Ann S. Epstein writes novels, short stories, memoir, essays, and poems. Please use the links or site menu to go to the HOME PAGE; learn about her NOVELS, SHORT STORIES, MEMOIR, ESSAYS, and POEMS; find interesting facts in BEHIND THE STORY; read REFLECTIONS on writing; check NEWS for updates on publications and related events; see REVIEWS; learn about her END-OF-LIFE DOULA credentials and services; and CONTACT US to send webmail.
When the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz was made, Technicolor was a relatively new process. Intense, saturated colors were a hallmark of the film. Artists debated for six weeks before choosing just the right color for the yellow brick road. Dorothy’s ruby slippers required much less debate. Read more about the making of the movie in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).
In 1938, the San Diego Civic Center (now the County Administration Center) opened, including sculptor Donal Hord’s monumental stone statue “Guardian of Water,” which still stands on the Harbor Drive side of the building. Carved from a 22-ton granite block, the statue shows a pioneer woman holding a jug, symbolic of the city’s precious resource: water. The mosaic tiles at the fountain’s base symbolize clouds from which water streams into images of orchards and then flows on to the carved sea creatures in the fountain’s basin. Hord’s intent was to show the importance of water in the cycle of nature. Discover more San Diego history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).
In the first half of the nineteenth century, as more girls attended high school and college, the medical establishment became alarmed. Edward Hammond Clarke, a respected Harvard-trained physician, claimed educating girls was dangerous. He said that when girls aged 13 to 17 spent too much time learning, it hindered the growth of their ovaries and uterus. Boys could handle six to eight hours of schooling a day; girls no more than four or five. Read more about Clarke’s theories and his “evidence” in BEHIND THE STORY.
My Amazon and Goodreads review of Educated: A Memoir (Rating 5) – Breaking Free of the Ties that Bind. In Educated: A Memoir, Tara Westover recounts an isolated and ultra conservative Mormon upbringing that most of us would find bizarre. She nevertheless makes her story universally relatable by focusing on her deep attachment to family. Readers understand why it was so hard for her to break free of her towering, conspiracy-fueled father; resourceful yet compliant mother; and smart but abusive brother. Westover survives nearly insurmountable setbacks, or “pullbacks,” to home by facing the disappointments and embodying the strengths of those who raised her: her father’s determination, her mother’s faith, and her brother’s resolve. That the unschooled girl emerges as an intelligent and above all empathic woman is a testimony to the resilience of love and the power of truth. As a fiction writer who welcomes the challenge of making an unlikable character sympathetic (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I applaud Westover’s success in accomplishing this feat with her family.
From an interview with historian and writer Jill Lepore: “The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril: Jill Lepore on writing the story of America, the rise and fall of the fact, and how women’s intellectual authority is undermined” by Evan Goldstein (Chronicle of Higher Education, November 13, 2018):
Q. You get asked about your productivity a lot. I gather it’s a question you don’t like.
A. I sometimes say to people — this is like a 1930s thing to say, you can picture Barbara Stanwyck saying it in a noir film — it’s like complimenting a girl on her personality. It’s not about “You do good work,” it’s about “You do a lot of work.” // For a lot of people writing is an agony; it’s a part of what we do as scholars that they least enjoy. For me writing is a complete and total joy, and if I’m not writing I’m miserable. I have always written a lot. For years, before I wrote for The New Yorker, I wrote an op-ed every day as practice and shoved it in a drawer. It’s not about being published, it’s about the desire to constantly be writing. It’s such a strongly felt need that if it was something socially maladaptive it would be considered a vice.
I’m with her. Read Lepore’s latest book, These Truths. For more of my thoughts on writing see REFLECTIONS.
Most Italian male immigrants in the 1900s were manual laborers, constructing public works such as roads, sewers, subways, and bridges. Women worked as seamstresses in factories or did piece work at home. Many established small businesses to serve fellow immigrants in their city’s Little Italy neighborhood. Read more about Italian-Americans at the beginning of the last century in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).
I’m happy to announce that my short story “It Ends With Cake” was accepted for publication by CultureCult Magazine — a journal of art, literature, and culture — for their Winter 2019 issue. Here’s the log line: Told in the first person plural, “It Ends With Cake” draws readers into the meeting of a death café, where participants seek closure about their own notions of mortality while revealing deep fissures between them. Read about the publication in SHORT STORIES. Learn more about the death café movement in BEHIND THE STORY (see 09/23/18 post).
This Sunday, November 11, is the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the Armistice was signed. The Great War took the lives of 10 million soldiers worldwide, including over 117,000 Americans, and decimated the French and Belgian countryside. Singularly, the windblown seeds of poppies thrived in the blood-soaked soil, and became a symbol of the dead, as memorialized in John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields.” Read more about WWI in On the Shore (see NOVELS).
In September 1941, isolationist Senator Gerald Nye charged Hollywood, many of whose studios were headed by Jews, with producing pro-war movies “to drug the reason of the American people, set aflame their emotions, turn their hatred into a blaze, and fill them with fear that Hitler will come over here and capture them.” In truth, it was just the opposite. With Europe a big consumer of American. cinema, studios were afraid to offend the Nazis. That changed in December 1941, after Pearl Harbor, when Hollywood enlisted in the war cause by producing combat films with major stars and patriotic cartoons with Disney characters. Read more about Hollywood and WWII in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).
In Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional for Congress to enact child labor laws, which was the right of states only. In the Progressive Era, public outcry against child labor grew. Children worked 60-70 hours a week, often in hazardous conditions, which documentary photographer Lewis Hines said left them “stunted mentally and physically.” Child accident rates were three times those of adults. While recognizing the adverse effects, the Court said Congress could not control such practices when they involved products, such as cotton goods, that were not inherently immoral. Read more about labor laws over the last century in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).
