For the last month, I've been teaching a writing class at my local community center. It occurred to me after meeting many retirees in a Tai Chi class that many of these folks have great stories to tell and that doing so would enhance memory and social interaction. The later, of course, is vital in these post COVID years. I've been pleasantly surprised at how this little class is going. I figured that if took all the best practices and prompts from my teaching career and offered them in an non-threatening manner, that there would be interest in spending an hour a week meeting and then doing a little homework to rekindle the declining art of "creative writing." Of course, all writing is creative writing, but people sometimes need permission or at least a vehicle to go ahead and indulge in the practice. At our age, we write to save our lives, literally and figuratively. At our last meeting we read and discussed models where we write about our fami...
I've been reading Imani Perry's fascinating collection of essays called Black In Blue, which is a brilliant meditation on the color blue in Black culture. Aside from the many historical references and anthropological connections between the significance of the color blue in African and African American culture, Perry delves into many areas that might not be well known to those outside the culture. For example, the way we know where the graveyards for many who were enslaved were is through the presence of periwinkles on the ground, planted there. Former slaves were not allowed to have grave markers (imagine that!) so their descendants marked the sites with blue periwinkles so they could be located and remembered. Another thwarted attempt to erase the past and strip people of their identity. The book goes into important explanations of blue notes in the development of the blues and jazz music. But there are other connections present that extend all the...