I’ve been spending long delicious hours in a tiny world, the space bordered on one side by my computer and the other by my chair. I’m doing a last pass through my manuscript, reading aloud as I edit. In a week or two, I will send it to a few lovely people who’ve agreed to …
A quotation from James Baldwin has been making the rounds of some friends on Facebook this week. I like to observe this phenomenon, how a snippet of text gets unmoored from its intended context and eddies through cyberspace, washing up on shores of meaning its author surely never intended. People latch onto scraps of text …
Father’s day on Facebook is filled with sweet smiles and tributes. I am touched by my friends’ photographs and texts, but that’s not what brings tears to my eyes this morning. My father died suddenly just after my tenth birthday. “The last day of my childhood,” I always say, because he was the tenuous tie …
I spoke last night at the Diekeou Collection in Denver, the venue for a talk on cultural policy cosponsored by WESTAF and Arts for Colorado. My subject was “Getting Our Hopes Up: Envisioning Art at The Center,” an exploration of the fear of disappointment and how it has shrunken our vision of art’s public purpose, …
Note to readers: This is the third in a series of blogs I am delighted to be writing for Harmony: The WomenArts Partnership Project. They will appear biweekly on the WomenArts site, and I will also reproduce each one here. What can be accomplished when women artists and activist organizations work together? Most activist groups …
What does it take to dislodge undigested assumptions? I’m thinking of the worlds of education, art, and finance, but I got there via Thanksgiving. There can be a claustrophobic quality to Thanksgiving dinner (apart from being stuck at table with an army of seldom-seen relatives). Often, there are so many dishes that even if you …
The title of this essay is a quote from Lily Tomlin I’ve had for at least a decade: I used it in my email signature for a few months half a dozen years ago, and it seemed true then. But after the utterly cynical way racism and antisemitism have been used this week to market …
Shine on me Let the light shine on me The Black Monks of Mississippi I spent the day at Grantmakers in The Arts’ Support for Individual Artists preconference (entitled Artists and Grantmakers: A Shared Enterprise). Dozens of artists and funders took part in the program, performing, offering panel presentations, Web pages, video clips, and PowerPoints. …
Two notes to you, dear readers: First, from Sunday through Wednesday (17-20 October 2010), I’ll be one of three bloggers invited to attend and write about the annual conference of Grantmakers in the Arts. I’ll be posting at least once a day, perhaps more, both through my own site and at GIA’s site. If you’re …
My friend heard it from Wilbert Rideau, a writer she admires. He was commenting on the constraints that shape certain prison writers’ perspectives. “They can only see the world,” he said, “through the lens of their own pain.” Some of us are imprisoned by iron and stone, some by cages erected in our own minds. …