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By: Gail Piernas-Davenport,
on 9/25/2007
By: Rebecca,
on 4/19/2007
I’ve been a vegetarian for over a decade and inevitably, when I meet someone new, they end up asking me questions. How and why did I stop eating meat? Do I miss it? Do I cheat? Long ago I stopped telling them the real story (which is dreadfully boring) and started recounting the scene below from The Simpsons.I imagine I’m not the only one out there that uses The Simpsons to prove a point. Well, our friends over at the DNB have created a very special happy birthday treat for The Simpsons fans. Keep reading!
By: April Henry,
on 4/14/2007
March 30 was the birthday of poet and novelist Marge Piercy. She grew up poor, one of the only white girls in a black Detroit neighborhood. She started writing when she was 15 and was the first in her family to go to college. She was involved in Students for a Democratic Society (which later influenced a book of hers I like very much, Vida, about a woman on the run for years from the FBI). After writing six novels that were all rejected by publishers, in 1968 she published a collection of poems called Breaking Camp. Then, in 1976, she published the novel Woman on the Edge of Time, about a woman imprisoned in a mental hospital who has a vision of a utopian future.
I really, really loved Braided Lives and Gone to Soldiers, so when she was in town about 12 years ago, I went to hear her read. I was such a naïf that I brought my battered paperback of Braided Lives (because it meant so much to me) for her to sign, rather than buying one of the brand new books that were all on display. I was first in line, and began to stammer about how much I admired her writing, and how I wanted to be a writer too, and blah, blah. Meanwhile, she was shaking the pen she had been given, her face wrinkled with disgust, saying to no one in particular, "I hate these kind of pens. I told them not to give me this kind of pen!"
It was not the bonding moment I had hoped for.
I still do admire her, because she has written in so many genres, and her writing is so vivid. She's always been unconventional, living in an open relationship that often included other people, the SDS thing, etc. I still remember her description of kissing another woman as being like "eating a nectarine."
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