Once upon a time, I thought I might want to be a librarian when I grew up. I enrolled in graduate school and started night classes, pleased to be learning something new. I didn’t really like my first teacher because he told me most of the people in his class would figure out they didn’t […]

Another of Alice Walker’s books that ventures into African causes is her novel Possessing the Secret of Joy. Tashi, whom we met briefly in The Color Purple, is a main character, and her plight is insufferable.
Tashi’s story is engaging, and the prose carries me along. But I cringe when I remember, and clench my thighs […]

My second review for The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge took me on a canoe trip down a wild river in northern Georgia. Although the Cahulawassee River referenced in James Dickey’s Deliverance is fictional, the rapids and the cliffs, the forests and the kudzu are a very real and beautiful part of that country. Both the […]

In Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar, Lissie is an old woman who tells stories of her past lives. Although she has lived in the southeastern United States all her life, many of her memories are from Africa.
She remembers living in the African trees in one of her earliest incarnations. She remembers living on […]

Alice Walker has taken me to Africa on a number of occasions, most recently to South Africa, in her memoir The Same River Twice about making the movie based on her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple.
Her chapter called, “Crossing Perseverance,” includes a journal entry and letters surrounding her need to respect the cultural […]

I used to wonder why they made musicals out of dark stories like Les Miserables and even Fiddler on the Roof. Operas are one thing, but musicals are supposed to be happy-go-lucky, right?
But my favorite story of South Africa is the musical Sarafina! It reminds me that even when people are going through horrors and […]

My first review for The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge takes us to the three Indian states of Punjab, West Bengal and Maharashtra, with a brief trip to the beach in Goa.
Monica Pradhan’s The Hindi Bindi Club shares some history, customs and flavors from the various parts of India, flashes of color floating in the melting […]

Now that we’re back in South Africa, I’m suddenly feeling bi-polar, like I’ve been manically singing silly songs for weeks, and now I’ve hit the deepest depression. It’s almost as if I’ve been racing around, trying to keep my energy up, so maybe the centrifugal force can keep me from falling, falling into the darkness. […]