In a few days you’re going to take a standardized test known currently as a Common Exam (or MSL, which sounds like missile).  The test will include both multiple-choice questions and “constructed response” which in my day was called “short-answer.”  It will cover a wide-range of topics that you have studied this year and although you will struggle with questions and sections, I’m confident that you will think critically, analyze, evaluate and use all the tools in your arsenal to succeed in doing your very best.

Unfortunately, it expects you to see the world through multiple-choice answers.  You will “choose the best answer” between A, B, C, and D.  You will not be able to show the argument skills you sharpened in the debates you had this semester, or the discussion skills you refined in my classroom to become deep-thinkers who can not only answer a question, but prove that answer with textual evidence and proper argument or informative writing.  You will be expected to read, read, read and then answer, answer, answer.  There won’t be time to show the test administrators the talent you have at thinking around, outside, behind, above, (all the prepositions that you learned) the box, or the bravery it took you to write a complete paragraph with capital letters, perfectly placed commas, and quotation marks around each little detail that you found to prove your answer.

I know you will do your best because I’ve taught the best students at this school this semester.  I know you will do your best because you’ve shown me nothing but that on most days you’ve been in my classroom.  You’ve fought through being kicked out of your houses, friend drama, losing high-stake’s sports games, bad reputations, the rudeness of your peers against your idea of funny or smart, the possibly low expectations for students of this county and other student’s wild ideas about who you are or what you are, when they have no idea that you’re a hero, you’re a winner, you’re the breath of fresh air in my room every single school day.   I have high expectations that you will do your best, will be scored not by a number, or a percentage, but by the amount of heart you give.

This is a test in the grand scheme of your life.  It does not define you.  No one in this school can define you.  It is not an indicator of how you could survive in the wild, if you could be clever enough to escape a Cyclops, if you could lead a group of teenagers to freedom from a deserted island unharmed, or whether or not you would stand up for a man on trial even if the whole town was against him.  This doesn’t show how often you stand-up for other students, how often you convince your friends not to drop out, or not to fight, or how often you make someone’s day by just being yourself.  You are something beautiful and something unique.

I don’t want you to stress over whether your pencil is sharpened enough, or how to highlight on a PDF because you’ve never seen a computer test before, or how long it will take you to read a passage.  When you grow up the world won’t yet know it has been waiting for the type of brilliance you will bring to it.  You will “walk into it, shake it out, fingertips trembling though they may be.”

These things may be true about you: you may not be a good test-taker, you may not know the “best answer” but you know that A and C are definitely not correct, you may not know how to define “essential” or “significant” in the context of the question, but you must know that I will not look at your test scores and say “I am disappointed.”  I will look at each score and see that you thought about each answer, you analyzed, you created essential questions in your head, you used textual evidence, and you showed global awareness.  This test is also just one way that they will define my teaching competency.  I am not worried about this in the least.  I am confident in your abilities and you have proven time and time again that I should be proud to have you day in and day out.

In four years, I will watch each of you walk across the stage in a cap and gown.  I will look for you on “nerd day” and write recommendations for your college applications, military applications, or job applications.  I will be the proudest teacher and it will be my honor to shake your hand.

Thank you,

Ms. Mannes

Favorite Tweets:

Favorite Search Terms:

• naming plants in the garden: I can’t get the idea of having a moon flower garden out of my head.  In the book, the boyfriend says, “Why would you want to grow flowers in the dark when no one can see them?”  I can think of about a thousand little secrets why.
• type of narrator in your high school english class look at mr. killian’s face. decide faces are important. write a villanelle about pores. struggle. write a sonn...: This is so long it had dot, dot, dot in my search terms.  I feel like this is my life right now except I don’t wear tweed like Mr. Killian and I’m the proud owner of femininity.
• jessica rabbit crotch: Who searches cartoon crotches?  You couldn’t have used a prettier word? Why.  Why, I ask.

Books News:

• 

  Bookshop Sign (VIRAL)

  My Psychic Garburator @ NY Books

• Advice to Little Girls: Mark Twain Edition @ Brain Pickings
• Literature Saved My Life @ Jewish Journal
• Early Starts @ The Millions
• How Faithful is Gatsby to the Original @ Slate
• 

  Gatsby Infographic: How Much Would it Cost to Live like Gatsby Today?

  How Much Would it Cost to Live Like Jay Gatsby Today @ Huff Post

• Do Readers Judge Female Characters More Harshly Than Male Characters @ The Atlantic
• Anne Carson Red Doc Review @ The Quietus
• The Biological Challenges of E-Readers @ The Rumpus
• Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys @ The Rumpus
• Anais Nin on Love @ Brain Pickings
• Friday Faves: Gender Gatsby @ Beyond the Margins
• Critical Linking @ Book Riot
• This Week’s Hot Reads @ Daily Beast
• Tequila Mockingbird @ Huff Post
• Literary TED Talks are the Best TED Talks @ Book Riot
• Dialect Map of the US @ Huff Post
• Colbert’s Book Club @ Colbert Nation
• From the Official Department of Diary Rescue @ Poetry Foundation
• Book Burning in History @ Huff Post
• If You Make a Bed of Comics, You Have to Sleep In It @ Huff Post
• Covers Before and After @ NY Times
• Restyling the Classics @ The Atlantic Wire
• Book Publicity: What’s Changed and What Hasn’t @ Digital Book World
• William Faulkner’s Only Children’s Book @ Brain Pickings
• Overdrive Unveils Big Library Read Pilot Project @ GoodEReader
• Why Paper is NOT Dead @ Huff Post
• Paul Theroux’s Favorite Inner Journey Travel Books @ Daily Beast
• Can You Ace a Great Gatsby Test from the Movie @ Slate
• Goodreads Book Club Eats Itself @ MHP Books
• All Hail the Epistolary Novel @ Book Riot
• Topless Pulp Fiction Club @ NY Daily News
• Open Letter to the Girls of ‘Girls’ @ Flavorwire

You know it’s bad when you’re sticky-noting the white brim of library book pages.  The book in its plastic trench and my pink hang-nails hanging out.

With Michael Ondaatje, I would say most readers have a love/hate relationship.  His books are always at the pace of which you would suck and teethe a wheat pick.  By the end you feel thankful that you made it through the heap and somehow it was worth it.  There’s a twinge of you in every book he writes.  Somehow he knows just what to write to make each reader feel like they’ve been touched in the shadows.  I started with Ondaatje for The English Patient which is a hell of a book.  There are no other words for it.  It was dark, but beautiful and chaotic, but quiet, and sensitive, but brutish.  It was just this book of binaries that makes the reader feel like they’ve just been strangled.

In the Skin of a Lion – Michael Ondaatje

I’m not sure why I thought, “Yes, let’s do Ondaatje again” when I was in the library.  The English Patient was a very difficult read.  I didn’t particularly like the time I spent with it, but afterwords I felt like I needed it.  I went originally to get a volunteer application for this summer and happened to walk through…oops, every isle of the fiction section and pull out numerous books, placing them back almost-correctly.  If I don’t leave blank space when I pull it down to read a page, there’s no hope for my broken dewey decimal heart to put the book in the right place.

It must have been the cover.  It has two nude people in a bed, but there’s cooled coffee on the table behind them, each cup holding a spoon.  It’s as if the passion was too much, but it’s not erotica.  The people are entwined in the position of dreaming sleep.

I don’t regret it.  I sat here all night listening to Hoarders in the background, finishing off this book about the heat of thievery and matters of the heart.  Michael Ondaatje seems to weave the  mundane and the delicious so well in his stories.

A heron stretching his head further underwater, the eyes open within the cold flow, open for the fish that could be then raised into the air and dropped moving in the tunnel of the heron’s blue throat.

While herons are an easy bird to find majestic because as they grow older, they grow beards, it’s just one of the most beautiful eating images that I’ve ever read.  He makes me want to plunge my head into creek water.  The novel is all about fishing and water as well.  The reader must take the oars and paddle out to the center of the lake leaving the hook in the poetic glory of the words and wait for sudden feeling.  As a reader you want to keep swimming, but not because the pace is quick or it’s an easy-read but because there’s mystery within the story without it being a detective novel.

Strachan Avenue storm sewer, 1913 @ City of Toronto Archives

At the heart of the novel is one man’s path at finding himself.  It begins and ends with Patrick in the car with his daughter.  They have awoken in the middle of the night to drive cross-country and are telling stories.  Like any good road trip, the stories are fantastic, but believable.  They feel like memories that are passed down by generations.  Stories you’ve heard so much from your mother, from her mother’s mother, that you start to believe them as your own.  Of course it’s true that your grandfather fought a gang of Italians in WWII and because of that came back to the Ford Plant and Friday night’s cashed checks at the bar.

These are the stories that people carry.  They aren’t legends, but they’re the climbing branches of the family tree.  How will we know what we are without these memories?  I’ve asked this before.  They may be painted with the names of different countries, or surrounded by water, but they are our own memories and we raise them as our own.

When I read Philip Roth, I was mesmerized by the glove terminology of the factory.  When I read Ondaatje, I was mesmerized by the way things were built and created in the early 20th century.  Into the start of the novel, men carry steamed breath in the winter and ax’s to load timber.  They don’t know where they are, but it is winter and they are cutting lumber for the owners.  A father and son watch them walk from their bunkhouses to the steep woods of pine trees and in the end the father goes to work for the company.  He begins by building explosives to get trunks from piling up in the river and creating a dam.  The way this technology is told; how the father builds the explosives, the way the trunk’s swing into the air and scar the banks of the river.  I never thought I would be interested in that.

Construction Workers, Bloor Street Viaduct @ City of Toronto Archives

He describes building a bridge and the way the men ride ropes down to their terminal to cement or harness.  How a water viaduct is built by the hands of displaced men and history gives its ownership to the bulbous rich who name it and put up the money.  There’s the feldspar mines, and the idea that thieves are made for love.  I didn’t even know what feldspar was before reading this book and yet it sits in the soft white of my mother’s china cabinet.

Kate’s Literary Tour of Canada. Bloor Street Viaduct

Part of the tension in this novel is the pounding uprising of the working-class immigrants of Toronto, Canada.  This is going to make me seem really dumb, but I always assumed Canada was a country of freedom from the beginning.  History is told in the eyes of the winner and I never thought that the immigrant experience in Canada could be so unfair.  The rich owner, Harris has been using Macedonian’s from all over the city to fix the darkest corners of his dream architecture.  He doesn’t lift a finger from his fat office, but watches men dipped under ground into the caves of feldspar.  Men are expected to live with the duty of near-death.  Some work at the tannery factory and dip themselves in dye, so fully, just for a dollar-a-day.  They don’t last more than six months ever says the author.  Of course, dyed to their necks, becoming wholly new everyday.  Going from a father or an important family gentlemen to a man dipped in color for the pocket watch of a businessman.  It’s strange the way the world divides people, but it must in the way it runs.  This novel had me from the moment a blurred nun is saved by a viaduct worker after slipping off the edge of the bridge.  His arm out of socket, his harness tight-roped at the lip of the bridge, cradling the woman in the brown habit from certain death.

Slant of Moon on a Lake

There’s a way that authors can write about things that we just would never think about.  Ondaatje must sit in the cubicle of a library and wind his way through history books in order to write the intricacies of architecture.  Somehow, mines of feldspar and the lowering of donkeys into the darkness by harness and whines becomes a metaphor for strength.  I just love the way that everything small connects to the bigger picture until again we are riding in a car through the night with a father and daughter who are telling each other the only stories a father and daughter can share, those of memory.  Whether that memory is true, or half-true, or not true at all, it’s a memory that our brains have guarded.  A memory like the slant of moon on a lake, the only pore for a late-night writer’s hand.

Favorite Tweets:

Favorite Search Terms:

• parody rhyming book about shoe laces and velcro and library books: My nephew totally needs a book to teach him how to tie his shoes. YES.
• booksandbowelmovements.com+book-review: I just adore when people have googled my blog for a book review.  I have to do a slow clap for myself real quick.
• library stack bowel movement: Usually I get REALLY WEIRD bowel movement searches, but this one just made me laugh.
• “emma bolden” -emmabolden.com: People google you, lady.  People are googling YOU.
• minecraft instructionals: ERMAHGERD MINECRAFT!

Book News:

• Art of Fear @ The Guardian
• 

  Book Spines on a Thumb Print by Cheryl Song on Etsy

  9 Amazing Book Visualizations @ Ebook Friendly

• Brothers Grimm on Preserving Fairytales @ Huff Post
• A Daddy’s Letter to His Little Girl (About Her Future Husband) @ Good Men Project
• Patti Smith on The Novel She’s Carried for Almost 40 Years @ Slate
• An Homage to Beloved Classic Authors @ Huff Post
• 53rd Street Library @ New York Public Library
• Poetry Still Matters @ Washington Post
• Mitch Albom Lands 3-Book Deal @ Huff Post
• Baudelaire’s Femme Fatale Muse @ The Daily Beast
• What Would Atticus Do @ The Millions
• The Biological Challenges of E-Readers @ The Rumpus
• Cinderella Doesn’t Have to be a Passive Servant Girl Who Gets By on Her Looks @ The Atlantic
• Great Gatsby Video Game Lives the American Dream @ Slate
• Critical Linking @ Book Riot
• Wreck This App Author Returns with Scavenger Hunt @ Galley Cat
• ‘Enders Game’ Trailer’ @ Huff Post
• This is Water Glossary @ Brain Pickings
• The Books That Helped Me Move On @ Book Riot
• Hellish Conditions of Translators for Dan Brown @ Telegraph
• “Fair Use” Takes Center Stage at Google Books Appeal @ Paid Content
• 10 Tips to Help Your Child Become a Better Writer @ Huff Post
• 

  It’s almost here! Gatsby Book Fetish @ Book Riot

  

  100 Years of Solitude Cover Designed by Richard Tuttle @ Flavorwire

  Book Fetish @ Book Riot

• DC Comics Writer Talks the Books That Inspired Him @ LA Weekly
• Bill Cheng’s Novel is “Southern Cross the Dog” @ NY Times
• Michelle Obama Honors Outstanding Libraries, Museums @ Huff Post
• Amanda Knox: By the Book @ NY Times
• Five Great Books About Libraries @ USA Today
• Leonardo as Hamlet @ Huff Post
• Library Love: Anatomy of a Book @ Lit Reactor
• On Designing Books in a Series @ Design Related
• Vote for Favorite Books @ Arm Chair BEA
• The Lifespan of 23 Words @ LA Times
• Fascinating Stories Behind Classic Book Titles @ Flavorwire
• Life-Changers and Soul-Crushers @ Lit Reactor
• Granta’s Best Young British Novelists @ Independent
• Poet Laureate Proliferate Across the US @ New York Times
• Candace Bushnell Upcoming Novel Leaked by Hacker @ LA Times
• US Publishers Still Reeling from Borders Bankruptcy @ The Telegraph
• Murakami Makes First Japan Appearance in 18 Years @ The Telegraph
• Three Minute Fiction Round 11 @ NPR
• Censorship for Anne Frank’s Diary in US (SO STUPID) @ The Guardian
• How Would Shakespeare Really Sound @ The Telegraph
• World War Z Author Said The Movie is Nothing like the Book @ Huff Post
• Academics Chastised for Bad Grammar @ The Guardian
• 

  Fan-Designed Great Gatsby Covers @ Flavorwire (Image Credit: Phillipp DornBrierer)

  45 Fan-Designed Covers for The Great Gatsby @ Flavorwire

• Tennessee Teen Launches Book Donation Project @ Staugnews
• Books Matter: A Discussion of Women and Criticism @ Mostly Gruntled
• Tattoos Inspired by Books @ Buzz Feed
• Words that Last @ Washington Post
• “This is a Book Shop” Sign Goes Viral @ Galley Cat
• Richard Tuttle’s Incredible One-of-a-King Bindings for Classic Books @ Flavorwire
• Scandalous Works of Art @ Book Riot

In the letter I wrote to myself in kindergarden, I said I wanted to be a veterinarian and go to NC State.  I got one of those goals accomplished, but learned rather quickly that the only thing I loved about biology was dissecting a frog.  It seemed my grandfather’s frog catching rubbed off in the classroom.  Fried frog legs are a delicacy in the Shealy house.

The world should have known I was coming out to write when my father found me making Poetry Anthologies for class projects.  It seemed this was also during my Wizard of Oz phase if that spiked raggedy-ann is in fact a scarecrow.  You never know though, it could just be a creature of the night.  I believe the green thing is a UFO.  I wasn’t only into far away places like Oz, but faraway places like Mars.

I liked to think I was more neat when I was in second grade.  I like to think I was born with these immense organizational skills that I use in my classroom, however it seems I dealt easily with scratched out letters and wrinkled paper.  It gets better.

My spelling was probably the best part of my childhood writing.  Turtle became tortul, which is another form of the word “torture.”  It all becomes clear to me in the spelling of that word.  I clearly wasn’t riddled with enemies, but “emenies.”  I don’t even want to think about how I would sound out “sea anemones.”  Too bad Nemo wasn’t out when I was a small child.  We had to stick with the “There once was a…” Disney Princess movies.

Now I write poems and stories about Southern women and their deep history of waiting.  Women who have spent retirement listening to the heartbeat of a rocking chair, the creak and thump.  Women who can rub their fingers together to make the sound of a cricket’s switch back legs.  Girls with the patience of a firefly.  Women who wear shawls of weight across their shoulders while they watch pastures dry.  Back then I wrote poems about “losers” and “emenies.”  I wrote limericks about ducks named “qwuackers” because I knew somewhere in the cobblestones of my brain that U came somewhere after Q most of the time.  There’s definitely a W in there though when you sound it out, really gives it that onomatopoeia.

We should probably talk about how perfect my cursive is.  What happened to students knowing how to sign their name at the bottom of a check?  Apparently that’s of no use anymore because we live in a world of instant credit cards and square machines.  Well, back then, I had the cursive of a “Dear John” letter.  I had the cursive of a man’s dusty pocket, folded into the square of his chest.  I wonder what a hand-writing analysis would say about this cursive.

If the poem to your right is “the fourth worst pome I ever ritted” than what were the three before that?  I need to practice my cursive in order to figure that one out.  Maybe these poems came in my later years when I thought I was a poet writing about college boys and the way they open their whole mouth to kiss as if they’re rewriting Moby Dick.

I just like that this poem discusses a farmer’s wife who is highlighted in the majority of my latest short stories.  The wives in my stories carry around mud in the cracks of their boots.  They pick the clumps with a butter knife underneath their kitchen tables.  Eat with those same mud-caked hands.  I’m writing these women still.  I must have had an inkling of this in second grade.  I must have known myself, led lives before this one where I lived on a cattle farm and found milking a religious experience.  Did I know then that lives later I would write to be.

My characters are telling a story of ages.  A story of a second grade girl who loved poetry so much that she made a glitter cover page and wrote each poem in her best cursive.  What she didn’t know was that she’d be staying up nights after work to get the story down.  She’d be writing a marsh stranded with Carolina girls who knew what waiting felt like, holding heat in their crossed arms.

Favorite Tweets:

Favorite Search Terms:

• on the moon we have everything lettuce and pumpkin pie quote pg#: I’m obsessed with this book and I feel that my mom would definitely live on the moon.
  
• slam poetry on self respect: Look at Katie Makkai “Pretty”
• women fart more than men: A good dose of potty talk for the bowel movement viewers of this blog.  Make sure you reenact the moment by using your mouth to create a voice for the flatulence.

Book News:

• Memories of a Bedtime Book Club @ NY Times
• The Greatest Books of All Time, As Voted on By 125 Famous Authors @ Brain Pickings
• Maya Angelou Recovering After Hospitalization @ Huff Post
• Desmond Elliot Prize Longlist Dominated by Female Authors @ Telegraph
• The 10 Best Words the Internet Has Given English @ Guardian
• Gus Van Sant for ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ @ Huff Post
• The Curious Tale of Stolen Books @ BBC News
• 10 Crazy (But Undeniably True) Stories @ Huff Post
• 

  Minimalist Prints @ DesignDifferent on ETSY

  Quote Poster @ Huff Post

• Book News: Middle States, How Stories Are Made @ The New Yorker
• Top 10 Words Management Speak @ Guardian
• Love Sick and Tired: Unnecessary Romance in YA @ Huff Post
• Describing the Condition of Used Books Found on Amazon @ McSweeney’s
• Disney’s Bella Thorne to Write Ya Series @ USA Today
• Jonathan Franzen – By the Book @ The New York Times
• No Jury for Penguin in E-book Case @ Publisher’s Weekly
• MLP Shuts Down (Pick Up Their Inventory) @ The Millions
• Diary of the Hitler Diary Hoax @ The New Yorker
• Advice for Aspiring Children’s Book Authors @ GalleyCat
• 

  Children’s Picture Books @ Brain Pickings

  A Brief History of Children’s Picture Books and Visual Storytelling @ Brain Pickings

• What is Your Comfort Reading @ Book Riot
• World Book Night 10 Reasons Reading @ Guardian
• Surprised by Fame @ The Spectator
• I Was a Giver for World Book Night 2013 @ Huff Post
• What Common Core Curriculum Misses @ Beacon Broadside
• Podcast: Who Will Save Our Books @ Publisher’s Weekly
• The Secret Recipe for Inviting Children to Take Care of Books @ Teach Preschool
• The Lives They Lead @ Biographile
• 15 Delightful Vintage Books that You Need to Read @ Buzz Feed
• 8 Rare Books That Cost a Fortune @ Mental Floss
• Summer Reading List @ ASCD
• Nice Poem; I’ll Take It @ NY Times
• Six Novelists on Their Favorite Second Art Form @ Guardian
• YA Underground Books for Trains You May Have Missed @ SLJ
• Guantanamo Prison Library Books @ Tumblr
• Reddit User Buys Old Martin Luther King Jr. Book and Finds Autograph @ Huff Post
• 9 Books on Reading and Writing @ Brain Pickings
• Bill For Compulsory Science Fiction in WVA Schools @ Guardian
• 

  Niagara Falls librarians, 1955. [Photo via]

  25 Vintage Photos of Librarians Being Awesome @ Flavorwire
• New Documentary Explores the Sad Future of Books @ MediaBistro
• Art of Fiction Number 168 @ Paris Review
• Power of Books Photo Series @ Laughing Squid
• For His 100 Day School Project @ Ex.plore
• Famous Books You Didn’t Know Were Censored @ Flavorwire
• Year of the Cat @ New York Times
• Free Samples of Scwbi Crystal Kite Member Choice Awards @ MediaBistro
• Best 100 Opening Lines from Books @ Stylist
• 

  The Power of Books Photo Series

  Read to Lead: How to Digest Books Above Your Level @ Thought Catalog

Virgin Soul by Judy Juanita from Penguin

Have you ever heard anyone say, “Every time you drive on a Martin Luther King Jr. Road, Boulevard, Street or Avenue you have to assume you’re in the ‘ghetto.’”  It’s certainly not a compliment to this man that inspired so many people with his speech on the Washington walk, and so much more.  In saying that, people carry the deep remnants of racism and prejudice to cities everywhere.

Chicken Exhaust.

I think about it each time I pass Martin Luther King Jr. Rd in Raeford, NC.  The biggest thing in Raeford (the only thing in Raeford) is a chicken plant that sits on acres and football fields of land behind a small forest of trees just off the highway.  It’s a commune of chicken processing.  If you live anywhere near Raeford, you’ve been stuck behind a chicken truck on a two-lane road and you would recognize the smell anywhere, it heats the air.  It comes in through your air conditioning vents and leaves everything stale and full of shit.  You’ve seen feathers drift from the back of the truck, beaks in between caged metal.  Chicken exhaust.

I think about my friends in the City talking about Martin Luther King Jr Blvd in Raleigh.  How they don’t drive South on MLK because it leads straight into project housing.  In Raeford, MLK leads straight into fundamentalist America, chicken processing and chicken packaging.  It’s what we eat and what we survive on.  Filled with toxins or not, it’s the heart of hearty America.  Not that either of these represent the legacy of MLK, which is the point it took me two paragraphs to get to, the legacy of MLK shines through in Virgin Soul, Judy Juanita’s new novel from Penguin.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

What is a Pig Poster BPP

In the novel, Juanita hardly discusses MLK, but it’s the unsaid that has the biggest impact on her reader.  In all honesty, this novel made me extremely uncomfortable.  It was a discussion of the origins of the Black Panther Party in California through the eyes of a naive, but insightful college student.  Geniece is a wonderful narrator because she’s incredibly smart, but makes unnerving and deliberate decisions.  She made me uncomfortable the more she became invested in the violence of the Black Panther Party movement.  The more she became “indoctrinated” as her Aunt Ola says, the more she becomes so sure about her role in the movement and less sure about her entire life.

There’s a deep tension in this novel that Juanita does so well.  Geniece is on the edge of everything, she’s the secretary of the movement and because of this we hear about the riots, the burning of neighborhoods, and the arrests by “the pigs” second hand.  It isn’t until she becomes the Editor of the Black Panther paper that she actually begins to see a different story unfolding in the revolution.  She starts to see her own revolution through the story of these two young girls with a drunk mother and constant police calls.  These two little girls who are dressed in their perfect Sunday best for a Christmas dinner at the Children’s house, who’s mother is drunk and broken in bed, her face swollen from a boyfriend’s boot, they are the game-changer in Geniece’s life as a revolutionary.

The story of the revolutionaries, the black house, the Black Panther Party is one I wasn’t aware of until I read this book.  I’ll admit I’m knowledgable about Vietnam and knowledgable about the “funnies” of Hippie history, but I knew nothing about the Black Panther Party.  I dabbled in Malcolm X’s biography when my kids were reading it at the teen center after school.  I love what he says about the dictionary during his time in prison.  (You can read “Learning to Read” here).  Geniece’s story is one of “on paper equality.”  On paper in this story, black people were free and equal, however in the reality of the streets, this just wasn’t true.  The 1960′s in America was still a war between colors, but when I taught this time period to my student’s this semester, I hadn’t tried to see the perspectives like I had to in Virgin Soul.  In 1992, just 21 years ago, we had the LA Riots over racial injustice so I can’t even say that we’re fully equal now beyond the paper saying that we are.   I used this article, The Roots of Racism, with my students this semester while they read To Kill a Mockingbird.  I think it says a lot about how we categorize people in the 21st century.

Olive Morris of the Brixton Black Panther Movement.

While Virgin Soul made me uncomfortable and the tension became even more traumatic as the pages escaped behind me, I think it was worth reading, just for the subtle hints at a history that I had never studied.  History teachers always say that history is told from the perspective of the winner and Virgin Soul tells how true this is. The brief fictional history of the Black Panther Party from the perspective of a woman no-doubt, and a woman who was deeply imbedded, but also stuck to the outskirts for her womanhood, was definitely worthy of competing for its historical place.

I think it’s deeply ironic how Geniece’s womanhood keeps her from the heavy battles that ensue during the novel.  Here she is watching the violence unfold around her, watching the boys she’s trusted to lead her into power, and unable to really involve herself within the movement other than through words.  I appreciated Juanita making sure she took over the role of editor by the end.  Wars start with words, not with guns and it made Geniece become a more dynamic character because she was in control of the words behind her movement.  Even then, she was visiting members in jail to hear the news, and the read-all-about-it experiences that needed to be shared out of The Bay Area.

This book is just in time for its coming-out party.  With President Obama running on the Change campaign in 2008, Virgin Soul is the book that highlights the change that America has been trying to make from the beginning.  How many moments of change have we tried to fight and how many have we accepted without much fuss. I wonder now.

Analia Saban – Acrylic in Canvas with Ruptures: Grid (2010) – Acrylic and stretcher bars in laser-cut canvas bag

Virgin Soul gives readers a glimpse at the beginnings of change.  People so often start knowing what they want to move, but don’t often know how they’re going to move it.  How will you get something to budge.  How large, how tall, how obtuse, how deep is the well of the problem and how far are the movers willing to stir.

Reading wise, this book was slow.  It probably needed to be slow though so it unfolded like a pamphlet given out by a member.  I was at times shocked by the brutality, the sexual exploration, and the choices that Geniece would make (like Barry with his “funk,” BLEH).  Then I realized that not only is Geniece a member of the Black Panther Party, she’s a girl who is going to college in the hopes to earn her degree and get out of everything that she’s fighting for.  She wants to grow into a woman who is known for the education she holds rather than the mistakes she’s made.  If I were to write the history of the college girl in a sentence I would say, we retreat into someone else’s ideas until we find our own during the outbreak of education.

Favorite Tweets:

Favorite Search Terms:

• “we have always lived in the castle” nailing the book and the pocket watch: I just wonder if this person is constructing a shrine….or making a cake.
  
• dr. seuss book spines: Color-up your library!

Book News:

• David Sedaris Picks 5 Favorite Unusual Book Titles @ Nook Blog
• Baby Girl Names Inspired by Beloved Book Characters @ Huff Post
• 

  The Night Life of Trees Illustrations @ Brain Pickings

  The Night Life of Trees @ Brain Pickings

• Your Favorite Poets’ Favorite Books of Poetry @ Flavorwire
• The Dos and Don’ts Of Teaching Children How to Read @ Take Part
• Radicalism 101 @ The Rumpus
• Isabel Allende’s Book Bag @ The Daily Beast
• The Ten Greatest Creepy Farm Books @ Flavorwire
• This Week in Fiction: Joshua Ferris @ The New Yorker
• 

  This is for Emma Bolden (Alice B and Gertrude) in their “Famous Literary Salon.”

  Visit Some of History’s Most Famous Literary Salons @ Flavorwire

• Riding in Cars with Words @ Ploughshares
• Don’t Be Afraid to Listen to Constructive Criticism @ Galley Cat
• The Most Playful Libraries in the World @ Flavorwire
• The Wendell Berry Sentence That Inspired Michael Pollen’s Food Obsession @ The Atlantic
• Sexting with Authors @ Electric Literature
• Sylvia Plath Becomes Experimental Cinema @ Open Culture
• David Sedaris Moonlights as a High School Speech Writer @ The Atlantic
• How to Write About Nature @ Galley Cat
• 11 Famous Actors Reading Shakespeare Outloud @ Flavorwire
• The American Gods Dream Cast on HBO @ Book Riot
• Your Book Starts Here @ Loft Literary Center
• World Book Night: Ten Writers’ Reasons for Reading @ The Guardian
• 9 Letters from Young J.D. Salinger @ New York Times
• NYT Book Reviews: How the System Works @ Huff Post
• The Dialogue of the Dogs @ MHP Books
• My Jewish Characters @ Table Mag
• 

  Joshua Bright for The New York Times The small gold object inside the white circle is “The Chameleon,” a book less than a millimeter across.

  Redefining a Little Library @ NY Times

• Exploration Scientifique de L’Agerie @ Smithsonian Libraries Unbound
• Are Male and Female Writers Treated Equally @ Huff Post
• Poet-Think @ LA Times
• Country Living Appraises a 1952 Literary Map @ Huff Post
• American Psycho Musical London @ The Guardian
• Henry Miller on Reading, Influence, and What’s Wrong with Education @ Brain Pickings
• Margaret Atwood on Literary Los Angeles @ LATimes
• The How-To of Erotica Writing @ Huff Post

Favorite Tweets:

Favorite Search Terms:

• when women were birds negative review: This does not exist.  Stop looking.
• is it insane to post a 3 paragraph response on facebook: Yes, yes it is.  If you have friends that you have to write a 3-paragraph post to, then you should delete that person.  I don’t have a facebook, but once I had a friend who decided she was going to post a science video (that wasn’t actually science) saying that women on birth control are more promiscuous AND choose the wrong guys.  I then progressed to delete her with a very hard click, a pounding click if you will, and went about my normal day. 

Book News:

• 

  Awesome Typography @ IdN World

  AWESOME Typography @ IdnWorld

• 2012 Sales Figures Show Spike in YA E-Books and Hardcover @ The Examiner
• Pablo Neruda’s Bones to Be Examined in the US @ Huff Post
• Beautiful Failures @ The New Yorker
• 10 Authors Who Loved Their Film Adaptations @ Flavorwire
• Ten Ways Self-Publishing Changed the World @ Guardian
• In Conversation with Robert Silvers @ NY Mag
• Dear Filipino Immigrants Who Will One Day Read Our Books @ Huff Post
• Getting Stuffed: Love, Taxidermy Owls @ Guardian
• What Makes the List of Challenged Books @ Yahoo
• The Science of Paper Versus Screen @ Scientific American
• Advice on Passion, Brilliance and Bugs ‘in Letters’ @ NPR
• What Next? Three Books to Read After The Book Thief @ Book Riot

• ‘Romeo and Juliet’ to Come From Downton Abby @ Huff Post
• Books Discussed by @BillGates Followers @ Book Vibe
• Yoko Ono to Write ‘Instructional Poetry’ Book @ NPR
• Booksellers Hope Fiction is Awarded @ NY Times
• ‘Catching Fire’ Trailer Debuts @ Huff Post

• 

  Stray Books

  Meg Wolitzer’s Favorite Books @ Book Riot

• The History of Our Emotions According to Books @ Huff Post

• Do Writers Really Retire @ The New Yorker
• Matilda on Broadway and Other Children’s Books That Should Be There @ Book Riot
• Pulitzer Fiction Watchers Rest Easy This Year @ NPR
• Amanda Knox Pens About Prison Abuse @ LA Times
• The Most Ridiculous Claims Used to Challenge Classic Novels @ Flavorwire
• Massive Volunteer Collective Proofreads 25,000 Public Domain Books @ The Atlantic
• Adam Johnson Wins Pulitzer in Fiction @ La Times
• Pulitzer Announcement Live Chat @ Book Riot
• British Literary Stars in Granta @ NPR
• National Book Festival Authors @ Huff Post
• Holy Grail of Rare Books @ ABC News
• Library of the Future @ Fast Coexist
• One Million Books Donated to Sandy Hook @ Good Men Project
• Book Jacket Fashion @ The Guardian

Anis Mojgani

I, like a lot of beating-hearted teenagers, first fell in love with Anis Mojgani over Shake the Dust.  I wanted to “brush my shoulders off,” peel the wane of fluff from my legs and arms, let the old skin flake and shed so I could come back a chameleon, and “walk into it.”  I was a teenager then, or maybe I was in college.  Maybe I was a college teenager.

I needed someone to tell me that life wasn’t all lollipops and raindrops, but instead give me the real struggle of it.  It didn’t happen throughout my high school literature circuit so I began looking to poems somewhere between not getting out of bed for Pre-Calc and changing my major from religious studies to creative writing.  Somewhere on the in-between, probably lying in bed because I did that for most of my freshman year, I confused a perfect world with my world.  I thought when you made silly faces at boys in class, it wouldn’t lead to cheating on your back-home boyfriend.  I thought that people didn’t backstab each other, that they loved one another truly when they said, “this is a commitment.”  I believed my friends partook in recreational drug-use, but none of that back-shed-lab stuff.  I believed in the majority good, the hearts of the people I met and the friendly faces that passed me on the all-brick campus where I had my first writing lesson:  No one wants to hear about the good stuff, and no one wants to be entertained by something perfect.

“This is bullshit.”  I remember distinctly when Allison said this to my fiction workshop.

Why can’t we write about happiness.  Why does shit always have to be dark or go dark.  How does darkness just come, just show up on a doorstep and expect to be let in because what else can you possibly do when half the world is bearded in it.  There are forests of it, holes of it, religious movements dedicated to it, gangs of starships who have gone to its side and yet we expect to somehow fight it off and let the good triumph.  Always, always over evil.  What we forget is this binary.  This halfness of the world.  When we’ve had winter, we know spring is coming.  When we have light, we know the moon will skim the sky like a mini-skirt and leave us in the dark.  I wish there was a color for it, I wish I could say “leave us in the black” but that’s not even right.  It’s like a steeped gray.  It comes. Everytime.

Song From Under the River by Anis Mojgani

That’s what Anis Mojgani knows about the world.   When I saw his book of poetry, Songs from Under the River, years of poetry collected, up on NetGalley, my breath caught.  I may have spit up something I was drinking.  Here’s what I had been waiting for.  This selection of poetry, ending of course in one of my favorite slam poems ever, Shake the Dust.  Those who are not familiar, need to immediately watch the video.  It’s a poem that makes you want to pray, even if you’ve never believed in anything greater than yourself.  Then, you pray for yourself, you pray by yourself, you pray with yourself.  You fold your hands together like a little drummer boy and you lean your head towards your feet and you become humble to the words coming out of this man’s swollen mouth.  So full of words, it’s buoyant.

I thought Shake the Dust was his best.  I thought he gave it as a gift to the teenage world.  With all these hormones, all this carrying-on, all this switchback, where’s the poem for us.  It’s here in these words of half-God, half-growing pains.  That’s not it though,  Shake the Dust isn’t all he whispered into the darkness.  There’s so much more to Anis Mojgani as seen in Songs from Under the River.  It made me want to eat my ipad it was so delicious on my tongue.  I would read it into the ferns on my porch where a Robin has warmed eggs in the hanging pot of it.

Songs from Under the River is a fascinating collection of new-age poetry, slam-poetry and rambling.  I think sometimes it’s easy to consider rambling, poetry,  especially if it’s someone you respect as a poet, but it’s just not.  You can’t ramble your way through a poem.  Poetry is a thing that needs specific words.  That’s why I believe that once you reach poet status, you have reached the highest level of writing.  It’s just too hard to get perfect.  Your word choice has to be impeccable and even after you publish that 12-line, succinct, beautiful little capsule, you’ll find that one word that’s off.  A poem is one of the hardest things to get right.

National Poetry Month Poster 2013

I think Anis Mojgani has some definite winners in his collection with lines like:

Know this: my heart was too big or my body so I let it go.  And most days, this world has thinned me to the point where I am just another cloud forgetting another flock of swans — having shaved off so many of my corners that I have flet at home only in the shape of a ball, bending myself so far backwards that the song of my mother believed I was returning home.  But believe me when I tell you my soul somehow still squeezes into narrow spaces. – Closer

Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary–I know all the other words.  None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does. – On the day his son was born the astronomer screamed out his window

Come Closer – Anis Mojgani

(5) I was never a broken man/but I too know how to pick the pieces/ up.  Some days the pieces are all teeth/ pulled from the mouths of children.  Some days they are simply books/ searching for a shelf.  (6) I have carved shelves out of my heart/ to try and bring an order to things. All/ it did was make space.

(10) Some ladies’ legs are shaped like/ confessionals/ and some confessionals are built like/ the bows of burning boats.  Speaking/ through both my body caught fire like/ everything else. – 17 books

All the flowers have the same name.  They all grow in the direction of her mother’s house. – Love is Not a Science

A Paixão Segundo N.A.B. | via Tumblr auf We Heart It.

Sometimes he does fall into the category of unedited.  Sometimes you want something to be a poem so badly, and yet it’s just not there yet.  I think his poems didn’t make sense because they weren’t edited correctly.  It’s a myth that poetry isn’t supposed to make sense.  Poetry should make sense in the deepest recesses of your soul, even if it’s so specifically your story and your experience, it should matter to the world.  That’s why poetry works, it takes the most true happening of one person and makes it general, worldly, international.  My favorite poetryism is from Joe Millar.  Joe says when you go to the poetry store, you don’t look for these inflated academic words like however, rudimentary, reveal, assessed, constructed, objective, but words like hairbrush, vein, dogwood bud, wet, chalk.  There are other words the poetry bookstore doesn’t sell: love, hate, mad, angry, sentimental, because in poetry you’re supposed to make us feel those words.  It’s the great fictionism: show don’t tell, but in even tighter detail.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t inspired by this book and I would be lying if I said every poem in it is perfect.  There is some unbreakable writing in this book, lines that I want to etch into a tree.  (Line from Anis: “but the initials carved that break the trunk open the tree flaunting its body”).

There were moments when I almost cried because something he wrote on the page was so beautiful that it hurt and helped at the same time.  However, some things could be parred down, some poems could be taken from the mind and then worked into real things that live on the page, instead of a reader just being confused at what Anis thinks about during his writing hours.  It’s an honest collection of poems and it’s for the individual with secrets; both filled with anger and just quiet little ones that we haven’t found a way to give up yet, or speak up.

Tumblr Image

Sometimes, as writers, we look at something and say, yes, this makes perfect sense.  This is exactly how you would describe a…fist fight, or a break-up, or a wedding.  And then, when the reader gets to the page, it’s just a swan’s feather, or the gully of the Grand Canyon, or just something that makes no sense to anyone else.  It’s frustrating and is really just a call-out for better editing and more early morning writing sessions.  I’m not knocking Mojgani by any means because he is impeccable and he made a writing career from a college dorm room.

I encourage everyone to live a moment in the church of themselves, that small sanctuary we keep just below our rib cage and just above our stomach and read this poetry collection.  Spend time in the river water, don’t just dip your toes in, touch the bottom with your flattened palm.

Here is my new favorite slam poem of the moment: