She is Here: A Nicola Griffith Anthology

 I requested She is Here from Edelweiss in advance of publication because I have read this author, and thought I'd like an anthology of Nicola Griffith's work.   The books that I have read by this author are the novels Ammonite and Hild.  Unfortunately, I read them so long ago that I have no record of them, but I do have a good impression of these books which is why I decided to review She is Here.       

                                                  

                                                                                                

Griffith tells us that a writer is "a kind of  shaman"  which she defines as being able to "explore unknown territory and bring back maps".  Shamanic trance is an alternative state of consciousness.  Your mind is elsewhen.  There are no maps.

Griffith  continues from her author perspective to discuss immersion.  This means experiencing what a character experiences.  It's not only thoughts and feelings, but the sensory aspect--what the character sees, hears, smells and tastes.  In order to accomplish this, the writer must not only do research, she must be able to live within the book's context herself. 

In an article about branding for books and authors  that appears in She is Here,  branding is defined as "knowing who you are...and showing it".  I dispute this definition because it's author oriented and implies authenticity.  If you write a novel, self-publish it, and it has a few reviews on Amazon, you may be thrilled that anyone has read your book.  Yet such a book doesn't even require branding.

Branding is really  about selling a concept of a marketable product.  If you have a self-published book that only sold a few hundred copies, then it won't interest a major publisher.  They would say that there is no established market for this book. The marketing department at a major publisher develops the brand.  Branding is a commercial concept.  It involves what the marketing department can sell to the audience who is the market for the product. Major publishers want your book to sell hundreds of thousands of copies at the very least. They spend money on advertising their products, and they want to make a profit.  Authenticity doesn't even enter the equation.  In fact, commercial marketing inflates the value of a product through branding.  Authenticity goes out the window.  

I was reminded in this book that the Bechdel Test involves works that contain at least two female  characters who talk to each other about something other than a man. Griffith tells us that the disabled version of the Bechdel Test is The Fries Test  which was developed by Kenny Fries.  The disabled characters can't be cured or killed.  Fries is a memoirist, poet and librettist. Since I am interested in opera, I'd like to note in this review that he wrote the libretto for The Memory Stone for Houston Grand Opera which premiered in 2013.  For more about Kenny Fries see his Wikipedia article.

Griffith put out a call for book length manuscripts intended for adult readers that pass the Fries Test toward the end of 2017.   Eventually, she had a list of more than fifty submissions.  Of those fifty some were written some time ago, some were out of print and a few were in a foreign language.  Based on my own reading of fiction by disabled authors, I believe that most have dealt with the blind.  I don't know if a seeing individual in a wheelchair feels represented by fiction centering on blindness.  At that time, there were five million novels in English.  Griffith says that a census from a non-specified year recorded that one in five people were disabled.  So in order to represent the reality of English speaking people, the proportion of novels with disabled characters passing the Fries Test should be one in five. There would need to be one million novels that pass the Fries Test.  I don't think that will ever happen because the publishing industry is controlled by non-disabled people.

Griffith claims that a million novels centering on disability are needed  to "overwrite the corrosive influence of "ableism".  They wouldn't necessarily do that because the Fries Test  doesn't require that disabled characters be positively portrayed.  Some readers might say that positive portrayal is implied by the Fries Test, but I think it should be specified because non-disabled authors may be trying their hand at dealing with disability themes with no background in these topics.  They should immerse themselves in positive work by disabled authors before attempting their own works on this subject.

 I was glad to learn from this book that Griffith intended her novel Ammonite to challenge the science fiction writer Doc Smith's misogynist assumption that women aren't human without men. 

 Her novel Hild deals with the 7th century Abbess of Whitby Abbey which was founded as a double house that separately included both nuns and monks.  Griffith tells us that Hild means battle in Old Norse.  A search revealed that on Wisdom Library the name is associated with the Valkyries. This Abbess hosted the Synod of Whitby in 664 C.E. (Common Era) that dealt with trying to resolve the differences in the practices of the Celtic Church and the Roman Catholic Church. Hild was baptized in a mass conversion.  She probably wouldn't have known very much about Christianity then. The only biography of Hild is five pages long.   It emphasizes her visions and the miracles attributed to her. We also know that she advised royalty.  It isn't known where Hild was buried.

Griffith realized that she wanted to become a writer at Whitby Abbey.  She thinks of the Abbess Hild as having made both Whitby Abbey and her.  She was named  the 2025 Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers Association.  

Despite this recognition, I have to say that  I liked this anthology, but didn't love it.  I'm giving it a B which will be three stars on Goodreads.

 

                                                    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                   

 

                                                        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New York Times Book on Voter Suppression

I decided to read this library book because I'm interested in a book on voter suppression that was written by New York Times staff.   I subscribe to this newspaper and I respect it a great deal.  

I have a great deal of interest in voting and have always voted ever since I became eligible to vote.   I understand when people have challenging work schedules and can't manage to vote. Yet if they have relatively easy circumstances for voting in their precincts, I really don't understand why they absent themselves from the polls on Election Day.

                                                   

 I was amazed to learn that a national Election Day was established in 1845 in order to prevent fraud.  According to political science professor Michael McDonald, a single election day was considered to be needed so that people couldn't vote multiple times at more than one location. The U.S. has been obsessed with election fraud for almost two centuries. Consider how hard political organizations have to work to get people to vote at all, yet our leaders think that people would vote multiple times in the same election if they didn't actively prevent fraud.  Election fraud is actually so rare that it's nearly non-existent. Yet I predict that there will never be national elections held online because of the fear of fraud.

In 2002 the Help America Vote Act passed both houses of Congress. HAVA required all states to have electronic voting machines.  This doesn't mean that an individual precinct will have an electronic voting machine.  A precinct may be hand counting ballots.

I discovered that my impression that persons who had ever been convicted of a felony weren't allowed to vote in my state was completely wrong.  They are allowed to vote after serving their time.   I looked it up online.  This is the case in most U.S. states.  Though Republicans in Virginia and other states are trying to keep people with convictions from voting permanently.

The case of a woman who was released from prison in Florida was mentioned.  She was suing the state because she was charged $1000 in court fees that she considered a poll tax.  I imagine that she was considering it a poll tax because she needed to pay it in order to vote. That is a considerable barrier to voting for a newly released prisoner who will probably have difficulty finding employment.  

I learned about voter suppression of Native Americans in states where you must have a residential address.  Many Native Americans don't have residential addresses if they live on reservations.  Those Native Americans who are allowed to vote and register to vote, usually vote for Democrats. 

Then I read in this book about Maine Republicans ending voter registration on Election Day claiming it will stop voter fraud. Maine has had only two cases of voter fraud in 38 years.  The Republican governor of Wisconsin predicted that his state's voter ID law would cost Hillary Clinton votes.  In 2012 he claimed that the voter ID law would lower Obama's voter tally because Democrats cheat more often.  One of the few instances of voter fraud in Wisconsin was a vote for this same Republican governor.  Later in 2015 a staff aide to a Republican state legislator resigned because the Republican caucus was discussing voter ID bills as a means of suppressing the votes of college students and minorities.  

Photo ID laws mandating that voters must display their photo IDs when they vote tend to suppress the votes of the elderly and minority groups because an ID costs money.  The author of this article does consider requiring IDs to vote a kind of poll tax.  In Missouri, as of the publication of this book, the Missouri State Legislature had voted to approve a referendum in which Missouri voters will decide whether there should be a constitutional amendment requiring that voters show a photo ID when they vote. 

In an article on early voting, I discovered that a 1977 flood control proposition that was on the ballot in Monterey, California was the first modern American election decided by people who voted early.  The author of this article predicts that in the future campaigns may be starting up to six weeks before Election Day.  He must have meant local elections, not elections involving candidates for state or national office which start a great deal earlier.  

I was astonished to learn that in 1978 California was the first state to allow anyone to cast absentee ballots.  I would have thought that absentee ballots began earlier than that to allow soldiers who are serving outside their districts to vote. 

There is an article in this book with the title "The Student Vote is Surging, So Are Efforts to Suppress It" by Michael Wines.  In 2018 there was a poll taken at Harvard University.  45% of students aged 18-24 identified as Democrats, 24% considered themselves Republicans and 29% called themselves Independents.  Students became an important voting bloc in the 2020 election.  The Speaker of the Republican majority state legislature in New Hampshire promised to "clamp down" on students voting.  He said that students should be discouraged from voting because they have no life experience, but I encountered students who were working part time at a lower level in their professions while I was in graduate school.  They also did all the practical things that people who may have been high school dropouts have needed to master such as shopping for groceries, doing laundry and paying the rent.  

Disenfranchisement, as the New Hampshire Speaker of the State Legislature demonstrated, is an actual issue.  Voters recognize this. 3/4 of Americans say that the country is going in the wrong direction.  Gerrymandered districts cause certain voters to be favored over others.  So does the campaign finance system that gives corporations and the wealthy greater power. 

Another issue is that in most elections voters don't see any candidate that understands their problems.  So they end up voting against a candidate who they believe will make things worse rather than for one who will make their situations better. 

Almost every state allows ordinary citizens to challenge a voter's eligibility on or before Election Day.  I challenged a voter's eligibility once.  I was an election officer in several elections.  During one election, I did see someone enter the precinct a second time and stand in line to vote.  I informed the other election workers in case they hadn't noticed that this individual had already voted. The voter's signature on the rolls would have stopped this person, but I thought that the individual should have been escorted off the premises.

I spent some time poring over my notes on The New York Times articles in this volume because I care so much about this topic.  I want my readers to stay informed and please find the time to vote!

                                                     

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

My 2025 Retrospective

                                               

                                                   

                                                                   Happy New Year  

                                                                                     2026    

            

 I hope you're having a happy 2026 so far.  Here are a few statistics for 2025.  

My most viewed post was as usual on Flying High Reviews which has a larger audience.  That post was the review of Laurie R. King's 2025 Mary Russell novel which can be found here.  The most viewed post on Shomeret: Masked Reviewer is the one reviewing  Renters Unite which is a book dealing with tenant organizing.  It can be found here. 

I read 30 books in 2025 which is three more than I read in 2024.  Well, it's not much of an increase, but reading more is an improvement over reading less.  Let's hope I can do better in 2026.  Since I'm starting off 2026 with a BFB (Big Fat Book), I might want to consider doing a page count at the end of next year in addition to the book count.  

I had eight five star reads in 2025.  I know that it's six more than in 2024. So I'm happy with that.  I'll be featuring brief comments about all of those eight reads in this post.

 1) Hidden Libraries by D. C. Helmuth

  With a degree in library science, no one will be astonished to learn that I love libraries. Through Hidden Libraries by D. C. Helmuth, I discovered libraries whose existence was totally unknown to me.

2)Hope Dies Last by Alan Weisman 

 This deals with environmentally destructive policies that have devastated what was once known as the Fertile Crescent, and an engineer's hope that the damage can be reversed.  I was so sorry about the conditions in the area of the Middle East that Weisman was discussing.

3)Red Flag Warning by Dani Burlison

Red Flag Warning deals with the ongoing tragedy of California wildfires. People losing their homes to the fires and having to evacuate is the most important news story for Californians.  I was particularly interested in reading about incarcerated firefighters who make up one third of California's firefighting force.  

4)Renters Unite by Jacob Stringer

This is a book dealing with tenant organizing.  There was a tenant demand that landlords charge the same for rent to poor families renting the landlords' properties as is charged for public housing. I considered this demand one that was unlikely to be met.

5)The Hidden History of American Oligarchy by Thom Hartmann 

This book deals with the various types of oligarchy in American history and the struggles we have had with oligarchy which includes the American Civil War with the Confederate oligarchy. 

6)Spell Freedom by Elaine Weiss

This volume focuses on voter participation in the Deep South, and the school founded by Myles Horton to educate Black voters on what they would need to know to participate in elections.

7)The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon

There were well-known events from throughout American history, and information about racial and cultural minorities.

8)How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

  Antiracism involves taking a stand to actively oppose racism. The goal of activists should be to bring racism to an end. Antiracism needs to be spread as widely as possible. 

I am delighted to be able to bring these worthy books to the attention of my audience once more.  I hope more people will read them as a result of this retrospective.