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Buying into the dream that education is the road out of poverty, a teen mom takes a chance on bettering herself, gets on welfare rolls, and talks her way into college. But once she's there, phallocratic narratives permeate every subject, and creative writing professors depend heavily on Freytag's pyramid to analyze life. So Ariel turns to a rich subcultural canon of resistance and failure, populated by writers like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldúa, Tillie Olsen, and Kathy Acker. Wryly riffing on feminist literary tropes,We Were Witches documents the survival of a demonized single mother. She's beset by custody disputes, homophobia, and America's ever-present obsession with shaming strange women into passive citizenship. But even as the narrator struggles to graduate--often the triumphant climax of a dramatic plot--a question uncomfortably lingers. If you're dealing with precarious parenthood, queer identity, and debt, what is the true narrative shape of your experience? Ariel Gore is a journalist, author, and teacher. She is the founding editor/publisher ofHip Mama, anAlternative Press Award winning publication covering the culture and politics of motherhood. Her memoirAtlas of the Human Heart was a 2004 finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her anthologyPortland Queer: Tales of the Rose City won a Lambda Literary Award in 2010.

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction "[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange."--Roxane Gay "In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women's memories and hunger and desire. I couldn't put it down."--Karen Russell In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella "Especially Heinous," Machado reimagines every episode ofLaw & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious,Her Body and Other Partiesswings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

She Of The Mountains is a beautifully rendered illustrated novel by Vivek Shraya, the author of the Lambda Literary Award finalist God Loves Hair (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014, also available from Turnaround). Shraya weaves a passionate, contemporary love story between a man and his body, with a re-imagining of Hindu mythology. Both narratives explore the complexities of embodiment and the damaging effects that policing gender and sexuality can have on the human heart.

In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo, one of our leading Native American voices, details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, the end place of the Trail of Tears, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by finding shelter in her imagination, a deep spiritual life, and connection with the natural world. She attended an Indian arts boarding school, where she nourished an appreciation for painting, music, and poetry; gave birth while still a teenager; and struggled on her own as a single mother, eventually finding her poetic voice. Narrating the complexities of betrayal and love, Crazy Brave is a memoir about family and the breaking apart necessary in finding a voice. Harjo's tale of a hardscrabble youth, young adulthood, and transformation into an award-winning poet and musician is haunting, unique, and visionary.

In the gripping first pages of this true story, Jana Leo relives the moment-by-moment experience of a home invasion and rape in her own apartment in Harlem. After she reports the crime, she waits. Between police disinterest and squabbles from the health insurance company over who’s going to pay for the rape kit, she realizes that the violence of such an experience does not stop with the crime. Increasingly concerned that the rapist will return, she seeks help from her landlord, who refuses to address security issues on the property. She comes to understand that it is precisely these conditions of newly gentrified lower-income areas which lead to vulnerable living spaces, high turnover rates, and ultimately higher profits for slumlords. In this most singular memoir, Leo weaves a psychological journey into an analysis that becomes equally personal: the fault lines of property mismanagement, class vulnerabilities, and a deeply flawed criminal justice system. In a stunning conclusion, Leo has her day in court.

Originally published in 1980, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals offers a profoundly feminist analysis of her experience with breast cancer & a modified radical mastectomy. Moving between journal entry, memoir, & exposition, Lorde fuses the personal & political & refuses the silencing & invisibility that she experienced both as a woman facing her own death & as a woman coping with the loss of her breast. After Lorde died of cancer in 1992, women from all over the U.S. & beyond paid tribute to her in essays & poems. Aunt Lute's special hardcover edition of The Cancer Journals gathers together twelve such tributes as well as a series of six photographs taken of Lorde by photographer Jean Weisinger. Tributes by: Margaret E. Cronin, Linda Cue, Elliot, Ayofemi Folayan, Jewelle Gomez, Margaret Randall, Adrienne Rich, Kate Rushin, Elizabeth Sargent, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, & Evelyn White.

Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson's aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Jane's murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area between 1967 and 1969. Nelson was born a few years after Jane's death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche. Jane explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, dream-accounts, and documentary sources, including local and national newspapers, related "true crime" books such as The Michigan Murders and Killer Among Us, and fragments from Jane's own diaries written when she was 13 and 21. Its eight sections cover Jane's childhood and early adulthood, her murder and its investigation, the direct and diffuse effect of her death on Nelson's girlhood and sisterhood, and a trip to Michigan Nelson took with her mother (Jane's sister) to retrace the path of Jane's final hours. Each piece in Jane has its own form, and the movement from each piece to the next--along with the white space that surrounds each fragment--serve as important fissures, disrupting the tabloid, "page-turner" quality of the story, and eventually returning the reader to deeper questions about girlhood, empathy, identification, and the essentially unknowable aspects of another's life and death. Part elegy, part memoir, detective story, part meditation on violence (and serial, sexual violence in particular), and part conversation between the living and the dead, Jane's powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, expands the notion of what poetry can do--what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.

The leader of contemporary feminist theory discusses such issues as racism, self-acceptance, and mother- and woman-hood.

Navigate to: The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.

Since the beginnings of time, people have been interested in sex - the form it takes, the pleasure it can give, the circumstances in which it occurs, and what it means - both for the individuals concerned and to society more generally. Often seen as a synonym for love, sometimes as an expression of power, and infrequently as a means of exploitation and abuse, sex is a complex and multi-faceted aspect of human behaviour that has been written about by numerous writers and theorists worldwide. This book offers an introduction to the central debates in sexuality research. Among the issues examined are the social and cultural dimensions of sex, human sexuality and sex research. It will be of use to students of sociology, cultural studies, and health and behavioural studies.

As a response to the increasing violence in our culture, the widening ideological divides, and the growing gap in economic well-being, there is greater awareness that a deeper sense of community is desperately needed. But even as we acknowledge the need to build community, the dominant on-the-ground practices about how to engage people, civically and organizationally, remain essentially unchanged. We still believe community is built with better messaging, more persuasion, and social events for people to get to know each other better. All of which is naïve. In this new edition, Block draws on a decade of putting these ideas into practice to emphasize what has worked and extract those thoughts that were nice but had no durability. He explores how technology, instead of bringing us together, has driven us into more isolation. New examples show that community building can be a more powerful way to address social problems than more traditional policies and programs. And encouragingly, Block insists this is really simple, once we decide it is essential. He offers a way of thinking that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.

This book is a collection of the best blogs from Indigenous Nationhood produced by well-known lawyer, activist and academic Pamela Palmater. Her blogs offer critical legal and political commentary and analysis on legislation, Aboriginal rights, Canadian politics, and First Nation politics and social issues like murdered and missing Indigenous women, poverty, economics, and identity and culture. The intent of the blogs and the book is to help rebuild the connections between Indigenous citizens and their home communities, local governments, and Indigenous Nations for the benefit of future generations. Underlying those connections is knowledge and capacity within the Indigenous population to support their self-advocacy efforts and to forge relationships with academics, students, lawyers, politicians, like-minded organizations, volunteers and others to undertake activities supporting the efforts of grass roots Indigenous peoples. For too long and too often, the struggles faced by individual citizens have been forgotten or subsumed under other issues faced by their home communities. Under the current Conservative government, urgent Indigenous issues have been sacrificed for political posturing. Right-wing "academics," news media and others have dominated the public debate such that the information being absorbed by the public at large is skewed against Indigenous peoples. These blogs tackle myths and stereotypes about Indigenous people head-on and provide accessible, critical analysis of government laws and policies being imposed in Indigenous peoples. This book is part of an attempt to develop good old fashioned leadership to work with grass roots people to make the change we owe our children.

Describing a research paradigm shared by indigenous scholars in Canada and Australia, this study demonstrates how this standard can be put into practice. Portraying indigenous researchers as knowledge seekers who work to progress indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing in a constantly evolving context, this examination shows how relationships both shape indigenous reality and are vital to reality itself. These same knowledge seekers develop relationships with ideas in order to achieve enlightenment in the ceremony of maintaining accountability. Envisioning researchers as accountable to all relations, this overview proves that careful choices should be made regarding selection of topics, methods of data collection, forms of analysis, and the way in which information is presented.

North America¿s Indigenous population is a vulnerable group, with specific psychological and healing needs that are not widely met in the mental health care system. Indigenous peoples face certain historical, cultural-linguistic and socioeconomic barriers to mental health care access that government, health care organizations and social agencies must work to overcome. This volume examines ways Indigenous healing practices can complement Western psychological service to meet the needs of Indigenous peoples through traditional cultural concepts. Bringing together leading experts in the fields of Aboriginal mental health and psychology, it provides data and models of Indigenous cultural practices in psychology that are successful with Indigenous peoples. It considers Indigenous epistemologies in applied psychology and research methodology, and informs government policy on mental health service for these populations.

Donato examines Canada's speculative fiction scene, which has been racially charged. Today's writers who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) are including themselves in a narrative landscape that has long been an ethnic snowstorm. However, the emerging BIPOC storytellers are striking back and terraforming the literary scene so that it's habitable for all. Unafraid of reimagining realities for brown bodies and queer love, a new wave of specific writers are building on the work of past generations; in doing so, they're smashing through the publishing industry's status quo. Here, Donato cites the works of several speculative writers such as Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Hiromi Goto. He finds that while the difficulties remain for speculative writers, it can't be denied that their work is valued. Consistently, writers of color attribute each other for inspiration and heap love on understanding editors more often than they chew out bad ones.

Volume 61
Issue 3
Pages: 234-238
Alternative schools can provide all students, especially those with challenging behaviors, low motivation, poor attendance, failing grades, or those afraid to even walk into the school building, with an engaging and enriching educational experience. Through designing, leading, and serving students as an administrator of an alternative middle school reengagement center in a large suburban district, I have identified six powerful practices as essential pieces to the academic and behavioral success of the students. This article seeks to demonstrate how effective use of these six ideas can transform any alternative program.