Eileen St. Louis

Today is the day on which an immigrant named Amadou Diallo was asked to show his ID as he climbed the steps to his apartment in Harlem after a long day at work. As he reached into his pocket, the officers shot him 41 times. As he reached into his pocket, the officers shot him 41 times.  His wallet still in hand, he dropped his knees- a bleeding carcass on that brownstone stoop. There was no resuscitating him. But his wrongful death was a catalyst to my walking out of LaGuardia high school along with the students of three other specialized high schools in New York to participate in a sit-in at the mayor's office by  City Hall organized within just two days.  My Social Action Club was belittled by the administration who threatened us and our peers saying we only thought we knew what we were fighting for, but all we just wanted was to cut classes and skip school. Perhaps that motivated some of those that followed us, who did not yet know the details of the events that...

The Year of Conquering Negative Thinking https://t.co/mQs6Brodrj #neurology meets #healingarts #foundation #hereistherevolution #INCITE #americanarttherapyassocation — Eileen Cheong (@ModestDweeb) January 25, 2018 #modestdweebink #whoraisedyou #rwthntc #STLimprovanywhere #fergusonforward #artherapy #qtPocUnite #audrelordeproject #angeladavis

Ursula le Guin writes: "The Hero has decreed . . . that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of the narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn't any good if he isn't in it. "I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us. "One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I once read a how-to-write manual that said, 'A story should be seen as a battle,' and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) "Conflict, competi...