All posts by Mandy Van Deven

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven
 
Interviews

The Graphic Canon: Literature Gets a Modern Kick

In The Graphic Canon, comic artists reimagine dozens of classic works of literature, philosophy, and religion. The result, says creator Russ Kick, is like The Norton Anthology with pictures, drawn by an army of emerging artists who provide their personal — and sometimes unexpected — gloss on the world's great books.


More than a decade before Julian Assange and Edward Snowden became poster boys for information freedom, Russ Kick was a pioneer of using the Internet to heighten government accountability. If you’ve seen the video of then president George W. Bush reading “The Pet Goat” with a second-grade class in Sarasota, Florida, as terrorist attacks were underway on September 11, 2001, you can thank Kick for posting an uncut version of the footage on the web.

While he was an editor at the Disinformation Company, an online publisher of “the most shocking, unusual, and quirkiest news articles, podcasts, and videos,” Kick produced a number of anthologies that exposed untruths and challenged conventional wisdom. His most popular collections are Everything You Know Is Wrong and You Are Being Lied To. When a decade of media-based, information-freedom advocacy began to take its toll on his well-being, Kick knew it was time for him to switch gears.

While visiting a bookstore in Tucson, Arizona, Kick’s chance encounter with a graphic novel sparked a new direction. For the last three and a half years, he has been working with comic artists to reimagine classic works of literature, philosophy, and religion for a three-volume collection called The Graphic Canon. This summer, the final volume was released (the first and second volumes were released last year), and the trilogy will be available as a box set in October.

I spoke with Kick about how going in a new direction can be both daunting and gratifying, and why his current project adapting children’s stories is unsuitable for kids.

Part of what makes The Graphic Canon intriguing is that it does two things at once: elevates comic art while making classic literature more accessible to contemporary audiences. What led you to take on this ambitious project?

It was so depressing to produce these sociopolitical books, but I knew I wanted to keep writing and editing anthologies. So, I returned to some of my other lifelong interests: literature and art. One day I was in was in the graphic-novel section of a bookstore in Tucson and found a full-length, graphic adaptation of The Trial by Kafka. It struck me that there should be an anthology of graphic adaptations of classic works of literature. I thought it should be like The Norton Anthology I had dragged around in college. That was the moment the idea was born, and it seemed so obvious to me once I had it.

When did you become interested in graphic novels?

I’ve read comics all my life. Once I signed the contract with Seven Stories Press, I started approaching my favorite artists to ask them to be a part of this project. Then I branched out from there. One of the most fun parts of working on The Graphic Canon was discovering new talent. It is unbelievable how many talented illustrators and comic artists are out there. It was great to find people who are essentially unknown and give them the opportunity to be part of this collection.

George Orwell, Animal Farm
Animal Farm  as reimagined by Laura Plansker.

Reinterpreting iconic works of literature must be intimidating, and some of the chapters are closer renderings than others. Did you feel a responsibility to maintain these works’ original forms?

Because this is an art project, I started out by making the decision not to place limits on what the artist could do. I wanted the result to be a real collaboration between the original writer, their work, and the artist. By giving talented artists the greatest source material possible, I knew the result would be amazing.

A part of editing an anthology is learning to let go of control. It’s a process of chance and synchronicity. Some things you want at the start never materialize, and you end up with other things you’d never even considered that are just brilliant. It’s like looking into a kaleidoscope; what you see is always unpredictable yet interesting.

The Graphic Canon isn’t just works of literature. You also include philosophical writings from people like Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche and excerpts from religious texts. How did you decide what to include as “the canon?”

I started with a list of what I considered to be the most critical works of literature. These were stories that would leave a noticeable gap if they weren’t included, like The Iliad, The Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Tale of Genji. But I also wanted to go beyond what was predictable and bring in unexpected things. That’s why I included the Incan play Apu Ollantay.

I also had a wish list of things I wanted to see adapted because I thought the story would work really well visually. Some of the artists I worked with told me they’d always wanted to adapt a certain work, but they never had a reason to do it. That’s what happened with Rebecca Dart and Paradise Lost, which are these stunning full-page illustrations and beautiful hand-lettering. It also happened with Rick Geary and the book of Revelation. Being a part of this project gave those artists the excuse they needed.

The Graphic Canon, Jabberwocky
“Jabberwocky,” as reimagined by Eran Cantrell.

There’s a lot of diversity in the collection, stylistically and in how the artist approached the material. Some adaptations are straightforward and use the original text, while others are more abstract interpretations of a partial or whole work. What does this diversity bring to the collection as a whole?

People have told me they were pleasantly surprised with The Graphic Canon because it is so multilayered and features so many different artistic styles. A few times while I was editing, I was surprised when an artist brought something out of a story that I’d never noticed before. Even though some of these works are hundreds of years old, they still have really relevant things to say. The themes are so timeless and universal, and the artwork helps to get that across.

Every chapter begins with an introduction you penned that serves to contextualize the work and familiarize the reader with the comic artist. What did you learn by writing those introductions?

Too many amazing writers and poets died in total poverty, and only gained recognition for their work posthumously. In the chapter introductions, I talk about why the work is important and give some interesting facts about the writer or poet and the history of the work, to humanize it. A lot of times the backstory of a writer’s life and career is as interesting as the work itself. There are a lot of fascinating stories about pieces that were either completely ignored during a writer’s lifetime or torn to pieces by critics when it was published. I almost got tired of having to write that again and again. But it did teach me to never give up hope.

You mention the possibility of a fourth volume a couple of times in The Graphic Canon. Is that something you have in the works?

I am working on another anthology right now, but it won’t be a fourth volume. It will be graphic adaptations of children’s literature. Originally, the publisher and I thought this would be a book for children and adults, but now that the artwork has started coming in, I realize the book isn’t going to be appropriate for kids. It’s well known that a lot of what we consider to be children’s stories are really dark and violent, so you can imagine how the artwork might be disturbing. The artists and I won’t be watering these stories down like they do at Disney.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

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The Stories We Tell Ourselves


I didn’t expect a collection of stories about the inner struggles of psychoanalysis patients to be so much like a detective novel. Yet, in The Examined Life parallels abound.

Clues are uncovered slowly in each chapter and a mystery unfolds. Hidden motivations are unearthed by identifying the meaningful in the mundane. The skillful narrator walks the reader through his ruminative process of making sense of the clues. A truth is revealed that appears to have been there are along.

Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz has penchant for storytelling. He knows when to showcase his professional proficiencies and when to let the tale tell itself. The truth, after all, is somewhere in-between.

What was your motivation in embarking on this project?

I am sixty. I have a ten-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son. My father had two heart attacks by the time he was my age, and my mother died when she was sixty-four. If I’m not here when my children are teenagers or young adults, I thought about what I want them to know.

The thirty-one stories in The Examined Life address what I think of as some of life’s biggest problems — problems we all face. More than that, I wanted to portray a way of thinking, a disposition towards oneself and the world that might be useful to them and others. Also, psychoanalysis requires time and money, and many people won’t be able to afford it. I wanted to set down some of the important things I’ve learned in a way that may be helpful to those who are unable to have psychoanalysis or therapy.

Given that you have a twenty-five-year history to draw from, why did you choose to include these particular stories?

I chose these stories because they have a kind of urgency, and I felt I had something to say about these fundamental life issues. My patients had taught me something that I wanted to get down on paper. Of course, I also write with my patients’ privacy in mind. Confidentiality plays an important role in what I choose to write about, and how I write.

In some ways, The Examined Life demystifies psychoanalysis, which has become a part of popular culture — and not always in an accurate or respectable way. How did this influence the way you told these stories? 

Psychoanalysis has become something of a joke in our culture. In the book, I try to set all that aside and just give a simple picture of what psychoanalysis really is — and what actually happens between an analyst and patient.

The truth is, the people who come to psychoanalysis are in pain, and usually part of the pain is that they can’t articulate it well. They don’t have a way of telling their story. The author Karen Blixen said, “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” But what if a person can’t tell a story about their sorrows? What if the story tells them?

In my work I try to hear the story my patient cannot tell and then to help them to tell it. To me, all the highfalutin psychoanalytic language — which is not in my book — is a diversion from the directness of our speech. So, I try to tell stories I think are important as plainly and directly as possible.

Change is a recurring theme in the book. People come to you because they desire change, because they have experienced an unanticipated or undesired change. People resist change. People succeed and don’t succeed in making changes in their lives. Does hearing other people’s stories of change make it easier to do so ourselves?

“I want to change, but not if it means changing,” a patient once said to me in complete innocence. Change is difficult for many reasons. One reason people resist change is that all change requires loss. This can be hard to see, and even harder to accept. But there are many things that help us to change. I believe one of those things is hearing other people’s stories.

Some stories touch our heart. A good story can help us to think differently. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree — these recent books made me think differently. If you are able to think in a new way, you can act in a new way. Thinking differently is the first step towards change.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

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Photo by Battle Creek CVB.
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The Discomfort of #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen


photo of Sojourner Truth monument
Photo by Battle Creek CVB

“Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter.”

Thus began Sojourner Truth’s famous 1851 speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Or, at least, this is what we’ve been led to believe by suffragette and abolitionist Frances Dana Barker Gage. It’s her version of Truth’s extemporaneous oration that became popularized in American history.

According to one of Gage’s accounts of what happened at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, she granted Truth the opportunity to speak at the podium, in spite of protests from white suffragettes. They feared the emancipated slave would detract from their cause by bringing up the issue of slavery. Instead, in Gage’s telling, Truth acknowledged “negro’s rights” only in passing and focused on the rights of women.

To some, this account may come across as a heartwarming moment of white feminist solidarity in the face of race-based tensions. To others, like me, the story serves the suffragists’ agenda too neatly. A white woman gave a black woman a platform to speak, and she used that platform to support the cause of women who had just moments before called for her silence?

Historians have poked many holes in the accuracy of Gage’s retellings. In fact, much of what we’ve come to know about Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech may have been fabricated by Gage.

When #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen tweets began flooding my Twitter feed on Monday, I thought about the historical revisionism of Truth’s speech. Although a part of me wishes I still believed the rousing and monumentalized story, knowing the dubious purpose it served makes the words feel hollow. My enthusiasm for feminism long since waned in the wake of critiques from people who have been marginalized in the movement.

More than a 150 years after the delivery of Truth’s speech, many white feminists have yet to internalize the seminal theories contained in works like The Combahee River Collective Statement, This Bridge Called My Back, and the INCITE! anthologies. Our refusal to accept the perspectives of women of color regarding our shared history means white women continue to resist, dismiss, and ignore the same critiques when they are made today.

I was humbled by the magnitude of feminist history that was contained in Mikki Kendall’s spontaneous #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen tweet — its force enough to ascend the hashtag to trending in a matter of hours. But my delight quickly turned to dismay when the responses sought to divorce the hashtag from its historical context. So, I paused to remind myself that we all have different points of entry into conversations about race and feminism. After all, my own public introduction was something of a mess.

I stumbled into web-based debates about race and feminism in 2007 by writing a shamefully indelicate review of Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism. My utter lack of humility was justly greeted with a rather harsh smack down from a number of influential feminist bloggers, including Valenti. With arrogant amusement, I fired back and people came to my defense.

Except, the exchange that occurred wasn’t happening because anyone wanted to defend me. It was happening because I’d unknowingly expressed similar critiques to ones that had been lodged long before my review. Because I’m a white girl it didn’t have to occur to me that there might be discord between white feminist and women of color bloggers. And once I did see it, I thought all anyone needed from me was a declaration of solidarity.

The thing is, my actions weren’t really about being in solidarity with anybody. They were about doing what I needed to feel good about myself, to be seen as a white girl who “gets it” when it comes to race. I thought differentiation and distancing from the “bad” white feminists would show that I understood what people of color have been saying for all these years. That was a selfish mistake. I should have realized that the work to end racism isn’t going to be comfortable — for me or anyone else.

Many of the responses I’ve seen to #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen criticize the hashtag for its supposed alienation of white allies, angry tone, and defensive divisiveness. But those allegations overlook the context from which the hashtag emerged. Hugo Schwyzer debacle aside, Mikki Kendall is not the first woman of color to point out that some white feminists claim to speak for all women while excluding the concerns of a great number of them. So long as white women dictate a revisionist feminist history, just like Frances Dana Barker Gage did with Sojourner Truth, the conversation about race and feminism will continue its circular path.

#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen wasn’t meant to be an invitation for white feminists to participate in a discussion about white women’s privilege — again. It was intended to be an outlet for a woman of color’s frustrations. It turned into a clever litany of injuries women of color have endured (and do endure) due to the actions (and inactions) of white women whose solidarity has been illusive. The anger some women of color have expressed through #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen is justifiable in the face of white women’s consistent and systematic exclusion of what they say is critical for their survival.

Sometimes I think I’ve got this social justice thing on lock, but in truth, none of us do. We’re all fumbling through it and doing the best we can, hoping it’s better than those who came before us. In some ways, it is. That doesn’t mean we can allow ourselves to be seduced into complacency in order to meet our own needs and desires. It means that, although we are learning, we have the responsibility to be vigilant about how far we have left to go — and move things forward.

Whether we own them or don’t own them, our respective privileges are still there. We may not be able to eliminate their power, but we can mitigate their capacity for damage by making different choices. Sometimes those choices will be uncomfortable, but the discomfort is an indication that we are living into change. The discomfort is an opportunity to do something better that we have done it in the past. The discomfort is necessary for growth.

We all have the need to feel we are being heard, but it’s not enough for white folks to simply stop speaking and listen. We also have to learn to see and empathize with other people’s points of entry. We have to be honest about our own motivations when doing antiracist work, especially when we muck it up. We have to lift while we climb, but resolve to do this outside of our own cliques and communities. We have to stop denying that putting our own self-interest first is hindering collective progress.

In the process of learning to live with and learn from our discomfort, we may just find the means for healing.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
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Changing the Conversation on Abortion


photos of pro-choice and pro-life abortion protestors
Photos by John Pisciotta (top) and UTSFL.

The first job I got out of college was at a health center that performs abortions in Atlanta. This was just after September 11, when abortion clinics across the country were receiving threatening notes in envelopes containing a white powder that the senders claimed (it turned out, falsely) was anthrax. The health center where I worked received one of these letters. For the first time, I had to grapple with the fact that the work I was doing put me in danger. I made the choice to put principle over fear and have been an outspoken advocate of abortion rights ever since.

For a long time, I toed the line on abortion. I had little patience for people who identified as pro-life, especially when they were members of my own family. Holiday dinners were ruined when I stormed self-righteously from the table after arguing with my sister. I cared more about getting my politics across than getting along with the people I loved.

As I learned to value community more than ideology, I became less certain that dogmatism creates a better world. Now, I no longer use abortion as a litmus test for determining whether someone’s perspective is “right” or “wrong.” To me, abortion is a health-care necessity, it is a human right, and sometimes, it is a heartbreaking tragedy.

Yet the national abortion debate continues, polarizing Americans more than perhaps any other political issue. Democratic state senator Wendy Davis was catapulted to instant celebrity last month as a result of her thirteen-hour filibuster of a proposed law to heavily restrict abortion access in Texas. In the end, the bill was voted on and passed, and the filibuster served little purpose beyond spectacle for reproductive health advocates, clinic workers, and the people they both serve.

It is lamentable that America — and, to some degree, the world — keeps having the same fruitlessly hyperbolic scrabbles over abortion that rarely effect meaningful change, much less bring about greater understanding across the issue’s battle lines. But there are some who seek to change the conversation.

In last month’s New York Times, medical student Joshua Lang wrote about what happens to women who are denied abortions. Lang provided a nuanced view of recent research on the outcomes these women, and their children, experience. He coupled this analysis with an affecting story that shows the complex reality of unexpected — and unwanted — motherhood.

Sarah Erdreich’s new book, Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement, takes a similarly balanced approach. (The essay currently featured on our site, Looking Back on an Abortion, is an excerpt from Erdreich’s book.) Drawing from her interviews with women who have had abortions, Erdreich highlights views often left out of the intensely partisan debate. She points out that many women and men want to move beyond the stale and divisive rhetoric about the sanctity of life or a woman’s right to choose.

These ideas are not new, but they are gaining traction. Perhaps this is evidence that someday we will finally be able to call a truce in this bitter culture war.

Read an excerpt from Sarah Erdreich’s Generation Roe.

Correction, July 15, 2013: Due to an editing error, Sarah Erdreich’s name was misspelled in one reference.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
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Celebrating Supreme Court Wins for Sexual Rights


photo of Profamila Puerto Rico marching in a Gay Pride ParadeThis month Americans are celebrating two historic victories for sexual rights handed down by the Supreme Court: the eradication of the federal Defense of Marriage Act and the weakening of a law that required groups fighting AIDS to make an “antiprostitution pledge.”

Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)

In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court declared that DOMA is unconstitutional. The 1996 law had prevented the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage, which is currently legal in thirteen states.

“The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy, on behalf of the court’s majority. “By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.”

Although the court’s decision continues to allow individual states to not recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, it does put an end to same-sex unions being “treated as second-class marriage.” It also forces the federal government to provide the immigration benefits of marriage to same-sex couples, thus helping along congressional negotiations over immigration reform that had stumbled over Republican opposition to extending such benefits in the legislation.

Today is the forty-fourth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which launched the LGBT rights movement in the United States. The Supreme Court’s decision is another landmark for the movement, and yet it also highlights how much farther the country has to go on the path to full equality. Fifteen countries have passed laws permitting same-sex marriage. A dozen more have such legislation pending. And even in some countries where marriage equality continues to face strong opposition — such as Australia, Ireland, Israel, and Colombia — antidiscrimination laws have already been passed that grant LGBT people the right to civil unions and adoption. As for America? Thirteen states down, thirty-seven to go.

The Antiprostitution Pledge

As part of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) that Congress enacted in 2003, NGOs that received federal funds to fight AIDS internationally were required to sign a statement publicly opposing sex work. Last week, a 6-2 Supreme Court majority struck down the “antiprostitution pledge,” ruling that it violated the First Amendment.

However, the decision affects only US-based organizations. Foreign NGOs who receive US funding can still be required to make the antiprostitution pledge. “The implication for foreign NGOs remains murky,” Chi Mgbako, a professor at Fordham Law School, told the Nation. “Many current and potential recipients of US global AIDS funding are foreign NGOs.”

The antiprostitution pledge has forced organizations to make a difficult decision: denounce the communities they serve, or lose vital funding for lifesaving HIV/AIDS programs. Increasing condom use among sex workers requires demonstrations of correct use, training on negotiating with clients, and collective action among sex workers — all of which could be considered under the policy as “promoting prostitution.”

On the other hand, publicly opposing sex work makes it harder to establish the trust needed to provide services to hard-to-reach men and women. Sex workers are one of the groups most at risk of HIV infection, and yet stigma and discrimination drive them away from the kinds of health education and services that could lower that risk. “At first when we went to [Lima’s] red-light district, people wouldn’t talk to us,” said a health educator at INPPARES, a group that provides sexual and reproductive health services in Peru (disclosure: INPPARES is a member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region, where I work). “They’d grab a bunch of condoms and run away.” 

Red-light districts also serve as a safe haven for LGBT individuals, where men and women — especially those from rural areas — can freely express their gender and sexual identities. “Many of the clients we work with live as men in the jungle during the week and as women in Lima on the weekends,” said Dr. Daniel Aspicuelta, the executive director of INPPARES.

By hindering NGOs in their fight against HIV/AIDS, the antiprostitution pledge has endangered the lives of sex workers, their clients, and their families. The Supreme Court’s decision has gutted one part of this misguided policy, but it needs to be fully repealed so that groups like INPPARES can do their job.

This post is based on posts on DOMA and the antiprostitution pledge that appeared in the blog of the International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region, where I work.

Update, June 29, 2013: This post was revised for length and clarity, and to add disclosures.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
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Is it Time to Put Morality on the Market?


What Money Can't Buy, book coverOver the last thirty years, Americans have seen an infusion of market thinking into areas that were previously governed by collective ethics and morality. Today, the drive to make a profit dictates the way we view things like health, education, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, and even procreation. In What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Harvard University professor Michael J. Sandel argues that markets have become detached from morals, and that it’s time we reconnect them. The book is an engaging exploration of where to draw the line between having a market economy and being a market society.

In the introduction, Sandel makes it clear that providing definitive answers to the questions he raises is not his intention. Instead, he views himself as the kickstarter of a much-needed, public debate on markets and morality, and offers a philosophical framework in which we might have the conversation. The inquisitive title of Sandel’s book reinforces this position. For now, his focus is on highlighting the questions we haven’t been asking over the last three decades, but probably should have been.

So, what does economics have to do with morality? Since he’s the expert, I’ll let Sandel explain:

“Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if we turn them into market commodities,” Sandel argues.

If the role of markets were simply to allocate goods, Sandel would be hard-pressed to find an ethical objection to using an economic rationale to solve all our problems — but, he explains, the reach of markets goes beyond goods allocation to express and promote attitudes toward whatever is being exchanged. It is our job as members of a just society to interrogate what those attitudes are, and whether they reflect the values we want to promote in our culture. If we determine that the values are out of sync with the ethical standards of our culture, then we need to regulate the markets to avoid the unintentional promotion of morally questionable social norms.

For many Americans, regulation is a dirty word. But Sandel asks us to consider the idea of regulation in the context of the parameters we’ve already placed on things that currently cannot be bought and sold, such as human beings and civic duties. For example, it is illegal in the United States to sell one’s vote in an election or a child through adoption processes. These boundaries were not established by the rules of economics; they were established by our moral compass as citizens in a participatory democracy.

So, what values do our markets presently exude? And are we satisfied with that? Because Sandel isn’t. He believes we need more robust engagement in civic discourse around these issues.

“When we think of the morality of markets, we think first of Wall Street banks and their reckless misdeeds, of hedge funds and bail-outs and regulatory reform,” he writes. “But the moral and political challenge we face today is more pervasive and mundane — to rethink the role and reach of markets in our social practices, human relationships, and everyday lives.”

As funny as it is intellectually engaging, What Money Can’t Buy is an excellent point of entry for those concerned with addressing the challenges of markets and morality. It will augment your view of laissez-faire economics and what is a stake in our society if we don’t intervene.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
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Putting a Human Face on Climate Change


The Human Face of Climate Change book coverTalk of climate change seems to be everywhere these days. From elected officials in Washington, DC, to the farmers of rural India, people hold wildly divergent opinions about the ways climate change is affecting our lives, and the impact it will have in the future. In spite of widespread disagreement, many people are already seeing the consequences of climate change in the form of more storms, less rainfall, and severe flooding in their countries. Although the slower-onset disasters may be imperceptible to some, the rising sea levels, higher global temperatures, and food shortages are being endured by many.

In a deeply unjust twist to this story, the people who are most vulnerable to climate change’s harshest effects are those who contribute to the problem the least: millions of the world’s poor. A 2009 report by the Global Humanitarian Forum estimates that 315,000 people die every year as a result of climate change. The injustice of the equation is striking, and so far action to solve the problem has been insufficient compared to the need. Fortunately, there is still time to turn some of the impact of climate change around and solve what some world leaders are calling the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time.

In their book, The Human Face of Climate Change, Swiss photographers Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer present a glimpse into the lives of people who have suffered various hardships brought about by climate change. The images and stories of people from sixteen countries across all continents are at once beautiful and heartbreaking.

In Santa Barbara, California, sixty-six-year-old Christine Powell had to move in with her child after a wildfire destroyed her home and all her belongings. “The morning after the fire, everything I owned was suddenly gone,” she said. “I woke up in the middle of the night and cried in a way I had never done before.”

A forty-year-old fisherwoman from Havana, Cuba, lost her home and possessions in a hurricane. “We have gone through the toughest time,” said Estrella Sosa Osorio. “Even if we pray to God, I don’t think the hurricanes are going to stop.”

Shortages of water and food threaten the lives of people whose means of subsistence are tied to the regularity of the seasons. A fifty-nine-year-old farmer in Chad explained, “There are no more fish and no water. The rainy season is late. It takes three hours to walk to the lake from here. We are all tired of this situation, but have nowhere to go.”

These harrowing stories serve as a reminder that tackling this global challenge cannot wait. With the world continually shrinking, it is our collective responsibility to do what is necessary for the sake of all humankind.

Watch this short video made by the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation featuring some of the photographs and stories from The Human Face of Climate Change.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
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Birthday Reflections on Obsessive Reading


I discovered I had bibliophilic tendencies when I was a child, and though I’d like to attribute this trait to precocious proclivities, it was more likely the personal pan pizza BOOK IT!® awards my elementary school gave out for reading. I grew up on a household where fast food was a luxury my single mother could not afford. So, in order to earn a dinnertime treat for my sisters and me, I would obsessively read.

The incentive program eventually paid off in more than individual-sized pizzas; it turned me into a lifelong, avid reader. Today, I actively read no fewer than four books at a time, with a stack of ten or more in reserve. I keep fiction in the mix to maintain creative sanity, scholarly writing to encourage new ways of thinking, memoir fulfills my desire to hear intimate stories, and bestselling nonfiction is excellent fodder for conversation among strangers. I like to have a variety of options from which to choose depending on my mood, and I keep books in various locations — my bag, next to the bed, in the kitchen — so I can access them with ease.

Books are both a comfort and a challenge. Although the completest in me makes every effort to read each one from beginning to end, pragmatism alleviates the guilt of setting a partially finished novel or dry bestseller aside. Life’s too brief to trudge through prose you don’t find pleasing or short stories that put you to sleep. On Saturday I entered my thirty-third year, and I’m celebrating by sharing thirty-three quotes from works I’ve gained something from reading. Perhaps you’ll gain something by reading them, too.

Book cover for The Marriage Plot“She wanted a book to take her places she couldn’t get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.” ― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Being comically generative and having a sense of humor are one and the same thing. The former is among the least important things in the world, while the latter is among the most. One is a handy social tool, the other an integral component of human survival.… Not being funny doesn’t make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.” ― David Rakoff, Fraud: Essays

“Empathy has the potential to be the first, crucial step on the way to solidarity — not just feeling someone else’s pain, but working together to try and cure it.” ― Gary Younge, Who Are We ― and Should It Matter in the 21st Century?

“It’s alright that there are things you do not get over, not really. You just go on, knowing that the things you love could be stripped from you at any moment, remembering to love them now. It makes you human. You try to be decent and treat people gently, knowing that they, too, have their scars and madnesses that, like yours, do not show.” ― Joy Castro, The Truth Book

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’m gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter.” ― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“If you’re an introvert, find your flow by using your gifts. You have the power of persistence, the tenacity to solve complex problems, and the clear-sightedness to avoid pitfalls that trip others up. You enjoy relative freedom from the temptations of superficial prizes like money and status. Indeed, your biggest challenge may be to fully harness your strengths. You may be so busy trying to appear like a zestful, reward-sensitive extrovert that you undervalue your own talents, or feel underestimated by those around you. But when you’re focused on a project that you care about, you probably find that your energy is boundless. So stay true to your own nature.” — Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

Book cover of The Rules of Inheritance“Even in the moments when you don’t think you are moving forward, you really are.” — Claire Bidwell Smith, The Rules of Inheritance

“Writing is hard for every last one of us.… Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.” — Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“The sun is always there, even if the clouds are covering it.” — William Dalrymple, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

“Don’t push too hard; your last chance to see a person the way you wanted them to be may come at any moment.” — Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

“Dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world, through which people constantly re-create that world, cannot be an act of arrogance. How can I dialogue if I am closed to — and even offended by — the contribution of others? How can I dialogue if I am afraid of being displaced? Dialogue requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human (which is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all).” — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.” ― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“The experience of cross-cultural living reminds us, not in an intellectual way, but in a firsthand way — full of wincing, shame, hope, and disappointment (and often laughter, both at us and by us) — that, in fact, we know very little about the way things really are.” — Sarah Davis, Being There: Learning to Live Cross-Culturally

Book cover of This is Running for Your Life“We must find a way to continue dreaming of each other. If it seems simple, it should. If we could just rest our minds a minute, it might even be easy. The more difficult it gets to clear the necessary space, the more necessary that space becomes.” — Michelle Orange, This Is Running For Your Life

“I want my past to remain vital to me because I need to keep learning its lessons.” — Annette Kolodny, True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School

“We do not need to become each other in order to work together. But we do need to recognize each other, our differences as well as the sameness of our goals. Not for altruism. For self-preservation — survival. Every day of your lives is practice in becoming the person you want to be. No instantaneous miracle is suddenly going to occur and make you brave and courageous and true.” — Audre Lorde, I Am Your Sister

“The assumption that if somebody commits a serious crime they have to go to prison is based on the idea that crime is a deviant form of behavior and criminals should be separated from the rest of society. I understood crime as a process, not an isolated action or deviance from correct behavior, but rather the consequence of a system that produces a criminal class and also benefits from it.” — Jana Leo, Rape New York

“They stood up, his hand still in hers, and went inside. Somehow, without saying anything, it had turned into this. Into an exchange of confessions — the little ways they’d hurt or disappointed each other, and themselves.” — Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” — Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Book cover of An Angle of Vision“I took it as a given that women like me would have to do it the hard way, steal time away from my day job, work without an editor or ready reader, and never have any confidence that what I was writing would be anything that anyone would want to read. But I never considered not writing.” — Dorothy Allison, An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots

“She placed both hands on his shoulders and gazed at him for a long time with a deep, rapturous, and at the same time searching look. She studied his face to make up for the time in which she had not seen him. As at every meeting, she was bringing together her imaginary idea of him (an incomparably better one, impossible in reality) with him as he was.” — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“A society’s social policies should support morally justified reproductive needs and choices and provide assistance in acting on them. Individuals making choices about procreation should not and cannot be regarded as acting in a social void.” — Christine Overall, Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate

“I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the quality and the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.” — June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die

“There is no way to do it right. You cannot have it all. Something has to give. You won’t know what it was you gave up until it is too late to recover.” — Danzy Senna, You Are Free

“One morning I awoke to find that, during the course of the night, my mind had completely ejected the names of all the streets in Pakistan, as though to assure that I could not return, or that if I did, it would be returning to a loss.” — Sara Suleri Goodyear, And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women

Book cover of The Sibling Effect“Growing up in a house full of siblings and failing to make the most of that lucky accident of birth is like inheriting a thousand acres of fertile farmland and never planting it. You can always get your food elsewhere, but think of what you’re allowing to lie fallow.” — Jeffrey Kluger, The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us

“The demand for women’s safety is inevitably articulated in terms of surveillance and protectionism and contributes to reducing rather than expanding women’s access to public space.” — Shilpa Phadke, Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets

“She’s not your servant. She is your key to the culture. Don’t mix the two.” — Adele Baker, Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka

“At first, as they stood there, their hands were clenched together. They relaxed slowly until during the walk back home their fingers were laced in as gentle a clasp as that of any two young girlfriends trotting up the road on a summer day wondering what happened to butterflies in the winter.” ― Toni Morrison, Sula

“Writing is an activity that colludes with you. It’s absorbing, gratifying, and creates the powerful illusion of escape to another world, another existance. At the same time, it’s keeping you exactly where you are, wasting time, not really changing anything. But the alchemy of publication can sometimes achieve that.” ― Carrie Jones, Cutting Up Playgirl

Book cover of Impossible Motherhood“The language of choice invokes free will based on individual freedom, obscuring the interplay between social constraints and human activity. Choices are primed by larger institutional structures and ideological messages.” ― Irene Vilar, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict

“This was what I required of love: an equality in which no one accused the other of being an irrational female, or an oblivious male. We both understood that we shared the burden of being flawed.” ― Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl

“For us, writing isn’t a career so much as it is a vocation, a life saver, a way to prove, to ourselves at least, that we actually exist, that our struggles aren’t for nothing, that our lives are meaningful, are triumphant. We write to release old injustices and abuses, to make sense of them, to contextualize ourselves. We write to tell the truth…so that we can finally see our experiences portrayed honestly, in many dimensions.” — Michelle Tea, Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Boudhanath in Kathmandu, Nepal, by Mandy Van Deven.
Blog

Curing Fernweh with Imagination


Photo of Boudhanath in Kathmandu, Nepal
Boudhanath in Kathmandu, Nepal. Mandy Van Deven

Fernweh: (n.) an ache for distant places; the craving for travel

On Christmas Eve in 2008, I watched the sunset at Boudhanath in Kathmandu, Nepal, while hundreds of red-cloaked Buddhist monks chanted evening prayers and others circumambulated the stupa in silent meditation. In a café overlooking the scene, my partner and I sipped hot coffee and chatted with a group of monks-in-training, five British guys and one woman, who had come down to the city from a monastery in the Himalayas to indulge in earthly pleasures: beer, rum, coffee, and cigarettes.

As darkness fell, the stupa was lit up with strings of colored lights. It was a pluralistic moment that moved my partner and me, in spite of our devout agnosticism, and we resolved to spend every Christmas thereafter in a place we’d never been. (After all, we’d spent the previous Christmas Eve at the Poush Mela in Shantiniketan, West Bengal, India.)

Despite our enjoying the following Christmas Eve watching an American guitar player cover Swedish pop songs in an Irish pub in Bangkok — I joined in at one point and (badly) played tambourine to round out “Dancing Queen” — my partner and I were unable to see our travelphilic holiday commitment through. My mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer the following year, and the thrill of spending Christmas Eve of 2010 in the boondocks where I grew up in Georgia was that my mom had lived to experience it — though not 2011.

We fell on hard financial times for the last two Christmases, but satisfied ourselves by exploring places we’d never been in our adoptive home of New York City. Now, however, we’ve set our sites on a 2013 Christmas Eve in a city like Istanbul, Reykjavík, or Buenos Aires. Inshallah, we will see this through.

Until then, I am sating a debilitating case of fernweh by reading about other people’s journeys. In today’s piece, The Crossing, Frank Bures writes about traveling to a corner of the world few tourists have ever seen. In the tiny African nation of Djibouti, Bures overcomes his own fernweh in search of a fascinating place called Bab al-Mandeb. His story reminded me that sometimes the cure for what ails us can be found somewhere we carry with us: our own imaginations.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Self-Portrait in Shadow, by Mandy Van Deven
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The Megalomaniac’s Shadow


a photo of the author's shadow
Self-Portrait in Shadow, by Mandy Van Deven.

British journalist John Lanchester once famously described writers as being “shy megalomaniacs.” I have pondered this somewhat humorous description in an attempt to better understand my own reasons for engaging in this excessively scrutinized profession — might I be a megalomaniac? I’ve also considered the connections it alludes to between writing, mental health, and pathology. (My interview with Joy Castro, for example, teases at the interplay of these concepts.) Certainly, there are writers who possess an audacious understanding of the value they bring to popular conversation and literary craft, but what is the effect of focusing on public personas that reflect bombast and bravado over consideration and humility? What is obscured by the megalomaniac’s shadow?

When the blogosphere began to gain mainstream credibility back in the mid-aughts, I attended a discussion at the Barnard College on feminist blogging as an act of resistance, where the panel declared that “feminist bloggers have become the cultural producers blazing some of the most radical and rousing paths toward revolutionary social change.” A bold claim, indeed! The arguments boiled down to three main points: 1) blogs are accessible, public forums that anyone can create or engage in; 2) blogs encourage citizen participation by giving the Average Jane a place to voice her political discontent; and 3) blogs are democratic, egalitarian spaces where every person’s voice holds equal weight.

Seven years and an online media explosion later, it is clear blogs do not live up to these weighty and idealistic assumptions. We now understand that what happens online is not separate from, but an extension of, the social dynamics and inequities that plague societies in “real” life. Whether online or offline, most writers whose work receives widespread recognition still sit at the top of social and economic hierarchies, writers from marginalized groups still face the same barriers to success, and it still takes money to make money.

Fortunately, there are spaces online that have managed to work through or avoid the magical thinking that so often accompanies discussions about the Internet. There are spaces that prioritize stories that remain untold because they fail to be what’s hip or bite-sized or sexy. There are spaces that focus not on the center, but instead on the fray.

To be a megalomaniac one must be overly invested in one’s own power and relevance. For better or worse, I don’t fit that bill — writerly cred be damned! Although I started writing because I believe I have something important to say, I have since decided that sometimes, many times even, my time is better spent lifting the voices of others. I am duly honored to be a member of In The Fray‘s editorial team, and look forward to helping others claim their rightful place outside of the shadows.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
New York
Interviews

Born Again: A Conversation with Writer Joy Castro

Best of In The Fray 2013. At an early age, Joy Castro ran away from an abusive home and renounced her faith as a Jehovah’s Witness. What she found instead was a new set of beliefs and truths for herself.


When Joy Castro was fourteen years old, she ran away from her abusive family, who had adopted her at birth. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, in an environment where she was to proselytize “the truth,” Castro sought refuge in the church. But after the church failed to protect her from the emotional and physical anguish she endured on a daily basis, Castro reached beyond their teachings to forge her own path to salvation.

This past year has been a busy one for Castro. Her 2005 memoir detailing her childhood, The Truth Book, was re-released. This coincided with the publication of Island of Bones, a collection of essays that continues Castro’s story of survival and resilience as she moves through adulthood. In addition to her nonfiction work, Castro’s debut crime novel Hell or High Water also recently hit the shelves.

In The Fray spoke with Castro about letting go of traditional concepts of faith, becoming a parent, her attraction to the crime fiction genre, and her definition of truth.

You were raised in an environment where the concept of “truth” was steeped in paradox. What is your understanding of truth now?

When I was growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness, “the truth” was the short-form term we used to refer to the belief system of our religion. Someone was “in the truth” or “not in the truth.” From infancy, I was taken to the Kingdom Hall for five hours each week, and my mother read to me regularly from Jehovah’s Witness literature at home. We went preaching door to door. I prayed morning and night and before every meal in the way I had been taught. So, it was pretty much a full-immersion experience.

I was a believer. Another option was impossible for me to conceive when I was a child. It was only as I got older — ten, eleven, twelve — and had been exposed to enough contradictory material at school that I began to question the tenets of our faith. I ran away at fourteen and stopped attending the Kingdom Hall at fifteen. As we know, “truth” is something that’s energetically debated by political and religious systems all over the world, so it wasn’t as though, when I was fifteen, I moved from a brainwashed state into one of clarity. Truth remains up for grabs.

Now, I just prefer to believe in kindness, compassion, the attempt at honesty about one’s experience and perceptions, and the effort to create justice. As a species, we need a variety of competing voices, competing subjectivities, in order to be able to figure out the best strategic ways forward.

You’ve written about there being freedom in accepting one’s own imperfections and inability to conform to social expectation. As a woman who grew up in poverty and a survivor of childhood abuse, how have you learned to constructively carry the confines of your personal history?

It has meant relinquishing the dream of having had a beautiful childhood — or, within academia, the psychic comfort of having an intellectual pedigree. I cannot compete with people who sailed or had families full of love or went to Harvard. I cannot compete with people who were not raising a child in poverty or riding city buses or doing without. By writing transparently about my own experiences and making them public, I’ve gradually let go of the desire to have been someone else, someone more socially acceptable.

How did unintentionally becoming a parent influence this process for you?

Becoming a parent at twenty, while perhaps not ideal in terms of timing, was overwhelming and transformative for me. Parents will tell you that their souls broke open when they had children. That was true in my case. That radical empathy, that willingness to sacrifice and defend, that compulsion to make a better world for all children — it’s so powerful.

For me personally, it was an opportunity not to neglect, not to abandon, not to abuse, not to commit suicide — all the things my own [adoptive] parents did that left my brother and me damaged and bereft. It was a chance to face down the deep, brooding fear of becoming an abuser. It offered a long series of moments in which to choose to say “yes” to love and growth. While that sounds like a positive, obvious, easy thing to do, it’s not so easy for people who’ve shut down after multiple traumas. For me, opening up and committing to someone in such a profound way was risky and difficult. And, ultimately, so worthwhile.

Before my son was conceived, I was never the sort of person who consciously longed to have a child. Unexpectedly becoming pregnant derailed what I thought my life would be, but in a good way. It carved out a kind of generosity and compassion in me that probably would not have otherwise developed.

My son is twenty-four now, so I’ve been this person for a long time. Lately, my focus has been on changing into someone who does not have a child, like a compass that steers all her choices, at the center of her life anymore. That has been the real challenge for me for the past few years. I think I’m getting the hang of it.

For those of us with unenviable pasts, writing can be a kind of coping mechanism employed to escape or manage the darker realities of our lives — which makes writing both painful and necessary. Has this been your experience?

For me, writing has been a beautiful gift, an escape — as you say — and a way to manage painful truths. It has also been one of the most profound pleasures of all. Using our imaginations to shape and reshape the world is a magnificent gift. What power! And hearing our own voices and exploring our own thoughts in a noisy world is such a soothing, beautiful, private thing that writing allows us to do. I’m grateful for it.

You’ve recently published your first crime novel, Hell or High Water. Does writing crime fiction allow you to explore issues in a way your previous work did not?

As a child and adolescent, I loved reading mysteries. I enjoyed the puzzles and the suspense. I still do. But now, as a writer of crime fiction, I’ve come to appreciate how devoted the genre is to issues of justice. Writing crime fiction has been a method for translating the insights of the academy for a broad audience. I’m not sure crime fiction provides additional freedoms; it’s just a different vessel for exploration.

Joy Castro head shotYour novel is set in New Orleans, a place known for its stark contrast between the lives of blacks and whites, rich and poor. What do you find compelling about placing a struggling Latina journalist in this post-Katrina backdrop?

There are a couple of reasons. First, like many people, I love the city of New Orleans. My husband grew up on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and he lived, went to college, and worked in the city as a young adult. When we met in graduate school, he took me home to meet his family, and I fell in love with the city as I was falling in love with him. I’ve been going there regularly for twenty years now, and my affection and respect for New Orleans made me want to set a novel there.

You’re right about the black-white construction of race and ethnicity in New Orleans. While there has famously and historically been a great deal of mixing, it has usually been defined along a black-white continuum, though the influx of Latino construction workers and their families has shifted the demographic somewhat since Katrina. I was interested in exploring how a character lives her Latinidad in an environment where there’d been almost no Latino community.

You have personal experience with that as well.

Being a Latina without an ethnic community was my own experience growing up. Though I was born in Miami, we quickly moved to England, where we lived for four years when I was little. Then, after two more years in Miami, we relocated to West Virginia, where I lived until I graduated from high school. In the 1980s, I was the only Latina student in my high school, and my Spanish teacher was the only Latina I knew outside my family. Being culturally isolated is something I knew well. So, I wanted to tell a story about cultural isolation, and the strange pressures and loneliness that come with that.

There are similar feelings of isolation that come with “escaping” poverty and climbing the social ladder that your main character contends with throughout the novel.

I don’t see [the main character] as a social climber in the negative way we usually construe the term: someone who sacrifices her ethics and true feelings to attain prestige and wealth. She’s a newspaper reporter, after all, because she believes in justice. But it’s true that she did climb her way out of poverty, and she did leave some people behind, which she regrets.

Bright, poor, ambitious people in our society often live that painful story. Our social structures frequently push gifted young people to choose between pursuing their talents fully and remaining in the community that raised them. Either way, people sacrifice. It’s unfortunate.

A theme in your writing is finding redemption in telling the truth, though the result is not always a victory. Why do you embrace the mistakes people make?

It just seemed more realistic, more true to what I’ve experienced in the world. I have failed in ways that schooled my soul. Even when we’re trying, we make mistakes. We have blind spots. Knowing that about myself helps me to be compassionate with others who fail.

It’s often the case that various forces — commercial forces, political forces — don’t want uncomfortable truths to become public, and they sometimes have the power to squelch those stories. Other times, the route to a public hearing is beautifully clear. It’s a process, and it’s a choice. There will be hits, and there will be misses. The important thing is to keep telling your truth.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: