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Editors' Picks--Week of July 5

Editors' Picks--Week of July 5

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This week's highlights from the Community Blog. Found Writers: How My Great Aunt Celebrated July 4th by Lisa Rivero One of my current projects that is giving me greater joy and satisfaction than I ever could have imagined is transcribing my great aunt’s diaries, which she kept daily from January 1, 1920 through the middle of 1957, the year before she died. For this holiday weekend, I thought you might enjoy these posts from July 4 from various years. All of them were written from her farm and ranch in Hidden Timber, South Dakota, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Read more here. 4 Women Writers on America's Independence by Miranda D. Parker. Every year my family celebrates not only America’s independence on July 4, but also our Aunt Doretha’s birthday. This year she will be seventy-six. She’s taught me a great deal about humility, inner strength, faith, longsuffering, and the long road my culture has traveled to get to where we are now, especially in the publishing industry. Like the fictional maids in Kathryn Stockett’s popular novel The Help, for most of Aunt Doe’s life, she wasn’t afforded the opportunity to share her writing with the world. She was a South Georgian maid and nanny in the 1960s. She lived in a town that threatened to murder anyone who thought about protesting with a march, boycott, or sit in. Read more here. Do We Hold the Solution to the Recession in our Hands? by Jessica DuLong. I promised to write a longer piece on this—and why not go big? My first Huffington Post piece is live! I talk about what was missing from Friday's New York Times front-page story on the skills gap in manufacturing. Here's a snippet: Now, the recession is serving up a serious wake-up call. Tumultuous times provoke change. People today are recognizing that our American identity—our economic power—does not exist solely on Wall Street. It also exists in the tradition of innovation and in the muscle and sweat that built the nation, and continues to sustain it. After all, where would we be without plumbers, electricians, welders, elevator repairers, and lathe operators? Still, because of the long-standing social stigma against manufacturing and hands-on work, young people have turned their backs on these industries as options for meaningful work that provides a secure future. Read more here. Summer Reads--Survey Results! by PM Favorite choice for SW readers is: The Guernsey LIterary and Potatoe Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows Happens to be a personal favorite as well--appealed to me as a history fan and as a great story with interesting characters. Check it out if you are still looking for a Summer Read. Read more here.