Sarah Marian: Writing only leads to more writing

"Fiction is dangerous, Gaiman explained, because “it lets you into others’ heads, it gives you..."

fellowette — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:44:00 -0400

“Fiction is dangerous, Gaiman explained, because “it lets you into others’ heads, it gives you empathy, and it shows you that the world doesn’t have to be like the one you live in.” That imaginative leap into other minds and other worlds is surely the reason many of us read fiction.”

- Why Neil Gaiman Thinks Fiction is Dangerous, and Why I Think Fiction is Dangerous

http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2013/06/prepub/why-neil-gaiman-thinks-fiction-is-dangerous-and-why-i-think-its-dangerous/

(via londonxbridge)

A little editing humor, via writerly folks on Facebook.

fellowette — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:42:44 -0400

A little editing humor, via writerly folks on Facebook.

Around the Sisterhood

fellowette — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:50:00 -0400

So since the Sisterhood is my primary blogging gig these days, I thought I’d continue to highlight my favorite posts now and then on my Tumblr. Here are a few:

Confessions of a Disney Princess
Cleveland Kidnapping, Elizabeth Smart and Us
Judy Blume’s ‘Tiger Eyes’ Comes to Big Screen
The Enduring Rape Myth Created by Nazis
And be sure to read the Sisterhood on your new RSS reader: http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/rss/

"A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic, report that people who..."

fellowette — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:51:18 -0400

“A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic, report that people who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty—attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity.
“Exposure to literature,” the researchers write in the Creativity Research Journal, “may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.””

- Study: Reading Fiction Makes People Comfortable With Ambiguity

Hurray!

"His long legs were like girls sheathed to the neck in shining riding boots. He smiled at me, struck..."

fellowette — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:41:54 -0400

“His long legs were like girls sheathed to the neck in shining riding boots. He smiled at me, struck his riding whip on the table, and drew toward him an order that the Chief of Staff had just finished dictating.”

- “My First Goose”

I just returned from TENT: Creative Writing, a pilot program for young Jewish or Jewishly-inclined writers at the Yiddish Book Center. I have a lot of thoughts, but I’ll start with sharing an Isaac Babel story that became the touchstone story for my writing workshop with Ehud Hazvelet. See if it doesn’t break your heart a little, and say a lot about Jewishness without being explicitly Jewish.

Ruth Franklin: An open letter to a few good magazine editors; or, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore"

fellowette — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:12:58 -0400

Ruth Franklin: An open letter to a few good magazine editors; or, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore":

Dear Jim, Scott, Graydon, Hugo, Josh, and Adam:

I hope you don’t mind that I’m calling you by your first names, even though I know only one of you. (Josh and I go way back.) I realize I could have just said, “Hey guys!” which, come to think of it, really makes my point for me. But I wanted this…

"The struggles of Friday Night Lights’ young women were most often seen through the eyes of Tami..."

fellowette — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 12:45:13 -0400

“The struggles of Friday Night Lights’ young women were most often seen through the eyes of Tami Taylor. Week after week, Coach Taylor endeavored to be a “molder of men.” But Coach Taylor’s role wasn’t unique. Beside him, Tami was a molder of women. Often laboring in her husband’s shadow in their football-mad town, she strove to help mend the broken sexual and emotional lives of Dillon’s young women. And in order to steer those women toward healthy choices, she had to steer herself away from echoing the widespread misogynist assumptions of her community. Tami’s status as feminist icon for viewers (New York’s NARAL chapter made “don’t mess with Tami” T-shirts) doesn’t come from an explicitly political or ideological stance she took—it would be strange to hear her call herself feminist or use words like “misogyny” or even “sexism.” Instead, Tami’s status comes from her own earned understanding that to help women, you cannot parrot degrading patriarchal language or assumptions. Whether she was comforting Lyla, who found herself in the position of school slut; navigating her daughter’s burgeoning sexuality (which Tami desperately wanted to delay); or, ultimately, in the show’s most explicitly feminist plot arc, sitting down to counsel a young woman seeking an abortion, Tami consistently chose empathy over being judgmental.”

- Smart Pop Books — “It’s Different for Girls”

My essay from “A Friday Night Lights Companion” is available for one week only at Smartpop books.

"The Innocents’ very first tableau — the image that Segal says inspired the project — exemplifies how..."

fellowette — Wed, 29 May 2013 21:12:06 -0400

“The Innocents’ very first tableau — the image that Segal says inspired the project — exemplifies how effective her concept is. Wharton’s iconic opening scene has the protagonist Newland Archer training his opera glasses on Countess Olenska, the woman who will upend his life — sitting in the family box besides his future bride, May Welland. Segal deftly shifts this moment from the concert hall to the synagogue gallery, during the holiest, most somber night of the year, Kol Nidre. Our innocent hero, Adam, looks up from his davening to scan the women’s balcony and gaze with “certainty” upon his fiancée Rachel; beyond Rachel, he sees Ellie, Rachel’s American cousin, the family shonde, “exposing skin from clavicle to navel.” He is repelled yet intrigued; we are simply the latter. The certainty has ended for Adam; for the reader, the pleasure of a good story is beginning.”

- Los Angeles Review of Books - Looking Askance At The Goyim: Francesca Segal’s “The Innocents”

Very proud of this review in LARB!

LABA Journal #3 is out! YOU’RE NOT GOING TO EAT THAT? ‘2 Yet they seek Me daily, and...

fellowette — Tue, 28 May 2013 11:23:00 -0400

LABA Journal #3 is out!

YOU’RE NOT GOING TO EAT THAT?

‘2 Yet they seek Me daily, and delight to know My ways; as a nation that did righteousness, and forsook not the ordinance of their God, they ask of Me righteous ordinances, they delight to draw near unto God. 3 ‘Wherefore have we fasted, and Thou seest not? Wherefore have we afflicted our soul, and Thou takest no knowledge?’—Behold, in the day of your fast ye pursue your business, and exact all your labours.’ Isaiah 58

There is a deep-rooted human instinct to ritualize eating. Maybe it is your morning coffee, just the way you like it. Maybe it is your grandmother’s brisket, your only true moment of Shabbat transcendence. Maybe it is maintaining a careful separation between all things milk and all things meat, for reasons that you can’t quite rationalize. Or maybe it is a cold-pressed juice or a Pinot Grigio, quaffed in a search for a new truth.

The decisions about what we eat and what we don’t eat are rarely isolated ones. Instead, they are part of a larger attempt to create meaning in our lives and control the world around us. Through eating we punctuate our days, participate in moral systems, and express our vitality in the purest and most intuitive fashion available to us. I eat because I am. I am because I eat.

This ritualistic power of eating is precisely what gives not eating its might. Fasting is a way for humans to refresh and reboot, to break habits and to question our values. We deny ourselves food with the hope that our hunger will yield a sharper understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.

In this journal we look at the ritual of fasting, how it slows down time and empowers us all while denying us our might. Can we really change through fasting? Can fasting really change us?

Elissa Strauss

Editor

ESSAY: When Karen Hartman fasts, she feels. But is it true?

MUSIC: Like fasting, Amir Shpilman can slow down time.

FICTION: A fabulist short story from Sarah Seltzer about a woman whose juice cleanse goes too far.

ROCK MIDRASH: Stephen Hazan Arnoff on Bob Dylan and a tale of two Angelinas.

COMMENTARY: Basmat Hazan Arnoff on how fasting can empower the powerless.

Anniversary

fellowette — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:42:19 -0400

I got hitched three years ago to this amazing guy.

That summer, I wrote about balancing my ideals with the decision to marry:

"Daisy may not be the technical villain of Gatsby (Tom, a proto-bro, gets that honor) but she still..."

fellowette — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:21:36 -0400

“Daisy may not be the technical villain of Gatsby (Tom, a proto-bro, gets that honor) but she still sucks, and if it weren’t for her a couple key players in the book would be alive at the end of it. In her honor, here are the top 10 detestable characters of literature—a brief rundown of bad guys who aren’t the bad guys.”

- Daisy, You’re a Drip, Dear: Detestable Literary Characters Who Are Not Technically Villains | The Hairpin

Occasionally someone writes something I really wish I’d written. In this case Ester Bloom, dear friend of dear friends, has crafted a brilliant lit-list that hits on many of my faves.

rhrealitycheck: Kathryn Joyce’s new look at the adoption...

fellowette — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:45:46 -0400

rhrealitycheck:

Kathryn Joyce’s new look at the adoption industry, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, contains within its pages true horror stories. Perhaps most shockingly, the book details what appears to be the long-term abuse of a group of Liberian orphans “adopted” into a life of virtual slavery in Tennessee—starved, hit, manipulated, and isolated by “parents” practicing an extreme brand of back-to-the-land Christianity.

But Joyce, through intensive reporting around the world, also tells the stories of “orphans” who have actual families, even mothers, back home and who were adopted under false auspices, as well women in the United States who are manipulated into relinquishing children for adoption bycrisis pregnancy centers (CPCs).

Throughout the book, these dynamics of exploitation are recreated on a macro scale as the increasing drive for Westerners, often people of faith, to adopt orphans keeps feeding into, and off of, a global system of poverty, corruption, and mistreatment of women and children. Joyce’s work touches on bigger social issues, like the intersection of capitalism with reproduction, the role of religion in shaping policy, and the way conventional—and even inspirational—narratives of care and charity intersect with old paradigms of oppression and power.

Joyce recently spoke to RH Reality Check about how the movement she chronicles relates to abortion politics and the treatment of biological families of adoptees at home and abroad.

Read more—>

Loved doing this Q+A.

Cheesy, but gotta love it.

fellowette — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:33:46 -0400

Cheesy, but gotta love it.

"The horrifying event that forms the basis of Mandel’s memoir occurred in 1952, when American..."

fellowette — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:03:21 -0400

“The horrifying event that forms the basis of Mandel’s memoir occurred in 1952, when American Airlines Flight 6780 crashed into her family’s New Jersey home. The accident ripped a figurative as well as literal hole in the family’s heart; one daughter, 7-year-old Donna, was killed, and the other, 2-year-old Linda, was seriously wounded…In the years following Donna’s death and Linda’s slow, painful and surgery-laden recovery, Mandel’s mother, Florence Mandel, suffered from depression and was told by a doctor to have another child. Judy was born two years after the crash”

- Replacement for a Child Lost – Forward.com

My profile of Judy Mandel, long labored-upon, is up.

"Also Lawrence Selden from the House of Mirth, says, “My idea of success is personal freedom. To keep..."

fellowette — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:24:36 -0400

“Also Lawrence Selden from the House of Mirth, says, “My idea of success is personal freedom. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit, that’s what I call success.” This is both Selden’s virtue and fatal flaw, but it was my high school yearbook quote and remains my mantra. For instance, I refused to take any unpaid internships, which would likely have helped me a lot career-wise. And yet here I am. I get paid—often—to write! I am so fucking lucky, and I recognize that.”

- Talking About Jealousy of the Professional Variety | The Billfold

Chanel asked me to talk about jealousy. I had a lot to say!

As a culture, we obsess over methods for...

fellowette — Sun, 12 May 2013 10:40:28 -0400

As a culture, we obsess over methods for parenting—breastfeeding! slings! crazy potty training!—but we don’t rush to pass the laws that would empower moms to parent as they choose. Our orgiastic annual spending spree feels at times as if we’re saying, “Mom, I can’t get you maternity leave, health care, or societal respect. But, um, here is a planter of petunias.”

Fairness, Not Just Flowers — Gender Justice/Feminism — Medium

"The current controversy combines two of my most loathed patterns in our public discourse. The first..."

fellowette — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:43:45 -0400

“

The current controversy combines two of my most loathed patterns in our public discourse. The first is a basic misunderstanding of the state of abortion policies in this country. In fact, thanks to a bucket load of restrictions and the odious Hyde Amendment, we’re alarmingly creeping back to a lack of access like we had before Roe — which in turn creates the potential for predatory Gosnell-types.

The second issue is a more personal complaint with policy ramifications. It’s the problem that, as I noted when I wrote about the VIDA count, many men seem uninterested in reading the words of women who write about women’s lives.

”

- What the Gosnell Horror Reveals About the Abortion Debate – The Sisterhood

rhrealitycheck: Feminism? In MY Nashville? It’s more likely...

fellowette — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:43:51 -0400

rhrealitycheck:

Feminism? In MY Nashville? It’s more likely than you think.

Sarah Seltzer: Hi Lauren! Despite its fluffy pop star exterior, this is a show that’s created by someone with genuine feminist bona fides, Callie Khouri of Thelma and Louise fame, and starring another recent heroine of reproductive rights on television, Connie Britton, aka Tami Taylor from Friday Night Lights. I think you can see the feminism creeping in at the edges of this show, or at the very least a certain woman-centric point of view. Do you detect any traces of real ideological edge in this primetime soap, or is any impulse in that direction tempered by the need for big ratings?

LK: Ah yes, our Lord and Savior Connie Britton. There are many reasons to love her and the characters she plays. On Friday Night Lights, Britton, playing Tami, has that great series of scenes where she’s persecuted by anti-choicers for discussing abortion with a teenage student. Britton plays those scenes with so much compassion—not to mention frustration at the anti-choice activists (“Come on, y’all”).

As for Nashville, I think you’re absolutely right about feminism “creeping in at the edges.” The show very much passes the Bechdel Test. It’s about strong-willed women, Rayna James and Juliette Barnes, who are super career-focused. They’re vocal about what they want out of their careers, they negotiate hard, and they’re ambitious. There are plenty (plenty) of sub-plots about the men in their lives, but the show is first and foremost about two women who are successful music stars, trying to navigate the industry.

LABA Eat Journal #2 is Out!

fellowette — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:27:00 -0400

EAT JOURNAL #2: FOOD & ETHICS

DID YOU LEAVE ANY WHEAT BEHIND?

“The Gleaners” Jean-Francois Millet

9 And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest. 10 And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger.

ESSAY: Diana Spechler on her search for someone to eat with.

COMMENTARY: Ruby Namdar on why the old method to feed the poor is much better than what we do now.

LIST: Elissa Strauss’s list of ten things you share when you share food.

ART: Artist Joshua Schwartz wants to make you a playlist.

CURRENT: Sarah Seltzer on Sandy and how we fail at providing for our gleaners.

ROCK MIDRASH: Stephen Hazan Arnoff on Bob Dylan’s call to help the poor.

Recent Pieces at the Sisterhood Run the Gamut...

fellowette — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:42:00 -0400

Here are a few of my latest efforts for the Forward…as you can see, they are very varied in subject matter, but I thought I’d group them together anyway.

You Are Not Washed Up, Yale SWUGs!

Have you heard about “senior washed up girls” — or “SWUGs”? They’re the latest acronym for a sexual trend that affects Ivy Leaguers, in this case young women at the end of their college careers discovering that (either due to free will or lack of options) they do not care anymore: about grades, hookups, relationships or anything but having a good time.

Jewish Feminist Shulamith Firestone’s Lessons

By Sarah Seltzer

A young woman from a strict Orthodox family clashes with her father, leaves home and finds a home of sorts in the “Movement” — first the New Left of the 1960s, then the explosion of radical feminism out of that group’s fed-up female contingent. Her forward-thinking writing and organizing electrifies this new “wave” of feminism, but after infighting and teardowns within its ranks, she finds herself exiled and suffering from mental illness — and despite comrades’ efforts to intervene (efforts that are successful for a time), she ends up dying alone.

Positive Remarks on Female Politicans’ Appearance Hurts Them

By Sarah Seltzer

Think it’s no big deal that President Obama called Attorney General Kamala Harris the best looking Attorney General? I didn’t. Sure, I thought that it was an irritating reflection of sexism but not a big cause for banner waving. I particularly felt this way because of the outcry’s implicit condemnation of, well, me. Perhaps I too often make comments about the appearance of others, particularly those I see as interesting or attractive. I also believe that the affirmation of a public and powerful African-American woman’s beauty remains a novel and positive development in our screwed up racist culture.

A Slob Takes on the Gendered Cleaning Debate

By Sarah Seltzer

Jess Grose, writing at the New Republic, has kickstarted a provocative discussion about partnerships and housework with a piece called “Cleaning: The Final Feminist Frontier.” She notes that the culture shift that has brought about many men’s newfound willingness to help cook and parent has not been matched by an eagerness to scrub the darker, grimier corners of the home. And she notes that for women, the desire to clean is often driven by social pressure: “Unfortunately, the notion that women will be the first to be judged for a messy home and the first to be commended for an orderly one isn’t much of an incentive for men to pick up a mop.”