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I am a writer who recently noticed I spend more time reading articles about writing, absorbing Top Ten lists of famous authors’ work practices, and laughing at clever memes than doing any writing. That space where your hands pause, your mind deepens, and your lips slightly part in anticipation was being filled with links to the latest insight from Junot Diaz or a must read command on Facebook because my name was tagged in a post. The time I was supposed to be working was filled with sending a few dollars to an activist whose rent-and-grocery bank account was low, reading breakthrough essays from emerging writers, and passing on information about independent films, memoirs about Caribbean girlhood, and petitions to Free Marissa.
When I noticed my attention span was getting shorter — and that perhaps Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, GoodReads, and Google+ were contributing to frenzied jumps from link to link — I booted myself off social media. Still, there were animated videos about the political situation in Syria and applications for studio time, grants, and artist residencies to fill the small space I’d regained. My attention span was like a connect-the-dots page, but there were no lines drawn to make a picture.
My inability to focus became shamefully apparent during an embarrassing moment the other day. I raced upstairs to get directions on my computer before going out with my family, but found a stray, open tab when I sat in front of the screen. I quickly sunk into an article about postpartum depression, then read about the origin of the magazine in which the article was published, then moved to the bio of the magazine’s founder, then on to one of the zines she’d once written, then … Click. Click. Pause to read. Click.
Nearly twenty minutes had passed when I heard my husband’s voice from downstairs, “Did you get the directions?” Although no one could see my face, I blushed. Have I no sense of time, respect for others, and self-discipline to focus on just one thing?
I thought about the struggle I have with digital distractions. I pondered how my love of things smart and wordy might be balanced with being an essayist and a mother. For writers, the Internet can be a portal to resources, networks, new knowledge, and communities that encourage creativity, but it can also bring the temptation to observe rather than create. While there is a safety in observation, and an allure to continual learning, the deepest gains a writer can make is in the act of writing.
Social media is an infinite playground for intellectual stimulation. It is an unhinged door with no threat of being closed. And its endless void often leads to a blank screen. I want the buzz and the quiet, but the duality remains illusive to me.
Last week my publicist reminded me that I need to “get out there,” and encouraged me to use social media to establish a public voice. I know it’s good advice, but I fear the tightrope walk. Can I effectively balance entertainment and social meandering with prolifically producing creative work?
Over the last several days, I snuggled with my son without wondering if I should take a picture of how cute he looked to post on Instagram. I texted love poems to my partner. I started a morning prayer routine for the billionth time with the hope that this time it will be sustained. I was more present with others, and I was more present with myself.
It felt authentic. I felt authentic. That cannot be downloaded.
I finally returned to Twitter and Facebook today, and the pace felt dangerously hurried. It also felt wonderful. The tide begin to tug at me as I waded in, and its pull shifted the ground under my feet. Afraid again, I take a deep breath and wonder if I will finally learn how to swim.
Captain Phillips Directed by Paul Greengrass
Columbia Pictures. PG-13. 2 hours, 14 minutes.
Captain Phillips, the new film based on a real-life encounter between an American commercial-shipping crew and Somalian pirates, opens with the titular character in Vermont, driving to the airport with his wife. Richard Phillips expresses concern about the state of the shipping industry, sunk by the global recession that struck a year earlier.
On the other side of the globe, Muse, a poor Somalian fisherman forced into piracy by his own economic woes, wakes up to news that the local warlord has demanded that his village capture another ship, or suffer violent consequences. Muse joins a crowd of hungry men on the beach jumping and shouting at a young pirate captain to give them a spot on his crew.
The angular fisherman-turned-pirate is an obvious foil for Phillips, their stories — and those of their first-world American and desperate Somalian crews — woven together through crosscut scenes. This parallel storytelling guides much of the film, emphasizing the economic anxieties shared by the men even as it highlights the brutality of the Horn of Africa’s most chaotic state. (The film is based on a book that the real-life Captain Phillips wrote, a memoir of the 2009 piracy attack he survived.)
Somalia’s recent history of civil strife makes it the global poster child for a failed state. The country’s last functioning government dissolved in 1991 when the Cold War ended. The civil war that followed degenerated into a free-for-all of sectarian bloodshed, first pitting political factions and, eventually, tribal clans. In recent years, the economic situation has deteriorated to the point that the installation of ten miles worth of solar-powered street lights in the capital of Mogadishu last May was a cause for celebration among the beleaguered population.
Basic statistics about today’s Somalia — unemployment numbers, literacy rates, total population — are currently unknown, although two relatively stable, if unrecognized, governments have sprung up in the northern part of the country, at the tip of the Horn of Africa. In one of the breakaway states, known as Puntland, many former fishermen during the recession years began raiding the busy commercial-shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden. The Somalians claimed they took to piracy because international companies used the waters as a chemical dumping ground or overfished, as the film references. In a nod to Somalia’s fractured state, the pirates call themselves the Coast Guard when approaching their prey; Muse compares the ransom money they demand to taxes for passing through Somalian waters.
In a meeting after their first encounter with the Somalian pirates, the crew argues with Phillips. One sailor, a twenty-year veteran sailor, says he didn’t sign up to fight pirates. Phillips points out that each crew member knew the ship’s route before signing up for the voyage, and each knew the dangers of the Somalian waters. When the crew insists that they evade the pirates by heading further out into the ocean, Phillips tells his men that switching the course would slow down the trip and cost the company money. If they don’t like it, he tells them, they can go upstairs to his office and sign the paperwork to quit their job — and go home with the rest of the crew anyway when they reach their destination, Kenya.
Later on the in the film, a wounded pirate cries to Muse that he never planned on being hurt. The Somalians were supposed to capture the ship, hold it for ransom, then get paid and leave. Muse shouts at him that anything can happen on the job. Piracy, like capitalism, isn’t for the weak.
The comparisons continue. Everyone — American or Somalian — hates their boss. After Phillips and his crew escape the pirates thanks to a sputtering motor, Muse wants to chase them. The pirate captain refuses after their radios pick up Phillips “requesting an air strike” from the Navy.
“I may be skinny, but I’m not a coward,” Muse snaps — a remark that provokes a particularly violent kind of work disagreement.
Later in the movie, Muse (played by first-time actor Barkhad Abdi) brags to his captive that he and his fellow pirates recently netted a six-million-dollar ransom for a Greek ship. Phillips, nicknamed “Irish” by the pirates, asks why Muse is still in the piracy business. The Somalian replies that their bosses have bosses, and — much like the American sailors — low-level grunts like him must pay their dues.
But that fact of life also says something about the key difference between the two crews. The Americans benefit from the safety net of union-bargained contracts and a stable legal system to see them enforced. When the Somalians disagree over business decisions, they don’t sit around a table with lawyers and discuss their options. They pull out guns and threaten each other with death.
Somalia hasn’t changed much since 2009, when the film takes place. The United Nations-recognized government controls little territory outside of Mogadishu. With piracy down thanks to an increased international naval presence, Somalians have lost one more option for gainful employment. Young men join tribal militias or the Islamist insurgency. Gun-shy Somalians working at the bazaar live in constant fear of suicide-bomb attacks. Even subsisting off food rations and other international aid comes with its risks: UN personnel have been accused of child abuse and other sex crimes.
In film’s final scenes, with the US Navy drawing near, a battered Phillips pleads with Muse. “There’s got to be something other than being a fisherman and kidnapping people,” he says.
“Maybe in America, Irish,” Muse replies. “Maybe in America.”
Tony Cella is a freelance reporter who has covered crime and grime in Los Angeles, New York City, and the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska. Email: tonycella37@gmail.com
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At the heart of Sister, Brenda Davis’s documentary debut, are three inspiring stories of an Ethiopian health officer, a midwife in rural Cambodia, and a traditional birth attendant in Haiti. When Davis met Goitom Berhane in Ethiopia in 2008, she was taken with his vivacious personality and dedication to solving the maternal health crisis in his country. Berhane’s example encouraged Davis to explore women’s health as an international human rights issue. Eventually, he became a central figure in her film.
We meet Madame Bwa in the poverty-stricken Shada neighborhood of Cap-Haitien, Haiti. An aged woman who struggles with basic survival, Madame Bwa has delivered more than 12,000 children with no formal medical training.
In an area of Cambodia that is littered with land mines, Pum Mach puts her own life at risk so that geographically isolated mothers and their children may live through the common event of childbirth. In one of the more ghastly moments of Sister, a nineteen-year-old girl delivers her baby by caesarean section thanks to Mach identifying the child as breech and securing transportation to the nearest hospital, which is several hours away.
These moments make Sister as beautiful as it is brutal. The film showcases the passion of health workers who overcome incredibly difficult circumstances to combat the alarming rate of maternal and newborn deaths occurring around the globe — deaths that, with adequate care, are almost entirely preventable.
In The Fray spoke with Davis about her family’s experience with child mortality and the challenges of filming a tragic topic.
When did you develop an interest in maternal and child mortality?
My grandmother gave birth to sixteen children in rural Nova Scotia. Four died during childbirth and one died at the age of two. She lost her first child when she was nineteen and her last at thirty-nine. I remember my cousins coming together to buy a gravestone for all the children my grandma lost. They spoke about it casually because this happened a lot where my grandmother lived, but it had a lasting impact on me.
Why did you choose to explore this topic for your film?
As an artist, I’m interested in storytelling. If a subject is compelling to me, I want to pursue it, but I don’t want to speak for people. I want them to tell their own stories.
I was very fortunate to find people willing to tell their stories in Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Haiti. We were able to show similarities in women’s experiences, despite entirely different cultures, while also focusing on local strategies. The unifying theme to every story is a lack of access — access to basic health care, access to emergency obstetric care, and access to family planning.
How are health workers attempting to close these gaps in access?
It’s difficult to articulate just how important health workers are, and in many instances, it goes beyond the service they’re providing. In Ethiopia, Hirity Belay is a young woman who walks to places where there are no roads to provide women with the care they need to have healthy babies. While that service is invaluable, you must also consider what an amazing example she’s setting in these small villages. One of the things that inspired the name of the documentary was Hirity’s relationships. The women would often call each other “sister.” I thought this was so beautiful and warm.
In the case of Madame Bwa, being a traditional birth attendant has been passed down through her family. The work she does is important to her community, and for the most part Madame Bwa lives off donations from the families she helps. Traditional birth attendants fill a gap where there is nothing. I’m not a medical professional, but I don’t understand why so many people want to eliminate traditional birth attendants. They’re making a difference, and with a bit more support, they could be making a much bigger impact.
I found many of the scenes hard to watch, not because they’re graphic, but because they are heartbreaking. How do you approach filming people’s intimate tragedies respectfully?
In Ethiopia, we spent time in the hospital without cameras and became a familiar presence. The women often didn’t understand why we were filming or why anyone would be interested. I’d explain that we wanted to show what was going on in their communities.
Sister was definitely difficult to film, and the director of photography and I constantly struggled with the fear that we may be invading a woman’s privacy. When you’re meeting people in such intense and difficult circumstances, you constantly grapple with whether or not you’re being sensitive and respectful.
In some respects, I feel like Sister is a war movie. Women everywhere — but especially in developing countries — are fighting for their lives. What you see was exactly what was happening. The women, health workers, midwives, and birth attendants all speak for themselves and tell their own stories. It was a conscious decision not to narrate or pretend to know the answers.
What do you hope viewers take from the film?
I hope Sister encourages people to think critically about what the United States does that affects other countries — from a its inability to grow food to being littered with land mines. People should think about how they’re connected to what’s happening in other places, or how they’re complicit in it. Donating funds is awesome, but it’s not enough.
Mojo Hand: The Life and Music of Lightnin’ Hopkins By Timothy J. O’Brien and David Ensminger
University of Texas Press. 294 pages.
Blues legend Sam Hopkins — known as Lightnin’ Hopkins to his fans — influenced everyone from musical giants like Bob Dylan and John Coltrane to activists like Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale. Long after his death, Rolling Stone named him one of the greatest guitarists of all time. Yet not much is known about him. Notoriously private, Hopkins fabricated and exaggerated details about his early life, preferring to keep his origins a mystery.
Mojo Hand, a new biography of Hopkins, details the obscure life and music of an iconoclastic bluesman who was the consummate musician’s musician, inspiring legions of artists across many genres. Born in 1911, Hopkins lived in rural Texas at a time when slavery was still fresh in the minds of those who would inherit its parting gift of Jim Crow. His grandfather, a slave, hanged himself to be free of its atrocities. His father was murdered when Hopkins was three, and his brother left home at fourteen to keep from avenging their father’s death. In his youth, Hopkins endured incidents of vicious racism, including the abusive treatment of white supervisors at the various plantations where he worked.
His was a family of poor sharecroppers with an affinity for music. Hopkins’s brothers, sister, and mother each played instruments, and Hopkins learned to play his older brother’s guitar. By age eight, he had made his own guitar with screen-door wire, and his prodigious skills kept him from having to inherit the “family business” of sharecropping.
Those skills also kept him from following convention. “He didn’t play with a clamp,” says drummer Robert Murphy, who worked with Hopkins. “He just played by ear, just like most of the old-time bluesmen. He wouldn’t pay much attention to whether it was an eight-bar blues or a twelve-bar blues, just as long as it fit what he was singing and doing.”
The biography captures quite well Hopkins’s aversion to conformity. From his playing style to the way he carried himself, Hopkins was a law unto himself, choosing to do things his way no matter what people said or thought of him. Long before Dylan was rejecting autograph seekers, or band members of Van Halen were making bizarre demands about M&Ms, Hopkins was known for his idiosyncrasies. He was a raconteur, a heavy drinker, and a fancy dresser. He would not record, or rerecord, if he didn’t feel like doing so. He refused to honor contracts that restricted him from working with other record companies at the same time, and would either change the name of a song or change his name to sidestep any lawsuits. He did not like venturing too far from his home base in Houston, and refused to fly, which made life difficult for those who worked with him, and made him hard to locate when there were deals that needed to happen. He did things his way, or not at all, with very few exceptions.
Dick Waterman, who booked gigs for Hopkins, points out that most blues artists came from rural areas. Though Hopkins was raised in Texas farm country, he stood out because he also had spent time in the city and been influenced by its culture. He carried himself as an “urban man” and played his blues not acoustic, but amplified with a pickup. As Waterman says:
He came from a very different place socially and musically. He was very cool. Some of the other [bluesmen] would be overly polite and respectful around white people, but Lightnin’ didn’t have any of that. Lightnin’ would just treat everyone the same, and if anything he carried himself with a sense of confidence and almost arrogance. He was Lightnin’ Hopkins.
Hopkins was also a loner. He would work with only one or two other bandmates, or just by himself. He preferred to be the focal point, and here he showed his nastier side. He would deliberately change the timing as soon as his band got used to a certain tempo or rhythm — in part to keep them from launching any ambitious solo efforts. Oftentimes, Hopkins would not rehearse, and the haphazard adjustments he made with every new performance made it nearly impossible to follow along while accompanying him.
Despite all these things — or, perhaps, because of them — Hopkins’s style is indelible. He made songs up impromptu, and hardly ever sang them the same way twice. His guitar playing was not easily mimicked: he changed it at whim and did not stick to any particular structure or chord style. He rambled through most of his concerts, telling stories that were at times incomprehensible, thanks to his drinking and thick Southern accent. And yet his performances thrilled his audiences.
Hopkins sang, in typical blues fashion, about women (short-haired ones, cheating ones, drunk ones). But his songs also had things to say about everything from work, to road trips, to politics. He often improvised lyrics, such as this freestyle take on astronaut John Glenn’s first orbit of the earth:
People always said this morning
With this on their mind
Said ain’t no livin’ man go around the world three times
But John Glenn done it
The main issue I had with Mojo Hand was the connection the authors imply between Hopkins’s illiteracy and his approach to business. Hopkins rarely signed contracts, and when he did he drew an “X” in place of his signature. He also preferred to be paid up front, in cash rather than royalties. Did Hopkins do these things just because he couldn’t read? The authors briefly mention the suspect business practices of music publishers back then, but they do not elaborate on how these practices often pushed musicians into destitution while the companies made money even long after their deaths. Royalties and publishing rights were rarely honored in those days, and many popular musicians were paid poverty wages for their work. These problems were rampant and well known in the blues and jazz worlds. Operating in a white-dominated industry, Hopkins clearly developed his own survival techniques.
The authors also could have dealt more with Hopkins’s influence on the generations of artists who came after him. Some of his fans included Ringo Starr, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmie Vaughan, Johnny Winter, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Elvis Presley, and ZZ Top. How did Hopkins’s work inspire them?
Mojo Handgives us some tantalizing details about a pioneering but private blues legend who, two decades after his death, remains an enigma. An alcoholic, an insatiable artist, and an understatedly temperamental man, Hopkins wound up becoming one of the greats, hailed by scholars as the “embodiment of the jazz-and-poetry spirit, representing its ancient form in the single creator whose words and music are one act.” In the end, though, this biography is just a sketch of the complex man Hopkins was, a troubled artist with a life that, just like his songs, cannot be fully translated to the printed page. Perhaps that’s what Hopkins would have preferred.
Olupero R. Aiyenimelo is a freelance writer, poet, and lyricist based in Los Angeles.
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:
Young college-educated workers have struggled to find jobs in the wake of a devastating global recession. In Greece, the European epicenter of the economic crisis, the hardship is on a whole different level: college graduates are giving up on the careers they planned and heading home — to work on the family farm.
In the last several years, stories have abounded in the American press about the struggles of recent college graduates. Unable to find jobs, overeducated young workers end up waiting tables, brewing espressos, and living with their parents. In Europe, the joblessness of the young — long an issue throughout the continent — has become desperate: Spain, for example, now has a youth unemployment rate of 56 percent, 17 percentage points higher than its rate four years ago, with no relief in sight.
And yet Greece — the country worst hit by the recession in Europe — offers a new twist on this woeful tale of well-educated but luckless youth. With no good job prospects, some college grads there are turning to one of the world’s oldest professions: farming.
Foteini Kollias is one of them. Now twenty-five-years old, she graduated with a degree in physical education from the National University of Athens around the time Greece’s economy collapsed five years ago. Unable to get a full-time job in her field, she eventually turned to growing fruit in Nafplio, a seaport town to the southwest of Athens.
Once a week, Kollias makes the hour-and-a-half trip to Athens to sell her fruit in the city’s central market. Over four years of farming, the hard labor has taken a toll on Kollias’s health, leaving her with a meniscus tear in her right knee that gives her constant pain. “Imagine lifting a box loaded with forty-five kilos of cucumbers every day while weighing no more than fifty kilos [110 pounds] yourself,” she says.
It is a grim outcome for a young woman who had been on track to get a well-paid government job before the economic crisis hit. “Torturing my body for so little money and no future prospects really depresses me,” she says.
Of course, youth unemployment is not just a problem for people in rich countries. The global recession has damaged the prospects of young workers throughout the world, and even as economies have recovered, the jobs have not come back. The problem is much worse for those without college educations.
Yet facts like these provide little consolation to young, educated workers like Kollias, whose careers have been permanently scarred by the country’s deep recession, which began in 2008 and has yet to end. Last year, the economy shrank by 6.4 percent. The nation’s unemployment rate currently stands at 27.6 percent, more than twice the average rate in the Eurozone and more than three times what it was when the crisis struck in October 2008. Other countries in Europe have also been beset by severe economic problems in recent years, but Greece has been hit the hardest, becoming the focus of international efforts to stop the spread of its economic ailments throughout the continent’s interconnected market.
There are many reasons given for the collapse of Greece’s economy and the massive unemployment it unleashed. One school of thought argues that huge budget deficits and expensive government benefits — in Greece, excessively generous worker pay and pensions — were at the heart of a crisis accelerated by the global recession. Other economists point to evidence that the economic collapse had more to do with the destabilizing rush of foreign dollars into those rapidly growing economies. Regardless of why it happened, the damage is clear: In 2004, Greece’s national debt was 99 percent of its GDP. Last year, it was 157 percent.
In Greece itself, much attention has been focused on political mismanagement. According to one popular account, one-party governments led alternately by the center-right New Democracy party and the center-left PASOK spread a pandemic of corruption and incompetence within a nepotism-plagued public sector, which had been growing unsustainably up until the crisis. Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs helped the government to fudge statistics and conceal its rising debt levels from European regulators. Meanwhile, the allure of fast money had eroded ethical standards in the country to the point that tax evasion became rampant.
Amid the country’s recent decline, it is difficult to remember the Greece of the fifties, sixties, and seventies — a period called the “Greek economic miracle” — when the country’s economy was roaring. Occupied during World War II and devastated by the civil war that followed, Greece began its rebuilding in the fifties with an ambitious campaign to “urbanize” its rural communities. En masse, Greeks living in the countryside moved to the expanding concrete landscape of the cities, rapidly expanding the workforces and consumer markets to be found there. The Greek “miracle” ended in the seventies, but healthy economic growth continued over the next few decades — until 2008.
Now the same process seems to be happening in the other direction, as young urbanites dash back to the fields. According to a survey conducted for the country’s Ministry of Rural Development in the populous counties of Attica and Thessaloniki, 68 percent of respondents — representing over one million Greeks, in a country of just ten million — are considering leaving the city. Two-thirds of them are college graduates, and a majority of them under the age of forty. Nineteen percent of those surveyed said they have already initiated their moves.
The Greek press likes to call the country’s legions of unemployed young workers its “Lost Generation” — a term also used in the US and UK, among other countries, to identify their own struggling youth. It may be hard to compare their experience to that of the iconic Lost Generation of young men and women traumatized by the bloodbath of World War I. That said, these young Greeks have been traumatized by a cataclysm of an economic kind: a massive contraction of the nation’s economy on the order of 20 percent over five years. Their job prospects remain bleak even as the global economy has recovered: youth unemployment — for workers aged twenty-four and under — now stands at 64.9 percent, triple the rate five years ago. (Among those aged twenty-five to thirty-four, the rate is 38 percent, but for those thirty-five to forty-four, it is much smaller — 25 percent — proving that unemployment is wasted on the young.)
Greece, once one of Europe’s rising stars, now looks to be headed in the same direction as Japan during its “Lost Decade” of the nineties — into an age of diminished expectations, with swelling ranks of unemployed youth, and no simple way out of its economic malaise.
In the elegant coastal city of Kalamata, sister and brother Demetra and Vassilis Psonis tend to a stall in the farmers’ market, where their many wares are on display: chestnuts, peaches, tangerines, cherries, onions, cabbages, corn, and a variety of greens. When the recession struck five years ago, Demetra was just beginning her studies at the Technological Institute of Crete, where she majored in accounting. Up until the country’s crisis, Demetra had been confident that she would land a job in a field that — back then — was highly paid and secure. “Trying to find decent employment in the recession turned out to be a wild goose chase,” says Demetra, twenty-three. “I soon ended up working in a cafeteria.”
At the time, Demetra considered moving to a wealthier country in northern Europe to seek out better employment opportunities. But she had no idea about what city to move to, much less how to transplant herself there — even within the borderless European Union, labor is not as mobile as capital. “Going abroad? Where and with whom?” she asks. “I didn’t have to dwell a lot on the decision.” So Demetra ended up returning to her family’s farm in Kalamata. She knew the work well; she had been growing vegetables there ever since she was ten years old.
Her brother soon joined her. Vassilis, twenty-five, had trained to be a hairdresser. But when he graduated from school, he couldn’t find a job, and he lacked the capital to open his own business. Even if he did have a salon, he says, it was obvious then that few people would be paying good money for haircuts in that economic climate.
Like his sister, Vassilis worked the fields of his family’s farm as a child. “I always felt I had an alternative in case things didn’t go as planned,” he says. “I like it. I like everything that involves my hands. I tell myself I hold the hoe instead of the brush.”
Oddly enough, when the siblings decided to return to Kalamata, the people most opposed were their parents. Farmers for life, they and their generation had suffered through the misery of hard manual labor. They had cheered Greek’s meteoric ascent to economic power. They had dreamed of raising future academics, lawyers, and scientists who would lodge their families — and the children and grandchildren to come — within the well-paid professional classes.
“They sacrificed their lives to offer us a good education,” Vassilis says. But when the economy fell apart, those newly minted educations became worthless. And Vassilis, Demetra, and many of their peers headed for the fields — the familiar trend of urbanization played in reverse.
The ancient Greek playwrights, who developed the concept of irony, would find much to write about concerning modern Greece’s travails. Older generations of farmers who once exhorted their children to seek out more and more education now find themselves advising the same kids — off the record — to take up farming again to “fill their stomachs.”
And yet Tassos Papaphilis, a thirty-four-year-old farmer, is reluctant to advise anyone, however desperate, to follow his path. Tassos grows crops in Corinth, an hour’s drive west of Athens. He is somewhat of a celebrity in the Athenian market where he sells his fruit, a long-haired jokester who teases and compliments passersby as he implores them — sometimes aggressively — to smell the sweet fragrance of his oranges.
A trade-school graduate, Tassos used to work as an estate agent for a large Corinthian firm, but he lost his job five years ago when the recession annihilated the country’s real-estate markets overnight. Unwilling to leave his birthplace, he decided to take up his father’s profession of farming. These days, he grows oranges, tangerines, and zucchini, and rears hens to sell their eggs.
His father died around the same time that Tassos lost his job. Farming became a way of coping — more than just financially. When plowing the soil, Tassos says, he feels an intimate connection to his dead father.
But his decision to go into farming has not yet paid off with a stable income, in spite of how hard Tassos works his fields. Taking over the family farm was “the biggest self-entrapment of my life,” he insists. Early on, Tassos received a European Union farm loan of 35,000 euros to enhance his business. But the country’s consumers cut back on their spending much more than expected, and with the markets so sluggish, his plans to expand his farming business came to naught. He has yet to repay the loan, and with his payments on it now exceeding his profits, he is doubtful that his crops will ever bring in enough money to do so.
In fact, Tassos is still dependent on his grandmother’s pension to make ends meet. In this regard, he is like a growing number of young Greeks, who, unable to keep up with their monthly rent and bills, have retreated to the family nest, living off the incomes of more secure parents and grandparents.
Now well into his thirties, Tassos knows he cannot start a family when he can barely feed himself. And there is no telling if and when the troika of European and international lenders who now prop up Greece’s economy with loans will decide to pull back, leaving Greece to implode. “The worst is yet to come,” Tassos warns.
Even though his farm is doing poorly, even though he has lost his business career, Tassos the farmer keeps greeting his customers in the market with a smile and a joke. “People are grumpy and sober nowadays,” he says. “Making others laugh is an antidote to depression that comes free of charge.”
The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once observed that unemployment in the days before industrialization was unheard of: “In traditional agriculture it did not exist; there was always work to do on the farms and in the supporting rural services.” During the Depression, he added, “farm employment or farm existence of a sort was the resort of some millions of urban workers in the United States.”
The Great Depression may offer this and other practical lessons for those struggling through the Great Recession. And yet it is also true that farming has become a less reliable last resort for families, with less bread to go around to their many breadwinners.
The rise of huge corporations has transformed the practice of agriculture and drastically lowered prices — and profits. It has become abundantly clear to Kollias, the farmer from Nafplio, how much things have changed. Her parents are both well educated: her mother studied medicine and her father is a mechanical engineer. In their thirties, they chose to become farmers because they valued their freedom, Kollias says. A family farm, back then, could actually support a family. “They worked hard, but their profit was in proportion to their labor hours,” she says. “If you had been eager to devote your body and soul to the land, you could have made good money in the past.”
Not anymore. Kollias puts it bluntly: “My brother, father, mother, and four workers live in the same house and struggle to scrape together a living,” There are no more “happy farmers,” she says — nothing like the yeomen farmers of Romantic poetry and Thomas Jefferson’s writings, tilling the soil and communing with nature — just jaded, overeducated young workers like her, anxious about their unsold merchandise and demoralized about their futures.
In between her trips to the farmers’ market in Athens, Kollias works occasionally as a lifeguard and gym instructor. The jobs pay little, but they help her retain the skills she learned studying physical education in college. When she was a student, she planned to take the civil-service exams and get a government job in her field. But when the crisis hit, the exams were called off. They have yet to be unfrozen. With no one willing to hire her, Kollias continues to grow her fruit.
With the years they spent in college amounting to nothing, and their work in the fields offering diminishing returns, the talents of Greece’s younger generation are being squandered. Who is to blame for the country’s modern tragedy? Kollias is unsure. She believes everybody shares some of the fault, even if she singles out Greece’s politicians for special scorn. “Still,” she adds, “we eat what we sow.”
Stav Dimitrοpoulos would like to thank Eleftheria for the newspaper’s help in finding interviewees and photographs for this story.
Stav Dimitrοpoulos Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since.
Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav
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From social inanities to institutionalized idiocies, we are looking for pieces — both serious and lighthearted — that speak to the all-too-human nature of ineptitude.
In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | October 2013: Incompetence + Stupidity
In a glaring example of governmental dysfunction, Congress has shutdown the US government and may default on the national debt. Many of the most powerful institutions in history have suffered from mismanagement and corruption, but that is only part of the explanation for their failures. Another is good, old-fashioned stupidity.
Organizations can be infuriatingly bureaucratic. Government leaders can be feckless, clueless, and out of touch. Legal loopholes and unintended consequences can create impairments and catch-22’s.
From social inanities to institutionalized idiocies, In The Fray is looking for pieces — both serious and lighthearted — that speak to the all-too-human nature of ineptitude. We want original news features, commentary, photo essays, and review essays focused on incompetence and stupidity.
Please review our submissions guidelines and send a one-paragraph pitch to the appropriate section editor NO LATER THAN NOVEMBER 30, 2013. You may attach a complete draft if you have one.
We also welcome submissions on any other topic that relates to the magazine’s themes: promoting global understanding, encouraging empathy, and demonstrating compassion.
Lately, as a result of planning my wedding, there’s been a lot of talk among my buddies about what drives the expensive social conservatism we see during our various social and religious ceremonies in India. There is, of course, the cash-flashing, wealth-waving syndrome that leads to obscene shows of buying power, and the media-spurred my-fairy-tale-wedding delusion, but what spurs people with sensible plans and ideological commitments to chuck it all and take a nosedive into these pro forma spectacles of self-destructive wastage?
In a country like India, where power comes in many forms and from many different sources — age, caste, gender, class, senior social roles, perceived religious devotion, nobleness of profession — I’d say that, apart from the usual suspects, embittered failures in roles of familial power play an enormous role in enforcing socioreligious conservatism. This is not to say that successful people with genuine affection for their families cannot be socially conservative, but in the specific case of bitter underachievers, reverting to traditions crafted for the patriarchal family head in a very different economic era allows them, temporarily, to become directors instead of dependents. The more rules and strictures they reinforce, the more power and control they have.
Rituals and ceremonies are their particular triumphs, since during them, they can reduce their more successful kin to temporary penury (or close) by insisting things be “properly” done at enormous expense, almost none of which they bear themselves. The worst aspect of this entire situation, perhaps, is that we have an automatic pity-flavored weakness for the weak and dependent among us — and for these brief periods, give them free(ish) rein over our lives out of affection or sympathy or adherence to social hierarchy, not realising the undercurrent of malice that such indulgence feeds. Indeed, I would say that most people practicing such malice don’t realize they are being malicious either. They take their socially assigned roles seriously, and quite successfully hide their subconscious jealousy and vengefulness (even from themselves) by dressing them in the righteous garbs of culture, tradition, and propriety.
This is aided in Hindu society by a complete ignorance of what Hinduism accommodates and entails. A very practical set of scriptural directives have been drowned under a collage of folk practices over the centuries, and since firsthand knowledge of Hinduism requires actual scholarship — and a broad, receptive mind — most self-identified Hindus go with the flow of simplistic, homogenized inventions and outright aberrations, firmly convinced they’re treading the path of their ancestors a million times removed.
If today I get married and decide to serve roast beef and fried pork at the wedding feast, it would be an absolute phenomenon. I would find no caterers, people would nervously offer sorry excuses for not attending, and those who attend may think they’re being revolutionaries by breaking stupid “Hindu” rigor. But even for a few centuries after Buddha’s death, roast calves and fried pork were centerpieces of Hindu daily and ceremonial eating, in combination with deer, rabbits, boar, various birds, ghee, rice, barley, and honey-thickened, milk-based sweets. But I digress.
The point is, in a social system where there are competing structures of power, every time you mark a social milestone in your life — unless you have genuinely loving and/or sympathetic kinsfolk in positions of familial power, or people secure enough in themselves to either aid you or allow you the freedom of choice — be prepared to either incur considerable financial damage in the name of maintaining the social fabric or causing breaches in the family, for which you shall bear all the blame after you have spent a smaller — but still considerable — amount in marking the milestone anyway.
It’s called social living. Or the tyranny of the weak.
Priyanka Nandy works on structural inequities in public education and public health in India. She blogs at priyankanandy.com and photo shares everywhere.
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I recently read Lindsey Woo’s contribution to a series of writings about feminism and race on NPR’s CodeSwitch blog. In her piece, Woo discusses the frequent exclusion of Asian American women from conversations concerning race in the context of feminism and poses an important question, one I ask myself often: who is considered a woman of color?
I talk about race — a lot. I constantly initiate discussions with friends and colleagues, and find that even in our supposedly postracial world many still deem race to be an uncomfortable subject. Although I believe attempts to have a dialogue about race are important, another part of me does it for purely selfish reasons. These conversations help me to figure out my own relationship with race. They validate and invalidate my opinions, and give me a better understanding of where I fit as a light-skinned Latina.
My mother’s family is self-proclaimed “white trash” with roots in Tennessee. My father’s family is from the southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán. In the 1960s, my dad crossed the border into the United States, where he lived for twenty years as an undocumented immigrant before obtaining citizenship around the time I was born.
The legacies of two vastly different cultures live inside of me. One side of my family has former Ku Klux Klan members. The other has undocumented immigrants. Holidays meant a feast of fried ham, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese that was served alongside mole, tamales, and flan. Backyard barbecues featured Johnny Cash and Vicente Fernandez, Patsy Cline and Ritchie Valens. The blending of cultures is a beautiful thing, but it can also be confusing.
Being biracial means growing up with a keen understanding that your identity is not yours alone. It is something others feel entitled to foist upon you, including your friends and family. You carry the weight of racial tensions that not only exist in society at large, but also among those you love.
My mother’s family stopped talking to her because she had married a “wetback.” I didn’t know my maternal grandfather for the first eight years of my life because he refused to see me. According to my mom, when I was born he took to referring to me as a “mutt,” so she shielded me from his racist epithets and maintained a safe distance.
After members of my father’s family settled in the Los Angeles area from Mexico, they made many jokes at my expense. They told me I could never be a “real” Mexican because my mom was a gringa, but my dad insisted I proudly tell the world, “Soy Mexicana.” He now teaches the same to my biracial nieces.
It’s hard when neither side of your family embraces your blended ethnicity, and it set the stage for the identity crisis I’ve been having for twenty-eight years. As a Latina whose pallor matches my blonde-haired, blue-eyed mother, I don’t feel comfortable with the label “woman of color,” although it is often ascribed to me in the context of my work. In some ways my reticence is the product of not having the emotional bandwidth to defend my right to use the term when I come up against backlash, particularly from people of color.
I understand the discomfort some darker-skinned women feel when a light-skinned Latina identifies as a woman of color. After all, we are often the recipients of racial privilege that comes when we are (mis)perceived as being white. At the same time, my dark hair, ethnic features, and clearly Latina last name all place me squarely in the category of being raced. I try very hard to understand my place on the racial continuum, but knowing which side I’m supposed to be on isn’t always clear. And it is always shifting.
My identity has been shaped by my experiences as a Latina feminist. I resisted my father and brothers’ violent machismo, and also make sacrifices for my family that most white feminists don’t understand. Yet, fellow Latinas tend to have a deep appreciation for my family’s complicated love. Despite my skin color, identifying as a white woman was never an option for me.
A recent Census Bureau report shows that children in America are more racially diverse than they’ve ever been, and the fastest rate of growth is among children who are multiracial. Mixed-race people are rapidly becoming the new norm, but we still live in a world where we’re expected to choose and neatly conform to just one thing.
I often wonder if Chicana writer and feminist Cherríe Moraga, who was born just ten miles away from my hometown, underwent an exploration of her own identities that’s similar to the one I’m engaged in now. A woman of Mexican and Anglo ethnicity, Moraga is one of the foremost authorities on race and feminism in America. Her story gives me hope that I will one day reach the place where I no longer allow others to question my identity, the place where I determine for myself who I am and who I will be.
In The Fray contributing writer Joshunda Sanders recently spoke at TEDCity2.0, a conference focused on the challenges and innovations that cities across the world are experiencing today. Joshunda gave a moving talk about her mother’s struggle with mental illness (a story she also told for our blog), and the ways that cities can help, and hinder, the lives of the mentally ill — particularly those who are poor and homeless.
Joshunda’s mother resisted therapy and medication for her bipolar disorder, internalizing society’s view (especially prevalent within the African American community) that mental illness is a personal weakness. In her relationship with Joshunda, she veered between euphoria and depression, loving attention and violent abuse. The family ended up homeless because of her untreated condition, and Joshunda’s childhood was marked by evictions, stays in homeless shelters, and a perpetual hunger. Fortunately, their hometown of New York was generally benevolent in its benefits and its attitude toward the homeless — providing Joshunda with free breakfast in the summers when school was out (often her only meal of the day) and free transportation to and from shelters — even though it never really met their needs for food and housing in such an expensive city.
There are compelling reasons, Joshunda adds, that so many homeless individuals congregate in cities:
After my brother Jose got killed by a bus, my mother moved to the suburbs. So we lived in Chester for the first few years of my life. Chester is outside of Philadelphia. Most families there, in the suburbs — which are considered the heart of the American Dream — had cars, but because we couldn’t afford a car, we had to rely on public transportation. Often, without carfare to get into the core of the city, we would end up languishing in the isolation of the suburbs, and it was a little bit nightmarish. Sometimes the lights would be off, or the water would be off.
And one of the things people forget is the surprising truth about the visibility of the mentally ill in cities … there are real resources for them there. It’s not just the density and public transportation, but there is also this equal-opportunity solace from the cultural vibrancy of a city. So I urge you to think about that the next time you see someone who is mentally ill in the city. Before you think of them as a problem, consider how both they, and we, are transformed by our witness of them in the city. Think of me and my mom, just two fragile souls trying to make it through the city, with what little that we had.
Here is the video of Joshunda’s talk, which begins at the 49:09 mark:
Fifty years after the March on Washington, we are well versed in the visual cues of the civil rights era: grainy black-and-white photos and footage of peaceful protesters being accosted by angry mobs, beset by dogs and water cannons, and enveloped in plumes of tear gas. John Lewis, one of the giants of the civil rights movement, not only lived those scenes of protest and violence — a beating by Alabama state troopers fractured his skull — but he worked to make sure the struggle led to real political and cultural change by the era’s end.
Now Lewis and his collaborators offer a new visual take on the protests and the people behind them, in the graphic novel March, an illustrated (and unconventional) autobiography of the civil rights leader and longtime member of Congress. In a way, the book brings Lewis full circle: Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a comic book published in 1956, helped inspire him to take up the nonviolent cause as a teenager.
There’s a long tradition of autobiographical comics, from Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor to Jonathan Ames’s The Alcoholic to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (the basis of an Academy Award-nominated animated film). But Lewis is not just any other thoughtful voice of retrospection. One of the original Freedom Riders, he was a founding member and then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was instrumental in organizing some of the era’s most important sit-ins and other nonviolent protests against segregation — including the March on Washington. (The youngest speaker that day was Lewis, then twenty-three years old.) He also played a prominent role in another of the era’s iconic demonstrations, the Selma to Montgomery march, the source of the scars he still bears on his head. Lewis went on to a career in politics, representing Georgia’s fifth congressional district since the late eighties and now serving in the House Democratic leadership.
Lewis, we learn in March, was an unusual child. His parents were sharecroppers, and Lewis grew up on a farm in Alabama. As a boy, he raised chickens, not only giving them names but even devising a makeshift incubator because his family couldn’t afford the one in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. His youth in the forties and fifties is captured in a series of panels: Lewis as a boy honing his sermonizing skills before a congregation of chickens (his first ambition was to become a preacher). Lewis as a young man first hearing King on the radio and becoming inspired to embrace nonviolence. As the narrative of Lewis’s life advances, March reminds us of the events transpiring in the background — from Rosa Parks’s civil disobedience to the killing of Emmett Till to the Brown v. Board of Education decision that struck down school segregation — all of which shaped Lewis’s worldview and led him and others down the path to protest.
The best dramatizations carry a sense of dread, or anticipation, even when you know the outcome. Like a train slowing a moment on the tracks and, by degrees, gaining momentum, March crackles with a sort of inevitability. We watch as Lewis and other young protestors in the Nashville Student Movement, a nonviolent direct-action group fighting against segregation, subject themselves – and each other – to a series of humiliating tests, preparing them for not only the harsh words, but also the physical retaliation they were likely to encounter. As Lewis points out, “For some, it was too much.” The hardest part to learn, he adds, was “how to find love for your attacker.”
Once the book settles into the sit-ins by Lewis and his fellow activists in downtown Nashville, you’re firmly locked in — you’re enlisted. And, here, really, is where Nate Powell’s art takes off.
When the sit-ins begin, the artwork becomes darker, the pages soaked with dark ink, the lines sketchier, shadowy, conveying the pain and fears of the nonviolent protestors. Powell’s style is somewhere in between the worlds of photorealism and animation, the images at times seeming to move on the page. It’s detailed enough that each face is distinctive from the other, with exquisitely rendered backgrounds undoubtedly reflecting Powell’s research on the downtown buildings of that era. His use of black and white is not just an artistic choice; it intensifies the action by making the reader slow down to see the details.
Part of a planned trilogy, March ends right after Nashville Mayor Ben West announces to the press and a group of protesters at city hall that he will support the desegregation of lunch counters. On May 10, 1960, six downtown stores, the book tells us, “served food to black customers for the first time in the city’s history.” We’re left with scenes of black Americans sitting at a lunch counter some three years before the historic March on Washington.
In August, Lewis spoke at the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, sharing the podium with former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama. The last surviving speaker of the original march, Lewis noted that the country still has “a great distance to go before we fulfill the dream of Martin Luther King Jr.” And yet, he said, change had come — as March itself suggests, in its introductory depiction of the inauguration of the country’s first black president. “Fifty years later we can ride anywhere we want to ride, we can stay where we want to stay,” Lewis said. “Those signs that said ‘white’ and ‘colored’ are gone. And you won’t see them anymore except in a museum, in a book, on a video.”
Sometimes I hear people saying nothing has changed, but for someone to grow up the way I grew up in the cotton fields of Alabama to now be serving in the United States Congress makes me want to tell them come and walk in my shoes. Come walk in the shoes of those who were attacked by police dogs, fire hoses and nightsticks, arrested and taken to jail.
March invites the reader to walk in the shoes of Lewis and the many other men and women who sat down, picketed, and marched for justice, without violence and with a great love for their attackers — and for their country.
Cornelius Fortune is a journalist whose work has appeared in theAdvocate,Citizen Brooklyn, theChicago Defender,Yahoo News, and other publications.
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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.
The Graphic Canon (Vols. 1–3) By Russ Kick
Seven Stories Press. 1,600 pages.
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.
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.
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.
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