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Educators Reading & Writing Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Woman. Warrior. Writer. Vanessa Hua

 

Meet May’s Woman Warrior Writer Vanessa Hua, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of A River of StarsDeceit and Other Possibilities, and Forbidden City. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Steinbeck Fellowship and honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Asian American Journalists’ Association. A Bay Area native, she teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. www.vanessahua.com 

How did you come to author your life?

Years ago, on a reporting fellowship in South Korea, I told another journalist that I’d always wanted to write a book. She looked at me and said, “Well, then, write a book!” Dinnertime small talk, but her words resonated with me. I realized that if I truly wanted to achieve this goal, I needed to make it a priority. Writing in the mornings before work and at lunch and on weekends wasn’t enough; I needed to center my writing, to put the best part of myself in it even as I juggled other commitments.

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Blog Educators Reading Reading & Writing Teachers Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Woman. Warrior. Writer. Artress Bethany White

Meet April’s Woman Warrior Writer Artress Bethany White, a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for her poetry collection My Afmerica (Trio House Press, 2019) and author of Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity (New Rivers Press, 2020). She is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University and teaches poetry and nonfiction workshops for Rosemont College Summer Writer’s Retreat in Pennsylvania.

How did you come to author your life?

I came to author my life when I accepted my first university teaching position. I was already living in New York and describing myself as a writer. I was working as a coordinator for New York University’s executive MBA program and I was earning a livable wage. Then someone approached me about a teaching job at Long Island University. Intuitively, I knew that this was going to be a game-changer for me, and it was. That first job propelled me into completing a master’s degree and a Ph.D., and became the perfect career companion to my life as a writer. I love what I do!

 

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Educators Hawai'i Poetry Reading & Writing Teachers Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Woman. Warrior. Writer. Debra Kang Dean

 

Meet March’s Woman Warrior Writer Debra Kang Dean! Debra Kang Dean is the author of two prize-winning chapbooks and three full-length books of poetry. Totem: America, her most recent book, was shortlisted for the 2020 Indiana Authors Award in Poetry. Long engaged with taijiquan, she is on the poetry faculty of the Sena Naslund-Karen Mann School of Writing.

 How did you come to author your life?

Although the words “woman,” “warrior,” and “writer” separately apply to different facets of my being, it might be truer to say that life keeps authoring me—not as subject but in terms of the kind of writer I am. Widowed at fifty, I find those words rearranging themselves, each taking its turn as a verb. I have never forgotten reading how some post-menopausal women became ambiguous figures in one tribal society and so were able to move in the spaces between conventional boundaries—not an especially good fit for our very gendered, youth-oriented culture, but one that has helped me to keep the self that creates intact and persist through changing inner and outer weather. The struggle is real, but remember: This work is no small thing.

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Educators Reading & Writing Self-help Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Woman. Warrior. Writer. Anjali Enjeti

February 2022’s Woman Warrior Writer is Anjali Enjeti. Anjali Enjeti is a former attorney, organizer, and journalist based near Atlanta. She is the author of Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, and The Parted Earth. Her writing has appeared in Oxford AmericanPoets & WritersHarper’s Bazaar, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Reinhardt University and can be reached through her website, anjalienjeti.com.

How did you come to author your life?

Writing is not something I pursued with any intention the first 28 years of my life. I read several books a week. I journaled. I studied narrative. But I couldn’t picture myself as an author. I didn’t feel as if it was something available to me. 

The birth of my first child changed this. I was not only flooded with words and stories about my life, I felt, for the first time, that these words carried with them some kind of value. It took a monumental moment in my life – becoming a mother for the first time – that opened the door for me to author my own life.

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Blog Educators Hawai'i Reading & Writing Teachers Woman Warrior Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Woman. Warrior. Writer. Darien Hsu Gee

November’s Woman Warrior is Darien Hsu Gee ! Darien is the author of five novels published by Penguin Random House that have been translated into eleven languages. She is also the recipient of an IPPY award for her collection of micro essays, Allegiance (2020); a Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship for Other Small Histories (2019); and a Hawai‘i Book Publishers’ Ka Palapala Poʻokela Award of Excellence for Writing the Hawai‘i Memoir (2015). She lives with her family on the Island of Hawai‘i and serves as series editor for Haliʻa Aloha, a micro memoir writing and hybrid publishing program.
How did you come to author your life?
I’ve never been good at listening to other people. I’ve had cheerleaders and naysayers, not to mention my own nagging doubt and self-sabotage, but I’ve always managed to right the ship and get back on course. It hasn’t been easy, but a writer’s life isn’t easy. I know the risks and sacrifices. I’ve worked hard, I’ve been lucky, I have some regrets. It’s in my bones. I’m willing to own it all, even when it’s hard or seemingly impossible. 

 

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Belief and Philosophy Break Divorce Educators Health Self-help Teachers Woman. Warrior. Writer.

BREAK: Marriage and Divorce and How to View a Sculpture

How to View a Sculpture

I would like to explain a few ways that we can think about the practice of observation that might help us come to terms with the way we see ourselves within the construct of marriage and divorce.

Here’s the famous Venus de Milo (photo by tabitha turner) an ancient Greek sculpture displayed in the Louvre. She is a symbol of Western beauty. There are many tales surrounding her beauty and interpretations of her appearance. I am unaware of an Asian equivalent image of a woman that is as significant on a global scale. There’s a meta element to her existence as a sculpture that also interests me: the physical element that socially distinguishes an individual and determines personal navigation is the face, the next are one’s hands. What we move, carry, sculpt, shape, stroke, create, carve and more, determines what we do in the world. She has no arms, no hands, so we look at her body and face…but let me continue.

When I was sixteen my parents sent me to France for the summer to learn French. I stayed with an acquaintance of my father’s, a medical doctor’s family, which I did for a few weeks in their summer home in the south of France. It was eye opening for me: large meals of rabbit stew at noon, a Pink Floyd blasting grandmother, a tennis playing aunt with a deep tan wearing a bikini that displayed tufts of her pubic hair, and a bucolic estate replete with a vineyard and peacocks pecking about the front lawn. There were other teenagers, but I was an admittedly difficult teen, bookish, and easily bored and not the best social companion, and so, within a short period of time found myself alone on a train to Paris where I spent the remaining part of the summer attending classes at Alliance Francais. I was terribly lonely and wanted to return to the US, but refused to do so out of pride. Determined to stay on, I decided to be purposeful, and so I set myself the task of going to every single museum in the city. 

As anyone knows, there are countless museums in Paris, but I covered many of them, an admirable ambition and a reflection of what I recognize now, as a sometime dutiful and obedient nature. I wandered about with my guidebook and recorded my observations in French in my journal as I downed cups of hot chocolate and cut my way through pastry after pastry. One day I met an older man—I no longer remember his name or even what he really looked like, although I seem to recall dark framed glasses and hair, and a leather briefcase. He saw me wandering around outside the Louvre, introduced himself, and then kindly proceeded to take me on a tour of the museum, pointing out significant art, and commenting in a way, I realize now that suggested someone with an abiding passion for art. After we drank coffee in a nearby cafe and chatted about what we saw, although I politely declined an invitation to meet him again. There are all kinds of ways we can read this encounter, but suffice to say the lesson he imparted to me that day about how to look at sculpture was probably one of the most significant I learned in terms of observation, one that I have carried with me and added to, and have passed on to students throughout my life.

When we look at a sculpture face-to-face or face-to-shape a single look from one angle does not suffice. Modern life is hurried, but when we slow down and look carefully, we experience art in new ways. To take in a sculpture in a way that evokes a relational response to the art and artist, we observe the piece from multiple vantage points, address the three dimensional material object at various angles. We might walk around it, do a 360 degree stroll. We squat down and look up, as if to be a small child beholding the world above. We reach out and touch it. Lean against it, if we can, press our own body against it, feel its surface. We stand up on our tiptoes and then look down upon the object. We tilt our head sideways and maybe even upside down. Most significantly, we look at the piece of art at different times of the day to observe how the shadows change, how the light and dark are cast across the shape, and note what this does to the object. The shadows tell a story. A sculpture does not look the same at dawn as it does mid-day. We must interact with it at different times, note the miracle of how it changes, to really see what the sculptor might have been communicating.

We too must allow ourselves to understand that the way we observe, define, any object, idea, institution, state of being, or whatever we encounter as humans, depends on our vantage point and may dramatically shift throughout the course of a day, over a number of years, as we weave our way through a lifetime. This perspective is derived from where we are physically, emotionally, or in time. How we see and why we see is fluid. It changes depending on the light or dark, on our moods and priorities, on what came prior or after.

Our responsibility then is always to understand, and if writing, to record and detail what we know when we know it, forgiving ourselves for what we cannot possibly see at the time we are observing, or if we dare say, participating, responding, or dancing with the art or idea. We might be generous to ourselves, allow ourselves flexibility as we move to a new insight closer into the seeing and knowing of how and why, nurturing or answering our questions as we linger and skip. It is impossible to take in all angles at once. Maybe there is a spot where we gaze beyond the sculpture, and so the object becomes framed within the background, or the object comes forward, the background receding. We touch the shape, feel its ease, roughness, and smoothness, its temperature and crevices. This moment is all that we take from the experience of looking at the sculpture as we remember it later, trying to recall and feel again what we felt. Somehow, removed from that moment, we feel a bit differently, and we say in our hearts that the art was more expansive at that time, at that place. Maybe it was. Or not. We have to have a little faith in ourselves, that where and how we are seeing at the moment is one perspective and it is fine, we are doing our best, we are seeing what it is we are supposed to see. When we look back at the moment, we are also doing our best, recalling what we can with all that we can muster. 

Truly seeing art, understanding an idea, feeling, person, place, concept, requires us to be compassionate with ourselves. Seeing involves being seen–specifically, we must see who we were and are, and this will allow us to envision who we can be. Slow down. Take in the sculpture. Allow yourself to see. This practice of seeing will help you to see others and yourself.