Leadership Team Member of Al Gore's Climate Reality Project; Animal Rights Activist; Mom of Senegal Parrot, ToQer; Wife of Art Brickman; Chocoholic; Singer/Songwriter/Percussionist; Catch up on the latest Tara's Thoughts – offerings about climate issues, animal rescue, musings about current events, the written word and people who write. Tarasitser.blog
This post from Literary Hub should be of interest to any author, for that matter any artist of any kind, who wants to fight back against the current attempts to ban books in the US. The Author’s Guild has created a toolkit to simplify the process of speaking out against this attempt to quash self-expression and rewrite history.
We have to be on the alert because, if the attempt is successful, they won’t stop with books.
Read the post here: Want to stop Book Bans?
This week, just in time for your holiday shopping, I offer a book of poetry from Author, Poet, Lyricist, and Artist, Ann Vincent Vila.
“Grieving Healing Accepting: 25 Sympathy Poems of Loss”
Available on Amazon
Ms Vila has written an eloquent book of poems for friends and loved ones suffering loss, a circumstance too many of us have had to live through recently. In place of sympathy cards or flowers, this book is a gift to anyone you know who is experiencing loss. Ms. Vila’s poetry offers the comfort and companionship of knowing you are not alone in your experience of loss or grief. Once read, these poems can be revisited again and again as your journey through grief takes the all-too-common unexpected detours to acceptance.
Available in paperback and Kindle editions, this collection of heartfelt thoughts for “the darker moments” solves the question of what to give to someone you care about that will acknowledge their suffering and offer support when you can’t be there to hold them close.
From the Author:
“It is a book for those suffering around us when we are left speechless and can find no words from our hearts to soothe those grieving souls. An array of work that speaks to the darker moments of life when despair arrives in the wake of loss leading from the darkness of grieving to the healing light of acceptance.”
Ana Vincent Vila, Grieving, Healing, Accepting
Would a heaping dose of hope-in-the-future help you right now? How about someone in your circles who might be looking for some inspiration?
A whole lot of us are finding just that in a newly published book from my dear friend Barbara Caplan-Bennett. If you have been feeling the weight of all the crises happening in our world, if you are not sure how to find hope in the face of your daily struggles, this is a book worth your time.
Check it out for yourself and then please help spread the word.
NOSEWORTHY, A Memoir
“Noseworthy is a memoir about a woman who faced a difficult choice when diagnosed with melanoma — lose her entire nose or very possibly lose her life. Her year long journey to obtain a prosthetic nose is filled with big challenges and small victories.”
This is a real-life story of courage in the face of great trauma (or as Barbara likes to call it, “the shit show”) and, ultimately a triumph over a life-changing course of inescapable events. Barbara has been a bright spot in my life for many years. I have always been awed by her ability to keep smiling through the tears and to welcome whatever life throws at her.
I watched her face this battle and come out on the other side with her moxie, her sense of humor, and her love of life still intact. As a writer she has a natural gift for making her readers comfortable and the skill to tell her stories in her very authentic, likable, honest voice.
Literacy is the key to overcoming so many of the challenges we face in our lives. Being able to read – and having access to books, something many children do not have – opens the door for so much. The most obvious result of better literacy is a better education which leads to better job skills and a better chance to be able to support yourself and feed your family. But beyond that books are resources for problem solving and creativity that will give a child a way to look at the world beyond what they themselves experience. That last result, gaining the knowledge that there are many ways of being in this world and there are other perspectives just as valuable and just as valid as yours, is the first step to developing empathy. Empathy is an invaluable and necessary tool for building understanding and compassion for other people and other cultures. And that’s the first step to reducing the fear, hate, war, poverty and greed that seems to have overtaken our society.
Give a child a book. That simple act can open so many doors.
Here’s a way to give books to kids with a single click – and it’s FREE! Go to the link below and bookmark The Literacy Site. You can click on the “Click here to give – it’s free!” button and the site will donate for you
Tara's Thoughts 