Monday Link Roundup: Fresh Food, Seeds, Bulbs and more

The Seattle-Post Intelligencer ran a feature last week about poor access to fresh, healthy food in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. The article quotes Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty: "Unless cities begin to realize they have a role to play in ensuring access to healthy food, then we're going to keep stumbling along." Parke Wilde at the U.S. Food Policy blog posted a more personal take on the issue, focusing on the definition of "food desert" and the focus on chain supermarket stores as a marker of access to food. (Parke also recently interviewed Mark Winne for USFPB.)

In the wake of the leaked email showing that the VA tried to downplay the suicide epidemic, Penny Coleman wrote this analysis of the DoD's annual suicide prevention conference at Alternet.

Gristmill posted an excellent review of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds by Claire Hope Cummings. You can also read an excerpt of Uncertain Peril at Alternet.

Last Tuesday, USA Today columnist Laura Vanderkam discussed Seattle's novel approach to homelessness: give people a place to live. The piece features Rev. Craig Rennebohm, author of Souls in the Hands of a Tender God: Stories of the Search for Home and Healing on the Street.

The other "L" word: Stephen Ducat, author of The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity, offers Obama some advice on how to take back the liberal label. (Once he does that, can he take back arugula?)

There's some fantastic coverage of the PEN World Voices Festival over at MetaxuCafe. Nice redesign of that site!

Bookseller David Unowsky offers some advice on how to get your book on the shelves. The piece is aimed at self-pubbed authors, but has some good insights for any author.

And here's a great springtime parable from our friends at UUWorld.

A Tree Grows For Shirley

Beacon Broadside is pleased to introduce today's guest blogger, Kelly McMasters, the author of Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, which was recently released by fellow independent publisher PublicAffairs. 

As my husband and I watched the Earth Day news coverage of schoolchildren packing soil around flowers and seedlings in dirt lots last week, we cringed at the rows of plastic planters left in their wake. So many well-intentioned moves toward sustainability or earth-friendly practices end up like this, it seems.

My first book, an environmental memoir about my blue-collar hometown on the east end of Long Island, was released on April 21, the day before Earth Day, which seemed fitting to me. And since my book, deals with environmental issues—in this case, the physical along with the psychological effects a federal nuclear facility has had on my hometown of Shirley, and the radioactive waste that will be sitting next door to the town for more than 300,000 years (longer than Long Island has even existed)—I realized I had an opportunity to see how I could inject some green into the often wasteful process of publication in an effort to not leave behind my own proverbial plastic planters.

What We Talk About When We Talk about Nature

by David Gessner

David Gessner is the author of six books of literary nonfiction, including Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond and The Prophet of Dry Hill: Lessons From a Life in Nature. He is the editor of Ecotone, the literary journal of place. 

It is bad form to refer to one's own work and worse to quote oneself.  But here goes.

In 1999, well before Drs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger pronounced environmentalism dead, I diagnosed the field of nature writing as a terminal case in an essay and, three years later, a book called Sick of Nature.

The essay came about when, after throwing a book against a wall in which the author had droned on serenely about "being the present moment" and "living in the natural woods," I went for a walk on my unnatural beach carrying my unnatural micro-cassette recorder, into which I spoke the beginnings of an essay. When the essay was later published it began exactly the way I spoke it that day as I tramped along the beach:

      I am sick of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean. 

Of course I wasn't really sick of the natural world, just of the way some writers chose to portray it. I was sick of the hushed voice, sick of the saintliness, sick of the easy notions of the perfectibility of man, sick of the apocalyptic robes, sick of the scolding.  But most of all I was sick of the certainty that seemed to ooze out of the words. Writers certain that they knew what would happen in the world and certain that they knew how to be in that world and certain that they should tell us these things. The odd thing was that, for all their certainty, the world they described didn't sound much at all like the world I happened to live in.

From the Director: Notable Fiction Honored by PEN

by Helene Atwan

I have the honor to serve as the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award administrator for PEN-NE (please visit the web site if you don’t know this wonderful organization, devoted to the causes of literacy and freedom of expression). Last Sunday was the day that the award was conferred, this year to novelist Joshua Ferris for Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown), a remarkably witty and deeply affecting book about the world of work in an era of downsizing. The Hemingway is for a first work of fiction, and the judges also named two finalists, Rebecca Curtis for Twenty Grand (Harper Perennial) and Ravi Howard for Like Trees, Walking (Amistad). In the same ceremony, at the magisterial John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Mass., PEN-NE handed out the L.L.Winship Award for fiction to Rishi Reddi for Karma and Other Stories (Harper Perennial), in Poetry to Ann Killough for Beloved Idea (Alice James Books), and in nonfiction to Kristin Laine for American Band (Gotham Books).

Link Roundup

I was on a semi-vacation last week, so this week's link roundup is a bit larger than normal. Enjoy!

Howard Zinn is adding to his People's History of the United States with a new graphic novel, A People's History of the American Empire. Read about it at Tom Dispatch, and check out this Viggo Mortensen-narrated clip featuring Mike Konopacki's artwork and Zinn's words. 

Fantastic review of Eboo Patel's Acts of Faith at Beliefnet. And don't miss Patel's excellent post on pluralism vs. diversity over at OnFaith.

...[I]t’s not about whether diversity is good or bad. Diversity is a fact, and in America it's not going away. The question is how to best engage the fact of diversity in a way that builds social capital and increases civic engagement. And when the pluralists don't engage diversity by building positive social bonds, then we leave a vacuum that is often filled by extremists or bigots.

In light of the recent Obama/Wright controversy (read Chris Bracey's take at BlackProf), Terri Gross talked with James Cone, author of Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968-1998, about Black Liberation Theology. Also listen to the other interview from that show, with Rev. Dwight Hopkins, for a better understanding of the context Rev. Wright's comments were ripped from.

Kai Wright is in the American Prospect on starting over in AIDS research and in the Dallas Morning News about the danger of the high rate of teen STDs.

Penny Coleman attended the Winter Soldiers' conference, and her thoughtful analysis is appearing on Alternet. Be sure to check out her article about Stop/Loss: "Pentagon Holds Thousands of Americans 'Prisoners of War'."

Rabbi Arthur Waskow urges Jews and others to observe a green Passover.

Kevin Jennings, author of Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son, is a hockey fan. And he doesn't appreciate the homophobic atmosphere at Rangers games.

 

Link Roundup: Mary Oliver, Sherrilyn Ifill, and YouTube

Books are great—we all love books around here—but seeing a writer in person, giving a reading or a talk, can stimulate the intellect, illuminate the work, and delightfully entertain.

Mary Oliver is one of Beacon's most popular writers, and, according to the Poetry Foundation, author of five of the top seven best-selling poetry books last year. When she tours, she fills auditoriums, which, as any poet in America can tell you, doesn't often happen for poetry readings. In fact, her reading on Monday as part of Seattle's Arts and Lectures series sold out in record time, and tickets were reported to be changing hands on Craigslist for as much as $100 per seat.

So does she live up to the hype? Beautifully, says Seattle Post-Intelligencer book critic John Marshall, who says "the poet orchestrated her reading like a maestro, alternating poems of humor with poems showcasing bittersweet truths and honest emotions."

Many were drawn to the Oliver event by her approachable verse with its intense focus on the natural world and its quiet delights, but she soon dispensed with any notion that the evening was destined to be some sort of ecumenical worship service of nature or the poet herself. That seemed a possibility when many in the crowd of 2,500 gave Oliver a standing ovation even before she had uttered a word.

But Oliver's self-effacing sense of humor soon punctured such awe, delivered with a Seinfeldian sense of timing.

"I have a little dog and I'm working hard to make him famous," Oliver said.

Knowing murmurs rippled through the crowd.

"And he deserves it," she added, to widespread laughter.

Another Beacon author, Sherrilyn Ifill (On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century), recently spoke at University of Maryland Law School about a troubling time in the history of race relations in America. Introducing the documentary film Banished, scheduled to air on Independent Lens on PBS later this month, Ifill discussed  "'racial cleansing' of blacks from communities that have remained virtually lily-white, even in the 21st century." In this Baltimore Sun article, columnist Gregory Kane talks about the importance of acknowledging the history of banishments, and of making reparations to citizens whose property was stolen from them after they were driven from their homes in at least twelve different counties:

That dreaded "R-word" is indeed dredged up in Banished. When blacks were driven from Forsyth County in 1912, many left behind land that they owned. They were never paid for that land. It was simply gobbled up and sold by whites who saw an opportunity to make a quick - and easy - buck. Neither the blacks who lost land nor their descendants have been compensated.

But you don't need to leave your house to see a reading or a book talk anymore—in fact, you don't even need to leave your desk chair! The Cambridge Forum, which has featured Katherine Newman, Philip Winslow, and Fred Pearce, among other Beacon authors, has audio and video available on their website. Unfortunately, we can't link to the Cambridge Forum videos via our new YouTube profile, but there are a lot of other good tidbits to be found: Thich Nhat Hahn, Eboo Patel, even Wallace Shawn reading Howard Zinn. For your enjoyment, here's one of our favorites at the moment: Lester Young and Billie Holiday performing "Fine and Mellow".

The People Speak: Performances from Howard Zinn's Voices of a People's History of the United States

by Allison Trzop

Several weeks ago, a couple of folks from Beacon -- including Director Helene Atwan -- had the pleasure and the privilege of attending several readings and tapings for a miniseries being shot over at Emerson College’s Cutler Majestic Theatre here in Boston.

Hosted by Executive Producer Howard Zinn -- not only a wildly influential historian and one of the most inspirational activists of modern times, but also one of the most imminently likable people alive --"The People Speak" featured an all-star line-up performing excerpts primarily taken from Zinn’s book Voices of A People’s History of the United States. The four performances, broken into segments titled "Class," "Women," "Race," and "War," were the culmination of tremendous work by Zinn, Anthony Arnove, and Chris Moore of "Project Greenlight," as well as actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

While every last one of the actors who participated should be loudly applauded (yet again!), standout performances included John Legend pouring his heart and soul into Nina Simone’s "Mississippi Goddamn"; Marisa Tomei reading the words of Cindy Sheehan; David Strathairn standing in for a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which for those of us who loved Good Night, and Good Luck was hilarious; Josh Brolin doing more for Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun than any high school lit class ever could; and every last time Staceyann Chin walked onstage.

Did you ever expect to hear Viggo Mortensen sing Bob Dylan?

For those who couldn’t make it into the filled-to-capacity Cutler Majestic, you can read more about it over at Alternet,  watch some more clips on YouTube, and, with any luck, the producers will find a home for the miniseries.

Allison Trzop is an assistant editor at Beacon Press.