Guest Post by Kathleen Murphey.

That the 2020 Presidential Election was close depressed me and made me search for higher education jobs in Canada, but then I read the Mother Jones article, “How Facebook Screwed Us All.” If Facebook and other social media platforms are enabling bad actors to undermine democracy across the globe, they could be forced to adhere to better regulation standards.

To learn more, I am reading Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee. McNamee outlines Facebook’s rise and its failure to imagine its persuasion architecture being used for nefarious purposes—even though evidence of bad actors using its platform keeps piling up from Brexit to the 2016 U.S. election to incidents in Sri Lanka and Nigeria.

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Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee. Penguin Books, February 2020.

Reviewer bio: Kathleen Murphey is an associate professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia.  She does both academic writing and creative writing (www.kathleenmurphey.com).

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Guest Post by Tiffany Mitchell.

I have always been a reader of philosophy, spirituality and self-improvement books. I really think it is important to have a space in your life to connect directly with yourself in order to make more inspired choices so that the rest of your life is constantly being fed with the best of you. This pandemic has lent the opportunity to do that but in a more deliberate way. It wasn’t just about reading to develop better communication skills or finding new ways to build confidence. It was about reading to stay grounded in faith. When uncertainty became the “norm,” faith became the remedy.  My reading choices mirrored that internal understanding.

When I read Dying to Be Me by Anita Moorjani, I was quickly reminded of the beliefs woven throughout religious and spiritual teachings. This book was the culmination of all those understandings that we know but somehow allow our circumstances to silence. Moorjani’s relocations of her near-death experience and the knowing that she developed made relying on higher power even more purposeful and necessary. It made our current pandemic feel like a shared manifestation of our internal fears and offers still an opportunity to shift and renew our beliefs and values. It is time that we transition into more connected individuals and a unified world. It was an understanding of the power of compassion, acceptance, and self-love and how that directly impacts everyone and everything around us. This is an opportunity to reevaluate beliefs and how they are affecting our lives. This book provokes you to do just that. One thing is for sure, we are changed forever. But how we change is our responsibility.

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Dying to Be Me by Anita Moorjani. Hay House, September 2014.

Reviewer bio: Tiffany Mitchell is a Certified Life coach and founder of DearlifeIgetit.com.

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Guest Post by Renée Cohen.

Throughout the quarantine, I took to rereading old favorites. Most notably, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear and Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft—two books on the craft of writing that I recommend, particularly to aspiring writers.

Oddly enough, I was never a huge fan of either author’s prior works of fiction. (Although, admittedly, I have enjoyed movies based on some of their oeuvres.) In 2015, I purchased Big Magic prior to boarding a long-haul flight. Some fluff to pass the time, I reasoned at the time. By pure luck, On Writing was given to me at a holiday party during a random gift exchange. Continue reading “Magical and Practical Inspiration”

Guest Post by Jennifer Brown Banks.

It goes without saying that effective leadership is not exactly a dinner table topic, a trending news item, or a subject matter that most of us consider on a daily basis. Yet, good leadership is firmly ingrained in many roles and rites of passage in our daily lives.

Consider this. Good leadership is needed to be an effective parent, a supervisor, a mentor, and even an American president. Which is why so many people have a definite opinion on Donald Trump—be it good or bad.

In the book, Leadersh!t by former CEO and leadership development coach, Rande Somma, many aspects and attributes of an effective leader are explored; as he addresses the need for accountability, transparency, and integrity to fix what he considers a “broken system” in corporate America.

This compelling read includes chapters on the dumbing down of values, the price of incompetence, the enormous ROI (return on investment) of character, and more.

Leadersh!t provides a paradigm shift for tomorrow’s leaders and reflection for stake holders in current business affairs.

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Leadersh!t by Rande Somma. Booklocker.com, November 2016.

Reviewer bio: Jennifer Brown Banks is a veteran freelance writer, award-winning blogger and avid reader, residing in Illinois. Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jenpens2.

Guest Post by Joe Taylor.

For sure, this book is about menopause and all the related inconveniences, silly jokes, and notions—but it’s also about sexuality, patriarchy, mortality, acceptance, spirituality, wisdom, and whales. Yes whales, for it seems those creatures that can live well over a century elect matriarchs who have experienced menopause to lead their packs in something of a crone’s position. And why not? Experience matters. Lack of distraction matters. It’s called wisdom. And this, Steinke tells us, is precisely why women should not pursue hormone treatment, why men should not pursue Viagra. Acceptance of life’s stages and the accompanying wisdom, not denial and infantile retreat.

This book presents Darcey Steinke par excellence, perhaps a bit angrier than her usual when discussing the mostly male-dominated medical and pharmaceutical fields, but then, as she would no doubt insist, she has earned that anger. As have we all.

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Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life by Darcey Steinke. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2019.

Reviewer bio: Joe Taylor has published five novels and three story collections. He is the director of Livingston Press: https://livingstonpress.uwa.edu.

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Guest Post by Shamae Budd

Patrick Madden’s third collection of essays is a playful conglomeration of experiments (in form, in collaboration, in thought). Interspersed among more traditional personal essays, you will find a menagerie of borrowed forms. The collection opens with an essay masquerading as an eBay listing for “Writer Michael Martone’s Leftover Water.” (Or is it an eBay listing masquerading as an essay? We can’t be sure, which is half the fun.) You will find blackout poetry (“Insomnia”), an essay written with the help of predictive text algorithms (“Unpredictable Essays”), mixed up proverbs (“The Proverbial ____” ), and a series of “Pangram Haiku.” Continue reading “A Playful Conglomeration of Experiments”

Guest Post by Reem Ali

I genuinely don’t think I can recommend Mariam Khan’s It’s Not About the Burqa enough. Wow, just wow. I’m not much of a nonfiction gal, however, this was the exception. As a Muslim woman living in a western country, I’ve accepted that descriptive representation requires decades more of advocacy and activism. However, what I don’t accept is the blatant islamophobia and racism portrayed by the media that’s being fueled by white supremacists (and the like) commanding elected positions. This collection of essays not only expands upon this issue, but many others as well.

The authors are all successful women in their respective careers, breaking down stereotypes of Muslim women ingrained into western society. There have been so many cultural, moral, and systemic issues that I have pondered and struggled with, but these essays articulate and address them in such a succinct and thoughtful manner. I sincerely believe that this is a definite must-read. With the wave of people aiming to educate themselves on BLM issues, I suggest picking this up as well.

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It’s Not About the Burqa by Mariam Khan. Pan Macmillan, February 2020.

Reviewer bio: Reem Ali is a third-year law student, and a born-and-raised Texan. She loves spending her free time reading, traveling (pre-coronavirus) and playing backgammon. She enjoys engaging with tough readings and sharing her perspectives. For more book reviews: @reemsreads.

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Guest Post by Wilfred M. McClay

For at least the past thirty years, we have done a terrible job in this country of educating the young for the tasks of citizenship in a republic. Despite endless talk about the problem, little is actually done to improve matters. The concept of “civic literacy” is the latest buzzword of educators, and yet no one seems to know what the word signifies, let alone how to achieve it. But help is on the way.

Civic literacy, meaning the body of knowledge that enables a citizen to function actively, intelligently, and effectively, is precisely what is offered us in Edwin Hagenstein’s splendid new book The Language of Liberty. To call it a “citizen’s vocabulary,” as the author does, is true enough; but the book is much more than that. It is not a treatise, but instead a collection of wise, subtle, and reflective essays on the keywords of our political and social discourse, covering everything from “the administrative state” to “the referendum,” with topics as philosophical as “conservatism” and “liberalism” and as down-to-earth as “gerrymander” and “whip.” It is both a handy reference book and a work of philosophy, nicely parceled out into easily digested essays. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

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The Language of Liberty: A Citizen’s Vocabulary by Edwin C. Hagenstein. Rootstock Publishing, October 2020.

Reviewer bio: Wilfred M. McClay is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma.

Guest Post by Amber Caron

Like other readers, I had grand plans when the world went on lockdown. I would begin with War and Peace. I went as far as borrowing the book from a friend, left it on my shelf unopened, and instead turned to newly published nonfiction that grappled with the question of what it is to live a good life. The most recent addition to this stack of books is Jennifer Sinor’s Sky Songs. (Disclosure: Sinor and I teach at the same university.)

Both the title and cover image of Sinor’s essay collection are drawn from Alfred Stieglitz’s photographic study Songs of the Sky (later titled Equivalents), nearly four hundred abstract images captured when Stieglitz turned his camera to the clouds. “What is of greatest importance,” Stieglitz said, “is to hold a moment, to record something so completely that those who see it will relive an equivalent of what has been expressed.”

It was an emotional equivalence Stieglitz sought, and the same could be said of Sinor’s fifteen essays. Sky Songs meditates on the defining moments of a life—the tragic death of an uncle, a dissolving marriage, new love, the birth of a child, an encounter with wildlife, the loss of one religion and, years later, the unfolding of another. Read on their own, each essay offers a patient, lyrical examination of these moments. Together, the essays offer a profound reading experience, enriched by a layering of images, a deep sense of place, and the inescapable truth that although we are often haunted by our earliest tragedies, we are equally shaped by the beauty we find in the world around us. Ultimately, Sky Songs delivers what it promises, and what it promises is no small thing: the emotional equivalence of a life well lived.

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Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World by Jennifer Sinor. University of Nebraska Press, October 2020.

Reviewer bio: Amber Caron’s fiction and non-fiction can be found in The Threepenny Review, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, Southwest Review, Longreads, and elsewhere.

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Guest Post by James Gering

Here is a born creative writing teacher generously imparting dollops of warmth, humor, and wisdom in three sections that combine to resemble no other book in this crowded genre.

“The Shapes of Fiction” is the first section, where Stern vividly demonstrates his ideas in original and artful little storylines often featuring engaging dialogues. The first three shapes “show (you) how to handle thoughts, dialogue and action—techniques you’ll use over and over.” In “Iceberg,” a writer focuses on what characters choose to express or choose to keep in mind:

 

Brian thought, Oh God, here it comes. My Principal. The Pig That Walks Like a Man. “Hello, sir. What a fine day.”

Eiswold nodded. “What’s that on your tie, boy? Your lunch?”

“Oh, goodness,” Brian said, “I hadn’t noticed. Thank you, sir.”

A dynamic interplay between thought and speech unfolds, and it should be noted that fulsome conveyance of thought is where fiction triumphs over film.

Other shapes include “Bear at the Door,” “Onion,” “Visitation,” “Aha!,” and “Explosion,” the last of which advises you to blow the rest of the advice to smithereens and exclusively celebrate your own brilliance. The point: these are Stern’s insights (culled from decades of teaching at tertiary level), not cumbersome rules.

In the second section, “A Cautionary Interlude,” Stern points out common pitfalls on narrative journeys. Find out how to avoid “Population Explosions,” “The Banging-Shutter Story,” “The Hobos-in-Space Story,” and more.

The final section, is a comprehensive alphabetical rendering of writing terms, some universally known, others, like ‘intrigant,’ less so. The terms are deftly cross-referenced, making it a pleasure to follow related strands.

Befriend Jerome Stern! His wisdom and generosity will enrich your writing.

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Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern. W.W. Norton & Company, November 1991.

Reviewer bio: James Gering is a poet and short story writer from the Blue Mountains in Australia. He welcomes visitors at jamesgering.com.

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