Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo: a lament and a reminder #amreading #BookTube #MemorialDayWeekend

This Memorial Day — a patriotic holiday that my partner and I do not celebrate — as I sit in the sadness that is America, I thought it fitting to post a reminder from Joy Harjo about the origins of this country. I had good fortune to see Joy at The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the first video is a clip of Joy playing sacred music on the flute. Under that is the YouTube video of a review that I did of her memoir, Poet Warrior. Peace.

I’ve long followed the work of Joy Harjo—far before she was Poet Laureate of the United States.

When I discovered that she had a recent memoir called Poet Warrior (2021; W.W. Norton & Company), I couldn’t wait to read it. It is a powerful book that reaches far into the past and leaps into the future. It is a memoir of healing the past—of wondering what life would be like if what Joy describes as “the rituals of becoming,” were available to her ancestors, in particular to her mother. It is a book that gives us the cold hard truth and at the same time it is a book that talks about the importance of forgiveness.

When I heard Joy say that before the end of her life, she wanted to prove that Indigenous Americans are people, I felt glad for her. She did achieve her goal, especially by becoming U.S. Poet Laureate. But I also felt sad. Of course, Indigenous Americans are people. In Joy’s words, “some of us are poets.” That cannot be denied. This powerful memoir is told in poetry and prose. Even though it is about a life built from language, in many ways it cannot be contained in language.

It is also a memoir about the truth of the United States being built on racism and lies.

As Joy writes, bringing together the personal and the political:

“….. Dona Jo passed in the hospital as everyone in the country celebrated a false story of settlers and Natives having dinner together, when in reality Native heads were on spikes surrounding the settler community who were feasting on what they had been taught to plant by the Native people. Though at that moment I was far away in New Mexico, I felt my cousin’s soul lift from her body as she was taken home.”

To say that the book is eye opening is an understatement. Poet Warrior is a book that demands attention. I found that I could not put it down.

It is about the act of becoming—specifically about becoming a poet, a musician and artist. Joy is someone who found herself with words and she tells us how listening to her inner voice made her a poet. She also writes about art as survival.

She tells us that when she first began writing poetry, “Some of my closest friends were Navajo drag queens who taught me to accept the contradictions within myself and laugh hard about them and with them, as they bravely were themselves.”

Joy reminds us that “Everyone is a teacher.” And she tells us that “Poetry is a tool for navigating transformation.”

I found Poet Warrior A Memoir by Joy Harjo, published by W.W. Norton & Company, to be both a fascinating and necessary read. It is a memoir of courage and vulnerability and a memoir that puts the reader in touch with the mystery.  I cannot recommend it enough.

This is Janet Mason writing for Book Tube.

To learn more about my latest published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

The Unicorn, The Mystery now available from Adelaide Books — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBT

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Musings on the Bible and imagination — #amwriting #LGBTQ #Bible

I’m still getting comments about the novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (Adelaide Books — New York/Lisbon) that was published in 2018.

The recent comments were “what Bible are you reading?” and “You have it all wrong.”

Musing this morning, I realized that there is a connection.

Like it or not, the Bible is made of myths. Myth is defined as a story …”especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.”

It sounds to me that this dictionary definition of “myth” is about the Bible. Of course, there are many other holy books or creation stories. When I read the Bible, it was natural for me to imagine myself and others in it. In particular, I wondered how marginalized people (including women) survived in a fierce patriarchal desert climate. That’s how THEY was born.

I would say that it’s impossible to be wrong when you start to imagine.

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

To learn more about my latest published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

The Unicorn, The Mystery now available from Adelaide Books — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBT

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LOST: reading from a new memoir and reflecting on Buddhist teachings — #UU #amreading #fathers #govegan

This morning I participated in a service on life and death at the Unitarian Universalists of Mt. Airy in Philadelphia. The YouTube video of my part of the service is above and the text is below.

Good morning

     I am going to read the opening two paragraphs of my memoir which is now titled LOST: a daughter navigates father loss and discovers what it means to belong. 

Above the Washington Crossing National Cemetery—its squat white markers on even green grass flanked by low walls that would soon hold my father’s ashes—the blue sky, with white whisps of clouds, was vast. It seemed endless— I would say eternal, but my father was not religious. He was agnostic and along with my atheist mother, had raised me secular. But now I was Unitarian, with Buddhism selected as my root religion because it felt most natural to me.

     Buddhists believe that energy is eternal. The death of a father has been compared to a cloud. The cloud becomes rain and then eventually returns to the sky and so on. The energy of the cloud never dies, and the father’s essence doesn’t die either. It is a comforting theory. But I was too upset that day to be thinking of Buddhist theories. Grief had carved a hole the size of the universe through my chest. I was on automatic pilot. My only thought was to get through the day.

It seems like I have been working on this memoir forever. Maybe I have because it is about my father’s life and my life which adds up to a lot of years. It has been five years since my father died. I was close to sixty when he died, and he was nearly a hundred years old. I have been through a lot a changes since my father died. In many ways, I have become my own parent.

The late Vietnamese Buddhist Monk Thich Nhất Hạnh was and continues to be an important influence on my revision process. I have been particularly influenced by his teachings about how a parent lives on in the child. He has said that it is hard for a son to be angry at his father because the son is the father—an extension of the father. I would say the same thing goes for daughters. This scientifically accurate statement might explain why so many are at odds with themselves.

Working on this memoir has not been easy. In fact, there have been times when it was physically painful. But working on this memoir has forced me to drill down into the marrow of my bones and uncover the forces that shaped me. And I find a certain satisfaction in self-discovery.  

Recently, I was talking to an old friend about my father living so long. I explained that he had lived twenty years longer than most people. I described him as a tough old bird.  Like me, he was stubborn, strong, and when he still could, did exercises every morning and night and took a walk nearly every day.

A few days after describing my father as a tough old bird to this friend, I realized I had been describing myself.

I am fast becoming a tough, old vegan bird.

–Namaste–

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

To learn more about my latest published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

The Unicorn, The Mystery now available from Adelaide Books — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBT

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Time to tip over patriarchy — a long view of #RoevsWade #LGBTQ #amreading

When I heard the news this week about the leaked document from the U.S. Supreme Court this week about the planned and possible overturning of Roe V. Wade, I told my partner and we were both silent for a moment.

In that silence was years of witnessing the changes in the history to women’s reproductive rights.

An older friend, also a lesbian, told us how she kept a phone number of a reputable illegal abortionist in her pocket when she was in college so that she could help the many women who needed it. This was in the years before abortion was legal.

When I was in junior high abortion was legalized. Before I came out, I had a long-term boyfriend in college. As I recall, the option of abortion was an easy out. If my birth control didn’t work, I could get an abortion. Fortunately, I didn’t need one.

Soon after college was over, I stopped rebelling against my-ahead-of her-time-feminist mother with the Catholic boyfriend who I had nothing in common with and came out. So, I haven’t even thought about needing an abortion for a very long time. But I do recognize that it is crucial for a woman to be able to control her own body and I understand how this is connected to other civil rights.

Even the possibility of overturning Roe is outrageous. People should be angry. They should also organize and vote.

But in that moment of silence and outrage, I thought about cause and effect, and I thought about empowerment.

Regardless, if Roe is overturned or not — women and their male partners should think about the fact that penis-vagina sex can lead to pregnancy. There are of course, other ways to have sex. Cunnilingus is one of them.

Years ago, we met an old lesbian, Katy the Ax Maker, whose motto was “Tip Over Patriarchy.”

It was always time, but perhaps now is especially the time to tip over patriarchy.

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

To learn more about my latest published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

The Unicorn, The Mystery now available from Adelaide Books — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBT

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Learning More About Chickens — #govegan, #LGBTQ, #amreading

Remember the saying Mother Hen?

Yesterday I learned that one of the admirable traits of chickens is that they are excellent mothers. That’s where the saying comes from. Once when I met a chicken who had just laid an egg, I could tell by her behavior that she was protecting her babies. To read more about my encounter with a chicken, click here.

This past week, I’ve been listening to The Food Revolution along with hundreds of thousands of people around the globe who are interested in moving to a plant-based diet for their health, for the animals and for the planet.

One of the other things that I learned about chicken is how many — if not most — are bred to gain weight quickly so that it is more profitable to slaughter them for humans to eat them.

It is my theory that when people eat animals that are bred to be larger, it makes people gain weight more rapidly — leading to and increasing the obesity epidemic.

Two and a half years ago, I went to a healthy plant-based diet primarily for health reasons. One of the things that made me give up chicken was a brochure that my acupuncturist gave me that detailed that chicken is loaded with bacteria including the bacteria that comes from eating chicken that is packaged in the juice from its feces. That brochure was all it took.

What I learned yesterday while listening to The Food Revolution, the information that learned about the bacteria in chicken and the way that chickens are treated was even more hair raising.

The end result was that listening to The Food Revolution made me so glad that I have moved to a plant-based diet. I am thankful also that my partner has made this change with me.

Both of us feel great!

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

To learn more about my latest published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

The Unicorn, The Mystery now available from Adelaide Books — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBT

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