Charleen Touchette's Blog: February 2007

February 24th: Welcome to TouchArt, Ltd - a network connecting 21st century minds

Take a break in the late afternoon and join me Charleen Touchette Host of Mixed Blood Radio for a virtual cup of organic fair trade tea or coffee in the pristine mountains of historic Santa Fe to chat, reflect on the weather, art, raising children, and keeping creativity flowing in a challenging and exciting world.

Check this One Earth Blog as the mood moves you. I'll be adding thoughts, pictures and links a few times a week. I'll post current thoughts and an archive of selected writing since 1970.

ONE EARTH - THINK ABOUT/ACT LIKE IT
You can make a difference.

February 2007

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

February 24th: ONE EARTH - THINK ABOUT IT - ACT LIKE IT

When we think about the crazy weather changes that threaten to destroy the homes of so many people and animals, we can see the earth is cleansing herself. If we continue to think in us and them terms and look around for someone else to blame, we will move towards more wars, chaos and great suffering. Instead we can see how we share one world and everything we do impacts the earth and every being on it. I try to take little steps. I make thousands of little decisions everyday about what I consume, how I use energy, and what happens to the waste I produce. If ten mothers think about whether the product they are buying was produced in a way that pollutes the environment and pours toxins into the air and water, and caused suffering to other human beings who made it, things would shift in the world slightly. If a hundred, then a thousand, and ten thousand mothers and fathers refused to buy food that was produced and is laced with chemicals, the corporations would stop making it and organic healthy food sellers would thrive. What if women refused to drink diet sodas with the neurotoxin Aspartame? Each little choice repeated a thousand, a million times would be a silent unstoppable revolution to a world where each person chooses with the welfare of all the people, the earth and the seventh generation in mind.

February 17th : My 53rd birthday was delightful spent surrounded by family. Birthdays make you assess. This year I will get the work and word directly to people across the world through the net following Spiderwoman as a guide. Exclusion, marginalization and stigmatization are tools to neutralize, deny and make invisible, and as a voice in the diaspora of Franco-American literature and art, I stand with Jack Kerouac, David Plante and Rhea Cote to say that we are here and we will tell our own stories. Our collective stories were carried by the Memeres and Peperes, and our connection to our Indian identities are tied to the persistence of the mothers, les mamans, who told us to remember we are Indian. The persistence of the mothers who taught us to honor the earth as our mother and consider the effects of our choices on the relatives and the next generations. Heal the Earth and Honor the Women. Seem like innocent words. Who would argue against the earth and women? But look at what Western culture does to the earth, women, families and children. Speaking truth about what our overconsumption of energy and stuff has done to the earth makes me suspect. Speaking truth about Women's Power makes me a very dangerous woman. If woman knew how powerful we are, we'd stop consuming to fill the hole in our souls, and demand clean air and water and safe healthy food, shelter, education and health care for everyone. We'd reclaim our bodies, spread our legs as women who belong to ourselves, rejoice in our ability to give life, and close our legs to anyone who violates our sisters, our children or our mother earth.

December 2006

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Banned in my Hometown Library :

"One reason childhood can be hell is that as a child you can have no power, and you can have no recourse, and you can have nobody who actually believes you." (Margaret Atwood, speaking on January 21, 2001 in support of student at anti-censorship rally in Ontario, Canada.

"A banned book is one that has been removed from the shelves of a library or classroom because of its controversial content. A book may be challenged or banned on political, religious, sexual, or social grounds." http://classiclit.about.com/od/bannedliteratur1/

When I wrote my memoir, I knew my parents would call me a liar, but I didn't think my college president would advocate banning my book in my hometown.

Family members see things from different perspectives, and a seven year old child's experience of the events is clearly different for that or her five and three year old sisters.

It took me nearly fifteen years to get up the courage to tell my story. I buried the memories of my childhood for over three decades. Left home at seventeen college bound, and spent the next twenty years forgetting my birth family and building a happy family with my husband and four young children. But when my daughter was a baby, I realized I had to heal from my childhood and began drawing memories of my father's violence and writing about the scary memories.

Most people, who write about difficult childhoods, whether in non-fiction or fiction modes, encounter opposition from people portrayed in their books whether in a positive or negative way. Every author faces this fact at some point. People don't like to be written about. In any case they don't like to be depicted from another person's point of view. But if you are a writer, you write, and the best writing any writer does is about what they know. They know their family best, and you get the rest.

So the daughter or son who is compelled to tell the story, to write the book, to reveal the secrets that the rest of the family can't face, worked hard to hide, and spent the last thirty years trying to forget, has to be called a liar, discredited, and buried deeper than deep.

No family wants a writer in it. Ask Pat Conroy's relatives who picketed his book signings of THE PRINCE OF TIDES and THE GREAT SANTINI with placards proclaiming, "Pat Conroy is a dirty rotten liar." Or Julia Alvarez who wrote, HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS GOT THEIR ACCENTS. I read about their experiences when I struggled about whether to tell my story as fiction or non-fiction. They made me realize the futility of self-censoring to protect, please, or flatter family members. Fictionalizing their stories didn't soften the anger those and other authors' families released upon them. My editor Beth Hadas cast the deciding statement. The real story of a person who triumphs over adversity has more power to inspire people.

I always knew telling my story would exact a big price. But not telling was not an option when the images and memories of my childhood would not stay buried, and sharing them made a big difference in other people's lives. Like most people who write, I did not write about my family lightly or with any malice, but instead told the story that I knew to be the deepest truth about my own experience. It would never make sense to claim that my truth is the same as any one else's and there is no doubt that other family members experienced life on Clark Road differently than I did. But that doesn't give them or anyone else the right to censor my inalienable right to freedom of expression or to demand that my book be banned from a public library.

December 15th, 2006

December 15th, 2006 : Woonsocket Harris Public Library Board of Trustees
Diane Rivers, Chair
Dorian Parker, Vice-Chair
Lisa Sparks, Secretary
John Pellizzari
Ernest "Buddy" DiSpirito
303 Clinton Street
Woonsocket, RI 02895-3214
Fax: 401-767-4140

Dear Members of the Woonsocket Harris Public Library Board of Trustees,

On behalf of the 2,900 members of PEN American Center, an international organization of writers dedicated to protecting freedom of expression wherever it is threatened, we are writing to express our deep concern over the fact that the Woonsocket Public Library Trustees are considering a request to ban It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl written by native Woonsocket author-artist Charleen Touchette.

We understand that a citizen request to ban the book was made at the Library Trustees' September meeting. The Library Trustees removed the book from the Woonsocket Harris Public Library shelves after the September meeting pending a decision.

It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl, the latest work by author-artist Charleen Touchette, invites you into the provincial world of a French Canadian girl in Rhode Island who cannot tell anybody her family secrets. Years later when she has her first daughter she must relive her childhood to heal the future generations of her family. It is a story of survival and triumph as a victim of childhood abuse and was written for an adult audience. The novel tells a realistic story with complex figures. Such books help readers approach sensitive topics and figure out how to deal with them. Even if the novel's themes are too mature for some, they will be meaningful to others. No book is right for everyone, and the role of the library is to allow community members to make choices according to their own interests, experiences, and family values.

Author Charleen Touchette, a member of our colleague organizations PEN USA and the Author's Guild, advocates for the freedom to write worldwide. It Stops with Me has been praised by authors Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Louise Erdrich, Margaret Randall, Ana Pacheco, and Winona LaDuke, and received a Foreword Book of the Year 2004 Finalist Award.

PEN American Center respectfully asks you to deny the request to ban It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl and to return it to library shelves. By doing so, you will be upholding a fundamental principle of freedom: the right of all Americans to read, inquire, question, and think for themselves.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Hannah Pakula

Larry Siems
Chair, Freedom to Write Committee Director, Freedom to Write
and International Programs

November 2005

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

November 30th:How Can I Tell My Children the U.S. Doesn't Torture? A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Charleen Touchette

I am a mother of four. My children see the pictures of our young Americans torturing Iraqis. They hear our President say, "America does not torture." The Ten Commandments teach, "Thou shalt not kill," and "Thou shalt not lie." Yet my children see President Bush kill and lie everyday.

Maman's Terror by Charleen Touchette Author of "It Stops with Me"

Is this Christian? Is this American? My teenage daughter is appalled by the genocide in Darfur and the Bush administration's inadequate response. Shouldn't all Americans be appalled?

Bush is making American soldiers torture and use chemical warfare. I can hardly breathe when I think about how my tax money was used to torture people and to melt the flesh of innocent women and children with white phosphorus in Fallujah. How can we sleep at night when our money funds such horror in America's name?

We must stand up and save America's good name.

People talk about "us" and "them." But it is us who are doing this to other human beings. Over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, tens of thousands of Iraqi combatants, and over 2,000 good American soldiers have been killed.

We, Americans, are doing this; it is our money that pays for the destruction; it is our president and congress that are doing it; and we can stop it.

Two things, we can vote with our voices, and with our actions. We live on one earth; think about it, and act like it.

Everything is connected, and each time I turn on a light switch, I need to think about where that energy comes from and if the way it was produced hurts or benefits life. If I extend that question to everything I consume, it won't be possible to use plastic without knowing the consequence might be the murder or mutilation of a child in Iraq to protect my "right" as an American to petroleum products.

And I won't be able to forget that drilling for oil on that California high school campus gave American teenagers fatal cancers, or that emissions from plants making plastic kill inner city youth with asthma.

This thinking won't make me stop using plastic all together. After all, I'm a modern woman, a mother in the modern world who loves the conveniences just like everyone else. But it is time we look at the real cost of our American lifestyle -- the cost to our environment, our children's future, and our souls.

How safe are Americans when our government uses torture and chemical warfare? My children want to travel, but I'm terrified they'll face the anger of the world at what George W. Bush has done in the name of Americans.

American mothers, and mothers everywhere, want peace and justice. We don't want Bush sending our young people to Iraq to kill in the name of protecting us and our children. It doesn't start with them and it isn't their fault; it starts with me and you.

There is no path, no blueprint, no road map to peace; the path is peace. Act peace, be peace, buy peace.

Charleen Touchette
Santa Fe, New Mexico

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Charleen Touchette is an artist, writer, curator, art critic, educator, and activist. www.touchart.net Her bio is at http://members.authorsguild.net/touchart/bio.htm

Monday, February 26, 2007

One Earth Blog February 24th

Congress Must Defend the Constitution and Impeach Bush