This post is published as part of the Association of University Press’s University Press Week blog tour. #ReadUP. Mindy Greiling was a state legislator for twenty years. She helped found the nation’s first state mental health caucus, and has served on state and national boards of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Greiling’s son, … More #ReadUP: Reckoning with mental illness.
BY MINDY GREILING Mental health advocate and former state legislator Describing my personal feelings was the hardest part of writing my memoir. My writing group nurtured my fledgling attempts to capture the story of son Jim’s mental illness and my legislative work, but after offering encouraging compliments, they would invariably ask things like, “But, Mindy, … More On writing—and processing, and editing—difficult matters in a memoir.
BY MINDY GREILING Many people are seeking mental health support during the sheltering-in-place COVID-19 siege. Social media is fraught with posts about the anxiety and depression it can cause, and the National Institute of Mental Health is researching how stressors related to the virus affect mental health. Our son Jim, who has a mental illness, … More On caring for a loved one with mental illness during Covid-19.
With Tara Sweeney and Nate Christopherson We are a mother-and-son creative team. A to Zåäö: Playing with History at the American Swedish Institute is our debut picture book. It’s taken nearly four years to complete it. Our individual artistic styles are polar opposites: I use vivid watercolor to create convincing illusions of the observable world; … More Behind the Book: A to Zåäö
BY ANIKA FAJARDO I once went swimming in natural hot springs in Colombia. It was the mid-1990s and Colombia was, according to the U.S. State Department, the most dangerous country on earth. At twenty-one years old, I had just arrived to see my father for the first time since I was a baby. His wife … More Anika Fajardo: On searching for identity, exploring origins, and reconciling what family means
BY JOANNA FRUEH Surrealism is an art and literary movement in the early twentieth century. Its best-known work is a painting by Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, in which clocks look like they’re melting in a bleak and blank terrain. In Surrealist painting, distortions of everyday reality, in scale, shape, and space give surreal … More The Big Surreal
BY SHEILA WATT-CLOUTIER The world has come to know the wildlife of the Arctic more than its people: The Inuit. For two decades my life’s work, which includes elected positions with an international mandate to protect the rights and interests of our people of the circumpolar world, has been to work diligently to put a … More Earth Day 2018: Facing the greatest human-rights challenge of our time.
BY LINDA LeGARDE GROVER Here in Duluth, not long after my seventh grandchild was born, I began to write short essays about aspects of Ojibwe contemporary life that link to the joy and gratitude that Ojibwe people have for new life and the continuity of our existence. He is a third-generation child of our extended … More Linda LeGarde Grover: "Everything that we experience, no matter how small, is a story."
An excerpt from Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent by Thomas Glave (2005).Chapter: “(Re-)Recalling Essex Hemphill: Words to Our Now.” It has been said, and we recall: we were never meant to survive. Not here. No, not then or now. Not in the gorge of a grasping empire poisoned by the recurring venoms of … More "In the United States . . . where such events are always now."
BY JEFF SOLOMONAssistant professor of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Wake Forest University Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein should not have been famous. Both secured their reputations between the Wilde trials and Stonewall, when the most widely available understandings of homosexuality were inversion and perversion, and when censorship prevented the public discussion … More Exclusively gay, remarkably famous: The "fabulous potency" of Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein.
