We’re doing a massive throwback to when the puppies were still babies and I was the proud mama of fifteen dogs. Keeping in the vein of: I’m so far behind in writing content for the blog, I’m showing up with these pictures taken in the middle of May 2020 when the babies were tiny and I had yet to realize I had lost all motivation. So content I meant to publish well over a year ago is finally seeing the light of day.
This was as haywire as it looks.
As of right now, the puppies have been in their forever homes for a year and three months. I ended up keeping four and the mama along with my first rescue dog. The house is chaos, and I love it.
When it comes to names, I believe a name is important. It is an identity. The utterance of a name evokes an entire being. I’m the owner of a unique name with meaning. My dogs are my children, and I wanted to bestow them with unique and meaningful names; even if those names would only be with them for a short time.
Beau is the first baby I named. Her full name being Beauvoir for Simone de Beauvoir, the French writer, feminist, and existentialist. I wanted her to be strong and smart and full of character. All things that she very much is. When Tess came along, she was a pregnant teenager alone in the world, so I named her for the titular character in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Let’s just say, her story has a much happier ending than the novel.
Tess brought the puppies into the world on March 3 and 4, 2020. Dylan and I went back and forth naming them. To say the least, the names were not necessarily equal in creativity. No paws pointed in any direction… Just to inform, the names I chose were largely literary or historical and sometimes both. The exception being Noski, meaning socks in Russian because he had four white paws, creatively uncreative.
My favorite thing was sitting down and letting them climb all over me.
March—Everyone thought I named her March because she was born in March. That would be coincidental. I named her for the March sisters in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Now named Vienna, for Vienna sausage because she looked like a tiny sausage puppy.
Hardy—Named for one of my favorite authors, Thomas Hardy, who wrote Tess of the D’Urbervilles. He was a Victorian novelist, who wasn’t afraid to tackle difficult subjects and women’s struggles. Now named Marcus, for Marcus Aurelius, so yay for a creative furever dad.
Hera—[Dylan Named] He wanted to name a few girls after ancient Greek goddesses, who are strong. Yay for mythological stories. So I’m not mad about it. Still named Hera.
Boudica—A warrior Queen of the Iceni tribe, who met and conquered the Roman forces in 60 AD. Maybe not literary, but there are some great books about her! Now named Lucy!
Makeda—Named for a highly disputed woman who may or may have not existed in Ethiopia and/or the Middle East, depending on tradition. She is better known as Queen of Sheba and first mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.
Lily-May—A combination of Lily Bart from House of Mirthand May Welland from The Age of Innocenceboth by Edith Wharton. Now named by Sadie.
Athena—[Dylan Named] Another girl named for an ancient Greek goddess. She’s still named Athena, but she goes by Teena.
Oryol—The hometown of Ivan Turgenev, a Russian writer, known for exploring nihilistic themes in much of his work. Fathers and Sonsis a particular favorite. He now goes by Murphy.
They were chaos, but they were cuddly chaos.
My house has three girls and three boys. The girls were all named by me: Beau, Tess, and Makeda. Dylan named the three boys: Knight, Duke, and Bear. None are literary names. I did make Knight’s name fun by pronouncing it K-Nig-Hit. It is pronounced phonetically and not with a silent k, g, or h. People look at me weird, and I love it. I like to tell people Duke was named for Duke Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and Bear was named for Professor Behr in Little Women. Neither is true, but I can pretend.
bisous un обьятий, RaeAnna
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I read Kate Chopin’s The Awakeningtwice in high school, but I haven’t touched it since.
Normally, I write book reviews, but this is more of a book forward, a book impression, a book remembrance. I read it for the first time and fell deeply in love with this classic, feminist triumph of a novel, but I’ve been scared to return. As a young woman, it came to me while I was in the midst of my own battle against the patriarchy, man, and family for freedom of self. My uncertainty to open its cover once again is out of fear. Fear of what I will find it would do or maybe what it wouldn’t do. Would it mean the same thing it did to sixteen year old me as it does to twenty-nine year old me? Not only am I stronger and more broken, I have been of this world longer with its misogyny, laws, patriarchy, double standards, abuse, and more. I’m also a more experienced reader. So of course The Awakeningwon’t mean the same to me today as it did a decade ago, but I was scared it would mean less.
Literature with a capital ‘L’ arrived on my bookshelf when I was eight. I was an overachieving priss of a child; children’s literature did not speak to me. I love Literature because I didn’t get it right away. It demanded an understanding of the vocabulary, history, culture, and more in which it was written and set. I yearned for knowledge. Literature made me do the research; in a time before Google and the internet, it was an interactive experience as I read one book surrounded by a dictionary and encyclopedia. As much as I loved Literature, I craved more. I craved seeing myself on the page. Even as I kid, I knew I was not being represented in the pages I so loved. There is very little written by women. More exists than meets the eye, but even as an educated reader and researcher, finding older works by women takes effort outside of Dickenson, the Brontës, Alcott, and Austen. It was years before I found Woolf, Morrison, Eliot, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Duras, Wharton, Cather, Plath, Lee, Stein, Beauvoir, Angelou, Gaskell, Lennox, Stowe, Hurston, and of course Kate Chopin. All of whom have shaped me as a reader, writer, and most importantly as a woman. Chopin was my gateway into a world of writers writing about me, my plight, my pain, my existence in a world not meant for me. Even a hundred years later or more, the words these women wrote represented my place in the world. Chopin wrote in the late nineteenth century, and she rocked society with her daring works about the internal and external lives of ordinary women daring to live.
The Awakeningwas the first book I ever felt a deep connection with. I was a young reader beginning to understand the importance of Literature, representation, feminism, activism, and more. I was starting to come into my own as a thinker with a vagina. I was beginning to grasp at what it meant to walk this earth as a woman. A lover of Literature and history, I was probably more aware than most fifteen year old girls of women’s historical lack of autonomy. Historical being the key word. I did not feel equal, and I wanted equality, but I knew it wasn’t mine. Even with my fundamentally better understanding of history, I had yet to grasp the whys or the hows or the history or the culture or any of it. I just had a feeling. This book came into my life when my life was changing from bad to worse to what I would eventually title “Hell”. As I read The Awakening, I was struck by the realization that I knew very little had changed for women. I could wear pants like the boys, but I would never be like the boys. I was a girl. America had never been the land of the free.*
Four months after I experienced my first sexual assault in the lunch room by a school administrator. Four months after I told my mother. Four months after she told me to keep quiet and see if it would happen again. Three months after my first kiss at the Winter Formal because my mother told me I had to or I wouldn’t have a boyfriend anymore. Three months after I realized no one would protect me. Two months after I realized I was only worth something connected to a man. I was a freshman in high school. I was experiencing my first tastes of being a woman.
It was the summer I turned sixteen. I had new boyfriend because that’s what sixteen year old girls do. But I had no faith in men. No faith in women. No faith in family. No faith in people. I felt utterly alone. With no one to protect me, to understand, to hold my hand, I was accepting that to be a woman was to be alone.
What I had read in history was not at all in the past. Nothing had changed really. Being a woman meant being an object for male consumption. Some took gently. Some did not. It would be another year before I learned how much they could and would take without permission, without waiting, without caring I was human. And if I turned to women, they would not protect me if they believed me at all. My mother taught me that.
At sixteen, the next seventy years looked like a lonely, losing battle. What was the point? Did all women feel this way? Why weren’t they do anything about it? I was years away from understanding the nuance of internalized misogyny and all the culture shit we are taught to swallow, believe, conform to, and uphold as women. But I already knew existing like that in this world was not for me, and so I already had a few suicide attempts under my belt. I had very little desire to live even before the first of many men took what he thought was his right.
And then Edna walked along a Grand Isle’s beach and dared to yearn for more than motherhood and wifedom. We were separated by a century. We were separated by experience. We were separated by so many things, but I understood her. She didn’t save my life, but I felt seen. I felt validated.
I reached out to my fellow bibliophiles asking for their opinions on The Awakening, on Edna. The few who had read the book hated Edna. They found her shallow and selfish. The ending was completely unrealistic. What woman with a life of leisure would walk into the ocean? What wife would leave her husband? What mother would choose death over her children? To me, it was the perfect ending to her story. I was frustrated by the vitriol. How could they not understand? She was alone and desperate, leading a meaningless life.
The Awakeningwas the first time I saw a female character with any emotions or internal life I could comprehend and identify with; probably because she was the first woman written by I woman I had read. Edna was the first, but many have come after her.
My concept of womanhood has evolved over the last thirteen years. I am no longer the optimistic sixeen year old, but I’m no longer the devastated sixteen year old. All is not completely lost, though I have a dismal view of the present and near future. My world view is complex, and I know I am on a lifelong search for my place and role in society. Not all share my view of womanhood, nor should they. But I will continue to fight for every woman. As a twenty-nine year old, I know my life has seen challenges many have never and will never seen, but it has also been blessed in many ways. Pain is not a competition. I acknowledge my many privileges and disadvantages. Pain is not the only thing I have known, but pain is still central to my experiences as a human and as a woman.
Kate Chopin, The Awakening, and Edna gave me validation. Someone understood. 122 years ago, a woman knew the pain I knew and dared to want more.
I am not going to review The Awakening. For so many reasons, one of which being: I don’t want to. Another being: It would be a very long review. My fears ended up being unfounded. The book means more to me as a grown ass woman than it did as a teenager. I found the nuances, narrative, and storytelling far more enthralling than I had thirteen years ago. Not only did I fall more in love with Edna, I fell out of love with her husband, paramour, and female companions. What had seemed like a love story years ago is anything but today. It isn’t romantic but deeply depressing. I could identify the tragedies with the eye of an analyst and the heart of a woman and the mind of a partner. I saw the craft in Chopin’s work and the soul in her story. The Awakening spoke to me in new and more powerful levels.
Edna is very much alive.
bisous et обьятий, RaeAnna
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*This is being written from the perspective of a white woman as I look back at the views I had as a teenager exploring my own place in this world as a woman through the knowledge, resources, and books I had at my disposal. It would be several more years before I learned the term “intersectionality” and began applying it to my own life, views, feminism, and activism. Up until that point, feminism and racism were uniquely separate issues because that is all I knew. Black women suffered racism. Black women suffered feminism. I wanted equality for everyone: men and women, Black and white and Asian and Hispanic and everyone in between. I was more apt to identify as a humanist than a feminist. My fundamental beliefs have remained the same, but my terminology has expanded to better encompass and express my desires for intersectionality, equity, and advocacy.
Worth A Read Definitely Length 320 Quick Review Starting with a bang, Porter dives into America’s past and complex issues with racism, classism, feminism, and all the other -isms as two families intermingle from the 1950’s to the last years of Obama’s presidency.
Regina Porter knows how to write. Her skill is on full display from the very beginning of The Travelers. This is an impressive piece of literature in and of itself, but the fact it is her debut makes it even more momentous. Simultaneously concise and epic, Porter packs a punch with every character and plot line. A story that is sure to leave an impression on anyone who picks it up.
With a huge cast of characters, The Travelers does its readers a favor by including a cast and familial context before the intricately woven plot begins. Convenient for reminding myself who’s who in the milieu without having to backtrack, I appreciated it..
Porter dives into the plot and complexities of relationships and humans search for answers with “When the boy was four, he asked his father why people needed sleep. His father said, “So God could unfuck all the things people fuck up.”” Two sentences. A striking way to start a novel that lives up to and surpasses the promise of its first impression. Spanning seven decades, The Travelers explores the realities of living in the United States through a variety of lenses and eras as two families come together.
This is not an easy book to read. It challenges readers to follow along a journey mired by stark realities. As chapters change so does the perspective, characters, era, setting, style, and tone. It’s a chameleon of a novel; changing drastically to fit the characters, situations, and times. There are no good characters or bad. Although, there are a few who fall much further on the wrong side of bad. Flaws and brilliance are present in each character. Instead of relying on tropes, The Travelers snapshots people’s lives to depict the greater faults in American society not just historically but currently.
People are not one thing. They are not just black. Just white. Just gay. Just rich. Just a father. Just an anything. Being human means being many things all at the same time and experiencing events in very unique and personal ways. We walk through life as a culmination of all our identities and experiences commingling simultaneously. Porter does not dilute her characters. They are not just white, mentally ill, black, veteran, sister, mixed, lover, poor, victim, straight, abuser, rich, gay, etc. She allows them to be many things concurrently.
The real triumph in The Travelers is Porter’s resistance to explain. She does not water down her stories or characters or layers by telling the reader how to perceive it. She lets it play out and leaves it. She has a straightforward yet nuanced way of writing. As in life; she allows the reader to infer and interpret what happens outside the line of sight. Readers are used to having a degree of omniscience, but Porter doesn’t allow this.
As a survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence, Porter delivers one of the most believable literary sexual abuse encounters I’ve encountered. I admire her dedication to tackling often misunderstood and misrepresented atrocities with sincerity and tact. It’s a hard line to walk, and she does it well.
This is good Literature. With a capital L. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop has a reputation for excellence. It has earned this reputation because Regina Porter and writers of this caliber called it home for a time. It is an incredible program, and I’m not just saying so because I grew up in Iowa.
The Travelers is one of the most affecting contemporary novels I have encountered.
Memorable Quotes “You can’t see the end in the beginning. So play it safe and get the beginning right.” “But we inherit it. Don’t you want to know what makes them tick?”
Should I Read Meh Length 336 Quick Review Traditions refuse to change in Homeward Houndeven when a snow storm threatens the Christmas hunt. Everyone makes it home safe except one.
Homeward Houndby Rita Mae Brown is comprised of elements, which should make me like it. Unfortunately, they are just that. Elements failing to come together to create a memorable book. What I thought would be a huge cast of dynamic characters was a bland smoothie.
The basic gist: A whole bunch of characters are gathering in the Virginia countryside for the traditional run days before Christmas. The run is steeped in 400 years of tradition and hierarchy. The hierarchy is further bolstered by the social structure of the area they all live. Toss in a pipeline and a wealthy gentleman, who goes missing.
Brown begins Homeward Houndwith a list of characters including the humans and the animals. Each character was accompanied by their traits and role within the group. I like the concept when there are so many characters involved because the story doesn’t have to explain it in the story. Unfortunately, the story still felt the need to, so it was basically a waste of time reading those pages. Brown has one family and their “African American”ness was emphasized. Instead of feeling inclusive, it felt racist for needing to point out this otherness in rural Virginia. I got it, they’re black in a sea of white folk in a literal blizzard.
Having a pipeline and a missing person were the main driving forces behind the plot in Homeward Hound, but neither did a great job of making me want to read more.
My favorite part of the entire novel was the way Brown decided to deal with dialogue. The animals had conversations among themselves in the midst of human interactions. The human dialogue was noted in the traditional way with quotes. When the animals spoke, their conversations were italicized, so the reader would know an animal was speaking instead of a two legged character.
I do really like the cover art and the concept of Homeward Hound. The elements just did not come together in a cohesive and compelling enough way to make me enjoy reading the book. I like the cover more than the content.
Read Yes Length 256 Quick Review A collection of women’s stories and experiences with feminist ranging from hopefully to angry. Curated by Scarlett Curtis and in partnership with Girl Up. You can’t not feel empowered reading it.
I knew I would love Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and other lies,an incredible anthology, as I read the first essay by Evanna Lynch – aka Luna Lovegood – talking about cats and period panties and the fear of bleeding on someone’s couch. Honestly, who hasn’t been there? There is a vivid authenticity coursing through the pages with the strongest potency of passionate women.
The pink cover is just the beginning of tearing down ill-founded preconceived notions about the hairy, man-hating feminist ogres instilled in our psyches by the patriarchy. Every contributing author has her own feminism just as unique as her. One thing is clear, their feminism is as unboxable as the universe. Some like pink, others like pants, some dream of being mothers, some just want careers. In their own way, they are working towards equality and opportunity for everyone to live their lives to their own drums.
Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and other liescontains a multitude of essays with a variety of lengths, narratives, messages, tones, and more. Each woman tells her own bit. Some women are joyous and other are angry while others find humor in what others some describe sorrow. Feminism has as many emotions as people do with just as much complexity. Contributing authors range from the incredibly famous to advocates to the unknown working behind the scenes. Emma Watson, Keira Knightley, Jameela Jamil, Claire Horn, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, and so many other incredible women. Each woman has an incredible voice filled with experience and brilliance. I loved every moment of reading.
With the holidays coming up. I highly suggest stuffing this pink treasure into the stockings of the girls and women you love most, and also the males should read it too. Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and other liesis a really wonderful and inspiring book.
Memorable Quotes “Does femininity impede feminism?” Evanna Lynch “14. My religion mandates sexual satisfaction from my partner. What does yours do?” Amani Al-Khatahtbeh “We have a lot of work to undo…” Jameela Jamil “Learning to have sex from porn is like learning how to drive from The Fast and The Furious.” Jameela Jamil “Women hold up the whole world.” Akilah Hughes
Read Yes Length 496 Quick Review A tail of ruin and riches, love and heartbreak, joy and sorrow. History and fantasy entwine in Imogen Hermes Gowar’s debut novel The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock to completely captivate the reader.
I was hesitant about this novel. I don’t read much historical fiction anymore because I have a tendency of getting caught up in the historical inaccuracies because I love history. So when The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar arrived on my doorstep, well, I hoped the writing was as pretty as the cover. I was exceptionally surprised.
Set in London of 1785, Mr. Hancock is a middle-aged merchant widowered many years prior. Anjelica Neal is a courtesan with a tenuous position but a lot of confidence. They are both getting by without experiencing joy. Their lives have completely different trajectories and motivations. Due to circumstance, they are brought together.
Courtesans are often the subject and driving force behind historical fiction. It’s rarely done well or with any respect to the conditions sex workers were forced to live and work under. This is different. It’s gritty and real. It doesn’t use courtesans as a thinly veiled excuse to create sex and passion for women readers thirsting for a little jolt into their lives. Instead The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancockuses courtesans and a brothel to critique modern day racism, sexism, and sex work. A staunchly feminist piece of piece of literature, it drags the reader into a plot of betrayal, obsession, and mysticism.
I’m not a huge fan of fantasy. I like my literature real and a little bit stressful. Imogen Hermes Gowar creates a completely believable fantasy for me because the mermaid isn’t a star in this. Though it motivates the plot, it sits in the backseat letting the more realistic plot play out.
The writing and narrative style is beautifully constructed. The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancockfocuses on the perspectives of Mr. Hancock and Anjelica Neal shifting from chapter to chapter. Every once in a while, a secondary character’s perspective will be explored to add layers and complexities to the world created.
Memorable Quotes “Men are not fearful; they build one another to greatness. Women believe their only power is in tearing one another down.” “Treat them as if they are the centre of the world, and they do not hesitate to believe it. A charmed life these men lead…”
Title: The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock Author: Imogen Hermes Gowar Publisher: Harper Copyright: 2018 ISBN: 9780062859952
