A book tour like none other…
admin October 18th, 2007
(Frances) From past experience I’d seen the challenge of a book tour as figuring out how to repeat my key messages over and over while always sounding fresh. But this time around, with Getting a Grip, the challenge is not the similarity of experiences but the rich differences. My head is spinning.
Last week it was the UConn Coop in Storrs, Connecticut, where I met impressive student leaders before the event. We sat in the bookstore café next to a lighted sign offering two recipes from my 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet. That’s a first! We talked about social movements on campuses and the need to ignite students’ sense of what’s possible. One idea we came up with was the student paper running, each day, a surprising, featured fact about the environmental crisis and known solutions. The idea was to create a “drip, drip, drip” of startling information to trigger more student engagement.
Later, at the packed book event itself, I spotted my old friend and democracy-champion Martha McCoy of the Study Circles Resource Center, whose words—about democracy not always being a need we know we have until we experience it—open chapter 3 of Getting a Grip. Then came the Massachusetts Public Health Association gathering, where I tied the message of Getting a Grip to health. What energy in that room! I was pleased to learn from host Terry Mason that the association is part of a campaign to send colorful postcards to state legislators asking for the removal of junk food from schools. Mine is on its way. The Wellesley Booksmith, selling many of my books, ran out of Getting a Grip–a real thrill for me.
Now here I am at Suffolk University where I am a visiting scholar for a week of classes and talks. It’s great! This morning, for example, I met with a media literacy class. I’d asked the students to prepare a one-page assignment answering the following question: What is the root cause or causes of needless suffering in the world? Their answers were thoughtful and fascinating. Many concluded that humans are simply selfish and greedy and power hungry.
An author’s dream: Suffolk students reading Democracy’s Edge (only slightly staged!)
On the way to class I had stopped for coffee. The shop asked each customer to contribute $1 to Boston’s Children’s Hospital, and among those in my line not one person refused. What an interesting juxtaposition to the students’ views. A premise of Getting a Grip is that we absorb in this culture the notion that human beings are narrowly selfish, even though it is belied by our daily experience. Getting a Grip makes the case that it is the much greater complexity of human nature—including hard-wired need for fairness and cooperation—that makes the emergence of Living Democracy possible.
I hope I helped students to question negative assumptions that may themselves be self-fulfilling.
I also got to visit the Boston farmers’ market with students in a course on sustainability. And after our visit they prepared the best apple sauce I’ve ever eaten!
With Suffolk students at Boston farmers’ market
A book tour like no other!
Frankie
P. S. Yesterday here at Suffolk I showed our new film, Getting a Grip on Money and Politics, on a big screen for the first time. It reveals that we don’t have to settle for the “best democracy money can buy”! I hope you watch it and get inspired.
