Think About It 110: SAMIRA AHMED

 

When I was a high school teacher, I taught a unit called 'What is an American.' I used to start my American lit classes with a simple assignment — look in a magazine and bring in a photo of an American. Over 90 percent of my students in the diverse suburban and New York City public schools I taught at brought in photos of white models… Representation matters. Consider what it must be like for a child to be bombarded with Presidential tweets and popular culture where the people who look like them are labeled as terrorist, thug, cockroach, criminal, liar, un-American. EVERY CHILD DESERVES TO SEE THEMSELVES AS A HERO ON THE PAGE.

 

Samira Ahmed Challenges Librarians: “Use Your Power” | Writing and Reading in the Trump Era [School Library Journal, 15 November 2019]

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of US novelist SAMIRA AHMED: 

 

 

https://samiraahmed.com/

 

 

 

 

 

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Think About It 100: VERONICA ROTH

 

 

Think About It 090: SALLY YATES

 

 

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The Write Advice 218: DORIS GRUMBACH

 

Talk uses up idea, although others have told me that they find it profitable to talk out their ideas and plans for a story because it clarifies their intentions.  Not I.  Once I have spoken them aloud, they are lost to me, dissipated into the noisy air like smoke.  Only if I bury them, like bulbs, in the rich soil of silence do they grow.  Sometimes I am lucky.  In the internment process, they often multiply and become more complex.

 

Fifty Days of Solitude: A Memoir (1994) 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read The View from 90, a 2011 essay about solitude and the aging process by DORIS GRUMBACH:

 

 

http://theamericanscholar.org/the-view-from-90/

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 128: GRACE PALEY

  

Think About It 109: KHUSHWANT SINGH

 

For too long have we been fooled into believing that the basis of a happy man-woman relationship is love. Love is an elusive concept and means different things to different people. There is nothing elusive about lust because it means the same thing to all people: it is the physical expression of liking a person… Cuddling, kissing and fondling leading to sexual intercourse. Love cannot last very long without lust. Lust has no time limit and is the true foundation of love and affection.

 

The Company of Women (1999)

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read about the life and work of Indian writer, journalist, lawyer, diplomat and politician KHUSHWANT SINGH (1914–2014):

 

 

 

https://www.globalindian.com/profiles/khushwant-singh/

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 217: CAN XUE

 

As soon as I learned to read, I fell in love with it.  When I read primary literature stories, I began an undertaking — playing the parts of my stories in my mind.  Those parts — sometimes they were from my reading materials, sometimes they were just my inventions — but if I loved a certain character in a book very much, I acted that character many times, and was moved deeply by the acting.

      Language is a magical thing.  When a child who is very sensitive to spiritual things enters that world, his or her imagination will proliferate wildly, and performances will become his or her real life.  So although I didn’t begin writing formally until I was thirty, I gave performances all the time.  And only these sorts of performances could satisfy my needs.  All the other things were at most second-best compared with this.

 

 

Interview [Chinese Literature Today, 2010]

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read about the life and work of Chinese novelist (and recent Nobel Prize candidate) CAN XUE:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-67014660

 

 

 

 

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