Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing
Edited by Carol Smallwood and Suzann Holland
The Key Publishing House Inc., Toronto, Ontario (2012)
$27.99; 343 pp; ISBN: 978-1-926780-13-9
(Reviewed by Lisa Fraser)

Writing about family is a time-honored activity for women, whether it is keeping a private diary, writing a family history, or crafting a novel. And while the world of publishing offers ever-increasing opportunities for new writers, it can be difficult to take the step from writing for oneself to writing for a broader audience. Women Writing on Family is a start-to-finish resource for writers facing this challenge. Like a trusted writing group, the authors provide insight and advice on everything from mental preparation to marketing and promotion. The personal experience of the contributors lends credibility, but the focus of the book is on helping the reader to reach her writing goals.

Co-editors Carol Smallwood and Suzann Holland have assembled an impressive array of contributors for this anthology. While all are experienced authors, each has taken a different path to reach that goal. They are psychologists and nurses, college professors and secondary school teachers. Several teach writing courses, and many have won awards for their work. Their accumulated knowledge and skills are the backbone of this book. These are women whose advice I would not only trust for myself, but pass along to my friends. For example, Kezia Willingham’s contributions go to the heart of two major challenges for many women who write. In one chapter, she gives concrete tips for balancing writing, family, and work, while in the other she discusses the emotional risk of writing with honesty. Willingham knows what she’s talking about. She was a single parent and high school dropout in her teens. She has gone on to earn a Master’s in Social Work and now works for Seattle Public Schools. Her work in Women Writing on Family exemplifies her journey as a writer, a parent, and a family participant. Each of the contributions brings a similar quality of authenticity and experience, even while the ages, professions, cultures, and publishing backgrounds of their authors are widely diverse.

There are many resources for writers, some of which focus on women. The emphasis on writing about the family is what sets this book apart from the others. The unique issues that women face when they use their family as the basis for their writing transform an activity that is already highly personal into one that may be fraught with risk even while holding the potential for significant personal and professional development.

In her chapter “Family Secrets: How to Reveal What Matters Without Getting Sued, or Shunned,” Martha Engber explores the tension between the right to express oneself in writing and the emotional and legal consequences that can result from publishing others’ personal stories. She explains concepts such as libel using clear, jargon-free examples, then goes on to suggest five ways to reduce the likelihood of damaged relationships and limit exposure to legal action. Additional chapters on personal and legal issues help the reader assess her subject matter and make informed decisions about whether and how to share sensitive topics as part of her work. This advice is supplemented by insightful words meant to encourage the writer who is still uncertain whether she is ready to reveal her work—and her family—to the world.

Families are a never-ending source of stories ranging from full scenes to tiny snippets. The challenge is using your own writing style and solid technique to develop the characters, setting, and story into a finished piece with reader appeal. Women Writing on Family offers several viewpoints on crafting both fiction and nonfiction. In “Making Up Grandma: How to Blend History and Imagination Into Powerful Family Narratives,” contributor Lela Davidson offers on-target advice for effectively blending historical fact and imagination to bring family stories to life. She offers guidance on how to embellish a single incident using historical details about the place and time, as well as exploring the likely emotions of the people involved. Asserting that “…it’s a shame to let a story die just because it’s only a snippet,” Davidson gives permission to combine fact and imagination in order to portray family stories more completely.

The internet is a valuable tool for writers, and three chapters written by successful bloggers provide information about opportunities for career development through online writing projects. Other career-related topics include marketing, self-publishing, and efficient use of writing conferences. Of course, many authors writing about family are doing so between loads of laundry and during naptime. A particularly valuable section on balancing writing and family commitments provides inspiration for those days when everything seems to hit at once.

Women Writing on Family is a gift from experienced writers to their sisters who are just starting down the road to a writing career. The techniques, exercises, tools, and tips make it a resource to consult again and again. Poet or family historian, blogger or novelist, this book offers something for every woman seeking to write about family. Amazon.com includes several reviews.

LISA FRASER is a librarian with King County Library System and an adjunct lecturer at University of Washington. She writes on local and family history and library practice.

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By Jon Sands
Write Bloody Publishing  (2011) www.writebloody.com
$15.00; 120 pp; ISBN: 978-1935904267
(Reviewed by G. David, phati’tude Literary Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 1)

JON SANDS’ RISE IN THE POETRY COMMUNITY in New York and beyond these past few years has been meteoric. Known primarily as a spoken word artist, he is also a poet, writer, educator, youth worker, thinker and activist. Sands pours all of these assets into his debut poetry collection, The New Clean.

The title of this slim volume, The New Clean, asks the question: Is Sands talking about coming clean into a “new clean”? Or is “the new clean” a euphemism, like “dirty is the new clean?” The poems suggest it could go both ways, but in this collection, Sands introduces himself to readers by “coming clean” about who he is, where he came from, how he sees himself and the world around him, and possibly, where he’s going.

Sands’ poetry has a blistering intensity that almost leaves you breathless — never forceful, but always urgent. Frank, honest and moving, his work shines as he puts himself on the line — pouring out a cavalcade of emotions, letting readers know exactly what’s at stake. With a style that moves between spoken word and hip-hop beats, much of Sands work signifies an expanding demarcation of racial and cultural identity.

For those unfamiliar with “spoken word,” think of it as a lyrical short story narrative delivered through verse in about 2-4 minutes that’s loud and fast, with rebellious flair. Sands has built a reputation delivering poetry in a big voice with a hip-hop sensibility. As he navigates through different worlds — white, black, Latino, gay and straight, young and old — he traverses through Harlem and Bed-Stuy, lands somewhere in Queens, returns to Cincinnati and ends up on the West Side, presenting a true reflection of his cultural DNA.

The New Clean is divided into four sections with an asterisk, and begins with brief quotes, either from the author or from others, as varied as Walt Whitman to Nuyorican poet Willie Perdomo, or the character Harper from “Angels in America.” Rather than group the poems by theme or style, Sands elected to group them together largely by the tenor and sound of the poems, which works well in this collection.

Sands opens The New Clean with the repetitive poem, “White Boy,” letting the reader know right off the bat that he “ain’t” no ordinary white boy. “White boy coffee shop Bed-Stuy / White boy vegan. / White boy hot sauce on everything. / White boy black music // White boy black friends . . . .” In a “Waldenesque” way, he uses this playful poem to let readers know that his work is written from an untraditional white perspective. In this day and age, it’s not this perspective that “shocks” readers; rather, the joy Sands exudes in this less-than-joyful time, draws them into his work.

The poems that follow are a mixed bag of villanelles, prose poems, list poems, and free style forms that Sands have made so popular on the stage. For example, I’ve heard him perform “My Friend” about losing his cell phone and the loneliness of not having it; and “What I Know,” a villanelle that uses the word “watch” as a repetitive hook, which translates very nicely onto the page. Collectively, these poems create a narrative about Sands’ life impressions: famous people such as Etta James, Toni Morrison, Michael Cirelli, Nina Simone, Cate Blanchett, and John Murillo get brief mentions alongside friends and family members. The standouts are poems about his grandparents, which are both poignant and inspiring. And then there are a couple of love poems that talk of “me” and “her” and “she” with lines like: “. . . I miss the way your neck / wraps around my face like a cave we are both lost in. . . .” (“A Working List of Things I Will Never Tell You”). How delicious!

Poems like “Am,” “Passover (or Thursday)” and “Not About Me” are manifestos/rants that are pure Jon Sands. In “Am” Sands notes:

“I am my older brother — a sophomore in high
school, seating his
Sibling, whispering, This is what I am and I love
myself. His eyes
When I still used faggot as slang for the last time
in my life. I am old —
Tattered-trenchcoat on a woman wearing her
story on the 6 train.
The dragon, fire-breathing-defiance, Noah turned
away from his
Ark because I don’t take no shit; . . .”

In “Passover (or Thursday),” Sands confesses “. . . I am a Gemini. I am a / Vegetarian. I am a Poet. I am Jewish. . . .” He acknowledges that his family “treat our Jewish like a distant cousin,” yet acknowledges that his Jewishness is an integral part of who he is.
But it is Sands’ elegant “love letters” to his grandmother and grandfather found throughout the collection linking the past with the present, which are absolutely stunning. It’s clear that Sands love for them anchors his very being, which is evident in “Epithalamion: For Mollie and my Brother Jacob,” “Elegy,” “What I Know,” and “Turbulence.” In “Elegy,” Sands says to his grandmother:

“When he falls into the population of those
holding keys
to the big question, years from now, now — where
even
when he’s not thinking, he looks like he’s
thinking. When
he’s not detached, he looks detached. When
he’s not
mourning as life that never quite paid his due
promise.
When he does pass, and I accompany you on a
flight back
to a nursing home in Cincinnati, a city that by
then will
call to me like a slow dying, you’ll say, Its been
seventy years.
I don’t know who I am without Nat.”

What a beaut!

While Sands is a child of hip hop and the spoken word, he is not an urban outlaw, nor did he grow up in the hood. Dig deeper and you’ll find that he graduated from Ohio University, summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in Integrated Social Studies and a Spanish Minor. Obviously very bright, he excels at scratching beyond the surface. Yet Sands makes it clear that he’s not trying to sell that he is “down with folk,” rather, “he is folk.” In the end, Sands succeeds in writing poetry of astute technical variation, dimension, and diversity that readers can easily relate to.

Let’s face it, spoken word artists are a dime a dozen — everyone wants to be a star. But it’s the really good ones that are true poets, able to perform, write good poetry, and everything in between. This explains why spoken word artists like Sherman Alexie, Patricia Smith and Tara Betts have successfully made the transition to the page, where others have failed. In his debut collection, The New Clean, Jon Sands, the little boy with the big voice from Cincinnati, has proven without a doubt that not only does he write to read out loud, but that he also writes to be read.

JON SANDS, an editor of phati’tude Literary Magazine, is Director of Poetry Education Programming at the Positive Health Project (a syringe exchange center located in Midtown Manhattan), a CUNY adjunct lecturer, as well as a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC. His work has appeared in decomP, The Millions, kill author, Suss, The Literary Bohemian, Danse Macabre, and others.

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By Anne Waldman
Coffee House Press (2011) www.coffeehousepress.org
$40.00; 720 pp.; ISBN 9781566892551
(Reviewed by Jennifer-Crystal Johnson, phati’tude Literary Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 2)

SAYS ANNE WALDMAN IN THE OPENING of her book, Anew: “So poem is the song in spite of the will of Zeus. Blast him, and that willpower played out as it is doing now, twenty-first-century fix. I’ll be the gray-eyed Athena, clear-sighted through his fog of war.”

To set the tone for this epic poem, Waldman unveils a sense of feminine power and investigative curiosity intrinsically present in inquisitive minds and determined people. To research, dig deep, and uncover the truth — this is the mission and accomplishment of the few. But more than that, in order to convey the intricacies of intertwined generations and how each affected the other,this poetic and imaginative piece weaves history and fantasy together in a scarf of silk and curiosity.

“She, the muse, puts an invisible protection cord around my neck to protect me from ego. She exceeds my aspiration to disappear.”

[. . .]

“I want to don armor of words as they do and fight with liberated tongue and punctured heart. But unlike the men’s, my history and myths are personal ones. I want and need the long poem.”

Passionate and with a hidden depth, Waldman states her vision for her personal epic in the introduction, “Both, Both. We are coaxed into a world where passion and fact melt together to form a beautiful message that cannot be seen through ordinary perception.”

When you pick up The Iovis Trilogy, enter into the journey with an open mind and heart, a willingness to understand and accept beyond the popular scope of those ideas.

“I am excited but worried about this exotic girlfriend who is brewing Vietnamese coffee in the next room. “What don’t move!” He says as we’re about to kiss. “Hold that stance!” He pours a bag of cement in the robin’s egg blue porcelain sink, mixing it with hot water the way you do henna. Then he picks up a little shovel in front of the fireplace and proceeds to dump the mixture over my head. It feels good and quells desire.”

This type of imagery is sprinkled amidst glimpses of blatant truth and personal experience like stars in a blackened sky. Use your imagination: the ordinary and extraordinary, the history and myth, meld with the cacophony that is present day mediocrity.

Delightfully human yet still enchanted with the world, Waldman paints worlds with her words that make you laugh, cry, question, and reconsider. The state of mind that only emerges in dreams and imagination is suddenly awoken and ignited . . .

“Brenda carries a nightstick. Kaitlyn wears a long black leather trenchcoat. Judy is blasé, administrative, & sits back. Types. Brenda will be on edge. Kaitlyn will strut & pace back & forth like a streetwalker. Anne steers this vocal constellation, shifts gears to interject surprise, moves at irregular intervals. We hold text in hand. Use it in gestures, as obstacle, as point of reference that we carry tangible words with us. Voices will come in on top of one another. Now purify the ground of ritual theater. This is to be heard as a four-part Sprechstimme conversation in the head of an insomniac.”

At once an interpretation of the historical and mythical as well as of her own self and life, this creation, destruction, observation of worlds is a refreshingly colorful collection of thoughts — as one, combined, linear, but standing tall alone. Equal parts politics, insomnia, and emotional highs.

“What is the lore
of love?
deals & false erections
missile deployments
trigger happy”

When reading and perusing this manifestation of Anne Waldman’s imagination and experience, I found myself swept up and swept away, swept sideways and upside down, to a level of confusion and then, the “Aha!” that is immeasurably hard to come by. The humor and irony in this book amazed me, while the comparisons and imagery left me in awe. We can learn a great deal from this poet.

“I have a case of a very simple woman’s
mind going in more than a few directions”
Queue the epiphany.

ANNE WALDMAN has published more than forty books of poetry, and her work has been widely anthologized, A co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado (now Naropa University), she is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and the Director of Naropa’s famous Summer Writing Program.

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By Runo Isaksen
Interlink Pub Group (2008) www.interlinkbooks.com
$18.00; 222 pp.; ISBN-10: 1566567300
(Reviewed by G. David, phati’tude Literary Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 3)

WHILE AMERICAN LITERATURE COVERS an abundance of ethnic literatures and a myriad of social and political issues, the unifying factor is the English language. On the other hand, Israeli literature is a bit more complex; while the literature is unified by religion, works classed as Israeli literature are written in five languages; with Hebrew as the dominant language, some Israeli authors write in Yiddish, English, Arabic and Russian.

But that’s not all. Political and social scenarios are vast, ranging from Zionism (which has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland), to religious viewpoints as vast as “secular”(where a person’s Jewish identity is largely independent of traditional religious belief and practice) or of those individuals who follow an orthodoxy religion. To add to the mix, Israeli writers are of different backgrounds: Ashkenazi (Jews primarily from European countries); Sephardic (Arab Jews, also known as “Mizrahi,” who come from the Iberian Peninsula, African and Middle Eastern countries); and Muslim and Christian Arabs who live in Israel, whose work is often classed as “Palestinian” literature along with Palestinian writers, an affiliation that is national rather than territorial.

So it is in this context that Norwegian writer Runo Isaksen sets out to investigate the inner-workings of these writers in Literature and War: Conversations with Israeli and Palestinian Writers, an illuminating collection of interviews of novelists and poets, which he conducted in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in 2002 and 2003.

Editor Isaksen is a Norwegian novelist, active in Norwegian writers’ groups, who became increasingly curious about whether literature can bridge the divide between peoples at war. A founding member of Israel’s Peace Now movement in 1977, Isaksen has been a political player for decades, giving him a firm grounding in the conflict and its literary legacy.  Norway’s active role in sponsoring Arab-Israeli negotiations and support for Palestinian cultural institutions inspired him to consider the political and social roles of writers. One example of this socio-political power on the part of writers is Isaksen’s belief that connections between black and white writers helped end apartheid in South Africa.  The key question that Isaksen poses in each interview is whether literature can play a role in helping one side see the other.

The book consists of 14 interviews with writers including Israel writers Etgar Keret, David Grossman (“The Yellow Wind”), Orly Castel-Bloom and Amos Oz (perhaps Israel’s most famous writer); and Palestinian writers Yahya Yakhlif, Mahmoud Shuqair, Sahar Khalifeh and Liana Badr. Isaksen, who conducts these interviews in the writers’ homes or in the cafes of Tel Aviv and Ramallah, examines the obligation artists feel (or don’t feel) to help bring peace to the region, the differences between being an Israeli and being a Jew, the likelihood of true democracy in Israel, the meaning of exile and statehood in the minds of Palestinians as well as other weighty topics.

Isaksen’s idealistic notion doesn’t quite succeed.  First, comparing South Africa to Israel is like comparing apples and oranges. Israel’s situation is far more complex than South Africa’s, especially when you factor in religion, ethnic and nationalist strife compounded by an ongoing war.  In other words, too many issues exist between the Israelis and Palestinians and it cannot be cured with a stroke of a pen.  On one point the writers agree: a true cultural exchange will have no effect until a political solution has been reached and the bombings have stopped. In a sense, what these interviews do confirm is how far each cultural community has to go before truly understanding or even engaging the other in a meaningful way.

This doesn’t mean that Isaksen’s book is not worthy of a read, in fact it’s absolutely riveting.  Isaksen let’s the writers speak for themselves, and in doing so, they reveal how their narrative is complicated by problems of religious beliefs, nationalism, war, terrorism and military occupation; how it frames their subjectivity, with each side staking a claim to a certain way of being and belonging to a land they co-inhabit.

Perhaps the most interesting points raised in Literature and War is when the writers assess their own cultures, providing insight into a touchy subject that is rarely visible to the general public.  The interviews are illuminating in many other ways too.  Arab writers, on both the Israeli and Palestinian side, point to how the minority Jewish population from Europe, with the legacy of the Holocaust defining their understanding of themselves, dominates Israeli culture. Jewish and non-Jewish Arabs, who make up the majority of Israelis, complain that their own diverse cultural heritage has been systematically marginalized. The Palestinians complain that Israel has no interest in Arabic translations, and the Israelis complain that the Arabs have no interest in Hebrew translations.  Isaksen, who is fascinated with the efficacy of Arabic modernism in a culture where these taboos severely restrict artistic freedom, further probes and asks each Palestinian whether sex, religion and politics are Arabic taboos in literature.  They all concur that social taboos are a problem and that they must find ways to address certain issues subtly.

Isaksen divides the book evenly between Israeli and Palestinian authors. The section on Israeli authors is considerably stronger and more reflective of the diversity of opinion in Israel.  The Palestinian section is less revealing, because physical access to the writers themselves was challenging, whether it was the difficulty of getting into Gaza, or the fact that a number of Palestinian writers split their time between Palestine and Europe and were out of town.

Overall, Literature and War presents an honest and candid dialogue with writers of different ages, genders, and styles, linked by a common experience of life in a culture under siege. These writers also share a number of sharp insights into the process, promise and limits of art in the face of war.  Isaksen may not have determined if either side can know the other through literature, but in Literature and War he has succeeded in interviewing some of the more eloquent observers of the interminable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These dialogues — urgent, humorous, despairing and hopeful — are themselves a first step toward peace.

RUNO ISAKSEN lives in Bergen, Norway. He has a Master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Norway, and has published four novels about modern Norwegian life, and has worked as a freelance journalist for several newspapers and magazines. Isaksen works for The Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Higher Education (SIU) is a public Norwegian agency that promotes international cooperation in education and research.

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By Sayd Majrouh, Marjolijn de Jager (Tr)
Other Press (2010)  www.otherpress.com
$14.95; 128 pp.; ISBN-10: 1590513983
(Reviewed by Rebecca Kaye, phati’tude Literary Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 3)

SONGS OF LOVE AND WAR: AFGHAN WOMEN’S POETRY is a collection of two-line poems — called landays — improvised and sung by thousands of anonymous female voices. The poems stem from an oral tradition among Afghan women and it is only through the efforts of the editor, poet and visionary Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, and two diligent translators, André Velter and Marjolijn de Jager, that they have become accessible to us in Songs of Love and War. As Majrouh explains in his wonderfully succinct introduction, the landay (literally, the “short one”) is a form of Pashtun poetry centered on the invocations of women. With very specific rules of versification, the landay is comprised of two lines, nine and thirteen syllables, which enthrall the audience with brief and touching melodies. Majrouh also offers insight into the historical and cultural context of these mournful songs which tackle themes of female beauty, defiance, male honor, exile, battle and death as well as sexual and political power struggle and disempowerment.

One of the most striking qualities of Songs of Love and War is that you do not have to be familiar with the tumultuous political history or the displacement of the Afghan People to appreciate the beauty of the landays; you do not have to know of the treatment of women nor the loss of home and country to understand and empathize with their lament. The act of reading the lines is enough; the strong, simple language sings,their melodies imprinted as both foreign and familiar, a powerful reminder of a forgotten mother tongue of longing, loss and insatiable hunger for change.

Lines such as “the woman in exile never stops dying” reflect a pathos and an understanding of displacement that is universal, a “cry of separation” that could have arisen from any era, any country and from any individual facing oppression. Similarly, the landays that address sensuality and sexual longing are frank and empowering,speaking to the boundlessness of human desire: “My mouth is yours, devour it and be not afraid. It is not made of sugar that might be dissolved.” Majrouh uses such displays of sentiment as a springboard for the examination of how the landays function as the sole outlet for Pashtun women to air the subversive personal and political frustrations that they must keep hidden from the society of men: “See the dreadful tyranny of husbands: He beats me then forbids my weeping.” The poetry of Afghan women is a forbidden art as much as the sexuality and the derision towards the “gesticulations of masculinity” that they express are forbidden fruits from which the Pashtun women have willingly and copiously eaten.

While Songs of Love and War is unquestionably universal in the scope of its lament, the knowledge Majrouh imparts in his notes on the poems, concerning the specific context of repression that engendered this poetic form, renders the directness and sparseness of the landays even more poignant. What is ultimately so very striking about Songs of Love and War is that the authoresses say in few words that which ought not to be spoken at all. While the men around them defend their virility and the statutes of patriarchy with recourse to an established canon of religious texts, the nameless, faceless multitude of Pashtun women, growing out of an environment of scarcity and exercising a “profound and pure restraint,” patiently weave the substance of their rebellion twenty-two syllables at a time. Songs of Love and War is the result of this sustained effort and is essential reading for anyone interested in the powerful emotions of love, loss, defiance and longing that mark the human condition.

SAYD BAHODINE MAJROUH earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Montpellier, later serving as the Dean of the Department of Literature in Kabul, Afghanistan, and then as the Governor of the Province of Kapia. After the Soviet invasion, he went into exile in Peshawar, Pakistan, where he founded the Afghan Information Center. The literary heir of Rumi and Omar Khayyam, his epic, Ego-Monstre, constitutes the whole of the major poetic work of twentieth-century Afghan literature. He was assassinated in 1988 in Peshawar.

MARJOLIJN DE JAGER was born in Indonesia, raised in the Netherlands, and has been living in the US since 1958. She is an award-winning literary translator from French and Dutch to English, with a special interest in francophone African and Middle Eastern women writers.

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