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Articles by Sari Fordham
Shaking Hands with Idi Amin
My mother stands in the Entebbe airport, a daughter on each side. It is January 1978, and Idi Amin has been up to his usual brutality. He has murdered four college professors, scores of Christians in the southeast, and fifteen high-ranking officials, and these are just the killings reported in The New York Times. Since he has taken power, Idi Amin has killed one hundred thousand Ugandans, or three hundred thousand. Human rights observers aren’t sure.
Care about pollinators? Skip ‘No Mow May’ and do this instead (Guest Opinion by Sari Fordham)
Sari Fordham, of Manlius, is a creative writing professor at SUNY Oswego. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Insider, Electric Lit and Short Reads, among others. I’m an environmental activist, and this May, we will mow our lawn. If you haven’t heard, No Mow May is an environmental movement where homeowners forgo mowing for a month so spring flowers can bloom and feed pollinators. It began in England and has spread rapidly in the United States.
7 Books to Read When the World Is on Fire
Reading Lists Steps for a sustainable path forward “System Change, Not Climate Change,” we chant during environmental marches. We write the slogan on signs and hashtag it on social media. But how do you change systems when your government denies climate change, silences experts, and promises to increase fossil fuel production? When my daughter was born in 2014, it was the warmest year on record; each year since has been warmer.
Some Excellent Personal Essays to Get You Through this Week...
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, now featuring four verticals: Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “MRI of a Rose,” by .
Redfin, Show Me a Renovated Version of Myself
Redfin, Show Me a Renovated Version of Myself There, on Redfin, is Grover Cleveland’s childhood home. Price: $295,000. Despite my undergraduate degree in history, my knowledge of Grover Cleveland is scant. I can only pick him out of a presidential lineup is if he’s included twice for those nonconsecutive terms. A Google search reveals a mustache and a vague Theodore Roosevelt vibe, though I might be romanticizing since I now want to live in his childhood home.
Soma Mei Sheng Frazier on the Dangers of Writing About the Uyghur Genocide
Skip to content interviews The author of "Off the Books" discusses how being a parent has made her a better writer and the connections between structural racism in China and the United States In Off the Books, Soma Mei Sheng Frazier draws readers into a classic road trip novel and then surprises us with a geopolitical twist. Protagonist Měi, an Ivy League dropout, drives a taxi off the books and is transporting her new client Henry across the country.
Driver Ants
The night we arrive in Uganda, my mother wakes to the sound of rain, not a storm, but a steady slap of drops against pane. She rolls over, her body weary from the plane and the children and the jet lag. Although we are at the top of a hill, windows flung open to catch a breeze, the air is heavy and my mother realizes with a start that she’s in Africa. Full awake, she sits, pulling one leg against her chest. Next to her, my father is stretched out, snoring.
You Might Need Actual Magic to Escape Your Hometown
conversations Sara Flannery Murphy's novel "The Wonder State" is a portal into the Arkansas Ozarks in the Y2K era The Wonder State, Sara Flannery Murphy’s genre-bending novel, follows five friends as they reckon with a past betrayal. Brandi, now missing, has invoked (with a touch of magic) the oath they all made as teenagers. With her words ringing in their minds—”You promised”—the friends return to their small hometown in Arkansas.
The Beauty and Pain in Growing Out of Adventism
Review of All of Us Together in the End by Matthew Vollmer. Matthew Vollmer's exquisite memoir All of Us Together in the End arrived at my house on Wednesday, and by Friday I had finished reading it and had recommended it to four friends, all with roots in Adventism. Finding my childhood church in a literary—by which I mean secular—space was a satisfying experience for me, made richer by Vollmer's prose, which is tender and precise, never straying into the simplistic.
My daughter loves picking up trash. This is not the feel-good story adults want it to be.
My daughter made me realize the trash around us when she was a toddler and would pick it up. One day she made me stop the car to grab a deflated balloon so an animal wouldn't eat it. Adults need to realize the mess we are leaving children with. Loading Something is loading. Thanks for signing up! Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go.
My daughter loves picking up trash. This is not the feel-good story adults want it to be.
Read full article The author with her daughter collecting trash. Courtesy of the author My daughter made me realize the trash around us when she was a toddler and would pick it up. One day she made me stop the car to grab a deflated balloon so an animal wouldn't eat it. Adults need to realize the mess we are leaving children with. My 5-year-old daughter Kai scurried around a bus stop in Finland, picking up candy wrappers and plastic bottles and dumping them in the waste bin.
Books Archives - Collegeville Institute
You are here: Home / Archives for Bearings / Books The stories we tell about our bodies can bring freedom, agency, and joy, even when faced with our bodies' limits or trauma. What does the story of your body reveal? "The question Dorothy asked of herself and her readers in 1933 remains the same one I have: what are people of faith to do in such a moment in history?" Enjoy these books by Collegeville Institute-affiliated writers about parents, grandparents, and healing.
Female Fear Is a Rational Response to Violence
In her debut collection, Under My Bed and Other Essays, Jody Keisner meticulously unpacks her fears, revealing their complex interiors. Her subject matter is diverse, ranging from 1980s horror films to parenting to adoption to wildfires to reincarnation to autoimmune disease to murder. She weaves research throughout her personal stories, which has the effect of ensuring that readers learn something about themselves and what it means to be human.
An Unfinished Death
The Clean Daughter: A Cross-Continental Memoir by Jill Kandel is a meditation on family. It’s also a fascinating examination of Jill’s vexing relationship with her Dutch father-in-law, Izaak Kendal. When Izaak chooses euthanasia, legal in the Netherlands, Jill is shaken and unable to process her grief. She turns to research, and it is there she learns horrifying details about the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and Izaak’s trauma as a teen.
I don't give party favors at my kid's birthday. I wish more parents would join me in giving kids nothing.
At my kid's graduation parade, I suggested giving out rocks and money. Plastic toys are harmful to the environment. I want to make sure my kid has a planet to live on. I wish more parents would join me in giving kids absolutely nothing at parties. Loading Something is loading. For my daughter's birthday, I baked two cakes: one so she could blow out candles during a pandemic and one for guests.
A Conversation with Sari Fordham
Sari Fordham teaches creative writing at La Sierra University and is the faculty editor of The Roadrunner Review, an international literary journal that features the work of student writers. Her essays have been published in Brevity, The Chattahoochee Review, Passages North, and Green Mountains Review, among others. Fordham’s first book Wait for God to Notice is a memoir centered on her childhood in a Seventh-Day Adventist missionary family in Uganda during Idi Amin’s dictatorship.
Adventist Environmentalist Tackles Plastic Pollution in Uganda
Sadrach Nirere, founder of the End Plastic Pollution initiative and Coordinator for Fridays for Future Uganda, has partnered with fellow activists and youth volunteers on various projects and initiatives throughout Uganda in an effort to raise awareness, hold corporations to higher standards, and end plastic pollution in his home country and beyond. Question: Can you tell us about your Adventist background? Answer: I was born in Uganda to an Adventist family. My father is a local church elder.
The Environment and the Sabbath
There’s an old Adventist joke, which goes something like this: Two Adventists meet each other on a path after potluck. One has binoculars and a bird book, the other is wearing a swimsuit and carrying a towel. The Adventist with binoculars sniffs at the Adventist in a swimsuit and asks, “So, what are you planning on doing today?” “Oh, I’m going fish watching. What about you?” I’ve been thinking about this joke a lot lately, though it’s so dated not every reader will catch the punchline.
A (Sometimes) Beautiful World
November 17, 2020 How we find what we look for BY SARI FORDHAM On a cloudy afternoon in South Korea I watched water flow uphill. Cars, placed into neutral, also seemed to roll up the tarmac. I knew it was an optical illusion, yet I was still charmed. I was traveling with strangers. We had few words in common—just smiles and gestures, yes and no. We had met on Halla Mountain, and as so often happens on mountains, we began hiking together. They shared tangerines; I shared chocolate.
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