Since today is Mothers Day, I thought I would start off my blog here on She Writes with a post from my own blog, RANTIN' RAVIN' AND READING, from April, in which I blame my mother for me being a writer.…

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Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, who lost his son to the "drug war" in the country, is leading an effort to increase awareness and understanding of how government policies on both sides of the the U.S-Mexico border are contributing to the violence, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 60,000 people. Today's post presents a brief profile of the Caravan for Peace that has come to America and is led by Sicilia.…

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The adults are crying and hugging as they come into the house and as they leave.  One lady nestles my Mami’s face in her hands.  It looks like she is trying to hold Mami’s face together.  Another person gives Papi a big hug, the kind where they slap each other on the back really hard.  The kids aren’t crying or hugging, we’re playing on the floor with a set of Jacks.

 

The cold…

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Have you ever wanted something SO much you were willing to wait however long it took? Well, Keiko Fukuda waited almost 80 years to realizing her dream.



At the age of 98 Keiko Fukuda became the first woman to achieve a tenth-degree black belt in Judo. The petite woman not quite five feet tall has attained…

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Civil disobedience is on the rise. This can be a good thing, as is the case in Israel this summer. Israeli women are risking criminal prosecution by going to the beach. They are taking Palestinian women along to protest decades of dehumanization. Read the full story on my…

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It is a beautiful

Wednesday night in Seattle area.  I love

summers here, it is the best season. The sun is shining still at 8:00 pm,

everything around is green and beautiful, I even have nice herbs at my backyard  for tea, and  strawberries that keeps coming back and even

expending each year.

I love the

NW in the summers. The biggest and a very well-known joke about Seattle is that

A new neighbor asks a seven year old…

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The state of Alabama on Thursday passed the strictest illegal immigration legislation imaginable. In November, Republicans took formal control of both the state House and Senate for the first time since Reconstruction. However, this by itself was not necessarily the determining… Continue

Today's post is a new poem, "American Dream", complemented by an image by Nancy Davis Rosback. The poem was not inspired by the image, which was taken recently when Nancy traveled to Arizona.

 

The poem is my contribution to One Stop Poetry's "One Shot Wednesday" event, which begins later today.

 

http://writingwithoutpaper.blogspot.com/2011/02/american-dream-poem.html

This past weekend I saw a recent German/Albanian narrative film entitled simply The Albanian. Rarely have I seen a movie that confronts the fullest picture of the worldwide controversy regarding undocumented workers and illegal immigration. While its sympathies are clearly with immigrants, it does not resort to cheap sentimentality…

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Today's new edition of All Art Friday presents a round-up of art shows in New York City, Alexandria, Va., and Boston, and includes information about a screening at the Corcoran Gallery in D.C. of a documentary about painter Joan Mitchell. Also included is a brief feature about Polish sound postcards.

http://writingwithoutpaper.blogspot.com/2011/01/all-art-friday_21.html

This entry was originally posted on my blog on January 12, 2010. To see all the great visuals that go with this post, go to the post Landing the Dream.

Today is the 100th anniversary of Josef Gärtz, my paternal grandfather, arriving in America, losing the umlaut over the "ä" and becoming Gartz. My guess is that he didn’t record his first impressions because he was too excited and…

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Immigration reform is needed, but it would be foolhardy to suggest that the DREAM act satisfies the requirement. It would seem that we have entered a new era of protectionism. Perhaps we should revive the quota system while we are at it. Though exact numbers will not be regulated, immigrants allowed to attain formal citizenship will be… Continue

Is immigration a women's issue? You bet!



The definition of the word immigration is innocuous. Immigration, as defined at dictionary.com, is the act of immigrating. The word feels static, but the action of immigration affects the dynamics of families, neighborhoods, communities, and countries.



Immigration doesn’t just affect the person moving, it also affects the communities in which an immigrant settles. Immigration, therefore,… Continue

The first book I wrote about medicine, Singular Intimacies, did not start out as a book. It started out as a breather—an exhalation, you might say—after a decade of medical training at Bellevue Hospital. After ten

years of exams, hospitals, illness and death, I needed some air.

I left New York and spent the next 18 months traveling—doing temp doctor jobs in America to pay…

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