Q&A on Skedaddle

I’ve been so pleased with the response to my “No Pink” blog post that ran on the Women’s Adventure Magazine site.  Many women really seemed to respond to this paragraph:

“Mirroring my former life is not a realistic expectation. Nor, quite frankly, is it something that’s even a priority anymore. It’s not about not being able to. I simply don’t want to. There are other things I’d rather do, most of which involve my daughter.”

Lia Keller was one of those women who wrote me after my article appeared. She runs the Skedaddle blog (Activities, Giveaways and Reviews To Help Your Child Get Outside Rain, Sun or Snow) out of Alaska, and asked me to answer a few questions about getting outside with a kiddo.  Below’s a link to the Q&A she posted on the site:

Wild Child Tara Kusumoto

What fun to connect with all the other moms out there, trying to figure out how to navigate this mommyhood adventure!

Facebook friends offer book suggestions

When I asked for a favorite recent read, dozens of people chimed in… gotta love the Facebook universe for conversations like this! So that we don’t lose everyone’s recommendations, figured it would be worth collecting here.

Getting multiple votes were The Help, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, Sarah’s Key and Born to Run.

And the mamas spoke too: The Three Martini Play Date an Sippy Cups are Not for Chardonnay.

Of the suggestions, many are on my own personal favorites list: Little Bee (here’s a review I wrote on it awhile back for Women’s Adventure Magazine), Let the Great World Spin, Glass Castle, The Alchemist.

The full list:

• The Ice Margin
• Art of Racing in the Rain
• What is the What
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
• Sacred Games
• City of Thieves
• Cutting for Stone
• The Space Between Us
• Mutant Message Down Under
• Clash of the Eagles
• Passion on the Vine
• Speaking of Faith (essays)
• The Blue Sweater
• The Acumen Fund
• To the Wedding
• Blindness
• The Hour of the Star
• Ill Fares the Land
• To the End of the Land
• The Life of Pi

It’s almost time to do my annual “Top 10″ list… Let the Great World Spin will definitely be on it. Half Broke Horses, A Widow for One Year and American Wife will also likely find a spot.

Quote to Live By

I know I’ve been reading too much light fare when it’s been months since I’ve stopped on a sentence, re-read it and written down the quote in my “reading journal.” Finally, Curtis Sittenfeld made me stop and think – and appreciate – while I was reading The Man of My Dreams.

She writes:

“Perhaps this is how you know you are doing the thing you’re intended to: No matter how slow or slight your progress, you never feel that it’s a waste of time.”

Whether you’re talking about motherhood, a career, or relationships, these are certainly words to live by.

Of her three books, American Wife was my favorite, followed by Prep, then Man of My Dreams. I highly recommend Sittenfeld for her honest characters, her wit and humor, and her tight prose.  Can’t wait for the next novel!

Let the Paralympic Games Begin

The Olympics have wrapped up, but the Games are far from over in Vancouver and Whistler. This Saturday, March 13, the Winter Paralympic Games begin, with more than 600 athletes from 40 countries competing for gold.

The Paralympics – often mistakenly called the Para-Olympics – are for elite athletes with physical disabilities.

Joe Kusumoto Photography (http://kusumotophoto.blogspot.com/)

An alpine skier who’s visually impaired relies on her guide as her “sight” to stay on course. A soldier who lost both of his legs in Iraq races on prosthetic legs in his first Paralympic competition. A Nordic athlete swaps her wheelchair for a sit-ski for the 10 kilometer classic cross country race.

Along with visually impaired (VI), amputee and spinal injuries, athlete disability categories include Cerebral Palsy, which affects movement, reflexes and posture, as well as “les autres,” encompassing physical disabilities such as Dwarfism and Multiple Sclerosis.

Held at the same competition venues as the Olympics, the Paralympic Winter Games feature five sports: alpine skiing (downhill, Super-G, Super Combined, Giant Slalom and Slalom), cross country skiing, biathlon, sled hockey (also known as ice sledge hockey), and wheelchair curling. Both alpine and Nordic are further separated into “standing,” “sitting” and “visually impaired” categories to fairly match athletes against like abilities.

“Every day, every year, every Games, we continue to break thresholds and increase in excellence,” said Charlie Huebner, Chief of Paralympics, U.S. Olympic Committee. “Competitors are getting stronger, sports are developing and performances are phenomenal.”

13 women and 37 men will represent Team USA in 2010, and while they certainly have podium potential, Huebner says that “having the team represent our country and perform at the best of their abilities is what success will be.”

Building Community, Developing Athletes

For the U.S. Paralympics, establishing community-level resources for kids with physical disabilities goes hand in hand with developing a pipeline of future Paralympians. The organization’s Paralympic Sport Clubs create a healthier population of kids with physical disabilities by offering them the chance to participate in daily activity and sport.

“With physical activity comes engagement,” says Huebner, “and we see every day how being integrated as part of the peer process has positive social impact on those individuals.”

Continued emphasis on developing programs around the country will help the organization grow from 114 clubs today to their goal of 250 by 2012. And with that growth, chances are we’ll see a natural pipeline of elite athletes who may one day aspire to Paralympic dreams.

Where to Watch

Both in the U.S. and around the world, Huebner observes that the Paralympic movement is making more of an impact, leading to further integration of programming with the Olympics. This year, for example, the Olympic men’s and women’s hockey coaches and the Paralympic sled hockey coaches were named at the same time.

While U.S. broadcast of the Paralympics does not yet match that of the Olympics, coverage continues to improve thanks to increased interest from the American public, and increased support from individual and corporate sponsors.

This year, you can catch Opening Ceremonies and recaps on NBC Sports and Universal Sports:

• NBC Sports Opening Ceremony highlights – Saturday, March 13, 1:00-2:00 p.m. ET
• NBC Sports Paralympics recap – Saturday, April 10, 3:00-5:00 p.m. ET
• Universal Sports nightly two hour program – Monday, March 15–Tuesday March 23, 7:00 p.m. ET (re-air at 11:00 p.m. ET)
• U.S. Paralympic Team – daily video and news highlights
• Paralympic Sport TV – live daily coverage online

Additional resources:

• Paralympic Sport Club Programs
• Current Paralympic Sport Clubs

Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life

In the late 1960s and 70s, the male-dominated climbing establishment shunned Arlene Blum. During a time when women weren’t welcome because they couldn’t carry heavy loads or handle the effects of high altitude, she was ostracized for her sex alone. Hard to believe, that was less than 50 years ago.

Blum’s Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life tells her story of lost opportunities – both in the mountaineering world and her own upbringing – that led to accomplishment.

In many ways, she’s the “every woman,” describing trouble with relationships, how to balance a desire for adventure with career and financial needs, and family struggles that created both insecurity and drive.

On the other hand, Blum stands alone in her experiences. She received her PhD in chemistry, conducted protein folding studies that contributed to breakthroughs in AIDS research, and investigated flame retardants in kids’ sleepwear, helping to ban the use of such carcinogens. Alongside her academic feats, she also broke trail for female mountaineers: she led the first women’s climbing team on Denali (“The Great One”), was the first American woman to attempt Everest and set a world altitude record for American women on Annapurna I.

What sets this book apart from other mountaineering memoirs is Blum’s humility.

Read the rest of the review at Women’s Adventure Magazine.

The start of my writing career?

A friend on Facebook pulled up this old ‘book’ from grade school. While it was the proper use of a semicolon, boy was I lacking storytelling coherence!

Maybe this was the true start of my writing career….

Books with a Cause

As we come to the end of what’s been a challenging economic year, it’s worth taking a moment to shed the financial stress and dig down into what really makes us tick. For some, it’s more hours out on the trails or quality time with family and friends. For others, it’s appreciating that no matter how much they might have lost, too many people still have less.

One of my favorite Breckenridge, Colo. restaurants, Amazing Grace Natural Eatery, has recognized exactly that. Despite a tough year and endless hard work to make their small business thrive, owner Monique Merrill and staff have decided to start a small charitable giving program to benefit local nonprofits.

Good at the Grace, which they call “a small project inspired by the generous souls who visit us daily,” will take place once a season in support of philanthropic efforts that share the profile of Amazing Grace: “small in stature, but enthusiastically spreading goodness in the world in a joyful, big-hearted way.”

On December 22, Amazing Grace will kick off the program by donating 100% of the day’s net profit, including tips and salary, to the Langtang Medical Clinic in Nepal. The small clinic, established in 2006 by “Doc PJ” (Craig Perrinjaquet), provides free primary medical care to more than 1500 Nepali villagers annually.

Following the lead of Amazing Grace, I hope to extend the goodness with a list of reads that will educate, inspire and offer new ways to make a positive impact. Each of the books below incorporates elements of memoir, adventure and documentary style storytelling, while also leaving you with a reason to support the cause.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn In Half the Sky, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn discuss the major abuses of women worldwide, including sex trafficking, gender-based violence and maternal mortality. They are clear in their goal: they want to recruit all readers to “join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts.”

Strength in What Remains, Tracy Kidder – From the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Mountains beyond Mountains, Strength in What Remains tells the story of Deo, who after living through a civil war and genocide in Burundi, moves to the U.S. to create a new life in New York City.

Stones into Schools, Greg Mortenson – In the sequel to his bestselling Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson continues his story of building schools for young women, this time in the secluded northeast corner of Afghanistan.

First They Killed my Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, Loung Ung – This memoir follows Loung as she’s displaced from privilege in Phnom Penh and forced into work camps under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge army. Bones that Float: A Story of Adopting Cambodia by Kari Grady Grossman and The Road to Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine by Somaly Mam are also worthy companion reads.

Resources

• Half the Sky Movement
• Village Health Works
• Partners in Health
• Cambodian Genocide Program
• Sustainable Schools International
• Somaly Mam Foundation
• Central Asia Institute
• Pennies for Peace
• Grace Notes blog

(This post also appeared in my latest blog for the Women’s Adventure Magazine newsletter)

Guterson: Modern Day Hemingway?

I just finished The Other, by David Guterson (author of Snow Falling on Cedars.) Is this the most underrated novel of the year, or did I just miss the reviews? I loved everything about this book: the social commentary; the pitch perfect narrator voice; the risks of the mysterious, yet believable, storyline; the literary, cultural and geographic references. This is truly a modern day classic.

Let me back up. This is the story of two friends, John William Barry and Neil Countryman, who meet as competitors at a highschool track meet in the 70s and connect through a love of wilderness and outings exploring Washington state’s remote backcountry. According to the back of the book, this is a “coming-of-age novel that presents two powerfully different visions of what it means to live a good life and the compromises that come with fulfillment.”

As I was reading it, I kept thinking of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Strong male perspective. Female characters in the wings. Constant inner turmoil battling everyone else’s expectations. Hermetic brooding. The cave. Survival. Compromise.

Early on in the novel, it’s all about getting high and getting lost:

“We kept spinning our map around and rereading its contours, but so what? There was no way to make its symbols correspond to the world. Always this pattern – the three of us huddled over our map and deliberating on emptiness, then coming up empty. Was there something, somewhere, we could anchor to?”

The novel goes far beyond boyhood games in the woods. It’s exploration on a much deeper level – exploring ourselves, our families, the world around us.

While I’m certainly not a backcountry expert, I love the wild realm of the outdoors: the peace, beauty and connection it offers over a cushy, material life. As Neil says, “…there was a residue of this lonely and acute perception of the organized social world as a pathetic illusion…” This pull of contrasting environments and philosophies serves as the foundation for The Other - the storyline and setting are current and relevant, yet the questions that surface are timeless.

This is not a book for a casual reader, but I’ve already recommended it to a handful of people- surprisingly, all men -who I know will appreciate it.

(As I was writing this review, Simon & Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound came on the radio. Like pairing the right wine with your meal, this is perfect soundtrack for this book… )

Little Bee

I’m blown away by Chris Cleave’s Little Bee. One of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.

I need to simmer on this a bit before writing, but stay tuned for a review. In the meantime, fiction lovers: keep an eye out for this winner!

Mr. Cleave: Bravo.

“To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well – here is the truth – you have to talk yourself out of it.“

Lost in the Twitter Vortex

Has anyone else’s blogging suffered since they entered the world of micro-blogging?

I am shocked that I am now a regular Tweeter (@TaraDK) but quite honestly, I love the connections it breeds, from books/ authors/ publishers (a thriving community on Twitter!) to technology pundits/ reporters/ vendors. The only downside of the vortex is that it has distracted me from my original blog baby – Mingling with Words. (And alas! even as I am back here in the WordPress dashboard, I am still thinking and writing about my other love: Twitter.)

More on Twitter in future posts, but for now, let’s talk adventure reads…

For the history/biography fan, check out Linda Colley’s The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, which I reviewed for Women’s Adventure Magazine in March. (Twitterized Review Title: One Woman’s Wonderlust, 200 Years Removed.)

And, just in:  a review of A Pearl in the Storm, by Tori Murden McClure. (Keeping an Even Keel: A Solo Trip across the Ocean.)

Happy reading – and of course…

Happy tweeting!