Search Results for: jacqueline alnes

Oklahoma: A Reading List

A stunning lightning bolt at sunset under a severe thunderstorm with a dirt road vanishing into the distance, taken near Magnum, Oklahoma, Tornado Alley, USA. Getty Images

A few nights ago I filled my bathtub with blankets and every pillow in my house, set a lantern and four bottles of water beside me, and took shelter. On my laptop, I watched the local news, where weathermen urged drivers to clear the roads and pointed at cloud rotations. The skies, through the screen, looked like oceans inverted: clouds rolled like tidal waves at too fast a pace and swirled like aerial eddies. Usually I love the openness of Oklahoma, the way a sunrise here can tinge the world any number of sherbet hues, but that night, from my tub, the heavens only looked ominous.

For an hour I watched the color-coded markings on the map, scanning for my small city, and only went to bed after the red and green splotched signs of danger had passed north, to Kansas. Even then, I didn’t sleep. I listened to the hail and rain pound my roof. I worried for people, animals, and houses in the storm’s path. I wondered if there would be an undetected storm moving toward me in the night, a tornado that might whip through the cover of dark as one had when I was in college, hitting my home when none of us were inside.

The morning after the storm, robins emerged from hiding and hopped across my yard with spiky hair and tussled feathers. Rain drained across the red clay in rivulets. Gray skies cleared into sun, and a soft summer breeze rustled honeysuckle, stirring the scent. This is Oklahoma in spring: mercurial, dangerous, beautiful. Here, I feel closer to the elements than I ever have before. Watching a bird prey upon a baby snake from my kitchen window, tearing the red inner meat into shreds, or witnessing the sky meld from blue to the shade of a bruise in moments, I have grown attuned to the thin line between awe and fear.

I am leaving this state very soon, and it’s filled me with the kind of ache for understanding that so often accompanies a goodbye, a sense that I can never know quite enough. Though I’ve explored great swaths of the state; learned the habits of starlings that murmur at daybreak and dusk; taught students from a variety of different towns; listened to Dear Oklahoma, a podcast where writers ruminate and examine the way in which Oklahoma is a part of their work; and tried my best to understand the histories of this place, this state still escapes my description. As a way of getting outside my own experience, I have turned to the words of others. I don’t think there’s any way to capture the vastness of this place — and this is by no means a comprehensive list — but below is a collection of stories that offer a glimpse.

1. Pawhuska or Bust: A Journey to the Heart of Pioneer Woman Country (Khushbu Shah, October 5, 2017, Thrillist)

With only oil and cattle to rely on as industries, rural Pawhuska, Oklahoma was at risk of becoming a ghost town until Ree Drummond stepped in. Also known as “The Pioneer Woman,” Drummond is a Food Network Star known for her marriage to a cattle-rancher and what fans describe as her “real” food. After Drummond opens a restaurant called “The Mercantile” in Pawhuska, Khushbu Shah flies from New York to better understand Drummond’s influence on Oklahoma’s cultural scene and economy, and why so many visitors flock to a restaurant seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

Similar sentiments were later echoed by every Pioneer Woman fan I spoke to, the vast majority of whom were white and from the Midwest or the South, like the three tall and husky female friends who told me they’d driven 13 hours from Indiana because Drummond makes ‘real American food’ and ‘the stuff you actually want to eat.’

2. They thought they were going to rehab. They ended up in chicken plants. (Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter, October 4, 2017, Reveal)

Given the option between prison and a rehab program called CAAIR (nicknamed “the Chicken Farm”), Brad McGahey chose the latter. Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter, in this harrowing piece of investigative journalism, reveal that CAAIR, located in northeastern Oklahoma, relies on unpaid labor from thousands of defendants. Additionally, though marketed as a rehab program, participants receive very little medical care or treatment.

‘They came up with a hell of an idea,’ said Parker Grindstaff, who graduated earlier this year. ‘They’re making a killing off of us.’

3. A Bend in the River (Pamela Colloff, July 2002, Texas Monthly)

Newspaper accounts of the escape focused on the manhunt, paying scant attention to the original crime or the victim, invariably described as a ‘sixteen-year-old Waurika, Okla., cheerleader.’ Only along the river did people know what the crime had done to their isolated slice of the world, the illusions it had cruelly stripped away.

In this riveting, haunting longform piece, Pamela Colloff writes about the murder of Heather Rich, and the impact her death had on the community of Waurika, Oklahoma, as well as the ways in which place and landscape influenced the investigation and subsequent events.

4. Why Black People Own Guns (Julia Craven, December 26, 2017, Huffpost)

Julia Craven interviewed 11 black gun owners in order to better understand their relationships to firearms. Though each of these accounts are important in their own right, RJ Young speaks specifically about his experiences with gun ownership as a black man in Oklahoma.

If I could walk around Oklahoma and not count how many black folks were in the room, I’d probably feel better about firearms as a black man. I’d probably feel safer walking around with one. But the fact is, most people have a narrow view of who I am.

Young’s book, Let It Bang: A Young Black Man’s Reluctant Odyssey into Guns offers more thorough insight his personal experiences with guns in Oklahoma within the context of a well-researched, larger cultural framework.

5. Spiritual Affliction: A Thank You Note to Oklahoma (Kate Strum, October 1, 2018, Hippocampus)

After moving to Oklahoma for graduate school, Kate Strum becomes fervent to understand the landscape: she travels to various parts of the state, engages politically, experiences the severity of elements, and makes meaningful relationships with people who have been here longer than she. And still, Oklahoma is somewhat elusive, though this essay is a beautiful rumination on Strum’s time spent here.

I am at once furious about what is wrong here and losing patience with the opinions of outsiders. I am home. I am marching at the capitol in the morning and late night on social media I am telling my friends on the coasts that they don’t get it. I shake my head when they read articles about rural America and think they know us.

6. Grace in Broken Arrow (Kiera Feldman, May 23, 2012, This Land)

Rather than taking reports of child molestation to the police or the Department of Human Services, the leaders of Grace Church, a Christian school that featured amenities like a ball pit, soda shoppe, and an antique carousel, instead held meetings to address what they didn’t believe to be that serious of an issue. Kiera Feldman, by interviewing survivors, former employees, and conducting immense amounts of research, brings to light a sickening tale of how Aaron Thompson, a former PE teacher at the school, molested boys there for years.

Grace Church was Oklahoma’s Penn State of 2002. After such things come to light, we always wonder: how on earth did that ever happen?

Here is how it happened.

7. Landlocked Islanders (Krista Langlois, November 16, 2016, Hakai Magazine)

Marshallese citizens, granted indefinite permission to live and work in the U.S. as a result of an agreement made with the U.S. during Marshallese independence, are leaving the Marshall Islands due to factors like climate change and lack of opportunities. As Krista Langlois writes, “by the year 2100, it’s conceivable that climate change will force the entire population of the Marshall Islands to US shores.” Many Marshallese migrants are ending up in Enid, Oklahoma.

Though Enid seems like an improbable place for Pacific Islanders to settle, it is, in a way, familiar. The first Marshallese came here with missionaries about 40 years ago, and wrote home about the jobs that could be had in meat-processing factories, and the public schools their children could attend. Eventually, family joined family.

8. The Teachers’ Strike and the Democratic Revival in Oklahoma (Rivka Galchen, May 28, 2018, The New Yorker)

Oklahoma teachers, rightfully tired of working multiple jobs to provide for their families and paying large sums of money for their own school supplies, walked out of school in April 2018. Some teachers drove to the capitol, where they asked for pay raises and better funding for their schools. Others walked in protest, making their way through “snow, lightning, and an earthquake.” Rivka Galchen examines the unique political composition of Oklahoma and chronicles the events of the two-week teachers’ walkout in Oklahoma in this longform piece.

The state’s license plates once read “Native America,” though almost no tribes are native to the area; they were sent there in the Trail of Tears. And Oklahomans are proud to be called Okies, a term coined by Californians to disparage people who were fleeing the Dust Bowl.

Related read: How Oklahoma’s Low Pay Dashed My Hopes of Teaching in My Tribal Community, March 28, 2018, Education Week

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

Women and Pain: A Reading List

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“But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted — beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.”

–Virginia Woolf, The Waves

In a recent NPR piece, “Invisibilia: For Some Teens With Debilitating Pain, The Treatment Is More Pain,” readers are introduced to Devyn, a 14-year-old who develops intense bodily pain, seemingly out of nowhere. In search of the source of the pain or a cure, Devyn’s mother Sheila takes her to doctor after doctor. Each time, medical professionals tell Devyn, “‘You are healthy. Nothing is wrong,’” until, eight months later, when Sheila finds Dr. Sherry, a man responsible for a highly controversial treatment for pain: inflicting more pain.

As reported in the NPR piece, patients of Dr. Sherry’s “do physical workouts five to six hours a day.” All medicine, “even medication for apparently unrelated problems” is taken from patients. When Devyn experiences an asthma attack on the first day of practice, she is “directed…to simply walk around the gym” rather than take her inhaler.

At the end of the piece, Devyn claims to have been cured by Dr. Sherry’s program — she “even went back to dancing.” But for many readers, the essay was infuriating, unethical even. Maya Dusenbery, author of Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick, called the piece “irresponsible” and generated a list of 12 questions that journalists should have asked experts, including “An asthma attack and a nosebleed are not pain complaints. What possible justification was there to ignore these problems in Devyn?”

Abby Norman, author of Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain, tweeted that while she hadn’t been a patient of Dr. Sherry, she had tried swapping “one pain for another more intentional pain” and “just ended up with twice as much pain and a deep feeling of failure and shame that I couldn’t get ‘better’ and ‘beat it’ and ‘be normal.’” Norman is not alone in the ways she tried to ignore pain rather than accepting and learning to live with high levels of physical discomfort. Women’s symptoms — particularly pain, which is invisible — are often dismissed, disbelieved or diminished by doctors. Even when women do voice what’s happening with their bodies, they often do not receive treatment or even an acknowledgment of what’s ailing them.

Norman, in response to a series of questions I asked her about pain, wrote that she received pressure from “everywhere — doctors, friends and family, society” that “if you aren’t actively trying to get better, you’re wrong. If you aren’t making strides at getting well, you’re wrong. If you’re failing, if you stay sick, if your pain is still there, not only have you failed but you must want to be this way. Maybe you’re even faking it. Or making it worse than it really is.”

Women, in particular, are subject to this type of blame from doctors and others. As Norman notes, “on a sociocultural level, there are a lot of messages specifically undermining a woman’s interpretation of her own mind, body, and experiences. Not just in terms of physical pain, either. Where it becomes difficult (and in some cases life-threatening) is that the overarching patriarchal structures under which healthcare systems of the world operate, the very long history of misogyny in the medical profession and in our culture at large, vigorously and consistently reinforces these messages.”

Knowing this, how do we begin to change the narrative of how women’s pain is perceived, understood, and treated? How might we validate the experiences of women who have been repeatedly and systematically ignored, dismissed, and blamed by medical professionals and society at large? How do we treat pain without inflicting further physical and emotional harm?

I don’t think there are easy answers, but we can work to support initiatives dedicated to create lasting change to correct data that demonstrates the pain of women — affected even further by factors such as race, class, and weight — is routinely disbelieved by medical professionals. We can examine the language used to express and treat women’s pain, and work to find a vocabulary that allows us to rewrite the current narrative. We can listen carefully to women with histories of pain who write or speak about their experiences and heed their calls to action.

1. The Long History of Discrimination in Pain Medicine (Sarah Zhang, February 28, 2017, The Atlantic)

“The emergence of objectivity influenced the stigma around patients who suffered from pain without visible injury—and this stigma ends up overlapping with stigma that already exist along race, gender, and class lines.”

According to bioethicist Daniel Goldberg, author of a recent paper, “Pain, objectivity and history: understanding pain stigma,” the 19th century brought new instruments like the X-ray, which allowed for an “objective” means of understanding previously unseen pain, and these developments forced a reckoning with the way doctors had previously understood patients and the body. Sandra Zhang interviews Goldberg in order to learn more about how histories of racism, sexism, and classism have influenced the way doctors treat patients today.

2. I’m a fat Black femme searching for a doctor who believes my pain (Dominique Norman, January 24, 2019, Hello Giggles)

“I’m Black, fat, and femme, living with a chronic physical illness and mental illnesses. I can tell you that self-advocacy in doctor’s offices is incredibly difficult when no one will listen to you.”

Histories of racist practices in medicine such as the Tuskegee experiment or cells taken from Henrietta Lacks without her consent have left lasting negative impacts on the way black women are treated by medical professionals today, as Dominique Norman explains in her personal essay about being disbelieved and dismissed by a variety of doctors for years on end.

3. Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain (Leslie Jamison, Spring 2014, Virginia Quarterly Review)

“The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.”

How can we talk about women’s pain in a way that is true to their experience? What kind of pain is perceived as “real” and what kind is seen as a cry for attention? How can women write about their pain without adding to a history of narratives that have glamorized “wounded women”? By analyzing representations of women’s pain in art and literature, Leslie Jamison asks — and seeks to answer — these questions and more.

(Related: read “Writing Women’s Pain: Part Two of a Round Table, a conversation with Alethea Black, Abby Norman, Esme Weijun Wang, and more,” November 2018, 2018, Lit Hub)

4. Nothing Protects Black Women From Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth (Nina Martin, ProPublica, and Renee Montagne, December 7, 2017, ProPublica and NPR)

Shalon Irving, who earned a dual-subject Ph.D. and worked to “eradicate disparities in health access and outcomes,” passed away at the age of 36, just three weeks after giving birth to her first child. As Nina Martin and Renee Montagne report, Irving’s death is representative of a much larger issue: black women are “243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes.”

“Black expectant and new mothers frequently told us that doctors and nurses didn’t take their pain seriously — a phenomenon borne out by numerous studies that show pain is often undertreated in black patients for conditions from appendicitis to cancer.”

5. Pain bias: The health inequality rarely discussed (Jennifer Billock, May 22, 2018, BBC)

As happens to many women who have valid symptoms, Jennifer Billock was told by her doctor that she was “paying too much attention” to her body — he recommended she go home and relax.

“I still left his office thinking it was perhaps anxiety. And so, listening to the advice, I tried to ignore the pain.”

Billock explores the numerous ways in which women’s pain is dismissed and discredited throughout this piece, and also why.

6. It’s All In Your Head: The Dangers of Disbelieving Female Pain (Caroline Reilly, July 6, 2016, Bitch Magazine)

Caroline Reilly feels a sense of relief when she wakes from surgery and a medical professional tells her they “found a lot” of endometriosis within her. Her pain, previously disbelieved, was now validated by a name. Reilly, through research studies and personal experience, advocates for women’s pain to be legitimized.

“The disbelief of female pain is well documented. “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain,” a 2001 study in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, documents how women are given less pain medications than men for the same procedures. On the other hand, the study notes that women are more likely to be given sedatives—as women are more often perceived as anxious than in pain. Women also wait longer than men in emergency rooms.”

7. Black Health Matters (Jenna Wortham, August 27, 2016, The New York Times)

“In April, a study by researchers at the University of Virginia found that African-American patients were routinely undertreated for their pain, compared with white patients. Ultimately, black patients were conditioned to underestimate their own pain.”

Plagued by a mysterious rash and other health concerns, Jenna Wortham visits several doctors and an emergency room before her acupuncturist asks if her condition might be related to stress. Upon reflecting on the overwhelming trauma she encounters daily in her newsfeed, Wortham discovers Simone Leigh, “a renowned artist with a history of examining social movements and black subjectivities, with a focus on women,” and works to “deal with the psychological toll of racism” through practices such as yoga and acupuncture.

8. Treating Migraines: How Women are Harmed by Gendered Medical Language (Rachel Mabe, February 6, 2018, Catapult)

“So the question is: Does the stigma of migraines as a women’s disease, and the stereotypically feminine language still used to talk about them, affect patient treatment? Does it affect how much time and money are spent on studying migraines?”

Rachel Mabe seeks to answer these questions by sharing the story of Patty, a woman who experiences “twenty-two headache days a month,” analyzing words such as “oversensitive” used to describe women’s migraines, writing about her own experience with incapacitating headaches, and examining how the gender biases present within the history of language related to migraines has contributed to the way migraines remain understudied.

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

Home Cooking: A Reading List

Getty Images / Katie Kosma

From second grade to eighth grade, cereal was my portal to the United States. Whenever my dad flew from where we lived in Indonesia to the U.S. on business, he’d bring a near-empty suitcase so he could fill it with Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, Captain Crunch, and whatever other colorful boxes caught his eye. When he came home, my brother and I would deliberate over which to open first, rationing ourselves. I treasured each bowl enough that once, when a gecko flung out of the box along with a kaleidoscopic pour of fruity pebbles, I simply brought the creature outside before dipping my spoon into the bowl.

The longer I lived in Indonesia, the less I remembered about life in the United States, even though others reminded me that the U.S. was “home.” Whenever I ate cereal, I imagined an alternate version of myself. The girl I envisioned lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in a brick house like that of my cousins. She wore outfits from Limited Too, a store I’d visited once during summer vacation. She somehow didn’t have braces or wear glasses. In imagining what I might be like if I lived in the U.S., I began to construct my own version of the country based on summer visits and foggy memories of early childhood. As a result, the U.S. became more artifice than reality, a place I imagined might absolve me of my complicated feelings about identity.

But my illusions about the U.S. were as sugary and insubstantial as the cereal I associated with the country; they dissolved as soon as I moved to Texas during my freshman year of high school. Once there, I realized that even though I spoke the language and looked the part, I felt different from my peers. As much as I wanted to feel at ease in the U.S., I found myself torn between the reality of the place where I lived – all cookie-cutter homes and gleaming aisles of grocery stores – and where I’d grown up. I felt homesick for Indonesia, a place I could never truly call home, privilege making thorny my presence there.

For years, I buried the feelings of loss that came along with leaving Indonesia and instead tried to forge different lives in the states I’ve lived since then. But, like the bowls of cereal of my past that once brought me back to a country I’d left behind, I was given a piece of Kopiko after a meal a couple years ago, and the even the sight of the wrapper was enough to transport me to my old house, one shaded by a rainbow eucalyptus trees and robust flower blooms. Food can be nostalgia embodied, a means of traveling to a place you wish you could return to, a way of bringing to life a memory. Candy in hand, I remembered wandering aisles of the outdoor market, where sounds became a kind of song: vendors chattering, pans clanging, someone calling nasi goreng! nasi goreng!, live birds chirruping from a small cage, knives whisking over metal sharpeners, chickens scuttling around table legs looking for scraps, and motorcycles chortling to life before whining down the road. For sale were tables of produce – spiky round rambutan, bundles of greens, starfruit stacked in precarious piles, shrink-wrapped mango, mounds of durian – slick bodies of fish gutted and chickens plucked clean of their feathers. Nothing went to waste. Blood was boiled down until it congealed, and intestines were arranged on plates like long tendrils of spaghetti.

Perhaps food isn’t a permanent means of returning to anywhere, but a taste can be enough to bring you home. In the following essays, writers interrogate the complicated pasts of place through food, express nostalgia for long-gone homes, and find belonging by sharing meals. As for me, when I put the Kopiko on my tongue, thousands of miles away, the blend of coffee and sugar resonated bittersweet, as it always had, before melting away.

1. I Want Crab. Pure Maryland Crab. (Bill Addison, September 15, 2016, Eater)

I moved away from Maryland over 25 years ago, but if I don’t make it back to the state at least once a year for steamed crabs, I’m like a bird whose migration pattern has been disrupted. I’m unsettled in the world.

Back in Maryland after time away, Bill Addison digs into a pile of local crab while ruminating on the history, preparation techniques, best places to eat, and future of crab in Baltimore.

2. NASA is learning the best way to grow food in space (Sarah Scoles, June 6, 2018, Popular Science)

Sure, astronauts can gaze down at Earth and see its most beautiful spots—literally all of them—every 90 minutes. But those places are always out of reach, reminders of how far away sea level is. Having something nearby that photosynthesizes might cheer the crew.

A complex set of factors such as humidity, mold, and a host of other ecosystem variants makes growing plants in space a challenge. But far away from the comforts of home, astronauts have begun cultivating zinnias and lettuce on board, thanks to the work of scientist Gioia Massa and her team, who are part of an experiment called Veggie.

3. Say It with Noodles: On Learning to Speak the Language of Food (Shing Yin Khor, February 27, 2018, Catapult)

In this beautiful illustrated essay, Shing Yin Khor expresses how difficult it is for her to communicate emotions verbally. She instead uses food as a means to share feelings of disappointment, love towards others and, eventually, love toward herself as well.

4. Eating to America (Naz Riahi, November 2018, Longreads)

Two years after the Iran-Iraq war ended, and six months after her father, a political prisoner, was executed, Naz Riahi and her mother, Shee Shee, move to the U.S. There, homesick and grieving, Riahi finds happiness and hope through food.

The food sat inside me, taking over spaces that had been full of worry just minutes before and making the worry go away.

5. An Adopted Obsession with Soondubu Jjigae, Korean Silken-Tofu Stew (Bryan Washington, February 20, 2019, The New Yorker)

I first tasted gochujang because of a boy. We were in a busted strip mall, just west of Houston’s I-610 loop. A lot of things were changing in my life, and I hadn’t been home—home home—in a minute, and we were too broke to go most places.

Though he ends up splitting up with his partner, Bryan Washington’s love for soondubu jjigae remains strong. Washington recounts his efforts to figure out how to make the stew on his own, and eventually brings the recipe home.

6. The Food of My Youth (Melissa Chadburn, July 9, 2018, The New York Review)

In search of a better future, Melissa Chadburn’s mother brings her family to northern California, where they “lived on saltines with peanut butter and beans from a can.” At fifteen, Chadburn is taken to a group home where her hunger is satiated, but she is treated as a case number rather than a child.

Only, for us, the explosions had already happened. The places we’d called home had been lit up and burned to the ground, with nothing left save for the blackened foundations of our past. We kids were screaming for love, for touch, for home.

7. Chop Suey Nation (Ann Hui, June 21, 2016, The Globe and Mail)

After a blogger wrote a post called “I can’t believe there’s a Chinese restaurant in Fogo,” Ann Hui, influenced by her family, for whom “food was an obsession,” sets out to drive across Canada to figure out how the restaurant owners decided to open shop in such an isolated location and why there’s a Chinese restaurant in nearly every Canadian town. Hui wrote a book, Chop Suey Nation, based on her article.

The name “chop suey” translates more or less into “assorted mix,” and refers to a repertoire of dishes mostly developed in North America in the mid-20th century. A mix of ideas both East and West and, to my eyes, frozen in time.

8. Farm to Table (Laura Reiley, April 13, 2016, Tampa Bay Times)

This is a story we are all being fed. A story about overalls, rich soil and John Deere tractors scattering broods of busy chickens. A story about healthy animals living happy lives, heirloom tomatoes hanging heavy and earnest artisans rolling wheels of cheese into aging caves nearby.

Skeptical of the chalkboard menus touting local, organic ingredients in front of nearly every restaurant in Tampa, Laura Reiley stops at farms, contacts vendors, and “for fish claims that seemed suspicious, I kept zip-top baggies in my purse and tucked away samples” in order to determine the extent to which restaurant owners lie about obtaining ingredients from sources close to home.

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

‘What Happened to You While You Were Gone?’

Arequipa, Peru. Getty Images

As she recalls a trip to Peru, the body of a mummified girl sacrificed for the safety of the Incans over 500 years ago, and the frustrating neurological condition that steals her memory and strength, Jacqueline Alnes mines the topography of female identity and the stereotypes that erode our self image. Read her essay at Guernica.

Jacquline Alnes regularly contributes reading lists to Longreads. They’re worth your time.

Here is what is known: In the beginning, there is a runner, capable and strong. In photographs, her thighs striate with muscle on the down step. Brown-blonde hair in French braids, she waves and smiles in each image. But on a mountainside in Peru, her legs give way beneath her. Rushed to North Carolina, where she attends university, her body crumples again and again, surrendering to a neurological abnormality.

I like to dream that my body first failed me while I was abroad, but really, my body started to become enigmatic during my freshman year of college, two years before landing in Lima. At eighteen, after living a remarkably healthy life, I fainted one day in my dormitory. When I woke, the world around me turned into a surrealist painter’s vision: dressers spinning toward the white tiled ceiling, bed wobbling in my sight. That day marked the separation between the old me and a new girl. When I entered the doctor’s office, I became a body. A set of symptoms. A story someone else told.

To take up residence in my body again, I write. I struggle, over and over again, to compose a whole narrative from the loose threads of my own history. If only I could pin down the meaning of my body’s hidden illness, maybe I could make a shape of my body, carve a smooth statuette to hold in my palm. Young woman experiences disorienting neurological illness but emerges as a writer; Division I runner collapses, loses running for years, but returns and reconnects with her body; university student once bullied by teammates learns to be vulnerable once again. But none of these stories are completely true.

Within studies of history, there is room for shape-shifting. This gives me comfort. Perhaps instead of considering my body as broken artifact, I can think of myself as palimpsest, something influenced, though not overtaken, by those who have studied my internal waves, revealed my fragilities, given the gift of care to my body, lent their voices when mine could not be coaxed into coherence. I imagine rewritten lines, whole memories, and erasure. The doctor’s notes scrawled across my thighs, my mother’s voice loping across my forehead, song of my lost memories erased from my mouth. Autobiographies written neatly on my palms.

Read the story

What Remains

Longreads Pick

As she recalls a trip to Peru, the body of a mummified girl sacrificed for the safety of the Incans over 500 years ago, and the frustrating neurological condition that steals her memory and strength, Jacqueline Alnes mines the topography of female identity and the stereotypes that erode our self image.

Published: Feb 21, 2019
Length: 19 minutes (4,935 words)

Revisiting the #MeToo Movement: A Reading List

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In her TED Talk “Me Too is a movement, not a moment” at TED Women 2018, Tarana Burke paces across the stage, saying, “I’ve read article after article bemoaning wealthy white men who have landed softly with their golden parachutes following the disclosure of their terrible behavior. And we’re asked to consider their futures. But what of survivors?”

Burke’s TED Talk, which took place in late November 2018, came just after the one-year mark of the #MeToo hashtag going viral, giving Burke — and others — a chance to reflect on the history of the movement, and whether or not it’s headed in a direction that supports Burke’s original intent.

“This movement is constantly being called a watershed moment, or even a reckoning, but I wake up some days feeling like all evidence points to the contrary,” Burke says. She pauses, shaking her head. “We have moved so far away from the origins of this movement that started a decade ago, or even the intentions of the hashtag that started just a year ago, that sometimes, the Me Too movement that I hear some people talk about is unrecognizable to me.”

Roxane Gay, in a piece for Refinery 29 at the one-year mark of the #MeToo hashtag, expresses how the movement has diverged from the heart of Burke’s work, asking, “What will change for women? What, especially, will change for the most vulnerable women among us — the undocumented, women of color, working class women, single mothers? What will change for women who cannot afford to come forward when they are harassed or assaulted? As I consider this past year, what strikes me is how #MeToo has mostly benefited culturally prominent, mostly white women.”

Burke’s movement, which originally began in 2006, was originally intended, as Abby Ohlheiser reports in The Chicago Tribune, “to help women and girls — particularly women and girls of color — who had also survived sexual violence.” Beyond the one-year mark of the hashtag going viral and the decade of work Burke has done to support survivors of sexual assault, there exists a history of black women activists fighting against sexual violence. As Danielle McGuire writes in her essay “Recy Taylor, Oprah Winfrey, and the long history of black women saying #MeToo” for The Washington Post, “stories of subversion date from the 1830s, when Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman in North Carolina, lived in a crawl space for years to escape her owner’s sexual abuse.”

And Burke, in her TED Talk, emphasizes the true purpose of the #MeToo movement, which is “a movement about the far-reaching power of empathy. And so it’s about the millions and millions of people who, one year ago, raised their hands to say, ‘Me Too,’ and their hands are still raised while the media that they consume erases them and politicians who they elected to represent them pivot away from solutions.”

This erasure from media is noted by Salamishah Tillet and Scheherazade Tillet, in a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, “After the ‘Surviving R. Kelly’ Documentary, #MeToo Has Finally Returned to Black Girls.” Tillet and Tillet note, “even today, as #MeToo continues to dominate headlines, black girls have been invisible in the movement.” While the release of Surviving R. Kelly has pivoted attention toward black women, Tillet and Tillet write, “our optimism is tempered by history, which shows that social justice movements rarely center, for any meaningful period, on black girls, or anyone who has survived sexual violence. That’s because black girls experience racial, gender and economic oppressions at the same time, a phenomenon the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw calls intersectionality. As a result, their voices and experiences do not neatly fit into a single-issue narrative of gender or race.”

The collection of essays below seeks to heed Burke’s call for inclusivity and her vision of #MeToo as “a movement about the one-in-four girls and the one-in-six boys who are sexually assaulted every year and carry those wounds into adulthood. It’s about the 84 percent of trans women who will be sexually assaulted this year. And the indigenous women, who are three-and-a-half times more likely to be sexually assaulted than any other group. Or people with disabilities, who are seven times more likely to be sexually abused. It’s about the 60 percent of black girls like me who will be experiencing sexual violence before they turn 18. And the thousands and thousands of low-wage workers who are being sexually harassed right now on jobs that they can’t afford to quit.”

1. The Sexual Assault Epidemic That No One Is Talking About (Aviva Stahl, July, 25, 2018, The Village Voice)

Iffat and Mariam (second name changed for anonymity) are two New York City residents who have experienced Islamaphobia firsthand; both women have been assaulted while using public transportation. In this piece, Aviva Stahl reports that more than “one in four” “Muslim Arab hijab-wearing women…had been intentionally pushed or shoved on a subway platform.”

The #MeToo movement has brought new attention to street harassment of women, but Ahmad says she doesn’t think it’s done enough to address the experiences of Muslim women. “I don’t think they’re doing anything” to address gendered Islamophobia, she says. “As a survivor of that specific kind of [Islamophobic] violence, I don’t see myself in that movement. It doesn’t seem connected to the realities of Muslim women.”

2. Hotels See Panic Buttons as a #MeToo Solution for Workers. Guest Bans? Not So Fast. (Julia Jacobs, November 11, 2018, The New York Times)

After Ms. Melara, a housekeeper in Southern California, was accosted by a guest who exposed himself to her, she locked herself in a nearby room to escape, but wasn’t given assistance until nearly twenty minutes later. Her story is not an anomaly; many workers in the hotel industry are sexually assaulted and harassed by guests. Julia Jacobs reports on panic buttons, a solution proposed by the hotel industry to protect workers.

3. We Need to Include Black Women’s Experience in the Movement Against Campus Sexual Assault (Candace King, June 15, 2018, The Nation)

Only a few weeks after Venkayla Haynes received a rape whistle at her Spelman college freshman orientation, she was raped by a football player. Though Haynes reported the rape to a Dean at Spelman at the time, her situation was complicated by “institutional realities. Both Haynes and her assailant are black.”

Haynes believes the way college administrators responded to her assault reflects longstanding tendencies in the black community to shield black men from interactions with authorities.

“We always come to these situations where we can’t come forward because we want to protect black men or protect our black brothers because they’re already fighting against a system that further criminalizes them,” Haynes said.

4. #NotInvisible: Why are Native American women vanishing? (Sharon Cohen, September 6, 2018, The Associated Press)

 

Ashley HeavyRunner Loring has been missing since June 2017, and her family has embarked on around 40 searches in attempts to locate her. Ashley is one of many missing or murdered Native American women and girls, as Sharan Cohen reports in this piece, though the precise number is difficult to establish because “some cases go unreported, others aren’t documented thoroughly and there isn’t a specific government database tracking these cases.”

On some reservations, Native American women are murdered at a rate more than 10 times the national average and more than half of Alaska Native and Native women have experienced sexual violence at some point, according to the U.S. Justice Department. A 2016 study found more than 80 percent of Native women experience violence in their lifetimes.

5. In The #MeToo Conversation, Transgender People Face a Barrier to Belief (KC Clements, April 18, 2018, them.)

Much of the narrative about #MeToo has revolved around sexual assault between cisgender heterosexual people, and too many still believe that it is only experienced by conventionally attractive cisgender women, or that is only perpetrated by “bad” cisgender men.

I’ve wondered where exactly I fit into this dialogue, because I’m a nonbinary person who was assigned female at birth, and, well, #MeToo.

KC Clements recalls their own experiences with sexual harassment and assault, presents testimonies from other trans people, and urges inclusivity, emphasizing the need for more resources, support, and materials for trans survivors of assault and harassment.

Related Read: Trans Women and Femmes Are Shouting #MeToo – But Are You Listening? (Meredith Talusan, March 2, 2018, them.)

6. When will MeToo become WeToo? Some say voices of black women, working class left out (Charisse Jones, October 5, 2018, USA Today)

After being sexually harassed by coworkers at McDonald’s, her place of employment, Kim Lawson, along with nine other employees, filed a harassment complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

An analysis by the law center of complaints filed from 2012 to 2016 with the EEOC found that black women working in the private sector lodged sexual harassment charges at nearly three times the rate of white women.

While the media has focused extensively on the #MeToo movement in Hollywood, Lawson, as well as other activists, emphasize that the #MeToo movement needs to include women of color, particularly those working lower-wage jobs.

7. The Sexual Assault Epidemic No One Talks About (Joseph Shapiro, January 8, 2018, NPR)

In February 2016, Pauline, a 46-year old woman who lived with a longtime caretaker, was raped by two boys who were part of the family. In this piece, the product of a yearlong investigation by NPR, Joseph Shapiro details the staggering statistics related to sexual assault for people with intellectual disabilities, including the fact that women and men with intellectual disabilities are seven times more likely to be sexually assaulted than people without disabilities.

The federal numbers, and the results of our own database, show that people with intellectual disabilities are vulnerable everywhere, including in places where they should feel safest: where they live, work, go to school; on van rides to medical appointments and in public places.

Related read: The #MeToo Movement Hasn’t Been Inclusive of the Disability Community (Emily Flores, April 24, 2018, Teen Vogue)

8. R. Kelly and the Complexities of Race in the #MeToo Era (Jelani Cobb, January 11, 2019, The New Yorker)

 

Jelani Cobb opens this piece with a memory from childhood of a woman with a black eye who visits his mother. Cobb’s mother later tells him that the woman had been abused by her husband, and Cobb recalls the moment being a “lesson in the consequences of male brutality. It was an implicit instruction in how I was not to behave as a man.” By putting his personal experience in conversation with the recent public response to Surviving R. Kelly, Cobb delves into complexities of race and reporting violence, and what it means to bear witness to brutality in the era of #MeToo.

There’s a gulf between the accusations directed at Harvey WeinsteinMatt Lauer, and Les Moonves—wealthy white men whose alleged excesses were understood as a perquisite of their status—and those directed at Bill Cosby and R. Kelly, black men for whom success represented some broader communal hope that long odds in life could be surmounted. Cosby and Kelly know this, which is part of the reason that they were so effective at manipulating public sentiment around their various accusations.

***
Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness.

The Need for Distance: Jaclyn Gilbert on Writing and Running

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Jacqueline Alnes | Longreads | December 2018 | 11 minutes (2,773 words)

Early in the morning, the light soft and warm and the air cool after yesterday’s thunderstorms, Jaclyn Gilbert runs a new route. From Grand Army Plaza she makes her way toward the Green Wood cemetery, hugging it through the second mile. Around the fifth mile, she passes over a parkway through a cylindrical barbed-wire tunnel, peering down at cars whirring by on their morning commutes, before continuing down Tenth Avenue back toward the park, finishing at Grand Army for a clean seven miles.

“New routes are always my favorite for the maps they form inside me: a series of sense impressions that filter through my memory as the day passes on. When I sit down to write again, these impressions reappear as remnants of light, color, or feeling, making their way into the imaginings of my characters,” Gilbert writes to me in an email. Though we live half the country apart — she in New York, I in Oklahoma — I feel a connection to her. Both of us are former Division I athletes turned writers. And both of us still run, frequently testing our limits; our writing processes are informed by our fastidious need for distance. Read more…

From the Sidelines: A Reading List on the Need for Female Coaches

Arizona Cardinals training camp coach Dr. Jen Welter poses for photographers after being introduced, Tuesday, July 28, 2015, at the teams' training facility in Tempe, Ariz. Welter is believed to be the first female to hold a coaching position of any kind in the NFL and will be member of the Cardinals coaching staff throughout training camp and the preseason, working with inside linebackers. AP Photo/Matt York

After playing one season for the Dallas Cowboys and one for the New England Patriots, I huddled up for a third season with the rest of my flag football team wearing a uniform that simply read “NFL Flag.” The uniforms were relics of a world far from mine. I lived in Indonesia at the time; what I knew of football came from my dad wearing his Packers shirt around the house after work, where he discovered the scores of games played twelve hours and nine-thousand miles away from our dial-up computer.

As little as I knew about the NFL, my participation in flag football was never a question. I loved sports so much that I joined soccer, baseball, basketball, the swim team, and a running club where we ran at least five kilometers every Tuesday night. Because our school was so small, each team was co-ed. Athletes were known for their skills rather than separated by gender, which is a quality of those early years that I still treasure. Looking back, perhaps I idealized athletics, believing that sport could erase the expectations of gender placed upon me in other ways. On the field, I imagined myself not as a girl, but as a twirling blur of muscle and breath.

This illusion was punctured in a huddle during my third year of flag football. My coach that year was a man with a reputation for calling his sons “sissies” if they showed any sign of exhaustion on the field. He glanced around the gleaming faces of our team, signaling off starting positions. When he got to me and another girl, the only other on the team, he said “bench” to us both. I stood on the sidelines, cheering my team toward a touchdown, and waiting for the signal to tag in. There was an unspoken rule within our league that teams should be fair to both boys and girls by giving them equal playing time, and my coach gave a chance to the other girl, who was older, but quickly took her out again when he thought someone else could do better. When his son showed up to half-time sweaty and lagging, I thought I might have my chance, but he told him to “man up” and sent him back in. As the game stretched on and the lowering sun colored the sky a dusky blue, I remained sidelined. When I got home that night, I wept. I knew I was fast, knew I could hold my own — as I had for three years — against anyone in the league, and knew I cared enough about my teammates to run fake routes without a chance at the ball. But none of that was enough. To that coach, I was a girl. Someone who could watch the game, but not participate.

I won’t say that after that moment I began to negotiate gender and sport, but something in me shifted. I quit playing flag football after that season. Wondering if I would always be categorized as a “girl,” I pushed myself to the absolute brink of what was possible in every other sport I played, ensuring, for example, that when I crossed the finish line of the mile first, before all the boys, that I was acknowledged for my prowess and not my gender.

I competed in multiple sports for almost all of middle school and high school, and then went on to run for a Division I team. When I look back now, I’m amazed to realize I can count two female coaches across a lifetime, plus a handful of female assistant coaches. I’m not the only one to experience this inequality. The 2017 College Sport Racial & Gender Report Card, which assigns grades to sports based on a comprehensive evaluation of gender and race, notes that white men “dominated the head coaching ranks on men’s teams holding 86.5 percent, 87.8 percent, and 91.6 percent of all head coaching positions in Divisions I, II, and III, respectively.”

I’m not insinuating here that female coaches are superior to male coaches or vice versa, but I’m wondering where these discrepancies come from. Are the factors that lead to highly disproportionate numbers of white male coaches somehow related all the way back to childhood athletics, during which young female athletes are told that they belong on the bench? Or are there other factors at play? Female coaches are earning positions in sports previously coached only by men — Jen Welter became the NFL’s first female coach in 2015, and, in 2016, the Arizona Coyotes hired Dawn Braid as the first female coach in the NHL — but the fact that these titles are newsworthy indicates that we have a lot of work to do to diversify coaching staff not only by gender, but also by race.

1. College Athletics’ War on Women Coaches (Pat Griffin, March 8, 2015, Huffpost)

In 2015, Shannon Miller, who coached women’s ice hockey at the University of Minnesota Duluth, was notified by the university that her contract would not be renewed at the end of the season because of concerns that she was being paid too much for her work.

“Placed in the context of a disturbing trend in the diminishing number of women coaches and the treatment of the women in athletics over the last several years, this decision has more far reaching consequences for college women’s athletics.”

Pat Griffin summarizes a list of troubling action taken toward female coaches from 2007 to 2015 and argues that “the public rationale offered by athletic administrators for their decisions in each of these cases masks a deeper and more fundamental problem in college athletics: misogyny, sexism, and homophobia.”

2. An Open Letter About Female Coaches (Pau Gasol, May 11, 2018, The Players’ Tribune)

Pau Gasol of the San Antonio Spurs, in an open letter, not only successfully dismantles others’ arguments as to why Becky Hammon should not be head coach of an NBA team, but also urges the NBA — and fans of the NBA — to advocate and work toward a more inclusive league as a whole.

“Let’s recognize that one protest does not mean we have solved the problem of racial inequality in this country. One parade doesn’t mean we’re doing everything we can for the LGBTQ movement. And one coaching interview doesn’t mean we have solved the issue of gender diversity in our workplace.”

(Related: read Sidelined by Matthew J.X. Malady in Slate.)

3. American Running Needs More Female Coaches (Erin Strout, September 14, 2018, Outside)

By examining the sport of running as a focal point in this piece, Erin Strout illuminates the reasons why women are less likely to become coaches, interviews women in coaching positions to understand their challenges, and wonders about the future of women’s coaching and how more women in coaching positions could impact sport.

“Whether at the professional or collegiate level, Hogshead-Makar says that adding more female influence within the sport is crucial—not only to advance gender equity but also to provide a safer environment where athletes can thrive.”

(Related: read Reem Abulleil’s Why aren’t there more female coaches on tour? published by the Women’s Tennis Association.)

4. Where Are The Women? (Rachel Stark, Winter, 2017 NCAA Champion Magazine)

“In 1972, women coached more than 90 percent of collegiate women’s teams. Today, they coach fewer than half.”

In this 2017 piece for NCAA Champion Magazine, Rachel Stark investigates the effect that female coaches’ visible representation has on younger athletes who play sports, and also provides a number of resources such as “How to Support Young Coaches on the Rise,” “How to Strengthen Your Contacts,” and “How to Deepen the Candidate Pool” as a way to encourage more women to apply for coaching positions, and to open the conversation about gender, race, representation, and coaching within college sports.

(Related: read Number of Women Coaching in College Has Plummeted in Title IX Era by Jeré Longman published in The New York Times.)

5. The Field Where Men Still Call the Shots (Linda Flanagan, July 28, 2018, The Atlantic)

In this deeply researched essay, Linda Flanagan argues that a dearth of female role models in sport can negatively impact female athletes in several ways, such as leadership styles, lack of participation in sport, and an inability to visualize themselves as future coaches.

“According to a 2009 study by the sociologists Michael Messner and Suzel Bozada-Deas, men typically coach, and women typically serve as “team moms”…In the researchers’ view, this imbalance stems from “institutional gender regimes” that divide the work between men and women based on traditional roles.”

6. The Rise of Women Coaching Men (Michael LoRé, April 26, 2018, culture trip)

When Natalie Randolph tells a man at the bar that she’s a former football player, he barrages her with questions.

“Wait, you played football? Did you wear pads? A helmet? Was it the Lingerie Football League? And you coached? So then, what’s a spread offense? Do you know the 3-technique?”

This instance, as Michael LoRé reports, is representative of the kind of frustrating and discriminatory reaction Randolph encounters frequently when she talks about her experiences as a woman of color who is both a football player and female coach of a male football team. And her story is not an anomaly. LoRé, using Randolph’s experiences as a thru-line throughout the piece, discusses the current state of coaching and weaves in stories from other female coaches.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness.

Home Again, Home Again: A Reading List

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“Home, I began to feel, was the half-formed beliefs you fashioned in the middle of all you didn’t and couldn’t understand, a tent on a wide, empty plain.”

-Pico Iyer

Nine or 10 months after I was born in Anchorage, Alaska, my parents packed up all of our belongings in a Mazda 323, and drove us away from my natal home. My parents took the Alcan highway through Canada, and then made their way down to Texas, where we lived for a couple of years before moving again. There are photos from that initial journey. In some, I am lolling on a viewing platform in Yellowstone National Park, and in others, I’m bundled up in a snowsuit, unnamed mountains behind me. My parents tell me I remained watchful in the backseat, my eyes trained on the scenery as it flushed from snowy white to green.

After Texas, we maintained a peripatetic existence, moving to Louisiana, then back to Alaska again. Though I learned early on in my life that we didn’t live anywhere long enough to change the walls from sellable beige, the idea of home didn’t concern me until my first-grade year, when my parents suggested we move to a small seaport city on the edge of Borneo, the second-largest island in Indonesia. We spent six years in Indonesia, only moving once from Borneo to Java. It was the longest I lived anywhere. Not knowing as an elementary schooler the layers of privilege that complicated my presence there, I allowed myself to feel as though I had found a home. I learned to pull nectar from the pink flowers outside my front door, speak Bahasa Indonesia, and scooter past the monitor lizards on my way to school. America — the country people often reminded me I was from — became the other end of infrequent long-distance phone calls, during which I’d listen to the crackling, faraway voices of people I loved. When we returned to the States once a year, well-meaning family and friends would always say, welcome home or I’m so glad you’re back. I felt, in those moments, as though there were two of me, both versions shimmering and illusory. I didn’t fully belong in Indonesia, but I also couldn’t understand how I fit into the landscape of technicolor grocery-store aisles and the dazzling suburban asphalt streets of a country that others called mine.

My family found out we were moving from Indonesia while on summer leave in the U.S., so I never got the chance to return or say goodbye. My memories from the formative years I spent there are buried somewhere deep within me — for years, I have felt too homesick to let myself remember. It is only in certain moments — the voice of a woman speaking Bahasa Indonesia rising from a crowded venue in Oregon, the echo of an adzan from a mosque — that I allow my memories from those days to unfurl like lush rainforest leaves, broad and green and glossy, beading with dew and bursting with song.

I move every two to four years now, and I am always filled with anticipation, hoping for a place that will hold me. I feel rootless, capable of fitting in anywhere, but not truly belonging. Most of the time I carry these thoughts quietly within myself, but I have found comfort in the way others voice complications with the idea of home. How much of who we are stems from the places that bear us? What does it mean to long for a home that doesn’t exist in the way it once did? What memories rise to the surface when you return to a long-forgotten place? What does it mean to be unable to return?

1. Reading ‘The Odyssey’ Far From Home (Azareen Van der Vliet, March 10, 2018, Electric Lit)

When Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi moves to South Bend, Indiana, she feels unmoored.

“Given the disorienting cartography of my life, there isn’t a singular home for me to return to. I am from nowhere; or, perhaps, I am from a constellation of places which habits and social codes violently contradict one another, leaving me empty handed.”

Van der Vliet Oloomi reads The Odyssey in Indiana, which helps her better understand her own nostalgia for an intangible place. Her encounter with the tale serves as an example of the power that literature, like place, has in offering an intersection between reality and possibility, solace and hope.

2. Baby Boy Born Birthplace Blues (John Jeremiah Sullivan, December 6, 2016, Oxford American)

When John Jeremiah Sullivan was young, a local paper in his hometown of New Albany, Indiana, ran an article about a boy who discovered a passageway that had once been part of the Underground Railroad. By researching old newspaper clippings reporting on runaway slaves, instances of racial violence, and the origins of blues music, Sullivan unravels myth to reveal truths about the complex and rich history of the place he “was raised in and where occurred the events that most shaped and damaged me as a human being.”

3. A Map of Lost Things: On Family, Grief, and the Meaning of Home (Jamila Osman, January 9, 2017, Catapult)

While watching salmon return to the site of their birth to lay thousands of eggs of their own, Jamila Osman feels a pang of jealousy at the certainty of the fish, their ability to find their way back to a point of origin. In this lyrical, haunting essay, Osman chronicles her parents’ journey from Somalia to Canada to Portland, Oregon, and reckons with grief after the death of her sister, the shortcomings of maps, and how her own identity has been shaped significantly by loss and place.

“A country is impossible to contain; a people are impossible to boil to the silt of parchment. A map is only one story. It is not the most important story. The most important story is the one a people tell about themselves.”

4. Enduring Exile (Alia Malek, October 15, 2013, Guernica)

When Anto’s neighbors warn him that he’s no longer safe in northwestern Syria, he heeds their warning, quickly shuttering the windows of his restaurant and inn, and selling what possessions he could. Alia Malek not only tells the story of Anto’s displacement in this harrowing journalistic essay, but also writes about the devastating effects of the Armenian Genocide and the way Anto’s family’s relationship to the idea of home was permanently altered as a result.

“He was curious to visit Armenia, even if it wasn’t really Armenia, and he wasn’t really from this Armenia.”

5. Fountain Girls (Samantha Tucker, Fall/Winter, 2016 Ecotone)

“There are Fountain girls who try to leave, but cannot outrun their hometown legacy; there are Fountain girls who never even stumble upon the chance to try.”

By deftly weaving together her own personal narrative about her upbringing in Fountain, Colorado and the death of her brother Ronnie, with the death of a “Fountain girl” named Tara, Tucker illuminates how a place can hold you in its grasp, even after you’ve physically left it behind.

“Where, in our reach for something better—an enlistment, an education, a steady job, a family, the dream—where do we, instead, cycle back, or discover our beginnings have inevitably been our end?”

6. Looking for Home in the Palestinian Diaspora (Marcello Di Cintio, September 24, 2018 Hazlitt)

Over 70 years have passed since Palestinians were first displaced by the Palestine War in the late 1940s, and many of the refugees living in UNRWA-administered camps have not been able to return to their ancestral homes. After Palestinian author Mona Abu Sharekh guides Marcello Di Cintio through Shati refugee camp in Gaza, Di Cintio begins to wonder “about the descendants of refugees who live far from the villages their grandparents lost — not just across a fence, but across an ocean.” Di Cintio meets with several Palestinian poets in Brooklyn in order to bear witness how both literature and heritage inform their conceptions of home.

“‘My father infected in us a nostalgia for Palestine,’ Hala said. Though she’d never seen Palestine, she came to love the place because of her father’s love.”

7. A Woman’s Choice — Sexual Favours or Lose her Home (Jessica Lussenhop, January 11, 2018, BBC News)

Broke and homeless, newly released from prison, Khristen Sellers was offered an abandoned trailer under the condition that she’d clean it herself. She did, but when the inspector came by, he “asked her if she ‘gives head’” and implied that “his signature on the inspection was the only thing standing between her and a place to live. Sellers is not the only one to experience this kind of harassment.

“In a post-Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo world, most people are well aware sexual harassment occurs in the workplace. But across the US, women are subjected to it in a far more intimate setting – their homes.”

In this piece, Jessica Lussenhop chronicles the experiences of sexual harassment that many women tenants have experienced, the flaws in the system that allow for such egregious incidents, and related legislation.

8. Home by (Chris Jones, Jaunary 29, 2007 Esquire)

After the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated before re-entry in February, 2003, Donald Pettit, Captain Kenneth Bowersox, and Nikolai Budarin were left stranded in space. Through interviews with the crew, and research about the surrounding circumstances, Chris Jones, in this moving piece of longform journalism, writes about what it means to be suspended far from Earth’s comforts and minutiae, not knowing when — or how — you’ll be able to return.

“And sometimes you’re no longer a month away from home–you’re suddenly much farther, although you’re not really sure how far, because the miles are meaningless.”

* * *

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and illness.

I Believe Her: A Reading List

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On September 27, 2018, I sat home alone at my kitchen table, my laptop open to Christine Blasey Ford delivering her opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Outside, the neighbor’s dog barked and a truck throttled down the street, but as Dr. Ford uttered the phrase, “but his weight was heavy,” the world around me, the one I have built for myself here and now, seemed to dissolve. As she testified about Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge’s laughter, “pin-balling off the walls,” I wept. My body tensed. I was no longer seated at my kitchen table, but waking up instead on the cold hard tile of my college dormitory, my assaulter and my best friend both standing above me, laughing.

During the second semester of my freshman year of college, my mattress had been placed directly on the floor because a neurological illness had stolen my ability to safely climb into my lofted bed. The man who assaulted me was a friend. The night of, he kissed my roommate goodnight before making his way down the ladder of her bed. He crawled on top of me, using his body weight to pin me down. His breath smelled like beer. With one of his hands he pressed hard against my collarbone, and with the other he groped me beneath my shirt. When he at last fell asleep on top of me, I squirmed away. Not knowing where else to go, I found a spot on the tile floor and curled up there for the rest of the night.

There are more details but, even in saying this much, my voice quakes. I have seen what happens to women who offer testimony. Leigh Gilmore, in her book Tainted Witness, writes about “how women’s witness is discredited by a host of means meant to taint it: to contaminate by doubt, stigmatize through association with gender and race, and dishonor through shame, such that not only the testimony but the person herself is smeared.” Women who report sexual assault are asked, what were you wearing? Why didn’t you tell someone? How hard did you fight back? During her Senate testimony, Dr. Ford was asked, “So what you are telling us, this could not be a case of mistaken identity?” “You would not mix somebody else with Brett Kavanaugh, correct?” “You do remember what happened, do you not?” And in 1991, when Anita Hill faced the Senate Judiciary Committee to offer her testimony of Clarence Thomas’ sexual harassment, she was asked, “Are you a scorned woman?” and “Do you have a martyr complex?”

Watching Dr. Ford on the stand, and remembering with respect Anita Hill who testified before her, it is clear to me that both women’s testimonies represent much more than simply the confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee. In their stories, I hear my own, of which I am usually reluctant to speak. And in the voices of people who disbelieve both Ford and Hill, I hear my worst fears vocalized. In the days that followed Kavanaugh’s confirmation, all that held me were the words of writers who skillfully dismantle harmful rhetoric, expose systems of privilege and power, illuminate the stories of vulnerable others, and bravely voice their own.

I believe Dr. Ford. I believe Anita Hill. And I believe in the power of our collective witness as a way to make change. As Tarana Burke, Amanda de Cadenet, Glennon Doyle, Tracee Ellis Ross, and America Ferrera wrote recently in their open letter to Dr. Ford,

“You’ll see it when we march, when we walk out, when we show up.

You’ll see it in the voting lines that go on forever.

You’ll hear it in our reawakened voices.

You’ll feel it in our strengthened siblinghood.”

1. “One Year of #MeToo: The Legacy of Black Women’s Testimonies”(Allyson Hobbs, October 10, 2018, The New Yorker)

By writing about the fragmented nature in which memory of her own sexual assault emerges, chronicling historical incidents of black women such as Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Simril, and Betty Jean Owens bearing witness against their attackers, and examining the context surrounding Anita Hill’s testimony, Allyson Hobbs illuminates why it is so difficult for women — particularly African American women — to share incidents of sexual violence. She emphasizes that to move forward we need to stop privileging the voices of white women, and create a narrative that’s more inclusive.

“To do better by all women, we must listen and recognize the historical and contemporary circumstances that shape their experiences and have real consequences on their lives.”

2. I Rewatched Anita Hill’s Testimony. So Much Has Changed. So Much Hasn’t. (Liza Mundy, September 23, 2018, Politico)

Liza Mundy writes about Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, providing valuable context for how incidents within the 1991 hearing can be reframed based on our current knowledge of sexual harassment. This piece was published before Christine Blasey Ford testified, but Mundy offers insight as to how Dr. Ford’s testimony might be received differently based on changes in the digital age, the presence of female members on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the influence of the #MeToo movement.

“Even now, even given the remarkable climate-change wrought by the #MeToo moment, we are seeing in real time how women can be intimidated by everything from the attacks they face to the constrictions placed on how they can tell their stories.”

(Related: read Exclusive: we re-ran polls from 1991 about Anita Hill, this time about Christine Blasey Ford by Dylan Matthews at Vox.)

3. And You Thought Trump Voters Were Mad  (Rebecca Traister, September 17, 2018, The Cut)

Studying historical instances of rage in relation to both race and gender, Rebecca Traister examines the ways in which anger can be progressive or a means of maintaining harmful institutions of power.

“This fight has been against an administration with virtually no regard for women, for their rights, or for the integrity of their bodies, either in the public or private sense. The point should be obvious, yet the anger of the female protesters has repeatedly been cast — as Ford’s story quickly was — by those threatened by it as desperate and performed.”

4. What Do We Owe Her Now? (Elizabeth Bruenig, September 21, 2018, Washington Post)

On September 21, 2018, Donald Trump tweeted, “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed,” which immediately resulted in a viral #WhyIDidntReport hashtag on Twitter. There are a slew of reasons why women don’t report, one of them being the way that sexual assaults are treated by both authorities and communities.

Elizabeth Bruenig, in a tour de force of literary journalism, writes about a woman named Amber Wyatt who reported her rape 12 years ago to both friends and authorities in Arlington, Texas, only to be harassed and shunned by her peers to the point that she had to leave school. Authorities, even though they were in possession of a rape kit and Wyatt’s testimony, chose not to prosecute, saying “it was a ‘he said, she said’ thing.”

“Making sense of her ordeal meant tracing a web of failures, lies, abdications and predations, at the center of which was a node of power that, though anonymous and dispersed, was nonetheless tilted firmly against a young, vulnerable girl.”

5. What Kind of Person Makes False Rape Accusations? (Sandra Newman, May 11, 2017, Quartz)

On October 2nd, 2018, to the cheer of a crowd in Southaven, Mississippi, Donald Trump mocked Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, saying, “How did you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember.” He lamented, saying Kavanaugh’s “life is in tatters. A man’s life is shattered,” insinuating that Dr. Ford contrived her story of sexual assault.

While I am reluctant to engage with Trump’s abhorrent mockery of Dr. Ford, his unfounded claim that Dr. Ford made up her assault feeds into the extraordinarily harmful narrative that men’s lives are being ruined by women. Sandra Newman addresses this claim in her extensively researched essay, “What kind of person makes false rape accusations?” Point by point, she breaks down commonly made claims such as innocent men facing rape charges, false reporting, and who falsely reports, and counters each with data from a variety of unbiased studies.

6. Speak Truth to Power  (Lacy M. Johnson, September 24, 2018, Longreads)

“It seems impossible to speak about rape precisely because this threat of violent retribution is real, whether explicit or implicit, but also because of the widespread belief in our culture that rape is an aberration: a violence so unthinkable, so unfathomable, so taboo as to render it unspeakable.”

Through examination of Philomela’s rape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Steubenville, Ohio rape trial, Bill Cosby’s trial, the 1 is 2 Many campaign, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, among others, and by integrating her own experiences as a survivor of rape and sexual assault, Lacy M. Johnson, in an excerpt from her book The Reckonings: Essays, elucidates how women’s testimonies are perpetually ignored, silenced, shamed, trolled, and threatened. Johnson advocates for women to speak their truth — and publically — even in the face of fear.

7. Gabrielle Bellot: The Story I Kept Hidden (Gabrielle Bellot, October 11, 2018, LitHub)

Gabrielle Bellot, in addition to voicing her own experiences with sexual assault, writes about the history of trauma women have endured as a result of harmful patriarchal systems, and emphasizes the importance of telling true stories as a way of fighting back.

“When I hear the President of this country ask, dismissively, why women would wait to come forward and call women who make allegations “really evil people,” it feels like a slap in the face. And then it reminds me why so many women never speak up at all, even now, but instead let our memories curl up into a deep place inside us, until we can almost believe we’ve forgotten them.”

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir of running and illness.