Nadia Ellis’ Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora brilliantly articulates how black diasporic belonging transcends dominant understandings of identity based on locality/time/space. By analyzing the modalities in which “difficulty and loss” (5) become affective spaces of communal negation, Ellis explores the “gap between here and there” where the black diasporic subject’s […]
Books
An evening of storytelling with Nancy Corson Carter
On Wednesday, June 27th, I attended a reading by Nancy Carson Carter on her new book, The Never-Quite Ending War: A WWII GI Daughter’s Stories. Nancy illuminated stories of her family, both those that are her own and others that have passed down to her. Many of the stories she shared with us were typical […]
Swimming Between Worlds
I confess, much as I’m drawn to a bottle of wine with a provocative label, I’m also attracted to a book with high-profile accolades. So, when I was handed a copy of Elaine Neil Orr’s new book, Swimming Between Worlds, I flipped it over as a matter of habit to peruse those high-profile accolades, and found […]
Art-Party and Fundraiser for Bryant Holsenbeck’s Book, “The Last Straw”
When people are gathered for an art party, one may imagine paint, canvases, and brushes, or at least some paper and scissors. Since Bryant Holsenbeck was involved, something would be repurposed. But, despite official assurances that the artist herself would be there to guide and assist, I never thought all present would have the opportunity […]
Saving Bobby
On average, 115 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose.[1] That is one American every 12.5 minutes, a staggering statistic. As a public health professional with over a decade experience in injury and violence prevention, which includes poisonings such as drug overdoses, reading Saving Bobby: Heroes and Heroin in One Small Community provided me a rare […]
Ursula K. Le Guin
Once upon a time I used Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea in a first-year writing class centered on the theme of what makes a hero. I loved it. The students loved it. Since then, though, she has mostly hovered around the edges of my consciousness, even though she is among the most […]
Whiskey & Ribbons: A Novel
Click here to read RCWMS Communications Director Meghan Florian’s review of Whiskey & Ribbons for The Englewood Review of Books. Whiskey & Ribbons, Leesa Cross-Smith’s first novel, is a love story folded inside of a love story. It is a novel about grief, about family, about how we hold one another together when everything falls apart. The character […]
The Middle of Things: Essays
In the tradition of classic essayists from Virginia Woolf to Annie Dillard, Meghan Florian combines personal narrative with careful analysis, taking the ordinary material of undramatic daily life and distilling it into moments of clarity and revelation. Centering each essay in this collection on a different aspect of coming of age as a feminist woman […]
I Await the Devil’s Coming
When a friend handed me I Await the Devil’s Coming, a slim and red-covered volume, she was fairly reticent about its content. “Looks cool,” I commented. “What’s it about?” She stammered for a bit, and finally settled on her answer: “Just give it a shot. It’s hard to explain.” Intrigued and vaguely mystified, I slipped […]
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
One of the most useful terms I’ve learned, passed on to me by Kari Barclay, is “Kingsplaining.” It’s a verb that describes the process by which people in power use misleading representations of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work to claim that contemporary activists’ techniques are illegitimate. For example, during the Charlotte Uprising, some white guy […]
Young Adult Lit
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. I used to defend myself when caught on my university campus with a book marketed to teenagers propped in my lap, but honestly, who has the energy? So I’ll just say it straight-out: I love young adult novels. There really is nothing like them. Lovely prosey stories wrapped up […]
Wild Mountain
In Wild Mountain, Mona Duval has concocted a tidy life for herself in the rural town of Wild Mountain, Vermont. Escaped (mostly) from a bad marriage, she runs a general store next to an historic covered bridge—a bridge she loves so much, she literally wrote the book on its history. When an ice storm collapses the […]
The Handmaid’s Tale
I recently found a used copy of The Handmaid’s Tale at a local library book sale. In preparation for Hulu’s television adaptation I decided it was finally time to fill in this gap in my reading life, since I generally avoid watching screen adaptations of books I haven’t read. The timing was…well, not quite good, […]
Women’s Bodies as Battlefield
I was speaking with a friend last week about watching the third presidential debate. She remarked that she wanted to skip it, but would probably watch to remind herself that this is really happening. I understood what she meant. I, too, have wanted to turn away from the poisonous rhetoric and unprecedented divisiveness of this […]
Faithfully Feminist
“Survival is a creative act,” Erica Granados De La Rosa writes in her essay, “What Has Remained.” Survival is a creative act. And it is from such creation, and Creation, that the stories of Faithfully Feminist emerge. Faithfully Feminist is a collection of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian womyn speaking back at the question: why do […]
Something New
I love food. Growing it, cooking it, eating it, sharing it with friends. I also love to read, so it should come as no surprise that when I came across Lucy Knisley’s graphic memoir Relish: My Life in the Kitchen I knew I had to have it. I picked up a signed edition at a conference, and Knisley had […]
The Humble Essay
As memoir has surged in popularity, this other beloved nonfiction form, the essay, seems to go in and out of style. Critics alternately lament the demise or herald the resurgence of the essay, and despite the wild success of recent volumes like Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, there are plenty of people ready to tell you that essay […]
Summer Reading Retrospective
This summer I set out to read only books by women. This was not hard to do, though I struggled once or twice to maintain my commitment when I came across the occasional intriguing title by a man. They could wait. I’ve spent most of my life reading books by men. Most of us have, […]
Searching for Sunday
In the 70’s, we boomers raged and sneered about the Generation Gap. Those we now call ‘the greatest generation’ appeared to us youngsters as blind to the present and busy with traditions and values that had nothing to do with what we saw around us. Rachel Held Evans’ latest book reminds me that the gap […]
Lessons in Belonging
I didn’t expect to like this book. I started it only because the author is a fellow board member at RCWMS and reading it seemed like the congenial thing to do. Plus, the title caught my attention. Erin and I have at least one thing in common; I, too, am a commitment phobe. Unlike Erin, […]
God’s Hotel
I wish God’s Hotel were a book with pictures. No matter how precise Victoria Sweet’s descriptions, the world her words conjure is difficult to imagine. A hospital that looks more like a peach-colored, red-roofed monastery. Turrets, archways, and a tower with tucked-away priests’ quarters. Sixty-two acres of land, complete with a greenhouse, solarium, an aviary, and two […]
On Immunity: An Inoculation
It seems like every time I turn around these days I run into another story about vaccination. To me the message seems clear: everyone without a contraindicating medical issue should get vaccinated, especially for measles, but probably in general. Refusing to do so endangers the health of those who can’t. It seems pretty straightforward to […]
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
I’m usually skeptical about film adaptations of my favorite books, but after laughing and crying my way through reading Wild last fall, I was thrilled to learn the film was coming out the next month, and now I’m thrilled with the Oscar nominations for Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. Actually, I was skeptical about picking up the […]
Citizen: An American Lyric
Those unfamiliar with the breadth of contemporary poetry may be surprised when they crack the cover of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. A collage of prose poems, short essays, and images, Citizen often reads more like experimental nonfiction than poetry. None of this is to decry the book’s merits; on the contrary, it is smart, finely crafted, as […]