SOLSC 26: Another Small World Story

            I love small world stories, you know, when you discover someone you know also knows someone else you know, and you had no idea. One of my favorites: An American I’d met in my world with women in Eastern Europe in the 1990s gave me her book about her Fulbright time teaching in China in 1980. I sent the book to my mother, who had made several trips to China in the 1970s and 1980s. Surprise! my mother already had a copy of the book, having met the author when she was on her book tour 10 years earlier.

            Today’s small world story was slightly different. I was having coffee with Robin, a woman from my neighborhood. We’d met over a year ago at our neighborhood weekly Black Lives Vigil and often chatted, but hadn’t got beyond that until today. Over coffee we exchanged life stories and learned that we both had known, years ago, a man named Cedric Belfrage. Belfrage was a British writer and a leftist (he’d briefly joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, and co-founded the National Guardian, a radical weekly in the U.S.). He lived in the U.S. for several years until deported in the 1950s, when he moved to Mexico. When I worked as a book editor in the early 1970s, I signed Belfrage to write “The American Inquisition,” a history of McCarthyism. Robin, it turned out, was married to a Mexican whose parents knew many leftists in that country; Belfrage and his wife ran a guesthouse in Cuernavaca, and Robin and her husband visited there many times.

            Six degrees of separation? Sometimes it feels like there are only 5,000 people in the entire world, and we each know every one of them.

            Do you have a favorite small world story?

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 26 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

SOL2: Small World

            A week ago I was at a writing community I’m part of, Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon. Every month, the organizer, JP Howard, brings a published writer to the salon for a workshop, then to read her (usually, though sometimes the feature has been a man) work and to answer questions, about writing, about being published, etc.

           A week ago, the featured writer was DaMaris Hill. Her workshop was about revision, how to take a poem, or any piece of writing, that is or has become lifeless and wake it up. Partly, she suggested doing this through using methods from hip-hop, like remixing and sampling. (I won’t go into any detail, since this is her work, and I don’t want to be appropriating it.) The book she read from is her most recent, A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, in which she writes persona poems for African-American women, from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland, some of whom have been incarcerated. As Publishers Weekly wrote, “Hill's poems illustrate how oppression can summon inner strength, resistance, and revolution.”

            A few days later, on Facebook, I saw a post by a friend from my college days about his being in a conference and meeting a couple of his former students—one of whom turned out to be DaMaris Hill.

            Two people, from vastly different times in my life, who know each other, and know me. I love these small world stories.

            What was your last small world story?

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I’m participating in the 12th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 1 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!