Breena Clarke's Blog: A Few Whiles

My new novel - my fourth - ponders the intersection of past, present, and future in a series of letters.

Imagining an afterlife keeps humans from losing hold of the one slender concept that keeps us living in the present: hope. Hope is the thing that causes the suddenly traumatized heart to beat once more and then one more and one more time. That’s all it takes to stay alive. And a hoped-for reunion with our loved one nourishes our dreams of Heaven. Since the death of my son, Najeeb, I’ve cultivated a particular concept of the afterlife. Coalescing these fertile pictures with words on a page has taken a long time. "Alive Nearby" is a view of that place. "Alive Nearby" is a work of fiction, an intensely personal clutch of letters that capture a woman’s thoughts and feelings about the intersection of her personal past and her family’s historical records.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tovah Bailey is a small, meditative book, a memoir of illness and observation. The reader is introduced to a tiny mollusk and its perambulations inside the author's room for recuperation from an undiagnosed disease. The reader is carried along at a comparable, snail-like pace, a slow, steady movement of words as the tiny creature moves through the cycles of its existence. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is filled with insights about the human body and the evolutionary development of humans and snails. This beautiful book works like a mind detox, a gentle return to amazement at small things.

Mem by Bethany Morrow is an intellectually engaging, fresh, exciting and cleverly constructed speculative novel set in 1920's Montreal. It's an easy-going read, but entirely engrossing. The full spectrum of colors, ie races, are backgrounded here, but no privilege is given to any particular one in the text, an intriguing convention. Bethany Morrow leads us to ponder what is meant by consciousness, identity, and memory within the life of her completely unique protagonist.

The Cruelty Men by Emer Martin is a lovely lyrical, big chunk of a novel that is a wise and comprehensive narrative of Ireland. The title suggests that it will be a grim book. The events, the circumstances of the characters are harsh because the characters are the Irish and poor in Ireland. But the book is not grim. The book is written beautifully and that is just the pure fact. The narrative of Ireland is terribly grim and beautiful, and Emer Martin has found her way to telling it, to balancing the notions in a novel. If you read the first chapter, you will be on the hook for reading the rest. As big a story as it is though, it never overwhelms the reader or the characters. It uses short chapters narrated directly to the reader/listener to keep the reader hopping from one to the next. The narrative bounces between the characters as a crystal held to the sun and turned slightly reveals different colors in the same object. The story is intensely genealogic in almost a cruel way, a telling of how unalterable class division can be. The poor are trapped in a nearly unimaginable hell of ignorance, starvation, and predation while the middle classes remain blissfully unaware and the upper crust willfully unconcerned. The depths of the Catholic Churches’ outrages are plumbed. Oh, my goodness! Emer Martin has based her story on the accounts of survivors of the Industrial Schools and The Magdalene Laundries, as well as, as Irish oral traditions. And it is the age-old stories, carried on the lips of people who preserved them through memory and custom that have survived. Combining the elements of traditional oral narrative with the documented and witnessed accounts of survivors of The Industrial Schools and The Magdalene Laundries horrors is the magic of “The Cruelty Men.” The narratives are held together, are, and now the truth is known.

“When have the well-fed ever understood the hungry?” - Emer Martin

"Unforgivable Love" by Sophfronia Scott, a retelling of the classic, "Dangerous Liaisons," is a sexy and intriguing novel that plunges the reader into the world of fashionable African-American high society in Jazz Age Harlem, New York. Scott's novel is a panoramic exploration of the universal themes of love, sex, and social intrigue. "Unforgivable Love" offers a delightful opportunity to spend time in Harlem engaged with Sophfronia Scott's skillful, lyrical prose discovering this exciting, historical time and place.
Unforgivable Love
Also by Sophfronia Scott: Love's Long Line and This Child of Faith. more about Sophfronia at www.hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.blog
Sophfronia Scott returns to Hobart Festival of Women Writers. More information at www.hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.com

Much happens in the novel, THE TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN RACIST, as protagonist Ellen Burns, conducts an oddysey-like search between New Mexico and South Carolina in search of her white supremacist brother, Royce. How do we live with the presence of white supremacy encroaching and poisoning our everyday lives seems to be Blanche McCrary Boyd's question. How also do we live with the surveillance of Federal Government agencies like FBI, BATF, ICE?
Ellen Burns, an old Boyd character, now a recovered alcoholic in this iteration, tries to tear to the bottom and, in the process, nearly destroys herself as the novel turns to the 21st century. Her brother is "the Unknown Racist." The plot in this searingly prescient novel, take lots of turns and twists. Don’t stop before the brilliantly conceived last chapter though or you will miss a unique perspective on life.

Blanche McCrary Boyd is a Participating Writer at Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2018. She will present the workshop, WHAT’S THE TRUTH? Writing Fiction and Non-fiction. www.hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.com

IDOL TALK: Women Writers on the Teenage Infatuations That Changed Their Lives edited by Elizabeth Searle and Tamra Wilson is a collection of forty-four essays on the women and men who influenced the mature selves of women writers. These are the figures who guided the writers' growing up. In these delightful essays, the authors are at times lighthearted but are also frank and revealing and aware and descriptive of the zeitgeist of the teen idol era, that time between the end of the World War II up to and including the modern Civil Rights Era. And these idols were, by and large, rebels, visionaries, geniuses, innovators, and damn good lookers. And their looks were important as they were served up on magazine covers and on TV, the medium through which we all came to know a great deal about American culture. Bonus material in IDOL TALK is the “then and now” photos of the writers including glasses, braces and goofy hairdos, the fond, familiar glimpses of their youths. Includes essays by Elizabeth Searle, Tamra Wilson, Breena Clarke, Darlene R. Taylor, Suzanne Strempek Shea, Kate Kastelein, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Lee J. Kahrs, Judy Goldman, Nancy Swan, B.A. Shapiro, Michelle Soucy, Amy Rogers, Ann Harleman, Linda K. Sienkiewicz, Janice Eidus, Katharine Davis, Jill McCorkle, Marianne Leone, Susan Lilly, Ann Hood, Lise Haines, Marianne Gingher, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Susan Shapiro, Marjorie Hudson, Morgan Callan Rogers, Leslea Newman, Leslie Lawrence, Katie Hafner, Lisa Williams Kline, Mary Granfield, Leslie Pietrzyk, Susan Woodring, Caitlin McCarthy, Stephanie Powell Watts, Ann Rosenquist Fee, Shara McCallum, Heather Duerre Humann, Lisa Borders, Mary Sullivan, Diana Goetsch, Emlyn Meredith Dornemann, and Susan Straight. Wow! They cover a lot of ground.

The Book Doctor: A Novel by Esther Cohen does that most inexplicable thing that good novels do: it takes you by the shoulders and pulls you along into the world of Arlette Rosen and Harbinger Singh and you are surprised at how comfortable you feel. The author of the poetry collection, "Breakfast With Allen Ginsberg and the novel, "No Charge For Looking," as well as, "Unseen America: Photos and Stories by Workers" brings the reader into a wittily urbane, fictional though familiar New York City. Superb writing and a freshly quirky story.

Esther Cohen will present The Good Stories Intensive Workshop at Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2018, a six-hour workshop for serious students of the writing craft. Information and registration at www.hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.com

In “Suzanne’s Children,” Anne Nelson tells the extraordinary story of a woman whose courage and sacrifice saved the lives of many Jewish children in Nazi Paris. Suzanne Spaak, born in a privileged Catholic family and married (unhappily) into the leading Belgian political family, through her friendship with a Polish Jewish exile, became involved in the resistance to the German occupiers and their French collaborators. With total disregard for her own safety, she raised money, established safe havens for Jewish children left behind when their parents were deported, organized their escape from Paris to the countryside and helped Jewish groups in their attempt to alert the world about the Holocaust. She did not hesitate to enlist the help of her own teenage daughter and younger son in dangerous missions. She believed that, in the face of evil, “ something must be done”.
In 1944 she was arrested, possibly tortured, and died in Fresnes prison. After the war, she was almost forgotten (in part thanks to her husband’s actions) until 1985, when she was honored as “Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem.
Anne Nelson’s deeply researched book brings her back to life, together with other remarkable people who worked with her or moved in her circle of friends. What made her so special was that, when confronted with colossal injustice and cruelty, she did not look the other way, but she stood up for what she believed was morally right. As Ann Nelson points out in the last paragraph of the book “Suzanne Spaak was capable of seeing and serving the “alien other” because, in her clear gaze, no fellow human was alien, or other”.
Suzanne's Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris
reviewed for HBVFWW by Elda Stifani

Anne Nelson will be a Participating Writer for Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2018. www.hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.blog for Spotlights on all of HBVFWW writers.

In “Suzanne’s Children,” Anne Nelson tells the extraordinary story of a woman whose courage and sacrifice saved the lives of many Jewish children in Nazi Paris. Suzanne Spaak, born in a privileged Catholic family and married (unhappily) into the leading Belgian political family, through her friendship with a Polish Jewish exile, became involved in the resistance to the German occupiers and their French collaborators. With total disregard for her own safety, she raised money, established safe havens for Jewish children left behind when their parents were deported, organized their escape from Paris to the countryside and helped Jewish groups in their attempt to alert the world about the Holocaust. She did not hesitate to enlist the help of her own teenage daughter and younger son in dangerous missions. She believed that, in the face of evil, “ something must be done”.
In 1944 she was arrested, possibly tortured, and died in Fresnes prison. After the war, she was almost forgotten (in part thanks to her husband’s actions) until 1985, when she was honored as “Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem.
Anne Nelson’s deeply researched book brings her back to life, together with other remarkable people who worked with her or moved in her circle of friends. What made her so special was that, when confronted with colossal injustice and cruelty, she did not look the other way, but she stood up for what she believed was morally right. As Ann Nelson points out in the last paragraph of the book “Suzanne Spaak was capable of seeing and serving the “alien other” because, in her clear gaze, no fellow human was alien, or other”.
Suzanne's Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris
reviewed for HBVFWW by Elda Stifani

Anne Nelson will be a Participating Writer for Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2018. www.hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.blog for Spotlights on all of HBVFWW writers.