She wrote consistently, press releases and such, but not in the format or for the audience she preferred. Caught in a cycle of “almost writing,” it was her reading life that nudged her to go pro with the kind of writing she loved. Observing other authors telling Latino stories gave her inspiration and confidence to tell some of her own. Ten years later, she’s the award-winning author of four books for children and young adults, with a fifth on the way.
Continue reading “Meg Medina on Building The Courage to Write”
She wrote consistently, press releases and such, but not in the format or for the audience she preferred. Caught in a cycle of “almost writing,” it was her reading life that nudged her to go pro with the kind of writing she loved. Observing other authors telling Latino stories gave her inspiration and confidence to tell some of her own. Ten years later, she’s the award-winning author of four books for children and young adults, with a fifth on the way.
Continue reading “Meg Medina on Building The Courage to Write”
Sometimes the best thing an emergency room doctor can give a kid is a book. In a world where low-income children hear 30 million fewer words than more affluent peers, literacy’s the true life-saver. Sutures and IVs can do only so much to address the aftermath of poverty—violence, drugs and abuse—that accounts for so many ER visits.
Just ask Dr. Robin Foster, chief of pediatric emergency services at VCU Medical Center, who says she makes as much impact with social engagement as with medical intervention. Foster helped found in-hospital programs dedicated to child advocacy, youth violence prevention and literacy–all with the goal of reducing the need for emergency services by nipping issues before they reach crisis levels.
Read on to see how Foster and her colleagues promote early literacy and school readiness as a site of Reach Out and Read, a national program that integrates children’s books and parental advice into medical visits.
Continue reading “When Books Are the Best Medicine: Fostering Literacy in the ER”
Sometimes the best thing an emergency room doctor can give a kid is a book. In a world where low-income children hear 30 million fewer words than more affluent peers, literacy’s the true life-saver. Sutures and IVs can do only so much to address the aftermath of poverty—violence, drugs and abuse—that accounts for so many ER visits.
Just ask Dr. Robin Foster, chief of pediatric emergency services at VCU Medical Center, who says she makes as much impact with social engagement as with medical intervention. Foster helped found in-hospital programs dedicated to child advocacy, youth violence prevention and literacy–all with the goal of reducing the need for emergency services by nipping issues before they reach crisis levels.
Read on to see how Foster and her colleagues promote early literacy and school readiness as a site of Reach Out and Read, a national program that integrates children’s books and parental advice into medical visits.
Continue reading “When Books Are the Best Medicine: Fostering Literacy in the ER”
Instead, I found the same old, same old: an overwhelmingly white and male list. It featured just three women authors — Harper Lee, Margaret Atwoood, L.M. Montgomery. Haruki Murakami and Alexandre Dumas the lone people of color.
Irritated, I replied: “I hope this is a first draft and you plan to do some soul searching about the bias you just put on blast.” I wrongly assumed that the whitewashed list, like so many others every year, was a sole author’s creation. Turns out, the real origin was more interesting. Time reprinted a Business Insider article summarizing a Reddit thread that asked, “What is a book that everyone needs to read at least once in their life?”
A. Reddit. Thread. Continue reading “On Protesting Whitewashed Reading Lists”
Instead, I found the same old, same old: an overwhelmingly white and male list. It featured just three women authors — Harper Lee, Margaret Atwoood, L.M. Montgomery. Haruki Murakami and Alexandre Dumas the lone people of color.
Irritated, I replied: “I hope this is a first draft and you plan to do some soul searching about the bias you just put on blast.” I wrongly assumed that the whitewashed list, like so many others every year, was a sole author’s creation. Turns out, the real origin was more interesting. Time reprinted a Business Insider article summarizing a Reddit thread that asked, “What is a book that everyone needs to read at least once in their life?”
A. Reddit. Thread. Continue reading “On Protesting Whitewashed Reading Lists”
The conversation in this case centered around a single misleading caption in a high school geography text, but the issue is much more widespread. So many wonderful points were made by host Nancy Redd and my fellow panelists Roni Dean-Burren and Mark Anthony Neal that I wanted to share the full text of our discussion in addition to the video. Scroll down for the transcript. Continue reading “How To Address Misleading History in Texas Textbooks”
The conversation in this case centered around a single misleading caption in a high school geography text, but the issue is much more widespread. So many wonderful points were made by host Nancy Redd and my fellow panelists Roni Dean-Burren and Mark Anthony Neal that I wanted to share the full text of our discussion in addition to the video. Scroll down for the transcript. Continue reading “How To Address Misleading History in Texas Textbooks”
Here’s the speech:
My family and I moved here in May–with 3,000 other folks. We’re part of the influx of people primed to relocate by all of the Best Places lists that Austin tops. You know, the ones that say Austin is best for young professionals and retirees. That it’s tech-savvy, green, musical, safe, educated, weird. And somehow also manages to be the best place for barbecue, burgers and vegetarians.
Austin shows really well in TV specials and glossy magazines.
But when you move here and see it up close, it loses a bit of its sheen. You see firsthand that Austin has excellent homes, schools, and lifestyles–for some. But it also has incredible segregation that divides people by income, education, and class, not to mention race and ethnicity, in ways that perpetuate poverty and cripple educational attainment for far too many children. Continue reading “Nonprofit Spotlight: Why I Support Breakthrough Austin”
Here’s the speech:
My family and I moved here in May–with 3,000 other folks. We’re part of the influx of people primed to relocate by all of the Best Places lists that Austin tops. You know, the ones that say Austin is best for young professionals and retirees. That it’s tech-savvy, green, musical, safe, educated, weird. And somehow also manages to be the best place for barbecue, burgers and vegetarians.
Austin shows really well in TV specials and glossy magazines.
But when you move here and see it up close, it loses a bit of its sheen. You see firsthand that Austin has excellent homes, schools, and lifestyles–for some. But it also has incredible segregation that divides people by income, education, and class, not to mention race and ethnicity, in ways that perpetuate poverty and cripple educational attainment for far too many children. Continue reading “Nonprofit Spotlight: Why I Support Breakthrough Austin”
Set in 1987, it maps Angie Mackenzie’s fraught journey to retrace her deceased sister Ella’s steps from Detroit to Lagos, and bring a sense of closure to her mourning. Since Ella’s death, Angie had been stuck–unable to forge her own identity. She’s lived instead “as a kind of caretaker to the obsessions Ella left behind, an executor of her sister’s Afrocentric politics, new age beliefs, Fela Kuti devotion.”
But by 1987, four years after Ella’s death, times had changed. The African Liberation Day celebration in Detroit had shriveled, Fela was strung out, and Angie sporting her dead sister’s caftan and haunting her grave was long-past worrisome. She set off for Lagos Island, Ikeja and Surulera on a “hajj of some sort, yearn[ing] to return more certain of who she was, of what she could do in the world. Figure out what type of black person to be.”
Author Bridgett Davis makes a risky choice in telling this story through Angie, a thin, grasping imitation of Ella. It mutes the book’s most lively character and reduces Ella’s charisma and many compelling experiences to plot points along Angie’s quest for resolution. The effect is to dampen the urgency of some of the book’s best material. Pivotal moments in Ella’s life become, in Angie’s mind, mere explanations for her ultimate demise, making the tale a bit too pat and tidy.
Davis references a great deal of African-American history–the family’s migration north, Jim Crow, “black firsts” (the first black woman jockey, the first black woman congresswoman…), the Black Power movement. It provides important context for Angie’s journey and a counterpoint to what she learns of African current events, illuminating the dramatic personal, social and cultural change sweeping through countries on two continents.
Occasionally, though, the historical references to coups and crack, apartheid and AIDS feel forced into a story that’s principally about grieving, not racial consciousness. That Ella was “deep into the struggle, a dedicated Pan-Africanist” feels less important than that she was dynamic, loved, and greatly missed.
Stalking Ella’s memory proves to be extremely dangerous for a single woman in Nigeria, and naive Angie belatedly realizes that Ella didn’t make her journeys to Africa alone. Big sis was always a part of a delegation or with her on-again-off-again boyfriend Nigel. Davis hits her stride in the latter part of the book when she vividly describes Nigeria in all its poverty and prosperity, with many shades of lifestyle, identity, and culture in between. It’s a much more textured depiction than the one offered of Detroit, which is principally set in stores or in front of television sets.
Like the “go-slow” in Lagos for which the book is named–its notorious traffic–the novel’s direction is clear from the outset, but so dense with characters and activity that you don’t know when you’ll arrive. Be forewarned. It’s quite a ride and the destination may not warrant the travel.
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Hocus pocus title aside, “Big Magic” serves up delightfully grounded advice on mustering up the courage and sanity to live creatively. That is, by Gilbert’s definition, to live a life informed by curiosity, not fear or shame.
The occult does make an appearance in the book, but it’s largely confined to one section in which Gilbert sets forth some quirky beliefs about creativity and its “not entirely human” origins. She sees ideas as sentient, energetic life forms that “magically collaborate” with human partners, who escort them “out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.”
But beneath this New Age-y veneer, the book is supremely pragmatic. Gilbert conjures images of the surreal and otherworldly, not to exalt creativity, but to take the pressure off humans trying to enact it. She mentions the supernatural in order to inspire humble, joyful collaboration with the sources of inspiration.
“Just because creativity is mystical doesn’t mean it shouldn’t also be demystified–especially if it means liberating artists from the confines of their own grandiosity, panic, and ego,” she writes.
And we’re all artists in this account, not just the painters or writers among us. Gilbert insists that we each have the capacity to amplify our existences through the fine art of ”continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within [us].” This notion of a heightened existence is compelling. For some readers “Big Magic” will be a reminder that there’s more to life than the mundane. For others it will be a field guide for pursuing transcendent moments.
At heart, the book is an extended, and persuasive, account of the powers of curiosity, bravery, and persistence. Gilbert gives us the example of Susan, a friend who takes up figure skating after a 25-year hiatus because she is curious to see if she still loves it. Turns out she does, and she starts skating three mornings a week. Susan feels alive and ageless cutting across the ice, like she’s more than the sum of daily obligations and duties. “She was making something of herself, making something with herself,” Gilbert writes.
Beyond nudging us to try new things, curiosity also helps tamp down sabotaging emotion, in Gilbert’s reckoning. “Sometimes I think that the difference between a tormented creative life and a tranquil creative life is nothing more than the difference between the word awful and the word interesting,” she writes. “Interesting outcomes, after all, are just awful outcomes with the volume of drama turned way down.”
This is a sharp insight, elegantly rendered. And the prominence Gilbert gives to curiosity as both inspiration and palliative contrasts sharply with more tortured literary voices. In specific, Gilbert calls out Norman Mailer’s claim that each book “killed him a little more” and Oscar Wilde’s description of the artistic life as “one long, lovely suicide” as dramatic (and detrimental) examples.
Gilbert skewers the Tormented Artist stereotype again and again. The repetition is convincing and may save some readers from fruitless crusades into the darkness of dissatisfaction and self-pity when courage, trust and constancy would yield better results. “Since when did creativity become a suffering contest?” she asks. “[T]o suggest that nobody ever made valuable art unless they were in active emotional distress is not only untrue, it’s also kind of sick.”
Her own instincts, she shares, drove her “in the opposite direction–toward light, toward play, toward a more trusting engagement with creativity.” And with great results. This is the author of “Eat Pray Love” and “The Signature of All Things” we’re talking about, after all. Her track record lends great credibility to her promotion of a lighter, more joyful approach to creativity. Not only because her books are commercial successes, but because she was personally, positively transformed by writing them.
“Your creative work is not your baby; if anything, you are its baby,” she writes. “Everything I have ever written has brought me into being. Every project has matured me in a different way. I am who I am today precisely because of what I have made and what it has made me into.”
You creative work is not your paycheck, either, Gilbert also reminds us. (Not at first, anyway.) “Big Magic” doesn’t condone Big Delusions.
Thinking about quitting your day job? Gilbert discourages it. When embarking upon her own writing journey she vowed that she “would never ask writing to take care of [her] financially, but that [she] would always take care of it.”
Weighing the pros and cons of getting an MFA? Gilbert says to check your bank account balance for the answer. “If you’re considering some sort of advanced schooling in the arts and you’re not rolling cash, I’m telling–you can live without it. You can certainly live without the debt, because debt will always be the abattoir of creative dreams.”
In the final assessment, Gilbert’s Big Magic sounds a lot like good sense and daily toil–and it’s a credit to her creativity that she presented that age-old wisdom in a warm, fresh package.
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Greeting cards are a wonderful way to express appreciation for the people in your life–if you can pick one up before the occasion passes by. Why not make sure you’re prepared by keeping cards on hand instead? Make this the year you get your notes in order and plan for all of the occasions likely to emerge throughout the year. Continue reading “How to Organize Your Greeting Cards Because You Care”
