100 memoirs project #8: Heart Berries, by Terese Marie Mailhot

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100 memoirs, 100 memoirs project, Heart Berries, memoir in essays, Midtown Scholar Bookstore, read 100 memoirs, Terese Marie Mailhot

I’m behind, because life, but I’m reading!

I’m actually bumping a memoir I read two months ago to write this post because the book’s so good that I’ve been talking about it and now someone wants to borrow it. Must write this post before I lend the book away for who knows how long!

I recently visited Midtown Scholar, an acclaimed indie bookstore in Harrisburg, PA. It’s shameful that this was my first time—I, a native central Pennsylvanian—stepping foot into this space, but hey, now I’ve been there. And I’ll be going back.

In a 2010 Publisher’s Weekly review, Alison Morris described Midtown Scholar as “a cavernous space filled with some 100,000+ second-hand, out-of-print, and scholarly (…) books” that combines with an enormous warehouse inventory to make “the largest used book collection between New York City and Chicago.” The store also houses a coffee shop and its owners regularly host readings, workshops, and author events. It’s basically Disneyland for writers and readers.

I walked in, ordered a mocha and a chocolate peanut butter brownie, and immediately found a memoir to curl up with for the afternoon—one that had been on my Amazon nonfiction wish list for some time.

Roxane Gay calls Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries a “memoir in essays,” among other things.

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#Mustread: “Resistbot Turns Your Texts Into Faxes to Elected Officials”

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contact your reps, resist, resistance, Resistbot

You guys gotta try Resistbot!

Also, we all should be reading more Teen Vogue, for real. Last week, this mag featured an article about a tool called Resistbot, and it sounded interesting so I bookmarked it and promptly forgot about it until sippin on a hot toddy last night after putting kiddo to bed at the end of a particularly patience-draining day of another kind of resistance (i.e., preschooler to mother about EVERYTHING). I was scrolling through my bookmarks and whoa, hold up, you can text a message through Resistbot and it will fax it to your reps for you?

Yep. Resistbot is a thing. I just used it to fax Casey and Toomey about (again) opposing the new healthcare monstrosity legislation.

Here’s how it works:

Must read: “If They Should Come for Us”

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Fatimah Asghar, If They Should Come for Us, poetry

No think piece must-read will do this week. We should all read this poem by Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer Fatimah Asghar, “If They Should Come for Us,” from the March issue of Poetry. God.

my people I follow you like constellations
we hear the glass smashing the street
& the nights opening their dark
our names this country’s wood
for the fire…

When I’m weary of the headlines, I get the same news, the same humanity and inhumanity, from my overcrowded bookshelves and the literary web.

Sometimes poetry is the only way to hear things that we can’t and shouldn’t un-hear.

Must read: “Why I don’t like white women”

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Amy Alexander, DiDi Delgado, intersectional, intersectional feminism, solidarity

Intersectional or bust.

You wouldn’t believe the response to an article posted first on Medium, then on The Huffington Post, that until recently ran with the headline “Why I don’t like white women.”

The headline appears to have been changed to “Befriending Becky: On the Imperative of Intersectional Solidarity,” though the first line of the piece is still “I don’t like white women.” OK. I’m a white woman—and one, it should be said, who used to work in news, knows the writer doesn’t always write the headline, and despises clickbait—and I liked the old headline better. The author is DiDi Delgado, and I’m now following her on Medium because it was a great read, my must-read for this week.

Maybe you would believe the response to it.

Must read: “Protecting your inner life in times of political turmoil”

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inner life, Marie Howe, poetry, resistance, self-care

Photo by Flickr user James Petts (Creative Commons license).

I have said before that there are many different kinds of resistance. I listed some of them. I practice as many as I can.

But the one action that you might not think of as resistance is what poet Marie Howe calls “protecting your inner life.”

Shawna Ayoub Ainslie sent me this link earlier in the week, and it’s the best thing I’ve read in a while. It goes deeper than simply “practice self-care,” of which I am of course a huge advocate. Howe wrote her piece for Literary Hub, and she says:

We live in an economic system where everything, almost everything is commodified—everything can be sold for a price. And almost anything can be threatened. But there is a place within us no one can ever know. Within that place we hold all the books we’ve ever read, the music we’ve listened to, the paintings we’ve gazed at, the plays we’ve watched, the poems we’ve read. All the important conversations. We have within each of us a great library, a concert hall, a cathedral, a temple, a mediation space, and a field…before and after political action, I want to remember to protect and preserve that space where moral action (and poetry) begins.

I needed to read that this week. I wish you a weekend full of time spent nourishing your inner life, that part no one can take from us.

Must read: “Republicans push anti-protest laws”

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anti-protest laws, Must read, protest, resistance

I read headlines like this, like “Republicans push anti-protest laws,” and my gut reaction is a deluge of expletives so severe as to make truckers cringe.

And then, I smile. Because, and this is an important thing to remember, and I’m starting to remember it almost immediately, my gut reaction is starting to revise itself: They would not be trying to make our dissent illegal if our dissent did not matter.

I’ve been saying this a lot lately on social media. I want all my resistance colleagues to take that thought to heart. Not because it makes it any less maddening, but because it’s evidence that our efforts are getting attention. They can’t ignore us. Even when it seems like they’re ignoring us, they aren’t.

And there are so many ways to protest. Can’t legislate against em all.

Still, read the article I linked to above, which appeared Tuesday in ThinkProgress.

Must read: “Some inconvenient truths about the Women’s March on Washington”

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activism, awareness, Devon Maloney, do better, intersectional feminism, privilege, resistance, Some Inconvenient Truths About the Women's March, Women's March, Women's March on Washington

I marched on Jan. 21 in Washington, D.C., and I’m still processing that experience. But one thing that struck me over and over while I was there was that intersectional feminism is everything, or feminism is nothing.

Call it increased awareness of privilege, but when I saw cops jumping on their vehicles, jubilant, cheering us on, telling us we were beautiful, waving us toward Independence Ave.–because the crowd was so overwhelming, so much larger than anticipated, that many of us couldn’t get close enough to speakers to hear where we should go or what we should do next–I couldn’t help but wonder why I’d never seen that, on TV, say, in Ferguson or Baltimore.

Oh right. Racism.

Not that the March was exclusively white. Listen, just read this, it’s called “Some Inconvenient Truths About the Women’s March,” and Devon Maloney pulls no punches in this critique of the movement.

I agree with all of it.

Must read: Back and Forth with Kaveh Akbar

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all poetry is political, Georgia Review, Kaveh Akbar, Must read, poem lumber

I came across this quote two weeks ago and can’t get it out of my head: “I’m in the camp that believes all poetry is inherently political…I believe aligning yourself with wonder in a time that actively conspires against it is political.”

The speaker is poet Kaveh Akbar, and the quote appears in his Jan. 4 interview with The Georgia Review. It’s my must-read for the week because DANG.

Akbar goes on to say,

Affirming the sanctuary of the psychic life is political. These aren’t new ideas—think of Nazim Hikmet writing his poems in prison or Phyllis Wheatley studying Milton and Pope while still in chains. I’m literally getting goosebumps just typing their names. Poetry is deeply democratic—it can exist in the mind alone, and it’s therefore infinitely potent as a political haven. Mahmoud Darwish said, ‘Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility.’ I can’t improve upon that.

Additionally, I love what this poet says about mining our lives for poetic material, how it happens automatically, even inadvertently: “Every phrase and interaction acquires the charge of poetic potential,” or what he later terms as “poem lumber.” God yes.

So read this interview, and follow Kaveh Akbar!

Must read: Ijeoma Oluo’s tips for fighting injustice

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Ijeoma Oluo, listen, Must read, take action, The Guardian, tips for fighting injustice

I’m going to start doing must-read posts, and I imagine I’ll be linking to Ijeoma Oluo’s work a lot.

I’ve been following Oluo’s writing at The Establishment and The Guardian for a while now, and have been obsessed since I read “When I said all Trump supporters are white supremacists, I meant it.” She drunk-tweeted the debates, and it was a balm. I highly recommend her because she pulls no punches and is relentless in reminding us that we have a long way to go in eradicating racism and sexism. She gets trolled and harassed–which means she’s hitting alt-right, fragile-white nerves. I love her.–so maybe we could drop by once in a while and comment on her stuff and/or tweet at her with an emphatic, empathic fuck yes.

And, we could listen and do what she tells us to do.

It would be easy to despair, but Oluo came blazing out of 2016 and into 2017 with “Here are seven ways you can keep fighting for justice in 2017” at The Guardian, because vacation is OVER.

This is my must-read for the week.