Nanako Mizushima (Pen name Nanako Water) has just been published in a new Wising Up Press anthology, Flip Sides. The anthology is edited by Heather Tosteson and Charles D. Brockett.
Nanako notes that the title “Be Worthy of Your Heritage” of her short story set in 1987 Ghana, is the motto of an exclusive New England prep school. The story is told from the point of view of a Japanese-American woman, Nao. Her husband Lane, a white PhD student and her father-in-law, a prominent surgeon, are both graduates from this prep school. When Lane was a student in the early 1970’s, he learns his ancestor made the family fortune as a slave ship captain.
Description of the Anthology: Spot cleaning wouldn’t be necessary if we didn’t have beliefs and ideals—or if they didn’t need to be continuously reconciled with the exigencies of raw life. This evocative and thought-provoking collection from thirty-seven authors of poetry, essay, and short fiction allows us to explore many dimensions of these tensions—from our participation in systemic harms to the most intimate of ones, from dramatic instances to quiet, almost unnoticeable ones. They are organized by the dilemmas they explore: race; nationality and culture; class and community; family dynamics; and faith. This anthology was originally, and rather playfully, conceived as two. Truth, Fair Play & Other Myths We Choose to Live By was a response to an increasingly cynical worldview that disavowed our best intentions. The other, Spot Cleaning Our Dirty Laundry, responded to an increasingly righteous reactivity in all of us that refuses to take responsibility for the harm we ourselves can cause. Then we realized they were flip sides of the same coin. We invite readers into a more intimate, not always comfortable, engagement with those two interlocked dynamics.
READ MORE: http://www.universaltable.org/libraryanthologiesaf/flipsides.htmlPURCHASE: http://www.universaltable.org/bookstore.html [after July 1, 2021 also available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other internet booksellers]
Universal Table/Wising Up Press is an organization dedicated to exploring the complex challenges and lasting rewards of living up close and personal with pluralism in social, family, religious, and civic life, or, more simply, Finding the “We” in “Them,” the “Us” in “You.” Wising Up anthologies use literature by contemporary writers to approach various dimensions of pluralism because of the power of narrative to help us identify safely with others who may at first seem, by appearance or circumstances or culture, very different from us. The anthologies serve as an invitation to stand in that richer relation—empathic, musing, open to new meaning—with ourselves and with our neighbors.
FLIP SIDES Heather Tosteson and Charles D. Brockett, editorsWising Up Press, P.O. Box 2122, Decatur, GA 30031-2122ISBN: 978-1-7324514-9-0LC Number: 2021938070274 pp.; ill.List Price: $20.00 Distribution Arrangements: Lightning Source/IngramPublication date: July 1, 2021