Shel Graves' Sensorium

Taste: blood orange Sight:   leaves flapping like bird wings; windy day; baby in the driver's seat; squirrel in the magnolia, nibbling clusters of white petals; bony knees and shoulders, skin stretched thin Sound: "the elegistic melancholy of middle age" Touch: my fingers beneath her hand, the hand-heart connection Smell: baking Russet potatoes Extra: "Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God."— Year of the Flood , Margaret Atwood; "I want to drink to women all over the world...for them not to work too hard & to be happy with their families." — K. Lasuria, "Food should nourish life-this is the best medicine." — Okinawan proverb, "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects." ...

Goal: To provide suggestions for revision of works in progress and encourage continuous submissions. Group members, 3-7, will maintain weekly contact, meeting in person when possible or online. Anticipated start date: May. Irrespective of genre, the group should appeal to writers with literary daring or elements of the unreal, magical, or fantastic in their work. Members should: • Be writing on a near daily basis. • Be submitting works for publication. • Be widely read and reading. • Commit to weekly contact with the group. Members will agree on a formal reporting process designed to be useful to all and an efficient use of time. Members will contribute and receive: • Suggestions for revision of their works in progress (the focus will be on fiction, but writers may submit other kinds of writing: query letters, essays, blog posts other work for consideration by the group) • Suggestions for where to submit their work • Suggestions for reading to assist development of their ...

Tracy Kidder's nonfiction works Strength in What Remains (2009) and Mountains Beyond Mountains (2004) have firmly affixed him to #globalhealth #socialjustice and #hero in my recollection. Strength in What Remains tells the story of a medical student who survived genocide in Burundi to open a medical clinic. Mountains Beyond Mountains tells the story of Dr. Paul Farmer whose practice of empathy and compassion leads him to hold dear the lives of many. The book helped clarify for me that the organization Farmer co-founded, Partners in Health , deserves a percentage of my annual income . At his lecture in March at Benaroya Hall in Seattle , Kidder reinforced his other obvious mental marker #writer. He offered bon mots on the craft of the type that anyone who has spent a significant amount of time at the dull work of filling a blank page can attest to — it just sounds more solid coming from a Pulitzer Prize winner.  A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Kidder shares ...

Journalist Tracy Kidder writes the biography of Harvard-trained medical anthropologist, Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health , an organization which provides health care in some of the poorest nations. Farmer acts to value all life equally including valuing other children as much as his own. In a " This I Believe " essay for NPR, Farmer offers his view of utopia: "That goal is nothing less than the refashioning of our world into one in which no one starves, drinks impure water, lives in fear of the powerful and violent, or dies ill and unattended. Of course such a world is a utopia, and most of us know that we live in a dystopia. But all of us carry somewhere within us the belief that moving away from dystopia moves us towards something better and more humane." The description of Farmer's extraordinary devotion to a core belief and corresponding course of action brought to mind Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom . It was also in...

Fathom genocide? Feel empathy for 100,000 or more nameless victims? Author Tracy Kidder takes the reader in as close as possible to these impossibilities by focusing on the story of one medical student who survived genocide in Burundi. Deo has a harrowing tale to tell about how he escaped to New York from Burundi in 1994. But Kidder doesn't start Deo's story in Burundi, first he tackles an issue closer to home — poverty and income disparity in the United States. He tells how Deo, arriving in the city without English skills, scrapes by as a grocery deliveryman sleeping in Central Park. This too is harrowing. "To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardship," a quote by W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk becomes one of Deo's favorites, What does it feel like to be homeless? Kidder takes the reader into Deo's emotive core: "What did it say about him that no one was willing to lend him a bed? Th...

Writers, read this for: voice, extreme character (told in in the point of view of a psychopathic killer who seeks to make his own zombie) A fast, smooth, gripping read, dark humor, but deeply disturbing. Literary horror. It won a Bram Stoker Award in 1996. Not a zombie story — this is about a serial killer. Recommended by: Stephen King in On Writing 

Taste: raw tacos, raw corn tortillas; goddess lemonade; Plum Bistro ; banana enzymes Sight:   a squat body covered by a long turquoise argyle sweater with blue and purple diamonds, a short red skirt with a black flounce, black boots on stocky 15-year-old legs, a limp, and reddish hair; a flatttened black cowboy hat, a royal blue shirt, a black and white vertically stripped skirt, knee high lace up sneakers black and white; a knit stocking cap with skulls on the side and a mohawk of tassles; the city gunks (goth punks) are in rare form today Sound: phone quacks; "nebbish" "locutions" Tracy Kidder at Benaroya Touch: the squish of Small Planet Organic Tofu Smell: boiled potatos Extra: she recites poetry in her sleep, white-haired woman; her magenta and teal hair; "Dance first. Think afterwards. It's the natural order." — Samuel Beckett, an abbreviation of script from Waiting for Godot

Sherwin Nuland is the acid to Ray Kurzweil's base. In The Singularity is Near Kurzweil offers hope of immortality achieved through technology. Can we Live Long Enough to Live Forever as Kurzweil suggests? No, Nuland says, offering his experience as a physician, "Nature will always win in the end, as it must if our species is to survive...Against the relentless forces and cycles of nature there can be no lasting victory." In How We Die , Nuland depicts our likelihood of death from heart disease ("...each cigarette, each pat of butter, each slice of meat, and each increment of hypertension make the coronary arteries stiffen their resistance to the flow of blood."), stroke, cancer, AIDS, and Alzheimer's disease and gives detailed, clinical accounts of our miserable departures. It's a morbid book, unsurprisingly, but it's also gruesome. There's a disturbing account of a young girl's random murder by a lunatic and blow-by-blow descriptions of...

Ethicist Peter Singer makes a compelling argument that we need to create a stronger Culture of Giving and suggests a specific standard for what people in wealthy countries could do to help those in impoverished ones. He references Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Unnatural Mother" in talking about the "radical" utopian ideal of having a larger sense of family, mentioning how some utopian communities have tried (and failed) to instill a sense of community versus parental responsibility, and asking the question, "Are there times when our obligation to others is equal to or greater than that to our family?" This book pairs well with Mountains Beyond Mountains , a biography by Tracy Kidder about the work of Harvard-trained medical anthropologist, Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health . The organization, mentioned frequently in Singer's book, provides health care in some of the poorest nations.