seanessay.com Headnote: Last week I linked to a memoir about women being segregated… You surely remember, directly or through history, when much of the world was against “apartheid,” the legal rigid separation of Black and White in the state of South Africa. In theory, in those years, you could have said people with a vested […]
Poisonous Fruits of an -Ism
seanessay.com By “ism” I don’t mean Islam—or perhaps I do, (and not all isms are bad)—I mean any belief system that approaches tyranny over the minds of man. There are lots of isms. My university had a weekly Marxist-Lenninist study group—yes, like in the Sheryl Crow song—where the students were as sincere as the Christian […]
Auntie Flo and Younger Lover
At drop-in Free Fall Writing we chuckled at our prompts Auntie Flo and younger lover. People were scandalized as I read aloud. … My Auntie Flora was a character, a dumb blond although her hair was dark. I remember she once telephoned my mother crying that she had done her income tax five times, and […]
Blogging the Meaning of Abuse and Injustice
seanessay.com Karen Reed is free! With the common cynicism around social media, I wonder if young people remember the excitement around blogs? Short for web log. As the term “log” implies, blogs were never soundbites, never limited in the number of characters. Part of the excitement of this new, improved medium was that it would […]
Respect in Action, Part Two
seanessay.com Respect was mutual and easy among two female sex workers and I after we three moved into a duplex together. Their boyfriends loved them. This would have been long after I had learned to make eye contact and do small talk. But years earlier, when I walked as a security guard along an avenue […]
My Mother-in-law is a Free Falling Train Wreck
Free Fall Friday is a time when me and my peers, cautious slow writers, can loosen up, forget our “silly, slow, edit-as-you go,” and just let her rip! We set a timer of ten or fifteen minutes, to write before we hit the ground. For today’s pieces, my peers said, “Blog it” and “This is […]