vignettes

Scandalous Politics: Child Welfare Policy in the States

farhana — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Sixteen-month-old Amiya Brown died due to blunt force. Thirteen-month-old Christopher Thomas died and his two year-old sister. All under the auspices of child welfare. These and many other horrifying stories are the touchstones of Scandalous Politics: Child Welfare Policy in the States. A series of similar vignettes open the book with a jolt.

Meticulously structured, the book starts with a history of child welfare nationally before diving into the crux of the multi-pronged study featured. Though it clearly serves an academic purpose, it does so flawlessly. Scandalous Politics is incredibly well researched and could easily be mined for details for years to come. However, without my background in social science research it may have been a much more difficult read.

Gainsborough’s study supplements three different state case studies (Florida, Colorado, and New Jersey) with a regression analysis of how scandal influences funding and legislation around child welfare reform. She emphasizes the importance of media in highlighting child welfare atrocities in policy formation. Her regression analysis found a significant relationship between scandals and legislation, but not scandals and funding for child welfare program. Many of the bills came out within two weeks of a compelling story hitting the papers. Gainsborough recognizes the need for continued coverage and pressure from the media in order to create the funding base necessary to create systematic change instead of band-aid reform on a case-by-base basis, which is generally short term and not appropriately funded overtime.

Separation of the research from the stories of children appears conscious. Unfortunately, the continuity of the stories is then lost in the research. It’s as if the stories run in parallel to the study, making the book a significantly less emotional read.

Child welfare issues are not easy, and Gainsborough gives much credence to that. But must we simply leave the fate of the most vulnerable children in this country to the whims of the news cycle?

Written by: Nicole Levitz, January 31st 2011

In the Time of the Girls

brittany — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Anne Germanacos

BOA Editions

When do you stop being a girl? When do you start? And, perhaps most importantly, what does it mean to be a girl? These questions are necessary ingredients in order to fully ingest Anne Germanacos’ debut work, In the Time of the Girls. An exploration of history and individual experience, the book forsakes the traditional plot-driven narrative for a collection of short stories which themselves are a mosaic of prose and dialogue infused vignettes, each individually titled.

Feminist theory discourages identifying women as a definitive group whose lives are bound to each other on the basis of a shared gender. However, I am consistently reminded how my experiences mirror those of the women I’ve encountered throughout my life. Germanacos shines in her ability to tap into the collective consciousness of women as she deftly articulates the moments where our lives intersect.

“Men on Crosses” is an abstract, yet poignant, story that uses biblical allegory to explore pregnancy, abortion, and the ever-present dichotomy of choice. “Sundering Twins” explores identity and sexuality through the relationship of two outcast individuals—“He was an orphan, she the lesser half of a pair.” My favorite stories include the titular chapter, “In the Time of the Girls,” a celebration of the many ways of being a girl, and “Infinity,” which begins by asking, “But was it a doll or a person, or both? And, who could say? The girls, I guess, who read the stories, or the mothers who read them to the little girls who couldn’t.”

In its best moments, In the Time of the Girls reads like a lost diary of your favorite Women’s Studies professor—one part feminist prose and one part academic text. A cacophony of insights, Germanacos bravely and creatively tackles gender, race, religion, imperialism, and more, always returning to the nebulous experience of being “girl.”

Written by: Alicia Sowisdral, September 29th 2010

Brainscan #24 and #25

admin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Alex Wrekk

Putting one’s life on display is, in essence, quite a courageous act. Yet in this time of reality television, it is becoming more of a norm, infused with a sense of banality. Thank goodness for zines, where our need to know intimate details of strangers’ lives is a collaboration of intelligence between people who actually think about stuff, write with a purpose, and use their experiences to connect, grow, and reach out to their community.

Brainscan is an extremely personal zine. Its author, Alex Wrekk, is a zine superstar, and rightly so. Author of the popular how-to guide of zine-making, Stolen Sharpie Revolution, over fifteen years of zine-making under her belt, and the most intimate details of her life photocopied, stapled, and mailed around the world, this is a woman committed to taking her experiences in life and putting them on display in a way that is not for ratings or profit. Rather, she does it for the love of writing, creating, and sharing.

The most recent issues of Brainscan, #24 and #25, (which come as a set when ordered from Alex’s site Small World Buttons) are quite different from each other yet enjoyable in their own ways.

Brainscan #24 is a small collection of vignettes containing snippets from Wrekk’s life, such as her love for good beer and why her zine is called Brainscan. They are musings that give a good overview of Wrekk’s thoughts and attitudes without delving very deeply into any particular subject, making it a quick read and a nice sneak peak into someone else’s brain.

Brainscan #25, on the other hand, is much weightier, and concentrates on the story of Wrekk finding her way back to her true love, Paul, after being in an abusive marriage and growing exponentially as a person. Issue #21 of Brainscan is widely known throughout the zine community as it detailed the breakup of Wrekk’s marriage and is celebrated as a courageous story of overcoming abuse. This current issue touches on some of those subjects but is more of a celebration of finding the strength to love and being true to your heart.

The zine sometimes gets a bit painfully intimate to read, bordering on too much information, but it leaves you breathless with its honesty. It is constructed nicely, both visually and thematically, with flashbacks of Wrekk’s early relationship with Paul interspersed through a chronological telling of the dissolution of her marriage, and journey through learning to love herself and other people in new and radical ways.

Grammar and spell-check go out the window, on par with the zine making genre which rebels in both content and construction to mainstream publishing norms. Reading Brainscan is like you have gone into Wrekk’s house, sat on her bed, and read her diary, but she invites this intimacy, keeping no secrets. This style of writing is extremely feminist as it takes subjects women are told to keep hidden and be ashamed of and puts them out into the world, with a sense of acknowledgment and pride in personal growth, and the sharing of stories, in turn facilitating community dialogue.

Written by: Jyoti Roy, June 3rd 2010

Was That Supposed To Be Funny?

admin — Mon, 31 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Lauren Barnett

One can never truly pinpoint what feminism looks like. Sometimes it’s the faces of celebrities, proudly claiming the F-word; sometimes it’s a swarm of protesters gathering on the National Mall. And sometimes it’s a crown of broccoli asserting its dancing ability to a bullying stalk of asparagus. In her latest work, Was That Supposed to be Funny, Brooklyn-based cartoonist/blogger Lauren Barnett uses personal anecdotes as well as personified vegetables to invite the reader into her quirky, droll mind.

While the comic does not serve as the site for feminist criticism, Barnett’s presentation of her own experiences as a woman offers fertile ground for exploring the cultural constructs that pervade the female experience. The title alone, inspired by a sixth grade note between the author and a classmate, conjures memories of bra-snapping boys, sexist teachers, landlords, and doctors plus a lifetime of pop-culture references in which the joke is on us. While hunting for an apartment, she is nearly scammed out of her $500 deposit, and completely scammed out of the apartment. One is left to wonder, would the apartment have been secured if the boyfriend with whom she will share it had been the one handling the shady broker?

The most poignant—and strangely hilarious—moments are Barnett’s inclusion of actual diary entries from her adolescence, written verbatim, and brought to life in black and white illustration. Watching Jaws, a nine-year-old Barnett is saddened by the death of “the pretty girl” and later makes history as President of the United States Niki Taylor, supported by her secretary, and best friend, Cindy Crawford. Barnett’s work is a charming and unique representation of the third wave of feminism and a generation of women no longer succumbing to silence. In a country where women are still underpaid and outnumbered by men in a number of fields including publishing, animation, and comedy, Barnett bravely inserts her voice into the dialogue. The result is a sublimely feminist, refreshingly entertaining, and utterly relevant documentation of one woman’s world.

Written by: Alicia Sowisdral, May 31st 2010

Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style

admin — Mon, 10 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Fawzia Afzal-Khan

Syracuse University Press

A poet’s power lies not only in her well-crafted images but in the rhythm of her recitation. As I read Lahore With Love, the memoir of Fawzia Afzal-Khan, I longed to hear her read the volume aloud. Many parts of her story poured out in a stream of consciousness, and her anecdotes deftly wove between youth and adulthood, lighthearted desires and the pain of loss, politics and the laughter of girlfriends.

Afzal-Khan interweaves her personal story with key elements in the history of the establishment of Pakistan, her homeland, which was formed just ten years before her birth. The painful string of military dictatorships running her country creates a mirror for the tragic experiences endured by her girlfriends. As she writes, with foreboding, “I have sensed disaster coming their way, my way, my country’s way.” In some ways, Afzal-Khan escaped disaster: she is a professor in the English Department at Montclair State University (New Jersey), a scholar of postcolonial studies, a poet, and an actress. Yet while she lives a successful life in the United States, she carries with her a complicated sorrow and relief, a pain of loss that is aggravated each time she visits Pakistan and sees some new wounds inflicted upon her home and her loved ones.

Lahore With Love gives us vignettes of upper middle class life in a culture where propriety called for gender-segregated social gatherings, but someone was always ready to break rules. The line between acceptable “colonial” habits (Catholic school) and the dangerous “Western decadence” (art school) was at times thin and slippery. As the author forges her own self-identity, the nation also seeks a shape; she heads to the U.S. to obtain her PhD, and Pakistan begins to undergo Islamization, with new layers of reactionary rules added to the old. There is nothing dry about the presentation of material; in one bloody chapter, the story of Shia martyrs is juxtaposed with bullfighting in Spain.

At times I would have enjoyed seeing the vignettes fleshed out more fully, and I suspect some readers will want a volume of Pakistani history by their side to read further about incidents to which the author refers. However, any changes to the unique narrative structure would detract from the author’s intense style. Her voice is the one we use when we long for a reunion with dear friends who are now gone, or hunger to return to the past to stop tragedy from striking, or barely restrain our anger at the callousness of our fellow humans.

Afzal-Khan asks, “Are we doomed to inhabit this binary universe or can we challenge the system that turns us into the roles we wear like selves?” She sets for the reader a powerful mold-breaking example when she self-identifies as “actorsingerpoetactivistmemoirist.”

Written by: Lisa Rand, May 10th 2010

Brainscan #23

admin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:47:00 +0000

By Alex Wrekk

This second printing of Brainscan #23 was released in September 2008, but don’t worry about it being outdated. While the events in this zine happened between 1995 and 2003, none of Alex Wrekk’s narratives has an expiration date.

Wrekk’s travel-themed vignettes are entertaining stories, told the way a friend would talk about the wild things that have happened to her. Not only is this zine an amusing way to kill some time while riding public transit or sitting in a waiting room, it also allows the reader to experience bits of one woman’s life. From trying to discourage unwanted suitors to exploring the urban legends of Salt Lake City and helping an unappreciative bike jock fix a flat, I felt I was right there with Wrekk through every adventure.

The tales are not laid out in chronological order, which keeps the zine from feeling like an autobiography. Arranging the episodes out of sequence emphasizes them as brief glimpses of Wrekk’s life away from home. The fact that each short-short story is independent of the others, coupled with the booklet’s small size perfect for tucking into a backpack or purse, make it easy to read on the go. Readers can open to any page and dive right in without having to keep up with a plot or remember what they read last.

This black and white zine’s old-school cut and paste design is a delight. Nearly every page features an appealing background pattern, and vintage photos are scattered throughout. A variety of fonts, point sizes, and white-on-black printing keep the pages visually stimulating.

In her introduction, Wrekk writes that the first version of Brainscan #23 was “literally thrown together in the fits of a fever haze,” but it doesn’t seem like she did much editing before printing more copies. Missing words, typos, and grammatical errors plague this zine. I realize paid copyeditors don’t correct anything self-published, but I found the multitude of mistakes distracting. A single careful reading should have easily brought the most blatant of the needed revisions to Wrekk’s attention.

Overall, spending two dollars for theses thirteen tales from Wrekk’s journeys is a great entertainment value. At fifteen cents each, these stories are bargains! This is a zine I will pull from the shelf again and again when I’m stuck at home but want to get lost in the saga of the road.

Written by: Chantel C. Guidry, June 16th 2009

Revealing Moments

admin — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:47:00 +0000

By Wayne Scheer

Thumbscrews Press

In Revealing Moments, Wayne Scheers’ collection of twenty-four of prose vignettes, we are plunged right into dark, hopeful, nostalgic and passionate moments of people’s lives. True to form, each vignette is extremely short, ranging from one paragraph to nearly two pages at most.

In each carefully crafted snapshot the reader is voyeur to pivotal moments that presumably shape each characters’ reality for better or worse. These incidents can be catalysts for important change and within that there is a sense of hope.

A retired writing and literature professor, Scheer’s stories are very well written and filled with brilliant metaphors that crop up like the islands of sweetness and joy we experience throughout our lifetimes. Scheer writes with a wry sense of humor and above all, provides an accurate portrayal of the human condition.

Comparable to the heartbreaks of life, there are several oppressive or abusive characters in Revealing Moments. In “Climbing High,” a child climbs a tree to escape his abusive father, who is throwing rocks and snapping his belt “like a lion tamer’s whip.”

Carolyn, a pregnant character in “Pig Roast,” watches “as the men in her family roasted a fat pig.” The men spray Coca Cola onto the animal to tenderize and “sweeten the meat” and Carolyn’s husband jokes that “she sure could use some tenderizin’ her own self.”

In “The First Wife,” a daughter observes an objectification of women that results in serial marriages for her father. About his fourth wife she says, “soon he’ll tire of her and she’ll become another painting he once bought, but can’t recall why.”

What is perhaps my favorite line in the book can be found in “The Old Oak Tree.” A man alone in the dimming sunset of his life, faces the transition from Fall to Winter in his front yard and the narrative reads: “The oak tree would soon offer no shade, and its leaves, as scattered as an old man’s memories, would be little more than a nuisance.”

Another sweet moment can be found in “The Storm.” Woken in the night by a raging storm, a couple “make(s) gentle love amidst nature’s chaos.” I found myself searching, frustrated, for other uncomplicated and lovely portrayals of life. That being said, I am not a reader looking for an idealized, sanitized or otherwise sugarcoated version of reality. As I hope any work of art will, _Revealing Moments _provoked a response from me on multiple levels; it inspired emotion, reflection and thoughtful inquiry. Overall this collection, which illustrates the mundane tragedies of everyday people, left me feeling kind of blue.

The material may be somewhat melancholy but it is held together with threads of beautiful writing, and much like the duality of life itself, is worth experiencing.

Written by: Matsya Siosal, June 4th 2009