#ru freeman

https://loveinquotes.com/he-was-with-me-beside-me-inside-me-and-i-did-not-care-that-my-children-were-asleep-alone-at-home-or-that-the-neighbors-might-come-to-know-he-burned-the-fear-out-of-me-until-all-was-left-was-desi/

VCU English - Visiting Writers LeAnne Howe and Ru Freeman March 23, 2017 – 7PM VCU Cabell Library 

VCU Visiting Writers: LeAnne Howe (Choctalking on Other Realities) & Ru Freeman (On Sal Mal Lane) will be reading from their works tomorrow 3/23 at 7:00 PM. LeAnne Howe (Choctaw)’s Choctalking on Other Realities was the winner of the inaugural 2014 MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. Freeman is the 2014 winner of the Sister Mariella Gable Award for Fiction and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman. 

“There aren’t a lot of you out there”: What? Let’s fix our female Asian-American writer blind spot now

Who says Asian American women aren't writing fiction? "We are everywhere if you only look!"

"This summer, I traveled around the U.S. to promote my debut novel, “Everything I Never Told You.”  At one university where I’d been invited to speak, I asked the professor hosting me how he’d found me. He admitted he’d needed an Asian American woman fiction writer to balance his speaker lineup. “There aren’t a lot of you out there,” he said, with evident embarrassment.

Many universities and events deliberately try to select diverse speakers, and I think it’s a fine way to expose audiences to writers of different backgrounds. But I was startled to hear there weren’t many Asian American women fiction writers.  Off the top of my head, I could think of several dozen.

Early on, 2014 was designated the “Year of Reading Women.” Partly inspired by the annual VIDA count — which for four straight years has shown a huge gender disparity in major literary publications — the #ReadWomen2014 movement encouraged readers to do just that.

In May, Book Expo America was widely criticized when the initial lineup for BookCon, its public event, contained virtually no women and virtually no people of color.  The#WeNeedDiverseBooks Campaign arose in response, to promote greater diversity in children’s and YA literature. (Full disclosure: I took part in a BookCon panel myself, in the awkward position of a woman of color who had actually been invited months before the controversy.)

In other words, in 2014, we might have expected awareness of women writers and writers of color to be on the rise.  And I still hope it is, on the whole.  Yet there it was, that statement I heard surprisingly often: “There just aren’t many Asian American women writers.”

Several years ago, frustrated by similar remarks about authors of color, the writer and critic Roxane Gay compiled a list of them, aptly titled “We Are Many. We Are Everywhere.” Inspired by Gay’s list, I put out a call on Twitter for names of Asian American women writers. Within hours, I was deluged with suggestions.  Even after I narrowed the focus to authors who had published a book of fiction — the type of speaker most venues seek — the list swelled into the hundreds."

Interview with Jamaica Kincaid by Ru Freeman

Was there ever anyone so unabashed and articulate in her account of herself as Jamaica Kincaid in interview? This is the candour of a woman unafraid of facing up to her own contradictions and shortcomings, despite her fame and reputation. At some point I want to write about what this all means (something to do with confidence, commitment to inquiry and concomitant vulnerability), but for now I content myself with avidly archiving all her video and written interviews. Here she is in conversation with Ru Freeman, talking about her latest book See Now Then and much more.

on writing and/as thinking & failing to think

"For me writing a novel is to think, to turn it over, to see how it feels, how it is, trying to understand the essence of something. And then I get up from the desk and I've totally failed. But I'm not afraid to go back the next day and sit in the same chair and try again."

on Britain as the "Mother Country"

"The figure of the mother playing such a big role in my imagination must come from my interest in power and how it gets arranged. And that the central powerful image in my history is of course Mother Country [...] We talk about the Mother Country, and it's not just a phrase, it's a powerful influence in our imagination. And it's not a coincidence that for instance a book like Annie John which talks so much about the relationship between the child and the mother, is really talking about the relationship between the colony and the mother country which is this imbalance of power, this sort of violation of the Mother Country against the colonies and the colonies perhaps [] having little protestations. But the figure of the mother that plays such a powerful part in my fiction is really trying to understand that image, and that existence ... this horrible power that we have modified and made acceptable in the form of mother."

on land and its legacies

"One of the things that we never do in the landscape I'm from, is relax on it. No one I know  growing up, ever goes to the beach for a holiday. It's a landscape that horrible memories for us."

on A Small Place

"it was the first thing I wrote in which I began to understand that there was a certain truth, and however upsetting it would be to other people, I needed to say it.  In fact, when Antiguan people read that book - and it was banned in Antigua for a while - they would say to me, 'everything you said is  true, but did you have to say it?'

on literary style

"For me I don't really have any style or any literary thing, all I have is the words to say it - to quote a wonderful book - that's all I want, are the words to say it, and I will hunt down, spend a long time, looking for the words to say it and will use the word again and again."

on telling the truth

"I think the notions regarding fiction, non-fiction, essay and so on, are lost on me. I just want to say something, and I want the thing I'm saying to be true. The form can be fiction, the form can be non-fiction, but it has to have a truth. A lie in my mind is a singular thing, it's like a lump of coal. On the other hand, the truth is conflicted, it is opposition, it opposes itself, it destroys itself even though it rises to live again. It's eternal because it's true. That's all I want, is to say something true." 

on punning on Outkast lyrics in See Now Then 

"I felt really so delighted with myself"

on being called angry