Tag Archives: writing

Putting a Value on Free Education

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Last December, I had a chance to meet with Jamshed Bharucha, the new President of Cooper Union in his office with other Cooper Union Alumni.  During this meeting, I asked to what extent the tuition model has been developed. “On the question of how much tuition would be charged, how many would have to pay and how much of it they would have to pay, we’ve hired a consultant,” Bharucha said. “It’s a specialty now. It’s called enrollment management. We’ve hired one of the top enrollment management firms. They will do the market research.”

He reiterated that “any student that merits a Cooper Union education should not be denied one because of lack of affordability…but for those who can afford to pay—”

“Has that been defined?” I interjected, “for those who can afford to pay.”

“No it hasn’t been defined,” Bharucha said. “It is a consideration. It has to be costed out.”

While these items are costed out, and the ‘market research’ is performed, it is equally important to be able to articulate the value of a free education.

Last fall, Litia Perta, wrote a wonderful article in The Brooklyn Rail, called “Why Cooper Union Matters. ”  It  inspired many of us to think about our own Cooper experiences in a larger context.   The following is a personal reflection on my Cooper Union education that has been posted on the Friends of Cooper Union Testimonials Page:

Continue reading →

Green is the New Red: Cutting through the Fog of Fear

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Congrats to Will Potter! His debut book, Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege, has recently been nominated by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best nonfiction books of 2011. I was first introduced Potter’s work through articles he wrote for Satya Magazine  on the  “chilling effect” of the government crackdown on activists. Potter had been researching how animal and environmental activists became  the FBI’s number one domestic terrorist threat. He had also provided testimony against the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Since then, he has been reporting actively on what he calls the “Green Scare” on his blog, and last April, his book compiling years of research was released.

Green is the New Red is a thought-provoking and riveting read that examines several legal cases against activists. He gives particular attention to Operation Backfire, a series of arsons that took place in the late 1990s, as well as the activists arrested for their campaign to Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC7). The book opens with the story of Daniel McGowan, who is also the main subject of recent film If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.

Green is the New Red embodies one of my favorite forms of writing. It is part memoir, part history, part investigative journalism. Belonging to the school of “new journalism,” where an author acknowledges his role in the story, this book  is a thrilling read for both its exhaustive research and the intimate nature of the telling. Potter is reporter, activist and friend. While I find the resulting combined perspective to be one of the book’s greatest strengths, balancing these selves while writing had its challenges:

“No matter how many times I might think I’ve escaped these compartmentalized roles of being either a friend or a journalist, of either being part of the story or telling it, I find that I’m still trying to walk the line between them.” Continue reading →

Junot Diaz and Min Jin Lee Tell it Like it is #origins #doubt #why people want to become writers

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Last Saturday, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop hosted their third annual Pageturner Literary Festival (“the Siberian Literary Festival,” Granta Magazine Editor John Freeman joked when introducing his panel in the afternoon). Those of us who braved the snow/wind/rain to attend the amazing programs at Powerhouse Arena and Melville House, were very glad they made the trek. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the day then camped out in DUMBO, listening to heartwarming stories celebrating 20 years of AAWWs, a panel on Occupy Wall Street (“There’s a reason why revolutions always happen in the spring”), and another on China and India with Siddartha Deb and Jianying Zha and their “menageries of profiles of people.” Amitava Kumar and Hishan Matar discussed the war on terror and straddling the line between activism and art, and one could just listen to Amitav Ghosh forever discuss history and opium.

One of the highlights of my day was watching Junot Diaz and Min Jin Lee “hang out.” The program description was exactly that. I wasn’t sure what this would entail,  but I was so happy I stuck around to find out. Though neither one of them really uses twitter, the conversation was split up into hash tags. #origins, #doubt, #why people want to become writers. I am going to break this post into # origins, #doubt, #the reader and #we don’t sell anyway Continue reading →

Hiroshima in the Morning; Brooklyn in the Afternoon

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It is a beautiful Sunday.  Mookie knows this before we do.  She lays her head on the side of bed, urging us to wake up.  I look at the clock.  We overslept and her vocal communications may have nothing to do with the weather out, and more to do with the fact that she really has to go.  Patiently, she waits as I throw on a hoodie and  pants over my PJs.  Poop bags and treats fill my pockets and we race across the street to the park.  It is gorgeous out, but our morning walk is quick, just enough to get her business done.  There seems to be some sort of a march.  Occupy Brooklyn, I wonder/hope?  No, there are legions in pink, a walk for—against—breast cancer.  They are beautiful, strong and expansive.  But it is too much stimulation for Mookie, and we retreat back home.

Wan and I prep veggies to go into tonight’s vegan chili.  He then drinks chia seed water and programs his playlist for his Sunday long run.  My husband is training for the upcoming New York City Marathon.  Today he plans to run 23 miles.  While Mookie sun bathes in the light pouring in our living room window, I ponder what I should do this afternoon.

Perhaps go for a run myself, or a bike ride?   I really should write.  Keep working on the manuscript; make edits to pieces to send out for submissions; tweak the ending of this; write the beginning of that.  I often feel that in my limited spare time I have to choose between exercise and writing; reading and sleeping.  There isn’t enough time for all, and I’m never satisfied in my progress in any.

I choose to read this afternoon.  Not one of the four books I’m currently immersed in for pleasure or research, but something new.

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto‘s, Hiroshima in the Morning, was just nominated for the Asian American Writers Workshop literary award in nonfiction.   I received a copy, a generous gift, at my first Associates Board meeting at the AAWW this Friday.

I was intrigued by the blurb on the back cover :

“….The parallel narratives of Hiroshima in the survivors’ own words, and of Rizzuto’s personal awakening show memory not as history, but as a story we tell ourselves to explain who we are.”

As I write my own stories that blend memory and history, I cherish examining other narratives and the choices made in their creation.   The very first page, the very first words, draw me in: Continue reading →

Poetry and Performance; Process and Product

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We could all use more poetry in our lives.  I realized that last Friday night while at a book party for Ed Bok Lee and Patrick Rosal at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.  Both Lee and Rosal read a few long narrative poems-“a subversive act” in our 140 character lives, Rosal said about the form.

“Couldn’t you just listen to these guys all night?,” the executive director of AAWW asked the crowd after the reading.

Yes. I thought.  It was these long poems that spoke to me.  As I listened to Lee read his poems, I watched his body perform them.

“Every Poem is a Performance,” I once heard a poet announce at a reading.   I remember my writing professor, Louise DeSalvo saying, “There’s practice, and there’s performance.”   She reminded us that musicians, dancers, athletes practice every day but they don’t perform every day.  We build up to that.  As writers, we need to adopt a similar understanding.  We work toward that final performance.

Lee’s body knew the words before he spoke them. It was from revision, revisiting, practice  that this poem, this performance was possible.

What I love about going to see poetry performed, is listening to the narrative introductions some poets give about their work.  What inspired this particular poem.  What triggered it.  I sometimes crave that sort of introduction in poetry books.  While the poems themselves do stand alone, I love learning about their incarnation.  Just as their is practice and performance, there is also process and product.

Both Lee and Rosal talked about the earth’s dying languages.  Rosal noted that areas in linguistic decline are also the areas of signficiant ecological loss.  Languages and lives vulnerable to perhaps the same destructive forces.

Lee’s poem “Whorled,” addresses this and opens with:

“Dear speaker in a future age/when only a handful of tongues remain/I write this to you as a song/even as I know it won’t do.”

I enjoyed listening to Lee’s poem “Regenesis” and the backstory of  the “tiny aluminum spoon that could feed crumbs to an ant.”

It was history behind the poem “If in America,” that stirred my interest.  How the story of a Hmong man charged with murder and its portrayal in the New York Times resulted in anger by this writer and later in poetry.  Process is sometimes is equally as fascinating as product.

A Handful of Walnuts

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Every now and then, I read something that I immediately want to share with everyone I know.    I had such an experience recently while reading the current issue of Granta. The issue in print and online has some fantastic writing. (Shout outs to Hunter College MFA Alum Phil Klay and Samantha Smith).  I also really appreciated Nuruddin Farah’s “Crossbones” and Tahar Ben Jelloun’s “A Tale of Two Martyrs,” as well as work featured by Alia Malek and V.V. Ganeshananthan online.  Do check it out.

It was Ahmed Errachidi’s “A Handful of Walnuts.” that triggered something deep. I shared it with lawyer friends, animal loving friends, a friend in prison, writing friends and family members. This is an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, which I am eager to read.  Errachidi writes of his experience in Guantanamo Bay.  His lawyer Clive Stafford Smith provides an introduction to the piece describing the circumstances that led to his unjust detention.

But it is Errachidi’s descriptions of incarcerated life that brought me to tears.  It was not only the injustice of the situation that is revealed on the page, but a beautiful mind and tender heart that responds to this unfortunate set of events.  I hope you read his words for yourself– how he entertained his fellow prisoners with descriptions of imaginary feasts, his relationship with a visiting colony of ants, and how his mind worked to keep himself alive. “Thoughts were not restricted, even though hands and feet were shackled.”

Thank you Ahmed Errachidi.

Trauma Song

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This past summer, I was fortunate to participate in a historical writing workshop with the impressive Charles Strozier at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, MA. There,  I heard a little bit about his latest book on 9/11 survivors, his interviewing protocol and writing process. Earlier this month, he read from the recently published Until the Fires Stopped Burning at a bookstore in Brooklyn.

I was particularly interested in the chapter where he discussed traumasong:

“a deeply psychological state that evoked poetic forms of language, a kind of ‘melodious tear’ as Milton says in ‘Lycidas.'”

During my MFA program at Hunter College, I took a craft course with Meena Alexander,and we read a number of narratives of migration, dislocation and trauma. I became  interested in the impact of trauma on stories and story telling.

There is a loss and forgetting associated with the trauma. Fragmentation occurs. Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery writes:

“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.”

Pattrice Jones, author of Aftershock, Confronting Trauma in a Violent World, further notes that Broca’s area, the region of the brain devoted to language production and comprehension, is partially and even sometimes totally disabled during traumatic experience. Jones writes,

“Traumatic memories tend to stand alone, disconnected from their contexts and from other memories. Traumatic memories also tend to be experienced differently than other memories. They are more strongly sensory and much more difficult to express accurately in words.”

Jones cites Susan Brison who writes “ Saying something about a memory does something to it.” Jones adds:

“when we find words for traumatic memories that are stored as somatic sensations, we move the memories from one place to another in our brains. The traumatic sensory fragments may still persist, but they will be increasingly linked to the more coherent story of the event that emerges as the tale is told over and over again. In this way, fragmented memories literally become linked to their surrounding life stories.”

During the process of listening to his recorded interviews, Charles Strozier noticed something with some of the survivors—a certain cadence in their stories, a certain poetry.  He further  analyzes that language and notes:

“There is no question that trauma can destroy language, as well as the cohesive self, but death encounters seem equally capable of bringing out a language of witness that is highly rhythmic and sometimes metrical, often stanzaic and quite beautiful.”