Archives for August 2007

Amanda Marcotte is at the helm of the immensely popular progressive blog, Pandagon. Her talent and success led the John Edwards presidential campaign to tap her as blogmaster, a position she served in briefly last year. Marcotte’s book, titled It’s A Jungle Out There: A Feminist Survival Guide To Politically Inhospitable Environments, will be published by Seal Press this fall. She lives and writes in Austin, Texas.

Here’s Amanda:

Continue reading "Amanda Marcotte: On blogging, politics, and a feminist's place" »

Posted by Anna at 01:30 PM
Permalink | Comments (6)

Tremendously sad news: Grace Paley has died today, at age 84.

It cut us to the quick here at CNW. Paley is a hero to us all. Her creative engagement with the world spilled into her identities as a story writer (one of the greatest of our time), poet, feminist, peace and anti-nuclear activist—always fed by her fundamental passion for life.

Our catchphrase at CNW is “where women’s voices matter.” Paley embodies that ideal like no other. Her 45 stories, collected in three volumes, center the lives of women (mostly New Yorkers, mostly Jewish) and are propelled by their peculiar homegrown language. As The New York Times puts it:

“Though Ms. Paley’s work also rings with Irish and Italian and black voices, it was for the language of her childhood, a heady blend of Yiddish, Russian and English, that she was best known.”

Through the “narrative speech” of her own neighborhood, Paley underlined the worth of her native stories—and, implicitly, of the worth of the women who lived them.

Paley connected her work for women’s liberation with her fiction and poetry habit.

We, in turn, have been supported by the buoyancy, the noise, and the saltiness of Grace Paley herself.

I highly urge you to discover or re-discover Paley’s work. Here’s where you might get started:

Begin Again: Collected Poems
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Stories)
The Little Disturbances of Man (Stories)
The Collected Stories
Long Walks and Intimate Talks: Stories, Poems, and Paintings
A Dream Compels Us: Voices of Salvadoran Women (Anthology)
Peacework: 20 Years of Nonviolent Social Change
Just As I Thought (Essays)
Here and Somewhere Else (Feminist Press 2×2 series with Robert Nichols)

Songs of praise for Grace Paley:
Maud Newton—who was the first to report the news of Paley’s passing—recounts her two meetings with the writer.

“Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies” (The New York Times)
“To read Ms. Paley’s fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild onrushing joy and twilight melancholy. For her, cadence and character went hand in hand: her stories are marked by their minute attention to language, with its tonal rise and fall, its hairpin rhetorical reversals and its capacity for delicious hyperbolic understatement. Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg be read aloud.”

A Salute to Grace Paley (1922-2007) (The Millions)
“But given the buoyancy of her spirit and her passionate engagement with the world, hers is not the kind of death that leaves readers bitter. Rather, it offers us a reminder of our own “open destinies.” I’ll be raising a glass to Paley tonight, and revisiting her remarkable body of work for years to come.”

“Acclaimed Writer Grace Paley Dies at 84” (Associated Press)
“At the same time, Paley was a self-described “combative pacifist” who joined the War Resisters League in the ’60s and visited Hanoi on a peace mission. She was arrested in 1978 during an anti-nuclear protest on the White House lawn and for years could be found every Saturday passing out protest leaflets on a street corner near her New York apartment.”

“Acclaimed Writer Grace Paley Dies at 84” (The Washington Post)
“Ms. Paley was often regarded as a feminist writer because her stories brought rare and early insight into how urban women struggle with emotional and physical vulnerabilities; demanding children and lovers; and absent, often misogynistic husbands.”

Posted by Anna at 01:56 PM
Permalink | Comments (0)

Believe it or not, it’s already time to gear up for the 2008 Women, Action, & the Media (WAM!) conference, sponsored by the Center for New Words. It’s a conference for “activists, journalists & everyone” … which means we want to hear your brilliant ideas for session proposals.

At WAM!, we’ll share facts and ideas, develop skills, build collaborations, and create action plans to amplify progressive women’s public voices in society. We’re bringing together more than 400 participants to exchange observations, ideas, experiences, opinions, and tools for change—and plan together for action.

What questions, issues, and concerns do you want to hear debated? What thinking, strategizing, planning or skill-sharing work should happen at WAM! as a step forward in building the movement? What should we know, what should we be doing, and what should we be preparing for?

You tell us … click here for our Call for Proposals!

Posted by Anna at 05:40 PM
Permalink | Comments (0)

Ready to connect with feminist writers, activists, and media players? You’ll get all that and more as the new Events Coordinator with the Center for New Words. Check out the full job description and application details here.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted by Anna at 03:27 PM
Permalink | Comments (0)

Tech-savvy Tiffany Shlain makes things happen.

Among her latest creations are the short films, ‘The Tribe’ (2006), which explores American Jewish identity through the history of the Barbie doll, and ‘Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness’ (2003), which uses satire and humor to spotlight “the critical threat to choice to a new generation and galvanizes those who have benefited from nearly 30 years of freedom.”

Even with eight films to her credit, and a slew of honors to her credit, to call Shlain a filmmaker would be a simplification. Manipulating artistic hybrids, Shlain is known for her public performances, blending original film, theater, discussion, and spoken word to engage audiences in surprising ways.

She’s also the creative powerhouse behind The Webby Awards, which she founded 11 years ago, to invert the award show formula while honoring the best of the internet. In 1998, Shlain co-founded The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, designed to drive and explore the interractive potential of digital media. And just last year, Shlain and her husband partnered in founding The Moxie Institute, which is a media company interested in how film and online media can be used to catalyze social change.

Armed with such experience and skills, it’s no surprise that Shlain is highly sought as a worldwide speaker and presenter on technology, leadership, women, and Jewish identity—and particularly on how those realms intersect.

Tiffany Shlain was kind enough to take time to talk with the Center for New Words about her many projects, her seemingly boundless creative energy, and what feminists have to learn from digital media.

Continue reading "Tiffany Shlain: On the art of creating" »

Posted by Anna at 02:53 PM
Permalink | Comments (0)

It ain’t easy to be a female character in comic books. The pattern goes something like this: a sexily-drawn woman with barely-developed character and history is quickly set up to be raped, mutilated, tortured, brutalized, and whisked off stage to make room for the next doomed ingenue. Sure, shocking exploits are the bread-and-butter of comic books, but the gender differential can hardly be ignored: Male characters exist in far greater numbers, are developed into ambigious characters with an interesting backstory, and they grow and change over time. Women characters? More often then not, they are so much cardboard, existing only catalyze their male counterparts.

The grisly treatment of female characters has been long chronicled by Gail Simone at Women in Refrigerators (a name inspired by a particularly horrific storyline), as well as fan sites such as When Fangirls Attack and Girls Read Comics (And They’re Pissed). And the rumble’s being heard: The grassroots groundswell by comic fans who want more for female characters is resonating in more mainstream circles.

Continue reading "To be a female superhero" »

Posted by Anna at 02:52 PM
Permalink | Comments (0)