Stephani Maari Booker's Blog, page 3

My second Lego set review

My top minibuild and minifigure picks from the 2022 Lego City Advent Calendar

For the second year, The Brick Architect has recruited me to be one of five writers reviewing the new Lego Advent Calendars. Like last year, my part of the collective article is about the City Advent Calendar, which means I got a second full Lego set for free to assemble and review. If I keep doing these reviews every year, I’m going to have a pile of Advent calendar sets. For now, I’ve picked out my faves from the 2022 and 2021 sets, put them in one box and then set aside the others to give away.

You can read the full article of 2022 Lego Advent Calendar reviews here.

Sci-fi storytelling at MN POC Pride

My spouse recorded me performing my science fiction monologue “Adjudicated” on the MN POC Pride Festival stage in Minneapolis’ Powderhorn Park this past August. She used her cell phone, holding it vertically, so the video quality isn’t great. However, this is the first time the full monologue has been captured on video, versus the four-minute excerpt from a theater performance in 2018 that’s also on my YouTube channel. That was shot on a nice digital camera in widescreen, but the battery ran out so the video cuts off.

DJ Daddy Rox of RARE Productions, one of the organizers of MN POC Pride, is working on the stage in the background while I’m performing. DJ Daddy Rox had interviewed me for their radio show “The T” last December. The transgender activist has been a force in BIPOC queer organizing in the Twin Cities for long enough to age us both if I said how many years. Plus, they are one of my oldest friends in Minnesota.

A double rainbow for MN POC Pride

Last Saturday, I was a performer on the “Black Magic on the River” boat cruise held by MN POC Pride. As I was boarding the Mississippi River boat, I had the fortune to see a double rainbow at the dock. I was able to photograph it and take a short video of it — what incredible luck!

A letter to a therapist

I once had a therapist who took issue with my needing to leave my workplace when I had mental health crisis reactions. Like many people in the mental and physical health professions, she was convinced that there were means to “cure” me that would enable me not to have to leave work (or whatever situation I was in) to take care of myself. In response, I wrote her a letter that turned into an essay about the lack of equity and parity between attitudes and treatments for mental health versus physical health conditions.

While going through my computer files looking for unfinished material that I could use to write a poem for the poetry class I’m taking, I found the letter I wrote my old therapist. I had forgotten about it, since it was years ago and my relationship with that therapist did improve after that (the particular therapeutic program I was undergoing at the time was for a year; once I completed the program, the therapy ended).

Therefore, as this is another old piece of writing that I’ve never published, I’m posting it on my website. I’m even including the introductory email to my old therapist to which the essay was attached. Unfortunately, the problem of lack of equity and parity between mental health and physical health attitudes and treatments still exists today.

The elegy: a sestina

Since mid-July, I’ve been attending via Zoom a class on traditional poetic forms, such as the sonnet. Before this, I had never taken a class on poetry in my life, even though I’ve had poems published in many journals and anthologies. It’s been great because constructing a poem by the rules of a traditional form makes you think and makes you work! You can’t just throw something on the page; you have to consider every word, every syllable even.

In my most recent poetry class, the teacher educated us on the sestina, a very demanding form with rules for word repetition for specific lines. I’m not going to explain it, but basically I needed to track my writing with the alphabetically labeled lines of an Elizabeth Bishop poem provided by the teacher to get the basic form right.

I used the homework assignment to write a sestina to create my promised elegy to loss of friendship and friends. The length and repetition of the poetic form lends itself to my subject. However, the last stanza of my poem, though it follows the sestina rule of three ending lines with every repeating word from the previous stanzas in it, the lines themselves are in the form of a haiku. That simple, ancient Japanese poetry form is one of the only traditional forms I was ever taught in any class, and that was in elementary school!

This elegy may not be the best poem in the world, but it reflects the complexities of mourning for friends lost to time and our own human messiness.

A forthcoming elegy for lost friends

Photo by Sister Luke, licensed under CC BY-SA

Last August, I posted a goodbye poem/letter breaking up with a friend who had hurt me profoundly years ago. In April of this year, the ex-friend was injured in a car accident. My wife contacted the ex-friend’s longtime chosen family member to see if we could visit her in the hospital. At the time, the ex-friend’s condition was too acute for visitors, but the family member said she’d let us know when that changed.

My former friend’s condition remained serious, and she never left hospital care. Tonight, my wife found out that she had died.

I do not regret ending our friendship, but I hate that I never got to visit her in her convalescence. I’ve emailed her chosen family member and let her know I’ll be going to the funeral.

I will be working on and eventually posting an elegy poem about loss of friendship and loss of friends, so interrelated and so painful.

Arts @ MIA filmstrip

I’m having more fun with the simple video editor that comes with my laptop, another result of which is a filmstrip video of photos I took last year at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). This museum is huge, with lots of sections and collections devoted to specific cultures and time periods as well as temporary exhibits of works by contemporary artists.

During this tour of MIA, I chose to go to the traditional African arts gallery and an exhibit of modern works by African-Diaspora artists named “Rituals of Resilience.” On the way, I passed by a striking statue by a contemporary Asian artist working in a traditional medium of porcelain and cobalt glaze with the addition of precious metals. I couldn’t help but feature this work in my photos.

I also featured what’s become my favorite work in the MIA’s permanent collection, a terracotta woman’s head from 12th-14th century Nigeria. This head from the Yoruba culture has beauty that rivals the famous head of the queen Nefertiti.

Sculpture garden filmstrip

Selected sculptures in the Harrison Sculpture Garden at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum

Creating a filmstrip-style video of the photos I took of a heron was so easy that I’m doing it again, this time of the pictures I took of the Harrison Sculpture Garden at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.

Flowers in the arboretum

My spouse and I took our first trip to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum since The Before Times recently. The arboretum is basically an open-air horticultural research site owned by the University of Minnesota. It’s a 1,200-acre site that’s jam-packed with multiple themed gardens, arbors and model landscapes.

We did the Three-Mile Drive, a circuit that has points of interest along the way including places where cars can stop and park so people can get out and check things out. One of the stopping points is a native wildflower garden. As you may have read in previous blogs, I’m very into native plants, so my spouse and I stopped at this garden and took a nice walk around.

Pictured above is a yellow lady’s slipper (left) and a white trillium in the wildflower garden. (The other flowers in the photo with the trillium are some kind of phlox, another common wildflower.) The trillium was a real surprise because it’s very late in the year for those to be flowering, so I was delighted to see it and take a photo, even though the bloom is showing its age.

Next week, I’ll be posting a filmstrip video of the Harrison Sculpture Garden at the arboretum.

A little nature filmstrip

My spouse and I have started doing the mile-long walk around Wirth Lake in a park shared by the City of Minneapolis and suburb Golden Valley once a week to try to shed some pandemic pounds. At the start of one of our walks, we lucked out on this water bird sighting. I’m convinced it’s a great blue heron, but as you can see in the posted filmstrip-style video my phone camera pics weren’t the best. Still, I’m glad to capture in photos an image of some unique wildlife in an urban park setting.