kahn et al) is spreading across North America. <br />
<br />
When these movements meet those where the ancient strongholds of "homelands that feed and clothe us" are still indigenous, what will happen? It's pleasurable to imagine an overflowing of spontaneous joy and celebration as indigenous populations from Lithuania to Ulan Bator, from Senegal to Lake Titicaca, find fellowship with us in resisting the forces of globalization that mean to unravel their cultures, "same as it ever was," since 1492 and before.<br />
<br />
Back to Planting Justice and young people who resonate to their Robin-Hood ways to rebalance resources, shifting from those willing to share their abundance to the needy--how Diggerish!<br />
<br />
Within the loose population of the now-aging Diggers, a movement has caught fire to redistribute resources among the group (in size anywhere from a couple hundred individuals, to associated groups numbering perhaps a thousand, and on out in circles of correspondence.) Called Diggerbread, this group proposes to do at a small scale what is being increasingly called for in the larger population.<br />
<br />
The redistribution of wealth is not a sly infiltration. The term has brought Republican ire down on our seated president Barack Obama. Capitalists everywhere, those feathering their lofty nests at the expense of an underclass and middle class, are reacting as one would expect a sleeping citizen to react when wakened by the cry of "Fire! Fire!"<br />
<br />
Softening the terms to "rebalancing abundance" removes the whiff of Marxist revolution from the necessary process. Diggerbread willingly aggregates both cash and other resources from those who self-identify as having enough, to those in the community who don't have enough, a sharp, pointed, snowballing condition as one ages in poverty.<br />
<br />
Among the loosely-defined DIgger population, somewhat atomized over the last thirty years of diaspora as everyone spread out to apply our core values in as many milieu, a lack of regard for money or material comforts too often has resulted in individuals finding themselves isolated and living off the threadbare social safety net: social security, no dental care, Medicare A but not B for hospitalization, perhaps food stamps.<br />
<br />
In particular, men and women who have been called to lead large social changes in restoration, indigenous rights, quality of universal education, inner city regeneration, and a host of anti's: globalization, GMOS, nuclear <br />
energy, for instance, have found themselves at the other end of dazzling careers, with books, accomplishments and awards aplenty, but no pension to make their elder years secure. Simply having been salaried for serving as an executive director, field project manager or social entrepreneur in the last quarter of the 20th century in many fields of social change was a mark of distinction. Enough of a distinction to make your contribution, make a difference in your field, raised principled children and see one's life work flow into a society that values you in your elder years, yes? Not necessarily so.<br />
<br />
Hence Diggerbread.<br />
<br />
It's my observation that while talent, brains and intellect are evenly distributed in the population--particularly in a population like the United State whose rich store of genetic material from all over the world, calls to those who myopically see only opportunity when they contemplate immigration--the laws of karma or chance (call fortune what you will,) are unevenly distributed.<br />
<br />
I fell in love with a song-and-dance man who happened to be a radiologist. Others inherited family wealth or education. Still others, with extremely fortunate blends of gifts and character traits, made careers that paid out<br />
handsomely. Often women, particularly single women with children, made careers out of necessity.<br />
<br />
Take away my doctor husband and I wouldn't have been able to write my novels without also having to teach. I feel my novels are important examinations of what values and practices we left behind as a society in that "vast cemetery of forgetting" (MIlan Kundera.) Take away my doctor husband and I wouldn't have been able to practice my community organizing skills learned in Johnson's War on Poverty and SDS' initiatives to stop the War in Vietnam and bring our soldiers home. I have applied these skills for the last thirty years in the poor rural area we live in on the NY/PA border. Take away my doctor husband and I would be trying to live on less than $1000/month in social security, might become a burden on my daughters as my health deteriorated, given the capitalist-imposed fraying safety net for the poor, widowed, orphaned, returning vet, and undereducated and underemployed of all stripes. <br />
<br />
People say: give yourself more credit! But life has a way of pulling us along on its tides, surprising us when we are marooned on the shores of being elder in a society that doesn't value its elders.<br />
<br />
Oh yes, I likely would have found a way. I have my education, the broadening experience of travel, my core values from radicalization in the early Sixties, fermented in a nutritious brew in the counterculture, values too strong to be coopted by my decade of making a living and building a resume while a single mom.<br />
<br />
Diggerbread calls upon us to magnetize around those values which we have been practicing and refining all our adult lives. We are proposing a Third Act for those of us who forged our common values in our youth as a First Act, who went out into the world and applied them in broader contexts as a Second Act.<br />
<br />
For many, whose names we honor, the mere act of recognizing the immensity of what we had set ourselves "counter" to, required some pain relief to go on. Deaths from overdoses of heroin in particular claimed many of our best and brightest, while the War in Vietnam and drive-by shootings in the inner city and wholesale incarceration claimed more. Alcoholism and despair on pitifully poor reservations, the privations of the elders reduced to witnessing the wholesale destruction of their sons and daughters...I could go on and on. <br />
<br />
We have come through that Second Act in which we had to fight the Enemy toe-to-toe. We have come out on the other side, with casualties. We have to honor our dead, our wounded. We have to work on restoring the health and wellbeing of those who have paid an unjust bill for their contributions in the Second Act. (Treyvon's mother!) <br />
<br />
And then we have the privilege of contemplating what is left for our Third Act as our children and their children gather themselves for the next fifteen years, in which time, scientists say, the fate of our homelands, our planet, will have been decided.<br />
<br />
We have time to rebalance resources, to take care of each other.<br />
<br />
If the Mayans are among the ancient timekeepers we can trust because of their timepiece's duration, we are at the beginning of another b'ak'tun of 134 years. Next piktun (20 b'ak'tun) will occur on October 13, 4772, by Long Calendar accounting, 2760 years into the future. Are we capable of demonstrating that we can plan eight generations out like the indigenous peoples of this continent urge?<br />
<br />
Neither we nor our children will be alive at the end of the next b'ak'tun in 2146. But our great grandchildren will be, just as we are here as spokespersons for our great grandparents who struggled through the years of the Civil War and early Petroleum Age.<br />
<br />
Calendars imply the possibility of improvement, of moving social change forward to the new dream that Thomas Berry has urged us to articulate.<br />
<br />
In the next fifteen years, the potential energy of our coming together again, may have generated an evolved set of living principles as powerful as "free", as potent as watershed and fibershed ar proving to be as units of organizing. We have to give ourselves permission to generate fresh philosophies for action in our perilous times, building on the old ones from the First Act...but not using the old ones as creeds to bind us from considering actions we experimented with and refined in the Second Act. We are the products of both our First Acts and our Second Acts. <br />
<br />
Pharaoh! (Our own hierophants living in our brains and our histories of ourselves, our critics, our fearful selves, our reptilian brains.) <br />
Set us free!-- to discover the next thing, to become that thing and model it for the larger culture. <br />
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The next fifteen years may be all we elders have of productive contribution to society in our own limited lifetimes. Let's spend that largesse together, freely, without stint, without cropping our own momentum. Do we trust ourselves enough to continue forward together?<br />
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<br />Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-32777145348296388302013-03-13T16:09:00.000-07:002013-03-13T16:14:53.988-07:00Textile & Dye Tour in Oaxaca on International Women's Day<br />
I spent women's day evening in Tehuantepec, the capital of the infamous Tehuana women, among matrilineal people who speak Zapotec.<br />
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The legendarily ballsy Tehuana women, from whom Frida Kahlo sprang, had several parades last night: one where hundreds of women dressed all in white marched for peace apropos of the violence against women in the world, in Mexico and here in the Isthmus.<br />
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The other--as the sun set over this town, making the huge gilt statue of an unnamed woman glow from the rooftop--brought women out in their traditional glamour, known all over the world through Frida's style, into the street carrying large painted papier mache stars on sticks, while their skirts flowed in the wind around them. Their hair braided with flowers and bright cloth, short bicolored huipils/blouses like the Zapotec state flag adorning their torsoes, they chatted excitedly among themselves, heading for an unknown destination, while a band led the way and insectlike open-framed personal vehicles brought up the rear.<br />
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At dinner, our group of eight women and one man discussed the state of women's rights and questioned our amiable and amused waiter about how gender equity in Tehuantepec has shifted over time. In the market, Tehuana women--depicted in murals covering the restaurant walls, their arms and legs firmly planted akimbo--sell the produce.<br />
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Our guide asked him for us: what do the men do?<br />
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He said that up into the 18th century, men tended and harvested the garden and orchards. Then, while large extended families covered child rearing, the forces of capital organized food production and distribution centrally, upsetting the balance. Studying what has eroded or obscured matrilineal practices in cultures close at hand, like the Haudenausaunee and Zapotec, gives our ongoing drive for full women's rights and gender equity with men definition and insight.<br />
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Uncovering the roots of matrilineality, which produces true gender equity where it is found (most notably among the Haudenausaunee/Iroquois in the US), allows us to connect with authentic equity practices that the macho marriage of church and capital have tried to obliterate.<br />
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Patrilineality has produced one unified social form across the planet: the enslavement of women, the loss of our rights. It is time for women and men of conscience to call for the end of patrilineal practices--the real villain, globalization, capitalism, and colonialism being manifestations--with one unified voice. As my husband says, patrilineality is just a way for men to keep the mothers of their sons under their thumbs, assuring their own paternity.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-6967263969295112402011-09-11T09:15:00.000-07:002011-09-11T09:27:51.677-07:00Sic Transit Gloria: a eulogy for Peter Berg, the father of bioregionalism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggNHgP-CCzCKIFUuKd20ToU0-uvIqh1xLiaSVVHQSUNRPkEC53VFlR7EBU1ol8VAzlTpBxuMoVBu5UUIE15JL4hKWNEOKKkYOpJJWHYuseh7fMskG1Lh1aWO744QHFmXHuKtIVU1g1dKY/s1600/sevenofswords.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggNHgP-CCzCKIFUuKd20ToU0-uvIqh1xLiaSVVHQSUNRPkEC53VFlR7EBU1ol8VAzlTpBxuMoVBu5UUIE15JL4hKWNEOKKkYOpJJWHYuseh7fMskG1Lh1aWO744QHFmXHuKtIVU1g1dKY/s200/sevenofswords.jpg" width="118" /></a></div>Sic transit gloria: And so passes one of the most intriguing, profoundly influential men I have met in my life.<br />
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I first met Peter Berg in the spring of 1967 at the Digger's Free Store in the Haight Ashbury District of San Francisco, where radical politics met the counterculture. <br />
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My daughter Gilian and I lived on the Panhandle on Oak. I was 24. I waited table nights at the Committee, a comedy club in North Beach. Days, I worked as an entry-level garmento at Alvin Duskin, which made mod-inspired dresses at affordable prices. Our working group was planning a free city event and I was assigned to line up some free bands. Those were the days when everyone knew everyone in San Francisco, at one or two degrees of separation at most.<br />
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Gilian immediately found Judy's son Aaron in the store, both of them three years old, soft raven feather hair, pale skin, rosy cheeks, blue eyes and high energy. They began tearing up and down the aisles while Judy, who was folding clothes on the far side of the store, called to Peter on the opposite side. When I walked over, Peter jackknifed out of a curtained cupboard bed. Compact, quick on his feet, and concentrated, like sprung steel, Peter had a wry piercing gaze. While his every move and word was theatrical, it came from within him, to punctuate and call attention to what was occurring. Peter was faintly reptilian (like a raptor is also reptilian) without being repulsive. In fact, I found Peter highly attractive because of the caliber of thoughts and impulses that emanated from him like a natural pulse That day, in the Free Store, when I quickly explained what we were doing, he put me on the pay phone on the wall with Danny Rifkin, manager of the Grateful Dead, who assured me they would be there for us.<br />
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I like remembering that I started by asking Peter Berg for a favor, which he quickly made happen. (Later the tables would be turned and I would be asking others to fund our ideas: a fishing boat, a trip to Mongolia, Punch and Judy puppet theater workshops.)<br />
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A week later, on my way to a North Beach meeting of our Free City group, having accepted a ride on a motorcycle, I smashed my right thigh and spent in the Summer of Love in traction above Golden Gate Park at the UC Med Center on Sutro Hill.<br />
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I didn't see Peter and Judy again for a year, but the thing they were helping broadcast made their way from the Haight Ashbury and the Park into my hospital room effortlessly. You've doubtless heard it said: we were all Diggers. I was one of those denizens of the scene happy to have the inner cadre plan the events, publish the Oracle, put out broadsides that reflected our views, open a free job Bank, free Clinic…in short, I trusted them absolutely to represent me. That cadre--the Free Family--never betrayed that trust.<br />
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Later that summer, I moved into a house with good friends Fay Blake and Phil Davis, radical steelworker. Frank Cieciorka, the artist, Vinne Rinaldi, Murry Korngold were all part of this circle of Diggers. From my window, supported by my crutches, I watched Phyllis Willner and the other wild Free Family girls head off for New Mexico in the back of a pickup truck. I went back to work at Alvin Duskin's and moved to North Beach, part of a Jules and Jim ménage-a-trois.<br />
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In the intervening year, I shared glasses of wine at Enrico's with poets and writers in North Beach, while going to work every morning. When it got too hard, I gave everything away and moved into a tepee in Big Sur for the winter. After my first Passover at the Sun Gallery, in south Big Sur, I headed east to my family's property in western New York, where we were magnets for all the countercultural energy that was building there. In the fall, I moved to Santa Fe where I took my place as a member of our East Indian band: sitar, sarod, and tabla. I played tamboura.<br />
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And then the Diggers sent out a call: Would everyone come back to the Haight to make a stand? We did.<br />
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During the terrible winter of 68-69 Haight Ashbury became an insane asylum without walls. The street became a gaunlet of hustlers, groups took up resident in our basement, our front room. Motorcyclists killed a young woman in her home down the street. <br />
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Peter Berg remembered picking me and Gilian up, taking us to Treat Street for the women there to feed and comfort. I don't recall that incident at all but I believed Peter years later when he told me about it. Things were so bad--think Paris as the Nazis marched on it--I called Gilian's father and got her a plane ticket to safety. As the winter tapered into spring, Psychedelic Rangers made the rounds of houses where individuals in catatonic states of fear were coaxed back with simple therapies. My Ranger non-verbally explained the golden mean to me with a painting and a piece of string for measuring. He squeezed out fingerpaints and had me draw the sacred Sanskrit letter aum. Someone gave me a small bag of medicine, acid chips in a baggie--"Just one at a time"--to give me the courage to go out and see the world again.<br />
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Then a town meeting was called to brainstorm what might be next. I remember--or think I remember--a vision being articulated of taking to the road, visiting the far-flung communes who had established beachheads of experimental countercultural lifestyle.<br />
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I stood up with my own vision, recalling being a child in England, how the interiors of blocks in London were often open parklands for the community of the block to enjoy: vegetable gardens, allees of large trees, fountains and playgrounds. After, in a article in the Berkeley Barb, I was credited with inspiring People's Park but what I recall is leafleting our block, standing the window with Vinnie Rinaldi, crowbars and tools in hands, trying to get up the nerve to take down the first fence with it was perfectly obvious that removing even one fence would have us all behind bars by nightfall.<br />
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In the spring of 1969, I married into the Free Family and Peter and Judy became daily intimates. So how to squeeze out the essence of that intimacy that lasted more than forty years?<br />
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Peter had an uncanny ability to make things burgeon in me. Judy and Peter named their truck the Albigenisien Ambulance, and spread stories of the Albigensians or Cathars, heretic perfecti from South of France in the middle ages who died to the last man, woman and child rather than renounce their values and their community. This story set deep roots in me: my novel Burning Silk, published last year and one of three winners of the Ben Franklin First Book awards, reached back into that deep history of the Huguenots and their Cathar/ Albigensian forebearers.<br />
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In fact, Peter awoke my love of history, such a crucial part of who I am, what shapes my time, that I can only observe wonderingly that I once loathed history for its focus on dates and treaties.<br />
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How many of us heard the story of the Duc Abors from Peter, those Slavic folk in the plains of Canada who, every few years, would burn their homes and move on, the ultimate spiritual potlatch for an incurably nomadic people?<br />
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Many have spoken of Peter's immense contribution to this period of time we inhabit, in reawakening us to our ancient relationship with our watershed. Together with Raymond Dasman, Freeman House, David Simpson, Gary Snyder and others an entirely new field of study was born. I call this the First Wave of bioregionalism. In the acknowledgements section of my novel, I credit Peter and Judy, Freeman and David for "incubating and fostering bioregionalism, one of the most germane ideas of my lifetime and of this book." In what I call the Second Wave of Bioregionalism, tens of thousands of small watershed organization were born out of this understanding, fostering and restoring not only local rivers, lakes and creeks but also the people and their culture, a continuous adjustment, revitalization and engagement Peter named "reinhabitation."<br />
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For me, Peter was also a memory bank. Key moments, etched with chiseled clarity, featured Peter, avuncular, leaning in close to me like a kindly raptor, with a message for me and me alone that would begin with "Let me show you something," or "Have you ever heard of…" or "We all try to be perfect. But.." or "I remember one Halloween in the Rockies when you…"<br />
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Of course Peter the actor was another caliber of being, his sense of nonverbal humor animating his face, hands, posture. I missed the years of Reinhabitory Theater from the mid-70's to the early 80's, as I headed east, home to my biological family. But I only needed to see black and white still photos of Peter in the role of Lizard to have the entire hilarious reel roll before my interior eye.<br />
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When I started the Reinhabitory Institute a couple years ago, an homage to Peter's vision, I told Peter and Judy that part of the mission of the organization would be to see the Third Wave of Bioregionalism ushered in, when every household, every neighborhood, every school would not only understand but practice the principles of bioregionalism…even though they might not call it by that name. In the critical first year of our start-up, both Peter and Judy were immensely supportive. In the small community on the Susquehanna River where I have practiced community organizing for the past 26 years, when I say the word Reinhabitory Institute, everyone nods. The term is self explanatory, crossing political and class boundaries. Thus, Peter's legacy keeps on expanding, his gift to humanity, to understand how to fit into the web of life.<br />
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Peter's wit was stiletto. We recognized the same gene pool in each other and understood behaviors that, to others, often seemed cold and even cruel.<br />
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Once when I called after an absence of a couple years, Peter said, "Is this Destiny the good witch or Destiny the bad witch?" I might well have turned the question around.<br />
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And yet know this: even when being ruthless and direct, Peter Berg was always moving in service to the truth and the light. <br />
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Peter's work was this: to give context to my work as a community organizer. Whether dumpster diving, behind the scrim of a Punch and Judy Puppet show, organizing participants to enroll in a dance, theater or yoga workshop, developing a community garden, working underground in the food and beverage industry, confronting the current history of a Valley on the Susquehanna with half of the population living in poverty, Peter's conceptual frameworks were steadying ballast, context in a raging sea of anomie, in a compassless culture.<br />
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Peter and Judy connected a vast web of likeminded people. I have never been to Gary Snyder's KitKitDizze but Peter and Judy brought us a piece of the herb to smell, the keystone herb that makes Gary's home unique. On the way to my husband Chuck Gould's and my house in Conundrum Creek outside of Aspen, lay Rolling Thunder and Spotted Fawn's house in Nevada who sent gifts and stories. We dropped south with the truck convoy to Dome City on the New Mexico/Colorado border and saw the advances those people were making in passive solar and geodesic domes, brought our sargis berry preserves.<br />
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Years later and years ago, I tasted my first acorn muffin that Judy had made. Heard about the independence struggle of Fourth Nations--Lapps, Galicians, Basques, Australian aborigines--from Peter, and considered, with him, a participatory democracy dilemma: how to devalue or neutralize the educated British accent making a point in open parliament against the person from an oral tradition, speaking English poorly, if at all. <br />
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That cadre--the Free Family-- betrayed that trust in only one essential way: the tribe was modeled--perhaps unconsciously--on the patrilineal rather than the matrilineal, and that made all the difference. We were zero-base modeling a new culture but--out of ignorance--we didn't pull out that noxious root. But time, the great healer, has brought parity and equity between the genders, leaving the Sixties experience of women being silenced a final harsh lesson from the annals of patriarchy. Finally, in many contexts, women have taken their place running things, while men represent our mutually arrived at decisions to the world. Sons and daughters hope that we can go forward with both men and women running things and representing our decision to the world. We shall see. Now that we have taken our voices back, and moved into our natural spheres of power, I can see us move from gender parity to full equality. With time, however, I have seen how much gender differences serve us in finding our roles.<br />
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</span></div>Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-89341306282346271992011-09-10T10:24:00.000-07:002011-09-11T09:17:16.557-07:00Susquehanna flood, community organizing--underwater in East Sayre<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0X8dpu5ksazIMU_Xz2jUonAWB90a3Ek-YQSWd53kTD9hC9ii90d4mva-gExtHRFwvDVC1XJCrUpZwPaeThZb7YeZi18QokdnYG0bSErJ0VC3n9EJ6l9DY3v1a3Ag-GU60P4mD9e4GA8M/s1600/Sayreyournewsnowphoto.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0X8dpu5ksazIMU_Xz2jUonAWB90a3Ek-YQSWd53kTD9hC9ii90d4mva-gExtHRFwvDVC1XJCrUpZwPaeThZb7YeZi18QokdnYG0bSErJ0VC3n9EJ6l9DY3v1a3Ag-GU60P4mD9e4GA8M/s200/Sayreyournewsnowphoto.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo: yournewsnow</td></tr>
</tbody></table>My partner in Reinhabitory Institute, Judith Thomas, was visiting the Penn-York Valley from the San Francisco Bay Area. I had told her my valley was a bioregionalist’s dream: in two states and three counties, between the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susquehanna_River">Susquehanna</a> and the Chemung Rivers. this community refers to itself as “The Valley,” and has a culture everyone who lives here understands. Judith was visiting here for a handful of days to let me take her on a tour to help her understand this community where I have been organizing for the past 26 years. Our organization is in the earliest stages of starting Project GROW! to involve young people from both sides of the border to learn how to grow and process food, an art form that was widely practiced in East Sayre and throughout the Valley until just a decade ago.<br />
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We visited the Ukrainian Community Center in East Sayre on the last day of August. Judith agreed with me: the center is an ideal place to organize from. Our infant Project GROW!- for disaffected and unemployed young people not going to college–could have its first garden right in the backyard of the vacant lot that comes with the building. We’d call it The Grange Hall and share offices there with other 501c3′s working in the community like <a href="http://www.carantouangreenway.org/">Carantouan Greenway</a>, the river organization I founded 16 years ago.<br />
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We’d invite collaborators when we had a better grip on how to get control of the building and purchase it with the State’s help. “These deals can take years to put together,” I had told Dan Polinski, representing the Ukrainian church community in the sale of the building. “We’ll all have to be patient.” <br />
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Dance floor and stage on the first floor, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor, the center had allowed us, Carantouan Greenway, to host several successful spaghetti suppers there. We’d featured the gardens of East Sayre on our annual Garden Tours where men of Italian and Ukrainian descent raised vegetables in the rich soil at the foot of the levees, in their backyards, canning for big extended families. <br />
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I’d had my eye on the community center for a decade. When it came on the market recently, I began laying plans to acquire it for the community. The bricks-and-mortar project was admittedly down the scale of priorities behind, 1) getting at least one garden on the ground by summer 2012 and securing funding to put kids to work in it during the growing and harvest season, with paid jobs. Training a new generation of leaders was slated for the winter of 2011-2012, to take over from aging shrinking boards and pick up fresh ideas for the Valley and run with them. The dozens of people I had interviewed mentioning this piece of our plans will smile reading this. I was candid with them; that community center was a perfect place, in the old ethnic neighborhood of East Sayre with its gardening tradition, right next to the river. We’d reinaugurate the summer festivals that spilled out onto the side lawn: Christmas tree lights, tables, beer garden, music. <br />
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Judith and I toured the center with Dan Polinkski’s back up the last day of August. We stopped down to meet with Tim Phinney then, Sayre’s genius at packaging public private deals, who opening his calendar on his desk at the <a href="http://www.sayreenterprisecenter.com/">Enterprise Center</a> suggested we see it Thursday morning 9/8, after Labor Day weekend. <br />
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A long Labor Day weekend passed. In the Valley, it started to rain and was still raining on Monday. Reports of flooded bridges and section of I-86 closing started to circulate. <br />
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I got a call from Tim Phinney early Thursday morning. The rivers and creeks were cresting; he had to watch the Enterprise Center to make sure it didn’t “spring a leak.” <br />
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If we had kept that appointment Thursday morning, we would have seen the dramatic change residents of East Sayre report. <br />
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Jerry Pryslopski told me on the phone that he was at his aunt’s at 10:15 am on Thursday.<br />
The basement and yard had taken some water. But even during Agnes his family’s basement only took water to mid-calf. He called his cousin, asking whether he should come down with a van to move some furniture out. She said she wasn’t worried. The levees weren’t breached during Agnes in 76. By noon, an hour and a half later, the cousin and Jerry’s mother had water past the first floor windows.<br />
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A women reported opening her back door and finding the river, right there in her yard. <br />
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On Friday morning, the Covey’s–mom, dad and daughter–looked down the street at their house, covered–along with other neighbors’–with water that had fallen four feet back to the first floor windows after the crest. Coveys said they had been berating themselves yesterday, Thursday, for not taking boxes up off the basement floor. By late afternoon, the water was in their second floor, giving new meaning to a “house gone underwater.” (This term has been used exclusively to describe a house that is worth less than the mortgaged amount.) This is not the case with most of the houses in East Sayre, which were purchased in many cases after the turn of the century, and inherited by their current inhabitants. <br />
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Sitting on their front porch, in a part of the neighborhood that’s dry, looked across the street at the community center and said that it would be perfect if the center were opened to the community. Neighbors could meet there, both those who houses are drowned and those dry, have a cup of coffee, commiserate. Perhaps a cook out. A town meeting. Social services could be organized out of there, rebuilding efforts. Having access to the center would give Tim Phinney, Dan Polinski, and Jim Daly, part of Sayre’s Emergency Management team, a place to sit with residents to collect information. <br />
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I said that Reinhabitory Institute is ready to open the community center with coffee, tea, pie, chairs and tables, as soon as an agreement can be reached for its use. <br />
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It seems a perfect metaphor for our times: those of us in some parts of the Valley are high and dry while in the Cannonhole, downtown Athens and East Sayre, it’s New Orleans all over again. <br />
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Mid-morning I arrived and parked. I had tried to walk down River Road toward Tioga and Orchard. I stood gaping. Half the north side of the neighborhood lay partially beneath the water. <br />
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A young girl in rubber boots stood at the edge grimly looking. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” I said. “Neither have I,” she replied. As I rejoined the group back at the intersection, I realized she was the Covey’s daughter; she was looking at her sunken and foundering house. <br />
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Covey’s partner of 30 years told me, “They told us we didn’t need flood insurance. No one in this neighborhood had it.” I told her that my family in California couldn’t buy earthquake insurance either; you couldn’t afford it. “Why didn’t they use sand bags?” Covey quietly asked Pierce, a multigenerational resident of East Sayre, a young man working in his neighborhood in waders. Pierce shrugged. It had happened so fast. <br />
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Perhaps everyone was in denial. <br />
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Within an hour and a half, or twelve hours, or twenty four–whichever timetable had residents of East Sayre start their personal countdown–the river poured over the levee, claimed all the sweet apple orchards bearing fruit ready to pick, washed out the gardens getting one more day of ripening before canning tomatoes in earnest, moved decks and sheds a city block, and peeked into the attic windows. <br />
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“It going to be years,” said Covey’s partner, who had grown up in the neighborhood. “Years.”<br />
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</div>Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-3977263779562567482011-01-20T09:38:00.000-08:002011-01-20T09:38:42.965-08:00My reading & discussion of Burning Silk at Riverrow bookstore in Owego on January 15A reading of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Burning-Silk-Destiny-Kinal/dp/0984458409/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295544480&sr=1-1"><i>Burning Silk</i></a> by Destiny Kinal at <a href="http://www.riverow.com/">Riverrow Bookshop</a> in Owego Sunday January 15th, 2011 morphed into a discussion of the Persephone myth, a natural midwinter theme dealing with the maladies of SADD, depression, and loss of community. <br />
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The discussion ranged further into the coming hard times that many are anticipating, not only from the economic downturn, but also from the collapse of our environment as global climate change proceeds: how do we prepare for these changes? <br />
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Participants pointed out that hard times are already afflicting those at the bottom of the economy, those who have depended on the underground economy to survive. Two individuals volunteered that they had just lost their jobs because their companies moved to China, a job one of them had held for 16 years. <br />
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Persephone, the story goes, the daughter of Mother Earth or Ceres, was abducted and dragged into the underworld by Pluto. The world went into an endless winter as Ceres mourned. The animals sent a delegation to Pluto to negotiate for Persephone's return. A deal was struck: Persephone could return to the surface of Earth if she ate nothing for an entire year during her stay in the underworld. <br />
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At the end of the year, Persephone ate three pomegranate seeds. Thus, a new deal had to be made: Persephone returns to the surface in the spring and summer while in the fall and winter, she remains in the underworld. In this way, not only were the season explained by our ancient forebearers but also death and the consequences of our mortality. <br />
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Medicine man of the Lenape Big Horn Band, David Chamberlain, told a myth from his people of horned serpents who live in the underworld, whose ill effects are released when the earth is pierced too deeply. A similar story of an abduction of a human girl by the horned serpents is told by the Lenape as well. Chamberlain, known as Hitakonanulaxk in Lenape, is the author of <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Grandfathers-Speak-Native-American-International/dp/1566561280">The Grandfathers Speak: Tales of the Lenape People</a></i>. The book is available at SRAC on Broad Street in Waverly. <br />
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John Doscher of Lockwood, NY, and author of a body of work studying the possibilities of a sustainable society, read three poems on the subject of loss and transformation. <br />
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Michael Sean O'Dwyer (Kane) of Waverly and Addison NY read from his recently released book, <i>A Voice in the Wilderness</i>, on his hike from Florida to Canada on the Appalachian Trail, during which time he naturally reflected on the state of the world. O'Dwyer/Kane read passages describing that winter of the soul we call despair as well as thoughts on organizing and strengthening community locally. <br />
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The group seemed to agree that the biggest challenge we face now is the disintegration of community, so necessary to organizing to meet hard times prepared. The theme of knowing how to grow your own food and preserve it came up repeatedly. <br />
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Destiny Kinal spoke about the metaphor of metamorphosis from a worm to a winged thing, that lies at the heart of <i>Burning Silk</i>, her novel about the alliance between French Huguenot silkmakers and their native American neighbors in southern Pennsylvania in the 1830's. <br />
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<i>Burning Silk</i>, the first novel in the Textile Trilogy, will be followed in 2012-13 by <i>Linen Shroud</i>, which--continuing the story of the Duladier and Montour families in their march toward modernity--takes place during the US Civil War. <br />
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<a href="http://www.riverow.com/">Riverrow Bookshop</a>, which is run by John Spencer, one of Owego's community development entrepreneurs, together with his daughter Laura, features an entire section at the front on regional authors. The basement of the bookstore, organized by subject and genre, is a treasure trove for book collectors. <br />
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The organizers of the reading will be meeting to decide whether the Persephone midwinter reading should be an annual event, open to regional writers to read from their work on these themes: the psychological trips to the underworld that afflict us humans at this time of year and the prospect of coming hard times. How can we prepare ourselves for a possible collapse that many scientists and social prognosticators are predicting? <br />
<br />
Call Destiny Kinal at 510-701-8909 or 607-565-8475 or contact the <a href="http://www.reinhabitory-institute.org/">Reinhabitory Institute</a> online at<a href="http://sitiotiempopress.com/blog/wp-admin/info@sitiotiempopress.com"> info@sitiotiempopress.com</a> if you would like to comment on the event and continue the discussion on the importance of community in weathering hard times.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-90770027238691967242010-10-27T18:13:00.000-07:002010-11-02T15:30:10.687-07:00The Big Daddy of all the Book Fairs: Frankfurter BuchmesseAs a spanking new press with one publication--Burning Silk, my first novel in the Textile Trilogy--and another in the pipeline, going to Europe to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair would have been a case of the intent of our grasp exceeding our reach.<br />
<br />
The Set-Up<br />
But since I was already going to be in Europe as a presenter at an academic colloquium on The Woodstock Years, 1965-75 at Le Havre University, and had exchanged my home in Berkeley for ten days in a canal house in Amsterdam to work on and research my second book, Linen Shroud, we decided to attend the Frankfurter Buch Messe, where the greatest cost was the hotel room (178 euros/night for a hostel.)<br />
<br />
Scale<br />
Reportedly 20K book professionals participate in what is styled as the world's biggest book fair. Does this include the 10K members of the press? It certainly doesn't include the public whose number reportedly swell into six figures.<br />
<br />
Gratefully, Not Everyone Speaks English Yet…<br />
<br />
And if they do, they often prefer to converse in their own language. My former neighbor and friend in Berkeley Inke Schwab, who had returned to her native Germany four years earlier, responded to my offer of a shared adventure. Inke, being trilingual, proved to be an immense asset in negotiating the complexities of the fair, a challenge not only linguistic but also deeply cultural.<br />
<br />
Proximity to the Past<br />
On Monday and Tuesday, we drove up into the hills 100 kilometers beyond Frankfurt into the Vogelsberg--as dotted with windmills as a Miyazaki fantasy film--where my relations through my immigrant great grandmother still live in our ancestral village. In Rebgeshain, perhaps three hundred households, people are most likely to marry someone from the village or from the next village. (This observation gives rise to the aphorism: Die besten stecken findet man in der hahesten hecken [sic] which translates loosely: If you're looking for a walking stick, find it in your own hedge.) This accounts for the remarkable fact, as my German friends tell me, that my first letter addressed to this family ten years ago, bore on the envelope only a century old photo of the original house, the family name Ruppel and the village name. It had arrived safely to tell of my impending visit.<br />
<br />
In the intervening decade, our family genealogist Bill Sackinger from Alaska, fluent in German, had visited annually to cement relations and comb through church records. This would be my second visit, announced long distance by a German friend who referred to me as the "instigator." I carried a secret weapon this time: Inke Schwab.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Too Big?<br />
We had been advised, through those in the know, that FBM has grown beyond professional enjoyment. Many of those who we had been referred to--fellow publishing professionals in Europe--no longer attend FBM because it has grown too large and impersonal. Buch Messe functions through appointments made months in advance. Inke and I decided that we would attend Wednesday and Thursday, the most intimate days in the opinion of those in the know, to check it out and figure out how it works.<br />
<br />
Scaling<br />
The scale of the Buch Messe coference center is roughly analogous to the square footage of the terminals of SF airport or Boston Logan (eliminating roads and runways, drawing the buildings into a more compact oval.)<br />
<br />
We spent all of Wednesday puzzling out the complex layout--eight buildings, each with three-four floors--as well as the functions and locations of both events and exhibitors. We attended an excellent seminar on buying and selling foreign rights (30 euros each.) We trekked the vast hallways, locating specific presses in the French, German and English speaking worlds.<br />
<br />
The English Language Publishing World<br />
Independent Book Publishers Association (ibpa) were there representing our novel Burning Silk as well as perhaps 75-100 other books in every genre. The distributor Ingram had a large airy booth. We stopped by Verso, the British radical publisher of Tariq Ali, the New Left Review, as well as scholarly leftist texts.<br />
<br />
Do we mention names when the science of name dropping is raised to such a high art at an event like this one? Our marketing staff back home in Berkeley urge me to fight against my reticence: MFA friend George Michelsen Foy had his nonfiction Zero Decibels (www.georgefoy.com) published by Scribner/Simon & Schuster. Surely I would be able to report back to him that his book had been prominently displayed among the others on the chair rail lining the large booth? Seeing his book nowhere in evidence, I combed through the catalog of Spring and Fall releases 2010: not a mention. I picked up a blue low budget publication titled: Subsidiary Rights Guide. Nada. Perhaps George's fine exploration, subtitled The Quest for Absolute Silence, as slim and rich as a Malcolm Gladwell best seller, needed to prove its worthiness to be published in another language by selling more copies in its first English edition? With time, I prayed, and moved on.<br />
<br />
In addition to a sales track, which decisive factors in this winnowing process determined which books would be featured for foreign rights? Surely a book that had just been released this summer would not have a sales record to speak of by October, would it?<br />
<br />
Wouldn't the interests of a given foreign market's readership come into play? Mizzi van der Pluijm of Amsterdam's Contact and a leading player on this stage according to the New York Times had written an article analyzing reader preferences by country. I was surprised to find that not only do the Dutch not read memoir, they scorn it. Back in the land of "j'adore" and "je deteste," Barbara Chase- Riboud of Sally Hemings and Venus Hottentot fame told me that the French adore historical fiction. Chase-Riboud assured me that Burning Silk would find a French publisher.<br />
<br />
France, Germany, Holland<br />
We quickly understood that the impressive booths of say, a Gallimard, with intimate tables and chairs for appointments, were largely selling foreign rights for books they publish. We dropped off a copy of Burning Silk and the bound bilingual translation of the first chapter in French for Gallimard's director of foreign rights, a contact given me by a scout I had met a decade earlier in Montolieu, France's book village where I had lead a collaboration of writers, artists, and printers to produce a limited edition book Entre Deux Rivieres. We were told that all the buyers were out on the floor, only sellers were in the booth. (Okay, I've reached the limit of my namedropping ability; I cannot cross the threshold of naming either the Gallimard director nor the scout in the Languedoc, handlers be damned.)<br />
<br />
We picked up a glossy Fiction France that featured excerpts from a number of contemporary French novelists including Agnes Desarthe's Dans La Nuit Brune (http://www.paris-expat.com/interviews/5-08chez.htm) and Jean Mattern's De Lait et De Miel. (www.frenchpubagency.com/Author-1079181/Jean-Mattern.html)<br />
<br />
By the end of the first day, it dawned on both of us that the key to selling foreign rights lay in having an agent to cover each country.<br />
<br />
Getting our Books through Customs<br />
Our books, shipped both from the US and from Amsterdam weeks earlier, had not arrived. A letter to our hotel on Wednesday informed us that our bilingual translation of the first chapter of Burning Silk, neatly bound with the book's cover art, was being held at customs. First thing Thursday morning, we retrieved them. Without Inke's taking the lead while applying the curb to my tongue, I would have had to pick a fight with these most insufferable of the bureaucrat caste. However, upon the multiple pounding of the official stamp on the last triplicate, we headed for the entry gate of the Buch Messe, our badge firmly established in the carryon suitcase we towed.<br />
<br />
Agents Sequestered<br />
Agents, listed in the invaluable directory (25 euros,) were housed in their own floor with a check-in desk admitting only those with previous appointments.<br />
<br />
Using our directory, we identified six agents under "literary historical fiction" to cover our targeted countries, and wrote them emails introducing ourselves.<br />
<br />
Attaching a note on sitio tiempo press' executive letterhead to each bilingual translation, and inserting the book's postcard and silk bookmark emblazoned with the title, we left bundles for each agent at the appointment desk, for followup post-Buch Messe.<br />
<br />
Personal Contacts<br />
A section called the Center for Politics, Literature, and Translation attracted us with its juicy events: presentation of the Paul Celan prize, a Cuban hour with a PEN presence, where Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the legendary Green's leader, did NOT show up, while Amir Valles, Rugelio Saunders and Jorge Arzola did speak on the panel. Multilingual earphone provided access to the discourse in one's own language.<br />
<br />
These events, often at the end of the day, usually concluded with drinks and hors d's. Here Inke and I met a publisher from Haiti, Willems Edouard of Editions Presses Nationals in Petionville. Kettly Mars, a Haitian novelist whose Saisons Sauvages was just released from Mercure to good reviews, is working on her fourth book. (http://repeatingislands.com/2010/03/19/new-book-kettly-mars’-saisons-sauvages/.)<br />
<br />
When Willems told me he had published Russell Banks, I offered my card and paid attention. (www.pressesnationales-dhaiti.com)<br />
<br />
His catalog features an impressive collection of intellectuals and writers, from the republication of Jacques Romains' oeuvres to poets, short story writers (Jean-Euphele Milce,) and novelists including Cleante Valcin's La Blanche Negresse and Cruelle Destinee, which advised the reader that this was a novel about an unfortunate prostitute.<br />
<br />
If the protagonist is named Destiny in this novel of the l930's, I thought, then I have finally found an older woman named Destiny. A short survey of the plots of each of these republished novels led me to believe that Barbara Chase Riboud would be interested in Valcin's treating subjects similar to hers. The press on Kettly Mars' Saisons Sauvages about the Duvalier regime in Haiti deals with master/slave relations as well. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Chase-Riboud)<br />
<br />
Many prizes are awarded for literature at the beginning of the fair, to take advantage of the attendant press. At the German Women in Publishing party, I met Ingeborg Hohl of LiBeraturpreis, which awards a prize for women writers from Third World countries. The winner of the German Book Prize this year went to Melinda Nadj Abonji for Falcons Without Falconers, a story of a Hungarian minority in Serbia. The novel, which begins with a child's point of view, continues in the adult woman's pov in an "apparently carefree Balkan comedy." One can't help but think of the beginning of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated with a similarly picaresque beginning; both books conclude in the shadow of wars with genocide as theme. Undoubtedly we missed a lot, but it seemed strange that only one American author, Brett Easton Ellis, was included in major events and programming.<br />
<br />
Jet Lag cum Geo-psychocultural Whiplash<br />
I made sure that I flew from Frankfurt to Philadelphia, with a several day stop over in our home in the rural Penn-York Valley. True, I had major events scheduled for two of the three days there, but by the time I arrived back in Northen California, it took me a couple days to get over the worst effects of the jet lag.<br />
<br />
I am developing a theory that the symptoms that possessed me--dizziness, fatigue--were really cultural whiplash masquerading as the need to meditate, perchance to dream. From Rebgeshain to Frankfurt, from Amsterdam's Dutch Resistance Museum, to Paris and rural Brittany, featuring the prized belon oysters and Neolithic tumulus, I was in the thrall of a challenge to my digestive system--psychic and cultural digestion--spending productive hours flat on my back sorting through impressions, not only filing them but connecting them with their corollary a-ha's.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-50030111349450940762010-09-28T14:51:00.000-07:002010-11-03T10:52:51.246-07:00Writers and Publishers Mix it Up in Europe: the first blog en route to the Frankfurt Book Fair<div class="p1">In the month that I am here in Europe, between three countries--Holland, France and Germany--half is dedicated to research and to writing on my second novel in the Textile Trilogy, <i>Linen Shroud</i>. I follow Carole Maso's dictum that form should follow function, therefore silk is by definition sensuous and heady: in our country, a novel of ideas only rarely includes the erotic, but it's no surprise that my favorite writers combine intellect and sensuality: Durrell, Duras, Nin, Miller, Maso. Kundera.<br />
<br />
<i>Linen Shroud</i>, by comparison with <i>Burning Silk</i> and their respective textiles, is tough, difficult to produce, flexible and enduring. The theme of Linen Shroud-- war--presents me with a particular challenge, as I am a lifelong antiwar protestors even while I acknowledge that WWII--my father a medic in Patton's Fourth Army--was necessary for the continuation of our western way-of-life.<br />
<br />
The other half of my month, one might say, is dedicated to developing an audience both for my books and for the other books that we--the publishing collective that is sitio tiempo press--intend to publish.<br />
<br />
So I am en train de traveling from Brittany, where I had the opportunity to put face and place--essential to a novelist--on the oystermen I had only read about in The Oysters of Locmariaquer. I am heading to Le Havre where I will be a presenter at a conference given by the University on The Woodstock Years, a fine bilingual audience for my books and our ideas I think. And after, I will be meeting a friend, Inke Schwab, who has the advantage of being trilingual, to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair.<br />
<br />
I will be issuing reports on a daily basis from the Frankfurt Book Fair in my blog.<br />
<br />
Purposes always overlap in my estimation. And so I began doing research years ago on selling foreign rights. A file disgorged an article I clipped from the NYT several years ago that followed Mizzi van der Pluijm of Contact Publishing in Amsterdam, around the floor of the Fair and to parties in the evening. This allowed me to google Mm. van der Pluijm, read her articles and appreciate how she analyzes the book market for foreign rights. How could I cold-call a possible publisher without doing at least this? I sent her my book Burning Silk, together with the bound bilingal booklet with the first chapter in French and English and a personal note on the press' executive stationery. I emailed her asking her to expect the same. I think I can't do more.<br />
<br />
While in Amsterdam, I checked out the two bookstores in Spui (said Spow): the American Book Center and the Athenaeum. Of the two, I would have to say Athenaeum is the more literary and multicutltural, while ABC and its attendant performance/<br />
<br />
meeting space The Treehouse, is largely for an English speaking audience. The buyer at Athenaeum, who will remain unnamed, implied that I was cracked to be going to Frankfurt without appointments. And, though I know this is how the Book Fair works, I have always had to see a product in production before I completely understand it.<br />
<br />
Inke Schwab and I will attend instructive seminars in buying and selling foreign rights. With 20,000 people there, all agenda driven, we will be able to tease out (I hope) the players that we are interested in speaking with us. That's the plan.<br />
<br />
While in Paris, I made a personal contact with the manager who books readings at Shakespeare & Co, as conversation we had begun months earlier towards understanding how to book a reading with Shakespearte & Co (Mondays only and months in advance.)<br />
<br />
I contacted a writer of historical fiction that I have always wanted to meet. She is also a textile artist. We have communicated by email over time and yes, Barbara Chase- Riboud, author of the puissante Sally Hemmings and other poignant investigations into the lives of women at once powerless (Venus of Hottentot) and influential (Sally Hemmings.)<br />
<br />
Turning the corner from my hotel, I ran into Gallimard's offices. I emailed a scout I met ten years ago while producing a limited edition book in France's book village Montolieu and asked him if he had a contact at Gallimard. He did and would not only give me the name of his close friend, the foreign rights acquisition editor, but also invited me to use his name.<br />
<br />
Everything bodes well. Stay tuned if you are interested.</div>Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-75559000376121680482010-09-26T14:09:00.000-07:002010-11-04T14:17:03.305-07:00The Dutch Resistance Museum: an hour of powerful sentiments unrolls across daysLuckily, a sign at the beginning of the museum explained something I would have had to deduce from the entire display: In 1941, the Dutch were divided about the German occupation, most complacent as the Germans made a great show of befriending the Dutch, "fellow Aryans." Nazi moves against the Jews were small and incremental. First registration, then a fence around the neighborhood, finally the yellow star and segregation, but all of it gradual, regrettable but not alarming. But when several hundred Jews were rounded up for deportation, the Dutch seemed to wake up, went out onto the street and mounted a general strike. Then, when the Germans brought violence against Dutch resistors, the population moved toward resistance very quickly. Actions accelerated. The Franks, Ann's family, went into hiding in 1942 for instance, where they remained for two years until they were betrayed.<br />
<br />
In comparing the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC to the Dutch Resistance Museum, I have to say that the two museums are equally powerful in presenting the horror of the Holocaust, each using completely different methods.<br />
<br />
The architecture of the Holocaust Museum reinforces the feeling of dehumanization, with railcars and barracks in the concentration camps reproduced effectively. A vast pile of shoes, men's, women's and children's in a jumble, made--as Peter Brook's theater troupe discovered as well--for a powerful nonverbal punch in the gut.<br />
<br />
By contrast, the Resistance Museum, leads one through a broken-up kaleidescope of spaces, each refracting and opening into each other, leading one deeper into the story.<br />
<br />
Scrolls of personal stories mounted outside the glass cases and projecting into the aisle, with large photo of each young person, told of individual acts of resistance by both Jew and Gentile. These men and women and their stories personified the kind of courage we must each doubt we possess unless we are tried. Many of these individuals paid for their heroism with their lives.<br />
<br />
An illegal bank, an illegal forger of papers, an illegal printing press, illegal crystal radios, doors concealed behind bookshelves, men dressed as women with scarves wrapped around their adam's apple: these elaborate systems were put into place within a year, escalating in sophistication. These Dutch individuals, contemporaries of my parents, put together a system of resistance that took my breath away. Code numbers in letters as small as an ant printed painstakingly on a cigarette paper…so much at stake.<br />
<br />
The main road where I walked from Waterloo Pelin to the museum, Plantage, holds a theater that was used as a detention and deportation center for Jews. On the other side of the street, we noticed a colorful day care center. The museum explained that this very day care center smuggled Jewish children out of Amsterdam. When a tram would pull up to the stop in front of the daycare center, the brave women would rush toward the tram with babies under each arm, or two children by the hand and leap on. Everyone on the tram would smile, while the Nazis on the other side of the<br />
street were none the wiser. Six hundred children were saved this way.<br />
<br />
The hardest part came at the end, not only the totting up of the sheer volume of Jews exterminated (photos remind you: men, women and flossy haired children, all clueless, faces all vaguely familiar, mishpookah) but also the terrible winter after France and Belgium were liberated, when the Dutch had no food at all. Twenty thousand people died of starvation. The houses in the Jewish quarter, later demolished for being unsalvageable after being empty for so long, were stripped for fuel. People boiled garbage for soup, gleaned every edible scrap, to survive that terrible winter, a despair much like the concentration camp survivors Elie Weisel described, forced by their captors to march through the winter snow, starving and inadequately clothed, as their liberators approached from the other direction.<br />
<br />
Unlike the darkness of the Holocaust Museum (I was alive when this happened, a baby; my father, a medic with Patton's Army, never spoke of his experiences liberating concentration camps,) the Dutch Resistance Museum, released me with a glimmer. These people DID resist, like the Dane, like Jews in Warsaw. Photos showed not only survivors of the camps returning to sit on their streets, to begin the search for their loved ones, as well as the Dutch citizens greeting allied forces, the end of the nightmare.<br />
<br />
A postscript surprised me. Apparently it wasn't until a neo nazi group arose in the 1960's, that members of the Dutch resistance began to tell their stories. It wasn't until the 1980's that the museum was organized to tell the story. Copies of two graphic novels illustrated by Heuve, the Tintin artist, tell the story both from the pov of a Jewish family and their good friends and neighbors, ordinary people drawn into becoming Dutch resistors.<br />
<br />
This reminded me of the fact that survivors of the Irish Potato Famine didn't tell their children the story of what had happened, out of shame perhaps that such a terrible thing had visited them. It wasn't until nearly a century later that the Irish came to own their history of abuse by the British which deepened the deadly outcome of the potato famine.<br />
<br />
Three million dead and one million and a half forcibly shipped off on death ships to other continents, if I remember my numbers correctly.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-55618816834343229922010-09-25T14:51:00.000-07:002010-11-04T14:54:30.837-07:00De Kat, the Cat: the windmill that produces colorsWednesday was going to be a sunny day, the weather projections forecasted, and so we planned our trip to Zaanse Schwanz [sic]for that day. There, the brochure promised, we would find a village which had been an industrial center with over 1000 windmills. Nine were left. One of them, Der Kat, The Cat, still ground rock and wood, bark and roots for dyes and pigments. Is your heart racing? Then you will want to come along with us.<br />
<br />
The banks of the river, lined with the nine windmills, evoked something between a possible history--travels along one's DNA I call it--and a Miyazaki film, for where else would you find the stirring spectacle of working windmills?<br />
<br />
To our regret, the mustard windmill was closed for repairs but we had out sights set on De Kat. Our host Todd told us that, when it is windy--they went in February--so much power is freighted, the windmill is almost frightening. Indeed we found choppers, pounders and grinders all on the main floor, whose levers clearly generated a great deal of force when operative.<br />
<br />
Display cases--all of this set into the larger wooden structure--gave us a tour of their products, as well as a history. When tiles were ground, a red dye was generated which was used to color the canvas windmill sails with their "summer" colors. Nearby a windmill was dressed in its winter sails, a dark rich brown, perhaps burnt umber. Not surprisingly, De Kat produces fresh sails for other windmills.<br />
<br />
The second floor was a marvel of gears, all of them at a distance from each other today, but clearly movable, to connect together to create motion in several directions. Yes, it is true: the miller is the only one permitted to run the windmill.<br />
<br />
De Kat's miller has worked five days a week for the past forty years. When I asked naively if there was going to be a demonstration, the step-in miller pointed out the obvious with a smile. No wind, no work.<br />
<br />
The top floor, with a small galley around the workings, let out in three directions to a outside porch. Even with a desultory wind turning the sails, anyone standing on the far side would be decapitated. The downward rush of a blade casts a large shadow with a whoosh. An interval of sunlight and then the downward blade was forecast by shadow and sound.<br />
<br />
The gift shop offered little bottles of pigment labeled "artificial" The display cases outside had a small sign saying that anyone interested in the pigments ground on site could ask at the desk. Within minutes of asking, we were conducted into the inner sanctum marked private. Here, in a pleasant room about the size of Rembrandt's etching studio, a central table stood for workshops and negotiations, packages of both pigments and dyes stacked neatly along the walls, glass<br />
vials affixed to each showing the color of the actual powder. Hanks of wool, silk, linen and cotton hung from the ceiling demonstrating the color each dye would produce.<br />
<br />
Workshops are held regularly at De Kat. Paint samples drying on plywood were the products of students from the art department at a nearby university.<br />
<br />
I bought several kinds of umber produced at De Kat for my friend, the painter Mollie Favour, and a small glass grinder for making the powder into pigment by mixing it with linseed oil. (I'm sure this instrument has a name.) I also bought indigo and sandalwood for my friend Judith Thomas and I. Wode, which I would also like to explore was too expensive to buy without immediate plans to use it. Cochineal which comes not only from Mexico, but also from Spain, seemed frivolous as I plan to go with Judith to Eric Mindling's dyeing tour in the Oaxaca Highlands where they raise cochineal.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-81890378960658897522010-09-19T13:43:00.000-07:002010-11-04T13:52:51.936-07:00The Turkish HammanWe were greeted by a beautiful friendly woman in a flowered headscarf and taken through our options. She and I each spoke a little French and so we communicated this way. We chose a program from the middle of the menu: 40 euros, plus towel and robe (6,) and a scrubby glove we would need (6.)<br />
<br />
"You have slips?" she asked us. On the phone, no one had said we needed slips or we would have brought them.<br />
<br />
"N'importe pas," she assured us.<br />
<br />
Nonetheless, this language issue gave us a lot of laughs. We arrived stripped down in a central room where a zaftig bathlady waited: everyone else had on underpants, the "slips" we could easily have kept on. She scrubbed us all over with our glove with a piney smelling soap and showed us into a steam room.<br />
<br />
Two young women who had just gotten their Bac degree were celebrating a day off from the preschool where they taught. They told us about a Dutch politician who showed up at the protest in NY at Ground Zero against the mosque. He insulted Muslim women by not only asking why they had to wear scarves but referring to headscarves as 'dirty rags," which seemed to all four of us not only as racism but also highly sexist with its veiled allusion to menstruation and to scrubwomen. Do you have to be a woman to feel the sexism in that racist slur?<br />
<br />
I had to rinse the caustic piney soap off early as it wasn't agreeing with my skin. After coming out of the steam, we were shown into a room with marble slab tables where we each received a vigorous if superficial massage with oil-infused hot water. After we showered, we were each given a dish of mud to slather on our bodies. Another room with benches and buckets allowed us to spend time attending carefully to our hair, feet and nails. We imagined that, with someone at home watching the kids, a woman might spend hours on a Sunday at the hammam--why not?<br />
<br />
After, feeling tight and toned, we retired in our robes to the salon near the door where cushioned couches were ringed with large hammered trays on stands as coffee tables.<br />
<br />
A group of Muslim women were enjoying animated conversation with each other and the attendants at the end of the day. How beautiful they were! We remembered that Ramadan was coming to an end with the full moon (or perhaps earlier.) We ordered a pot of strong mint tea and a small plate of sweets: baklava, carmelized sugar and nuts, almond and nougat based pastries--tiny tastes that we shared--rolled into crescents (10 euros.)<br />
<br />
In the dressing room, a young women coated her entire body in a white creamy paste. What is it? I asked. A masque, she answered and took herself off to wait the required number of minutes while the masque dried.<br />
<br />
I slept twelve hours after dinner and the hammam.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-35114035811797071292010-09-18T13:41:00.000-07:002010-11-04T13:42:41.164-07:00Yom Kippur, Day of AtonementThis was a difficult day I am not going to write about. Into every holiday, a little rain must fall: a failed fast, a silenced bell tower, a closed Portuguese synagogue, time in pharmacies, aching feet…..Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-10684261266381293732010-09-17T14:56:00.000-07:002010-11-04T15:00:33.289-07:00Museum Canal BoatToday we took a canal boat to three museums, a lovely way to view the city. A ticket allows you to get on and off at any of a dozen stops on the loop.<br />
<br />
The tour of Ann Frank House is structured much like the Rembrandt House in that a modern building alongside connects to the actual house and warehouse where Otto Frank ran his pectin business and the family went into hiding.<br />
<br />
As we went up the staircase to the actual house, I felt like I was going up to my grandmother's which was also above retail/commercial. Both Judy and I admitted that when we were young, the Holocaust seemed like ancient history while, as we have aged, the events have telescoped in, so that--by now--they seem appallingly close…which they are.<br />
<br />
Otto Frank, the only member of the family who survived, said that Ann's early diaries were much like any girl's, full of boys and giggling confidences. But after they went into hiding in the Annex, where they lived for two years, the diaries became very deep, as anyone who has read them knows. He said he had no idea that his daughter had such profound thoughts and emotions. He drew the conclusion that parents never really know their children's innermost thoughts.<br />
<br />
Ann decorated her room with cutouts from magazines. A photo of Scarlett O'Hara and another of a dark haired actress playing piano allowed me to imagine that Ann had pictured herself as a grownup adult through such images. She tells her diary (Dear Kitty) that she planned to become a famous writer. Since she died only two weeks before liberation, and before, while they were in the Annex, official word had gone out that collections and memoirs were being avidly sought for publication. In the annex, she began the novel that she planned to write based on her diaries which she called, The Annex.<br />
<br />
When that light was snuffed out, it lit up the world.<br />
<br />
Although my father was a medic with Patton Army, and helped liberate the concentration camps, he never once mentioned it. I have often reflected that his world view--he was strict father and a powerfully disciplined researcher in Archives his field of neurosurgery--must have been shaped by that experience. He said more than once that--while he loved individual humans--he had a profound contempt for humanity.<br />
<br />
To my surprise, the Rijkesmuseum has only three Vermeers. Of course there are only a couple dozen in the world.<br />
Still…<br />
<br />
Van Gogh Museum (and I have seen a comprehensive Van Gogh show earlier) revealed a young insecure artist who spent so much of his life as an artist copying the styles that blazed through "his set" like pointillism and Japanese prints; he also copied actual works by earlier artists. Everyone learns their own way; this way--copying, trying what others are doing--is timehonored. He was a fortunate artist in the support his brother Theo gave him to the end. I am not a Van Gogh scholar and yet it seemed to me that it was only after Arles, when he was institutionalized, that his voice came through in the boldstrokes we have come to associate with Van Gogh at his best: crows and wheatfield, starry night, olive grove.<br />
<br />
At the end of the day, exhausted, we went to the extraordinary art deco Tuchinsky [sic] Theater to see the film, The American, which seems to be occasioning conversations in Amsterdam from the newspaper and bookstore windows. For me, it was a reprise of Up In the Air, with George Clooney stuck in a meaningless life, finding and then losing love. In a memorable sequence, the observant village priest accuses Clooney's character, and all Americans, of not knowing history. And here I thought that was a human trait.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-47745305296597847042010-09-16T14:32:00.000-07:002010-11-04T14:35:02.136-07:00Lost in AmsterdamMy friend Judy from Findley Lake, our family’s home, arrived around noon and wanted to head right out. Directional coordinates are difficult in a semicircular city where street names change often. And so we promptly got lost which– as every intrepid traveler knows–is (within limits) the best way to discover a city.<br />
<br />
Around the corner, we spotted an unusual quilted down garment in the window of a store Riele. Within minutes, the shopgirl was showing us how chic Amsterdammers keep warm (for it is autumn here.) A khaki colored oiled/waxed linen kilt with a big belt and buckle at the hips captivated me. (If only I were 30 pounds thinner.)<br />
<br />
The “thing” that drew us into the shop pulled over the head and covered shoulders to below the breasts with a folded neck that could be pulled up to the ears. A down skirt, with curving quilt lines, had an attached knit top that allowed you to place the skirt anywhere on your trunk. (For those who don’t know, I had a down company with two design partners in Aspen in the mid-70!s and thus am alert to any innovations in down design.)<br />
<br />
We had a map, Judy and I, but the six-point type naming the streets and canals presented a challenge to our middle-aged eyes. As it worked out, we spent our time in the old original city, much of it highly commercialized.<br />
<br />
Nonetheless, we wandered along the Singelgracht Canal lined with the tulip mart. We stumbled into Spui (said Spow,) a square, lined with hip boutiques, and found the American Book Center and its attendant literary center The Treehouse.<br />
<br />
I had communicated earlier with their director Donna DuCarme who said that she was planning very little for September and besides, getting people to come to a reading would be an issue. We just missed their show on erotica, which would have been interesting to see in a city so uninhibited about sexual identity.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-64694055680486259842010-09-15T14:20:00.000-07:002010-11-04T14:24:24.025-07:00Nieuwemarkt, AmsterdamTodd and Barbara’s canal house has a footprint of approximately 16 feet square. Land is at a premium in Amsterdam; houses were taxed on their footprint so thrifty Amsterdammers built up. My room is under the roof beams, up a steep ladder to the most spacious room in the house.<br />
<br />
After a pancake breakfast, I venture out onto the street. Todd accompanies me to the corner.<br />
<br />
“This way”–he points left to a canal–”is the red light district and this way”–he points toward the church whose belltower will either tell me the time by looking out my window or by ears, as it rings out the hours–”that way are the markets and the Metro.”<br />
<br />
I head down our alley toward the church and–after peering both ways– take a left toward the shop that says “Tweewiilers,” a bike rental shop. After a moment gauging the traffic patterns–bikes and pedestrians throng the narrow street lined on both sides with small retail shops–I head out.<br />
<br />
Here, in a crosspattern that characterizes the core of the onion bulb, radiating in a semicircle from the Central Station where all transportation sources both to the North Sea and to the city itself, I find the pattern:<br />
<br />
One or two blocks, then a canal crosses–lined on both sides with trees and broad pavement to accommodate bikes, pedestrians and the occasional car–then another block or two before another canal crosses. The street I am on changes its name every time a canal crosses!<br />
<br />
Todd has pointed out to me a salient fact I would have missed. Each canal house leans out slightly and each has a grappling hook on the top story, where the roofbeam meets the top story. Thus heavy furniture is hoisted up to the floor where it will reside, be it piano or mattress, without the danger of banging out windows on the stories below.<br />
<br />
Terrified of getting lost in this maze, I find a coffee shop, having found out from my Lonely Planets guide book that this is how one identifies the places that sell cannabis, and entering, ask for their menu of hashish. After careful consideration, I choose the blond from Morocco, temporarily rejecting the more resinous, therefore darker, varieties from the Himalayas and Lebanon.<br />
<br />
I take a place up front by the window and potted palms–it is morning after all–and breaking off a small piece, light up. Here I can smoke hash in the way I prefer, working up a great cloud of smoke to get a good spark going, then inhaling part, blowing it out through my nose. (I prefer not to go into paroxysms of coughing.)<br />
<br />
Hashish has become so rare in the United States that my fellow smokers look at me in amazement when I exercise even a portion of this wasteful routine.<br />
<br />
I am curious: hash–rare though it is–has always been my preferred smoke, delivering a clearheaded high with a fine light-touch energy. Will it be the same now that I have reached elder status? It is.<br />
<br />
I buy the pipe, pocket the glassine envelope of hash and go out into the street. If all of Amsterdam is like this, I think to myself, one could live here forever.<br />
<br />
I retrace my steps so that I am sure I can find my way home, then carefully venture out several blocks in the opposite direction, quickly coming into a more modern street with larger canal crossings. The cafes are full at lunchtime. I find the Rembrandt house and enter it.<br />
<br />
I choose a small phonelike translator for English and proceed to the first room. This entryroom is covered with paintings both those of clients of Rembrandt’s–he was an artdealer as well as a painter–and his own. and a large chest that belonged to his mistress Hendrickhe Stouffels who moved in as his common law wife after his first wife Saskia died. The chest was used to store all of her wealth: silverware, gold boullion, rare silks and precious linens.<br />
<br />
The next small room didn’t even merit an audio explanation and yet was of high interest to me. It contained a screw type press, with lines strung across the top for Rembrandt’s etching to dry after coming out of the press. (I would see a film demonstrating the etching process in the studio on the top floor.)<br />
<br />
Along the far wall, all the instruments of etching lay out for display or use.<br />
<br />
The kitchen spoke to me the most, as I always glean so much information from a historic kitchen for my books. First of all, this room was one of several I was to find containing a cupboard bed!<br />
<br />
Readers of my first novel Burning Silk will recall the cupboard bed that Catherine and her husband shared, where she gave birth to their first child. Years after, I had visited Huguenot Street in New Paaltz NY. Entering the first house, I saw a cupboard knob in the paneling of the wall. Expectant, feeling time collapsing on all sides of me, I pulled the knob to find my first cupboard bed in person.<br />
<br />
Back in Amsterdam, the audio explained that these short cupboard beds in Rembrandt’s house were not only because of the short stature of more ancient peoples but also because a health belief they held had them sleep sitting up, propped by pillows.<br />
<br />
The hearth contained a tile stove, about which my mother had always raved for their radiant heat, and an open fireplace, flanked by a box of wood and a copper pot full of peat bricks.<br />
<br />
The footprint of the house was grand compared to the average canal house, for Rembrandt was successful in his time unlike his countrymen Vermeer and Van Gogh.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-14026134579767103612010-09-14T14:45:00.000-07:002010-11-04T14:48:43.701-07:00Frankfurt to AmsterdamI begin to suspect the train has crossed the border from Germany to Holland by the resemblance to landscapes and homes found in Flemish art: the pitch of the roofs; dirt road through an esplanade of poplars.<br />
<br />
I knew that we would transition from my starting point in Frankfurt to the lowlands, although I do not know precisely when we arrived: was it the modern windmills dotted through the landscape, one per hectare; was it the throngs of bicycles at every RR crossing? Lots of z’s in the placenames? Double aa’s and plenty of j’s. Yes, we have arrived in Holland.<br />
<br />
Clues keep racing by the window in our bullet train: the scale of the buildings: low and small, with economy. Neighborhoods and villages with a different look than Germany or France, in a language I do not understand yet: roof pitch and building materials.<br />
<br />
Cows along rivers that meander across broad expanses of fields. What is that little decorative touch above windows called? The Dutch make the most of it. Around me, women who look like Debra Kinal: regal with voluptuous lips, blond hair and milk-and-roses skin.<br />
<br />
Canals! Silver birch. Roofs that wrap around two sides of a house. Greenhouses. Heather wild and in bloom everywhere. Stand of a tall wildflower that look like small ladyslippers, several on a stem. Graffiti on every small public utility/structure. Bike paths well paved, going from village to village parallel to the train tracks.<br />
<br />
Gardens/playgrounds glimpsed. Like Adventure Playground in Berkeley, structures that also serve to grow things on. Ducks. Fragmides, same exotics invasives as ours.<br />
<br />
Knotweed, that invasive quasi-bamboo. Flocks of waterbirds. Clipped thatched roofs. I haven’t seen any storks yet; I hope I will.<br />
<br />
Utrecht and the classic canal boats, wide and low to the canal water, a deck surface that looks like it’s oiled canvas and stretched across the top ribs of the boat, just like the old masters’ painted them, shining with rain.<br />
<br />
Next stop: Amsterdam.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-80938452807081781162010-06-23T15:03:00.000-07:002010-11-04T15:06:32.053-07:00David v. Goliath, lit small press v. publishing behemoth: will it work?Hello editors,<br />
<br />
I am an Erie PA native, living parttime in Berkeley CA and parttime in Western NYS--Chautauqua County and in the Penn-York Valley south oMy first novel in the Textile Trilogy was just released a month ago from sitio tiempo press, an imprint of Reinhabitory Institute.<br />
<br />
What?! you might say if you are paying attention.<br />
<br />
Reinhabitory Institute was founded to bring the principles and practices of the love and care of your home watershed into every neighborhood, school and home in the United States--and beyond.<br />
<br />
What makes the first novel published by sitio tiempo "reinhabitory" is the subject of a blog on my website and without a doubt, for the editor with a nose for news, The Story: http://www.destinykinal.com/cms/blog/index/blogbyid/blog_id/105<br />
<br />
Yes there's much more to the story than woman-who-grew-up-in-Erie-publishes-novel-to-critical-acclaim...though I'd be happy with that story...as would you. I'm told I do a terrific interview and yes, I would be delighted to come into the studio for a live interview.<br />
<br />
The other terrific story is this one: traditional publishing is crumbling (5 giants owns all the trade publishing houses now, all focused on the bottom line.) Does it make for a good read, great literature? The clarion call has been sounded and scores of new paradigms in publishing are out of the gate. Without a doubt, the internet is making it a whole new game: book tours, book reviews, conversations about books--all are happening on line.<br />
<br />
Our virtual book club will go up within the month as friends and fan read and want to discuss Burning Silk.<br />
<br />
I once was a maven in the world of targeted marketing (I introduced the Fortune 500 consumer goods companies to segmentation by values and lifestyles (VALS), demographics and product usage--all mixed up in a lethal cocktail, back in the day.) i have never liked mass marketing. Target audiences for this book include French Huguenots, textile artists, American history buffs, native Americans, the GLBT community...and none of them have anything in common with<br />
each other except that they will all enjoy this book.<br />
<br />
Book sales, so far as we are concerned, is back to the personal network--mostly online.<br />
<br />
The personal relationship between writer and reader is being restored by a most unlikely medium: the computer.<br />
<br />
Question is: will it work? Will David be able to tilt with Goliath?<br />
<br />
Another question: what will happen to bookstores?<br />
<br />
Another question: what will happen to books?<br />
<br />
Our strategy for this book on the ground is simple: reading, creating a stir (if possible) where I/the author has lived and has family and friends.<br />
<br />
So from central NY/PA to western NY/PA, I will work my networks like I am doing now, supported by the staff at sitio tiempo press back in Berkeley.<br />
<br />
After that, I will be reading around the SF Bay Area, then back to New England. Finally, in December, I will be down in south Florida. With my personal networks exhausted, and my online community expanding, we shall see if "the book has legs." And that will be the proof of the pudding for one small literary press. With our technique sharpened, we will introduce our next book--poet Jerry Martien's The Authentic Life, another look at the iconic Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County Wars, presaging what is happening on our borderlands today. Yes another reinhabitory novel (with a lesson for us to examine encapsulated in it) from sitio tiempo press.<br />
<div><br />
</div>Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-73498256513736096932010-06-23T14:42:00.000-07:002010-11-04T14:43:42.207-07:00Am I embarrassed by the sex scenes I have written?A good friend and writer who will remain unnamed commented on the steamy sex in Burning Silk.<br />
"I have been reading your book. I am a bit embarrassed by the sex scenes between the two women. Does anyone else feel that way? However, the very good writing helps one to feel that the writer knows what she is doing!"<br />
<br />
My response: "Truth?--I feel a bit more than embarrassed about the sex scenes between the two women. I consider it an act of negative capability (or whatever we call that thing Keats described) that I not only achieved it--you should read my essay on how I did it from the Taos residency which I will post here up on my blog. Not only that I wrote it but that I had the guts to publish it. I stand behind it, discomfort and all. My question to my friend: did the hetero sex scenes embarrass you as well?"<br />
<br />
Here follows the essay I wrote at a residency in Taos NM about writing Burning Silk and how I came to include the detailed erotic scenes that will always characterize the book...and make it controversial..Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-15058085212630821292010-06-23T13:53:00.000-07:002010-11-04T14:08:06.338-07:00The Metises: designer people engineered by the continentIn fact, I STILL didn't know what my novel was about, after completing it in Taos NM at the end of 2005, dazzled by the compelling eroticism.<br />
<br />
The journal I kept named the tribes I passed through, Hopi, Navajo, and the drama of the season of rituals of the Pueblo people.<br />
<br />
Burning Silk is a contact story: French Huguenot silkmakers come to depend on their metises neighbors for the success of their venture.<br />
<br />
Who are the metises? They are modelled on the Revolutionary War Original people of the Susquehanna River where I have had a home for 25 years. Queen Esther Montour was Dutch/French/Mohawk/Lenape. A sophisticated woman from<br />
a line of women who made it into the white man's history books, Queen Esther and her sister Queen Catherine spoke several European and several native languages. The metises people, I have come to see, were this continent's attempt to produce a hybrid people who could live in harmony on this continent.<br />
<br />
It served the new breed of English settlers coming up the Susquehanna to style Queen Esther and her band as "savages," in order to justify taking their land. Queen Esther and her band were driven from their homes at harvest time, their log houses burned, their orchards cut down, their crops destroyed, men, women and children fleeing north across the border<br />
into Canada.<br />
<br />
[Footnote: Yes I have read every account of the Wyoming massacre that has been published, that is, white man's history. New settlers killed Queen Esther's young son as he was travelling along the river. She went mad. What happened after that, no one knows but several white men were ritually executed by angry native people, among them a raging woman<br />
identified as Queen Esther.]<br />
<br />
Here is how I describe them in Burning Silk:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>She had also not anticipated the impact their neighbors’ way of life would have on her family. None of the Duladiers had met an indigenous American before coming to this continent. To find a new race of people—the métis—sprung up here over the past two hundred years astonished them. The magnitude of this fact seemed like something they might have heard about before arriving.</blockquote><blockquote>Their neighbors, the Montour family, on whom they had come to depend for knowledge of this new land and its particulars, lived in homes with windows like theirs, of log and plaster and fieldstone, clothed themselves in a pastiche of European and deerskin clothing, furnished their homes in a stunning mélange of Louis Quatorze, Regency, and . . .</blockquote><blockquote>Bedouine, chic beyond any European woman’s dreams (if she had the eyes to see it, and the Duladier women did), as louche a chic as they had ever imagined. No doubt certain travelling Parisians found this rangy frontier style shocking Archives enough to take home and adapt to their own Bohemian lifestyles.</blockquote><blockquote>And the British? Little wonder that Marguerite’s grandmother was said to have run a salon on the distant Susquehanna that no European taking a tour of the Americas would have missed.</blockquote><blockquote>Sometimes, like catching a glimpse of herself in a window, and seeing herself as an outsider might, she understood how the Montours must see members of her own family: jarring and unnatural. Not belonging. Out of place. Their pale skin, coiffed hair, cinched waists, frock coats . . . all more than a bit stifling. The Montours were a fresh wind blowing, levelling pretense and piety. Not everyone in her family agreed with Catherine’s assessment, however.</blockquote><blockquote>La Madonne, source of all our success, we need the Montours. Need Regina. Why else would you send them to us?</blockquote><blockquote>She comforted herself the way a motherless child will: Soit tran- quille, my child. Breathe. Let your shoulders drop. Relax your jaw. There.</blockquote><blockquote>She lifted the cover of a small jewelry box her father Auguste had commissioned for her when she went through her first full volte with her mother, as apprentice. I must think of a gift to mark their first apprenticeships, she pondered, thinking of both Kristiana and Regina.</blockquote><blockquote>Tipping a velvet bag into her palm, she pulled out a snood set with seed pearls for her hair. Peering into the oval metallic mirror mounted near the window, and tucking the netted pearls around the contours of her braid, she felt her small rebellious spirit kindle in the act of adorning her corona. Too dressy for such a day, someone might say. Perhaps my conservative sister? At this late hour of her confinement, anything could be countenanced if it made her feel better. If Regina thinks it beautiful . . . Then she closed the lid of her treasure box, sealed the cupboard doors to her bed, and headed out to the day, to taste its flavor."</blockquote><br />
I cherish the possibility that we may still allow this continent to shape a new people, one who can live in harmony with each other on our home watersheds, this continent which we have so disrupted, this continent where we imported the worst of our European ways and now are exporting under the name of "globalization," a disease that feeds on authentic indigenous cultures, destroying them and supplanting the Golden Arches.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-13285632240676950532010-06-22T14:24:00.000-07:002010-11-04T14:29:08.930-07:00Matrilineality and honoring our foremothersToday I had an extraordinary encounter with a foremother, an ancestor who stood firm in her vision during the years when deals were being struck and friendships betrayed.<br />
<br />
I was first attracted by Sally Roesch Wagner's book Sisters in Spirit that documents how the Iroquois clanmothers made a terrific impact with their matrilineal way of life on our feminist foremothers from European stock. Her findings allowed my characters to move forward with what seemed the obvious outcome of their contact with each other: a high regard for the matrilineal way of life.<br />
<br />
Sally's work must be acknowledged for her contribution to my thinking, in my next novel Linen Shroud, book two of the Textile Trilogy (where the impact of her research comes into play more,) here, on my website, and in all arenas where I present matrilineality as a possible return to an earlier way of life that may have been widespread on many continents and in many cultures, if the archaeological evidence is to be credited.<br />
<br />
Sally was given the gift of directing the Matilda Jocelyn Gage Foundation, to re-introduce a woman who held the line for women's rights so consistently throughout her visionary life, seeing women's rights as a cornerstone which could hold a whole house aloft, a house that connects religious freedom, our ability of imagine a parallel world (she was the mother in law and muse of Frank Baum, creator of the Oz world,) the slavery that all of us are afflicted with even today (she was the first to refer to sex trafficking e.g.,) the influence of the Haudenausanee--paradigm in our time of a matrilineal culture that has held its identity continuously--and reproductive rights.<br />
<br />
Who has heard her name? When Anthony and Stanton struck a deal with the Women's Christian Temperance Union, narrowing the focus on getting the vote, and away from women's rights, Matilda Jocelyn Gage was struck from the historical record of feminism. The break came on the issue of religious freedom. Today we are in the grip of the tyranny of religious fundamentalism.<br />
<br />
A new lightning rod, a mecca for women's rights is springing up--not in Seneca Falls--but in Fayetteville, adjacent to the Onondaga and the Erie Canal.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-29377972816929636042010-06-09T14:36:00.000-07:002010-11-04T14:39:02.202-07:00Interview with Jason Wright publisher of Oddball MagazineI'm attending a week's certification course in Literary Small Press Publishing at Emerson College in Boston MA with a dozen other small press entrepreneurs.<br />
<br />
Yesterday, Jason Wright of Oddball Magazine interviewed me about my recently released book Burning Silk, doing it on his phone and then adding commentary (like this) on his blog. www.oddballmagazine.com (I think.) So today I interviewed Jason and am learning how to post this interview on my blog, schooled by my mates who are blog savvy.<br />
<br />
(Video interview forthcoming.)<br />
I also did a second interview with Margery Hannah who is working on a novel. Stay tuned for that interview.<br />
<br />
Settle in and hear about Jason and his rapprochement with bipolar disease. His commitment to Oddball Magazine. And his strangely but pleasingly unshielded personality.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-26226051239000404722010-05-05T15:09:00.000-07:002010-11-04T15:11:08.212-07:00Green Jobs and the Edible SchoolyardIn response to the article in the April 28 issue of East Bay Express airing the controversy about the value of Alice Waters inspired Edible Schoolyard at King Middle School, Caitlan Flanagan writing in The Atlantic misses the essential point. Children whose families raise food in their backyards are privileged children, regardless of whether their parents also send them to exclusive summer camps and travel abroad. Even Luke Tsoi, author of the article, brings his cultural baggage, opining that “the truth of the matter is that California is in crisis right now with its failure to equip so many of its students with the basic skills that they’ll need to go on to college and become successful.” Our failure as a society is this, to offer ourselves and our children one measure of privilege, one measure of success.<br />
<br />
<br />
My experience working with at-risk kids on the Susquehanna watershed replicates what Eichorn reports in the Edible Garden. Unsurprisingly, restoration work on one’s own watershed and/or tapping into our ancient agricultural heritage in a harmonious way—seed, water, harvest, prepare and share—restores the child. And restores the human. This unrelenting focus on standardized testing to the exclusion of pursuits that make us more human are shortsighted. But then shortsightedness is perhaps the most descriptive quality of human development at this time, the one that is driving our species and other species and the planet MAD: mutually assured destruction.<br />
<br />
Green jobs, now in its infant stage, will be the harbinger of a future that is sustainable. What a pity that Recovery dollars have focused on shovel-ready highway jobs rather than (for example) restoring the estimated 25,000 miles of West Virginia streams that have been despoiled by mountaintop removal of coal. The brief respite we and our pollinators experienced last year with State Departments of Transportations’ frugality will surely see a summer of blasted median strips, as the chemical companies restock DOT supplies for poisoning our wild verges and streams.<br />
<br />
I still believe that Green Jobs is on Obama’s checklist and that he will get back to a National Service Program for our young people. In the meantime, Edible Schoolyard isn’t a program, it’s a movement. It can’t be stopped by the shortsighted.<br />
<br />
Sincerely,<br />
<br />
Destiny Kinal<br />
<br />
Publisher, sitio/tiempopress<br />
<div><br />
</div>Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-551695292649256085.post-54533513004275553822010-04-16T15:12:00.000-07:002010-11-04T15:17:16.738-07:00What makes Burning Silk a Reinhabitory Novel?In case you wondered...<br />
What makes Burning Silk a Reinhabitory Novel?<br />
<br />
I had been waiting for someone to ask the question. David Simpson did.<br />
<br />
What makes Burning Silk a reinhabitory novel and further, what makes the book ideal to introduce sitio/tiempo press? The first book should set a bar.<br />
<br />
True, Burning Silk is fiction, while most of our writings have been poetry and nonfiction. And it features a female protagonist and a strong sensory coda. And yet Burning Silk, the first in the Textile Trilogy, is a reinhabitory novel through and through.<br />
<br />
Adaptation to the watershed<br />
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In the voice of a member of the silkmakers’ family, the book quotes Zenuemon of Japan as their guide: “Quality of silkseed and filament can only be improved by gradually adapting a strain of moth to regional climactic and geographic conditions.” The story documents a rare instance in the history of raising silk, of moving a domesticated silkmoth to a different continent, to acclimate to a different and unique home watershed. The Duladiers, a French Huguenot silkmaking family, collaborate with their native American neighbors on the Delaware watershed to find a native silkmoth to mate successfully with their domesticated one, a risky venture that could accelerate acclimatization.<br />
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Assimilation and differing ways-of-life<br />
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This not-very-subtle metaphor is echoed between the native and European families, who also have a metis child incubating in the womb by the end of thebook. And in a syndrome that has historically plagued metis communities, problems arise between the cultures. In the second book in the Textile Trilogy, Linen Shroud, conflict also arises between the Iroquois warrior societies and Quaker pacifists regarding participation in the American Civil War. And there’s a third element: the women of the silk worship a female deity, The Black Madonna, who--cruel when necessary--abhors war.<br />
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All of these conflicts are strongly reinhabitory, as we witness the differences in ways-of-life tear apart this family who has intermarried...and witness the victory of the industrial revolution over the traditional guild way of life<br />
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The third novel, Oil and Water, set on the early oil fields in NY/PA, dramatizes the triumph of the Petroleum Age over arts-and-crafts sensibilities as oil becomes the prevailing definition of modernity.<br />
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Part of the historical analysis we are calling reinhabitory involves seeing how these conflicts and struggles have formed the legacy we have inherited.<br />
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Matrilineality: agricultural societies<br />
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The proximity of matrilineal native neighbors–where everything, clan, property, land, name, comes through the maternal Archives line —lead European women directly on the path to Seneca Falls seeking similar rights and status. This buried history is<br />
a deep reinhabitory issue which has received no attention anywhere that I can find, a task to which reinabitory fiction is well suited.<br />
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Reinhabitory fiction<br />
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My idea of reinhabitory fiction draws heavily on Milan Kundera's notion that the role of history in the novel is to reinhabit those critical crossroads in history where we buried certain values "in that vast cemetery of forgetting," and walked on with others. This definition is still a rough draft but it moved Jerry Martien to say he had a novel which he also felt was reinhabitory fiction. He describes it as a land use story.<br />
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“It re-tells the events of the Lincoln County War, takes it back to Billy the Kid’s origins in the myth of Pan, the old nature god, and forward to the assassination of his killer and biographer Pat Garrett in 1908. The story is documented by an El Paso reporter who’s a recovering war correspondent wounded in the Philippines, our first foreign adventurer in empire. It’s all the same war, re-enacts the same question, whether the land belongs to us or we belong to the land.”<br />
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We hope to raise $50,000 in the next six months, so that we can publish The Authentic Life in the manner it describes and move forward with other books waiting in the pipeline.<br />
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The Future<br />
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We plan to publish other creative reinhabitory works, such as plays that have been produced over the last three decades to enthusiastic audiences, and both children’s and young adult books.<br />
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We have extensive group experience in letterpress printing, access to print studio, and some extraordinary poets who would love to have limited edition printing of their work.<br />
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Art, music, architecture: it’s time to expand the range of bioregional thinking and practice. If the First Wave was defining bioregionalism, and the Second Wave was tying together the groups who grasped the concept immediately and imported it to their home watershed, may the Third Wave be marked by the imprint of sitio/tiempo press.Destinyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18096701442137079747noreply@blogger.com0