I just received an email from Jennifer Coissiere saying I've been tagged to participate in the Book Buzz Tag. I guess she was determined to help me keep me my word to blog on a regular basis. This is her link.
http://bizarrejcmartin.blogspot.com
Thanks J.C. for handing me a challenge. Now let's do this and keep it moving.
Here’s the idea (you can copy this paragraph to use in your post):
I am going to list three categories of books. 5 MUST Read Books, 5 Books on Your Nightstand, and 5 Look For These Soon. Keeping with the theme, I am going to tag at least 5 bloggers. They should put these same lists on their blog but SUBTRACT one book from each list and ADD one of their own. Then they should tag at least 5 more bloggers. It will be fun to see how the lists change as it goes around the blogosphere. Please come back to this post and leave a comment so I can see how the lists are changing as they go around the blogosphere. Since this is Book Buzz…please keep your lists to titles released in 2007-2009.
5 MUST Read Books:
Them by Nathan McCall
Orange Mint and Honey by Carleen Brice
Song Yet Sung by James McBride
Seen It All, Dome the Rest- Pearl Cleage
Conception by Kalisha Buckhanon
5 Books on the Nightstand:
Up Pops the Devil by Angela Benson
Blood Colony- Tananarive Due
From Harvey River by Lorna Goodison
Stand the Storm by Breena Clarke
Trading Dreams at Midnight by Dianne McKinney Whetstone
5 Look For These Soon:
House at Sugar Beach by Helen Cooper
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
In Love With a Younger Man by Cheryl Robinson
Red Light, Green Light by Margaret Johnson-Hodge
The Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis Gates
The bloggers I’m asking to post the lists (and make one book-for-book change to each list if they wish)
http://acvermen.blogspot.com/
http://www.eisaulen.com/blog/
http://www.michellemcgriff.com/
http://www.anjuellefloyd.com/
http://sugahoney.blogspot.com/
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Cruisin' On a Summer Afternoon
This is the first time I have participated in something like this, something called a meme. I had not a clue as to what a meme is, so I looked it up.
meme
Show Spelled Pronunciation[meem] Pronunciation Key
–noun
a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.
[Origin: 1976; < href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meme">http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meme (accessed: August 06, 2008).
Modern Language Association (MLA):
Yasmin Coleman of APOOO Books threw out the challenge to cite thirteen things one remembers from childhood summers and to link it to your blog. I blog so seldom; on the spur of the moment I decided to participate. Maybe this will be a start of my blogging on a regular basis.
This exercise reminded me I have written a collection of childhood memories that have a working title of what else? Childhood Memories. Obviously, I need a better title. Two of those have been published and I need to work on polishing some more up and submitting somewhere. Growing up in Oakland, California was a lot different from the Oakland today. We roamed the neighborhood and beyond during the summer; sometimes, our parents didn’t know where we were but we knew to be home before dark. I grew up in a multicultural family neighborhood and there were a lot of Leave it Beaver moments. Boy, were those the days.
So, to get on with the Thursday Thirteen, I present thirteen summer occurrences I remember about my childhood.
Links to the post on Thursday Thirteen Childhood Summer Memories (with links to other posters’ blogs) and the original Thursday Thirteen are below.
1. 4th of Julys in Arkansas, either down in the country in Union County or in Little Rock surrounded by cousins and good food. Being the child of African American southern parents, making the trek back to the south to our place of our roots was a way of connecting with our history and ancestry.
2. Walking more than a mile to the swimming pool at Diamond Park. It would be a big group of us carrying our swimwear, including a swimming cap; even as a little girl, I had to protect the do. I write about my hair woes in the story “Shirley Temple Curls.”
3. Gathering at the top of E. 21st Street, watching the boys drive their homemade go carts down the hill. This was a bittersweet memory as one of my childhood friends, Tyrone was killed when he rolled down hill into the path of a bus and was killed. I wrote about this in a piece, “Blackberry Summer” that was published in a journal.
4. Digging up some change to go to the corner store for a big, fat, juicy dill pickle and pack of Kool-aid. There was nothing like it; busting open that packet of Kool-aid, preferably my favorite, grape and rubbing the pickle in it. mmm. Good stuff.
5. Roller skating and riding our bikes. Now my sister and brother claim I would be sitting on the porch reading while they were skating and biking but I know I did those things because I broke my arm roller skating when I was nine and stayed in Children’s Hospital for two days. But I can remember sitting on the porch reading a Nancy Drew mystery. Yep, my siblings were right, I did sit on the porch and read when I wasn’t playing and wrote in my journal also.
6. Going to our cabin in Morgan Hill as a teenager. That’s where my dad’s civic organization, East Oakland Business and Professional Men’s’ Assoc., had their annual summer picnic. Some of the Bay Area’s Talented Tenth attended this event and there were some cute guys! Mariea Johnson’s family had a cabin there also and I remember going to her debutante party in Berkeley. I definitely need to write about that, especially since the death of Dr. Clarence Avery this past spring.
7. Walking over to Jennifer’s house and the smell of her father’s gumbo meeting me at the front door. Her parents were from New Orleans and there was always something good at her house.
8. Gary U. S. Bond’s “School is Out at Last” blasting from the cars at the end of the school year. That was the standard song in the 60s. Jennifer, Lisa and I would be in one of our bedrooms watching Dance Party and American Bandstand, learning the new dance steps. Occasionally, one of us would show a new step from a visiting cousin or something we brought back from our visits to the South.
9. Walking to the movies from my cousins’ house at the Fruitvale theater on Saturday afternoons. My dad would give us money; it cost .25 cents to get in the theater. Wow, I’m dating myself.
10. Going to Housewives Market and seeing all the cases of different meats and foods and visiting with people. It was the meeting place for black folks. We also got back-to-school clothes there. We kind of mixed it up with items from Cap wells and Rhodes. A little downtown mixed with uptown.
11. Going over to Celia’s house on the day her mother made tortillas. Those were the best and the beginning of my love affair with Mexican food.
12. Playing tetherball and kickball at Manzanita School playground. I remember Deborah Stewart wanted to fight me because I beat her playing tetherball. She was a bully. Hey, I need to write a story about this.
13. Walking to the library once a week and carrying as many books as I was allowed to check out. My mother, the schoolteacher, saw to it we, my brother and sister and I got library cards as soon as we could write our names. It was big brown building over by my first elementary school, Garfield, around the corner where my little red-haired kindergarten friend, Peggy lived. I have a story about our friendship.
August 7, 2008
http://www.apooobooks.com/2008/08/07/apooothursday-thirteen-childhood-summertime-memories/
http://thursdaythirteen.com/
meme
Show Spelled Pronunciation[meem] Pronunciation Key
–noun
a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.
[Origin: 1976; < href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meme">http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meme (accessed: August 06, 2008).
Modern Language Association (MLA):
Yasmin Coleman of APOOO Books threw out the challenge to cite thirteen things one remembers from childhood summers and to link it to your blog. I blog so seldom; on the spur of the moment I decided to participate. Maybe this will be a start of my blogging on a regular basis.
This exercise reminded me I have written a collection of childhood memories that have a working title of what else? Childhood Memories. Obviously, I need a better title. Two of those have been published and I need to work on polishing some more up and submitting somewhere. Growing up in Oakland, California was a lot different from the Oakland today. We roamed the neighborhood and beyond during the summer; sometimes, our parents didn’t know where we were but we knew to be home before dark. I grew up in a multicultural family neighborhood and there were a lot of Leave it Beaver moments. Boy, were those the days.
So, to get on with the Thursday Thirteen, I present thirteen summer occurrences I remember about my childhood.
Links to the post on Thursday Thirteen Childhood Summer Memories (with links to other posters’ blogs) and the original Thursday Thirteen are below.
1. 4th of Julys in Arkansas, either down in the country in Union County or in Little Rock surrounded by cousins and good food. Being the child of African American southern parents, making the trek back to the south to our place of our roots was a way of connecting with our history and ancestry.
2. Walking more than a mile to the swimming pool at Diamond Park. It would be a big group of us carrying our swimwear, including a swimming cap; even as a little girl, I had to protect the do. I write about my hair woes in the story “Shirley Temple Curls.”
3. Gathering at the top of E. 21st Street, watching the boys drive their homemade go carts down the hill. This was a bittersweet memory as one of my childhood friends, Tyrone was killed when he rolled down hill into the path of a bus and was killed. I wrote about this in a piece, “Blackberry Summer” that was published in a journal.
4. Digging up some change to go to the corner store for a big, fat, juicy dill pickle and pack of Kool-aid. There was nothing like it; busting open that packet of Kool-aid, preferably my favorite, grape and rubbing the pickle in it. mmm. Good stuff.
5. Roller skating and riding our bikes. Now my sister and brother claim I would be sitting on the porch reading while they were skating and biking but I know I did those things because I broke my arm roller skating when I was nine and stayed in Children’s Hospital for two days. But I can remember sitting on the porch reading a Nancy Drew mystery. Yep, my siblings were right, I did sit on the porch and read when I wasn’t playing and wrote in my journal also.
6. Going to our cabin in Morgan Hill as a teenager. That’s where my dad’s civic organization, East Oakland Business and Professional Men’s’ Assoc., had their annual summer picnic. Some of the Bay Area’s Talented Tenth attended this event and there were some cute guys! Mariea Johnson’s family had a cabin there also and I remember going to her debutante party in Berkeley. I definitely need to write about that, especially since the death of Dr. Clarence Avery this past spring.
7. Walking over to Jennifer’s house and the smell of her father’s gumbo meeting me at the front door. Her parents were from New Orleans and there was always something good at her house.
8. Gary U. S. Bond’s “School is Out at Last” blasting from the cars at the end of the school year. That was the standard song in the 60s. Jennifer, Lisa and I would be in one of our bedrooms watching Dance Party and American Bandstand, learning the new dance steps. Occasionally, one of us would show a new step from a visiting cousin or something we brought back from our visits to the South.
9. Walking to the movies from my cousins’ house at the Fruitvale theater on Saturday afternoons. My dad would give us money; it cost .25 cents to get in the theater. Wow, I’m dating myself.
10. Going to Housewives Market and seeing all the cases of different meats and foods and visiting with people. It was the meeting place for black folks. We also got back-to-school clothes there. We kind of mixed it up with items from Cap wells and Rhodes. A little downtown mixed with uptown.
11. Going over to Celia’s house on the day her mother made tortillas. Those were the best and the beginning of my love affair with Mexican food.
12. Playing tetherball and kickball at Manzanita School playground. I remember Deborah Stewart wanted to fight me because I beat her playing tetherball. She was a bully. Hey, I need to write a story about this.
13. Walking to the library once a week and carrying as many books as I was allowed to check out. My mother, the schoolteacher, saw to it we, my brother and sister and I got library cards as soon as we could write our names. It was big brown building over by my first elementary school, Garfield, around the corner where my little red-haired kindergarten friend, Peggy lived. I have a story about our friendship.
August 7, 2008
http://www.apooobooks.com/2008/08/07/apooothursday-thirteen-childhood-summertime-memories/
http://thursdaythirteen.com/
Friday, June 6, 2008
History in the Making
There are thousands, maybe millions of blogs this week about the momentous occurrence this week when Barack Obama became the Democratic candidate for the President of these United States. I’m jumping into the mix; I blog so seldom but maybe someone will happen upon my two cents worth of rambling. This is an exciting time in American history in general and Black American history, in particular. Dr. Brown, the chair of African American Studies here at Merritt College, commented that history and political science books are being written at this moment and will be a part of our children’s and grandchildren’s curriculum.
Little did I know last fall, when I attended a rally for Obama in downtown Oakland’s City Center, would I believe the man who stood before a cheering crowd of thousands, proud and tall, would make it this far. My feelings at the time were he has promise, but maybe 2012 he would come into his own. Ha! But what did I know? Like millions of people, I saw him speak on television at the 2004 Democratic Party Convention and was absolutely blown away. I knew then he was a young brother to keep my eye on.
My coworker expressed how her 81 year-old mother marveled at the fact that she lived long enough to see a Black presidential candidate. For many of our elders this is a miracle as they remember, especially those born and raised in the South, the trials and tribulations our folk had trying to cast a ballot. I think about my late grandmother, Otelia Gilliam Rowland, and what she would be thinking about Obama. Grandmother was a die-hard Republican. LOL. Yep, she sure was and would not hesitate to tell you. When she first told me I must have been about nine years old when Kennedy and Nixon were running for president. I was shocked and outraged in all of my child understanding about politics and race. A Republican? But Grandmother, how could you vote for Nixon? He doesn’t like Negroes! It took me awhile to reconcile that Grandmother was from the old school Southerners who continued to follow the party of Abraham Lincoln. After all, he set us free, right? And he was a Republican. Well, Grandmother held steadfast to that theory and she took her right to vote very seriously.
Black folk and voting have had a tenuous, often violent history. After the Civil War, during Reconstruction, we exercised the right, albeit briefly. Then we were denied, threatened, harassed and beaten to keep us from the ballot box. It was a long, slow process; much marching and preaching, blood, sweat and tears, progress was made slowly. Some folks, like my grandmother in Arkansas were given the privilege while Black folk in Mississippi and Alabama were intimidated every time they walked up to the courthouse to register. Finally the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted under President Lyndon Johnson’s administration which essentially prohibited the denial of the right to vote.
http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/voting/intro/intro_b.htm
Getting back on topic here, see I told you I was rambling….. Here we are in 2008 and we have a serious Black contender for the President. But it is not all about race. Your vote is a person and private right. Just go do it.
Oh, and our illustrious candidate is an acclaimed author. Obama’s two books are, Dreams From My Father (see my review. http://www.amazon.com/review/product/1847670911/ref=cm_cr_pr_helpful
and The Audacity of Hope.
Until the next time….and who knows when that will be.
Little did I know last fall, when I attended a rally for Obama in downtown Oakland’s City Center, would I believe the man who stood before a cheering crowd of thousands, proud and tall, would make it this far. My feelings at the time were he has promise, but maybe 2012 he would come into his own. Ha! But what did I know? Like millions of people, I saw him speak on television at the 2004 Democratic Party Convention and was absolutely blown away. I knew then he was a young brother to keep my eye on.
My coworker expressed how her 81 year-old mother marveled at the fact that she lived long enough to see a Black presidential candidate. For many of our elders this is a miracle as they remember, especially those born and raised in the South, the trials and tribulations our folk had trying to cast a ballot. I think about my late grandmother, Otelia Gilliam Rowland, and what she would be thinking about Obama. Grandmother was a die-hard Republican. LOL. Yep, she sure was and would not hesitate to tell you. When she first told me I must have been about nine years old when Kennedy and Nixon were running for president. I was shocked and outraged in all of my child understanding about politics and race. A Republican? But Grandmother, how could you vote for Nixon? He doesn’t like Negroes! It took me awhile to reconcile that Grandmother was from the old school Southerners who continued to follow the party of Abraham Lincoln. After all, he set us free, right? And he was a Republican. Well, Grandmother held steadfast to that theory and she took her right to vote very seriously.
Black folk and voting have had a tenuous, often violent history. After the Civil War, during Reconstruction, we exercised the right, albeit briefly. Then we were denied, threatened, harassed and beaten to keep us from the ballot box. It was a long, slow process; much marching and preaching, blood, sweat and tears, progress was made slowly. Some folks, like my grandmother in Arkansas were given the privilege while Black folk in Mississippi and Alabama were intimidated every time they walked up to the courthouse to register. Finally the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted under President Lyndon Johnson’s administration which essentially prohibited the denial of the right to vote.
http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/voting/intro/intro_b.htm
Getting back on topic here, see I told you I was rambling….. Here we are in 2008 and we have a serious Black contender for the President. But it is not all about race. Your vote is a person and private right. Just go do it.
Oh, and our illustrious candidate is an acclaimed author. Obama’s two books are, Dreams From My Father (see my review. http://www.amazon.com/review/product/1847670911/ref=cm_cr_pr_helpful
and The Audacity of Hope.
Until the next time….and who knows when that will be.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Dreaming in Cuban
I took a trip of a lifetime to Cuba this spring. For eight days from March 22 through March 30, I lived and breathed the beauty of this small island of 11 million people.
I went with a group of faculty and staff from Merritt College in Oakland, California where I am employed working with curriculum. This was an educational field research trip which included visiting primary schools, the University of Havana, the medical school a polyclinic. BUT, we also immersed ourselves in the culture of the country.
Cuban live and breath their art and there was art everywhere. Music, dance, literature,visual and performing art. The children come out of the womb dancing salsa and rhumba. I got to see the world famous Cuba Internationa Ballet perform "Giselle". We danced in the streets in the Trininad Province at a block party in our honor. We walked through the marketplace and viewed the artistry, the crafts, the paints, oh my. I brought home two pieces of art. We danced at the Havana Club, learning the meringue. Pablo Menendez staged a concert for us at his rooftop home.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Not Exactly a New Year Resolution.... But a Start
I'm not one to declare New Year resolutions, however, I think if I write my goals for 2008 publicly, it will encourage me to look at what I have done and what I need to do. I am one to beat myself up about what I did not do and what I should have accomplished by now. But it is a new year and no more shouldas, couldas, wouldas. I placed in a short fiction contest in summer of '06 and then I seem to have languised since then. I still have a glob of a novel that is seriously in need of revising big time and just have not touched it in almost a year. BUT it is not like I haven't been writing. I have been writing my family history with my genealogy writing group and expect to have a couple of those stories published in a family journal. And a publisher of local and family histories is interested in my writing about the area in Arkansas where my mom was born and raised. I also have had scholarly/academic work published in the last year in a Greenwwod Press encyclopedia and am in the process of writing a big piece for a peer review journal on romance writers that I feel strongly about.
Knowing I needed a jumpstart on getting back to my fiction, I attended a one day "Crazy Child Writing" workshop one Saturday in early December. I wrote twenty-five pages in long hand on a new novel that I am excited about. But I am about to set my goals and one of them is to attend a revision workshop and or make the sacrifice and get a writing coach/developmental coach to get my first novel finished because the second one is really grabbing me. My problem is discipline and sticking to one thing and I need to correct that. Unfortunately I cannot chew gum and walk at the same time. LOL.
In the last six months several women have come into my life who have expressed a need to write or restart writing and I think I have the makings of a group of sisters where we can meet monthly or whenever and write freely and safely and who knows what can happen. So that is a goal. I have a few more days before I go back to work and I am taking myself on a little mini-retreat, checking into a nice hotel about 30 miles away while the storm comes into night and raining the next few days. I will be transferring my new storyline from paper to my new laptop and mapping out my 2008 writing goals. Whew, that felt good just getting this out.
Knowing I needed a jumpstart on getting back to my fiction, I attended a one day "Crazy Child Writing" workshop one Saturday in early December. I wrote twenty-five pages in long hand on a new novel that I am excited about. But I am about to set my goals and one of them is to attend a revision workshop and or make the sacrifice and get a writing coach/developmental coach to get my first novel finished because the second one is really grabbing me. My problem is discipline and sticking to one thing and I need to correct that. Unfortunately I cannot chew gum and walk at the same time. LOL.
In the last six months several women have come into my life who have expressed a need to write or restart writing and I think I have the makings of a group of sisters where we can meet monthly or whenever and write freely and safely and who knows what can happen. So that is a goal. I have a few more days before I go back to work and I am taking myself on a little mini-retreat, checking into a nice hotel about 30 miles away while the storm comes into night and raining the next few days. I will be transferring my new storyline from paper to my new laptop and mapping out my 2008 writing goals. Whew, that felt good just getting this out.
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