Caitlin Hicks's Blog: Book Reviews, page 6

Thirty One Days in 2021

It’s November, 2021. Omnicron is the current flu-like COVID variation; although a less lethal strain is in contagion, it’s still a fearful moment in an historical global event.

At this time, a mother and her son test positive with COVID simultaneously. The mother is 80 years old, the son, 49. Each makes a choice that will either save their lives, or send them spiralling towards death.

This is a true story. It took place in a British Columbia hospital between November 2021, and a few days before Christmas.

 

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A modern birth of twins: suspense, joy, disappointment

In her early twenties, Nievelina was diagnosed with Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome, which made the prognosis for her getting pregnant and bearing children highly doubtful, or at the very least, extremely difficult. But she became pregnant anyway and soon discovered she was carrying twins!

At 19 weeks, with no advance warning, she and her husband were faced with an excruciating decision – and it had to be made immediately. What happened next was an unexpected intervention from her family, her friends, and her community.

The emergency birth of her two baby girls was not without complications. But the most memorable and telling were events Nievelina endured in the aftermath of the hospital birth.

Her journey is intuitive and urgent and the lives of these tiny beings rely on her good judgement and her ability to persevere in adverse conditions. What she experiences is almost unbelievable, both joyful and regrettable. Is this the state of birth in Canada?

In honour of National Indigenous Month, here is Nievelina’s birth story.

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I Have Been Pregnant Twice: both ended without a living child

 

I Have Been Pregnant Twice, (and both ended without a living child) is Amanda Snelson’s story, her experience with the unpredictable process of pregnancy and birth. Ironically, it is part of the discussion around women’s reproductive freedom and rights regarding the threat of the United States’ Supreme Court imminently striking down the 1973 landmark decision: Roe v Wade.

WE ARE SHARING IT AS PART OF THIS DISCUSSION

Amanda deeply wanted to conceive and give birth to a live baby. In the complicated process, she discovered that her Choice over her own body in this highly unpredictable event was key to realizing her deepest wishes to create life and nurture a healthy child.

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In 1973, Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. The decision struck down many U.S. federal and state abortion laws. Since then, all women in the U.S. have enjoyed reproductive freedom and Choice over decisions about their own bodies.

However, there is imminent threat to this ruling, as on May 2, 2022, Politico obtained a leaked initial draft majority opinion penned by Justice Samuel Alito indicating that the Supreme Court is prepared to overturn Roe and Casey in a pending final decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,[11] expected to be issued by June 2022.[12] A press release from Chief Justice John Roberts the following day confirmed the authenticity of the leaked document, but stated that the draft “does not represent a decision by the Court or the final position of any member on the issues in the case”.

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Although the moral arguments for and against honoring a woman’s agency over her own body seem obvious, Amanda’s story introduces new complications to this discussion. Ironically, her deep maternal desire to conceive and bear children are at odds with the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Life is way more complex than can be regulated.

WITH THIS STORY, WE’RE HOSTING HERSTRY 

H E R S T R Y: TELLING YOUR STORY IS A REVOLUTIONARY ACT. 

Unless she did something very incredible (or very, very bad) most women don’t get named in history.  HerStry wants to rewrite the narrative and put women’s stories front and center.

Since 2015 we have collected hundreds of stories from women all over the world. Stories about love, loss, motherhood, friendship, and so much more. We all have something to say, and we all have experiences worth sharing. HerStry wants to get every woman writing, talking, and sharing her story.

Here is the podcast: I Have Been Pregnant Twice

Post Script: Since Amanda’s story was published on the Herstry website in April of 2018, she has given birth to two healthy babies.

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Four Treasures of the Sky

by Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Release Date: April 5, 2022
Publisher/Imprint: Flatiron Books

Reviewed by: Caitlin Hicks

A multilayered story with a narrative driven by fate and a passionate search for identity and survival in the face of meaningless trauma, Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang is historical fiction at its most compelling and memorable.

Told in the voice of a well-considered memoir and lyrical as a poem, the novel is further enhanced by the presence of one character who embodies a ghost, Lin Daiyu, for whom Daiyu has been named and who accompanies her throughout.

On the first page of this generous, brutal, and heartbreaking novel, 13-year-old Daiyu, named after a beauty who has been cursed with a tragic fate, is kidnapped. It’s the first day of spring. Her parents have already disappeared, vanished in the middle of the night from their small fishing village. Her grandmother has already shaved her head, put her in boys’ clothes, and sent her to the nearby city of Zhifu.

“’Do not write me letters,’ she said, putting a cap over my bald head. ‘Letters will be interpreted. Instead, let us speak to each other when it rains.’”

In the wake of this devastating end of her childhood, Daiyu survives for a time in the seaside city disguised as a boy named Feng, while she waits for rain and searches for work.

“I looked no different form the urchins who roamed the streets, the ones who looked like hunger was the only thing keeping them alive.”

Feng now finds some shelter and consolation from Master Wang’s calligraphy school and the Chinese characters of the language. While sweeping the sidewalk outside the school, Feng’s child’s heart listens to Wang’s lessons, clinging to some order in her universe. His voice floats out above the courtyard, telling how the practice of good handwriting can make you a good human. The orphan listens to this philosophy of hope and discipline, begins to draw the characters with her broom into the tiles under her feet. The longing and innocence is irresistible, and the reader is seduced into her reality. The pages melt easily, and then Daiyu is tricked into the company of a man who keeps her prisoner while she is taught to learn English. Then he stuffs her into a barrel, ties a rope around her neck, and smuggles her onto a ship.

And through her experience, the details of the trip, the characters in the San Francisco brothel spring to life in this important historical remembrance: the brutality, the greed, the profound disrespect for women; the reality of slavery. Here, Daiyu is called Peony. As she waits to be “chosen” by a customer of the brothel, she adds up her growing awareness:

“’Now I am beginning to understand that tragedy makes things beautiful,’ Daiyu says, looking at her captivity through the lens of calligraphy. ‘I trace the character for man in my palm. Man: a field and a plow, the plow a symbol of power. . . . Whoever this man is will be the one entering me, and he will also be the one who takes everything away. I could mourn the loss of my girlhood now, but I do not let myself. Mourning it would be giving power to whoever takes it.

“’Man, without power, he is just a piece of arable land.’”

And here, the reader is comforted by Peony who endures the suffering of her fate. Daiyu/Feng/Peony/Jacob’s determination, her philosophical view of her experience softens the relentless brutality of it. It’s the only way, once you love her, and you do, that you could endure the rest of the story.

For the full review, go to New York Journal of Books

 

Caitlin Hicks is an author, playwright, and actress. Her debut novel is A Theory of Expanded Love, winner of the 2015 Foreword Indie Bronze Medal for Literary Fiction.

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My Mother’s Story: The history of women

Introducing “My Mother’s Story”, a project founded by Vancouver actress Marilyn Norry, who began it years ago with an invitation:

Write the story of your mother’s life – just the facts from beginning to end – in less than 2,000 words, where you are just a footnote. When you are finished, and when you are ready, read your story out loud to at least one person. 

Gone Too Soon features 20 stories by women and men around the world who were bereaved as children and adolescents by the loss of their mothers. As well as their mothers’ life stories, they’ve written Author Reflections about the healing they found through ‘finding’ their mothers again through their journey to tell their mother’s story.

The fascination of this project, of this the book,  is the experience each child goes through, looking at their mother as a separate, complete person unto herself.

The book My Mother’s Story: Gone Too Soon, with a Foreward by Marilyn Norry and a Preface with Michelle Hohn, Editor and Contributing Author, was  released in March 2022. This is what we’re celebrating today with this podcast.

The above photo of Hilda and Eric Hardie, Jenn Griffin’s parents.

Here, in this podcast, I read the story of Doris, as told by her daughter, Colleen Winton. A tiny, tiny bit of editing was necessary with the final cut and including the wonderful sound design by Gordon Halloran. This is one to sit back and enjoy! Kudos to Colleen Winton and here’s to Doris Mary Oliveen Kerr, her wonderful mother.

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TAKE MY HAND, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Reviewed by:Caitlin Hicks

“ Engaging, suspenseful, courageous, and brimming with a warm heart, Take My Handwill stay with you long after the last page.”

“Civil Townsend begins her career as a nurse at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic in 1970 and she wants to make a difference in her African American community. Immediately assigned to administer birth control shots to two siblings in a poor family deep in the country, Civil is shocked to discover her patients are 11 and 13.

“Further troubling is that Depo Provera is suspected of causing cancer. Although Civil agrees that pregnancy would threaten the health and future of both children, she observes the conflicting situational facts: the family receives food stamps and government assistance and trusts the hand that feeds them, including the medical establishment; and neither the caregiver grandmother nor the underemployed father know how to read. The implications of this assignment shocks Civil and she questions her role as a nurse, sworn to do no harm. But her rapport with the sisters India and Erica, and their innocence and trusting nature, capture Civil’s heart, and she takes these motherless girls into her care. Through her visits, she gets to know the girls’ grandmother, as well as their father, Mace, a handsome and intelligent man who sorely misses the girls’ mother.

“Uneasy administering a drug that could cause cancer, Civil soon disobeys her orders and ejects the contents of the shot into the garbage, determined instead to give the girls the choice to take the Pill.

“In the meantime, she arranges for the entire family to be moved out of their mud-floor cabin to Dixie Court, a group of new social housing apartments built to accommodate low-income families.

“When Civil arrives late at their cabin to announce the good housing news, she discovers the girls have been hospitalized—and sterilized, with the “informed consent” of their illiterate father and grandmother’s “x” at the bottom of a medical consent form. Clearly the family has been misled to think the procedure “temporary” and “reversible.” At the hospital, both girls suffer excruciating pain from the operation they did not understand they were being subject to. As Civil demands pain medication that has been withheld, she must face telling the girls the truth of what has happened to them: They will never bear children.

The devastation of this incident thrust upon this family without their knowledge

. . . see the entire review at NY JOURNAL OF BOOKS

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Cynthia Jones & The Union Steamship

 

How would your life be different if you couldn’t drive a car? If once a week, a steamship arrived at the dock with supplies to keep you going for the next week? If your husband and the father of your children came home on “The Daddy Boat” once a week?

Cynthia Jones Meets The Union Steamship at 1 AM tells of a much simpler time on the Sunshine Coast – when anyone could go out in a sabot and grab a fish with her bare hands, when hospitals were miles from each other, when most lived in float houses by the light of a kerosene lamp.

This podcast features stories from Ethel McNutt and Cynthia Culbard Jones and  is part of the historical theatrical series called THE LIFE WE LIVED. I interviewed these women who were born at the turn of the century and into the 30s and recorded their stories during the Nineties. These we called Sunshine Coast old timers and they lived robust lives right here on The Sunshine Coast before there were any roads.

The individual podcasts in THE LIFE WE LIVED series can be found here under the various titles: Gladys and The Pig Man, Those Darn Chickens! Luella, Who Survived Her Times, The Women of Essondale, The Hospital for Injured Snakes, Your Predecessor Had a Nervous Breakdown!.Everything is In Motion and Read Island Santa Claus.

Enjoy! And feel free to share the history of this beautiful place that is changing so quickly!  -March, 2022 (Two days after COVID mask mandate was lifted in Province of British Columbia – we are all part of history!)

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Wilderness Mother

 

It’s 1980, two days from the summer solstice in the wild landscape of Northwestern British Columbia. A young woman and her husband, Jay Kawatski, tend their food garden carved out of the wilderness in the Ningunsaw Valley when Deanna realizes that their first child will be born very soon. The couple must hike difficult mountain & bog terrain through clouds of bloodthirsty mosquitoes for more than two hours to their cabin on Desire Lake. Along the path, Deanna’s water breaks. This is the story of their unattended birth, heralded by a family of loons who serenaded them throughout the night.

I’m happy to showcase Deanna Kawatski’s memoir, Wilderness Mother, The Chronicle of a Modern Pioneer. I met Deanna when I served as the BC YUKON Representative of The Writer’s Union of Canada and celebrated the release of her book Magda’s Odyssey, published by Gracesprings Collective. Deanna herself reads from Magda’s Odyssey in one of these podcasts.

“Wilderness Mother is a Canadian classic. It is nothing less than Canada’s Walden. A deep book and a superbly written one, it will always be read – and reread – with joy.” -Alexaner Forbes, Professor & Poet, Thompson Rivers University.

To get your own copy of this book: deannabkawatski.com

Photos of the loons are courtesy of Carl Olsen. You can find him on facebook https://www.facebook.com/CarlOlsenWildlifePhotography

https://carlolsenphotography.ca

Here is the podcast:

 

And I found a follow up article to their adventures. I’ve got to catch up on

Deanna’s adventures in subsequent books, but here’s an article to

tickle your curiosity.

 

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We got one!

“We are very pleased to inform you our editors wish to move forward with the publication of your manuscript. Our contract is attached for your review.” 

This is the news that makes me happy right now. My second novel, KENNEDY GIRL, has been selected by a US publisher for launch in fall of 2022.

We Got One! celebrates moments that, whatever else happens in life afterwards, we have, as artists, in those moments, all the meaning we will ever need.  It marks the Cinderella achievement of having been chosen, of having hit the bulls-eye on the dartboard of current social and artistic reality. We can now stand on the world stage and beam our happiness that we matter.

This podcast begins my exploration of my life in a family of artists. The ups and downs of creating ourselves over and over again, with each new project we invent. My partner is a public artist who has tried his imagination and his hand at a variety of forms: sculpture, illustration, drawing, portraiture, traditional oil and acrylic painting, public art, editorial cartoons, even art that is captured in ice, an art form he invented, Paintings Below Zero. He is also a filmmaker. I am a playwright, performer and author as well as a creator of this podcast SOME KINDA WOMAN, Stories of Us. Our son is a graphic designer who teaches design and has performed onstage with Vancouver Theatre Sports. Much of my work in this family has involved the promotion all our artwork. Gord and I are a partnership; we have our hands in each other’s pockets, supporting the other with our various complimentary skills.

“But this moment is like all of life’s moments. There’s never a guarantee. It’s simply now. In a few seconds we’re going to have to skate like the dickens and score another win.”

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My first audiobook review

“Find yourself in America during the Kennedy era with Annie Shea as your guide through the Cuban Missile Crisis, Finding the Next Pope, Disney World Paradise, and the race to make the Biggest Catholic Family—Protestants don’t count—in the neighbourhood.

Smart, skinny, irrepressible Annie, is the perfect and endearing companion, confiding her intimate thoughts and reflections, her yearning to be noticed, her desire to be best and spilling the beans along the way. No secret is safe with Annie Shea. All will be revealed—no detail is spared—about the workings of a large, messy middle-class family tethered to the commandments of the Church yet sharing the deep love of the ever-increasing number of little Sheas. Her stories are funny, scary, original with enough tension and drama—lost boys, pregnant girls—to keep the listener entertained.

This twelve-year old struggles relentlessly to hear her own voice lost in the chaos of the family and to extricate herself from the jaws of religious dogma—the American version of Roman Catholicism.

It’s rare to find an author read their own work with the theatrical talents of the best professional actors. Caitlin’s rich molasses voice rolls smoothly along delivering insights and revealing delicious secrets of family life.”
– Pamela McGarry, Author of Whistler Indy Prize-nominated book
“The Unsuitable Bride”

AVAILABLE on Findaway Voices & Chirpbooks

https://www.chirpbooks.com/audiobooks...

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