On Coming to Terms with Our Arseholery
Nobody wants to think of themselves as being a bad person. Bad people are ISIS fighters, child molesters, Shrien Dewani. They do horrible things which are blatant and obvious and talked about in the media. But in the last few months I have found myself in spaces where I’ve had to take a long and careful look at who I am in the world, the attitudes that have formed me and how I conduct myself in certain situations. And to say that it’s been an uncomfortable awakening is an understatement. Because many of you who follow my blog know that I’m relatively outspoken about race issues in this country. I have strong feelings about the socio-economic disparities and the white attitudes that feed them, and while I sit behind my computer screen in my nice study on the Atlantic Seaboard it’s easy to wax lyrical about egalitarianism and the way…
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I Found Your Poem, Samuel Clemens
Found poem © C.L. Quigley
Credits due to Mark Twain: Roughing It, Volume II, Chapter VIII
The Earth We Tread On: An Interview with Scott Strazzante
Scott Strazzante
Back in 2008, I interviewed photographer Scott Strazzante for Photo District News when his project Common Ground was—if you’ll pardon the pun—getting off the ground. Interviewing photographers can be hit-or-miss: not everyone who produces great visual work is capable of talking about it well. So it was a plus when Strazzante turned out to be not only a great visual communicator but also thoughtful and articulate.
It had been a good year for Strazzante. He’d won the Community Awareness award at the Pictures of the Year International (PoYI) contest, and was discussing having a documentary video made by the acclaimed company MediaStorm. Previously, his Common Ground work had been published in National Geographic and in Mother Jones, where it was accompanied by an essay by acclaimed novelist Jane Smiley. All pretty good for a project that owed its life to pure serendipity.
Recently published in book…
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Ndume: The Story of an Elephant
It reads like environmental pulp fiction:
A tribal family’s ancestral forest home is surrounded and cutoff from the main forest by illegal loggers and slash-and-burn farmers. When they eventually break out to try to rejoin the main tribe, they are discovered at dawn and set upon by a violent mob – the family is split, some run for the safety of the trees, others are hacked to death with machetes. In the fighting, one infant receives such a blow to the head that he’s knocked unconscious. On the verge of being killed, he is rescued from the mob by forest guards, and flown to a distant city. He wakes up in an orphanage, and screams for his mother. Ripped from his friends, his family, his mother, he has nightmares for months.
As the years pass, he slowly makes new friends, and with them he is moved to a ‘halfway’ house…
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On Malcolm, Martin, and That X-Men Analogy Thing
On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the activist, orator and the man once referred to in eulogy by the late Ossie Davis as “Our Shining Black Prince,” El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (most commonly known as Malcolm X), I quite foolishly decide to wade into that whole X-Men analogy thingy. Of course I’ve been warned. Of course I know better. But since when has that stopped me? So then, let’s do this thing.
And that supremely bad ass Malcolm & Magneto mash-up art you’re seeing, is courtesy of the amazing John Jennings and his 2012-2013 exhibit Black Kirby. If yuh dunno, now yuh know.
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How I Learned to Trust The Needle
Closing the Book
You get married and you think this is the man you will spend the rest of your life with.
Then life happens.
You separate, and for the next three years you don’t see him. You don’t hear his voice. The soft lilt in his Rs. You don’t see him ruffled up in the morning before he puts on his armour to face the world. You don’t smell him in the corridor before you leave the house. You don’t see his name pop up on your phone. You don’t know what song he belts out as he drives with the window down and Bluetooth earpiece on. You don’t know what person he thinks is a complete muppet. You don’t hear the word muppet anymore. You never have to put the toilet seat down.
You begin to wonder if you dreamed the whole thing up.
The waves now wash over you once every…
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The Educated Eater
Recently I was part of a conversation on Facebook about the concept of fat tax/junk food tax/whatever you want to call it. The current food being demonised is sugar, and this particular conversation was about a proposed sugar tax in New Zealand, but I’m pretty sure that wherever you are has had something similar in the not too distant past.
A lot of the conversation centred on how taxing any particular food is over-intervention by the government, however it ended up in the territory of possible ways to get people to eat “healthier”. As always, there’s a faint air of moralisation around even the most well meaning conversation about improving people’s general eating habits – the old binaries of fresh/processed, healthy/unhealthy, junk-fast/”real” are ever present, as though food is somehow either all good or all bad, which no food ever is. Foods have varying levels of usefulness/nutrition/substance to every person. …
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Top Ten Writing Mistakes Editors See Every Day
In addition to writing and teaching, one of the things I do for a living is to evaluate manuscripts for their suitability for publication. I read fiction (and non-fiction) across several genres, and write comprehensive reports on the books. I try always to guide the author towards knocking his or her project into a shape that could be credibly presented to literary agents, publishers and general readers. You know how Newman and Mittelmark introduce How Not to Write a Novel by saying, ‘We are merely telling you the things that editors are too busy rejecting your novel to tell you themselves, pointing out the mistakes they recognize instantly because they see them again and again in novels they do not buy,’ well they’re right; I am one of those editors.
However good the idea behind a novel, when the author is still learning the craft of writing – like any…
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imaz78 