I’ll be reading from my new book, We Set the Night on Fire–and signing copies–at the venues below. : Two Rivers Bookstore https://www.tworiversbooks.com/ 8836 North Lombard St. Portland, OR 97203 Sunday, June 4 at 4 pm Cross and Crows Bookstore https://www.crossandcrows.com/ 2836 Commercial Drive Vancouver, BC V5N 4C6 Saturday, August 5 The store is scheduled […]
Author Archive | Martha Shelley
Out into the Wider World, Part III
My first class ticket on the train from Jakarta to Banyuwangi entitled me to an air-conditioned sleeping car, which I shared with an elderly woman of Chinese extraction. She was either unhappy or in pain (headache? arthritis?—I never found out, as we didn’t speak each other’s language). Recently I learned that Chinese had lived in […]
A Sad Man, A Strange Dream
I hadn’t thought about Akou in years—decades, maybe. We were friends in the early 60s, over half a century ago. This past week, however, he appeared in a dream. The person in the dream didn’t look at all like the man I remember, yet somehow I knew it was him. The Milieu I met Akou, […]
Out into the Wider World, Part II
At the airport in North Jakarta, a woman made announcements over the public address system. Billboards and signs in Indonesian, incomprehensible. Worse than incomprehensible: Since I didn’t expect to understand Chinese in Hong Kong, anymore than I did in New York’s Chinatown, I wasn’t uncomfortable there. Here, though, the signs were in the Roman alphabet […]
We Set the Night on Fire
We Set the Night on Fire is the title of my forthcoming book. The official publication date is June 13, right smack in the middle of Pride Month, but it’s already getting great reviews, including an excellent one from Kirkus. According to Aspiring Author, Kirkus is the “gold standard” of the publishing industry. “While notoriously […]
Out Into the Wider World
The face was grey, color of dough mixed with ashes, flaccid, sex indeterminate but tending more toward female. Dark sockets where eyeballs had been. She—or was it me?—said she was so glad to have gotten into masochism, wished she’d started years ago, and now only wanted it to go on for a thousand years. I […]
The Empire Justifies Itself—Part II
In my previous post, I discussed articles by Helen Elka Meyers that justified police practices targeting the Black community. On her LinkedIn page, Ms. Meyers says she was with the New York Police Department (NYPD) for over five years, and also worked with the FBI for six months. Currently, she is a “fellow and director […]
The Empire Justifies Itself–Part I
In Response to “An American Pogrom” After I posted parts 1 and 2 of “An American Pogrom,” a reader sent me links to a couple of articles by Hannah Elka Meyers. Opposing Criminal Justice Reform The first of these two articles was published on 2/16/2023 in the New York Post, a right wing paper owned […]
An American Pogrom–Part II
As I wrote in Part I, what struck me about the cruelty that Black people experience in America, from slavery times to today’s police murders, is its resemblance to the pogroms my forebears fled. The Immigrants My parents and grandparents emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States hoping for both safety and prosperity in […]
An American Pogrom–Part I
Recently I received an article by my friend Carolyn Martin Shaw about the life and death of her brother—a young Black man murdered by police. I was profoundly moved by her account. The news media deliver us almost daily stories of such murders, along with mass shootings and updated earthquake casualties, to the point of […]