Happy Fat Tuesday — #vegan #amreading

Happy fat (vegan) Tuesday!

After a vegan lunch (at Malelani’s Cafe on Germantown Avenue) we stopped at a newish bakery (The Frosted Fox also on Germantown Ave.) to see if they had vegan cookies. They do carry a small selection but they were sold out.  That they carry vegan cookies at all was something that I took as good news. However, no vegan cookies were available for us.  But the vegan lunch at Malelani’s Cafe was wonderful.  Malelani’s is a Greek restaurant with healthy food and several vegan options.

Since going to a plant-based diet last fall for health reasons, I’ve taken off about twenty pounds, feel great, and always feel full.  Weight loss was a side benefit for me as were a number of other conditions that magically went away  I also wrote a novel with a talking dairy cow as a narrator. (More about that later.)

In researching Fat Tuesday I found that it has religious origins — the feast in preparation of the fasting period called lent that Christians celebrate. (I suspect that before that, it was a tradition the pagans celebrated.)

Everything is reinvented.

So happy vegan Fat Tuesday!

 

 

 

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“Truth is trouble” — a tribute to Toni Morrison — #writingcommunity

Yesterday, I went to see a program on Toni Morrison at the African American Museum in Philadelphia.  We saw the movie about Morrison called The Foreigner’s Home which included footage of the Paris street poets who were brought into The Louvre at Morrison’s insistence.

The movie is really remarkable. I highly recommend it.

Several authors, including the Philadelphia-based poet Sonia Sanchez, held a conversation afterwards and one read an essay from the last book that Toni Morrison wrote that included the line:

Truth is trouble.

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The Bible and the rise of LGBTQ suicide —#LGBTQHistoryMonth

 

Recently, I read with considerable consternation that suicide rates among LGBTQ youth are up — again.

Then I was targeted online with anti-LGBT citations from the New Testament. I was tempted to let this go — like most writers I have moved onto other topics — but then it occurred to me that there is a connection between anti-gay sentiment in the Bible and LGBTQ youth committing suicide.  Young people are being taught that they don’t matter — and the few anti-gay passages in the Bible are trickling into the bully culture of mainstream society.

My first thought was that citing the anti-gay passages from the Bible does not make one a Biblical expert.  In fact, the second citation was wrong.  The first citation from Romans (which Biblical scholars believe was written by the Apostle Paul who is believed to have been gay himself, unfortunately with no small amount of internalized homophobia) is one of the few (if not the only) references in the Bible to lesbianism. The citation reads, “women exchanged natural relations for those contrary to nature.”

To which I reply, “Good for them!”

It’s nice to know that some 2,000 years ago, same sex passion did exist and was important enough to have several mentions in the Bible.

There are plenty of references to men engaging in “unnatural” passions with each other. But what I noticed most when I read part of the Bible as research for my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders is the intense misogyny.  By comparison, the anti-gay parts seemed to drop away.  It is after all — one (patriarchal ) history of the creation of the world. Some would say it is THE history of the world.  But there are plenty of creation myths. Then there is science.  The Bible just happens to be a very popular set of creation myths.

There are also, beyond a doubt, some absolutely beautiful passages in the Bible. So rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water, I have decided to claim the parts of the Bible that suit me.

 

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

 

 

 

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Love is love — Happy #Valentines Day!

 

 

Happy Valentines Day!

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Interviewed about THEY — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBT

I was delighted to find that this interview was posted.

Where are you from? How has our childhood influenced you as an author?

I grew up in Levittown, a working-class suburb of Philadelphia in the states. The place was a bastion of sameness and it was very difficult there being different, but I did survive and became a writer. I was the first in my family to attend college and you never heard of being a writer as a career aspiration. I always wrote stories – even as a child. I also read a lot – you could call me a bookworm and was tall and loved to climb trees — so I almost actually had my head in the clouds. I also got a very strong work ethic from my upbringing — which came in handy.

Where did you go to college and what was your major? What were your career aspirations then?

I went to Temple University in Philadelphia – the same university where I now teach creative writing. I majored in journalism and then worked in the field and then in something called “communications” that included marketing. I worked for nonprofits – one was providing “forever” homes for legally free foster children. In another job, I worked for a nonprofit that provided services to disabled people and to elderly people. Journalism and marketing are actually good backgrounds for a creative writer because I learned how to set and meet deadlines. I also developed a sense of how important marketing is. It’s very important to get your book in front of the potential reader.

I did my own creative writing – nights, weekends, days off — the entire time I was working.

 

To read the entire interview, click here.

 

 

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Banned by the NFL: Compassion — #amfeeling #PETA

This is the controversial ad that was banned by the NFL. It shows in animated form the animals having compassion for the humans by taking a knee during the National Anthem. I was really touched by it and ended up wondering —- Why is compassion so controversial?

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