AnnMarie was leaving after picking up some of her work from a pottery cooperative stand. We had met years earlier at an art workshop on Guemes Island, during a time in my life when I had time to take art workshops. Now, seeing what she had in her hands, I commented on how much I loved her style, her brightly colored serving dishes decorated in original images. AnnMarie smiled and handed me a beautiful white bowl painted with green-colored leaves.

“Here, take it!” she said.

In return, I offered her some of the cheese I had left over.

“Next time,” she replied. “I am about to head out on the boat for two months!”

In addition to teaching high school ceramics, AnnMarie was also a fisherwoman, operating a 106-foot fish tender in Alaska with her husband, Mack, during summer break from school.  When I got home, I placed the bowl on my kitchen counter and admired the unique shape, design, and craftsmanship, that clearly made it a piece by AnnMarie.

At one point, I was so bold as to call myself a potter like AnnMarie. It is one of many titles—like writer, scientist, or farmer—I have given myself over the years. My creative urges have followed many paths that range from throwing pots, watercolor painting, printmaking, songwriting, and I will even include cheesemaking on this list. My admiration for AnnMarie’s work came from a shared appreciation of good food—this bowl would be perfect for a cucumber salad or a heaping side of potatoes—and past experience dabbling in various artforms.

A critic might say I am a jack of all trades, master of none. A fan might call me a renaissance woman. Admittedly, I am undecided as to whether having multiple, sometimes disparate, interests is a boon or a bother. History has a long list of notable dabblers who had many public and private interests, such as Plato and Leonardo DaVinci, Charles Darwin, and Emily Dickinson, who were applauded for their respective abilities to traverse and bridge multiple disciplines.

I remember when basketball legend Michael Jordan enraged the world by announcing he was leaving the Chicago Bulls prematurely to try professional baseball for the White Sox. It was around the time I started playing high school basketball (I can add “athlete” to my list of titles) and although I was loyal to the Seattle Supersonics, I loved the Chicago Bulls. In making this decision, Jordan had crossed some imaginary, sacred line in the sand and people did not have space in their minds or hearts for Jordan, the shooting guard, as well as Jordan, the outfielder, regardless of his all-around athleticism. While his baseball career only lasted a year and he did return to basketball for a few more championship wins, I’ve admired his boldness, his willingness to embrace a new passion.

I am not claiming to be the Michael Jordan of anything, but I sometimes feel plagued by my various interests and what to do about them. As much as I have tried to focus on one thing, new interests always tend to find their way in. Career-wise, I loved learning about the environment, so I studied biology in school. Later, I discovered that I preferred writing poems as a way of observing and working with nature. Instead of crafting experiments as an agricultural researcher, I started my own farm and learned to make value-added products, like cheese. All along, I have loved visual arts, but haven’t had the means (or maybe confidence) to focus on those inklings in any meaningful way. In my mind, my interests are a unique expression of me and therefore in conversation with each other. Creativity feeds creativity. However, we live in an era where specialization is paramount. The educational lens grows more and more narrow with time and the canyon between STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and humanities curricula runs wide and deep.

The term multipotentiality is defined by Emilie Wapnick, author of How to Be Everything, as “a psychological and educational term used to describe people who display aptitudes across multiple disciplines.” As someone who has always felt most at home in interdisciplinary settings and fairly claustrophobic in the siloed landscape of higher education in general, I find this term validating. Instead of thinking of multiple interests as a distraction, there is solid evidence to show that some people are wired to have an affinity for many different things.

***

AnnMarie at work. Photo: Violeta Martin.

Four years after receiving that bowl from AnnMarie, I reached out to see if she was offering any classes. She had recently retired from teaching. AnnMarie and Mack were in the process of selling their fish tender to their son. When she suggested I start with hand-built cheese plates, a light bulb went off. I remembered the work of Belgian artist Bernard Palissy, from the sixteenth century, who carried had an extensive list of titles (scientist, land-surveyor, religious reformer, garden designer, glassblower, painter, chemist, geologist, philosopher, and writer), according to the Getty Museum. His platters, with their intricate relief work and surprising nature imagery, have stuck with me. I quickly saw how I could make something similar using my own images and Ann Marie’s surface design technique.

When I moved onto the farm and had some extra space, I serendipitously found some used ceramics equipment. Someone from a nearby town posted on Craigslist that he was giving up his ceramics hobby to focus on woodworking and whoever bought the kiln could take every piece of equipment in his studio as well, which included a pottery wheel, lots of hand tools and glazes, and a sturdy worktable. Since high school, I have taken the occasional ceramics class with a variety of teachers, mostly men. I borrowed a friend’s truck and jumped on this great deal. However, that pile of supplies and equipment has sat idle in my barn for over a decade. The demands of the farm and, eventually appending the title of ‘mother’ to my list, made it hard to carve out space for art.

Time is, undoubtedly, an important topic in the conversation of multipotentiality. The predominant rule is that it takes ten thousand hours of doing something to become an expert. Interestingly, psychologists have debunked this theory of practice (made popular by Malcolm Gladwell) adding that while repetition is important, the quality of teaching matters just as much, if not more. Humans are awake on average of sixteen to eighteen hours today, and if we factor in the average lifespan (78 years), that leaves a lot of hours to learn new skills. While other important life things like eating, exercising, parenting, and working might take up the lion’s share of these waking hours, there should be some idle time left over? In theory, yes, but it’s complicated.

Admittingly, I confess that I have driven myself to various states of burnout in my adult life by taking on too much at once. It is a natural inclination for me that is maybe a mix of nature and nurture. However, I have learned that creativity is not linear, and I want to believe that in our lifetimes there are ample opportunities to spiral back around to hobbies and talents during various chapters, as time and fund allow.

When I get the comment, “Oh you do so much!” I know it is a compliment laced with a little confusion, envy, and disbelief. I don’t think I am phenomenally more productive. However, I have developed a seasonal lifestyle with farm work occupying my spring and summer months and writing and teaching being the focus of the fall and winter months. The transitions are never seamless, but I do get the chance to circle back to projects and make slow progress over time without getting too bored or overworked in one area of my life.

Repetition can be hard for the dabbler, but it is a core part of learning a new skill. Finding that sweet spot of talent, enthusiasm, and discipline is the true art of holding multiple interests.

After Ann Marie and I received the Heritage Arts Apprenticeship Program (HAAP) grant in August of 2024, we set up a weekly meeting time in her studio in Ferndale with the goal of eventually getting my barn space functional for making ceramics.

The urge to make things has always been innate for AnnMarie. A descendent of Italian immigrants, she says her relatives came to the new world with skills that ranged from marble cutting to lacemaking to plumbing. AnnMarie had started making ceramics at a community college in Alaska, going on to teach ceramics in Ferndale and Bellingham for thirty years. When she moved to her current property, a small farm in rural Whatcom county, the first thing she did was create a studio space in one of the farm’s old outbuildings. Even while on the boat she brought along ceramic supplies, draping freshly rolled slabs over countertops in the fish cut room. Multipotentiality is something AnnMarie understands.

Working in an apprenticeship model, versus a classroom, is illuminating and intimate, with ample room for growth and self-reflection. AnnMarie says a lot of her experience with high schoolers was about, “grabbing their attention and having them become engaged in an activity that they conquer. They can prove their skills, do a task, do it well, and then learn how to clean up their tools and write about it.” Our relationship is different than the typical student-teacher model and we have formed a unique connection that interweaves mentorship, friendship, a love of food (she feeds me every time I visit her), and a shared community of northwest-based artists (mostly female) that range in age from thirties to sixties. It is important to note here that another perk of having multiple interests is the connections formed with new and different people that share those interests.

The author with AnnMarie. Photo: Violeta Martin

Since we are both mothers, many of our studio conversations veer into the realm of artmaking and motherhood—how do you stay connected to your creativity amidst all the other responsibilities? The answers are not simple and for someone like me with multiple interests, the juggling act becomes even more precarious. AnnMarie has taught me the importance of my studio being “a separate place” apart from my regular life. Reflecting on her teaching days with young children, she says, “I didn’t get to go to the studio until nine at night and I worked out there from nine to eleven, then I would wash up and go to bed, and get up at five fifteen. It was stupid. I was exhausted all the time, but I really wanted to do it.”

With such a tactile medium, like clay, you can’t leave works for large swathes of time. It is not like an essay idea, which can deepen over time. My platters will literally dry up, crack, and warp, if I forget about them. Dedicating that continuous attention is hard, and I know that if I had more hours to care for my platters and bowls they would be better. (Most of those hours are going to sheep and children right now). When I can string together my attention I end up with something unique and elegant, like a pearl necklace. However, my often haphazard approach to art-making leaves me with a tangled knot of ideas that are hard to execute, produce sloppy work, or don’t ever quite come to fruition. Repetition can be hard for the dabbler, but it is a core part of learning a new skill. Finding that sweet spot of talent, enthusiasm, and discipline is the true art of holding multiple interests.

***

Ceramics hovers between craft and art. For me, ceramics will probably stay in the realm of a hobby, whereas AnnMarie is trained as a fine artist and I am ok with that. She has had a lot of success selling her work out of her studio and at galleries in Washington and Alaska. It is possible I will have wares to sell in the future, but right now I want to be competent in this form and also appreciate the process itself. Clay is for play for me whereas I hold my writing life to a much higher standard. Being clear on my intentions is what makes dabbling defensible for me.

Our HAAP grant ended in June, but I also now have someone to call when I have pottery-related questions or am feeling guilty about spending time with clay versus tackling my many other to-do lists. I have a mentor who understands my multiple interests. While my one hundred hours in HAAP pales in comparison to the ten thousand hours needed for mastery, this year spent reviving my interest in clay has enlivened parts of my brain. And, after taking time away for ceramics, I come back to my other work—writing, farming, and teaching—with a renewed sense of purpose and vigor. Multipotentiality begets vitality.

Every so often I let my daughters, who are now seven and nine, come out to my studio. It is exciting to see where their wild imaginations take them. The tactile experience of cool clay on their little hands draws them in and within minutes they are focused on a new creation. I can only hope I’m modeling a good way to be in the world—curious, open to new ideas, and forever willing to dawn my student cap.

The divisiveness we are witnessing right now in our country, between political parties, art and science, fact and fiction, is a result of limited viewpoints and rigid ideals. The elevation of science at the expense of reading and the humanities. An emphasis on output over critical thinking skills anchored in creativity. An inability to engage in meaningful, civil discourse. Maya Angelou (another noted multipotentialite) wrote, “I believe that every person is born with talent.” By lauding our multiple interests, we become better, more aware humans. Taking time to acknowledge and pursue our talents and interest, no matter how divergent, could bring us all closer together.

The post In Defense of Dabbling appeared first on Humanities Washington.

A 17-year-old drummer.
A 29-year-old stay-at-home dad.
A 22-year-old nursing student.
A 26-year-old marathon runner.
A 31-year-old artist.
An 82-year-old veteran.
A 45-year-old former model and mother.
A 28-year-old writer.
A 42-year-old oncologist.

I feel so little sorrow about it, which should concern me. And in many ways I know I should be concerned about the fact that I feel so little sorrow in this very moment or that I am able to get out of bed every morning and continue to attack every new day as if it was just another day.
As if these nine people had never come and gone.
But it is another day. And those people did come and go.
And the shape of my heart is not the same
as it was before I knew them.
Which is precisely why I’m not concerned.

What was different about this year was that I was
present in a way I had never been before.
I paid attention.
I looked for the beauty instead of mourning
what seemed to be its obvious absence.
In the past I had only seen the darkness in death.
I only felt the missing shapes and had only seen the shadows.
But I started noticing a pattern when a very close friend,
only 24-years old, died after a long fight with her cancer.
What I noticed in her eyes in her final few days was the same
thing I had seen in my father’s eyes right before he died.
The same thing I had seen in my own eyes when I was
28-years old and fighting for my own life, trying to upend a
doctor’s predicted expiration date of “three months at best.”
A lightness.
An odd kind of resignation that felt like
the opposite of resignation.
A kind of fearlessness I have never once seen on the
face of someone very much healthy and alive.
I’m not a religious man in any way nor am I an atheist. And
I have always turned away from people who offer up their
silver lining mini sermons, no matter how well-intentioned.
He’s in a better place now.
She’s not suffering anymore.
He’s with the people he loves.

I get it. And I don’t disagree.
It would be foolish to disagree with the unknown.
So I just embrace what I know instead.
And what I know is this:

Reality is what is. And what is—even at its most
excruciating—is inexplicably and infinitely beautiful.

When I really examine the entirety of my own life, I see
hints of this light most often in my most glorious mistakes.
I see it in my failed attempts to both love and to be loved.
I see it in divorces and in lost jobs.
I see it in the screams and I see it in the silence.
And I see it most acutely on the days when the simple
numbness of not knowing how to get through another
day is the only fuel I have to actually get me through it.

Because it is there.
A light.
A tiny infinity that often seems to dim in
moments I most need to see it.
And it always feels like it’s the first thing to play
hide-and-seek with me when I am most terrified.
And this year, I got to witness nine people find
it after lifetimes of directionless searching.
I got to witness them find it where it always was all along.
Where it is for all of us.
Right here.
In this moment.
I could choose to drown in the collective
weight of these absences from my life.
Many people do just that with loss of all kinds. And that’s okay.
It’s so human and it’s so natural. But I know
that such a cement never dries.
And I know I can make a different choice at any moment.
I can choose to stand back up.

I often hear people describe those who fight their way through disease and illness as courageous. And I agree. But in my own struggles with four different forms of cancer I have found that courage is often just this: a profound lack of options.
For me, it’s more about letting go and not fighting what is.
It’s about knowing that the light I need is not one I have to seek, but one that is burning bright
right there in the center of my chest.
That doesn’t mean that the struggle to survive is
not brutal and exhausting and capable of bringing
the strongest human beings to their knees.
I think we all know it’s often all of those things.
But whether you are the person preparing for the
journey into the unknown or one of the ones left to
watch the dust cling to the air where that person
once stood, it’s important to remember what I know
from having been on both sides of that itinerary:

All of this.
No matter how cleverly adorned or disguised.
Is inexplicably
and
infinitely
beautiful.

This I know.

The post The Nine appeared first on Humanities Washington.

This was a familiar lament that my grandmother would share with me as a child. When I would ask my grandmother what was hardest about being incarcerated during World War II, my grandmother would always share the same thing: How sad she was that her collection of Japanese Girls’ Day dolls was lost when she was sent away to camp. Families celebrated Girls’ Day (Hina Matsuri) on March 3rd and Boys’ Day on May 5th to give thanks for the health and prosperity of their children. For Girls’ Day, girls were given sets of Japanese traditional dolls resembling the imperial family. Even decades later, the loss of her precious Girls’ Day dolls still weighed heavily on my grandmother. While many of my family’s belongings were stored by the Japanese Baptist Church in Seattle, the dolls were lost forever.

My grandmother, Toshie “Phyllis” Yorioka, loved dolls, stuffed animals, and the family dogs. Even as an elderly woman, she retained a child-like love for anything kawaii. Her 90s Beanie Baby collection was extensive. I always think of my grandmother smelling of Shiseido face cream and the plumeria leis that she would bring from Hawaii on her visits to my family in Seattle. She had the softest skin of anyone that I’ve ever known, even into her 90s. I often wondered how my soft and sweet grandmother could ever have been seen as an enemy to the government.

When she was 24 years old, my grandmother, along with the entire Japanese American community in Seattle, was sent away from her home after Executive Order 9066 was signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. My grandmother and grandfather, Joshi “Joe” Yorioka, who was a University of Washington college student at the time, quickly married after their families were sent to the “relocation center” at the fairgrounds in Puyallup so that they could stay together. The new family was then taken to Hunt Idaho to forge a new life at Camp Minidoka. My father was born while my grandparents lived in the camp. When my grandfather was drafted into the US military to work as a Japanese translator for army intelligence because of his Japanese language skills, my grandmother was left alone to take care of her young child in camp.

The Japanese American Incarceration was a pivotal event for my family and all families of Japanese descent. Growing up with the specter of my family’s incarceration, the importance of remembering history has never been lost on me. Avoiding the dangers of politically induced hysteria and demonizing the “foreigner” is increasingly relevant today.

Bailey Gatzert School students singing near statues of Lincoln and Washington, Seattle, 1941. Credit: MOHAI

Last spring, while a student at the University of Washington in the Museology Masters program, I learned of sets of Girls’ Day and Boys’ Day dolls in the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) collection. These dolls were left by Japanese families living in Seattle during World War II to Bailey Gatzert Elementary School in the care of the Principal, Ada Mahon. In the 1970s, the collection of dolls was transferred to the historical society and have been at MOHAI ever since.

I had the privilege last summer of working with MOHAI as Guest Curator to research the history of these dolls. My hope from the outset was that I would miraculously be able to find anyone connected with the dolls. One day while digging deep in MOHAI’s extensive archives, I found a single print-out of an email, noting that the family name “Yutani” was found on one of the original boxes. In the early 2000s, Massie Yutani Tomita and her brother came to look at the dolls to see if they could recognize them. After the passing of over 50 years, they could not identify which dolls had come from their family.

In the summer of 2024, I was able to trace down the daughters of Massie Tomita to learn more about their family’s story. Daughter Laura Kusaka graciously agreed to be interviewed via Zoom call all the way from where she now lived in Japan. She shared her mother’s story as a teenager in camp—and her own, as a Japanese American living in Japan. The family shared photos, glimpses into their family’s life over the decades. While the dolls have been long forgotten, the stories of the people connected to these dolls will live on—both, now, in the archives of the MOHAI and in the memories of the next generation.

Emperor and Empress dolls that are part of a Japanese Girls’ Day set, 1930-1940. Credit: MOHAI.

The most startling moment in my research process at the MOHAI happened during an email exchange with a staff member at Densho, a nonprofit that has documented the oral histories of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated. In a gracious response to my request for any oral histories or photos connected to Bailey Gatzert Principal Ada Mahon, I received a list of photos. As I scrolled through each photo, one caught my eye: a photo of Principal Mahon visiting Japan in the 1950s to visit her former students. In this photo, Principal Mahon stood smiling at the center, with “unidentified” families next to her. Immediately, I realized she was standing next to my grandmother and father as a young boy. Through my research of these forgotten dolls, I was able to better understand my own family’s story—a story that traces continents and generations, marked forever by the incarceration, but ultimately a story of resilience and love.

Black and white photographic print of Ms. Mahon (center) and unidentified individuals standing outside on lawn. Ms. Mahon served as the principal at Donor’s school, Bailey Gatzert grade school in Seattle, Washington. After Ms. Mahon retired, she visited Tokyo in 1950. Seattle’s Nikkei community raised the funds to pay for Ms. Mahon’s Japan trip. Inscribed on back: “AUG 50/SHINJUKU GARDENS.”

The post The Dolls They Left Behind appeared first on Humanities Washington.

Once we finish lunch, Father offers me his arm to walk over to The Menagerie. He looks like the one who needs an arm to hold on to — he shakes at each step — but I accept his arm, trying to remember a youthful Father escorting Princess Isabella from room to room of The Menagerie like he was royalty himself.

As we walk up the winding driveway, I see the once perfectly tended grounds are now overgrown with weeds. A knot tightens in my chest. I don’t want to see what this place has become.

It’s dark in the first exhibit room. The grime covering the windows blocks out the sunlight. Mother said our specimens’ moods and health benefit from natural light, so each exhibit room was built with huge windows. An undertaking to keep clean, but they were always clean, under Mother’s care. We approach the cage, the curtains draped across it. Guests are — well, were — invited to pull the rope to make the curtains part, and as people who rarely do anything for themselves, they enjoyed it.

“Please, have the honor,” Father says, as I’ve heard him say countless times. There’s no joke to his voice; he’s really acting like I’m a guest. How long has it been since he’s entertained a guest? Two, three years. Yet, Svetlana told me, each day he dresses in a suit and tie, what little hair he has left slicked back, a rose in his lapel. Looking at the rope I remember Princess Isabella’s first visit, when I was around six years old. She was in her 30s but girlish in her demeanor, laughing with delight as she got to tug on the rope to reveal the first exhibit. As I grab hold of the rope I can feel the dust on my fingers; I can see it layered on the curtain fabric. I picture the residue it would leave on Isabella’s white gloves.

Father is beaming at me. To him I might as well still be that six-year-old he proudly showed off as part of the family business. We were specimens too, Mother would say, the three of us; we were part of the show. I tug at the rope, and the curtains part. I’m relieved to find the first cage contains Lemarce, as it has for years.  But my relief changes quickly. The cage is filthy, there’s a huge spider web in one corner, and the rug is threadbare and stained in several places. Lemarce is sitting on the floor staring straight ahead, unbathed, his beard several inches long. He isn’t wheeling himself around the room in his special chair. He used to impress guests with his dexterity; they would clap at his energy, his good humor, despite deformed hands and stumps for legs. Now, something in the air around him tells me he spends most of his time just sitting there.

The chair hunches in the corner, dusty.

“When is Marcia in next?” I say, a hint to Father that Lemarce needs attention.

“I had to let her go. She was making too many demands, saying she needed more resources. You know,” he says, as if Marcia was always unreasonable, when I know she wasn’t.

“You didn’t fire Albert, too?” I’m suddenly a bit panicked. Albert tends to the last exhibit. “No, rest assured. Albert still has his job.”

Relieved, I turn back to Lemarce, only to remember how little there is to be relieved about. I now see the stains on the rug are from Lemarce soiling it. Perhaps he had no choice because the slop pail was full, and the thought makes me cringe. I walk up to the glass. I hope if I catch Lemarce’s eye he will recognize me and it will create some spark in him. When he doesn’t look up, I squat down so our eyes are at the same level.  He used to get excited when I’d approach; he would wheel himself close to the glass and show me whatever new trinket Mother had found him. Now, the basket that held the toys is gone.

“What happened to all of Lemarce’s toys?”

“He didn’t seem to want them anymore. He broke them, threw them at the walls.”

Lemarce won’t look at me. There’s no reason to close the curtains but I do anyway, thinking the view of the fabric is kinder than the giant dirty windows.

In the corridor hangs the portraits of my grandparents, filmed over with dust. They created The Menagerie: they opened with a mere three specimens in simple wire cages, their son the tour guide, and a young go-getter their all-around helper. The go-getter was Mother. Together, my parents — mostly Mother — transformed the low-budget zoo into a world-class attraction accessible only to the .01 percent.  “Perhaps no other single attraction has ever had so many members of the elite clamoring for their turn,” said my favorite-ever profile of us, in Vanity Fair.

Image via Unsplash

The next specimen is Sagoraya. When I last saw her she was a child clutching a doll, wearing that specially-made frock. When I part the curtains they reveal her standing in the middle of the room. The change is startling, from the child I remember to an almost woman; but even more startling, she is naked. I’m mortified, especially with Father a foot away.  I’m also unexpectedly repulsed by what should be a familiar sight: the head of Sagoraya’s never-quite-formed twin poking out of her neck. Many of our guests enjoyed touching Sagoraya’s appendage through a window in the cage. As a reward for her agreeability, Father would then dispense a biscuit to her through a lever. She would devour it, crumbs flying everywhere, and our guests enjoyed that too.  Sagoraya looks right at us, then she puts her hands between her legs. I grab at the rope to pull the curtains closed, but not before I’ve seen the look of recognition on her face. I wrap my arms around my chest, my skin crawling.

I want to believe I’m the only one who has seen this spectacle, but I know it probably isn’t true. How proud I used to be of what my parents built. That they turned my grandparents’ idea into a first-rate attraction. How ashamed I am now of what father has allowed it to become; how ashamed I am of him, an old man, his suit and grooming now making him look like a chauffeur. Worse yet is his manner, jaunty, ever the proud impresario, when the only audience he has left is me.

When care of The Menagerie was first solely left to Father, I knew he couldn’t run the place as Mother had, but I believed he would generally keep things on track. For a brief time after Mother’s accident, I visited often; but my life took me in other directions. What did mother say to me, once, years before? A strange moment of candor; I can’t recall another time that she spoke of Father’s shortcomings. “If it had been up to him, he’d have put the specimens in barn stalls and charged $5 admission.” I share some of the blame. If I’d agreed to come home and run The Menagerie with him, I could have tempered his worst instincts. It was so unexpected, mother’s accident; I couldn’t abandon the independence I’d carved out for myself. I’ll come back eventually, I told Father at the time.

“Let’s skip to the end,” I say.

“Of course, whatever you prefer.”

***

Mother lies in the same bed I remember.  It appears a bit sunken in the middle although still in respectable shape, thankfully. The bed coverings, of fine white silk, look grayish now. Her upper half is uncovered and elevated for a clear view. They tell us she has almost no brain function, but I fear the worst, as impossible as it is – that she knows.

As if he’s heard my thoughts and wants to counter them, Father says, “She’d be so proud, knowing how we’ve kept going without her.”

So much equipment to keep her alive. It takes up most of the cage.

“I think it’s time to take her home,” I say.

He twitches. “This is what she would want.”

I can’t disagree. The three of us were specimens ourselves, Mother always said.

“You’re just feeling sentimental,” Father says. There’s a hurt note in his voice.

“I could return.” Words said before realizing I formed the thought.

“Yes, you could. Svetlana would love someone else to cook for. And if you could visit the specimens regularly, it would make a difference. They were always happy to see you.” As he gets excited, his voice gets higher. “We could open to the general public — maybe that’s the next phase. Your mother was always insistent that only the very best should experience The Menagerie, but she also understood adapting. Why couldn’t we let more people in?”

I don’t think he wants an answer, so I don’t give him one.

We never opened Mother’s cage for guests to touch her. But there was one time. I’d returned home to visit, my stay coinciding with a visit from Isabella. When Isabella pulled the curtains on Mother’s cage, tears engulfed her eyes and she turned away. She dabbed at her face with the handkerchief Father immediately handed her, then turned back to look at Mother. A quick dart of a glance at first, as if the glance itself would sear her eyes. I couldn’t blame her; Mother was now a mess of scar tissue in human shape.  I thought we perhaps should move Isabella along for her own sake. Then she said, “May I get closer?”

Without hesitation Father typed in the code — Mother’s cage locked like the rest, although for no reason  — and the glass slid open. Isabella approached Mother slowly as if she were a feral animal. She took off a white glove and smoothed her bare hand over Mother’s flesh. I could see the goosebumps form on her own, perfect skin. She made a strange noise like a coo. Then again.

“I think we should let Mother rest,” I said absurdly. I grabbed Isabella’s arm — the soft fleshy part where she would most feel my fingernails — and pulled her away.

Outside the cage, Father reached for Isabella’s hand. “Danae hasn’t gotten used to losing her mother.” Father looked at me expectantly. I glared back at him. He said, “Apologize, Danae.”

I expected a scene and knew I deserved it, but Isabella said only, “Let her be.” Relieved, father quickly ushered her to the lobby where her people waited, as our guests’ people always did. They were never allowed the privilege of going past the lobby. Of course, they never wanted it.

Now Father says, “I’m so glad you’ve had this idea. I knew you’d return one day.”

I turn to look at him and know I’m looking at him for the first time since I arrived, because every other second he’s been playing a part. The pity I feel for him claws at me as much as looking at Mother’s destroyed body does.

I turn away, reach for the rope, and cover Mother up.

The post The Menagerie appeared first on Humanities Washington.

Even though Halliday appeared to be still during that coma, in his mind he was battling to wake up.

In reality, Halliday comes from a long line of warriors. Although a member of the Muckleshoot tribe, ancestrally his family is Duwamish, originally inhabiting the area that is now known as South Lake Union.

“My great, great, great grandfather was the chief of the Boise Creek band of White River Duwamish, and he led the warriors, along with Leschi, in the attack on Seattle, on January 26, 1856, when 400 warriors surrounded the city and the battleship Decatur drove them off. But ultimately were able to get the governor, Isaac Stevens, to renegotiate the treaty and create the Muckleshoot Reservation,” he said.

Fighting to survive runs in Halliday’s blood.

Perhaps this is why during his coma he dreamed of his Canoe Family. A Canoe Family refers to the group or team of tribal members who journey together on a canoe for the annual Canoe Journey which is hosted by a different tribe every year. Most if not all Northwestern tribes join in on this tradition, but tribes such as the Maori, as well as the Hawaiian and Aleutian peoples, have been known to participate. The journey brings hundreds of Canoe Families together to different shores yearly.

In his dream, his Canoe Family was trying to break him out of the hospital, singing to him from outside. Later in his dream he saw his limp body inside a longhouse, being devoured by snakes.

“‘You don’t have to be afraid,” he thought to himself.

Suddenly a white wolf and coyote, his spirit helpers, or Tamanawas as it’s known in the Salish language, appeared to him. He then became the white wolf and defended his body from the snakes. All the while, his Canoe Family marched into the longhouse singing that their land is heaven and is full of chiefs. That’s when Halliday had a realization.

“I remember my mom told me that we had all kinds of different chiefs,” he said. “We had peace chiefs, war chiefs, chiefs in charge of hunting, chiefs in charge of fishing, chiefs in charge of gathering, chiefs in charge of the fire, chiefs in charge of watching the camp, both men and women… but what they all had in common was caring for others.”

When Halliday finished defeating the last snake, his Canoe Family handed him his own paddle and he walked out of the longhouse. That’s when he woke from his coma.

At 55, he opened his eyes but could barely see. Halliday is now legally blind. His sight is so limited that any glasses he uses must  “blow things up so big that in order for me to see it clearly in focus, it has to be so big that it’s almost as if I’m standing next to a letter,” he explained.

“After my [hospitalization], I introduced myself as a father and a husband, and I learned that those were really the important titles. That’s how I should have been introducing myself all along,”

Halliday’s life completely changed. Initially, it seemed like his own chief-like roles were being stripped from him all at once. “I was doing congressional and presidential correspondence. I was in charge of 17.5 million acres of Indian reservation,” he recalls. “I handled realty, probate, natural resources, range and agriculture, environmental compliance, engineering, and wildfires.”

Unable to read, write, or use technology, Halliday resigned from his role as the deputy regional director for the bureau of Indian affairs for the Navajo region.

“I came home and I couldn’t even get my key in the door,” he adds.

At first, losing all these titles felt like a loss of identity and purpose. But Halliday’s voice begins quavering not at the admission of this, but rather at the recognition that the more prominent roles he identifies with now should have always come before the ones he now forgoes.

“After my [hospitalization], I introduced myself as a father and a husband, and I learned that those were really the important titles. That’s how I should have been introducing myself all along,” he said.

It took all of six months to find a new purpose. Before losing his sight, “artist” was never a title he ever identified with before. With the help of his wife, Halliday obtained paints, canvases, and the inspiration to create his first work of art: “Bear Hope.”

Halliday is now traveling the state as part of Humanities Washington’s Speakers Bureau, telling his story, sharing his art, and exploring what it means to be a chief through his public talk, “What Is a Chief? How Native Values Can Teach Resilience.”

John Halliday.

What’s immediately apparent is that Halliday doesn’t need perfect vision to paint captivating images. According to Halliday, although he is blind, he sees his paintings in his mind, much like the dream he had during his coma.

In “Bear Hope,” two cool eyes balance between a stoic snout. They watch intently, popping out at the viewer from the surrounding fur that burns like embers.

Halliday didn’t so much become an artist as much as he returned to his roots, recalling how his father, a gallery curator, encouraged him from a young age to charcoal paint and create cultural regalia.

Halliday has now painted many other works including “White Buffalo Medicine,” and “The Salmon People.” He has also dedicated himself to making Native American regalia like eagle staffs and war bonnets.

In 2023, he was flown out to Denmark by artist Thomas Dambo, best known for his wood palette trolls found all around Washington State. In Denmark, Dambo commissioned Halliday to paint a mural on his house.

With the help of an assistant, Halliday created the outline by standing far away from the wall and marking the shadows cast upon a cut out placed three inches from his face. This way, the assistant could wave the brush and paint the wall based on the shadows Halliday could see on the cut out, sort of like how a pinhole camera allows a person to see an eclipse without staring directly into the sun.

An Orca whale now lives permanently on the facade of Dambo’s home.

In thinking back on his coma dream and the appearance of his Canoe Family, Halliday thinks his culture not only helped him overcome his disability, but taught him his purpose and a powerful lesson.

“Being a chief is about father helping son, daughter helping friend, mom helping granddaughter, friend helping friend. All of those are acts of being a chief, and you have to ask yourself when you have moral questions: What would a chief do? Are you being a chief by what you’re doing right now?”

He added, “I believe that I was brought back to bring this message to you: that we can all be chiefs in our own way.”

Agueda Pacheco Flores is a freelance writer in Seattle who focuses on social justice issues, music, arts, and the Latine diaspora. She’s previously written for The Seattle Times, Crosscut, Journey Magazine, Real Change News, and The South Seattle Emerald.

The post How to Be a Chief appeared first on Humanities Washington.

That sixth-place ranking is actually an improvement from 2018, when an incarceration rate of 642 per 100,000 put the US at the very top of that global list.

But that’s not to suggest that the numbers in the US are seeing positive trends across the board. There is actually a glaring—and growing—disparity between the incarceration rates in smaller towns versus those in cities, and that disparity isn’t tilted in the direction that you might assume.

According to studies by the Vera Institute of Justice, the jail rates for urban and rural counties were roughly equal at the start of the century. Thirteen years later, the rates of incarceration were 40% higher in rural counties than in urban metro areas. Between 2013 and 2019, jail populations dropped 18 percent in urban areas but increased 26 percent in rural areas.

Those statistics are hardly the only contrasts in urban and rural incarceration. Nationally, the number of individuals who are being held in jail while awaiting trial has increased by 223% since 1970. In rural counties, however, that increase is almost double (436%), a stark rise that is disproportionately impacted by rural regions in the South and the West.

What explains these very different pictures for rural and urban incarceration rates?

Jennifer Sherman, who specializes in rural sociology, was interested in answering that question. Between 2020 and 2024, she conducted two rounds of in-depth voice interviews with individuals who had experience with incarceration in at least one of six county jails in Central and Eastern Washington. The accounts she collected were designed to augment and, ideally, help put a real-world narrative to the data gathered by her research project partner Jen Schwartz, a criminologist and fellow professor of sociology at Washington State University.

Their mixed-method research found that criminal offenses weren’t driving the higher rural jail rates as much as small misdemeanors — things like failure to appear in court or driving with a suspended license. And when the researchers looked at the context around those misdemeanors, they found that they were often part of a vicious circle that arose from challenges in navigating the law enforcement system.

Take, for instance, someone who’s had their license suspended as a result of driving while impaired. Without a license, they’re no longer legally able to drive to work or treatment services or court appearances. But in rural communities, where public transportation networks are slight or even nonexistent, personal cars might be the only option to get from point A to B. It’s not hard to see the Catch-22 that arises from this predicament, and it only leads to further ones down the road.

At the same time, Sherman heard contrasting accounts. Some individuals she spoke with enjoyed certain perks that enabled them to navigate the system more effectively. They might get a crucial insider tip or a waiver that helped them meet court-ordered criteria and avoid further jail time.

The key factor in these divergent experiences was often—but not exclusively—social class. Another kind of wealth played a role, too. Sherman calls this moral capital, which can be measured by an individual’s standing in their community. Those with more moral capital tended to experience a smoother restorative path after jail.

For a new Humanities Washington talk, which draws on her recent research on rural incarceration, Sherman looks at how jail rates might be a byproduct of rural intra-community dynamics. Titled “Bad People and Good Ol’ Boys: The Criminalization of Rural Disadvantage,” the talk considers how an individual’s social standing can affect their ability to recover after a brush with the law — or whether they will find themselves in a punitive cycle from which it’s difficult to escape.

Humanities Washington spoke with Sherman about her research and how it informs her talk. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Humanities Washington: How did this talk originate?

Jennifer Sherman: This talk is based on research that I began in 2020 with a colleague of mine at WSU, Jen Schwartz, who is a criminologist. It began when I saw this call for proposals from the Vera Institute for Justice. They were looking for teams to study the rise in rural jail incarceration across the nation. Basically, they had this sort of uncomfortable finding, which was that rates of incarceration in rural jails had been rising for several decades nationally while they were falling in urban and suburban areas. And they wanted teams to look at what was going on. We were one of two proposals that were chosen for that grant.

And what shape did that research ultimately take?

We put this project together where we partnered with sheriff’s departments in six different rural counties in Eastern and Central Washington. And we did a combination of research. Jen was looking at booking and release data — that is, actually getting directly from them all of the data for who entered and left their jails. And then, because this was 2020 [during COVID], I was doing phone interviews with people who had spent time in the jails. There were two rounds of those interviews, which means I’ve now interviewed 71 people who have spent time in one or more of those six jails. So we’ve got these two really different datasets that speak to each other in different ways.

What were some of your findings?

We learned a ton about what is bringing people to jail in rural Washington and what’s perpetuating this problem in rural communities.

You see, when we asked the sheriff what was driving jail admission, they would tell us, “Drugs. It’s all drugs.” Well, drugs are a piece of this puzzle. But one of the most interesting findings early on was when Jen came to me and said, “A lot of what’s bringing people to jail are really small misdemeanors. They’re not really criminal offenses.”

She kind of put them all together in one category that she was calling system navigation problems. It was really little stuff like failure to appear in court, failure to pay fines or to complete court required activities, such as community service or that sort of thing. And she said, “When you put all these things together, they account for more than one-third of all the jail stays.”

She asked me, “Can you help me understand why this is driving so much jail admission?” And I was able to find in my data that the rural communities have some structural lacks that make it really hard to navigate the system once you get in it. For example, if they take your license away in a rural community, you’ve got a really tough choice now: Do you drive to work and risk getting picked up for driving with a suspended license? Or do you not go to work, which means you can’t pay your fines and fees?

So we heard a lot [from interviewees] about job loss and housing loss after an arrest and things like that, all of which contributes to people’s lives kind of spiraling out of control and them ending back up in jail. And, of course, the more times you end up in jail, the more likely you are to lose your job or your housing. It all kind of feeds on itself.

How else does the rural incarceration experience differ from, say, the urban experience?

Part of this story is also whether you receive support from your community or if you are further ostracized. Does the experience of being in a small town further help you or hurt you in that regard?

I look at a couple of different ways in which it can hurt, including exacerbating the stigma. People often felt a lot of shame around their arrests and their crimes. But when you’re in a really tight-knit community, it can be worse because everybody knows. They heard about it on the scanners. Or they saw it on the Facebook page. And word travels fast. Small towns are really good at publicizing the misdeeds of their community members in ways that cities are not.

For some people, that was a huge issue. And then for a few lucky others who had a lot of support and where the community had sort of already decided that they’re a “good guy,” they got all sorts of support that you wouldn’t have expected — things like tips from the inside, where the court bailiffs would give them hints about how to navigate the system better. Or they would be offered opportunities, such as alcohol monitoring devices for their cars that would allow them to still get to work and still navigate some of these problems that other folks could not.

Hence the name of your talk, where we see this subjective distinction between the “bad people” and the “good guys.”

Exactly. It’s like the population’s broken down into roughly two sets of folks. There are the ones that are just kind of assumed to be bad people. In fact, I have quotes from our sheriff talking about all the bad people that they have to protect their communities from. And then there’s those kind of good ol’ boys about whom they’ll say, “They’re not bad people. They just made a mistake.” And for them, the stigma doesn’t stick because they already have this protective bubble—that supportive community—around them.

And does socioeconomic status come into play here, whereby the good ol’ boys tend to be more affluent and the bad people tend to be less affluent?

Absolutely. I would say it’s not only social class but also, of course, race. There were definitely people who felt like they had been racially targeted or that their race mattered in their interactions. Some really felt like they were targeted in certain ways for being Indigenous or for being Latinx.

But I think what was most interesting to me was that class mattered more in this sample than race. And social standing in the community or social integration mattered more than either. Most of the people who had really positive [post-incarceration] experiences were more likely to be middle class, or at least comfortable. And yet if somebody was poor but had really strong social ties to the community, or was from a family that was well regarded, they still had an easier time. People that had what I call moral capital in their communities—which is basically just being known as good citizens, hard workers, or from good, strong families—did tend to have better outcomes, even if they were from a low-income background.

Did any other interesting findings emerge from this project?

One of the really interesting wrinkles to the research project is that there were two rounds of interview data. One was in 2020–21 and the other was in 2023–24.

In between those two rounds of data collection was the Blake decision. That was the state-level decision that decriminalized the personal use amount of drugs in 2021. They’ve since been reclassified as a misdemeanor, but it really changed the way we handle use amount of drugs in Washington State.

Small towns are really good at publicizing the misdeeds of their community members in ways that cities are not.

What I discovered in the research was that, along with Blake, there was some money that went into things like rehabilitative services — things like system navigation programs that actually help folks recover. And some of our communities have really run with that money and taken advantage of the opportunity to expand the services that they make available to people who come in and out of the jails who clearly have substance abuse problems.

In the communities that have made use of those opportunities, I heard really interesting stories where people talk about these shame spirals that made it so that they couldn’t recover from their addictions. And once they were provided with the right combination of often wraparound services that would include sober housing and drug and alcohol treatment, usually intensive outpatient treatment, drug court, all these kinds of things, a lot of these folks had really different experiences where they no longer felt ashamed of themselves. They now felt like they were being reintegrated into their communities and that people were proud of them. People didn’t judge them in the same way. And that was often one of the major factors that not only let them get their lives back together, but help them stay clean and sober and move on with their lives.

Aside from the Blake ruling, did COVID impact some of the trends you were seeing?

COVID definitely changed everything. The original design for the interviews was actually to be in-person in the two jails that were closest to me. And COVID threw a wrench in that. So we pivoted at that point to phone interviews, which turned out to be a real blessing for multiple reasons.

One was that it allowed me to cast a wider net and interview people across all six counties instead of just the two that I could easily commute to. Second, and we hadn’t really anticipated this part, but jail stays can be really short. So opening it up to people who were no longer currently incarcerated meant that I got a much broader sense of who goes in and out of a jail. It meant I was also speaking with people who only spent a night there for a DUI.

And doing the two rounds really helped us to see things like the impact of COVID as well as the impact of Blake — you know, different ways in which historical events had impacted people’s lives and outcomes. And without really meaning to, it allowed us to trace the explosion of fentanyl in Washington State and see that evolve through people’s stories. It’s an interesting snapshot of a moment in time.

Even if it is a snapshot, are there some potential solutions that we can draw from your findings?

One of the more effective supports that we’ve heard about are these recovery navigator programs. There are these folks—usually people with lived experience, meaning that they’ve also been through the system themselves and often struggled with addiction in one way or another—who are just an aide that helps people navigate the post-arrest experience. A lot of what they do is just literally provide rides. They’ll get you to court if you need to go to court. They will get you to your intensive outpatient program if you need to get to that. They’ll get you to treatment. They’ll help you move around these spaces where there’s no transportation. What they do is just provide for those lacks in the system.

And, finally, do attendees come away from the talk questioning this “good vs. bad” binary?

When I have presented the talk to non-incarcerated populations, there’s a lot of chuckling. Everybody sees somebody they know in the talk, or I describe an experience that they’ve heard of. A lot of the quotes that I read in the talk are from people who are really just decent humans who made a mistake or got caught up in something that they didn’t know how to get out of easily. They have multiple types of vulnerabilities sometimes.

But a lot of what they’re saying is, “Just because I did something wrong doesn’t mean I am a bad person.” To me, that’s the important takeaway. Beyond all of the details of the rural dynamics, these are often people that are struggling with all sorts of different issues that are outside of their control.

I think we’re improving our understanding of things like addiction, but we still have a long way to go, particularly in rural communities, to understanding how and why people end up on the wrong side of the law. And it’s not actually helpful to stigmatize them.

E.J. Iannelli is a freelance writer, editor, and translator based in Spokane. He’s a regular contributor to regional newspapers and magazines as well as the Times Literary Supplement.

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The scholar and historian focuses on African American women’s history in the United States, looking particularly at civil rights history, leadership, and politics. Cobbins-Modica’s analysis of Black activism exists in the intersection of gender and race, past and present, national and local. In the shadow of civil rights moments like Selma, Alabama’s “Bloody Sunday,” or the March on Washington, African Americans in the American West fought against a quieter violence—which sprang from the same insidious root.

Doubly overlooked in this Southern-focused narrative are the Black Washington women whose activism played a pivotal role in civil rights efforts both within the state and on a national scale. In nationally recognized groups, through small local grassroots campaigns, and as individuals, they fought to combat Seattle’s racist and segregationist practices that lurked beneath a veneer of perfunctory equality. Cobbins-Modica, who is currently in the midst of writing a century-long history of Black women’s activism in Seattle, focuses on the particular “political ferment” of 1960s Seattle in a talk for Humanities Washington, “We Are Also in Bondage Here: Black Women in the Washington Civil Rights Movement.”

Where does Washington fit into the larger civil rights narrative? What—and who—has been overlooked? And what might the profound achievements owed to Black women in this period teach us about addressing the issues that define today?

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Humanities Washington: Why is Washington State seen as an “exception” rather than a microcosm of U.S. society?

Quin’Nita Cobbins-Modica: Washington State, in the popular imagination, is seen as this racially progressive—and subsequently exceptional—place. What I mean by that is that it’s seen as being more racially tolerant, without much of the racial issues that other cities may have experienced. This is due, in part, to its early civil rights laws that were on the books in the late nineteenth century: collectively, Black men and women, especially by 1910, could vote unencumbered. For Black people, there were not really any legalized forms of segregation or profound instances of racial violence—to a degree.

At the same time, there did exist, of course, laws and legal barriers for Indigenous groups and Asian American groups, especially the Chinese—both of whom experienced varying forms of racial violence and vitriol. Even in the absence of legal barriers for Black residents, there has always been a color line, or Jim Crowism that existed in the state. In that sense, it doesn’t make Washington State that different from other parts of the U.S.

I complicate this idea, or myth, of Washington being exceptional through the examination of Black women’s activism, and to understand the ways they consistently fought against what we call de facto racial segregation. De facto segregation is discrimination by custom and practice. It’s not necessarily something that’s legalized. Whereas de jure is legalized, which is what you would find in the American South.

I explore how Black women exposed and challenged this color and gender line on multiple fronts: particularly in housing, education, and employment. Essentially, by the 1960s, they understood that their perceived relative freedoms in the state (and what I mean by “relative freedom” is the absence of the legal barriers, with the exception of racial covenants) were precarious. They had to be vigilant in advancing Black freedom and expanding women’s rights against the forces that sought to undermine their humanity and citizenship.

In a letter written to Dr. King, one of the women I highlight drove home this point. She drew a connection between Black struggles here and Black struggles in the South. She argued against the notion that Black people have an exceptional life in Washington. They encountered covert forms of oppression and, quite frankly, were not free at all, because she recognized that Black freedom in the PNW was tied up with the freedom— or unfreedom—of those in the Jim Crow South. They did not deal with racial violence, per se, but they dealt with high unemployment rates, residential segregation, school segregation, and other societal barriers throughout the state. She contended that Black Pacific Northwesterners, collectively, were feeling the weight of oppression and white supremacy that was having the same impact on Black life here.

“Many people often associate the civil rights movement as a Southern phenomenon and are unaware that a movement existed here in Washington State. It was indeed a nationwide movement.”

What did the activism of Black women look like in the height of the civil rights movement?

We can start with the 1940s when we began to see a surge in Black activism due to wartime migration. Black women were involved in concerted efforts and campaigns to challenge racial discrimination and segregation here in Washington State—one of them being employment discrimination. You have groups of women representing different organizations, such as the Seattle Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters [a labor union founded to improve the working conditions of those employed by the Pullman Company]; also, women in the NAACP [Women in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]; the Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and to a certain degree women in the Urban League. They all fought to secure a fair employment practices law [the Washington State Law Against Employment Discrimination], which was one of the first in the nation to ban racial discrimination in employment. That occurred in 1949.

A law is only effective if it’s enforced. Even though the Fair Employment Practices law banned racial discrimination in employment and had a provision that established a state board against discrimination, it was somewhat ineffective. Black women had to continue to fight for the enforcement of these laws in the 1950s. By the time we get to the 1960s, many joined new organizations such as CORE [Congress of Racial Equality], where they engaged in non-violent direct action campaigns and strategies borrowed from the Southern movement. Many women went out to stores to fight head-on with those businesses that wouldn’t hire Black folks. They worked through negotiation, boycotting, and picketing in order to force private businesses—like Nordstrom, the Bon Marche, and Safeway—to hire African American workers. Over two dozen Black employees, for example, were hired because of that direct action campaign (this was in 1962), but that was just a small victory in changing that social policy.

Another example is women organizing, again through CORE, the NAACP, and the Urban League to eradicate housing and residential discrimination. For instance, they fought to get an open and fair housing policy passed through the Seattle City Council. Vivian Caver set up human rights councils in a number of white neighborhoods in King County to try to win white support for fair housing legislation. She would go on to head the Seattle Human Rights Department in 1975. Women’s efforts in helping to drive those campaigns led the Seattle City Council in 1968 to pass a housing ordinance that prohibited unfair and discriminatory housing practices. This also came at the same time Congress passed a federal act to ban housing discrimination across the nation.

Another profound area of activism was education. Again, Black women—through the NAACP, CORE, and other organizations—banded under the leadership of E. June Smith, president of the Seattle NAACP between 1963 and 1968. She helped lead a two-day boycott of the Seattle Public Schools in 1966 because of the school board’s inaction to integrate the public schools. Due to the ongoing education demands, by 1978, the Seattle School Board instituted a voluntary desegregation plan without a court order–which remains controversial. Many community members, especially Black mothers and parents, didn’t particularly like the fact that their children were being bussed to white schools, nor did they support the closure of their neighborhood schools, which exacerbated the internal conflicts within the community on the direction of the civil rights agenda. For the most part, though, Black residents were very much committed to desegregating the school system, eradicating racial inequities, supporting the hiring of Black educators and administrators, and ensuring that their children received a quality education.

Was your focus more on groups of women activists or did you look at individuals?

I’m looking at both individual and collective efforts by Black women. Women helped to devise strategies, disseminated information, gave speeches, wrote correspondence, picketed, boycotted, facilitated meetings, and provided leadership and resources to the many organizations. They often held multiple memberships. So, I’m interested in women who worked through organizations and also those who worked independent of them as well. They did not all necessarily agree on strategy, method, or even what issues to prioritize.

Like the woman who wrote the letter to Dr. King. What was her name?

Yes, that’s where I begin the talk to frame the discussion. Her name is Freddie Mae Gautier. She was a Seattleite and, at that time, a clerk in the King County Sheriff ’s Office. She was also a very respected community organizer and helped co-found the Western chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded by King and a cohort of Black ministers in the South. She was also a founder of the Benefit Guild, which emerged in the aftermath of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed the four little girls. They raised money for the families.

In her letter, she urges King to come to Seattle, to the Pacific Northwest. She clearly outlines the conditions and the specific grievances that Black people are facing here: she says, essentially, “We’re having some of the same problems that exist in the South, but a lot of people can be complacent here. We need you to come.” She was very much concerned with Black women who were on the front lines in the South—because, she said, we are also ready to act, and we’re going to be on the front lines as well of this movement for justice.

She’s just one of the individual women I mention. I focus on others: Vivian Caver, who worked with the Urban League and held workshops to teach and encourage white residents about the importance of supporting open housing legislation; and E. June Smith, who was arguably one of the most visible Black women leaders at the forefront of the movement.

Another person I highlight is Roberta Byrd Barr, who was an educator in the Seattle Public Schools. She also ran a television program called Face to Face to address the racial issues Black people were experiencing in this city and in the state. In the height of the [Seattle Public Schools] boycott, she invited members of the school board to engage in a public discussion around school integration. She also traveled the state advocating for Black history and designing culturally responsive curricula for teachers to implement in their classrooms. She believed there needed to be intensive training for educators in relating to students of color and Black students—as the school districts underwent significant changes to address school integration and the push for bussing.

Those are just four of the six or seven women I highlight in the talk. Of course, there are more!

Image: A signing ceremony and reception attended by Freddie Mae Gautier (on the right) officially recognizing Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a City holiday. Photo courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archives.

Is the talk mostly expository, for the purpose of highlighting these women and these organizations that haven’t really been highlighted, or is there a way that this history maps onto today that you hope audiences take away?

My purpose is never just to highlight, to just say “Black women were there.” Instead, it is critical to understand the significance of their experiences and involvement. One of the main takeaways is to show that by centering Black women’s leadership and activism within a local context, we allow for a more nuanced understanding of the unique circumstances of the Black freedom struggle in this region that necessitated both similar and different protest strategies to combat racial discrimination and de facto segregation. Many people often associate the Civil Rights Movement as a Southern phenomenon and are unaware that a movement existed here in Washington State. It was indeed a nationwide movement.

Another major takeaway is the various ways that Black women have been on the front lines for social justice and change. As I mentioned before, many of them spearheaded multiple campaigns but are rendered invisible and marginalized in PNW and civil rights history.

A third takeaway are the lessons we can draw from women about the strategies they employed in the past to address some of those same issues we are facing today. Engagement in social justice work requires education. Black women activists educated themselves about the issues and their roles as citizens. They also educated others. They organized, strategized, and built coalitions—like Vivian Caver and women in CORE, for example. With such a small Black population, they needed people power, and to work with other groups to challenge these institutional barriers. It was, therefore, important to engage in coalitional politics for large-scale change to occur.

The ways that Black women conceptualized freedom can help us to (re)think what freedom means today, and it provides a lens for us to understand our contemporary moment and women’s place within it. I discuss the newer generation of Black women— some who have taken up the mantle and are continuing the work of the Black freedom struggle on the grassroots level, using some of the same direct action strategies and tactics of the past; and there are others who are using their government and leadership positions to create policies through the legislative process to address systemic racial, gender, and economic issues. There are still the same struggles around poverty, fair wages, housing insecurity, healthcare, and education–therefore, the freedom movement continues.

Ariana Sutherland is a freelance writer based in Seattle.

The post “We Are Also in Bondage Here” appeared first on Humanities Washington.

Van Lanen currently teaches history at Lewis-Clark State College. Her dissertation-turned-book, The Washington Apple: Orchards and the Development of Industrial Agriculture, examines how economic factors, promotional strategies, and infrastructure development transformed Washington into a major apple-producing region.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Humanities Washington: Can you briefly tell us about how apples became so popularized in Washington?

Amanda L. Van Lanen: Part of it has to do with the railroads. When they were building them across the West, they were looking for the best economic use of the land. When they were looking at parts of Washington, especially parts that needed to be irrigated, [they had] to have a crop that would be profitable enough to support the cost of irrigation. Apples were the one thing that could be sold for a profit and also be stored long enough to be shipped all over the country without spoiling. That’s partly why they chose them.

But on top of that, there were some crop failures back East that put Washington growers in the market. Washington also very early on had to advertise their apples with giveaways, cookbooks, billboards, posters, and even films. Silent film stars in the 1920s made promotional films for the Washington apple industry. I haven’t been able to track down the originals; I don’t know if they still exist. But I’ve seen still shots from them. [That publicity caused consumers] to associate Washington with apples.

What has been the most surprising thing you’ve learned through your research on how apples became so industrialized?

When I’ve given this talk, especially when I went outside of Washington, the thing that surprises people the most is that the place where we grow apples is a desert. It doesn’t make a lot of logical sense, because the primary [apple] growing regions in Washington get less than 10 inches of rain a year. Everything has to be irrigated, and that really runs counter to people’s mental image of lush apple orchards and everything being green and pastoral.

The thing that I found most surprising, as I was starting to research, is how much the railroads were involved. Because the railroads were really instrumental in not only providing transportation, but they were friends with all of the major players in the apple industry. They helped in various ways by financing irrigation, canals, and other infrastructure that the apple industry needed.

How exactly did you get started writing your book, and what motivated or inspired you?

It was actually my PhD dissertation, so that’s kind of the core of it. But then, I just really was motivated to tell this story. It’s such an interesting story, going all the way back to the first apple tree in Washington State and all the way to the present.

A lot of the records I worked with were from the Minnesota Historical Society, which were the railroad records. The fabulous thing about those is they have both sides of the correspondence. You can really see the conversations people were having, what they were thinking, and how they were communicating with each other. This is not always the case with historical research, you don’t always get both sides of the conversation. So it was a lot of fun.

Bigger than just apples, what do you hope Washingtonians walk away with after your talk?

Food systems are complicated. One of the things in recent conversation is climate change and how that affects our food systems. We know the pandemic-affected distribution systems, and questions of equity when we’re thinking about things like healthy food and organic food and which communities have access to those things and which don’t.

I hope that’s something that will open up the conversation because on the one hand, apples are an industrial product. There are a lot of inputs that go into them. They use a lot of pesticides and things that aren’t always great for the environment. On the other hand, it enables people to have access to fresh fruit at a very low cost. So that’s a complicated thing that we have to wrestle with. I would like people to just think about that complexity and those tensions. There’s not always an easy answer. But hopefully, understanding how we got to this point can help us think about how we move forward.

Now for the fun questions, what is your favorite apple?

I buy them from my local orchard, and he grows Galas and Fujis. So that’s what I tend to get the most, two miles from my house. They’re fresh. They’re amazing.

What are your go-to foods to cook with apples?

Apple pie of course. My family really likes pie. Or apple crisp. I make a lot of apple crisps because it’s faster than a pie.

Can you help settle the apple pie debate: Which apple is the best to make pie with?

I don’t think there’s many grocery store apples actually that make great pies. In my opinion, they’re all too sweet. So when I make apple pie, I usually put in some cider vinegar and lemon juice because they’re all too sweet for me.

Texturally, some of them turn to applesauce when you bake with them. Historically, they grew apples that were good for cooking and apples that were good for eating. Predominantly now, the commercial ones we produce are the eating type. We tried a taste test this winter where I made five different varieties. We concluded that Fuji made the best.

Do you have any apple recommendations for readers to try?

If you do have a chance, at a farmers market, try any of the old heirloom varieties. There are some orchards that are experimenting with those older varieties that have been lost commercially. There are thousands of varieties of apples that people used to grow that we’ve kind of lost. There’s one called Wolf River. They grow Winter Bananas at the research farm at WSU and different kinds of Jonathans and Macintoshes.

And just be adventurous and try whatever your grocery store offers, because it seems like every time I go, there’s something new.

Hong Ta is a freelance multimedia journalist based in Seattle. She specializes in food and culture reporting.

The post Story Core appeared first on Humanities Washington.

One of her children’s math teachers from Gonzaga Prep, John Tombari, knocked, introducing himself. “I’m here to welcome you and support your son,” he said, and he meant it. Though he lived across town, he picked up her son every morning to bring him to school, since driving her son to and from school conflicted with Idumwonyi’s teaching.

This teacher–who Idumwonyi calls “the face of humanity”–gave her inspiration during a time when it was sorely needed. In a city far from her birthplace, she found a warmth of human feeling that felt very familiar to her. Mr. Tombari had extended a generosity that made her feel human. Though he would not use the word, he practiced what Idumwonyi calls Ubuntu.

Being the recipient of Ubuntu from someone who did not know this African practice motivated Idumwonyi. She already brings this practice into her teaching, but the math teacher’s open-heartedness helped her see that outside of the university, people yearn to find a way through an epidemic of loneliness. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warns that social isolation has the same impacts on health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. But addressing this illness does not require complicated medical intervention; the remedy is to build relationships. Ubuntu offers a way. Ubuntu is a rich tradition built on the idea that we are human first before all the other labels–profession, race, gender, citizenship–that we may bear day to day. One act of kindness can change the outlook of another person by serving as a living reminder of this basic fact.

Ubuntu, as Idumwonyi explains it, is more than just one person treating another kindly. It is a “cultural intelligence” that creates a system of care that encourages individuals to not act as isolated units, but as the interconnected people we are. “A little show of kindness can make a turnaround for a person to feel loved, to feel human, to feel accepted, to feel embraced, even though a person is going through the storm of life,” Idumwonyi explains. “So when you come within the space of Ubuntu, I tell people you don’t need to connect with everybody in this space. Start with the person next to you. Whatever story you hear from that person may open you up to forming connections beyond that space.” Such listening and exchange of stories builds human flourishing. Recognizing, creating, and nourishing Ubuntu is what has helped Idumwonyi create her own happiness wherever she goes, in whatever situation. “You need other people to make this happiness,” says Idumwonyi, to start your story afresh when life brings you unanticipated twists. In a space of Ubuntu, where “I am because we are,” she feels her authentic self. As part of Humanities Washington’s Speakers Bureau, she has delighted in building Ubuntu by modeling how human flourishing starts–with the simple act of sharing stories that guide us in knowing how to look out for one another as a remedy to loneliness and alienation.

The following interview was edited for length and clarity.

Itohan Idumwonyi

Humanities Washington: How does the concept of Ubuntu help us see our connections to others differently?

Itohan Idumwonyi: You cannot say you are who you are, without looking back at those who have been in your life: your parents, your family, your neighbors. Ubuntu asks you to think of all the little and huge ways all these people support you. You’re not going to say, “I became who I am today by myself,” no. Instead: I am because we are. We need each other to survive, and we say “thank you” for giving me your shoulders to lean on.

Ubuntu’s mantra is, “I am because we are, and we are because I am interconnectedness.” It doesn’t matter whether you are American, whether you are Asian, whether you are African. Irrespective of where you are from, there is this essence of humanity that we all go to or come from, that we draw from before you became African, Native, American, Asian. You are human first.

Ubuntu pushes us to move beyond saying “I can’t help this one” because this one is different from me. Moving beyond asks you first to see the human in me. And to listen to the thing inside of you crying out to support this person. This is what Ubuntu points to. Ubuntu tells you to raise support for another person within your neighborhood, your immediate environment. We need each other to survive and flourish. And if I’m not in a position to help myself, it will be hard to help others. So the first thing is, I need to be well, to have the energy, to have the strength, to have the grace to stretch my hand to another person. If I am so weak, down and out, it will be hard for me to reach out. Thinking of your own flourishing helps you support another person. You don’t own another person’s problem. You only support them to also become.

How does Ubuntu help guide people to see our interconnectedness?
When you meet somebody, remember that however they react to you, it’s not because they don’t like your face. They have their demons they are fighting. You start building Ubuntu by connecting with the person beside you.

 Irrespective of where you are from, there is this essence of humanity that we all go to or come from, that we draw from before you became African, Native, American, Asian. You are human first.

When I’m teaching or doing a Humanities Washington talk, I pose some questions as conversation starters. Whatever story you hear from the other person, it’s a way of opening up to the person. Just starting a conversation with that one person you meet can make a difference. It nourishes a cultural intelligence that unites through shared humanity.

We need to connect. We are interconnected people, we are social beings. Living in isolation is demoralizing and depressing. It puts us in a space where we don’t get help because either we are too ashamed to ask for help or we think we’re supposed to have everything put together. But no, we all don’t have everything put together. Ubuntu allows you to be reached, and allows you to reach other people.

What’s something you enjoy about talking about Ubuntu with audiences?

I have been in situations where people do not welcome others until they are introduced as professor of XYZ. But when I do Humanities Washington talks, I like to be introduced as me. I am just Itohan Idumwonyi. I like to be treated as human, not because of whatever I have added. Let us shed all the labels that put us into separate compartments. Compartmentalization breeds division. Ubuntu is telling us, hey, look away from all this division. When we do this, we will speak to our authenticity, and our authenticity will foster human flourishing.

I’ve been in talks where people tear up. I’m not sure if it’s me, if it’s the Ubuntu conversation, I honestly don’t know. But it gives me a sense that the talk is having an impact. You’re getting handshakes, you’re getting hugs, you’re getting thanks for creating conversations that impact people– conversations that help us better interact in loving and accepting ways. Let your hand be the bridge that supports human flourishing–UBUNTU!

Michelle Liu is a professor of English and the associate director of writing programs at the University of Washington. She is a former member of Humanities Washington’s Speakers Bureau.

The post I Am Because We Are appeared first on Humanities Washington.

I’m on hold. Playing tag on the phone is not as fun as #IRL. At least in real tag, there are moments of triumph. Phone tag is nothing but worry and wait. Especially with oncologists.

The steam looks like smoke, and that’s what I’m thinking about. Have my habits caught up with me? The first time, I was 22. What blame can a young body bear for its tumors? Still surfing my parent’s insurance, I had not yet reached a quarter century. But now, I am 36, and wondering if possibility has come to call at my door. I must own my ruin.

Lo, I am low.

Ow, I said, on the toilet. Not a good sign. The first time I felt this strange internal twist, which reveals where my intestines coil past my ovary, I was a summer intern at TIME Magazine, warming a dorm toilet at Columbia University.

I was lucky to be there, and so I worked through pain for weeks. I took jogs through Central Park. Healthy living would unbind my bloat, right? I went to the ER when I could no longer bear it. I checked out before dawn, eager to get some sleep before work. In one nightmarish memory on a long summer evening, the sidewalks hot and thick with trash bags I loved because they belonged to New York, I held a vibrating paddle to my stomach while an unhappy woman evacuated my bowels with a suctioning waterwand. A colonic.

A week later, I learned that a large cyst was threatening to rupture my left ovary, and two days after that, I woke up without that cyst or my right ovary, swallowed first by a tumor and then by a surgeon’s bag. Even now, all these years later, I think back to that woman, and what she almost did to me with her vibrating paddle. Imagine a cyst rupturing and taking its host ovary like a meteor striking the earth into a gas cloud of blood.

I was lucky to have children, and it is they whom I think of most today, they whom I must protect. Just one more whiskey, and some paragraphs to stave off despair.

But it could be a cyst! That’s what I’m telling myself. Just a cyst. What joy in that just. Or a burst follicle. Fine by me! The truth is that I don’t know what caused my period to last two and a half weeks, though I resented the second box of tampons. My interest in sex takes a dive when there’s a string. But I kept spotting. When the anguish came, and I was again on the toilet, I made a note in my iPhone (right then and there) to call my doctor, remembering my toes spread against that dorm tile, stifling my cries to spare my roommates.

So many people told me to have children before it was too late. The hectoring began before the harvest of my ovary, when I was still an uppity college grad, a dewy fern. The top foreign editor at TIME took me aside and said, Here’s how you do it:

Move to a foreign country while the children are young because that’s where there are good stories and cheap childcare. Work for a bureau, and then take it over. Come back here when you’re set up and your kids are in school.

That’s what she did, and it worked for her. She was trying to help me. I think she saw how much I wanted. And still do.

I remember filing my last feed to TIME from the hospital. I was proud of my determination to keep working, fighting my blank terror in a room built for the sick. Are you sure you want to make calls about Friendster, my editor asked? And I told her, Yes! Plenty of time with nothing to do but wait. Everything’s fine.

No, she replied. No it isn’t.

But there was no job for me. Not there. No explanation but for a get-well card and some flowers. Swim along, little fish, do not linger in our pool.

I should not measure foregone conclusions, given the alternatives. But the pressure to procreate gained strength at odd times, like the morning a doctor failed to insert an IUD into my uterus, me crying and making noise so I could hold still. After, she looked me in the eye — I was still on my back — and told me, Don’t wait too long to have kids.

I did, she said. And then I couldn’t.

I will never forget her face, that pain unshed and glowing. Today I am 43, and right back to another scare. Yes, I sat on this essay for seven years. I might feel as good as I ever will. But I listened to her. When I turned 33, it was like a timer went off. I had two kids in two years. And now I am afraid they will lose me.

I made a log of the 10 calls needed to schedule a pelvic ultrasound, blood test and office visit with a nurse practitioner, not even the doctor, who won’t see me unless death threatens. Forty-five minutes in all, and if I weren’t so persistent, I wouldn’t be going to radiology tomorrow. I’d be going in January, when my deductible and out-of-pocket costs would once again be a blank slate.

Cancer eats time. Anyone who’s been near it knows that. Not just the years that one might have had, if the end is hastened, but the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and yes, years spent managing proximity to the specter.

What luck, to have a cyst whose removal provided a camera such intimate access to my insides. Otherwise, I might be dead. Ever since, I’ve spent thousands upon thousands of dollars getting checked every which way. Feet in the stirrups, breathe in, breathe out, don’t tense your muscles — an impossibility, I am astounded by what women do under duress — as with one hand in, and one hand out, a doctor palpitates the soft tissue that can be reached in the pelvic region. And yes, into the rectum goes a finger with an apology from its owner, a final insult, hours after I’ve been asked to insert a wand, its length lubricated, so that my insides can be imaged, my bladder filling and filling and filling with the water I was told to chug. Later I watch a woman insert a butterfly needle into my vein, her sweet smiles to distract from the spill of red into a vial, and another, so neat and tidy in a labeled row.

Years ago, I crowded these appointments into days that ended with me doubled over my keyboard on deadline. If you could only hear my purpose as I strode through the halls! My heels pounded that hospital floor in denial that I could be brought down by anything, even my own body. I am not one of you, my outfits implied to the real cancer patients.

I used to think of that time — waiting in a chair, or on my back, on a gurney — as spent. Lost. Flushed. Killed. Anything but needed. But now, I wonder. What little humility I have comes through my vulnerabilities. I do cry, sometimes, looking up at the tile ceiling, after the room has emptied of the male tech and his female assistant, paid to sit in a chair and assure nothing terrible happens to the woman on the table, which tells you how often it has.

Illustration: Michael Riester.

And yet it never occurred to me to ask my husband to come along to hold my hand, and I’ve always said no when he’s asked if I need him there. Why? Part of me knows that I dislike being exposed, and if this essay makes you question that statement, perhaps I’ve made progress, though it is a different thing to share life shaped into art than it is to share a life.

Not every cancer story is a love story, and not every love story is a love story all of the time. Maybe I don’t ask him along because I don’t like how people defer to men when they’re around. Maybe I don’t like what happens to my decisions when they involve him, how he tugs my thoughts down paths I’d rather walk alone.

Maybe I’m angry because I wanted to take out the remaining fallopian tube during the occasion of my second birth. I knew a Caesarian delivery was a strong possibility, given my first baby (sunny side up, back labor for a full day, me vomiting constantly and no meds, my cervix refusing to dilate for the huge head ramming ramming ramming).

Once I was on the mend, I brought my husband with me to see my gyn/oncologist. They agreed that, unless we were absolutely sure we didn’t want more kids, it shouldn’t be done. I don’t want more children, I told them, unless there’s a disaster of some kind, and I needed to gestate a reason not to die of grief.

Let’s not make permanent decisions, said my husband.

I suspect him of wanting to see me pregnant again and again, though I don’t know why. I should have listened to my other ob/gyn, who told me that, given that unlikely occasion of a child death, I could always get pregnant via IVF, which bypasses the tube that serves as a nursery for most ovarian cancers. Many doctors no longer recommend removing the whole ovary, which is what they used to do, sending women into the desiccation of hormonal depletion decades before our time. Now, they watch and wait. Turns out, the female bits do real work for the body.

With their urging, I decided to keep my left tube, and the ovary. And now I will pay to find what they harbor.

Don’t think about it, said my husband. Your mind is powerful. It could be telling your body how to feel.

Don’t tell me what to do or how to think, I spat. It’s my body. I got this.

In Of Woman Born, a book about motherhood that took her two whole decades to approach, Adrienne Rich wrote, Women are controlled by lashing us to our bodies. Like me, she had a kind and supportive husband who understood her need to write. And though seventy years elapsed between her motherhood and mine, I found patterns that should not have startled me, but did:

Before my third child was born I decided to have no more children, to be sterilized…My husband, although he supported my decision, asked whether I was sure it would not leave me feeling ‘less feminine.’ In order to have the operation at all, I had to present a letter, counter-signed by my husband, assuring the committee of physicians who approved such operations that I had already produced three children, and stating my reasons for having no more. Since I had had rheumatoid arthritis for some years, I could give a reason acceptable to the male panel who sat on my case; my own judgment would not have been acceptable. When I awoke from the operation, twenty-four hours after my child’s birth, a young nurse looked at my chart and remarked coldly, ‘Had yourself spayed, did you?’

I go alone. Before dawn, I wake to silence my phone and leave the house to my husband and sons, so beautiful in repose. Relaxed, their faces are soft and round. One day they will sharpen and thicken into strong lines like his. I want to see them grow.

After the intern and her overseer reboot the ultrasound machine, I start my jokes routine. It gets me through hard times with strangers in front of whom I do not wish to cry. In the blood draw waiting area, my one sob (quiet though it was) sent a shimmer of response through the other people. What could I say to them, I who still had my hair? I who, a week ago, was worried about losing weight. Cancer! The diet you don’t plan!

Many things cause pain, and not all of them are cancer, says the supervisor before the wand goes in, or should I say, before I insert it, having requested the honor from the intern whose inch-to-the-left poke, I told them, Took me back to high school. They guffawed before they could lock it down, and I was pleased, despite the wand waving around inside me.

The intern is too inexperienced to remember that she shouldn’t answer my question — Don’t see a little baby hanging out where it shouldn’t be, do ya? — for an ectopic pregnancy would mean abortion or my death by hemorrhage. One or the other, and no in-between. Think about that, in times like ours.

Their faces grow somber in the pale light of the image I cannot see. The longer they look at the screen, the less they hold my eye, until, by the end, the supervisor speaks to the pillow behind my head, and the intern to her keyboard, their movements gaining speed, briskness, authority, as soon as the report is typed. I go to the bathroom so they don’t have to avoid me. Good luck with everything, the intern says when I leave, worry tinging her gaze.

Facing diagnoses that have not yet arrived, I command myself to appreciate what’s here. Existential anxiety can be eclipsed. For a moment you see death dancing like a corona of solar winds, visible now that the moon has blocked the sun. The curve of the horizon turns gray and ghostly, all hues sapped from the sky except for the deep night of space. The birds quiet down. Flowers close against the cold, which you can feel in your body, knowing as if for the first time that we are part of a celestial order that cares not for our worries. Seen from outside the path of totality, the shattering prospect of a diagnosis is scattershot, a halo of leaves dappling the ground with estranged outlines. But within that path, the darkness is total.

These moments — like the one we are living, when women have to cross states and picket lines to access the care we need — thin the veil. For a second, we see through them to what is ahead. Even when we’re spared, we’ve seen it. We can’t pretend it’s not there.

Yet there always has been, and there remains, intense fear of the suggestion that women shall have the final say as to how our bodies are to be used, Rich wrote. It is as if the suffering of the mother, the primary identification of woman as the mother—were so necessary to the grounding of human society that the mitigation, or removal, of that suffering, that identification, must be fought at every level, including the level of refusing to question it at all.

I write hard because I want to build a body of work before it’s too late. Again and again, I defer gratification for future gain. I know I won’t be paid for these hours. It comes back to time. I may not have much. Facing tumors, facing toddlers, facing essays, facing my yearning to write more books, facing my desire to spend time with my kids my husband my friends my books my writing my own mind my own self feeding and caring for my own body, facing all of it, I want to live to the fullest extent of my imperfect freedom, and I intend to do just that.

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