A Community Affair
April 6th at 5:30 pm!!! DC Area friends please please save the date. Maybe you’ll get sick of hearing about this. Maybe you already are. But if you don’t come, I want it to be because you can’t come or don’t want to come. Not because you didn’t know about it. So I’m telling you about it every place. Abandoning the post I had been writing (next week, next week) to ask you to please join me for the launch of my brand new (newer than new–not officially out yet) poetry collection A Constellation of Half-Lives, and the very first Happy/Sad Tour Stop with Amelia Bane. Featuring performances by: Wytold, Derrick Weston Brown, Joe Merritt, & an open mic! Tickets HERE.
It’s on April 6th at 5:30 pm at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda
About The Happy/Sad Tour: One part comedy and one part poetry, Happy/Sad Tour celebrates a wide range of emotions in one hour long show. Start your night with the happiest stand-up and storytelling from Amelia Bane and end with Seema Reza reading the saddest poems you’ll ever hear. With incredible featured performers in between.
NYC Friends: Our next Happy/Sad performance will be on April 19 at McNally Jackson Bookstore in Williamsburg. Featured performers are: Jeanann Verlee, Chris Evans, and Yesenia Montilla. It is going to be so damn fun.
I am about to post this from an airplane because we ARE IN THE FUTURE YOU GUYS. I spent a few days in Portland at AWP, a writing conference, and on the last day, my dear friend Rosie came to visit and we talked about so many things and ate some delicious things and laughed and laughed in our very long ago way. One thing we talked about for a while was beauty–how our understanding of it has evolved over time, how we have worked to reclaim ourselves and our relationships with ourselves from all the poison that we were fed as girls and young women. And then I came across this incredible essay by Summer Brennan in Granta. Here’s an excerpt of the essay, which is an excerpt from her newly published book (which I ordered immediately).
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Many versions of the Cinderella story can be found all over the world. From ancient Egypt, to medieval Korea, to the Brothers Grimm in early nineteenth-century Prussia, each version involves four key elements. The first three are as follows: a beautiful young girl in a low social position, a man in a high social position, and a lost shoe that serves to unite them. The fourth and most important element is that the girl’s status is raised because the shoe has brought her to the man.
In these varying but similar Cinderella tales, sometimes there is a magical intermediary who puts the girl in front of the man, such as a fairy godmother, or the spirit of the girl’s dead mother who comes back in the form of a domestic animal or a tree that rains down gifts. But not always. Sometimes it is merely a matter of circumstance that throws the girl and the man together. She is hired to be a dancing girl at the palace, or her shoe is taken by a bird and dropped into a rich man’s garden. In some versions of the story, the shoe is made by the girl herself, and has been crafted or embroidered so finely that the man simply must meet and marry its craftswoman. Often, as with Yexian, it is the tiny size of the shoe that impresses the man, suggesting to him the bodily delicacy of its wearer in her absence. Every version of the story ends with a wedding as deus ex machina: The beautiful, intelligent, kind, or talented girl of low or reduced social status becomes a woman of high social status because she has been selected for marriage by a high-status man.
I don’t know what your prompt is, exactly. I think a woman will have a different response to this essay than a man, but it’s important that we all think about the social conditions that make us want to whittle women down (literally) into how they look, and men too, but differently. Women must be little, men must be able to cause harm.
