Warm-You-Up Sunday Links

Baby, it's cold outside.  In Lincoln, Nebraska, it's ten degrees, with a wind chill factor of eleven below.  I hope you're warm, wherever you are (and here's a shout-out of general envy to you folks down in Texas), and if you're in a chilly spot, here's some stuff to jump-start your battery.

•  Chica-lit juggernaut and general bad-ass Alisa Valdes Rodriguez calls out popular novelist Jodi Picoult for her racist stereotypes, not once but twice.  Thanks, Alisa!  With thanks to Tayari's blog for the heads-up.

•  And speaking of Tayari Jones, if you're female and you've got some fine fiction languishing in your drawer, send it into the chapbook contest Tayari's judging at Kore Press, a women's small press that produces beautiful books.  Win the contest; get an extra thousand bucks to spend.  (And if you feel like supporting small presses by purchasing books as your gifts this holiday season, Kore has gorgeous fine-press editions of Audre Lorde's essay Uses of the Erotic:  The Erotic as Power, Mary Gordon's The Fascination Begins in the Mouth:  Anger, and Brenda Ueland's gentle, teacherly Tell Me More:  On the Fine Art of Listening.  They're only $10 each, and each comes in its own envelope.)

•  And speaking of holiday seasons, if you're in the mood to listen to some Hanukkah stories, "moving tales of discovery and reconciliation, the persistence of hope and the promise of undimmed light," NPR's serving up four new ones, including one by my charming friend and UNL colleague Gerry Shapiro (left).

•  And speaking of contests, the estimable and inimitable Fourth Genre is running its annual essay contest.  Again, you stand to win $1,000, and the nice thing is that all entrants will be considered for publication, which is no small thing, given Fourth Genre's wow factor.

Founding editor Mike Steinberg is one of the sweetest, most generous guys on the planet, and I'm excited that Fourth Genre will be running my essay, "Grip" (which the Pine Manor MFA community heard last summer in Boston), in 2009, and my lovely student Tom Coakley's "How to Speak About the Secret Desert Wars," in 2010. 

Tom's piece isn't just playing bubbles in the bath, either (to borrow one of Sandra Cisneros's favorite expressions for writing lite, writing that's just fooling around):  he has worked in special operations for years, and the essay's whole raison d'être is finding a way to discuss that morally murky and emotionally agonizing territory.  Um, without getting court-martialed.   (And we think we have issues when we publish CNF.)

•  And speaking of wonderful students and their wonderful work, Madeline Wiseman's wrenching personal essay "How to Kill Butterflies" in the most recent issue of Grasslands Review has just been nominated for a Pushcart.  Laaa!   Yey, Madeline!  Here's a characteristically unsentimental taste:

You, the insect inside your mother, clinging to the stem of her.  You, throbbing, twitching, doubling in size, like a spider egg suspended in the corner of an ill-used window.  You undetected for weeks, months.  Then the calls out for the specialists with their gadgets and chemicals, their advice, their insistence on marriage.  And your mother, where is she in this?  Prone on the bathroom floor, not gaining weight . . .

I have a piece of fiction in the issue, too, which I'll link to on my uncollected publications page as soon as I get it scanned.   It's a short story, "Dinner," about a seventeen-year-old girl who drives six hundred miles to meet her biological father for the first time.  Things, shall we say, get strange.

But what's good news for you is that Grasslands Review editor Brendan Corcoran is actively seeking creative nonfiction (until January), so if you have something marvelous, send it his way as an attachment to bcorcoran [at] indstate.edu.   

•  And for something completely different, if you're wondering why all those wonderful egalitarian men you know aren't pulling down the big bucks, organizational psychologists Timothy Judge and Beth Livingston have some (depressing) answers for you.

•  In other gender news, if you've ever driven yourself slightly nuts by pondering the unsettling question, Are women set up to fail — by being appointed to positions of power only in hopeless situations?, two British researchers have an equally unsettling answer for you:

In a write-up of their experiments in The Leadership Quarterly in October, the academics, Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam, called it “the glass cliff,” which they contend is an invisible form of prejudice. In other words, people will give women a position of power only when there’s a strong chance of failure. Why? “If someone has to be the scapegoat to take the fall, you’re not going to put your best man forward,” Ryan says. Women are thrust into desperate situations precisely because they’re likely to fail, generating “proof” that women can’t handle responsibility.

This applies, they say, to racial and ethnic minorities as well--and if you're thinking of our recent U.S. presidential election, you're connecting the dots the way Clive Thompson did.  

•  If you were one of the apparently few and apparently silent folks who were, like me, underwhelmed by the culturally enshrined brilliance of David Foster Wallace, James Ryerson of the New York Times Magazine offers up an overview of DFW's undergraduate honors thesis, which, Ryerson claims, "casts a revealing light on the early stages of his struggle to use the powers of his formidable mind for the higher good" by managing to, um, (wait for it), prove that the future doesn't control human actions in the present. 

Got that?  Whew!  Okay.  I'm relieved--and, gee whiz, so glad the New York Times Magazine spent page-space on it.  Now I'm wondering if maybe DFW had any high school term papers about the existence of God that scholars might want to investigate, or maybe some Crayola scrawls that will reveal insights about life in other galaxies . . .

•  And speaking of giving books as gifts for the holidays, let me please just recommend one more for the introspective personal-growth addict on your list (even or especially if that's you):  How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything.  Perhaps unbeknownst to those who know me in my academic guise, I am also a little woo-woo, a little spiritual-searchy, and this book speaks to that.

Though it has a reassuringly (or off-puttingly, depending on your aesthetic) warm, colorful, handwritten SARKy look, it's actually a kind but stern Buddhist guide about recognizing your ego's little games and learning to let go of your own crap.  It's this interactive workbook--you actually fill stuff in, and occasionally draw--and it's fantastic.  Here's one tiny excerpt:

    Inside each of us is a "persistent voice of discontent."  It talks in terms of if onlies and can never be satisfied.  Its function is to keep you feeling as if there is always something missing, always something just beyond your reach, which, if only you could get to it, would finally bring you contentment.

What do you think would happen if you stopped believing this voice?

I chewed on that for a while.  Check it out.

•  And if you have any spiritual-searchy friends, they might like this CD of mantras, Darshana:  Vedic Chanting for Daily Practice, which has been road-tested by way better folks than me.  The liner notes have both the Sanskrit and the English translations, and if you've ever felt a wild urge to "salute Vishnu, . . . who sports a lotus in His navel," then this CD is probably a must-have for you.  You can listen to sample tracks (just little snippets--not the whole mantras, but they'll give you a sense) at the linked page.  (I am personally partial to "Peace Invocation" and the pretty "Prayer in Praise of Goddess Lakshmi.")

•  Last but not least, if you have any teacher-friends in your life, they might enjoy (since we're on the whole woo-woo track here) Mary Rose O'Reilley's thoughtful Radical Presence:  Teaching as Contemplative Practice.  O'Reilley, a Buddhist/Quaker/Catholic college professor who's Zen-like and crotchety by turns, writes,

Let me return here to Parker Palmer's comment, "To teach is to create a space."  For what, we wonder?  Well, for whatever has to happen.  The act of contemplation begins, for each of us, simply in creating a space.  Of course one can go further than that, but for my part, I am still at step one.  After twenty-five years of teaching, it takes all the courage I have to keep silence for a minute and a half after  reading a poem aloud, or asking a question that heads us all for the depths of experience.  A minute and a half of silence is, however pitiful, a space.  Something can rush in, something we did not plan and cannot control; how each of us, students and teachers, experiences these "openings" (to use the Quaker term) will differ.

It's the end of the semester.  Hurray!  Here's to being at step one and to keeping a space open!  As we tumble toward our various holidays, stay warm, and celebrate "the promise of undimmed light."