Lakota vs. Whiteclay

So this is disturbing:

Pine Ridge Reservation is dry, and it's illegal to sell alcohol within 10 miles of the Res. However, the town of Whiteclay, Nebraska ignores this.

And today, Oglala Lakota President Bryan Brewer was arrested for defending the natives who were protesting alcohol sales in Whiteclay--a town of 14 people, 4 liquor stores, and $3 million in annual liquor sales.

Now appearing on: The Huffington Post

Check me out on the Huffington Post today.

That's really all I can say.

(So psyched.)

#HesAGoodBoy

Charlie received an award today, from a little boy who first needed to know how to spell his name.

For the past two months, Charlie has been a therapy dog at Bond Elementary School in the West Englewood neighborhood on Chicago's south side. Every Monday, we make the 20-minute drive to 71st and May, so that second graders can take turns reading to Charlie one-on-one for an hour.

We work through the program Sit, Stay, Read, which goes to some of the hardest-hit Chicago schools to give children the chance to read to dogs. The idea is that reading to dogs is less pressure, and the kids can take their time figuring out their words. Charlie isn't going to judge. Sometimes he steps on a page to show he's really feeling it. But he pretty much just lays there.

After a semester of hard work, the kids today had their Reading Rewards Celebration. Each student received a bound book of the stories they had worked on throughout the program, along with a backpack filled with pencils, notebooks, and books to read over the summer. We cheered and drum-rolled as they accepted their award, and when the ceremony was over, the students took turns visiting with Charlie and reading their stories to him.

And, obvi, they thought Charlie deserved an award, too. One student even tore out the dedication page in his own book to recognize the small fat man laying on the floor next to him.

Coming soon

OK. So. I've found out that a blog series pitch I made to a certain large-scale Internet media site has been accepted. Stay tuned...I'll update here when the first installment goes live. Until then, I will be doing much typing, highlighting, deleting, and staring at the wall across from me until I forget what I was doing to begin with and decide to go water my plants instead.

.Biz cards

I haven't had a business card since my friend Rebecca made me one before a trip to the White House in 2009, and I requested a print run of twenty-five. When people give me theirs, I tend to lose them at the bottom of my purse only to find them in a coat pocket so many months later that I can't remember who the person is or why I have their card.

I assumed everyone else did the same, so cards haven't been a priority for me. 

However, as I've been doing more public speaking lately where people request them, I figure it's time to say, "Why yes! Here you go," instead of, "Sorry, I think business cards are a lame way to remember the 1980s. Let's just watch that business card scene from American Psycho and discuss the pros and cons."

Anyway, now I have one. Dan designed it with class and a great color palette in mind. Love that pale nimbus.

Opened my mailbox to find...

Exciting news, y'all: The second issue of Positive magazine has arrived, featuring stories on Southeast Asia, Italia, Einstein's inspiration, the voice of Bart Simpson, and more. It's a beautifully designed collection of art and words, and I'm proud to be listed as contributing editor. The quarterly publication has been in the works since publisher Sam Wilder's epiphany a few years ago following the scariest doctor's visit ever. And after working for nearly two years to get the first issue off the ground, the second showed up in my mailbox right on time--three months after its predecessor.

For this issue, I wrote the front section, "Seeds"--a collection of curious news nuggets that I fell down many Internet rabbit holes to find.

Check out select stories from the issue online, or let me know if you'd like to receive the print edition yourself. Totally worth it.

Daniel's 3rdieth birthday celebration

THANK YOU to all of our friends and family who fought rush hour traffic for Dan's 30th birthday party last night. It would not have been as fun without each of you making the trek either across town or across country.

Our neighborhood bar Tuman's was an excellent host, which I would highly recommend to anyone looking to have a party without cleaning up afterwards. Bar tenders were super accommodating, and  the kitchen staff kept us occupied with grilled calamari, portobello sliders, cumin-rubbed chicken skewers....

A great night for a great birthday. And now..............a great time for a great nap.

I don't always LOVE Chicago, but......

I didn't know Rachel Shteir existed until I saw her piece, "Chicago Manuals," in the New York Times today. I'm still not sure what purpose it serves. I think it is supposed to be a review of many books about Chicago, but of all the handful mentioned, only one is forthcoming. I read the piece mostly as a hate-fueled epistle to the city, perhaps because it begins with an extended (and weird) list of Chicago's issues, or as Shteir calls them, "urban apocalypses." These apocalypses include but are not limited to:

1. The Cubs (A losing sports team does not an "urban apocalypse" make. Ask any of the drunk fans in the bleachers.)
   
2. "Abominable weather" (Can we please reserve this for places like Siberia and South Dakota? Because I just got back from the latter, and they had had a week of school closings and no phone service due to continued blizzard conditions in April, which locals told me was "normal. We needed the moisture.")
   
3. Meter parking costing more than anywhere else in America — up to $6.50 an hour (Poor taste to mention this before the murder rate.)
   
4. Second-highest murder rate (Second-highest)
   
5. Second-highest "combined sales tax" (again, second-highest)
   
6. Ninth-highest metro foreclosure rate in the country (ninth-highest)
   
7. Third-most racially segregated city (third-most...how are these even reasons at this point? All these stats say is that Chicago is obviously not the worst place in America.)

I'm not defending Chicago. The city has major hurdles it needs to face. But the logic in this "book review" was severely lacking. Buried a few paragraphs down, a line about a forthcoming book about Chicago pops up. Ah...that's right...this is a book review, not some rich white chick bitching about having to live in Chicago. The book review almost slips by unnoticed, as we coast back into more disdain for Chicago.

"The swagger has bugged me since I moved here from New York 13 years ago. So I was interested to learn in 'Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker’s Guide to the Paris of America' — an 1893 guidebook being reprinted by Northwestern University Press next month — that it initially surfaced in the era of wild growth after the Great Fire of 1871. In their 1909 plan, Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett predicted that by 1950, Chicago would house 13.5 million people.

Today, Chicago has fallen short of such dreams. The city’s population, for example, is currently at 2.7 million, having dropped since a high of 3.6 million in 1950. But the bloviating roars on, as if hot air could prevent Chicago from turning into Detroit."

It is so nice to finally see someone define a city's success by its population into the millions. Could anyone who lives here imagine 13.5 million people in this city? It's enough to fight the 2.7 for space in grocery store aisles, on the subway, or for parking anywhere.

A few paragraphs later, after reviewing books that came out in 2012 and citing a 2009 issue of Granta, Shteir asks, "Where are the women writers?" I greatly appreciated WBEZ's response, which included a list of active women writers in Chicago and an even longer section of comments contributing more names. 

If there's one thing Shteir has proven, it all comes down to perspective.

With that in mind, let's acknowledge some of Shteir's favorite things about Chicago, which she mentions in the article. She says she loves Lake Michigan, Millennium Park, and global warming's work on Chicago winters. Sounds like it's time for someone to trade that resident status for tourist.

Journey to Pine Ridge

I followed community leader Ed Young Man Afraid of His Horses into the Lakota Prairie Inn for breakfast on Saturday. Camo-clad hunters filled a couple of tables, but seated alone at a table in the center of the near-empty dining room was a tribal elder, oblivious to all going on around him. He was staring at the screen of his flip phone. "How, Two Dogs," said Ed, as we approached the table. "On the Facebook again, are ya?" Reservation humor at its finest.

Ed was one of a handful of remarkable people I met this past weekend in Kyle, South Dakota. Kyle is part of Pine Ridge Reservation, and Pine Ridge is part of the larger Lakota Nation that makes up portions of South and North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska. A nation within a nation, it came into existence when the United States government and the Lakota people signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851--a treaty which the U.S. has re-written at will multiple times since.

More than a hundred years later, many of the people of Pine Ridge maintain their rebel spirit, fighting to keep their culture alive. I traveled there to meet wife, mother, and grandmother: Delores Takes War Bonnet.

Delores Takes War Bonnet telling stories of her husband, Ray

Delores' husband Ray passed away in 2012, and before he passed, he told his wife, "You have a book in you. You need to get it out." 

Which is where I come in. I went to Pine Ridge to meet Delores, to see if I could help tell her story. When I was in the middle of writing the book I just finished, the biography of geneticist Janet Rowley, I told myself I would never take on another book. It is a long, lonely process. Yet, when this opportunity arose, I never considered, not for a millisecond, saying no. In college, one of my favorite stories to write had been about a filmmaker who traveled to Pine Ridge, and the opportunity to meet Delores gave me a chance to experience the reservation myself.

Delores and two of her grandchildren during our first interview

The muddy drive down a three-mile driveway on Pine Ridge

The experience was so powerful, I hesitate to even write about it here and now. Some part of me wants to keep every bit of what I saw, heard, and experienced to myself.

However, I also know that Delores’ story and the story of Pine Ridge over the past few decades deserves to go beyond the Lakota Nation. As a result, I'll be documenting the process here, as I learn a woman's life story, and a culture's language and spirituality.

Prayer ties at one of the seven Lakota sacred sites, Bear Butte (Mathó Pahá)

Delores is my parents’ age, late 50s. She grew up in a log cabin and rode a white horse named Bill to school. For most of her life, the U.S. government forbid her from speaking her own language and her tribe from practicing their own religion. She fought for her husband in court when his people turned against him for running Native ceremonies, and watched her health decline as the direct result of U.S. government drilling on Lakota land.

The photos here represent a small window of what I saw over four days on Pine Ridge, accompanied by an artist, medicine man, and my friend Allison, who helped me make the 14-hour drive. 

Misa Art sketching Delores during our interview

This is what a great weekend looks like:

Charlie running free in a prairie field. (I had no idea his tail ever went that straight.)

And Charlie at a dog park, hanging out with the tall guys.

After this, the weekend looked less great, as I went for my first-ever eye exam...pupil dilation and all.      :(       

Season of the taxes

"'Taxman' was when I first realised that even though we had started earning money, we were actually giving most of it away in taxes. It was and still is typical." --George Harrison

It's that time of year again: pay up. One of the many beauties of freelance is that I have to track all my expenses throughout the year, so that I can write off the appropriate business-related ones when April rolls around. It is a pain, yes, but a minor one. When I see the amount I owe at the end decrease even marginally, I breathe a sigh of relief. And if I get money back as a result: pizza party for me on me.

I'm lucky that my dad is an accountant, and I can call him anytime for pressing questions. In the past, these have included:

Q: Can I write off this sweet new dress I bought for an author cocktail reception next week?
A: Unfortunately no. Only people who wear job-specific uniforms--like nurses or police officers--can write off the cost of their clothing.

Q: Can you make my quarterly payments lower so that I can just keep more of my money forever?
A: Hahaha I'm not Merlin the Magician. I will do my best, but the numbers don't lie. 

Q: How does Carmelo the Dog feel about tax season?
A: He's pretty excited but acts pretty low key about it, as you might imagine. We used to have a mood numbering system. The no. 1 mood was where you love it and you show it. I believe the loving it but acting like you don't was the no. 4 mood. 

But just because my dad is an accountant, does not necessarily mean I have inherited any of the organized, number-loving practicality that makes him a taxman worthy of a Beatles song. My system involves saving my receipts throughout the year and telling myself that I will log them into my Highly Organized and Professional Expenses Spreadsheet at the end of each month. Expenses include items such as a new printer, a meal with a client, and my phone bill. I do not log the expenses at the end of the month.

Instead, I continue to do the things I do on any given day--walk the dogs, lay in the middle of my living room floor and listen to Fleetwood Mac through my headphones, read about garbage dumps in India, stare at maps and plot out imaginary trips. Then, about two weeks before April 15th, my accountant calls to tell me that if I don't get my expense report to him, I'm going to have to file an extension. Dread. I do not want to file an extension. I cannot have a year's worth of taxes hanging over me for another six months. So I spend an entire day and night logging my expenses.

This is what approximately half of it ends up looking like:

And this is what the giant pile of receipts I will spend the rest of tonight sorting through looks like:

Wish me luck. OR...even better...send a bottle of wine and a motivating Spotify mix. Thanks.

And if you need an accountant, let me know.

Charlie goes to school

He did it! Back in February, Charlie passed his certification test, which means he can go into Chicago Public Schools to help second graders read. Each student in Charlie's group will get a one-on-one chance to read the book of the week to him. And because Charlie doesn't understand English beyond "outside", "dinner", "hungry", and "sit", he won't mind that he's hearing the same story eleven times in a row. 

We're working through a program called SitStayRead. Now that Charlie has met all of his requirements, it's on me to finish the final two steps before we get into the classroom. 

For the students, the experience of reading to a dog helps take the pressure off. "We had a child who was a selective mute. She didn’t talk at all. The volunteers were great with her. I gave them a heads up because I didn’t want them to be alarmed about this child not talking or reading. But there was success with her. She whisper read to one of the dog teams. It was a huge, huge deal. She’s had the same homeroom teacher for two years now and she doesn’t ever talk to her. But she whisper read to the dog!" A teacher is quoted on the SitStayRead website.

The program works because dogs don't judge, and children inherently realize that. Charlie, for example, is extremely grateful when anyone even glances his way, let alone if they have a treat in hand and want to talk to him. 

The trainer who certified him saw that potential. Halfway through his exam, she approached to test how he would react. Charlie remained in his standard ground-level position, laying on his side and wagging his tail with increased speed at each step the trainer took toward him. She shook her head. "The kids are going to love him."

Donald Rowley, MD, 1923-2013

The man who commissioned me to write his wife's biography passed away earlier this month. A scientist and furniture designer, he led an incredible life--one that deserved documenting. As a result, the biography I've written is nearly as much about him as about Janet, his wife. 

I contributed to Donald's obituary, which was both difficult and immensely comforting for me to write. You can read the piece here.

From the story:
"Donald Rowley made a series of fundamental discoveries that had a significant impact on the basic understanding of the immune system as well as on cancer immunology, organ transplantation, and cardiovascular disease.....A prolific author, Rowley published more than 100 research papers, many in leading journals, as well as several book chapters. He helped his graduate students publish single-author papers, describing work done under his supervision in his laboratory, often in high-profile journals such as Science or the Journal of Immunology. 'This is a courtesy that no longer exists,' said former student and colleague Hans Schreiber."


The photo above captures Donald in one of his favorite places in the world: his summer home in Porter, Ind. When I asked Donald a few years ago why he chose to build the home there versus somewhere more exotic, he reasoned it was close enough to home that he could be there with relative ease. And that's exactly what he did, spending his summers swimming daily in Lake Michigan, a few hundred steps down the dune from his back porch. Donald's youngest son, Roger Rowley, provided this photo.

First shot: New camera

Here's the first shot from my new DSLR--the Canon EOS 60D. After five years of Rebel love, I decided to step it up. The 60D is Canon's link between amateur and pro cameras, and I look forward to many happy years together. It's a beast compared to the Rebel, takes better low-light shots, takes video, has a rotating screen...all improvements I needed and already rely on. But I just can't let go of that very first DSLR. Hello, extra heavy camera bag.