OMG. . . This is likely one of the earliest photos that I shot, developed the film, and printed and mounted the photo.
Just found it spilling out of a storage box in my office.
Circa 1970. Teacher’s College, Columbia University, New York.
This was while my late Mom was doing graduate work at Columbia, and my late Dad was doing his psychiatry residency at Bronx State Hospital.
I remember several faces in this photo. It was an experimental “free school” where kids pretty much ran rampant.
I got leave to spend hours in the school darkroom to learn photography, and I’d also beg my teachers to let me go explore the gorgeous libraries at Columbia.
I love libraries and librarians to this day. The research staff at Columbia libraries were wonderful with an early teen who absorbed text and info at a prodigious rate .
We ordered textbooks from Canada so that my sister and I wouldn’t be behind when we returned to public school after a couple of years.
I’ve been an editor/writer, both in-house and freelance, for over 30 years.
There’s a handy space between the two printers (laser and colour inkjet) on my computer stand in which I keep my most-used reference book.
Well, today I realized I’ve been getting up and walking to a nearby bookcase to grab Stokes Birds way more often than I was reaching up for The Chicago Manual of Style.
In 2008, the Canadian Parliament passed an act so that throughout Canada, in each and every year, the fourth Saturday in November shall be known as “Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (“Holodomor”) Memorial Day”.
In commemoration of the Soviet-inflicted Holodomor, I’m sharing part of the introduction that I wrote to Maria: A Chronicle of a LIfe, a novel of those terrible times written by Ulas Samchuk, translated by my aunt Roma Franko, and edited by me, after the passing of my Mom who edited many volumes of Language Lanterns Publications translations of Ukrainian literature into English.
“To see a world in a grain of sand…” These words by English poet William Blake are interpreted to mean that minute, apparently inconsequential events in a life can represent universal truths.
“Ulas Samchuk’s character Maria is such a grain of sand––or perhaps in the context of the novel, she is such a kernel of grain.
“The life of this uneducated peasant woman spans great upheavals in Ukrainian history from approximately the 1861 emancipation of serfs in the Russian Empire under the Tsars, to the unimaginable horror of the communist-induced mass starvation in Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s that killed millions, and is now internationally recognized as an act of genocide.
“Samchuk dedicates his novel “to the mothers who were starved to death in Ukraine in 1932-33,” yet the story is much more than that, taking the reader through three sections: A Book about the Birth of Maria, A Book of Maria’s Days, and A Book about Grain. Each is important in its own way, as Maria grows, matures, and reacts to the changes going on around her.
“She may be just a bit of flotsam carried by a tsunami of social and political change, but her loves, her trials and her toil through her three score and ten (the author tells us that she lived for 26,258 days, or nearly 72 years) enable us to picture an often harsh existence that prompted hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian peasants to abandon their beloved villages and emigrate in search of land and freedom. . . “
As I come across more old photos, this looks like my Uncle Paul.
As I recall the story, he suddenly collapsed and died during recess in the yard of a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan.
I think it was an undiagnosed heart issue.
There’s another photo that I remember of my paternal grandmother stricken with grief at his funeral as his coffin was carried out of the tiny prairie church.
Such raw pain etched on her usually stoic face . . .
She was one of toughest pioneer women I’ve ever known, dedicated to work, family, and church, and yet so accepting and loving of us all.
I was named after him.
I love that in this photo he is holding books and a trophy, for I have always loved reading, writing, and editing.
Long out of print, I found a copy of Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake on Abe Books.
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a thought-provoking review of the book in 2011, and why she thought it disappeared:
Theory #1: Ophidiophobia. The phobia is common and extends to pictures, even the mention, of snakes; and the book features them even in the title. A heroine who lets snakes crawl on her, and she’s named Snake? Oh, icky . . .
Theory #2: Sex. It’s an adult book. Snake, though, is barely more than a kid, setting out on her first trial of prowess, so that young women can and do identify with her, happily or longingly, as they do with Ayla in Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children books, though Snake’s taste in men is far better than Ayla’s. But could the book be approved in schools? The sexual mores are as various as the societies, including some very unorthodox customs, and Snake’s sexual behavior is both highly ethical and quite uninhibited. . .
Given the relentless fundamentalist vendettas against “witchcraft” and “pornography” (read imaginative literature and sexual realism) in the schools, few teachers in the 1980s could invite the firestorm that might be started by a right-wing parent who got a hint of how young Snake was carrying on. . .
Theory #3. The hypothesis of gendered reprinting. It appears that as a general rule books written by men get reprinted more frequently and over more years than books written by women.”
Le Guin, Ursula K. . Words Are My Matter (pp. 139-140). Small Beer Press. Kindle Edition.
For my fishy friends, and anyone who cares for our beleaguered environment:
Just finished Alejandro Frid’s book Changing Tides: An Ecologist’s Journey to Make Peace with the Anthropocene.
Excellent work based on his experiences as an ecologist working with First Nations on the BC coast, integrating traditional knowledge with Western science.
With his own research into fewer fish, smaller fish, and overexploitation of marine and coastal resources, Frid maintains a positive outlook that humans can change and collaborate for a better future.
Sat down after lunch to read for half an hour and got lost for three hours in Ursula K. Le Guin’s non-fiction collection Words are My Matter: Writings about Life and Books.
A collection you want to read slowly, and savor. . .
One of her best-known quotations, so pertinent to the times we live in:
“I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries – the realists of a larger reality.”—Ursula K. Le Guin
I just finished the delectable and moving collection of essays called The Global Forest: 40 Ways Trees Can Save Us by Diana Beresford-Kroeger.
Written some ten years ago. the book is prophetic, and the last few paragraphs resonate deeply today. A few snippets:
“. . .the children of this generation will want to help the planet and nature in a collective way. . . They will alter their parents’ ways. . . ”
“The media is filled with stories of nature’s abuse. . . There seems to be no end to greed. . .”
“But the children exist. . . the consumerism of their lives bores holes of unbearable solitude. They are already reaching for something else, something elusive, something that is color-blind to race. It is called dignity, the dignity of life, all life.”
A wonderful book for those who love and nurture nature, and who can lose themselves in gorgeous writing. I often found myself rereading paragraphs and even entire essays.
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