A few months ago I had the good fortune to hear Rachel Cohen reading from her recently republished A Chance Meeting. Rachel had been one of my professors for my MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. In taking the opportunity to greet her after the reading and she mentioned the first long-form essay published in Callaloo Literary Journal in 2007 — Lonesome Refugees.
Are there TV shows you watch for no apparent good reason? I have an inexplicable affection for home repair shows. The advent of streaming services brought Welcome Home, based in Waco TX, to my screen (until I realized how homophobic and scarily right wing the show’s owners are) and then a whole raft of HGTV based programming featuring builders and renovators in Chicago, Indianapolis, Southern California, Atlanta, Mississippi.
Today I am half-way through the second week of #PlasticFreeJuly sponsored by the Story of Stuff Project. I took a pledge:
I pledge to avoid single-use plastic, to reuse or recycle the plastic that I do use, to educate others about plastic waste, and to take Citizen Muscle actions to make plastic a thing of the past.
We are officially half-way through the year and it’s time for Plastic Free July. I signed the commitment with the The Story of Stuff folks last year. I have done the same this year.
“The medicine of white slaveholders, on the one hand, was deeply implicated in southern legal and economic institutions, which translated slave health into slaveholder wealth. In contrast, enlsaved African-Americans developed a poowerful coountervision of personal and collective enduranceand, when possible, transcendence” Sharla Fett, Working Cures
Part travel journal, part memoir, part historical investigation, all in service to revealing the struggle, courage and losses of the men we loved and who suffered through the White Redemption period of early 20th century Southern life. Subscribe to More Urban Ecology: The Newsletter to receive updates on completion, publisher interest and availability of the work (and other interesting stuff).
Let’s get in touch to discuss a project, yours or mine.
