Paper Is White by Hilary Zaid6/30/2023 ![]() I was glad she wouldn’t be able to tell Francine what she saw as I palmed the phone from its cradle and stared at it, rehearsing the digits in my head. Lola’s collar jingled when I walked in she lifted her head, then settled her muzzle down again between two paws. Through the French doors, small squares of milky, urban late-evening light glowed against the East Bay darkness. That night, as Fiona’s jet dipped into the thick, blurred batting over San Francisco Bay, I lied to my fiancée about where I was going and crept into the shadowed living room of the house we shared to dial my grandmother’s number. But my grandmother, a widow, had cherished me. My parents had loved me in their own, distracted way. ![]() On the night my best and oldest friend sped three thousand miles west to hear the news of my engagement, it struck me finally and with the force of revelation that I couldn’t get married without telling my grandmother first. When the man came home that evening, he saw the jacket and the shoes, and accused his wife of unfaithfulness. The song turned itself into a pair of men’s shoes, and sat partway under the bed. One day the story said, ‘Bahin, this woman will never let us out.’ So the next day, while the woman’s husband was away, the story turned itself into a man’s jacket, and draped itself near the door. It’s about a woman who knew a story and a song, but she never told the story, and she never sang the song. ![]() There’s an Indian tale you may know, from a collection called A Flowering Tree. ![]()
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The dressmaker's secret rosalie ham6/30/2023 ![]() ![]() “It’s a title that goes to show the many ways people can make use of the library’s collections. Library Services Officer Denis McDonald said that it was not too late to read, watch or listen to Ham’s original bestseller The Dressmaker before the event. Joining Rosalie to read excerpts from her new novel will be Libbi Gorr, who will give voice to protagonist Tilly Dunnage, with additional characters to be performed by broadcaster Jacinta Parsons. This free online author event will be held on Thursday, 12 November from 7.30pm to 8.30pm. ![]() The Dressmaker’s Secret, published on 27 October, is the sequel to bestselling novel The Dressmaker, published in 2000 and adapted to a movie which was filmed regionally in the Wimmera area. The Greater Hamilton Library is excited to partner with Public Libraries Victoria to present a state wide reading from The Dressmaker’s Secret, by Rosalie Ham. ![]() ![]() She was the kind of woman you rarely got to read about in American literature in the 1960s. One of the women who helped Angelou find her voice was a teacher in Stamps, Arkansas, named Bertha Flowers. ![]() When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say.”Īngelou often wrote in hotel rooms with a few essentials: a deck of cards, a crossword puzzle, a Bible, a dictionary, a thesaurus and a bottle of sherry. In those five years, I read every book in the black school library. ![]() She would later explain, “I stopped speaking for five years. In the memoir, Angelou (born Marguerite Johnson) boldly told the heartbreaking truths of her childhood, including how she was raped at the age of 7 by her mother’s boyfriend. That book became I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which recently celebrated its 50th birthday. “The next morning, Judy Feiffer called a friend of hers at Random House and said, ‘You know the poet Maya Angelou? If you could get her to write a book.’” “We enjoyed each other immensely and sat up until 3 or 4 in the morning, drinking Scotch and telling tales,” Angelou went on. Writer Jules Feiffer and his then-wife, Judy. ![]() James Baldwin, the novelist and activist, took her to the party, which was at the home of the cartoonist. ![]() “At the time, I was really only concerned with poetry, though I had written a television series,” she would recall. Maya Angelou published the first of her seven memoirs not long after she distinguished herself as the star raconteur at a dinner party. ![]() |