Coyote, raccoon, field mouse, sparrow, Each watching from darkness this man With the moon on a leash. – Ted Kooser, Winter Morning Walks For a few weeks I have been thinking about a shift in my thoughts and feelings about the death of my husband last December. The great sense of loss is abiding with little…
The storytelling self is a social self, who declares and shapes important relationships through the mediating power of words. – Dyson, A. H., & Genishi, C. (1994). The need for story: Cultural diversity in classroom and community. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. My parents were both inveterate storytellers. My dad, often the life of…
… in sharing stories, we have the potential for forging new relationships, including local, classroom “cultures” in which individuals are interconnected and new “we’s” formed. – Dyson, A. H., & Genishi, C. (1994). The need for story: Cultural diversity in classroom and community. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. When Paul and I moved from our…
The storytelling self is a social self, who declares and shapes important relationships through the mediating power of words. Thus, in sharing stories, we have the potential for forging new relationships, including local, classroom “cultures” in which individuals are interconnected and new “we’s” formed. – Dyson, A. H., & Genishi, C. (1994). The need for…
This week in a dressing room in a well-recognized Seattle department store, I had a major melt-down. It wasn’t the I-look-fat-in-these-jeans sort of experience when I am sure that the mirror is distorted and comes from a fun house. Nor was it the where-in-the-universe-are-jeans-actually-$200 hissy fit. No, this was a I-cannot-decide-on-a-purchase-because-my-husband-is-dead flat out bawl. Paul…
Having an adolescence was sort of a new thing when I was growing up. I know that my parents didn’t have an adolescence. They went from school to work. In fact, more accurately they did them both simultaneously. It is possible that other people, perhaps the middle class, had those teen years as depicted by…
Reading in our culture has become so attenuated that all reading is now considered “good.” Children are admonished to read in general, as if all books are equal, but a brain bloated with truisms and clichés, with formulaic stories and simple answers to badly asked questions is hardly what we should aspire to. For the…
Very few establishments welcomed openly gay people in the 1950s and 1960s. Those that did were often bars, although bar owners and managers were rarely gay. At the time, the Stonewall Inn was owned by the Mafia. It catered to an assortment of patrons and was known to be popular among the poorest and most marginalized people…
This February marked the 50th anniversary of my coming out as a gay man. I was 16 at the time. Stonewall was several years away. The word gay was not in common use. At 16, there was not much of a community in which to be welcomed. I didn’t so much exit a closet as…
Lover alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. – >William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 Communities share an identity of sorts. This identity is affected by intentions, beliefs, resources, preferences, and risks. Community identity is also affected by its stickiness, by its adhesion. We sometimes call…
Creating Community for Everyone 