Rachel Howard's Blog, page 2

San Francisco Ballet’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”

Review of San Francisco Ballet in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” March 2024. Fjord Review.

San Francisco Ballet “Midsummer Night’s Dream” Opening Night

Review of San Francisco Ballet in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” March 2024. SF Chronicle.

Writing into 2022: Dance Criticism, Short Fiction, Essays

As 2021 closes out, I thought I’d informally update those who are interested in my work on what I’m up to. I’ve written a lot of short fiction in 2021–a story draft per month, actually. Some were keepers, some not. Now I am sending out and waiting to see the work’s fate. But some of that work may not appear under my name, of my own choice. So I won’t be able to update you about it here.

I’ve also been writing essays. One of those will be coming out shortly with the Los Angeles Review of Books, and I’ll be sure to post it here. (You can see all my short fiction and nonfiction on this page: http://rachelhoward.com/short-fiction-and-nonfiction/.) I also love to publish with the brilliant people at Berfrois, and I’ve had a few essays there in 2021.

The big change in my writing life has been returning to dance criticism. The pandemic was a strange opportunity for me. Because the Bay Area housing market pushed me out in 2014, I currently live three hours from San Francisco. (I hope to change that and move closer again by 2023). Nevertheless, I’d been reviewing occasionally for the SF Chronicle and for the miraculous Fjord Review, a marvelous collection of international voices that fortunately ascended just as Ballet Review ended its long and important run. When the pandemic hit, of course, all dance programming went online–and suddenly I was able to watch so much, and catch up with artists I loved, via digital streams and Zoom interviews. This combined with the death of my mentor, longtime Examiner and Chronicle critic Allan Ulrich, made me feel the old stirrings to bear witness and create space for dialogue about the ever-shifting, ever-stirring and thought-provoking activities of the Bay Area dance scene.

So I have been doing what I could in 2021, though limited in my ability to travel to shows because of family duties here in Grass Valley/Nevada City. And I will continue to do so in 2022. Sometimes I am not adequate to the task, as in this review of GERALDCASELDANCE’s “Not About Race Dance.” Still, I will see what I can and I will do my best, while continuing to write essays and fiction. The Bay Area dance scene is too stimulating to ignore. That is my resolution for 2022–to continue my own artistic practice as a writer while honoring the art of Bay Area dancers and dancemakers as much as possible.

I am also continuing to teach creative writing at Stanford Continuing Studies and am very grateful for the wonderful students and the supportive employment there.

GERALDCASELDANCE (Audrey Johnson, center) in “Not About Race Dance” at CounterPulse, December 2021.

Essay “Shaver Lake” Featured on Cover of the Northwest Review

My essay “Shaver Lake” was excerpted on the cover of the Winter 21 Northwest Review. Unfortunately the essay remains relevant and will become more relevant in the years to come. You can read it here.

New Story in StoryQuarterly Issue 53

I’m very grateful to have a new story out today in StoryQuarterly Issue 53:
http://www.storyquarterly.org/the-woman-at-the-party.html
As I’ve posted elsewhere, this is my favorite short fiction I have written, which seems strange when I revisit it and realize it contains somewhat graphic depictions of very unpleasant sex (a warning if for understandable reasons you would prefer to avoid that). However, I think ultimately the story is about a kind of positive reclamation that can happen when we are willing to look at ugly realities . . .Though as I write that, I would be far more interested to hear what *you* feel it is about, if you read it. I hope in its strange way it holds some worthwhile truth.

The image that figures heavily into the ending is the central panel of this triptych by Francis Bacon, “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion”:

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion c.1944 Francis Bacon 1909-1992 Presented by Eric Hall 1953 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N06171

We Who Saw This Moment Coming Never Wanted to Be So Right

Near the highest moment of conflict in my novel The Risk of Us, a family of three hears, over the radio, that Donald Trump has won the election. The little girl goes to bed wondering why her parents have fallen silent. After she sleeps, the parents say to each other, “We’ve lost our country.”

I do not think there is anything particularly imaginative about this scene. I am confident millions of families across the United States lived it. So I was surprised in 2018 when an editor asked if I would consider removing it, saying it would make the novel “dated.” I knew it would not make the novel dated, that this scene would come to faithfully and without melodrama represent a horrifying moment in history. Of course, another reason for removing the scene was to avoid offending book buyers who supported the president. But I knew history would prove the sad error of their support, too. The scene was inextricable from the story and I did not cut it.

Socks for sale six months ago at my local Ben Franklin.

I do not typically announce that I “know” things. I am far more likely to admit that I do not know. I try to live every day in the humility of not-knowing. I think most of the people who knew Donald Trump’s presidency would come to this would have been happy to not-know. But the signs were all so clear. I agree with historian Timothy Snyder: “When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done.” I also think it is important to acknowledge, as Snyder does, that racism has always been at the center of this.

Plenty of those people who would have preferred never in their lives to write a word about Donald Trump have done so over these last four years. I am just one of them. Here is what I have written:

“Love and Kierkegaard in the Age of Trump”: Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2018.

Excerpt:

I LIVE IN SEMI-RURAL Nevada County, California, and a year ago, in my gym, I overheard a tall, pale, buzz-cut, older-but-still-muscled man — a man I had once witnessed huffing in the direction of the TVs above the treadmills, “I don’t care what color you are, when an officer pulls you over you do whatever he says!” — I heard this man complaining to a friend at the bench press. “Liberal media,” he said, snorting at one of the TVs. “They twist everyone’s words. They make me sick.”

This was the week after neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, the week after Donald Trump picked up the narrative the right-wing media had prepared — the narrative the neo-Nazis had baited — by blaming counter-protestors for violence “on both sides.” I suspected I should stick to my StairMaster, but my skin twitched. For months I had watched the gym’s bank of TVs broadcast competing news stations side by side, the cross-captioning of each talking head suggesting parallel black holes, and I could hold the tension no longer. I crossed the gym floor, and stood at this man’s shoulder. I said, “I’m equally troubled by Fox News, if you want to know.” He drew his spike-haired head back in shock. And then this man and I stared, mutually baffled, as the whole gym watched.

That standoff now seems innocent. In the year since a white nationalist killed an innocent woman in Charlottesville, more Americans have moved their turf wars off Facebook and into the streets. In my grocery store parking lot, confederate flags are now popping up alongside the Make America Great Again bumper stickers. A few weeks ago, at the local “Families Belong Together” march protesting the separation of children at the border, “Motorists at the intersection responded by honking their horns, popping wheelies on their motorcycles, flipping the bird, or screaming ‘build the wall’” — so reported the front page of our little local paper.

Can anyone still speak earnestly of “bridging the divide”?

Sign two blocks from my home thanking “Patriot Militia” after they assaulted peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

“In Nevada City, Politics and Protest Stoke a Brewing Civil War”: San Francisco Chronicle, October 2019

Excerpt:

And so this area is a front line of the current civil war. Some showdowns, as in the town’s hub, the SPD grocery store, involve anti-maskers who deliberately cough on those who choose to cover their nose and mouth. Others involve shop owners who place “Recall Newsom” petitions at their cash registers or restaurateurs who defy COVID-19 measures, with their supporters harassing the county director of environmental health.

It is not an ideologically tidy civil war here, three hours northeast of San Francisco: Some anti-maskers are also pro-Black Lives Matter, and given the fire season, there’s plenty of complicated (and unnecessary) fissures over forest management and climate change. The general line of liberal versus conservative obscures the deeper point of difference that asserts itself daily in the Ford F-150s plastered with NRA and “Don’t Tread on Me” tags versus Subarus bearing “Coexist” bumper stickers. It’s a difference between pride in separatist self-sufficiency, which the other side sees as militant, and belief in inclusive cooperation, which the other side sees as immoral and naïve.

Since President Donald Trump’s election — and, truthfully, long before it — this soft civil war has played out on the opinion pages of the Union, our local newspaper, and on Facebook groups for locals, where neighbors insult each other in mile-long threads. Because of this, there has been a temptation to imagine our local conflict as merely virtual. But I wonder, as we hurtle toward the election, and as the rocks thrown through windows become shatteringly real, if that perception is a serious mistake.

“The Division”: Berfrois, November 18, 2020

Excerpt:

Some people, you already knew. My grandfather’s wife, for instance. Weeks before the 2016 election, she’d posted a photo of my grandfather in a red hat, his blonde-grey hair combed over his forehead: Benny jumped on the Trump Train!

I wrote to her after the inauguration. I appealed to her as a fellow Christian, though I knew she believed her Catholicism to be the one true faith and mine to be heresy. She had voted to save the unborn babies. What could you say in the face of that? I wrote to her that I was praying for our country. That I was concerned to see an avowed white supremacist named chief White House advisor. That I worried about non-Christian, non-white people being harassed and vilified. That I worried about my daughter’s future as a person of Mexican-American descent.

My grandfather’s wife wrote to me more about innocent unborn babies.

I am taking no happiness in being right this week. I am talking to family members near and far as best I can, endeavoring to keep them in one fact-based reality. I am praying for our country.

A question I still have for CA-1 Representative LaMalfa, who voted to object to certified electoral college votes even after a violent insurrectionist mob attacked the Capitol.

Letter to a Facebook Friend Regarding Fear

Dear Rachel,
Why worry about a few people driving down the street? Look at what’s been going on in every Democratic run city every night . I’m having nightmares of these black clad people attacking me on a street or in a restaurant. Look at what happened to Rand Paul and a lot of other couples when they were trying to leave the RNC. This is a Democratic movement and it’s going to be stopped, hopefully.
Be frightened when you see antifa groups because the are out to Burn Loot and Murder!!
I live in a small town in the south so hopefully neither one of us will ever have to worry about them but they are a national terrorist group of anarchists who will stop at nothing.
Peace and love, Rachel

Dear Susan,

Yes, I’ve been thinking about this, wondering how the fear feels on “the other side,” and I am sorry that you too are feeling fear. It’s interesting to hear that you are in a small town. I actually lived in Oakland through the reactions to Oscar Grant’s death, when anarchists came in and hijacked peaceful protests by breaking into stores and spray painting. I lived four blocks from where all that was happening. I think it’s different if you’ve lived in one of these cities, or for some people, anyway. One factor was, Oscar Grant’s death really woke me up to how African Americans were being wrongly killed, and I understood why people were protesting. It saddened me that anarchists and others were taking advantage of that, and much of what is being done in these current protests, the way they’re being distorted, and at times carried away by raw anger, also saddens me. And it wasn’t easy to live with the helicopters overhead, and if I had lived right in the zone where the windows were broken that would be even worse. But in strange ways, I also felt safer in Oakland than I do here.

I mean, I was part of a church there offering a free meal on Saturdays, I was with a lot of people who interacted with those who needed help and also those who deserved support and justice, and we had to be smart and stay safe while doing that, but it also felt like we were being part of the fullest society, and that was strangely encouraging and comforting. Whereas here, when the Trump supporters drive by with their revved up engines and their pictures of guns (and it wasn’t just a few, it was more than 100 vehicles), I think of how Trump has attacked journalists, how there will be no freedom of the press if he cements power. That is a much scarier threat to me. The way he is rolling back rules to allow companies to freely pollute, to spill tons of methane into the air daily–when I think of that and how the temperatures are increasing, that feels far more threatening to me. When I think of how he attacks anyone who criticizes him with violent words, when I think of losing the right to criticize our government, how that right is so essential to the freedoms in our country, that is so threatening to me.

So, you and I have different fears based on different experiences, different immediate worries. I respect yours, and I want to understand and empathize with them. I do not think they should be downplayed. But what I see in Trump’s behavior is this deliberate encouragement of the violence to increase your fears. No doubt he means to increase my fears too. So, perhaps for both of us, the work to do is to separate reasonable from unreasonable fear, to see the fears and honor them, and to try to calmly make good choices in the face of the fears.

As far as I can see in my calm moments, a Biden-Harris government would sincerely discourage violence on all sides, and bring together a coalition to address the many concerns fueling the clashes. So, that is the choice that I am making and I fervently hope others will make. But in the meantime, I am so grateful to you for sharing your perspective and the fears from your side without attacking me. I hear them and I honor them just as my friends here have offered support to me.

Peace to you and thank you,

Rachel

Yuba Lit Community Discussion on “The White Space”/”No Man’s Land”

These past two months I have been parenting, writing, teaching, and following the tumult both nationally and in my town of residence, Nevada City, California. To address these times, the reading series I organize, Yuba Lit, moved online to host a community discussion. Below are my letters to the Yuba Lit community about the outcome of that discussion, and the initial call for it.

July 25, 2020

Dear literature-loving friends,

Last Wednesday night, Yuba Lit held our online discussion of Elijah Anderson’s “The White Space” and Eula Biss’s “No Man’s Land.” In the midst of our national tumult, it was an encouragement and a joy to be part of such a thoughtful and searching conversation with an amazing array of community members who each had a special angle of insight to lend. And as we discussed what new or not-so-new perspectives we had seen in the readings, we naturally soon moved to the question: What can we do here in the Grass Valley/Nevada City region to create spaces welcoming and supportive to all? Specific ideas arose, and I wanted to share those with you.

Many of us agreed on the importance of gaining a fuller view of our local history and its inequalities. The following books were highly recommended:

-History of Us: Nisenan Tribe of the Nevada City Rancheria. Available at the Bookseller and Harmony Books. More information here: https://yubanet.com/regional/history-of-us-nisenan-tribe-of-the-nevada-city-rancheria/
—How Much of These Hills Is Gold. More information here: https://bookshop.org/books/how-much-of-these-hills-is-gold/9780525537205

I left the Yuba Lit discussion particularly struck by the importance of supporting the Nisenan tribe. Discussion members suggested writing to government representatives in support of federal recognition, and taking part in the Ancestral Homelands Reciprocity Program: https://ancestralhomelands.org/

At the meeting, we also discussed the challenge of most effectively standing up against racism when we see it, and the possibility of joining with other organizations to offer a Bystander Training. I will look into this and welcome further tips for pursuing this.

And finally but far from least important, discussion members pointed to two vital local groups: Creating Communities Beyond Bias and (a newer organization) Color Me Human.

Another encouraging outcome of the discussion: participants seemed to feel that Zoom worked well and felt salon-like, a good option for continuing our community while we cannot gather large crowds in person. So I will be looking into doing more Yuba Lit events on Zoom in September and beyond, with visiting writers sharing their work, followed by Q and A.
Thank you so much to Wednesday’s discussion participants and to the larger Yuba Lit community. Together we are holding a space for supportive, searching, and even at times vulnerable conversation. This gives me hope.

Yuba Lit will be reaching out in the weeks to come about future events.
Yours in the love of literature,

Rachel Howard

Yuba Lit Founder

www.yubalit.org

www.facebook.com/yubalit

PS: A participant in the discussion also offered a list of “Readily Available Resources Regarding Racism in America,” created by Bill Drake, founder of Communities Beyond Bias. I’ll include this richly annotated list as an attachment.

PPS: Another participant highly recommended Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist. As it happens, the Maryland public library system recently held a discussion with Kendi, available free here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VyIemUvoEQ

PPPS: Thank you to the Nevada County Arts Council for all their heroic efforts to support the arts during the pandemic, and for supporting Yuba Lit as our fiscal sponsorship organization. Tax-deductible donations may be made here: https://www.nevadacountyarts.org/donate

******************************************

July 13, 2020 article in The Union (available here):

When Yuba Lit last communicated with the public, we were canceling our March presentation in response to the rapidly spreading coronavirus.

Now we all seem to be living two lifetimes past that event, having endured almost four months of this new pandemic reality, and then the murder of George Floyd, which — captured graphically on video — awakened so many people to the reality of so many unjust deaths, including Ahmaud Arbery and Brionna Taylor but also Oscar Grant and Michael Brown and countless others, names known and unknown.

If, like me, you seek to maintain hope for a better society through these challenging times, I believe we can find hope together in the particular power of books and literature to challenge invisible assumptions, open hearts, and widen perspectives. The recent New York Times best-seller list reads like a crash course syllabus in anti-racism, and that’s good news. The surge of these book sales, to me, holds a truth: to really understand the history of the United States and its current structures and cultures, we need more than social media and news flashes. We need literature and books. And further: We need community spaces where mutual trust is upheld for open and even vulnerable discussion.

Amid the wealth of books, articles, and podcasts supporting constructive conversation on racial injustice, two very different works of literature have been on my mind. The same day George Floyd’s murder was filmed in Minneapolis, Christian Cooper filmed a white woman in the Central Park Ramble making false 911 accusations against him, pointedly describing him to dispatchers as “an African American man.” This took me back to a landmark article by Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson published in 2015, “The White Space,” which studies the problem of our entrapment in “white spaces,” where black people perform a delicate “dance” to prove a belonging that can be swiftly and dangerously revoked, while white people exist oblivious to their dominance. Re-reading Anderson’s article took me back, in turn, to Eula Biss’s 2008 essay in The Believer, “No Man’s Land,” in which Biss, a white woman, makes further connections to the eviction of Native Americans from their own lands.

The two articles with their complex, interconnected truths led me to a conclusion and an open question: Moving beyond “white spaces” is possible. What realities do these articles show us so that we — white Americans in particular — might hold the awareness to make this happen?

Yuba Lit right now cannot produce live, in-person author readings. But we can hold discussions of literature, much as Yuba Lit did back in Winter 2019 with our “Reading Chekhov for Our Times” meetings. And so, Yuba Lit would like to make a space for reading “The White Space” and “No Man’s Land” and discussing them together, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. on July 22. This free discussion will take place on Zoom. Those who would like to attend can email yubalit@gmail.com to RSVP and you will be sent connection information.

This will be a community discussion rooted in the readings. I will guide and lightly moderate with a series of structured prompts. The two readings are available free online at these URLS: https://sociology.yale.edu/sites/default/files/pages_from_sre-11_rev5_printer_files.pdf and https://believermag.com/no-mans-land.

I hope that this online discussion will create space for sustaining a conversation that requires trust and openness — a conversation that needs to continue far beyond the protests and beyond Juneteenth (and far beyond this single Yuba Lit event). Again, the date for the discussion is July 22 from 5 to 6:30 p.m., and you can reserve a space by emailing yubalit@gmail.com. It will be such a joy to reconnect with members of the Yuba Lit community, and I look forward to the day when we can also connect in person again at live readings.

Rachel Howard is the founder of Yuba Lit. To learn more, visit http://www.yubalit.org and http://www.facebook.com/yubalit.

November 2019 Updates

Like most of us, I’ve become so conditioned to flitting between the various social media outlets (except Instagram–sorry, I still cannot [do not want to?] figure out Instagram!) that I’ve neglected to share happenings here. It’s been a busy summer and fall. Some quick updates:

–I’ve been doing various readings and discussions for The Risk of Us, including some especially wonderful panels with writers who make me go googly-eyed with admiration at the Bay Area Book Festival and Litquake. Great thanks to both of those festivals for bringing writers together.

–I’ve been teaching, at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and at Stanford Continuing Studies and the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Much love to the students who have opened my eyes to so much more than I’d ever noticed in the readings we looked at together.

–I’ve been producing the reading series I founded three years ago, Yuba Lit, first with an in-depth discussion of Christian Kiefer’s stunning novel Phantoms in September, and (coming up this week), presenting Devi S. Laskar reading The Atlas of Reds and Blues.

–I’ve been writing. Some journalism for the San Francisco Chronicle. Some new short stories. And: I’ve finished a new book, a memoir. I’m pretty excited about it. Everything that I love most is held inside. I won’t say more from now, but below is a teaser photo.

However you’ve landed on this page, I hope you’re thriving in writing and life through these most challenging of times, and singing a little bit each day.

Collected Conversations About The Risk of Us

In the three weeks since the publication of The Risk of Us, I’ve been fortunate to speak with many sensitive and incisive interviewers. We’ve had conversations about whether unconditional love is possible, and what it takes to get there as a family; about the foster care system and the inherent failings of institutional care for children; about our culture’s attitudes towards motherhood and the false dilemmas we create for parents; about trauma and how we heal from it and become whole despite it; about fiction as a space for exploring situations otherwise fraught with judgement. I thought I’d collect those conversations here.

With Beth Ruyak.

Beth Ruyak, host of Capital Public Radio’s Insight, wanted to talk about trauma as a character unto itself in The Risk of Us. Interview here.

With Helen Little.

Helen Little, host of Helen Little’s Public Library podcast, asked about the foster care system, the writing process, and shifting between genres. Interview here.

Scott Jones, host of the provocative podcast Give and Take, was curious about the spirituality of the novel. Interview here.

With Kory French.

Kory French, host of Break Through Radio’s Book Talk, asked about my memoir as well as about The Risk of Us. Interview here.

GrottoPod, the podcast produced by the Writers Grotto in San Francisco, kindly asked all about the writing of the novel. Interview here.

Elizabeth Stark and Angie Powers, delightful hosts of the Story Makers podcast, chatted about craft considerations like the “why now” hook and storytelling rhythms of three. Interview here.

More interviews are still to come over the weeks ahead. And I wish I had recordings of the conversations that have taken place in bookstores, where I’ve had the especially heartening opportunity to speak with foster parents and former and current foster care workers in the audience. I will update this post as those become available. I am deeply thankful to everyone who has spoken with me about The Risk of Us.