Dear SheWriters, Here is the penultimate installment of excerpts from the next three fabulous finalists: Sally Kohn, Sandy Kuntz, and Tamiko and Teruko Nimura! Check back here tomorrow for the last three excerpts, and then, after the long weekend, prepare to congratulate the winner! All my best, Lea THE ANTIDOTE, BY SALLY KOHN In her own words: Why is it even when progressives win, they lose? Whether it’s watered-down health care reform or elections of centrist Democrats, it’s as though progressives occasionally win the battles but conservatives always win the war. The big business conservative Right has worked for forty years to dominate American politics, economics and culture, like an infectious disease. My book is The Antidote-- arguing progressives can create a just and equitable America and a better future for all of us, but only by finding the confidence and ambition they generally lack. Excerpt: Shortly after George W. Bush was elected president in 2000, Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, spoke to a gathering of liberal political activists. “Let me tell the problem with you Democrats,” Reed said. Whether it’s elections or legislative fights, Reed explained, “everyone has to get to 51% to win” -- meaning majority support. “You Democrats start with the assumption that 0% of the country is with you, so you try to get a few percent from African Americans, a few percent from women, a few from labor and hope you can cobble it all together to 51%,” Reed said. “We Republicans, we assume from the start that 100% of the country is with us and then hope we don’t piss too many people off along the way and, in the end, at least 51% of them are still with us.” Inside that story is the key to why power seems to have the same effect on progressives that kryptonite has on Superman -- the closer we get, the more crippling the disease. This book is the antidote. Conservatives operate with a brazen confidence utterly unjustified by their extremist views but that nonetheless creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces their power. Meanwhile progressives -- whose values and vision have always defined our nation’s brightest days and led humanity toward a brighter future -- somehow have all the confidence of a pimple-faced geeky kid in a contest for prom queen. While there are many obstacles to progressives’ victory in America, we progressives are our own worst enemy. Deep down, we don’t believe that the majority of Americans really share our ideals. We try to hide radical ideas in clever messaging or hedge our bets with centrist compromise, but we leave ourselves undermined in the long-term and we leave the nation uninspired. Speaking about health care reform in 2009, President Barack Obama said regarding the Democrats proposed legislation, “Those are changes that I think the American people want to see.” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said, “The American people don’t want us to pass this bill.” That’s just one example of a subtle difference in tone which, when replicated over and over and over again, leaves a lasting impression. ... There’s an old joke in Washington that Republicans don’t know how to lose and Democrats don’t know how to win. It’s about more than good sportsmanship. The joke points to a deeper truth that somehow, even when they’re out of power, conservatives continue to dominate and control our political, social and economic universe. Meanwhile progressives, even when technically in power, seem weak and powerless. Any doubts about this paradox have been removed by the first few years of Barack Obama’s presidency. While the conservative right has attacked Obama as a socialist revolutionary, progressives have complained that the president with arguably the largest electoral mandate of any liberal since Franklin Roosevelt has governed not only with political timidity but, most damningly, ideological apprehension. Sure, President Obama has passed health care reform and tougher financial regulations. But the policies themselves were a far cry from more ambitious proposals within the progressive community and were largely sold to Congress and the American public by appealing to anti-government, big business-friendly rhetoric. In other words, even with Democratic control of Congress, Obama passed “sweeping health care reform” that never even considered a creating a sole, federally-funded health care system and eventually dropped the watered down “public option” from the final law, yet was complicit in politicizing the budget deficit and whipping up anti-government fervor in the process. So whose victory was health care reform, exactly? … The time for settling and selling out is over. The time for a far-reaching, transformational movement is now. For too long, we have believed that if we are honest about our radical vision, we will lose the hearts and minds of America. What if the exact opposite is true? *** A GLASS HALF SHATTERED, BY SANDY KUNTZ In her own words: A Glass Half Shattered provides an edgy and honest look at a young mother developing and overcoming borderline personality disorder (BPD). The reader will follow my bizarre journey from an abusive childhood in a trailer park in Indiana to trying to act casual while sitting next to the President and Vice President on the Inaugural Train Ride into Washington D.C. The memoir will follow me through misdiagnosis, suicide attempts, unexpected motherhood, marriage, repeated hospitalizations and recovery. Excerpt: My father was married to another woman when I came along. As my mother liked to remind me, she chose not to abort me anyway. I spent most of my early years trying to repay her for this debt. Although we lived on the poverty line in southern Indiana, things weren’t always so bad. Some days she would dance around our tiny living room with my sister and me as the Eagles blared on the radio. We laughed until our sides ached and all the worries that come with being unable to make the rent were shaken away. Other days I watched her curl her hair and critique her reflection in the mirror while the smoke from her ever-present cigarette danced and twirled before disappearing into the ceiling. My mother held her head high, but she was always unsure of herself, an emotional teenager performing for an invisible audience. These moments made it hard for me to know where the blast would come from. It could be over a fight she had with her latest boyfriend, the water being shut off, a wrong tone, the way I crossed a room or nothing at all. I spent hours trying to anticipate where the land mines were, drawing and revising the maps in my mind. It didn’t matter. I would step on them anyway. She was fond of locking me out of the house for punishment. On this day, I forgot to crack my bedroom window so I could get back in. It was a rainy and humid late-summer day and my mother had just finished throwing me against the front door. The door handle had jammed in my back as I fell. The bruise was already forming. I lay down in the gravel of our driveway and looked up into the angry gray sky. The rain was cold on my face. Her razor sharp words echoed in my ears. I told myself I would not be here forever. It started to rain harder. My back hurt. I was muddy and becoming exhausted as the adrenaline left my system. I was soaked when I decided to take shelter under the roofed porch. There was nothing else to do but think of what I had done (or not done) and adjust my map. I would do better next time. *** THE WAKE, BY TAMIKO AND TERUKO NIMURA In her own words: Twenty-five years [after my father’s death], I have just reopened the envelope with [the manuscript of his memoir] and begun to write about it, as well as the far-reaching implications of internment and his death. I am writing about his memoirs as a lifelong voracious reader, as a creative writer, and a scholar and teacher of Asian American literature. My sister, an MFA graduate of the University of Texas in Austin, responds to the photos he took and the recent sale of our childhood house, which he and his brother built together. Teruko will be using her work as a visual artist to meditate on loss and home, continuing her work on the physical body and her cultural identity as a Japanese American. Our father was also a librarian, and because I am a writer and my sister is a visual artist, our project speaks to loss through multiple avenues: the archival, the textual, and the visual. By interweaving all three voices, our project is also the story of three creative lives. Excerpt: I could tell you that it smelled yellow. Not in a diseased, Charlotte-Perkins-Gilman way. Not in an inscrutable, exotic, “Oriental” way. It smelled like Northern California summer sunlight coming through shoji screen paper. I could tell you that it smelled, predictably, like aging paper. But that might only tell you so much. If you haunt used bookstores like I do, you’d probably recognize the smell. You’d also know it if you’ve done a lot of archival research, or shelving in library stacks. During a family walk at the Seattle Central Public Library, something like that smell greeted me. The envelope smelled, as my husband pointed out to me, like my childhood house. When I was growing up, we had touches of Japanese décor around the house: kokeshi dolls, a noren that fluttered in the main entrance to the hallway, even a tokonoma with a bright red painting. But for me it was always the shoji screens over our windows and glass doors that quietly said home. That was the smell: the yellow, the paper, the light. Since I love paper with a cocooning fervor that would make a silkworm blush, you’d think that the feel of the paper would be my first sensory hit. I’ve had this envelope for years, and it was at my mom’s house for a couple of decades before that, probably unopened. But at first, I was too tentative to rub the paper between my fingers. I even did some writing before I opened the envelope. I wrote the questions that I wanted to ask. During internment, how did you and our family deal with loss? How did you deal with the loss of your possessions, your house, your family papers, your baby pictures? And the difficult, near-impossible questions: How have I dealt, or not dealt, with losing you? How do we endure? It took me a week to think about those questions. I haven’t read the manuscript since I was eight or nine years old: almost twenty-five years ago. A week later, I wrote why I was so afraid of opening the envelope. I’m scared that it’s going to make me cry. I hate crying. I hate having lost him. On my computer desktop, I opened up and looked at an old photo of my father. I wanted to say something like a prayer, but I didn’t know what to ask for. I don’t really pray, if we’re being very honest here. I couldn’t think, didn’t say, probably felt: please. Then I opened the envelope. At the bottom of the very first page, he left me an unexpected gift. Taku Frank Nimura December, 1973 Out of the two-hundred plus manuscript pages, it’s this one that I just might cherish the most. He wrote this book, or at least this page, during the month and year that I was born. ***