memoir

“Just Being at the Piano” by Mildred Portney Chase

January 13, 2024 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Harmony Begins in the Soul, Long Before the First Note Is Played

Recommended to me by: the Little Free Library down the street

A meditative little book on how to learn and teach piano in a kind, body-centered way. Mildred Portney Chase was a musical prodigy, playing piano by ear at age 3 or 4, and went on to be a concert pianist. She writes in detail about how she finds relaxed, sensitive movement in her fingers, hands, and arms to play her best. She fiercely defends the right of young students to improvise and learn at their own pace.

I have only studied a little piano. Some of the book is applicable to singing, and some of it is specific to the piano, which as she says is an instrument that cannot be brought close in to the musician’s body. I passed the book along to a piano player and teacher, and I’ll be curious to hear what she thinks of it.

Recommended if you’re interested in music and musicians, or if you play piano and want to create beautiful tones.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Your Mindful Journal and Memoir” by Jenny Davidow

December 22, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Open the Floodgates to Your Creativity

Recommended to me by: the author

Your Mindful Journal and Memoir by Jenny Davidow has great advice for making journal entries more lively and personal and present. My paper journal is completely private and I’m not trying to improve it in any way, but the tips feel useful for online posts, and could apply to creative writing, too.

I met Jenny at Balkan camp years ago and we corresponded a bit about her book. I was happy to review it on Amazon:

“Your Mindful Journal and Memoir” is good medicine for our frenetic, fragmented modern lives. Jenny Davidow distills decades of experience with mindfulness, journaling, creativity, and teaching into a step-by-step guide full of wisdom and kindness.

For someone new to journaling, the book offers ideas on what to write and how to center it on the present moment even when it is about the past. For someone whose Inner Critic says, “You can’t say that!” or “You’re doing it wrong,” the book offers a shift toward safe experiments and listening inwardly with a kind ear. For someone whose attention is focused on external approval, the book offers fiercely guarded privacy and tuning in to one’s own voice and preferences.

For everyone, the book offers innovative ways to combine journaling with mindfulness and self-exploration, creating a lively personal record. For those who want to share individual entries or publish a memoir, the book offers strategies to do so with creativity and care.

As a longtime journal-writer, I appreciated the gentle invitations to turn events into metaphors, and I enjoyed reading the author’s example entries shared from her own journals.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to keep a journal but struggles with what to say, or who wants to heal their connection with their creativity, or who wants to create a memoir but doesn’t know where to start.

Available at Amazon.

“Recoding America” by Jennifer Pahlka

September 30, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

Recommended to me by: my workplace, a federal contractor

I work for a federal contractor as a programmer, so they strongly encouraged us to read this. I can see why! The government project and team I work on use Agile methods and have a strong focus on user-centered design. This book made me appreciate that a lot more.

It explained some of the difficulties that government projects encounter, including the problems with the healthcare.gov launch, the unemployment insurance backlogs at the beginning of the pandemic, and why a new generation of GPS satellites are running old software. Not only does government traditionally subscribe to the old waterfall methodology of requirements, then design, then implementation before users see working software, but it starts earlier with Congress making laws that drive the requirements.

Conservatives have actively pushed digital competence out of the government and said it should be contracted out. Then contractors are given no leeway to do research with users and alter the plan to work better. According to them, creating software is implementation which is entirely separate and considered “lesser” than creating policy, which is the government’s concern.

Jennifer Pahlka and others have been driving a quiet revolution in government, introducing 18F, a group of federal employees who use Agile software techniques and user-centered design to consult on a multitude of projects. Another new group, US Digital Service, also bring technological know-how inside the government.

She describes some of the victories, where individual government employees have been able to push back against the snarls of red tape and create, for example, a streamlined SNAP application in California that allows many more people to successfully apply. Covidtests.gov is another example of a big win, a very simple website that successfully delivers tests to 2/3 of American households, and corrected out of date USPS address database entries along the way.

She mentions that people say the “best” programmers are in the private sector, but there are highly competent people who prioritize service to the public over getting the highest salary, so the government gets the “best” by a different definition. The government also places an active priority on diversity and inclusion, so it gets a wider field of good people.

Highly recommended for people interested in government, software, and the joys and tribulations of CivicTech.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Fire Trail” by Maureen Larkin Ustenci

June 4, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: A Mother’s Journey Through Grieving

Recommended to me by: the author

Maureen Larkin Ustenci lucidly shares the raw shock and shattering grief of losing her beloved only son to sudden death in a mountain lake just after he graduated from high school. She also shares joyful stories of raising him in multicultural Berkeley with her Turkish husband. This is a love letter to her son Efejon, to her husband Mustafa, to the city of Berkeley, and to the community that surrounded them and bore them up in their terrible grief.

The book moved me to tears and also delighted me with its depiction of family members, friends, traveling in Turkey, and raising a child who never stopped talking. It dips into the depths and rises again, acknowledging both unbearable pain and the people who reached out again and again to help them bear it with kindness, generosity, and warmth.

Available at Amazon.

“Katarína” by Kathryn Winter

April 16, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Folk dancing with the author

I was chatting with Kathryn at a folk dance party, and explained how my grandparents had to leave Germany because of the Holocaust. She brightened in recognition and said, “I was a hidden child during the Holocaust.” Like Anne Frank, but she lived. I said, “That must have been hard!” She said no, at the time she thought the work camps were like summer camps.

Her lightly fictionalized memoir is beautifully written, a series of child’s-eye vignettes full of details about life in Slovakia at the time. It is also harrowing to read. Kathryn shows difficult events and physical and emotional pain in response, but doesn’t dwell on it. The child Katarína feels both joy and sorrow strongly, and keeps moving forward with fierce resilience. She survived through both inner strength and luck, through care from others and a loving response to care.

Highly recommended. In this time of rising fascism we need to understand fascism’s detailed cruelty to a child. This happened in living memory. We are well along on the road to it happening again. It needs to stop.

Available via Biblio.com

“Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe

February 2, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Soph

I was introduced to Maia Kobabe (e/em/eir pronouns) via eir lovely comic about folk dancing. Eir memoir is full of lively, beautifully drawn panels and naked honesty about the painful moments of growing up genderqueer.

Maia Kobabe shares the joyful moments as well, including er warm connection with er parents, sibling, neighbors, and friends. E explains that e felt a startling wave of joy on encountering the Spivak pronouns e/em/eir, and that’s why e uses them.

This came across to me as a book for adults, since it includes some sexually explicit drawings and discussion about a vibrator, etc. At the same time, Maia Kobabe says it is for genderqueer kids to see other people like them.

Maia Kobabe’s website includes a sample of Gender Queer.

Available at bookshop.org.