Sadakeo & the Thousand Paper Cranes

MAY/JUNE 2017: BY VERONICA LEIGH

Some stories you read or hear as a child stay with you for the rest of your life. Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes is one of them. I read it for the first time in Mrs. Jones’ second grade class. She assigned us the book. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, we had an hour set aside for reading and for a week or so, I spent my time learning the story of Sadak—how she lived her short life and how she died. Though she lived in the 1940’s and 1950’s in Japan, it was easy to fall in love with this bright and beautiful girl.

Inside the Glass Mountain

MAY / JUNE 2017: BY CAROL STARKEY

In Arabian culture, family carries great importance. As Margaret Nydell writes in Understanding Arabs: A Guide for Modern Times, “family loyalty and obligations take precedence over loyalty to friends or demands of a job.” This familial loyalty leads to overprotection of their women, and reverence of mothers. Arabians value courtesy and politeness as a culture, which leads to the setup of the set of tales in Jean Russell Larson’s The Glass Mountain, and Other Arabian Tales.

Fragile as Porcelain: Memoirs of a Geisha

MAY / JUNE 2017: BY CHARITY BISHOP

Dolls are non-sentient beings, created for beauty, pleasure, and play. Some of them sit upon shelves, or behind glass, while others live according to the whims of their owners. Some little girls show their dolls kindness; others do not. But the doll has no choice over its fate, its treatment, what it wears, where it sits, or what it acts out. It is helpless.

Enheduanna: The Original Woman of Words

MAY/JUNE 2017: BY SCARLETT GRANT

Women have a long and influential legacy in literature. From Murasaki Shikibu to Aphra Behn to Mary Shelley to Maya Angelou women have been able to tell their stories, thoughts, beliefs and dreams through writing. This history stretches further back than many believe, to a woman known as Enheduanna. She is one of the earliest authors in world history to known by name.

Magic in a Bottle: Aladdin and the One Thousand and One Nights

MAY / JUNE 2017: BY RACHEL SEXTON

Stories all come from somewhere. Our beloved fairytales originated in the oral storytelling tradition that thrived for centuries before the written word. Though the Grimm brothers have gained the most notoriety and familiarity for writing these tales down, hundreds of years earlier, various authors collected together stories from the Asian and Arabic world into One Thousand and One Nights. Also called Arabian Nights, this extensive work is full of well-known tales such as Aladdin. The film versions of Aladdin show how One Thousand and One Nights contains examples of classic fairytale themes.

Femnista May / June 2017: Exotic Nights

MAY / JUNE 2017: BY CHARITY BISHOP

Ancient civilizations found Asia, Egypt, and the Middle East “exotic.” They imported its spices, sought its elephants, tried to settle its wilds, and conquered much of it, but even today, when most of its mysteries are known, that part of the world continues to mystify, intrigue, and inspire our imaginations. Countless stories take place there. Hundreds of true stories originate there.

Shall we explore some of them?