What can I offer you? Hugs, cards, flowers, texts? Hope? No can do, not today. But what I can offer is a fight.
Author: Donna Decker
Watching Personal Meet Political
I was there in the room last week when 25 of my students put down their phones and engaged in face-to-face dialogue with Roxane Gay.
Be Safe, Kind and Fierce
The Boston Women’s March catapulted me into fresh awareness and commitment. It was the most peaceful, electric, powerful antidote to the world change we saw in November.
Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You
The following is excerpted from Donna Decker’s new novel, Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You, available now from Inanna Publications. The book is based on the mass shooting that took place in Montreal, Canada on December 6, 1989 at L’Ecole Polytechnique, also known as the Montreal Massacre. Jenean had been at home on Rue Verde when […]
What Don’t We Get After 25 Years and 14 Dead?
I almost quit feminism this week. Seriously. I plummeted into despair over the mélange of hate that allows batterers like Ray Rice to return to the NFL, cops to kill with impunity and universities to give a pass to rapists. My intersectionality nerves were frayed by this host of racist, misogynist traumas. Feminism cannot make […]
Stop Being Surprised, Damn It
I am not one bit surprised that a heavily-armed Elliott Rodger knocked on the door of Alpha Phi sorority at UC Santa Barbara, and when there was no response, shot and killed two Tri Delta sorority members who were outside. I am not one bit dumbfounded that when his anxious parents called police to do […]
Dear Men: Here is a New Kind of Fantasy
Dear Men: Here is a new kind of fantasy. It is about a new kind of man. These men are born on the campus of an Ivy League college in New England. Or at a West Coast university. Or maybe at a football-happy school on the Great Plains. These men talk to each other. They […]
24 Years On: Never Forgetting the Montreal Massacre
I live with 14 women I have never met. Each holiday season, I grade final exams, choose my Christmas tree, shovel my driveway and wrap my gifts, all the while remembering what happened on December 6, 1989. On that day in Montreal, 14 young women were in school studying to be engineers. They were doing […]
A Literary Canon of Dudes
I’m trying to lean in, Sheryl Sandberg, I swear, but this month–ironically, Women’s History Month–football players, military men, and popes have stricken me with patriarchy fatigue. March started out on a high. I got to attend the “best literary party ever invented,” as the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Vice President and 2013 conference […]
A Rich Legacy: Adrienne’s Words Call Us To Action
Last week we lost feminist foremother Adrienne Rich, to whom we owe boundless gratitude. Her poetry and prose guided many of us through the “anger and tenderness” of motherhood, helped us challenge countless “unexamined assumptions” and promised us that “we’re not simply trapped in the present…we can make…history with many others.” Nothing about Adrienne Rich […]