Mindy Withrow's Blog

I was born a skeptic squinting up at cynicism. In the upside-down America of 2018, I’m a skeptic dangling over the chasm of cynicism, willing myself to hang on a little longer. But you know what makes me happy in that immediate, blank-out-everything-else, grin-with-pure-joy kind of way?

Birds.

Well, not just birds. Any non-human species visiting my little slice of paved-over suburbia is bound to get a gleeful “ooh, look!” out of me. The rabbit committee that meets every dawn and dusk outside the vegetable garden gate. The squirrel that, in this summer drought, has taken to straddling our little patio fountain like a drinking fountain, and darting off again when he’s had his fill. The chipmunk who lives under the back step, stepping out to slick back his ears with tongue-dampened paws and chirp plaintively for his lover. I treed a young raccoon one evening; she’s wasn’t aggressive, just curious and hungry. Happily, the monarchs have been frequent this year.

It’s like a never-ending episode of Wild Kingdom over here. And they’re all my friends.

But more than all the others, it’s the birds that delight and comfort me.

What is it about putting out a block of suet, a column of mixed seed, a globe of sugar water, and then sitting back to watch the avian pride parade, a riot of color and joy, swooping in, whooping it up, and leaving feathers in their wake?

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Maybe a little bit of side eye from the Downy Woodpecker on our suet this morning. #birdwatching #birds #bird #birding #naturephotography #birdphotography #nature #naturelovers #ohio #midwestlife #midwestmoment #midwest

A post shared by Brandon Withrow (@bgwithrow) on Dec 31, 2017 at 6:14pm PST

Bird visitations are better than gifts. I’d rather catch a little buddy dipping into the blue basin of my bird bath than get $100 in the mail.

The goldfinches are among the most social species in my neighborhood. Sometimes just a single, radiant male drops by for a snack. But often it’s a throuple sharing a longer meal. They squeak up-turned questions at me as they pluck seeds from the coneflower heads. Did you know finches can be taught to speak? I hear that unless you’ve raised them by hand, they’re not likely to use your words, but I still respond with a high-low “hello” each time they make eye contact with me. Maybe someday we’ll get beyond a surface conversation.

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Goldfinch. 14 different species on our feeders this morning.

A post shared by Brandon Withrow (@bgwithrow) on Jan 6, 2018 at 9:46am PST

I do commune with the chickadees, though. They’re quick to tap at the window and let me know if the feeder is running low. And they keep up a running commentary on everyone else’s behavior.

I hear the white-breasted nuthatches in the tree cover before I see them. Those staccato beeps clear traffic just long enough to snatch a seed from the feeder and dash back to their preferred seed-cracking branch.

The rose-breasted grosbeak doesn’t make a sound, just waits majestically for a turn at the suet.

Are ducks smart? The pair of Mallards that nested in my ornamental grasses near the alley weren’t, but with the neighborhood watch on the job, their brood made it safely out of the nest. And for a few weeks we all got to enjoy the sight of Mr. and Mrs. Mallard sharing a short sunset flight together every evening.

The Eastern bluebird box was a pipedream, since the post I put it on isn’t meadow-adjacent. But the wrens found it to their liking, which is fine by me since they make daily rent payments in virtuosic singing.

Sparrows come in flocks of three or five or nine—always an odd number. Do they even know what it means to be alone?

The cardinals come in pairs, except for a brief window in the late spring when they sometimes bring a reluctant junior, his crest awkwardly too big for his body like a teenager’s nose.

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Coy Cardinal on the patio this morning making sure I noticed him over the top of my newspaper.

A post shared by Mindy Rice Withrow (@mindyricewithrow) on Jul 16, 2017 at 8:12pm PDT

And time just stops if the ruby-throated hummingbird comes to rest long enough for me to make out the scarlet sequins on her collar.

The ratio of work to reward is ridiculously low when it comes to welcoming nature to the backyard.

I don’t have much control over global politics or the fires burning through my beloved Glacier National Park. I vote. Protest. Email my senators. The skeptic in me reminds me not to get my hopes up while I do my small part to effect change.

But then I go out to the patio and lose myself watching birds.

Featured Photo Credit: Brandon Withrow

The post In a Cynical World, Birds Are My Happy Place appeared first on Mindy Withrow.

For the last several years I’ve taken a flu shot, for the simple reason that I don’t want to get the flu. But I hadn’t given much thought to the ethical choice that I was making for myself and for others who would encounter me during the flu season, until I read Eula Biss’s provocatively welcoming On Immunity.

The book has been widely reviewed, and Biss rightly praised for her careful handling of the scientific literature and medical history, her creative readings of Voltaire and the novel Dracula, and her imminently empathetic approach, all of which I second. There’s not a lot to say about the book that hasn’t already been said elsewhere, except what I’ve gained personally from the reading.

What I find most interesting about On Immunity is the author’s own story, the way an unexpected situation led her to dig into the science and the history and the philosophy, ultimately leading her to change her own mind about vaccination. She doesn’t frame the book around her story—it’s more of a series of tightly-related essays—but flashes of her story are revealed in her reflections, and they imbue her conclusions with a winsomeness not found in many discussions on this topic.

Biss is a middle-class American mom, with friends of the vaccinating and non-vaccinating kind, a mom with the relative good fortune of having some time and resources to devote to pondering the purity of her water, her air, and the toys in her playroom. Before the birth of her son, she planned to exercise her right to forego the standard vaccination schedule, for many of the reasons shared by other non-vaccinating parents. But complications during his birth required her to receive a blood transfusion, which meant that by the time she put him to her breast for the first time, her cells were already no longer their own.

But had they ever been?

This realization that her breast milk, while produced by her body, was being aided in this production by the foreign material she had received from an unknown donor, pushed her to start vetting some of her assumptions about what was in and out of her control, not just as a mom but as a human being.

“Our breast milk, it turns out, is as polluted as our environment at large,” she writes. She quotes from a report that “if human milk were sold at the local Piggly Wiggly, some stock would exceed federal food-safety levels for DDT residues and PCBs.”

These facts are not an argument for or against breastfeeding (or vaccinating, for that matter) but a simple, irrefutable statement that “natural” and “pure” are not synonymous, as she once thought they were. The notion that we are pure at birth—or that our state at birth is even somehow preferable to maintain—may be a lovely idea, but it’s a fallacy.

We are no cleaner, even at birth, than our environment at large. We are all already polluted. We have more microorganisms in our guts than we have cells in our bodies—we are crawling with bacteria and we are full of chemicals. We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other.

It’s this continuity between bodies—this permeable state that we think of as a border that is anything but—that draws out the incredibly important ethical problems of vaccination.

Thanks to today’s Ebola-saturated media, we’re well aware of how vulnerable we are, but many of us in the so-called first world forget that we are also, as Biss writes, “just by virtue of having bodies, dangerous.” We’re vulnerable and dangerous. Applying this to myself is uncomfortable, but Biss challenges me to do it.

When I get a flu shot to protect myself against the flu, I’m thinking of myself from a position of vulnerability: because I come in contact with people who might have the flu, I am susceptible to getting the flu, and therefore must protect myself from it. But I’m not thinking of myself from a position of contagion: that when I come into contact with people, I unknowingly might be carrying the flu to them. This realization puts the responsibility on me, because the person to whom I transmit the virus may have taken a precaution (a flu shot), may have opted not to take a precaution (their choice), or may have impaired immunity (not their choice) who could suffer greatly as a result of my choice. This is sobering.

While Biss digs into a number of studies and reports that have played significant roles in the internet debates and celebrity shouting matches, she makes it clear that the conversation should not be about taking one “side” over another. Instead, it should be an agreement between all parties to choose to understand the complexity of our relationships to others and our environment. And then take these relationships seriously.

“Debates over vaccination,” she says, “are often cast as debates over the integrity of science, though they could just as easily be understood as conversations about power.” And herein lies the heart of the matter.

The power of fear: “We do not tend to be afraid of the things that are most likely to harm us” (like the cars and bicycles we ride and the alcohol we drink and how much sitting we do), but paranoia is a contagion that “knows some things well and others poorly.”

The power of government: “We resist vaccination in part because we want to rule ourselves.” But biology is not a democracy.

The power of information: It’s a reality of the human condition that we tend to seek out sources that will “lend false credibility to an idea that we want to believe for other reasons.”

The power of community: “Immunity is a public space. And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry immunity.”

Ultimately, it’s about the power of conscience.

One of the mercies of immunity produced by vaccination is that a small number of people can forgo vaccination without putting themselves or others at greatly increased risk. But the exact number of people this might be—the threshold at which herd immunity is lost and the risk of disease rises dramatically for both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated—varies depending on the disease and the vaccine and the population in question. We know the threshold, in many cases, only after we’ve exceeded it. And so this puts the conscientious objector in the precarious position of potentially contributing to an epidemic. Here we may suffer what economists call moral hazard, a tendency to take unwise risks when we are protected by insurance. Our laws allow for some people to exempt themselves from vaccination, for reasons medical or religious or philosophical. But deciding for ourselves whether we ought to be among that number is indeed a matter of conscience.

For me, the significance of Biss’s contribution to the conversation is the clarity with which she knocks down illusions of independence and raises the moral questions of vaccination: If you’re in a position to put yourself (or your children) before the rest of your community, should you? Would you make the same choice if you were extremely poor? Had a compromised immune system? Had no access to health care?

In the end, Biss decides for herself that it is morally wrong to put the burden of inoculation on others, and has her son vaccinated. Many of Biss’s friends tell her they can’t in good conscience do the same. But when she asks one friend how she would feel if her non-vaccinated child led to another child’s death, her friend admits she’s never thought about that. Biss doesn’t try to change her friend’s mind, but she does insist how vital it is for this woman to thoughtfully consider the question and come to an answer that can she can live with.

This book is as much for people who don’t understand why a parent might choose not to vaccinate a child as it is for parents who are not vaccinating their kids. It’s slim but weighty, thoughtful but not sentimental. It forced me, as much as I like to think of myself as a loner, to grapple with what it means to be simultaneously vulnerable and dangerous, one small part of a larger organism with which I am, for better or worse, interdependent.

The post Vulnerable and Dangerous: A Review of On Immunity appeared first on Mindy Withrow.

Paris in the Jazz Age. A backdrop to art, literature, fashion, music, sparkling cocktails, catty society, public sexuality, political intrigue, and parties so lavish that the famous guests compete to be the entertainment. Rafaela Fano, American and seventeen, arrives in Paris not of her own will. But soon she is in love. The light, the architecture, the dresses—it’s thrillingly more than she anticipated when she was forcibly shipped off to marry a now-lost cousin. Doing what she must to stay and survive, she accepts anonymity in the glittering city—until she becomes the most famous model of artist Tamara de Lempicka.

The Last Nude, Ellis Avery’s second novel, re-imagines the relationship between the celebrated Art Deco artist and her most inspiring muse. Part One, and the bulk of the novel, is told from Rafaela’s point of view, sixteen years after they meet. She recounts their chance connection, Tamara’s offer to earn a little money modeling for her, the understated elegance of her apartment, the artistic discipline and brilliance she observes, and her own shock at being sexually aroused by this mysterious, self-possessed woman. Their passion is transferred to the canvas, where Tamara’s paintings of Rafaela win her recognition and a line of collectors. But their expectations are not shared. Rafaela recognizes, looking back, the naïveté of her youth, the clarifying lessons of first love and the seeds of the confidence she will live by later.

Part Two, much shorter and darker than the first, is Tamara’s story. It is decades later, and in her final days of decline she reflects on her achievements and her lost relationships. The structure is unusual; the shift in perspective is abrupt, and Rafaela’s story as told in the middle distance already feels complete. But then Tamara’s wandering memories—like light from an unexpected angle—reveal significant later encounters that changed the story, if her memory and her willful revisions can be trusted.

Avery’s writing is strikingly simple, spare sentences vibrating with the language of color and texture, occasionally flecked with French. The story is fiction, erotica, history. A handful of settings—Rafaela’s flat, Tamara’s apartment, an art gallery, a bridge on the Seine—evoke the intimacy of a stage. The cultural icons of the 1920s walk on and off; a few simply are mentioned in the wings. Some scenes are quiet tableaus, accompanied only by the flick of a paintbrush or the turn of a page, while others unfurl cinematically in silk and peacock feathers.

The Last Nude is a love story between two women, between an artist and her muse, between an artist’s skill and her admirers, and between a vivacious city at the end of era and her most memorable residents. It asks the unanswerable questions: What is the elusive quality that makes a painting art? How can a person’s essence be so completely depicted by another? How do the events of our past add up to a life? How do the hurts of our youth become sweet memories of age? And who would we be if we had never met the other?

The post Chance Encounters: A Review of The Last Nude appeared first on Mindy Withrow.

The daffodils are starting to emerge in Northwest Ohio, but I know not to let them fool me. It’s still cold, still mostly gray skies, still swaths of road salt in my wheel wells. Trump is still president, Brexit is still proceeding, and assault weapons are still mowing down schoolchildren. I want to see the #neveragain and the #metoo movements—like those eager daffodils—as harbingers of an awakening. But it’s still winter and “darkness is cheap,” as Ali Smith attributes to Charles Dickens in the epigraph of her latest novel.

Winter, like its namesake, is isolating, chapping, deep. Not much happens on the surface. Just Art and his mother and his mother’s estranged sister and Art’s fake girlfriend spending Christmas together in a huge, mostly unfurnished house in Cornwall. Art and his mother are both seeing things. The mother and the sister are both remembering things. The most revealing conversations take place in the dead of night. Lies on the internet become truth in real life. The characters, and the reader, are disoriented.

I wanted to read Winter because I loved Autumn, the first in Smith’s seasonal cycle. So I picked it up. And then put it down again a few chapters in. It’s so soaked in the zeitgeist of the last couple years that I couldn’t bear it. I found a blanket and a pile of Alexander McCall Smiths and ignored Winter for a couple of weeks.

But I went back to it, hoping for signs of spring. And I found them, as the stranger impersonating the girlfriend begins to thaw the family’s edges. Proximity revives warmth, and they start to feel their extremities again—painfully at first, and then subsiding into cautious comfort.

It’s a strange and beautiful book, perfectly pitched for the season it embodies. It’s a book that wouldn’t have made sense five years ago but will likely stand as a reminder of this moment in cultural time. In January, it was too devastating to read. But now that March has arrived and high schoolers are organizing protests at the White House, it feels warmer.

Hopefully, for fans of Ali Smith, spring is coming.

The post Darkness is Cheap: A Review of Winter appeared first on Mindy Withrow.

What would it mean to write the history of an age not only from what has been saved but also from what has been lost? What would it mean to write a history concerned not only with the lives of the famous but also with the lives of the obscure?

These are the questions that led Harvard historian Jill Lepore to dig into the personal history of Jane Franklin, sister of the great statesman. What she found is that while Ben was establishing a free press, fostering a revolution, and experimenting and inventing, Jane was raising (or burying) 12 children and a host of grandchildren, taking in boarders and sewing to pay off her husband’s debts, and working her extended family connections to help children and grandchildren get set up in trades. And for decades, it was the letters they wrote to each other that contained “Benny’s and Jenny’s” truest affections and opinions.

Having received no formal education (as a soap boiler’s daughter, her training was limited to cooking, stitching and making soap), Jane was embarrassed by her poor spelling and handwriting. But she wrote anyway, encouraged by her brother.

In the age when Mary Wollstonecraft was writing A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and David Hume was counter-culturally encouraging women to read history, Jane barely had enough daylight to see her household responsibilities carried out. But she once told her brother, “I Read as much as I Dare.” She made time to read every one of Ben’s books he sent to her, plus any sermons, natural histories, newspapers, and other printed discourses she could borrow or buy. In her letters, she picked her brother’s brain and prodded him about political and religious issues (she maintained a lifelong Christian faith, which Ben questioned from an early age). And while Ben was writing what would become his autobiography, she was bold enough to put her pen to her own handmade notebook, which she called her “Book of Ages”; in it she recorded births, deaths, and a precious few of her own observations.

Given her connection to a founding father, Jane might have been expected to leave behind a more substantive trail. But like most women of past eras, even those tied to the most influential men of their day, we have only fragments. Understanding what information about Jane is missing – and why – prompted Lepore to approach the book the way she did. In her appendix on methods and source, she writes:

In writing this book I have had to stare down a truism: the lives of the obscure make good fiction but bad history…For a long time, I was so discouraged that I abandoned the project altogether. I thought about writing a novel instead. But I decided, in the end, to write a biography, a book meant not only as a life of Jane Franklin Mecom but, more, as a meditation on silence in the archives. I wanted to write a history from the Reformation through the American Revolution by telling the story of a single life, using this most ordinary of lives to offer a history of history and to explain how history is written: from what remains of the lives of the great, the bad, and not as often, the good.

In other words, the details about women in history are as rare as the women who had the opportunity to read history. But because of these gaps, the piecing together of the personal histories of women are that much more valuable for how they augment and correct what we know.

By examining the handful of pages in Jane’s manuscript and the few extant letters (most are lost) preserved among her and her brother’s papers (at least one of Jane’s papers bear her note “to go into the Litle Trunk” for safe keeping [her spelling]), and filling the gaps with other contemporary sources, Lepore fleshes out some of the experiences that made Jane who she was: caring for her aged parents; burying her children; fleeing Boston during the Revolution; reading Cotton Mather, Thomas Paine, and Alexander Pope. In doing so, she not only brings this extraordinary, ordinary woman into relief, but also reveals an additional perspective on her famous sibling and the world-changing events of their generation.

Lepore has written a readable and compassionate life of Jane Franklin Mecom. The inclusion of photos of some of Jane’s manuscripts lend a touch of personality. Extensive notes, a Franklin genealogy, a calendar of letters by or to Jane and Ben, and an appendix of the books Jane is known to have read (including a title by Jonathan Edwards, whose own obscure grandmother, Elizabeth Tuttle, recently was restored to history by Ava Chamberlain) make Lepore’s biography the definitive source on Jane.

It’s a volume that makes me cheer for women of the past who strained the seams of society even as they went on with their daily work – which is something I suppose we could say about historians like Jill Lepore.

The post Women’s March Week: The Life Obscured: A Review of Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin appeared first on Mindy Withrow.

Those who recognize the name Elizabeth Tuttle know her only as the paternal grandmother of colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards, a woman her grandson was raised to forget because of her alleged failings as a colonial goodwife. Yet this same woman, two centuries later, was paraded by leaders of the eugenics movement as the paragon of genetic material, a woman whose descendants include an unusually high number of intelligentsia. And in between those wildly different portraits of her lie nearly 200 years of forgotten silence.

So who was the real Elizabeth Tuttle?

Colonial American scholar Ava Chamberlain’s latest book, The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards, resurrects a woman of seventeenth-century America who was as ordinary as any other woman but extraordinary in the diversity of claims made about her.

In her introduction, Chamberlain declares her methodology, outlines the case she will make, and establishes its position within the literature. She explains the predominant view of women in the seventeenth century (as well as the twenty-first) as primarily deceitful by nature and “prone to sexual sin,” and explains how the puritan divines countered this view by positioning women as spiritual companions to men, thereby redeeming them from their fallen nature.

Of course, one of the (many) obvious problems with this is that a woman who does not fit the socially constructed mold—by choice or by chance—is therefore relegated back to the untrustworthy category. And this is where our subject’s initial portrait begins to shapeshift.

When Elizabeth Tuttle’s husband divorced her, claiming desertion and mental illness (after ten years of regular childbearing, she refused to have sex with him), she went from respected goodwife to crazy seductress. The court felt there was precedence for her husband’s claim, as not one but two of Elizabeth’s siblings had committed murder and been declared non compos mentis. And though it wasn’t uncommon for a woman to appear in court, Elizabeth was not summoned to appear; a committee was dispatched to interview her but apparently produced no documentation of their visit. So eventually, per her husband’s wishes, she was set aside, cut off from her children, and spoken of only in hushed tones—while he remarried, started a second family and rose to prominence. Thus Elizabeth’s voice disappeared from history.

Chamberlain’s purpose, then, is to restore her point of view as much as possible, to create a chamber where her voice can echo:

My construction of a new figure of Elizabeth Tuttle is, therefore, an attempt to peel away this well-worn veneer and recover the fragments of lost humanity that lie beneath. To give this effort narrative coherence, I have structured it as a search not only for who Elizabeth Tuttle was but also for how she explained the breakdown of her marriage. Her husband’s explanation has been preserved in his divorce petitions. But the disintegration of a marriage of almost twenty-five years seldom has only one explanation. Rarely is either party wholly innocent….My narrative of the divorce exists on the boundary “between what we can know and what we can’t know” about the past.

The Prologue that follows is a sudden embrace of the narrative style, directly engaging the action on the most critical day of Elizabeth’s story.

On the morning of the last Tuesday in May 1690, Richard Edwards was perhaps carefully planing the edge of a pipe stave or tamping a hoop into place around a finished cask. He would not, however, spend this day working in his cooper’s shop. Having more important business, he took off his apron, set aside his mallet and driver, picked up a thick bundle of papers, and set out for Sandford’s Inn, where the Connecticut Court of Assistants met for its twice yearly session. As he entered the court chamber, Edwards likely felt confident that his case was strong…

…despite the basic stability of the puritan family during the first century of settlement, individual families did not always flourish. All was not right in these little peaceable kingdoms.

The stage is set for a dramatic telling of Elizabeth’s story. But from this point on, Chamberlain returns to the academic structure with which she started.

She takes great pains to trace the Edwards and Tuttle ancestors back to England. She explores colonial court cases involving mental illness, murder and divorce. She discuss how and why eugenicists claimed the Edwards family for their arguments.

She reveals that pre- and extra-marital sex, violence, and mental illness were far more common than puritan-revering Evangelical historians would like us to believe. She takes issue with all of the major biographers of Jonathan Edwards (including George Marsden, writing as recently as 2004) for disregarding or misrepresenting Elizabeth’s role in her grandson’s story. She demonstrates that the politics of gender were alive and well in the seventeenth century, just as they are still.

There is no doubt Chamberlain’s work fills a substantial and important gap in the historical record. Her research is meticulous and interpreted reasonably. She has reclaimed (or as close to as possible) an extinguished voice from our national history.

Books must be judged for how well they achieve their stated purposes, and Chamberlain has met the bar she set for herself. But form is as critical as content to story.

Chamberlain quotes colonial source material in the original spelling instead of modernizing it, and incorporates tangents that inform her research but do injustice to the narrative arc. The fascinating details she has revealed will be discovered by far fewer readers than if Chamberlain had chosen to write a narrative history. Her reasons for not doing so probably have more to do with the state of modern academia than personal preference, and academic readers certainly will find her style normative. But those who can’t bring themselves to slog through the academic language will miss out on a truly fascinating tale.

Sex, murder, madness and betrayal were the hallmarks of the life of at least one of our colonial foremothers, and I’m grateful to Chamberlain for expertly sleuthing out the real Elizabeth Tuttle. I only wish her once-buried story had not been further (and unnecessarily) obscured by footnotes.

The post Women’s March Week: The Failed Colonial Goodwife: A Review of The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle appeared first on Mindy Withrow.

Me hosting TEDxWayPublicLibrary, April 12, 2014

Last night I had the privilege of emceeing the inaugural TEDx event in my current hometown. (TEDx is an initiative of the TED Conference that allows communities to organize local TED-style events.) TEDxWayPublicLibrary was the vision of Natalie Dielman, program coordinator at our incredible local library (I’ve written before about my appreciation for Way Public Library). Natalie organized a planning committee that threw themselves into the task, and the event was sold out a couple weeks ago.

Our theme was “A Community of Ideas,” admittedly broad, but somehow all five presentations, plus the few TED talk videos we featured, together drove home a message about what we can see and hear in the everyday if we just pay closer attention.

C.R. Kasprzyk on “Sustainability and Found Composition” at TEDxWayPublicLibrary, April 12, 2014

C.R. Kasprzyk, a composer finishing his doctorate in music composition and digital media at Bowling Green State University, gave a gorgeous presentation on “Sustainability and Found Composition.” He played his own recordings of walleye, bats, a glacier, ambient city sounds and more (hear samples on his website), and talked about his compositional philosophy of letting his surroundings direct his work, demonstrating how all earthlings (human and otherwise) are connected. Cory has a effervescent charm that really connected with the audience.

Julie Rubini told her personal story about how she was inspired to found Claire’s Day, an annual children’s book festival and literary outreach program that helps thousands of children in our area, after her young daughter died unexpectedly. She has since published Hidden Ohio, and is working on two other books. She was passionate about the transformative power of bringing authors and illustrators face-to-face with kids.

Tim Marzullo of Backyard Brains at TEDxWayPublicLibrary, April 12, 2014

And last night I saw, in person, one man move the arm of another man using a human-human interface. Tim Marzullo, a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Michigan and co-founder of Backyard Brains, gave a mesmerizing, rapid-fire demonstration (involving bilingual slides and an unscripted device repair) of some of his neuroprosthetic research. In less than 20 minutes, he made an incredible case for inexpensive tech and community maker spaces to foster DIY science around the world.

Our city has a top-ranked public school system, but Tom Hosler, school superintendent, argued from statistics and personal experience that public education needs a new model. Instead of giving kids “faster horses,” a la Henry Ford (“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”) it’s time for real innovation in education – and he has a vision more communities should get behind.

We closed with a rousing call to action from Ken Leslie, former professional comedian and founder of 1Matters.org, a national nonprofit that works to house the unhoused. Once a homeless addict, his life was turned around by the realization that “when you feel you matter to no one, go care for someone.” Preaching the “power of one,” he had the whole crowd smiling in minutes (and had me laughing in the Green Room the second he walked in). Moose fist bump, Ken!

It was a great evening for the 100+ of us gathered around the TEDxWayPublicLibrary stage, discussing together how learning to look closer and listen more attentively makes our community more interesting and more humane. So many people came up to me during the breaks to say how excited they were to have access to such a program right in their neighborhood.

It was a bit of a milestone for me too. I’ve spoken in public many times before, but I’ve never introduced the mayor and anchored a 3-hour live event. As an introvert, I surprised myself at how much I enjoyed the back and forth with the audience, the on-the-fly connecting the threads of each presentation, and the general energy of the event. I was exhausted by the end of the night – and still feeling it today, too, if I’m honest – but so glad to have been a part of it. I’m sincerely grateful to Natalie and everyone at the Way for giving me the opportunity.

The post What I learned emceeing TEDxWayPublicLibrary appeared first on Mindy Withrow.

Just a quick note to say that I continue to do most of my blogging over at The Discarded Image, where in the last few months I’ve reviewed Virginia Dust’s atmospheric debut novel River of Dust; Joseph Geha’s Lebanese Blonde, set in my hometown of Toledo; Josh Hanagarne’s wise and witty memoir, The World’s Strongest Librarian; and Eli Brown’s magnificent Cinnamon and Gunpowder. One of our more popular features there is our weekly 3 for Thursday, like “3 Instant Writing Improvements,” ”3 Things to Do with Unwanted Books“, and “3 Practical Reasons to Support Public Libraries.” I’ve got some other personal projects underway, too, but in the meantime, if you haven’t yet checked out The Discarded Image – and you’re interested in literature, science, philosophy, and religion – please do.

The post Meanwhile at The Discarded Image appeared first on Mindy Withrow.

In my high school and college years, I read a lot of books by and about the Puritans. These were English Protestants who were first called “puritan” in a pejorative sense because of their stance that the Church of England had capitulated too much to Rome, and many among them followed the teachings of John Calvin. Their separatist nature was one of many factors that led significant numbers of Puritans to emigrate to the American colonies. Among the most famous of these colonists was Jonathan Edwards, an influential eighteenth-century preacher.

Puritan writers were fervent, earnest believers who urged their readers to piety. And the books about these Puritans to which I was exposed held them up as role models, in some cases to an extreme. The general theme was that these people were closer to God than we are in modern life, and the closer we modeled our relationships and daily activities after theirs, the better off we were spiritually.

What I didn’t understand in my early encounters with the Puritans was that their writings were ideals, the way they thought life should be lived in relationship to God. Which is not the same thing as how they actually lived—not because they were insincere, but because they were no more consistent in matching their beliefs to their actions than anyone else is. This is something that the writers of the books about the Puritans should have stressed—but the ones I read were too infatuated with the same ideals and therefore perpetuated my false impression. More objective books certainly existed; I just hadn’t encountered them yet in my particular community.

I have since come to read history and theology very differently, and I no longer have a romantic view of the Puritans. But sometimes early impressions are hard to root out, buried as they are under the strata of ideas formed over time. The only way to reexamine these ideas is to take up the subject again from other points of view and let them wrestle in the back of your mind until the inconsistencies shake loose and come to the surface.

I wasn’t specifically looking to do any more reading on colonial America or Jonathan Edwards, but I was intrigued when I saw Ava Chamberlain’s newest book, The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards. I was familiar with Chamberlain’s work as an Edwards scholar (for personal reasons, I’ve read far more than my share about him), and I was surprised to learn there had been a number of scandals in the family. That’s when a light went off that this was one of those areas where I might need to challenge my assumptions.

So I dove in. And sure enough, her retelling of Elizabeth Tuttle’s life was not only a fascinating story, but clarified a lot of details about marriage, family and mental illness in colonial America. Though I had a complaint about form, I gave it a positive review over at The Discarded Image:

Those who recognize the name Elizabeth Tuttle know her only as the paternal grandmother of colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards, a woman her grandson was raised to forget because of her alleged failings as a colonial goodwife. Yet this same woman, two centuries later, was paraded by leaders of the eugenics movement as the paragon of genetic material, a woman whose descendants include an unusually high number of intelligentsia. And in between those wildly different portraits of her lie nearly 200 years of forgotten silence.

So who was the real Elizabeth Tuttle?

Continue reading at The Discarded Image…

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Last July at The Discarded Image, I published a review of Alys, Always, British journalist Harriet Lane’s debut novel. The story opens with a bang, in a straightforward kind of way, but it soon becomes clear that the aftermath of this opening scene is going to fundamentally alter a number of lives—but whether for good or bad will be left to the reader.

Driving back to London from the countryside on an icy evening, Frances Thorpe comes upon a car accident. She can’t get to the driver, who calls to her saying her name is Alice and that she spun out trying to avoid a fox. Frances tries to keep Alice talking while they wait for the ambulance, but the trapped woman’s voice is getting weaker. When the paramedics arrive and set up heavy machinery to cut through the crumpled car, the police draw Frances away to take her statement, sending her home with a promise that they’ll be in touch. And when they call, they inform her that they did what they could, but Alice didn’t make it. Continue reading at The Discarded Image…

And that’s when Frances discovers who Alice was and decides to turn the tragedy into an opportunity for herself.

As the book unfolds, the psychological depths of Lane’s storytelling are revealed in surprising twists. I was so fascinated by the main character that I sought out the author on Twitter to get a little more backstory. And this week, just as the paperback of Alys, Always released here in the U.S., I posted my interview with Harriet Lane over at The Discarded Image. We talked about watching others’ lives from afar, choosing your own destiny, and whether or not Frances has really committed a crime.

The protagonist of Harriet Lane’s debut novel Alys, Always was remarkably good at putting me on my guard. She raised all sorts of fascinating questions about what motivates us when it comes to the narratives we tell ourselves and others about ourselves and others. So I was thrilled when Harriet agreed to chat a bit about the psychology of her characters and some of the experiences and observations behind the suspense. Continue reading at The Discarded Image…

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