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Mother’s Day Salute to my Mom
Throughout my childhood, my mother always spent a lot of time and energy tending and shaping the land around the house, following her own instincts of landscaping and working almost entirely with hand...
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Talking Union with my Dad: A Father’s Day Tribute
I got my love of narrative and my awareness of social justice very early in life, from my father’s vast repertory of American folk songs. My dad, Joe Browdy, learned guitar as a teenager in the 1950s,...
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Solstice dreams–an endangered resource!
So we’ve turned the corner on Thanksgiving, and now we’re going full-throttle into “the holiday season.” Here in the Northeast, that means the dwindling hours of daylight are aggressively bolstered...
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Writing of Disaster, Writing of Hope
As a professor of literature, I tend to pay special attention to what my son is reading in school. I wish I could say I paid attention to what he reads at home, for pleasure, but the truth is that he...
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Passionate Selfies
Why is it that girls are still being encouraged to take up less space, while boys are encouraged to bulk themselves up? In my gender studies courses at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, we inevitably spend...
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Bringing home the bacon and frying it up too: homage to mother-work
The theme of last Saturday’s opening night event at the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, Out of the Mouths of Babes: An Evening of Mothers Reading to Others, was “What do mothers make?” The answers...
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Daring to imagine a brave new post-patriarchal world
When was the last time you uttered the dreaded P-Word? Patriarchy, that is. Somehow the word itself comes out sounding like a challenge, even when it’s not meant as one. Calling attention to the fact...
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Generations to Come: Mother’s Day Reflections on the Future
My son and his girlfriend say they’re going to have a pig instead of a child. They mean that literally—they’ve fallen in love with the idea of small pet pigs—and they’ve thought long and hard about...
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Of school shootings, misogyny and the dream of gender equality
The lovely Commencement at my institution this weekend was shadowed, for me at least, by the latest school shooting—the psychotic Californian kid who blew away six other kids in a highly premeditated...
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Will All The Good Fathers Please Stand Up?!
It’s Father’s Day 2014, and I am distraught when I look out into the world and see the ascendancy of the kind of distorted, testosterone-driven style of masculinity that is antithetical to good...
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Yes, we have work to do! Seizing the potential of the borderlands between...
For me, as a parent and a teacher, one of the biggest areas in need of “new consciousness” has to do with rearing the next generations. We must fight the domination of the corporate media by insisting...
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Mother’s Day Anger
So it’s hard, when my Facebook feed is lighting up with lovely tributes to moms and children, to confess what’s in my heart. Especially when I too am so blessed—I have such a wonderful mother, such...
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