She's Got This!: Essays on Standing Strong and Moving On by Joanne Hartman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Knox Book Beat Wyndy Knox Carr The Berkeley Times, 25 July, 2019

You’re Doing WHAT? and She’s Got This! At Moe’s and Left Margin Lit

I really do think women and egalitarian men will save the world. I keep seeing guys downtown with T-shirts on that say EVOLVE on them, and many other total weirdos, women and men and pan-gendered originalists, speaking and acting defiantly in a multicultural “alternative” to the Back to the 1950’s either/or mentality touted on TV.
You’re Doing What? : Older Women’s Tales of Achievement and Adventure, was published by the brilliant and local Regent Press, Berkeley; the collection skillfully edited by Marjorie Penn Lasky to exemplify and plainly clarify how “we tell our stories to make sense of our experiences and to point the way to others.” I got the last seat in front in the PACKED lower level at Moe’s Books for their presentation reading. Though not all experienced performers, they totally rocked the house with their tales of courage and persistence through the unique lens of their own life stories.

Adoption of a biracial child and linking up with the birth families, rejecting sexism and poverty for a life of “love and abundance,” Effie Hall Dilworth’s researching and traveling to find her grandfather’s other “family trees” in China, Rose Glickman’s use of her Russian language skills to carve a way around academia’s glass ceiling and Lasky’s story of love, loss and letting go in her 70’s, how “The Inevitable Intrudes.” Stellar! Our guiding stars!
Mark Weiman has a nose for publishing spectacularly poignant non-fiction works indicative of our times. Lasky has chosen and encouraged the deeply honest and practical tales of women courageous enough to let relegation to “women’s place” fall away and ask themselves “What brings my life meaning?” and GO FOR IT, put our values into actions. Definitely “evolving” here!
She’s Got This! Essays on Standing Strong and Moving On, edited by Joanne Catz Hartman of Oakland and Mary Claire Hill of Berkeley, is less understatedly “lives of the heroic,” but far more lyrical, descriptive and crafted to evoke deep personal feeling with plenty of inner processes and relationship dialogue exemplary of “how much our experiences matter…when taken cumulatively and made public, profound social change can happen.”
These women (and one single-parenting man) select moving vignettes of powerful change points, and they sure can WRITE. I heard the She’s Got This! readers’ presentation at the Left Margin LIT salon between Vine and Cedar, a “creative writing center and workspace,” which was inspiring! A wonderful, airy and light place led by welcoming and creative folks Rachel Richardson and David Roderick, with readings, classes and open writing space. And let me tell you, the hand that rocks the cradle (or chooses or is fated not to) and has a silver-voiced pen in the other one really DOES “rule the world!”
There’s a lot of crossover between these stories, too – for example, the ones in Doing WHAT? who work for disability rights and understanding in the public, social or legal systems and the ones in Got This! who do so one to one as teachers, caregivers and family members. These younger authors break into Surfacing, Standing Strong, Moving On, Roots and Detours. If the “older” women hadn’t gone ahead and done it, with their necessities and drives as standards, the young might not have even been hopeful, or just in the moment at the crossroads, taken the same kind of option to be themselves.
Especially all of us who’ve been charged with the inspirational responsibility of parenthood looking into our newborn’s eyes. Or sometimes our parents’, grandparents’, mentors’, friends’ or our very own eyes challenging us to really engage, see more clearly and come out stronger from unexplored rites of passage, to be more than we have dared or imagined before, looking back at us in the mirror…

“Growth can proceed only if people honor that part of their soul that is turned toward the goodness, so to speak, of their ancestors, so that they know there is something essentially worthy in them, for whose sake they go through all this agony…do not lose touch with whatever good there was in our ancestors, and with that part of our own soul.” (Robert Bly)
The “tales” and “essays” contained in these two collections are guides that can lead us back to the good in our world, community and souls, and forward to live out the good in ourselves.

Bly, Robert, (1977 and 1996) The Sibling Society : An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood. Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, NY.

Hartman, Joanne and Mary Claire Hill, eds., (2019) She’s Got This! Essays on Standing Strong and Moving On, Write On Mamas publications, ShesGotThisAnthology.com , San Francisco Bay Area, CA.

Lasky, Marjorie Penn, ed., (2018) You’re Doing What? Older Women’s Tales of Achievement and Adventure, Regent Press, Berkeley, CA.

Left Margin Lit, 1543 Shattuck Avenue, Suite B, Berkeley, CA 94709.

Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704.

Regent Press, Mark Weiman, 2747 Regent Street, Berkeley, CA 94705.


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