Jane Roper's Blog, page 12

10 Things I Learned Protesting the Kavanaugh Confirmation

  So, as those of you crazy nuts who follow me on Facebook  and elsewhere know, I went down to DC last week to join the protests and demonstrations against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh.  I’ve been engaged in issues and causes for a long time, starting in high school. But I’ve never done something as […]

It’s Smash the Patriarchy Season, Motherfuckers.

Every year around this time, I post Colin Nissan’s brilliant humor piece, It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers on Facebook. If you haven’t ever read it, get thee to McSweeney’s now and read it. It’s one of the best freaking things on the Internet.  I posted it on FB a few days ago, per seasonal tradition. […]

God help us, they have phones.

So, this summer we got the girls cell phones. (I wished we called them mobiles (/MO’ byles/) in this country. Wouldn’t that be fun?) I’ve been semi-dreading this transition for the past couple of years. My ambivalence about phones is no secret. I hatehatehate the fact that so many of us spend so much time looking […]

Cat Person

If you’ve come here looking for the short story Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian that was published in The New Yorker and went all viral and landed the author a big fat book deal — well, sorry. That’s over here. This is a post by little old non-viral me, about this weird thing that’s happened recently in […]

The Privilege of Ancestry

This is a much belated post — I’m embarrassed by how belated, really — but I really wanted to get it up here.  (And I want to start posting more in general. But don’t hold me to that!) A few months ago, a colleague of mine, who is black, was telling me how excited she […]

When you assume…

A couple of weeks ago I was buying a bottle of wine at a big, not-fancy liquor store—the kind with everything from $50 bottles of bordeaux to vats full of $2 flavored vodka nips. This was shortly after the walkouts for gun violence, and shortly after I made the mistake of getting into one of […]

Liminality

I was an anthropology major in college. I guess because I was interested in what makes people as a species tick—what common traits and tendencies we all share across cultures and around the world. I also had a hankering for travel and exploration, and figured that by studying anthro in college, at least I could […]

Vulnerable

When I was in my MFA program at Iowa way back when, a friend said to me, “One of the things I like about you is that you’re so willing to make yourself vulnerable.” Because my self-esteem as a writer was at its lowest ebb while I was at Iowa, part of me thought,  Do […]

Escaping, Retreating, Dangling

  1.  Escaping. I got back a few weeks ago from another  sojourn at VCCA — I’m on the home stretch of my novel revision, and damn it feels good. It also felt damned good, as it always does, to escape from the demands of everyday life, go to this gorgeous, tranquil place, immerse myself […]

Fun kids activity: Cursing white supremacists!

Yesterday in the car, on our way to buy school supplies, I talked with the girls about what had happened in Charlottesville. There’s a house we pass on our way to Route 1, where we do a lot of our household shopping, that has a Trump flag on their flagpole, under their American flag. The […]