LM copyeditor and contributor Kristina Riggle's short story "Connection Lost" is featured in the current issue of Cimarron Review. In the story, a father wonders where he went wrong with his younger daughter, and thinks a particular college freshman might hold the answer, if he can only track her down. Look for it in bookstores, or you could order a copy (or a subscription) by going here
Dreaming About Water.
Amy Mercer (LM blog editor) and Violeta Garcia-Mendoza (Lm Literary Reflections co-editor) are seeking personal essay submissions from women writers for their upcoming collection.
Essays should fall between 1,500 and 3,000 words and explore an aspect of living with diabetes.
The collection will cover any and all aspects of living with diabetes: from diagnosis to aging gracefully. Other possible essay topics may include:
Diagnosis
Growing up with diabetes
Dating with diabetes
Diabetes at college/leaving home
Diabetes & relationships with food
Finding the Perfect Doctor
Wedding planning/marriage with diabetes
Diabetes in the workplace
Traveling with diabetes
Starting a Family (either through pregnancy and/or adoption) with
diabetes
Gestational diabetes
Parenting and diabetes
Dealing with complications/ Staying healthy with diabetes
Type 2 diabetes
Our goal is to provide diabetic women- type 1 and type 2- with a place of community while they navigate the various stages of their lives, and their diabetes.
We welcome you to submit one or more essays. For more information, or to submit, please write mercermendoza@gmail.com.
Want to take the big plunge, and write a novel? Novelist and teacher Masha Hamilton is offering two online novel writing classes starting on September 4th, and is seeking both beginning and advanced students. Susan Ito, Literary Mama columnist and fiction editor, highly recommends this fabulous teacher.
In continuation of the Who We Are posting,next up on our list is Suzanne Kamata, Fiction Co-Editor, lives with her Japanese husband and bi-cultural twins on the island of Shikoku in Japan. She is the editor of the anthology The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan, and the author of numerous stories, essays, articles and reviews. Her writing about motherhood appears in the anthologies It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons, It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, and elsewhere. You can read her blog at http://gaijinmama.wordpress.com.
In late July I watched a C-SPAN re-broadcast of a House of Representatives Oversight Committee hearing. I was initially struck by the testimony of Lindsay Huckabee of Kiln, Mississippi. She admitted she sometimes wondered if she was overreacting to her five kids' seemingly endless illnesses. That was something I could relate to. In the past I've been on the receiving end of the doctorly look that says "Oh no, another over-protective mother."
But I soon understood it wasn't Huckabee's pediatrician who had filled her with doubt. The doctor was just as worried about the cause of her kids' recurrent gushing nosebleeds and respiratory problems.
No, the "skeptic" in this case was the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)--the folks who brought us the bungled Hurricane Katrina response.
Well, they're at it again.
The Huckabees' apartment complex was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in August, 2005. With nowhere else to go, they moved into a FEMA-provided trailer. Soon the couple's children became very sick. Mrs. Huckabee's daughter Lelah was hit hardest, hospitalized twice with pneumonia. A specialist tried a variety of treatments, but nothing stopped her symptoms. Finally the doctor suggested their trailer could be the problem. "He had many repeat patients with the same symptoms all living in FEMA trailers," Huckabee said.
The likely culprit was formaldehyde. Mobile homes and trailers are built using many products that contain formaldehyde, like glues and particle board. The lower quality the products, the higher the emissions. The Huckabee's symptoms, such as sore throats, bloody noses and chest congestion are typical of short-term, unsafe formaldehyde exposure.
Mrs. Huckabee asked FEMA for help, but agency representatives pooh-poohed her story, one even accused her of "exaggerating." Briefly, in the midst of her family's bewildering illnesses, she wondered if she was imagining it all. Eventually the Sierra Club volunteered to test the trailer and found formaldehyde levels three times the accepted safe level for a workplace, let alone a residence.
In spite of hundreds of similar complaints from trailer residents, FEMA tested just one occupied trailer. A pregnant mother living with her four-month-old son called FEMA repeatedly about her trailer's terrible smell. In April of 2006 FEMA tested the air inside and found formaldehyde levels 75 times higher than the maximum workplace exposure level. She moved out.
So how did FEMA use those terrifying results? Did they warn the thousands of Katrina victims that some of their trailers were likely emitting toxic gasses? No. Did they mobilize their field agents to test every trailer and root out the bad ones? No. Didn't they do anything? Yes, they did.
They lawyered up.
FEMA attorneys advised the agency to stop testing trailers. An attorney explained in a June 15, 2006 memo: "Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK. Once you get results and should they indicate some problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them." In other words, if people know they're being poisoned, we'll actually have to do something about it.
If FEMA had investigated, they may have known what CBS News learned after the hearing. A former floor supervisor at an Indiana plant that built thousands of the trailers told CBS that FEMA's massive order forced them to use cheaper, more dangerous products. But FEMA did not investigate. Instead, the agency created to help people like the Katrina victims, hid behind lawyers and let the residents get sicker.
At the congressional hearing, FEMA Administrator David Paulison sang his agency's praises. Out of more than 66,800 trailers still in use, he said, "Only 58 units have been replaced because of formaldehyde concerns." But trailer residents at the hearing reported they had to badger the unwilling agency into replacing trailers for months, and when the new trailers arrived they also had high levels of formaldehyde. The fact that FEMA replaced only 58 trailers likely says more about their unwillingness to act than the number of complaints.
Paulison said FEMA tested some uninhabited trailers in September of 2006. After being "aired out" with windows open and air conditioners blazing for three weeks, the trailer's formaldehyde readings showed "safe levels," Paulison said.
But according to the testimony of Mary DeVany, an industrial hygienist, FEMA manipulated the results. The "safe level" FEMA claimed was actually 400 times higher than the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Register standard. DeVany said FEMA's testing methods were, at best, "unethical." At worst, I guess, they were lying through their teeth.
After months of FEMA promises, the Huckabees received a new trailer this past April. Testing on the second trailer showed elevated formaldehyde levels, but they were better than the first one. However, the nightmare isn't over. During a recent cleaning, a dentist found a mass in Mr. Huckabee's soft palette. The tumor is benign, but doctors warned mouth tumors can be a long-term effect of formaldehyde exposure, as can nasal and lung cancer. The family hopes to save enough money to move out on their own soon, but with five kids and astronomical medical bills, Mrs. Huckabee testified, "We are actually moving backward."
Now obviously FEMA can't be faulted for the trailers' formaldehyde levels. But there is no excuse for FEMA leaders, including Mr. Paulison, to allow the toxic trailers to continue poisoning Katrina victims long after they knew the dangers. Apparently these bureaucrats believe protecting themselves is more important than protecting America's most vulnerable citizens.
Heckuva job, Paulie!
“I’m not writing a history of famous people,” she said. “I am interested in a history of everyday life.”
Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died on Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. She was 84.
Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailiness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind. (New York Times, August 23, 2007)
Grace Paley is best known for her three collections of short stories, "The Little Disturbances of Man" (1959), "Enormus Changes at the Last Minute" (1974), and "Later That Same Day" (1985). She taught Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence. Her “Collected Stories,” published by Farrar, Straus in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. (The collection was reissued by Farrar, Straus this year.) From 1986 to 1988, Ms. Paley was New York’s first official state author; she was also a past poet laureate of Vermont.
Next up in the Who We Are category is Susan Ito, Fiction Co-Editor who blogs at ReadingWritingLiving.
Susan lives in Oakland, CA with her husband, two daughters and mother. She teaches writing privately and at UC Berkeley Extension. She is the co-editor of A Ghost At Heart's Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption (North Atlantic Books). Her essays and fiction have appeared in Growing Up Asian American, Hip Mama, Making More Waves, the Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere.
Former Literary Mama columnist Gail Konop Baker is contributing to a grog (group blog) for debut authors, The Debutante Ball. Check out Gail's posts every Monday; her memoir, Cancer Is A Bitch: Reflections on Midlife, Mortality, Motherhood and Marriage, will be published in October by Da Capo Press.
Instructor: Christina Katz
Class Maximum: 20
Finally, a writing workshop that fits into the busy lives of moms! The focus is on getting you into print sooner, rather than later, and without pulling all-nighters or paying a fortune in babysitter fees. You will learn how to write short, easy-to-write articles so that you will have an easier time working your way up to longer, more time-consuming articles (like features and profiles) later. You will try your pen at tips, fillers, short interviews, list articles, how-tos, and the short personal essays—all within six weeks. You will have the benefit of reading and learning from your classmates’ efforts. Opportunities for self-assessment and self-reflection are woven into the class.
Christina Katz has been putting writers through the writing and submitting paces since 2001. Personal attention from the instructor is offered throughout the class in the form of questions answered for the entire class, just like a traditional “live” class. Two detailed reviews of your drafts-in-progress are included at weeks three and six (you choose one of your pieces for an instructor critique each time). Because of the high volume of student productivity in this class, the instructor does not critique each and every student submission, but does share them with the entire class.
Busy dads and non-parents are also welcome, but should expect a course pre-designed to address and overcome the challenges busy moms face.
Duration: Six lessons with six assignments completed in six weeks
August 15 - September 26, 2007
October 3 - November 14, 2007
Prerequisites:
This may be your very first writing class or you may be an experienced freelancer. The only requirement is that you must be able to receive and create Microsoft Word documents to participate in this class (or text documents at the very least).
Cost: $160.00 for 2007 WPSS
Each week, we will introduce you to one of the women behind Literary Mama, including a link to her blog and/or website. Our diverse group of talented, smart and creative women work hard to honor "the difficult and rewarding work women do as they move into motherhood by making these stories visible."
First up: Kathy Moran, Editorial Assistant in Literary Reflections. Kathy has two grown boys and two granddaughters. In addition to being a retired secondary language arts teacher and literary magazine adviser in the Missouri public school system, Kathy is also a teacher consultant for the Greater Kansas City Writing Project and has been published in the Project's magazine The Quarterly (Caring Comes First: A Personal Narrative) and the Missouri Teachers Council of English publication Missouri Teachers Write. More recently, she developed the curriculum for an American literature semester course for the Center for Distance Learning and Independent Study at the University of Missouri. Kathy's personal reflections can be found at marmee's corner and marmee's musings.
Adams Media is publishing a new anthology (book) series featuring uplifting true stories about the experiences and relationships that inspire and enrich our lives—namely those with our mothers, our fathers, and our teachers (also mother-figures, father-figures, and mentors). These slice-of-life stories will be written by people from all walks of life and provide unique personal insights into powerful universal truths, as well as honor the "everyday hero" in their lives. Each anthology in the series will be divided to highlight the variety of ways mothers, teachers, and fathers go beyond the call of duty to heroism.
Submission Deadline: SEPTEMBER 5, 2007
For detailed guidelines, please review:
"Hero Series Guidelines" on Literary Cottage Agency.
For those of you in the Charleston, SC area, Amy Hudock,
Editor-in-Chief of LiteraryMama, will be team teaching a memoir writing course this fall.
Lowcountry Writing Project
The Citadel
Charleston, SC
Advanced Institute on Creative Nonfiction: Writing Memoir
Co-teachers: Amy Hudock, Ph. D. and Tracey Merton, MA
Offering 3 hours of graduate credit
Tentative Schedule
September 5th-November 15th, Saturdays and Wednesdays. $300.
http://www.citadel.edu/writingproject/
First Book is giving children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books.
Books stir the senses, inspire the imagination, and spark a love of reading that can last a lifetime.
Access to books is essential to reading development, yet many children from low-income families have no books at home or in the childcare centers they attend. There are millions of children waiting for your help. Donate now to put new books into the hands of children in need.
In September 2005, First Book committed to bring 5,000,000 new books to the communities devastated by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. With your help we reached our goal.
Join us now to join First Book and all of our partners who made Book Relief possible as we celebrate the distribution of our five millionth new book along the Gulf Coast. Please join us.
Tuesday, August 21st
1:00-2:30 PM
New Orleans Public Library
219 Loyola Avenue
New Orleans, LA
RSVP by August 7th
RSVP: Attend or Decline
or call 866-393-1222
Please note that space is limited, so RSVP as soon as possible.