An Ode to the Power of Words<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/rawImage-300x164.jpg\")
<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nOn March 8, Sandra Cisneros (a Mexican-American writer living in San Miguel de Allende) accepted the PEN\/Nabokov award for achievement in international literature. Poet, novelist, and memoirist, she is author of a dozen books including The House on Mango Street, Caramelo, A House of my Own,<\/em> and my personal favourite, Woman Hollering Creek. <\/em><\/span><\/p>\nIn an impassioned acceptance speech, Cisneros dedicated her award to a poetic list of word-workers as well as to those \u201cdivided by borders, the mothers and father punished for seeking asylum, the children traumatized by separation,\u201d and \u201call who know<\/em> writing is a spiritual act, who have faith writing can transform the lives of others, who have been resurrected by writing, who are transforming and resurrecting the world with their words.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nRead<\/a> her full speech or listen to it here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWomen\u2019s Manifesto<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/DklOtf-X4AA5TnX-300x225.jpg\")
<\/a>In 2017, the PEN International\u2019s 83rd World Congress in Lviv, Ukraine, unanimously passed the PEN International Women\u2019s Manifesto.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nPresented by Jennifer Clements (left), a feminist poet and novelist who lives part-time in San Miguel too, the Women\u2019s Manifesto strongly endorses the rights of women writers for the benefit of everyone. <\/span><\/p>\nStudies around the world, and most recently, the Emilia Report<\/a> in Britain, <\/span>have found a marked bias against women in the quantity and the type of coverage of the books they write. Women are less likely to be reviewed and less likely to be nominated for and to win prizes. The consequences can be life-threatening: when a writer is imprisoned for their work, humanitarian groups such as PEN use reviews and awards to determine their eligibility for a release campaign. Fewer women typically appeared on PEN\u2019s roster in part because women writers were less likely to meet these criteria.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/iwd-300x209-300x209.png\")
<\/a>The Manifesto may help change that:<\/p>\n\u201cThe first and founding principle of the PEN Charter asserts that \u2018literature knows no frontiers\u2019. These frontiers were traditionally thought of as borders between countries and peoples. For many women in the world \u2013 and for almost all women until relatively recently \u2013 the first, and the last and perhaps the most powerful frontier was the door of the house she lived in: her parents\u2019 or her husband\u2019s home.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cFor women to have free speech, the right to read, the right to write, they need to have the right to roam physically, socially and intellectually.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cPEN believes that the act of silencing a person is to deny their existence. It is a kind of death. Humanity is both wanting and bereft without the full and free expression of women\u2019s creativity and knowledge.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nDownload the Women’s Manifesto here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Pasted-Graphic-300x125.png\")
<\/a>Oh, Bidie-in, Where be your Chuddies?<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n134 years ago, the first installment of what became the Oxford English Dictionary was published. Its 352 pages covered only A to Ant, but even so, sold about 4,000 copies, a bestseller in its time.<\/span><\/p>\nLast year, in an attempt to expand its regional vocabulary. the OED launched a \u201cWords Where You Are\u201d appeal to mark the 90<\/span>th<\/sup><\/span> anniversary of the first full edition. The 2019 update, launched this month, includes a sampling of accepted suggestions from around the world, local words such as chuddies (underpants in India), bidie-in (unmarried cohabiting couple in Scotland), <\/span>gramadoelas (unsophisticated rural region in South Africa), and jibbons (spring onions in Wales), which should be ready for pulling any day now. <\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nNews from my Casita<\/b><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/balloon-225x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
On March 8, in honour of International Women\u2019s Day, the National Arts Centre Orchestra Performed Life Reflected<\/em>, an original symphony by Zosha de Castri, based on the Alice Munro story \u201cDear Life,\u201d which I adapted for the project. <\/span><\/p>\nIn May, the orchestra will take this astonishing multi-media symphony to Europe, performing on May 17 in Paris at La Seine Musicale, and on May 26 in Gothenburg at the Gothenburg Concert House. <\/span><\/p>\nI lived for a short time in Gothenburg, a place I wrote about in a story called “Navigating the Kattegat” in The Lion in the Room Next Door, <\/em>and my new work-in-progress has its roots in Sweden: strange confluences that make it hard to resist following the NAC east across the ocean.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
From the Department of How-Time-Flies<\/i><\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/IMG_1761-247x300.jpg\")
<\/a>I celebrated the first day of spring by dancing in Plaza Civica, where a Mexicano band tunes up the first Sunday of each month to play cumbia, cha-cha, salsa, danz\u00f3n, and more. My cumbia teacher from four years ago pulled me onto the cobbles and somehow, once I stopped thinking, my feet remembered the steps. I can’t recall my tap-dance to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” when I was seven, but the go-go routine my friend Nancy and I danced to “Wipe-out” has never faded.<\/p>\nThe connection between dancing and writing may seem tenuous, but not for Zadie Smith,<\/a> who asks: “What can an art of words take from the art that needs none?” She answers herself: “Lessons of position, attitude, rhythm and style, some of them obvious, some indirect.” And: “Writing, like dancing, is one of the arts available to people who have nothing. The only absolutely necessary equipment in dance is your own body.” As Virginia Woolf points out, \u201cFor 10 and sixpence, one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare.\u201d<\/p>\nBook Report<\/b><\/h3>\n
When I started this quarterly newsletter, I shared interesting literary websites through \u201cLinks I love,\u201d but the time seems right, this being the point of balance of the solar year, to shift to thumbnail reviews of recent books that have “stayed read” \u2014 their characters, ideas, and images entering me, altering me in some significant way.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/812wPl04e-L-196x300.jpg\")
<\/a>Lost Children Archive<\/em> by Valeria Luiselli<\/p>\nValeria Luiselli is a provocative Mexican writer now living in the US. I was impressed with her debut novel, Faces in a Crowd,<\/em>\u00a0I devoured The Story of My Teeth<\/em> and <\/span>Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions<\/em>, and now she has truly captivated me with Lost Children Archive<\/em>, an auto-fiction story of a family\u2019s road trip to the Mexican border\u2014a profoundly moving, twinned illumination of children and migration.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/9780735273962-191x300.jpg\")
<\/a>Women Talking<\/em> by Miriam Toews<\/p>\nMiriam Toews describes Women Talking <\/em><\/span>as “a reaction through fiction” to true-life events <\/span>at a remote Mennonite community in Colombia. The subject matter is disturbing and the structure of the novel\u2014presented as minutes of\u00a0 <\/span>series of women\u2019s meetings\u2014is also troubling, given that the minutes are taken by a man. At first, I was irritated to read women\u2019s voices filtered in this way, but I trust Miriam Toews as a writer and so I persevered. By the end, no other format seemed possible for this terrifying, tragic, uplifting story.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBest Little Bookshop<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-Shot-2019-03-18-at-12.43.16-PM-300x152.png\")
<\/a>Brittany Bond haunts used bookstores in New York City, especially the dollar shelves outside the Strand, looking for good used paperbacks by women writers. Posting her finds on Instagram garnered her a following and she began reselling the books, at first from home, and since January, from a book cart called Common Books<\/a>, which can be found on the streets of the Lower East Side.<\/p>\n\u201cI\u2019ve noticed that a lot of people, when they see someone reading a book by a female writer they don\u2019t recognize, they assume it\u2019s fluff or trash,\u201d Bond says. She aims to change that.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/rawImage.jpg\")
<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nOn March 8, Sandra Cisneros (a Mexican-American writer living in San Miguel de Allende) accepted the PEN\/Nabokov award for achievement in international literature. Poet, novelist, and memoirist, she is author of a dozen books including The House on Mango Street, Caramelo, A House of my Own,<\/em> and my personal favourite, Woman Hollering Creek. <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n In an impassioned acceptance speech, Cisneros dedicated her award to a poetic list of word-workers as well as to those \u201cdivided by borders, the mothers and father punished for seeking asylum, the children traumatized by separation,\u201d and \u201call who know<\/em> writing is a spiritual act, who have faith writing can transform the lives of others, who have been resurrected by writing, who are transforming and resurrecting the world with their words.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Read<\/a> her full speech or listen to it here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Presented by Jennifer Clements (left), a feminist poet and novelist who lives part-time in San Miguel too, the Women\u2019s Manifesto strongly endorses the rights of women writers for the benefit of everyone. <\/span><\/p>\n Studies around the world, and most recently, the Emilia Report<\/a> in Britain, <\/span>have found a marked bias against women in the quantity and the type of coverage of the books they write. Women are less likely to be reviewed and less likely to be nominated for and to win prizes. The consequences can be life-threatening: when a writer is imprisoned for their work, humanitarian groups such as PEN use reviews and awards to determine their eligibility for a release campaign. Fewer women typically appeared on PEN\u2019s roster in part because women writers were less likely to meet these criteria.<\/p>\n \u201cThe first and founding principle of the PEN Charter asserts that \u2018literature knows no frontiers\u2019. These frontiers were traditionally thought of as borders between countries and peoples. For many women in the world \u2013 and for almost all women until relatively recently \u2013 the first, and the last and perhaps the most powerful frontier was the door of the house she lived in: her parents\u2019 or her husband\u2019s home.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cFor women to have free speech, the right to read, the right to write, they need to have the right to roam physically, socially and intellectually.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cPEN believes that the act of silencing a person is to deny their existence. It is a kind of death. Humanity is both wanting and bereft without the full and free expression of women\u2019s creativity and knowledge.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Download the Women’s Manifesto here<\/a>.<\/p>\n 134 years ago, the first installment of what became the Oxford English Dictionary was published. Its 352 pages covered only A to Ant, but even so, sold about 4,000 copies, a bestseller in its time.<\/span><\/p>\n Last year, in an attempt to expand its regional vocabulary. the OED launched a \u201cWords Where You Are\u201d appeal to mark the 90<\/span>th<\/sup><\/span> anniversary of the first full edition. The 2019 update, launched this month, includes a sampling of accepted suggestions from around the world, local words such as chuddies (underpants in India), bidie-in (unmarried cohabiting couple in Scotland), <\/span>gramadoelas (unsophisticated rural region in South Africa), and jibbons (spring onions in Wales), which should be ready for pulling any day now. <\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n On March 8, in honour of International Women\u2019s Day, the National Arts Centre Orchestra Performed Life Reflected<\/em>, an original symphony by Zosha de Castri, based on the Alice Munro story \u201cDear Life,\u201d which I adapted for the project. <\/span><\/p>\n In May, the orchestra will take this astonishing multi-media symphony to Europe, performing on May 17 in Paris at La Seine Musicale, and on May 26 in Gothenburg at the Gothenburg Concert House. <\/span><\/p>\n I lived for a short time in Gothenburg, a place I wrote about in a story called “Navigating the Kattegat” in The Lion in the Room Next Door, <\/em>and my new work-in-progress has its roots in Sweden: strange confluences that make it hard to resist following the NAC east across the ocean.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The connection between dancing and writing may seem tenuous, but not for Zadie Smith,<\/a> who asks: “What can an art of words take from the art that needs none?” She answers herself: “Lessons of position, attitude, rhythm and style, some of them obvious, some indirect.” And: “Writing, like dancing, is one of the arts available to people who have nothing. The only absolutely necessary equipment in dance is your own body.” As Virginia Woolf points out, \u201cFor 10 and sixpence, one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare.\u201d<\/p>\n When I started this quarterly newsletter, I shared interesting literary websites through \u201cLinks I love,\u201d but the time seems right, this being the point of balance of the solar year, to shift to thumbnail reviews of recent books that have “stayed read” \u2014 their characters, ideas, and images entering me, altering me in some significant way.<\/span><\/p>\n Valeria Luiselli is a provocative Mexican writer now living in the US. I was impressed with her debut novel, Faces in a Crowd,<\/em>\u00a0I devoured The Story of My Teeth<\/em> and <\/span>Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions<\/em>, and now she has truly captivated me with Lost Children Archive<\/em>, an auto-fiction story of a family\u2019s road trip to the Mexican border\u2014a profoundly moving, twinned illumination of children and migration.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Miriam Toews describes Women Talking <\/em><\/span>as “a reaction through fiction” to true-life events <\/span>at a remote Mennonite community in Colombia. The subject matter is disturbing and the structure of the novel\u2014presented as minutes of\u00a0 <\/span>series of women\u2019s meetings\u2014is also troubling, given that the minutes are taken by a man. At first, I was irritated to read women\u2019s voices filtered in this way, but I trust Miriam Toews as a writer and so I persevered. By the end, no other format seemed possible for this terrifying, tragic, uplifting story.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve noticed that a lot of people, when they see someone reading a book by a female writer they don\u2019t recognize, they assume it\u2019s fluff or trash,\u201d Bond says. She aims to change that.<\/p>\nWomen\u2019s Manifesto<\/b><\/h3>\n
<\/a>In 2017, the PEN International\u2019s 83rd World Congress in Lviv, Ukraine, unanimously passed the PEN International Women\u2019s Manifesto.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>The Manifesto may help change that:<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n
<\/a>Oh, Bidie-in, Where be your Chuddies?<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\nNews from my Casita<\/b><\/h2>\n
<\/p>\nFrom the Department of How-Time-Flies<\/i><\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a>I celebrated the first day of spring by dancing in Plaza Civica, where a Mexicano band tunes up the first Sunday of each month to play cumbia, cha-cha, salsa, danz\u00f3n, and more. My cumbia teacher from four years ago pulled me onto the cobbles and somehow, once I stopped thinking, my feet remembered the steps. I can’t recall my tap-dance to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” when I was seven, but the go-go routine my friend Nancy and I danced to “Wipe-out” has never faded.<\/p>\nBook Report<\/b><\/h3>\n
<\/a>Lost Children Archive<\/em> by Valeria Luiselli<\/p>\n<\/a>Women Talking<\/em> by Miriam Toews<\/p>\nBest Little Bookshop<\/b><\/h3>\n
<\/a>Brittany Bond haunts used bookstores in New York City, especially the dollar shelves outside the Strand, looking for good used paperbacks by women writers. Posting her finds on Instagram garnered her a following and she began reselling the books, at first from home, and since January, from a book cart called Common Books<\/a>, which can be found on the streets of the Lower East Side.<\/p>\n