Submerged: Tales from the Basin - Softcover

Lauren Gonzalez

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0980230020 ISBN 13: 9780980230024

Publisher: StepSister Press, LLC, 2008

Synopsis

Submerged: Tales from the Basin is an anthology of literature, memoir, and art created by more than thirty women to benefit those who survived Hurricane Katrina. The title refers to a fear many of us had as young children, of having our heads submerged under water while our mothers washed our hair. The stories, essays, poems, and art of Submerged are an exploration of each contributor's relationship with her hair, in most cases emotional, often humorous, and consistently generated from youth. An African American writer discusses having her hair ironed straight in the 1960s, with her mother trying hard to keep her from looking like a Black Panther. A Southern writer laments her childhood braid lying in a box in perpetual youth while she, herself, ages. A young woman watches her aging grandmother go bald. A lonely widow rediscovers intimacy from the remote touch of her wax technician. A New Orleans performance group talks about Hurricane Katrina, gender stereotypes, and hair as stage craft. Artist Lorien Jordan has created a series of drawings in response to these essays, memoirs, and poems. A percentage of the book's proceeds will help support charities based in New Orleans that work with ongoing relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina survivors.

About this title

About the Author:

Lauren Gonzalez (editor and author of introduction) grew up in Illinois and has since lived in California and New York. She received her MFA in writing from Sarah Lawrence College in 2006, and was a Hispanic Scholarship Foundation/McNamara Family Creative Arts Project fellow that year. Thanks to this foundation's generosity, she completed a book of profiles called Animal People. Her narrative profile of workers on New York s Old Fulton Fish Market was published in The Reading Room literary magazine in June 2006. She has finished her first novel, The Junkyard, and is currently working on her second, They Met During a War. She is a member of the SoHo Writer s Room on Broadway in New York City. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. -- Lorien Jordan (Illustrator) is a visual artist whose work stems from isolating transient moments in time to reveal the beauty and sadness found in the impermanence of life. Lorien grew up in South Carolina and pursued her BA in painting at Arizona State University. She completed her MA in studio art with a concentration in printmaking at New York University in 2005. In 2007, she completed a one-year residency at the Amsterdam Grafisch Atelier in the Netherlands. Her many exhibitions include work at Young Blood Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia; Gitana Rosa Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, MPG Contemporary in Boston, Massachusetts; and the International Print Center New York. Lorien lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. -- Contributors: Gretl Claggett, Sumayya Coleman, Dianne D. Feula, Stella Fiore, Anne L. Francis, Kelly A. Gola, Lauren Gonzalez, Leslie Gonzalez, Mary Ann Gonzalez, Lauren Guida, Ellen Hagan, Shayla Hason, Anne Hays, Rebecca O. Johnson, Lorien Jordan, Jean Kahler, Cynthia Blair Kane, Hope Kavoosi, Shannon Kelley, Dafna Kory, Emily Macel, Jessica Palmer, Lissette Peña, Sara V. Pic, Carla Porch, Bonnie Richardson, Alyssa Robbins, Skye Van Saun, Bren Simmers, Miriam Weisfeld, Anne K. Wenzel, Kara Westerman, Allison Yates

Review:

"What a fine and striking idea, this response to Hurricane Katrina through the voices of women writing about hair, that primal and neverending preoccupation. Lauren Gonzalez's excellent introduction from the ground in New Orleans sets the stage for this meditation in which metaphor and reality intermingle, and a sharing of personal experience becomes a unique way of paying tribute to the disaster and its victims." --Molly Haskell, author of From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies and Holding My Own in No Man's Land: Women and Men and Film and Feminists

"This extraordinary collection is a gift not just to the women of New Orleans for whom it is intended, but to all of us. For those of us who watched rather than lived the post-Katrina flood, submergence of other kinds is a vital necessity, since it is only after we have dived below that we can even hope to begin emerging. These Tales from the Basin immerse us deeply, washing away cliche, superficiality, and abdication." ----Rachel Grob, PhD, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, Sarah Lawrence College

"Submerged is a creative collection of stories by women, with hair as the leitmotif -- obstinate locks, color and texture, childhood hairdos -- linking the separate life stories together. Each small history is a jewel, gaining life and luster from those around it. The women tell us about their hair, but really about everyone s hopes, daydreams, disappointments and desires." ----Dr. Nancy L. Segal, author of Indivisible by Two: Lives of Extraordinary Twins and Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior

About this edition

• Publisher: StepSister Press, LLC
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0980230020
• ISBN 13: 9780980230024
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Lauren Gonzalez
• Illustrator: Lorien Jordan