Thank You, Black Artists!

National youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman reading her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at the Presidential Inauguration dazzled, and Shonda Rhime’s Netflix series, Bridgerton took me to an alternate reality where I swooned and laughed.

These women grew hope for the year ahead and reminded me what ‘normal’ feels like. Sending heaps of gratitude – keep making more!

Wishing you a joyful Black History Month 2021!

More inspirational Amanda Gorman poetry and music by John Batiste who brings smiles and musical accompaniment to Stephen Colbert‘s monologues.

American Black History Study Resources

“If you don’t know better, you can’t teach better.” – Dr. Bettina Love | Sierra Writers Conference 2021 Keynote Talk

For Black History Month 2021, I’ve curated a YouTube playlist and additional study resources that have been helping to fill gaps left in my public school history education. 

Every video in it is associated with longer documentaries, films, podcasts, and/or books and audiobooks, as well as museums. The last video featuring Stanford Psychology Professor, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt talks about what needs to be done to slow automatic bias within the brain.

Roughly organized along a historical timeline, the video collection includes the following topics; cotton and sugar industries, the New York Times 1619 project, early free Black communities, slavery, Reconstruction, The Lost Cause, lynching, policing, Civil Rights, Confederate statue removal, historic figures, and contemporary work on caste, racism, and implicit bias.

Additional Resources:

Biology: Race is a MythInterview with Alan Goodman, Hampshire Collge Biological Anthropology Professor & Co-editor of Genetic Nature / Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Cultural Divide and Building a New Bio-Cultural Synthesis (PBS) | Video: Cautionary Notes on Using Biology to Infer Identity and Ancestry

There’s No Such Thing as Race (Newsweek 2014)

“Facts – The Civil War (U.S. National Park Service)” Nps.gov.

“What This Cruel War Was Over The meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it” The Atlantic. Coates, Ta-Nehisi 

Education, The Lost Cause & Monuments

Lost Cause of the Confederacy  – Wikipedia 

The ‘Lost Cause’ That Built Jim Crow“. New York Times. Gates Jr., Henry Louis (November 2019)

Make It Right (MIR) Project was a multimedia campaign from 2018 to 2020 dedicated to educating the public and strengthening the media capacity of the national movement to remove and replace Confederate monuments and memorials.

“The South’s Fight for White Supremacy” The New York Times. Meacham, Jon (August 2020)

“Texas Mother Teaches Textbook Company a Lesson on Accuracy” Nytimes.com. Fernandez, Manny; Hauser, Christine (October 2015)

Lesson Plans

Abolitionist Teaching Network

Facing History and Ourselves (Lesson Plans) – Facing History’s resources address racism, antisemitism, and prejudice at pivotal moments in history.

Pulitzer Center – The 1619 Project Curriculum 

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Racism Inserted into Popular Culture

The Birth of a Nation’ Shown” Washington Evening Star

“Romanticizing Confederate cause has no place onscreen” San Francisco Chronicle.  LaSalle, Mick (July 24, 2015)

“Regarding ‘Song of the South’ – The Film That Disney Doesn’t Want You to See.” IndieWire.com, Sergio (February 2016)

Vigilantism

“When Bigotry Paraded Through the Streets” The Atlantic. Rothman, Joshua (December 2016)

 

Research Eating

In order to authentically write about a railroad worker camp cook, I had to cook and eat like one.

Below are links to resources I’ve experimented with to get the feel and flavors just right for the railroad camps.

click the image to link to the recipe

*click image for book link* This book was written by a descendent of a Chinese railroad worker. It includes family stories that were passed down through the generations.

Intimacy with Personal Monsters & Un-Monsters

A Monstrous Tree?

Have you ever looked at a tree and seen a monster? When I was five, I was terrorized by thinking that the giant sequoia I was about to drive through would bend over to snatch me from the back seat.

Photo Credit: Mark Crawly, flickr

As an adult, in the middle of a windy night, I was awoken by a sound like a gunshot. My car was totaled when the walnut tree I’d parked under snapped. (The insurance did not cover an ‘act of God.’) A decade or so later, I cleaned-up shattered window glass after an arborist removed a cedar tree that was growing too close to the house. While I appreciate the daily benefits of breathing, I recognize the hazards trees can cause when things go wrong.

For me, the car totaling experience resolved the age-old philosophical question about the sound a tree makes (or doesn’t make) when it falls in the woods. The same debates about the nature of reality and how it relates to experience can be applied to monsters.

Are there really extra large, hair-covered, humanoids hiding in the forests of the Pacific Northwest? Does a diabetic older man enter your house each year with the intent to delight your children? (It’s OK! He’s not a stranger, he knows what they’ve been thinking.)

historic Spanish sea monster
Historic Spanish sea monster

Monsters are grown inside an electrically charged, submerged, gelatin-like structure that everyone carries inside their skull. This magnificent organ has evolved to specialize in pattern recognition. When we see or experience something that doesn’t make sense or for which we have no prior information, our brains concoct stories that seem real and make sense.

Addiction, accidents, rejection, unrealistic expectations, loss, grief and the fear of disappearing

are a few of the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that breathe life into our own personal monsters.

chaos and the sun god
Chaos and the sun god

Because we are social creatures, our monsters can spread like a virus. Screaming fire in a crowded amphitheater or a run on the market because a rumor predicted a crash are examples of monsters gone viral.

Monsters are as adaptable. as we are. Before we understood the stages of decomposition, we thought evil spirits inhabited dead bodies, causing them to move. Every time we drop our kids off at school, we hope that a gunman doesn’t lose his marbles anywhere in the neighborhood. We worry that refugees and immigrants are taking our jobs.

With easy access to a world of information and a bit of discernment, monsters can be vaporized. Yet, instead of doing the work to accomplish this, many of us cozy up to them, inviting them to tea, and letting them share our pillow at night.

Monsters are with us to stay. Many of them are portrayed as hideous and frightful, while others are beguiling. All of them signal some kind of danger and remind us to be alert.

With certainty, we know that tomorrow’s monster will be different from today’s.

Below is a variety of contemporary and classic monster representations and lists of themes they exemplify.

istoric depiction of body parts and monster assembly in Frankenstien
A historic depiction of body parts and monster assembly in Frankenstein

 

Frankenstein

contemporary portrayal of Frankenstein monster running through the woods

  • Parental rejection
  • Grief & loss from children dying (bringing the dead back to life)
  • Love outside of acceptable social norms
  • Weariness of industrial age science

 

The Shape of Water creature

  • Disenfranchised finding a voice
  • Courage to defy authority
  • Courage to fight for justice
  • Love outside social norms

 

 

Haylee and the Travelers Stone and Haylee and the Last Traveler book cover art
Haylee and the Travelers Stone and Haylee and the Last Traveler book covers

 

Haylee in the Traveler’s Stone & the Last Traveler

  • Power of sexual attraction
  • Responsibility for dependents
  • Reconciliation of love outside expectations
  • Acceptance that all wrongs can’t be repaired

 

a lightning strike causes Adeline to stop aging in Age of Adeline
A lightning strike causes Adeline to stop aging in Age of Adeline

contemporary portrayal of a vampire - exploration of immortality
Contemporary portrayal of a vampire – exploration of immortality

Age of Adeline & Vampires

  • Power of sexual attraction/ youth
  • Societal parasite
  • Fear of death
  • Immortality exploration

 

 

P.T. Barnum style poster of Phineas Gage after his TBI
P.T. Barnum style poster of Phineas Gage after his TBI

Phineas Gage

  • Physical deformity and social rejection
  • Loss of expectations for a young life (caused by a traumatic brain injury)
  • Anger from a detrimental, permanent change of circumstances
  • Family response to long-term care requirements
  • Legendary, iconic brain science/psychology touchstone

 

Chinese Railroad Workers’ Jaingshi

  • Conquering nature
  • Facing death, injury & disfigurement
  • Removed from and longing for culture and familiar
  • Racism and social ostracization
  • Fear of being lost & forgotten

graffiti in the Donner Summit train tunnels depicts contemporary monsters
Graffiti in the Donner Summit train tunnels depicts contemporary monsters

Contemporary Train Tunnel Graffiti

Colorful monsters and beasties painted on snowshed walls at Donner Summit tell their own stories.

  • Injustice
  • Disenfranchised finding a voice
  • Addiction
  • Fear of death
  • Self-expression
  • Seizing power
  • Claiming a space in place
  • Fear of being lost and forgotten

 

Un monster collage
Un-monster collage

Lisa’s Un-Monsters

The collage reflects the ugliness and beauty of struggles with self-criticism. Matching an image to feelings allows expression of concepts that seem impossible to say out loud.

  • Unconscious, underwater, unseen, unknown, unheard
  • Exposed
  • Choking with self-doubt

 

a cairn built on top of the center shaft cap for tunnel #6 at Donner Summit
A cairn built on top of the center shaft cap for tunnel #6 at Donner Summit

Like ice sculptures, sand castles, and graffiti, monster varieties come and go. They change with what we are thinking about at a particular moment in time, and they allow us to put faces on our fears.

 

Resources:

KQED – Why Don’t Murals Get Covered by Graffiti in the Mission? – “…you first need to know that there are three groups: graffiti writers, street artists and muralists.”

Character Muse, the Waterhouse Girl

John William Waterhouse

For me, beginning a lengthy writing project takes determination and vision. Not a ‘vision’ synonymous with a goal, but a picture, a face, and a setting. It is the first step in getting acquainted with a character I’ll be living with for a long time.

John William Waterhouse, an English oil painter – dead over one-hundred years – served up the face of Martina, a Chilean prostitute, a character in Haylee and the Traveler’s Stone.

“Mr. Waterhouse adds to his designs a certain mystic suggestion—a touch of that sad wonderment which troubles the deep thinker.” (The Art Journal, 1896)

That beguiling, haunting face along with Waterhouse’s rich clothing textures, set among nature, lovers, and water provides the tone and feeling that I wanted to convey with the Haylee stories.

His model, with the face that appears a significant number of the 200 paintings he produced during his life, must have been someone close, a next door neighbor or a niece?

“Waterhouse’s paintings are famous for the feminine beauty depicted in them. His genre of female beauty became known as ‘The Waterhouse Girl’. The identity of Waterhouse’s models range from family members and friends, to professional artists’ models. Some of the young female models would later become famous in their own right as renowned stage actresses and movie stars.” – www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.com

 

John William Waterhouse (1849 – 1917) was an English painter.  He was enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art.” – Wikipedia.org

“Most of Waterhouse’s work is based in Ancient or Medieval myth and legend. Such stories feature the strong female beauties and tragic love stories which Waterhouse was seemingly fascinated by.” – Artable.com

The character, Martina, developed from the Waterhouse face turned out to be a strong and determined young woman. She experienced tragedy, but she also knew love. Her struggle to protect her lover and right her wrongs echo the story arch of the main character, Haylee.

 

Lisa’s John William Waterhouse Pinterest Board 

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