Voices of August: index page

Your day-by-day guide to who wrote what during a month of guest blog posts:

Aug. 1 -- Voices of August: a month of guest bloggers | George Rede
Aug. 2 -- A "Courageous Conversation" about race | Aki Mori
Aug. 3 -- Field of American Dreams | Patty Chang Anker
Aug. 4 -- The Situation | Nancy Rommelmann
Aug. 5 -- Motherhood: The battle inside my brain | Heather Lalley
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Motherhood: The battle inside my brain

After 12 hours of labor...

By Heather Lalley

Should-Be-Doing List:
Pitching freelance articles
Looking for ways to promote my book
Re-launching my blog
Searching for a job at a bakery
Laundry
Dishes
Jogging

Actually-Doing List:
Changing diapers
Breastfeeding every two hours
Walking a fussy baby up and down the hall of the condo
Singing the Addams Family theme song over and over to elicit gummy, slobbery smiles

It’s raining. And we’ve just walked the 7-year-old down Irving Park Road on Chicago’s northwest side to summer camp. “We” are me – the mom – and Emma – the 52-day-old baby girl strapped to my chest, snoozing in her carrier. I’m writing standing up, swaying my hips and shushing every time I feel her stir.

When her big brother was tiny, I went right back to work as a newspaper reporter for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash.. But not this time.  I guess I’m a stay-at-home-mom now. Or a WAHM, or some such crazy acronym.

Emma

As a hard-charging, career-focused journalism student at Northwestern back in the ‘90s, I looked at SAHMs with much the same respect I’d offer  a cigarette butt wedged in a sidewalk crack. So pathetic, I’d tsk-tsk. Such a waste of a decent brain; throwing away a career to wipe someone’s backside and sing “Little Bunny Foo-Foo.”

But that’s me now, I guess. So you can understand the battle going on in my brain.

Oh, sure. I’m still “working.” Frantically pitching stories and writing during brief snippets of naptime. Lining up signings for my new farm-to-table cookbook while Emma coos in her vibrating chair. Praying I can finish a phone interview without background wailing.

I graduated from the baking and pastry program at Washburne Culinary Institute this spring, though, after two years of hard work. And I worry this time off will make it tough to find a job. I expended too much effort and cash on that degree to just be the room mom who makes pretty cupcakes.

But then I think: Emma will never be 52 days old again. This is my last baby.

 In a blink, she’ll be as big as her brother – all knobby knees and grubby fingernails, flying across the playground.

And I look down at her peach fuzzy head and think, today, this is just where I should be.

Heather Lalley is a mom, wife, recovering journalist, recent culinary-school graduate and author of the just-released “Chicago Homegrown Cookbook.” Find her on Twitter @flourgrrrl.

I met Heather during her tsk-tsk stage when she was a Northwestern junior and I was The Oregonian's recruitment director. I was impressed by her talent and her dry wit, both of which remain in abundant supply.

The Situation

By Nancy Rommelmann

Nancy Rommelmann

My husband and I went on Friday to see a friend's band play at Slabtown. For those who do not know the bar, it's a box, with a floor-level stage and acoustics so loud the only way you know the singer is singing is because you see his mouth moving.

There wasn’t much of a crowd, and only one person dancing; a dude in his 40s who’d squeezed his snowman physique into jeans with acid-washed skulls on the back pockets. He shouted the band’s songs back at them. He spread his arms and soared like a plane. He did that guitar-god jump-kick, and I recognized in him the sort of lonely boy who thirty years ago found a place to alight in punk rock.

When the band took a break, we stepped outside. Twenty feet down the block there was a house party going on. The house was typical enough, an old Portland with a big porch. But who were the people on it, the twenty or thirty people clustered in the yard and on the sidewalk? It was hard to tell. From a distance, the girls looked like hookers, which didn’t make much sense for a house party in Northwest Portland.

“I’m going to take a closer look,” I told my husband.

“Careful,” he said.

I walked up to the party and stood with my back against a tree. The partiers, I could now see, were college-aged, and they partied like college kids, drinking beers and shouting at each other. But where one might have expected green sweatshirts with gold Os, or skinny jeans and 80s T-shirts, there were girls in diaper-shorts as tight as a layer of paint and six-inch stripper sandals. The boys wore ribbed white tops, gold chains, their hair shorn on the sides and spiked on top.

“Can I tawk to youse fa minute?” a girl said to a boy, who did not break from throwing signs and busting into the dance moves that he and his friends performed for what seemed to be an invisible camera.

Even from six feet away, I had no idea what was going on. It was theater of a kind I had not seen in Portland. Among the cugine I grew up around in Brooklyn, sure, but here? Never. The scene was evidently curious to a couple walking past, gals wearing sensible fleece at 1 a.m. on a rainy night. One smiled at the partiers, but I could see she had as little clue as what was going on as I did.

I wanted to stand there an hour and figure it out, and would have, except I sensed more than saw a ripple. Someone had broken character. One of the dudes I’d been drinking in was walking toward me, palms up. He was going to ask me to leave, I thought, or what the hell I was doing here.

"Yo,” he said, moving in so close I had to press my back against the tree. “You want some of The Sit-u-A-tion?"

I tried to think quickly: situation meaning… the party? Meaning: being told to mind my own business? Meaning…

"I said, you want some of The Sit-u-A-tion?" he asked again, which is when I saw he’d pulled up his shirt up and was gyrating his naked torso at me. I started to laugh.

"Yeah, you want some,” he said, and backed away so I might admire his tan and, maybe, that he’d had himself waxed from navel to neck. I introduced myself.

"I'm Will," he said, shaking my hand. So, Will, what was up with the party?

"You know Jersey Shore?" he asked. I haven’t seen the MTV show about rowdy kids from, well, the Jersey Shore, but yes, I told him; I knew it. Oh… this was a Jersey Shore dress-up party!

"No, we are Jersey Shore,” he said. “We are Portland Shore!”

Portland… what? What shore? The shore is ninety miles away, a comment Will apparently found irrelevant, as he moved in close again and said….

“You want some of The Situation?" Up again went the shirt, Will doing his man-hula as if to say, I was very welcome to touch him; that this, in a way I was just starting to figure out, was the answer to all my questions.

I thanked Will; I told him I was married, and could he tell me who these people were and where they came from?

Will lowered his shirt. "You know Beaverton?” he asked. “A lot of them go to school out there.” No, he wasn’t in school anymore; he had an MBA. The house was his.

I told Will I was sorry I’d crashed his party, but I just found it so fascinating. I could see it pleased him that someone thought so. That like The Situation, the character on Jersey Shore whose self-anointed screen name Will had appropriated -- a one-time exotic dancer who, I recall reading, had earned $5 million in the past year -- that Will, too, was a hot commodity. He could, I thought, as easily have affected Mad Men’s Don Draper, and perhaps next year, he would. I thought of my own trying on of identities, the year of wanting to be a tough Puerto Rican chick giving way to gypsy scarves and Gitanes. How one outgrows the costumes but not the emulating. How long ago was it that I wrote Didion in my notes, to remind myself how a chapter must be structured? Oh, that was today.

"Give me your hand,” said Will, and led me through a multi-part handshake that ended with our fingertips tapping. And then we broke, Will back to his party, me back to Slabtown, where the Snowman was still performing for an invisible camera of his own.


Nancy Rommelmann is the author, most recently, of the novel The Bad Mother. Her book of essays and journalism about Los Angeles, "Forty Bucks and a Dream," will be released in November (Dymaxicon). Rommelmann will be a featured author and read from her work at Wordstock 2011.
 
I met Nancy two years ago when a mutual acquaintance recommended her to me as a talented freelancer who might be interested in writing for the Sunday Opinion section I was then editing. We worked together on a handful of essays, including a superb piece on the city's  twentysomethings, "Is Portland the new Neverland?"


Tomorrow: Motherhood: the battle inside my brain | Heather Lalley 

Field of American Dreams

Patty Chang Anker

By Patty Chang Anker
 
My first day in Mr. Weinstein’s fourth grade science class at P.S. 95 in the Bronx, he introduced me as the new student from Toronto.  “So, what do you think of the Blue Jays?” he asked.  I sat at my desk watching the other students watch me, and wondered if it was a trick question.  “They’re terrible,” I replied.  He broke out in a big smile and the rest of the class just about cheered.  Whew.  Right answer.

It was one of many trick questions I got as the new kid, harder than “Hey Chinese girl, can you speak English?”  but a lot easier than “Are you a virgin?” when I had no idea what the word meant.    I was an easy target, an innocent in a sea of street-wise 9-year-olds, but even I knew better than to root against the home team.

We became Yankee fans right away.  My dad, a Chinese immigrant who worked tirelessly to improve his English to improve his job prospects, wanted us to fit in.  He read the New York Times in the morning, watched Walter Cronkite in the evening.  And every chance he could from April to October, he listened to Phil Rizzuto call America’s favorite pastime on the radio. 

He would lie in bed, eyes closed, concentrating on the play-by-play.  My mom, sister and I gave him, the lone man and sports fan in the home, little access to our only television.  Who would, when there was Love Boat to be watched?  But once when we took pity on him and offered a turn, he declined. “I like the radio,” he said. 

I watched him listen to the game. “Here’s the pitch, and the swing and…” and for the moment the ball was in the air he was motionless, at the mercy of the announcer, “and it’s a fly ball to left field.”  Exhale and relax.  Held by a stranger’s voice, both hypnotic and thrilling.

It should have felt like a homecoming for me, moving back to the U.S.  I was born on the fourth of July in Columbia, MO, a Yankee Doodle Dandy.  But my heart belonged to Canada, a place I still associate with fresh air and endless grass, clean snow and smiling people.  When we got to New York the first things I noticed were the gates on the windows of my school, the concrete playgrounds and the many different languages shouted by our neighbors up and down the hall. 

But as dislocated as I felt, there was one tremendous advantage in America.  My birthday. 

Yankee Stadium on July 4 was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.  In the best birthday present of my life, my dad took us to the night game, where everyone was happy to be alive.  “New York crowds are livelier than Toronto crowds,” he observed.  That was an understatement.  The whooping, the rumbling, the music made us grin ear-to-ear.  We got to see the players we’d only heard about, we ate hot dogs and did the 7th inning stretch.  After the game, the fireworks were so close my dad thought sparks might fall on our heads.

My parents always told me that America was a great country, a place where people are free.  Outside the stadium, in the dirty, crime-ridden streets of New York in the early 1980s, it was harder to see.  But inside the stadium, bombs bursting in air, we sang the national anthem with our whole hearts, we cheered for the home team like everyone else.  Go Yankees!  We belonged. 

Last year we treated my dad to a game at Yankee Stadium on his birthday.  We chose a day game so the little ones in our clan could go.  Surrounded by grandchildren, their eyes wide with excitement overlooking the field, he looked as content as could be.  The crowd roared approval.  And grinning ear-to-ear, we did too.

***

Patty Chang Anker is a writer whose work has appeared in Good Housekeeping, Huffington Post and iVillage, and the blogger behind Facing Forty Upside Down (www.upside-down-patty.blogspot.com).  She is married to a Mets fan and no longer lives in the Bronx.  Sigh.

I met Patty when she was a student  journalist and I was a guest editor on the staff of a newspaper project at the 1991 annual convention of the Asian American Journalists Association. Earlier this year, we reconnected on Facebook.

Tomorrow: The Situation | Nancy Rommelmann

A "Courageous Conversation" about race

Aki Mori

By Aki Mori
My school district is sincere and purposeful about reducing "the achievement gap," a term that exists ubiquitously in public education circles. Even if you were not a teacher like me, you might correctly guess that the achievement gap refers to the persistent and troubling difference in academic achievement between White students on the one hand, and Black, Latino, and Native American students on the other. (Asian students don't easily fit into the dichotomy, a topic for another time.) 

As a major component in a larger strategy to combat this pernicious gap, my school district -- like many districts across the country -- has made a philosophical and financial investment in the approach outlined in the groundbreaking book "Courageous Conversations" by Glenn Singleton and Wallace Linton. Last week I just finished reading the book as a pre-condition to attending a district-sponsored training session, which I will attend in August to become a Courageous Conversation “facilitator.” 

The phrase "Courageous Conversations" refers not only to the title of the book, but also to the solution it prescribes: There is a growing cadre of educators in my district who, when they are asked what they are doing to bridge the achievement gap, will answer that they are initiating courageous conversations about race at their various school sites. 

Let me preface the remainder of this piece by saying that "Courageous Conversations" is an amazing, powerful book, one that frequently resonates with my own life experience as an Asian-American. But as I organize my thoughts in preparation for my upcoming training, I have a number of questions.  And these questions are what I am excited to share with the vibrant community of readers of the "Rough and Rede" blog. 

"Courageous Conversations" views White-ness from the narrow perspective of power and privilege. In a nutshell, the book advocates that true change around racial equity in education can not occur until a critical mass of White teachers accept 1) the daily experience of oppression that people of color feel and 2) the unearned privileges that they themselves benefit from, by virtue of being White. Depending on your own personal experience, you might admire the fact that a mostly White school district has adopted this book, or you might be horrified. (I reside in the camp of admiration.) 

Nevertheless, I am left with some significant questions that I plan on raising in a couple of weeks:
 
This might be an appropriate model of conversation among adults, but how does this inform, if at all, our classroom interactions with White students? If any of us as teachers were to accept the notion of White privilege (which, in fact, is difficult to deny), is there any point at which White students should begin to be made aware of it? (Consider that students of color often become aware of White privilege on their own, at a young age—I certainly did.) 

And the next series of questions reflect a vision I have that is different from mainstream attitudes around multi-culturalism and diversity in our schools. Namely, I feel that as educators, we must be more inclusive of White students within the context of celebrating cultural diversity. Why? Because providing White people the space and encouragement to explore and find pride in their heritage helps minorities in the long run by placing cultural celebrations of all types in a context that is neither "us versus them" or somehow "un-American." 

The other critical reason that White students need to view their identity in a cultural context is that eventually (when they are older) they need to understand that American society, though pluralistic, multi-racial, and multi-cultural, consists of institutions that are decidedly rooted in the heritage of Europe — the basis of White privilege, in other words. Such a knowledge places the nagging, persistent challenges facing people of color in a more contextual, non-judgmental light. 

With the above in mind, I pose the following additional questions: 

In our country, is there such a thing as a White (or European-American, if you prefer) culture, distinguishable from “American” culture, which we all share? Not all White families feel a sense of connectedness to their European roots because their generational roots in the United States run so deep. How can students from these families be included in celebrations of cultural diversity? 

It’s an honor to share some of my current reflections about race with the “Rough and Rede” community. Our society desperately needs more meaningful dialogue about race. And our discussions ought to be more honest, more frequent, and more open. Submitting this guest blog is my contribution.


Aki Mori is an educator in a Portland-area school district. I met Aki in 2009 after I published an op-ed piece he submitted to The Oregonian. In his author tagline, I noticed he had previously worked for the New Haven School District in California. That's where I went to grade school in Union City, roughly 40 miles from San Francisco. We met for coffee several weeks later and have kept up a nice correspondence since then.

Coming tomorrow: Field of American Dreams, by Patty Chang Anker

Voices of August: a month of guest bloggers

In the book "The Tipping Point" author Malcolm Gladwell wrote about "Connectors" -- "the kinds of people who know everyone [and who have] a special gift for bringing the world together."

You don't have to be the gregarious, back-slapping type to be a Connector, Gladwell wrote. He cited  Roger Horchow, a Dallas businessman, as one who is "more an observer, with the dry, knowing manner of someone who likes to remain a little bit on the outside. He simply likes people, in a genuine and powerful way, and he finds the patterns of acquaintanceship and interaction in which people arrange themselves to be endlessly fascinating."

It would be a gross overstatement to call myself a Connector. Yet, I'd say there's at least some Roger in me. One of the things that's most satisfying to me is introducing people to each other -- sometimes when they have little or nothing in common, other times when there is a shared experience but they don't know it.

Through my work as a journalist -- especially as The Oregonian's former newsroom recruiter, as the ex-Sunday Opinion editor and now as a web editor focusing on community engagement -- I'm constantly coming into contact with new faces in new places. Layered onto that is my increasing presence in cyberspace, something sparked by my teaching a mini-course at Portland State University a couple years ago and the subsequent birth of this blog.

Put them together, add in the personal contacts from new and longtime friendships, and you have a context for understanding the genesis of this project called "Voices of August."

Why am I doing it? Several reasons.

First and foremost, I think it'll be fun. By inviting a variety of smart individuals I know and respect, I expect there's going to be a high entertainment value.

Second, it could be a painless teaching tool. I'm hoping there are things I might learn from this exercise that I can apply to my work with public blogs and a related project involving blog partnerships.

Third, to bring more diversity to this site. This month you'll hear from people who live in New York City and Southern California, the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest. You'll hear from young journalists, established writers, educators, social justice advocates, a documentary filmmaker or two, parents, adult children, longtime friends, etc. I hope they'll share their passions -- be it music or baseball, race or religion -- or whatever moves them to write.

Credit for this idea goes to Kristen Mira, who invited me to write a guest post on her blog last month. I'm fortunate to know Kristen through my son and daughter-in-law. She was a bridesmaid in their wedding not quite two years ago and she'll be among this month's guests.

So, please ... read, comment, connect with each other -- and help spread the word about this project through your networks via social media, e-mail, snail mail, whatever. If you're not already, become a follower of Rough and Rede.

I can't wait to get started.

***

I'm dedicating this project to DEH. You know who you are and you know why.