Some people become more like their aggressors and oppressors. We call this identification with the oppressor. It is easy to view oppressors and attackers as stronger and possessing more power than we, their victims.
Abused children are the victims of their parents’ anger and aggression.
And yet
Of Oppressors, Attackers and Questions … Read More »
Witnessing our eldest graduate college in May 2009 and then graduate school eighteen months later in December 2010 delivered me to a new level of confidence and belief in myself.
I realized that something of all I had done as a mother had worked in nurturing our eldest daughter into not onl
Of Our Eldest Daughter, Gratitude, and Experiencing The Worth of Our Living … Read More »
Witnessing our eldest graduate college in May 2009 and then graduate school eighteen months later in December 2010 delivered me to a new level of confidence and belief in myself.
I realized that something of all I had done as a mother had worked in nurturing our eldest daughter into not only a good citizen, but one who had goals and plans for achieving those goals.
When after earning her graduate degree in
Of Mothers, Daughters and Seeing Each Other Eye-to-Eye … Read More »
Not a day has passed during the three weeks since posting my last blog that I have not felt guilty for failing to hold to my schedule of blogging.
It is a promise I give to myself, and a responsibility I maintain as a published writer.
The nagging feeling that has haunted me now abates as I write this post.
But what occurs when life happens and disrupts our goals and the tasks we have set our energies to?
What do we do when
Of Life, Revelations, and Our Differences That Bind … Read More »
I am always amazed how much screen time Bollywood movies donate to establishing and clarifying family relations of the film’s protagonist compared to the nil to absent mention of family connections in American movies.
The protagonist of an American made movie can be undergoing the direst and most despairing of circumstances and the screenplay makes no mention of mother, father, sister, or brother. Often very little time or explanation is given to the ex-spouse or ex-significant other, unless she or he is central to the plot.
Where Bollywood movies perhaps overdramatize the gifts and goodness of family, American theater emphasizes the need to break away and discover who one truly is.
…the writing life… | “Bollywood, The Hijinks of Thrillers, and Definition…” Read More »
During a recent interview for The Writer Magazine, short story writer, Antonya Nelson, also dubbed, “…master of domestic drama…” received the received the statement, “…your work focuses on family-centered problems. Sue Miller has said men used to light out for the territories, but that ‘home’ is the new frontier.”
To the interviewer, Sarah Anne Johnson’s question, “Do you agree?” Nelson responded, “I write about families because that’s what I know. I’m very glad other writers are writing about other things and places, adventures abroad, wars and plagues and science and zombies. But what I know intimately, what I can report on honestly, what I think about endlessly, is the relations among people who are attached to one another helplessly by faithfulness and need, as well as wrestling a contrary urge to be individuals. Family dramas are always positing the self vs. community, private vs. the public, and most importantly, the head vs. the heart.”
–A Gift for the Short Form, by Sarah Anne Johnson, The Writer Magazine, September 2010
Reading this I knew immediately that Antonya Nelson was someone whose work I needed to start reading, not simply and so much from my perspective as a writer, but as a person who loves reading about families working it out, trying to work it out, sometimes, and oftentimes failing to work it out.
I am also a writer, who as a wife of 28 years and mother of 3, ages 11, 18, and 23, continually ponders and explores the nature of the marriage relationship, connections that spin and sprout from this union and how ripples in this union spread to those interactions of family members surrounding them.
…Married Life-why i write… | “Antonya Nelson, Escapism, and The New Frontier…” Read More »
As an author of modern-day Women’s Fiction, I find that reading Historical Fiction and of the Victorian era gives me room to breathe and imagine, or re-imagine, if you will, new twists on possibilities for plots in the modern era. The modern era in wiping away the constrictions and hesitancies of the individual, and family
My Love for Things Victorian and Historical Read More »