Ellen Ullman Visits Woman-Stirred Radio on the Ides of March!

Ellen Ullman

Thursday, March 15th---the Ides of March---at 5:00, Merry Gangemi welcomes  award-winning author, Ellen Ullman, to Woman-Stirred Radio.


Ellen Ullman's new novel,  By Blood  (2012), set in 1970s San Francisco, is "absorbing" and "atmospheric," centering on a thirty-something analysand, her German-born therapist, and a disgraced university professor who has no idea what a personal boundary is.  The wall between his office and the therapist next door is thin; one of the patients hates the white-noise machine; and so the professor listens in, learning about the life and the complicated history of his "beloved" patient's adoption in the aftermath of World War II. This is a novel that gives new meaning to the term "triangle."


The dilemmas that unfold in By Blood are not alien and, given present-day political and cultural extremism, the history-bound back-stories heighten the tensions and emotional connections between analysand, therapist, and voyeur professor---who is invisible, dis-embodied, if you will, trapped in the malaise of American hypocrisy and the recalibration of American society and culture in the aftermath of the Holocaust.


By Blood, explores the constructions of identity and veracity, the vagaries of fate, the contradictions of a pliable moral landscape---and how the mind and soul fare in a world that constantly bombards one with rationalizations, the placebo of self-importance, and wishful happy endings. 


Ellen Ullman was a software engineer for twenty years when she began writing about her profession. Her interests are the effect of computing on its practitioners and on society at large. She is the author of the memoir Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents. Her essays, reviews, and opinion pieces have appeared in Harper's, Salon, Wired, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Her novel, The Bug, about a programmer's battle with an elusive bug, will be published in spring 2003.


So please join us on Thursday, March 15th at 5:00 for an interview with Ellen Ullman.  Want to join the conversation? Call the air studio at 802.454.7762 or email merrygangemi@gmail.com.

Woman-Stirred Radio is underwritten by Sinister Wisdom, celebrating 35 years of  lesbian-feminist arts and letters. Woman-Stirred Radio broadcasts live on WGDR 91.1 fm and WGDH 91.7 fm, Goddard College's community radio station located in Plainfield, Vermont. 

Marianela Medrano-Marra on Taino culture and poetry : : Crescent Dragonwagon on Bean by Bean

Marianela Medrano

This week on Woman-Stirred Radio, visiting scholar Marianela Medrano takes time from her residency schedule at Goddard College to talk to Merry Gangemi about Taino culture, poetry, colonialism, and the feminine divine. Our conversation moves from Taino cosmology, to colonialism, and on through poetry, the power of language, the caveats and crevasse of racism and cultural imperialism, to the healing power of self-knowledge and artistic expression.

 

Ruth Farmer, program director of Goddard’s MA in Individualized Study, explains: “In her essay, “The Ciguapa Speaks: Dominican Women in the 21^st Century,” Marianela points out that there needs to be ‘a resurgence of both feminine and masculine consciousness.’ She explains that this resurgence would lead ‘the feminine” to recover from “the dullness and fatality through which history has presented her’ and ‘the consciousness’ would be ‘stripped of its aggressive mask,’” a perspective which underscores and embraces the responsibility and opportunity of both women and men to instigate and implement social and cultural change. But changes come from an integrated understanding of who we are and how our origins, our roots both nourish and challenge us to learn about and value the inter-dependent relationships between our physical, intellectual, and spiritual selves—an integrated view of learning and knowing.

Marianela Medrano-Marra is a Dominican writer, poet, and a psychologist in private practice, and is the author of Diodes de la Yuca, (Torremozas, 2011), and Curada de Espartos (2002). She holds a PhD in psychology and is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Certified Poetry Therapist. She works as a consultant and has a psychotherapy private practice in Connecticut. Medrano-Marra has earned fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and the Center for The Divine Feminine at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.

The interview with Marianela was recorded on Sunday, February 19th, in the studio of WGDR. You can post your comments below or email to merrygangemi@gmail.com.

Crescent Dragonwagon

Then at 5:00, I’m delighted to welcome the inimitable Crescent Dragonwagon, whose latest cookbook, Bean by Bean hit the stores just last week, on February 13th.  

Crescent Dragonwagon is the James Beard Award-winning author of seven cookbooks, including Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread Cookbook, Passionate Vegetarian, and The Cornbread Gospels.

Dragonwagon, who calls herself a Southern Yankee, is a New Yorker (the daughter of writer-editor Charlotte Zolotow and the late Maurice Zolotow, who was Marilyn Monroe’s first biographer). Dragonwagon spent 36 years in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where she “ladled up beans and sliced skillet-sizzled cornbread for the masses—including Secretary of State Hillary, former president Bill Clinton, Betty Friedan, and that smooth-cheeked crooner Andy Williams.

Beans are serious nourishment; they are also highly economical, and while often considered a poor man’s fare, are quite chic these days, featured prominently on the menus of many of the world’s finest restaurants.

Beans can be curry, chili, stew, soup, or salad. They can start a meal or finish it in the guise of bread, appetizers, crepes, cake, ice cream, and even candy. Beans are chockfull of protein, fiber, vitamins, omega-3 fats, calcium, potassium, zinc, and more.  They nourish the soil and have made their mark in fairy tales and folklore (good old Jack and his beanstalk!); and bean carbohydrates have been found to improve the stability of blood sugar levels in diabetics.

The monastic followers of Pythagorus thought humans traveled through the stems of bean plants to reach Hades, where they were transmogrified for their next lives—and don’t forget those notable Roman surnames: Cicero (chickpea), Fabius (fava), Piso (pea),
and Lentullus (lentil).

Bean by Bean is a beautiful book, filled with more than 175 recipes, as well as how to pick and preserve the little legumes. Crescent Dragonwagon rocks!

So please join us Thursday, February 23rd from 4 to 6 p.m. (eastern), for another broadcast of Woman-Stirred Radio. Want to join the conversation? Call the air studio at 802 454 7762 or email merrygangemi@gmail.com.

Woman-Stirred Radio is underwritten by Sinister Wisdom, celebrating 35 years of  lesbian-feminist arts and letters. Woman-Stirred Radio broadcasts live on WGDR 91.1 fm and WGDH 91.7 fm, Goddard College's community radio stations located in Plainfield, Vermont.