International Women’s Day and Jane Addams

Yes, I’m a day late, but that’s because I’ve been thinking about this for several days and wanted to get it right.

Jane Addams is one of those amazing women who were famous and revered in their day, and then somehow disappeared from sight, in spite of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, her contributions and influence swept away by changing fashion, and dare I say it, because her social ideals are labeled too “feminine.” Ideals like feeding starving children, providing healthcare and education for immigrants, and keeping us out of World War I (for which there was a great deal of support across the country). Oh yes, and for supporting something as outrageous as the 8 hour working day.

You know, all those girly things.

She was a great hero of mine when I was a child, one of the few women included in my K-12 curriculum. A little hint of 1890s radicalism remained in our curriculum, thanks probably to the influence of Dewey and the Lab School in Chicago, since I grew up near Chicago. When I hear the nonsense spouted about immigration in our country right now, I think of her wise and thoughtful approach to considering the value immigrants bring to their new country, as well as what we owe to them. The same arguments and rhetoric we are hearing now have been used over the last several hundred years with astonishing regularity, from the time California passed a law to expel the Chinese, to deploring the “dirty and degenerate” Irish or Italians or Poles or Greeks in Chicago in the nineteenth-century.

Jane Addams addressed this head on at Hull House, set up to provide assistance to the wretchedly poor and exploited labor pool fueling the wealth of the stockyards, the railroads, and the other companies run by the titans of industry in Chicago.

I read her autobiographical account, Twenty Years at Hull House in college and was surprised at her cultural approach to the immigrant communities. The arguments she was making were anthropological arguments for the differences in how the different communities adapted. And her insights about the embarrassment the children of immigrants felt for their parents’ old country ways were very shrewd. Hull House’s Labor Museum of crafts and industries from the ‘old country” helped the younger generation appreciate the skills and knowledge of their parents:

“There has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has revealed the charm of woman’s primitive activities. I recall a certain Italian girl who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class in the same building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museum exhibit; and yet Angelina always left her mother at the front door while she herself went around to a side door because she did not wish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the rest of the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over her head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening, however, Angelina saw her mother surrounded by a group of visitors from the School of Education who much admired the spinning, and she concluded from their conversation that her mother was “the best stick-spindle spinner in America.” When she inquired from me as to the truth of this deduction, I took occasion to describe the Italian village in which her mother had lived, something of her free life, and how, because of the opportunity she and the other women of the village had to drop their spindles over the edge of a precipice, they had developed a skill in spinning beyond that of the neighboring towns. I dilated somewhat on the freedom and beauty of that life—how hard it must be to exchange it all for a two-room tenement, and to give up a beautiful homespun kerchief for an ugly department store hat. I intimated it was most unfair to judge her by these things alone, and that while she must depend on her daughter to learn the new ways, she also had a right to expect her daughter to know something of the old ways.

That which I could not convey to the child, but upon which my own mind persistently dwelt, was that her mother’s whole life had been spent in a secluded spot under the rule of traditional and narrowly localized observances, until her very religion clung to local sanctities—to the shrine before which she had always prayed, to the pavement and walls of the low vaulted church—and then suddenly she was torn from it all and literally put out to sea, straight away from the solid habits of her religious and domestic life, and she now walked timidly but with poignant sensibility upon a new and strange shore.

It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, and at least two things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of the big box under the bed the beautiful homespun garments which had been previously hidden away as uncouth; and she openly came into the Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud at least of the mastery of the craft which had been so much admired.”

Twenty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams

What has this to do with International Women’s Day? Addams was especially active in the International women’s movement, becoming one of the founders of the organization later known as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. If you read the historical accounts of the conference they held after Hitler came to power in Germany, it’s chilling to realize that every one of their assertions about the danger of Germany re-arming (with American arms and resources) proved true. If the boycott they urged had happened, if Americans had forgone the profit they were making from Germany, who knows how history might have been different. It’s a complex subject and you can read more about it here.

My middle-grade fantasy is done. Yes, really.

It’s been a long haul, but after a thorough copy-edit by the illustrious speculative fiction writer and hardcore editor, Laura Blackwell, or She Who Requires Commas, as I shall call her henceforth, this baby is ready to spread her wings and fly.

Which is appropriate because the book is about a 12 year-old girl who talks to crows…and learns to fly.

I just had to crow a little myself, that it was finally done.

Coming back from radio silence

(New Yorker cover by Maira Kalman)

I’ve had an incredibly busy last three months, and have neglected all that was not required of me – like this blog. Two deaths in the family, barely two months apart, a writing conference, ramp up at work, and deciding about surgery…well, it’s been a lot to organize.

The writing conference was the Northern California SCBWI conference in Oakland, at the beautiful Preservation Park, a collection of restored Victorian houses where many non-profits are located. I love this location, especially when it’s not raining and you can spread out outside on the benches.

Quite unexpectedly, I won one of the writing contest prizes. It was unexpected because I thought you had to enter to win (right?) and I was sure I hadn’t, but apparently this year they simply asked each agent or editor who was critiquing manuscripts to pick their favorite. My prize was eating lunch with the Executive Editor for Dutton books for Young Readers, Andrew Karre, and we chatted about all things publishing. He read the first chapter of my Restoration YA, Glimmerglass.

But the surprises didn’t stop there: I even won one of the raffle prizes – a comp toward membership or a SCWBI conference. I never win things, so this was great. Thank you SCBWI Norcal!

Oh yes, the conference was great too. Lots of good information and great portfolios of art.

The last time I went to this conference (a couple of years ago) we got to see Katherine Applegate officially presented with her Crystal Kite award for The One and Only Ivan. She gave a most moving presentation and I was really inspired by her long journey in the industry, from turning out series books to where she is today.

More updates about actual writing later.

Controlling a writer’s legacy

I suppose this falls under the category of mordant humor, but I’ve been thinking about how much of my life is on disk lately, old disks at that, and this pops up in the news.

To ensure that his unfinished works won’t see the light of day without him, Terry Pratchett stipulated that his hard-drive was to be run over by a steamroller.

“It’s surprisingly difficult to find somebody to run over a hard drive with a steamroller.”

Myself, I plan to take my old laptops (and a lingering palm pilot) to a place in Richmond where apparently there’s a huge machine that chews them to pieces and spits them out. Not as classy as a steamroller perhaps, but who wouldn’t want to watch that? Then I can go forth into the future with a more organized file system and the ghosts of documents past taken care of (not to mention the tax returns).

Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem

A reference to this poem appeared in my twitter feed and I had to go reread it. I used to have this posted on my office door, in a clipping from the Christian Science Monitor, back when I was an academic librarian. I kept the yellowed clipping for years because the poem was a story about the power of writing and description, of naming the unspeakable, giving the reader power over it. Her words are matter of fact but powerful, and I was also fascinated by the painting of Akhmatova (above) that illustrated the article. by Nathan Altman.)

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I
spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there) – ‘Could one ever describe
this?’ And I answered – ‘I can.’ It was then that
something like a smile slid across what had previously
been just a face.
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

From the poemhunter site

Why historical fiction?

Here’s Hilary Mantel’s take, from her series on BBC Radio Four:

As soon as we die, we enter into fiction. Just ask two different family members to tell you about someone recently gone, and you will see what I mean. Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted. When we remember – as psychologists so often tell us – we don’t reproduce the past, we create it. Surely, you may say – some truths are non-negotiable, the facts of history guide us. And the records do indeed throw up some facts and figures that admit no dispute. But the historian Patrick Collinson wrote: “It is possible for competent historians to come to radically different conclusions on the basis of the same evidence. Because, of course, 99% of the evidence, above all, unrecorded speech, is not available to us.”

Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.

From “Why I became a historical novelist” in the Guardian.

The lecture is wonderful and especially needed in these times of alternative truths.

Tatterdemalion

A person in tattered clothing; a ragged or beggarly fellow; a ragamuffin.
OED

Today is Gwendolyn Brooks’ Birthday

That seems like cause for celebration.

One of my favorite poems of hers is Kitchenette Building.

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.

You can hear her read it here at the Poetry Foundation site.

I remember being introduced to her work in grade school in Illinois. That was the first time I realized women could be writers. You’d think it would’ve been Emily Dickinson, but Illinois was proud of its Poet Laureate and made sure she was taught in our classes. Ms. Brooks was alive and part of my world, not part of a distanced past. She was writing about things I’d seen and experienced myself, not Victorian philosophizing.

She and Jane Addams made growing up in Illinois a lucky thing – I was exposed to two extraordinary thinkers and writers at an early age, because they were part of local history. (And, not to pile on here, but did you know Jane Addams won the Nobel Peace prize?)

Bay Area Book Festival

I went to the second annual Bay Area Book Festival last weekend, had a great time and acquired the nifty bookbag above from PapaLlama. A truly interesting mix of topics and speakers – if you read at all you would have found something to your taste. I most enjoyed hearing Susan Griffin and Starhawk speak on this present moment in our culture. I also just liked seeing the entire community of book folks turn out, along with clowns, music, bouncy houses, carousels, food trucks. Pretty much a downtown Berkeley street fair. Also, nifty bookbag.

If you didn’t hear about it and you’re local (I think publicity is the one thing they don’t do well) you might want to get on their mailing list to be sure to catch it next year. Food for the soul.