dangerous woman

 

It’s the birthday of the woman Teddy Roosevelt once called “the most dangerous woman in America” when she was 87 years old. Mary Harris Jones, or “Mother Jones,” (books by this author) was born to a tenant farmer in Cork, Ireland, in 1837. Her family fled the potato famine when she was just 10, resettling in Toronto. She trained to be a teacher and took a job in Memphis, where on the eve of the Civil War she married a union foundry worker and started a family. But in 1867, a yellow fever epidemic swept through the city, taking the lives of her husband and all four children. A widow at 30, she moved to Chicago and built a successful dressmaking business — only to lose everything in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Jones then threw herself into the city’s bustling labor movement, where she worked in obscurity for the next 20 years. By the turn of the century, she emerged as a charismatic speaker and one of the country’s leading labor organizers, co-founding the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
She traveled the country to wherever there was labor struggle, sometimes evading company security by wading the riverbed into town, earning her the nickname “The Miner’s Angel.” She used storytelling, the Bible, humor, and even coarse language to reach a crowd. She said: “I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I said if he had stolen a railroad, he would be a United States Senator.” Jones also had little patience for hesitation, volunteering to lead a strike “if there were no men present.” A passionate critic of child labor, she organized a children’s march from Philadelphia to the home of Theodore Roosevelt in Oyster Bay, New York with banners reading, “We want to go to school and not the mines!” At the age of 88, she published a first-person account of her time in the labor movement called The Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925). She died at the age of 93 and is buried at a miners’ cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois.
She said: “Whatever the fight, don’t be ladylike.”

Definition # 66 Storytelling, Slowed Down: On Writing Vertically

Vertical Story Telling for Pre-schoolers

Ripatrazone talks about his own writing habits,

and his attraction to moving down within the page, rather than across it:

I write vertically.

I have never been a writer with a lot of time to write.

I am thankful for that. I am not sure what would happen if I had hours to work.

 It makes me not want to squander the moments when I sit with a story.

This is a necessary tension.

I am not a writer first.

I have a family, and without them I would have little reason to want to write — or to do anything else.

My desire to create is held in silence during the day, so that my literary moments can be focused and absolute.

“Gestation of Ideas: On Vertical Writing and Living” is a lovely read, no matter if you’re a writer of fiction or nonfiction.

Ripatrazone shares insights on the writing life,

the benefits of slowing down and letting ideas unfold naturally,

and the importance of time and perspective when telling the stories within us.
Storytelling, Slowed Down: On Writing Vertically
by Cheri Lucas Rowlands