That Saturday at Mendorff's — Now available on Amazon Kindle!

On a sunny October morning in 2000, a man enters an Atlanta bookstore and opens fire, 

a vicious shooting that kills and injures over a dozen innocent people. 

Years later, journalist Mollie Dobbs goes on a search for the surviving victims — 

to learn who they had been, and how they changed after that Saturday at Mendorff's.

Available now as an e-book on Amazon Kindle!

The gilded age of narcissism

To feel empathy for another person doesn't require that you like or agree with them. It simply means you acknowledge they have emotions as well about the matter between you, and that their thoughts and feelings are as weighty to them as yours are to you.

It's only April and we've already had three throwbacks to the era of Jim Crow: the OU frat bus, happily belting out racist chants (Oklahoma); the discovery of racist behaviors and protocols in Ferguson's law enforcement system (Missouri); and the shooting of an African American man, Walter Scott, by former police officer Michael Slager (South Carolina). 

Where has the majority of words and energy gone? 

• Beauton Gilbow, the SAE house mother caught on video chanting racist slurs, lamented to news cameras that her way of life was ending. Fifteen years she'd been house mom at SAE and now she had to move out. What heartbreak! And such inconvenience.

• Parents of the two bus chant "leaders," the Rice and Pettit families moved like PR firms to pony up eloquent apologies, then begged for privacy so their families could "heal," never mind that the chant was an obscenity to African American members of the OU community. The world at large was still processing how two college men in the year 2015 could even chant such songs without qualm.

• Former Officer Slager's mom shook her head in TV news interviews, lamenting her son wouldn't be in the delivery room to see his child born, never mind that Walter Scott will be permanently absent from his family's big events. 

• Perhaps the most outrageous was Ferguson's clerk of court, Mary Ann Twitty, who made the hyperbolic equation that being exposed for circulating racist emails felt like a sexual assault. "I'm a good person," she insisted, "and I feel like I've been raped."

We are mere props in the movie of her life
The fact is Twitty has experienced neither racism nor rape. If she had, she'd have never made that analogy — nor found those jokes funny. But as with the others, her account of herself does point to a startling lack of empathy. Sure, there's been some public, scripted chest-beating but none of them have asked humble questions to learn the full scope of what they'd done. Their concerns have been for themselves, nobody else. Being exposed simply made such individuals even more self-absorbed — and that is its own set of red flags.

Write a Wrong

The erosion of civil liberties is like that frog in the pan of water. If you'd told Germans back in the 1930s: "The good news is that a leader will emerge to unite everyone and re-energize national pride. The bad news is that he'll institute racism and anti-Semitism into law, including eugenics, and trigger a Holocaust, followed by years of defeat, separatism, and economic depression," then most forward-thinking Germans might have balked at Hitler's initial allure. 

Toss a frog into a pan of boiling hot water, and it'll jump out.

But that's not how things evolved: what Hitler triggered was a steady but gradual degradation of civil liberties and human rights. Each one was abhorrent, but they didn't affect everyone — they just affected Jews, gays, the infirm and disabled, scholars/intellectuals, and gypsies — anyone the Nazis deemed unfit. Hitler also eliminated all the detractors and men of conscience who would've put his subversive plans through legal checks and balances. His ascendency was so lethal, few dared to speak dissent. Those who did were summarily snuffed out.

Toss a frog into a pan of cold water and heat it up slowly. What happens? The frog boils to death because it doesn't know to jump out at the first signs of trouble, so it weakens and submits.

• Ferguson, Missouri, has been exposed as one of the most corrupt and racist judicial systems in the US. Is it typical or an anomaly? 

• This year is the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Will anyone care? or will we be busy gerrymandering, cooking up legal mumbo-jumbo to deprive "otherized" Americans of their right to cast a vote? 

• These RFRA bills — if they succeed in institutionalizing discrimination against LGBT communities, then how long before another segment of American community is targeted? Religious freedom is the right to worship in one's own way, free of persecution, not to be used as a weapon against someone else (or have such individuals never noticed what's been going on in the Middle East? Taliban? ISIS? Boko Haram? Hello...?). Since when was the Bible intended to be a "law book" used against humanity?

Our current dysfunctional Congress has the scruples of a streetwalker, our democracy is becoming oligarchic, yet we saw Indiana governor Mike Pence squirm and reverse his position when business leaders, small business owners, LGBT activists, and ordinary people presented a unified front against a divisive and spiteful piece of legislation.

It's not just about protecting one's own civil liberties. If we don't protect the civil liberties of the targeted, weak, and vulnerable among us, then the bullies will have won the day. Make penpals of your Congressmen. Until this nation decides on term limits, these folks in Congress lead country-club lifestyles often without careful study of the bills they're expected to vote on. They may not heed one voice, but eventually they will have to listen to a growing number of voices. No matter which side of the issue you fall on, speak your truth to power. The world is run by those who are present and get involved.

Hold their feet to the fire.

Randomly, About Charlie

Humor is a tricky import/export. Jeff Foxworthy's redneck routine wouldn't register in other cultures but then Jerry Lewis movies made it big in France. 

Gallic satire has a long and dicey history — lurid, explicit, over-the-top lampoons demonizing Marie Antoinette as a self-serving lecher helped send those monarchs and hundreds of aristocrats to the guillotine. 

It's never been about "leaving well enough alone" (because things left alone were in fact not well) .... France's foreign minister Laurent Fabius has asked, "Is it wise or intelligent to keep pouring fuel on fire?" bc, after all, Charlie's offices were already besieged and their editor was under constant police protection. One of those was the first to be mowed down. 

I hate movies like "Human Centipede" but I hate censorship even more, and executing a conference room filled with editorial staff and cartoonists — cartoonists! — is about as grotesque as it gets. 

I wonder if those cartoonists still used the "forgotten art supplies" most of us now find via the computer, because they were still hand-drawing their ideas, maybe doing quick sketches at the meeting table to start brainstorming or refine an idea. 

Nick Kristof used a new word — is that all we're good at, "otherizing"? 

Historian Margaret MacMillan said, "History doesn't repeat itself exactly, but it does bear repeating stanzas." For centuries, those who "pour fuel on the fire" are among the first to be extinguished. 

Europeans who would themselves leave well enough alone at home and at their jobs would still read Charlie Hebdo for the laughs.

#‎censorshipservesanoppressor

American Mosaic

Gradient Spectrum by Erin Pankratz Smith

Dear Mr. President,

I'm an immigrant, "naturalized" to US citizenship in the early 1980s. What a day that was for us as a family — the sense of safety and privilege was very high.

We were permanent residents for a long time but in the 1970s, despite my father's best efforts, at that point when we were so close to achieving citizenship, the INS lost our entire file and the process had to restart at great cost. This occurred at a time when my parents were also planning for our college educations. 

[Ultimately, my parents sent their three daughters to Carnegie Mellon University, Swarthmore College, and Northwestern University. At this point in our lives, I've run my own business for nearly 30 years; my Swarthmore-educated sister is a psychologist with a Master's degree from Duke University; and my youngest sister is an MBA (Cal-Berkeley) and VP of info tech with Wells Fargo. This is significant for us because a mere century ago in China, girls were not considered worth educating, and we might've even had bound feet!]

Because our own naturalization process had been so arduous, I've had mixed feelings about the "line jumping" of illegal immigrants, but continue to believe we're all humans trying to attain the same things, and that first and foremost this is a nation of immigrant stories. As you emphasized, this is what makes America vibrant and innovative. This I saw at Carnegie Mellon, which has the planet's oldest and finest robotics program, and a diverse mix of brilliant engineering students from all over the world.

I live in Atlanta, a metro region that's benefited from a huge "diversity explosion" beginning in the mid-1980s. (My only child is a mixed-race kid who says "You can't say Caucasian without also saying Asian!"). It's taken 30 years, but we're now seeing the advantages of a diverse population, although we continue to struggle with the downsides of racism and xenophobia. Every day in DeKalb county where I live, I have interactions with refugees/immigrants from Ethiopia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Vietnam, Uganda, Nigeria, Bosnia, and Russia. Despite cultural differences, I continue to find that we all want the same things. These are not freeloaders or thugs, but people working hard to make a living (in jobs no American adult wants), who just want to see their children thrive in school.

Your speech the other night was exceptional. If your executive order is regarded as a "lawless" act, then let them find the laws to prove it.

Inclusive to my love for Australia, where I spent a part of my childhood, I feel very proud to be an American. I have conservative friends who regard me as idealistic and naive; "intellectually lazy" for believing that racism still undergirds political differences; and way too liberal for my own good. But if being liberal means we fall on the right side of history for offering safe harbor to refugee children fleeing murderous gangs in Central America; finding insurance solutions for those who've never before been able to afford it; or defining a sane and unthreatening path to citizenship so families can stay together, then I'd rather be liberal. People come to this country for safe harbor, and to pursue — and to innovate on — opportunities they could not find elsewhere.

As for the rest, they can (as you said) Pass A Bill. I'm sick to death of the obstructionism and brinksmanship, all the low-grade political skirmishing, with none of the governance. We are in real danger of becoming an oligarchy, and our Congress of the past six years has been a disgrace.

Thank you.

The atrocities of narcissism

John Rabe's diary

I've been reading books about "the rape of Nanking" for a couple years, part of research for my next book project. It's not a calming experience. From 1937-38, Nanking was described by eyewitnesses as a literal Hell on earth, but for the actions of a dozen Americans and Europeans who stepped up to protect the vulnerable. Their mere presence often prevented the oppressors from proceeding with the worst sorts of crimes against humanity, and even then such atrocities occurred with frequency and impunity. 

Because I do like to read history and historical fiction, a constant question is "Could this happen again?" Could genocides like the Rape of Nanking happen again? And the answer is yes: such things do repeat themselves (eg, Rwanda).

Then you ask the question another way....

Could the "heroes of Nanking" happen again? 

Although we've seen the professionalization of humanitarian aid-givers, people like John Rabe, Dr. Robert Wilson (left), and Minnie Vautrin acted as private individuals, as much on the strength of personal conviction as professional creed. There was no UN or Peace Corps in their lifetimes. There was no guidebook re: "how to save ordinary people from atrocity." Given every opportunity to evacuate, they chose to remain long after their peers fled the scene, and — in advocating for victims — had repeated confrontations with the Japanese command.

After all the powerful and affluent departed, the Chinese left in Nanking were those too poor to travel, with nowhere to go, just like the disenfranchised among us today (think: Katrina and the low-income communities of NOLA). This also included demoralized soldiers from the Chinese army, in retreat from advancing Japanese forces. Many of the Chinese troops were teenaged boys already worn down after months of defending Shanghai. Their own command was fleeing upriver ahead of them.

Dr. Wilson operated on mangled bodies for hours without rest, later dying young because his health was compromised by those months in 1937-38.

Minnie Vautrin had a nervous breakdown after giving safe harbor to 10,000 women and children on a campus set up to care for only 3,000 refugees. Part of what exhausted Vautrin were the daily improvisations for survival — not just administering the school during a brutal occupation, but negotiating safety terms with the callous Japanese command, coordinating with her Safety Zone colleagues for a daunting scarcity of food supplies, and safeguarding the women and children. The campus was large, she couldn't be four places at once, and Japanese soldiers were continually scaling the walls and assaulting women inside the campus — or duping her into surrendering the women and girls in her care.

For three months, no one left alive in Nanking was able to wash themselves because Japanese atrocities had compromised all water sources. (Cooked rice had the coppery taste of blood). Given Japanese orders that all corpses were to be left out in the open, there was constant threat of disease, and malnutrition alone produced an outbreak of beri-beri.

John Rabe didn't sleep, patrolling the grounds of the Nanking Safety Zone every night, pulling Japanese soldiers off the women and girls they were trying to rape. To no avail, he wrote letters to Hitler, imploring him to intervene with the Japanese emperor and halt the brutal lawlessness in his beloved Nanking. When his Siemens employer recalled Rabe to Germany, he was stunned — and deeply moved — to see 2,000 women amassed before him, bowing in gratitude but also begging him not to leave. His post-war years were so impoverished, Frau Rabe took to making nettle soup from the weeds in their yard. Hearing of this, the grateful people of Nanking sent them money that eased his final years.

The "atrocity" of narcissism

After Tuesday's elections, we're further immersed in a nation where democracy has been forsaken for oligarchy, and our poor and disadvantaged will be criminalized — where those with wealth and power will only struggle to accrue more of it — even if it means betraying their neighbors and employees — and an act of compassion is more of a tax shelter than an effort to fix the roots of a chronic social problem.

In 2015, turn compassion and generosity into small, achievable actions. It doesn't have to mean donating gobs of money. Write your Congressman and call him out on his inaction; let the corrupt know that you're watching them. Start a bus-stop library. Teach one evening of economic literacy at the community center of a low-income neighborhood; talk to middle schoolers about the stock market, so they see role-modeling for financial decisionmaking. Convince a kid not to drop out, and urge him to stay in school for greater gains yet to come. Read a book to an elderly invalid or a hospitalized veteran. Drop off some bagels in the teachers' breakroom of your local public school.

It doesn't have to be much. Two hours from your life can remake someone else's entire existence — it can give them hope. Just like the heroes of Nanking, small ordinary actions can give an oppressed person reasons to hope. With hope they might hang in one more day; persisting one more day can make the difference between survival or annihilation. And I know from personal experience that when you feel beat-down or heartbroken, the best antidote is to live outside yourself. Stand for something that serves more than just yourself. Live in paradox, and delight in your anonymity: you'll be surprised how much gets done when you don't care who gets the credit for it.

Maybe if each private individual does a little bit, we can build small acts of social justice into enough critical mass to turn the heedless tide of narcissism and greed and corruption that's swamping our American values. It's up to each of us, not our so-called leaders, because the ordinary world is filled with extraordinary stories — and you are one of them.

The Tools and Process of Writer Renée Moffett Thompson

Renée Thompson’s stories have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Literal Latte, Arcadia, Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine, 10,000 Tons of Black Ink (where her story “Twelve Pencils” was named “Best Of,” Vol. II, Spring 2012), and Chiron Review. She has stories forthcoming from Crossborder and Chiron Review, and has placed as a finalist in competitions sponsored by Narrative, Literal Latte, Glimmer Train, and Writer’s Digest. She is the author of two novels, THE PLUME HUNTER (Torrey House Press, 2011) and THE BRIDGE AT VALENTINE (Tres Picos Press, 2010), which Larry McMurtry called “…very original and very appealing,” and which was recently selected as the 2014 community book for Woodland Reads. She lives in Northern California.

Renée, thanks for talking with us. For starters, can you describe your tools — the things you like to use when you write, and what you have to have in place. Music? Coffee? What makes you feel comfortable when you begin writing?

Renée Thompson

 Lucy, first, thank you so much for inviting me to chat with you on your blog — I’m honored to visit!

As for tools, I’m sort of promiscuous. I love to write in longhand, using a pencil — a Blackwing 602 (so much so, I wrote a story featuring a protagonist who can’t even think using a pen), but I write on my laptop too. It depends very much on my mood, and my joints, frankly. If I wake up feeling a little stiff, I usually print the prior day’s work, then sit at the kitchen table and edit in pencil while my bones warm up. When I’m working on a novel, I start at 9 a.m., treating my work as a job, coffee at hand and no sound whatsoever. (Even as a kid, I couldn’t work on homework with my radio on; I needed silence then, and still do.)

I like to work near a window. I’m a very slow writer, and tend to think a lot; I’ll gaze into the yard, watch the northern flickers, acorn woodpeckers, and cedar waxwings skim the trees as I dissect a problem. Walking helps too. Almost always, I can resolve a plot or character issue while walking a mile or two.

I agree: nothing better than a nice long walk. What about your process? Do you use index cards for plotting or scribble notes all over a single sheet of paper? Do you find yourself talking in all parts of a scene as you're turning it over in your mind?

Often, my short stories and novels are inspired by photographs, and when that happens, I’m able to identify my protagonist right away — usually the setting too. Plot, though, is something else. With my first two novels, I knew what the ending was before I started, but this time I don’t know how my story will end. I have a map — an outline — but no “X marks the spot,” so this newest endeavor is a leap of faith, and it’s a little scary.

I’ve never been an index-card scribbler, although I do have an idea file, where I’ve stashed appealing names, photos, snippets of dialogue I’ve overheard, and descriptions of landscapes. You might appreciate this one, written on a paper napkin in red ink, dated 3/16/01: Duluth, GA:

·  Redbuds just coming out

·  Daffs about done; tulips emerging

·  Warm, breezy, few clouds in sky

·  Magnolias done; leaves budding

·  (And then at lunch, in a nearby pizza joint): Two teenaged boys playing chess at table. Short hair, white tee-shirts. One boy wears a metal bead necklace. Girls sit next to them – boys totally ignore

·  Little girl with red-juice mustache

I haven’t yet used these details, but I will someday. And I’ll use the photo of Jeff Bridges, too, as he appeared in True Grit. He’ll make an A+ character. 

Renée, best of luck with all your writing projects, and thanks for giving us some of your time.