In 2011, prior to the start of a Sierra Club hiking trip, I spent two days in Lahaina, and it left a bittersweet memory – discovering a quaint, sleepy, laid back port town dating back to pre-Victorian times. So much was preserved – from its ethnic groups’ heritage (Chinese, Japanese) to the mansions of the rich to the Old Jail. And the waterfront looking out towards Molokai was lovely, lined with surfboard shops and art galleries. What an unimaginable loss of life, of culture, of history.
Reading my travel/spirituality essay “Out of Dark Depths” (Parabola Magazine, Winter 2022-23) at the Authors Guild / LA chapter meeting/reading in North Hollywood. Great group of writers; interesting stories spanning the globe from Ghana to Kaua’i to John Lennon at The Dakota to, in my case, Yucatan.
On July 19, I presented at the 20th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA 2023) held at École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France. My talk, titled “Teaching to the Strengths: Language and Culture Inclusive Pedagogies for California Latinx Students,” was part of a daylong “Diversity, Inclusion, and Pedagogic Practices in Culturally Different Educational Systems” symposium, which attracted 60-some participants. The symposium talks and Q&A were conducted in French, English, and Spanish without translation.
In this talk, I summarized my study of culturally responsive pedagogies in the English composition courses taught at Los Angeles City College and proposed a 3-part model for the inclusion of majority minority students in English courses:
The purpose of these pedagogies is both to validate and honor student identities, but also to improve the quality of student writing, something that I’ve written about previously. My study is included as a book chapter in a new volume on decolonizing language pedagogy and research (Routledge, 2023), where it is supported by classroom examples and relevant scholarship. I will be sharing these pedagogies again at an upcoming faculty training symposium at my college in August.
I am grateful for the support from LACC Foundation, which helped me to attend and present at the congress.
For a pre-recorded video of my presenation, taped for the remote participants in advance of the live talk, please contact me at laneigoudin@gmail.com.
Photos: With the symposium organizer Paola Gamboa of Sorbonne University, Paris, and during the talk.
In the latest issue of my newsletter Blessing the Sea, I am reviewing three war memoirs that teach deep spiritual truths: Matti Friedman’s Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Flight to Arras, and Siege in the Hills of Hebron (Dov Knohl, ed.).
War is destructive, but also transformative, like an earthquake piling up new mountain ridges and transforming the landscape. It is also deeply insightful. Disrupting the existing social order, settled lives and laws, the thin layer of civilization that we take for granted, it shines the light into the deepest recesses of the human soul. In other words, war contains a wealth of wisdom about human condition. [ . . . ]
The Citadel, the annual literary magazine published by the English/ESL Department of Los Angeles City College, where I teach, is seeking submissions for its 2023 issue. A staple on the LA literary scene for more than 50 years, The Citadel features juried fiction and poetry by the writers from our college but also from the greater Los Angeles, and this year – from anywhere! Last but not least, present and past issues of each beautifully illustrated print issue are sold on Amazon.
I’ve had the privilege of publishing two narrative essays in The Citadel: “The iPad Wars” (2018), republished in 2022 by The Preservation Foundation Storyhouse Writers Showcase, and “Christmas Dreidels” (2020) included in my upcoming memoir A Family, Maybe, (Ooligan Press, 2024).
This year’s theme is “Belonging in Tempestuous Times,” and the submission deadline is June 10. There is a $5 reading fee benefiting LACC student scholarships.
For more information about the issue and how to submit, see the submission flyer.
On March 23, I greatly enjoyed and helped to facilitate an evening of Israeli poetry in Los Angeles, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the state. For my portion, I read – in Hebrew and English – a poem by a young Mizrahi writer, Adi Keissar. Her “For Those Who” /”Le-Mi Sheh…” is a combative spoken word piece, influenced by hip hop. It’s not nuanced or balanced. It’s in-your-face political, and it makes you think.
Our program was based on the selections from the poetry anthology Israel: Voices from Within, edited by Barry Chazan et al, (Third Place Publications, 2020). The poem I read came from its last, contemporary section, which also features several other Israeli Jewish poets like Erez Biton (my choice #2), Eliaz Cohen, and Ronny Someck, alongside the Druze poet Salman Masalha and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
After presenting Adi Keissar’s piece, I engaged the participants in a contemplative discussion, following something I’ve written about before – how to meditate by reading poetry. It’s a wonderful technique that allows you to move away from reading the text for literal and figurative meaning and open up to the awareness of your own internal reaction to the poem.
Our discussion, fruit/nosh, and music (some poems we read by Nathan Alterman and Zelda Mishkowsky have been turned into songs) reminded me of those fabled banquets from the golden age of Hebrew poetry – in Jewish homes in medieval Spain. A delight on a rainy night.
Reporting on a January 2023 trip
Arriving in Embera Quera was like arriving in paradise.
On the way to the village, as our dugout boat was gliding through the rainforest, we saw toucans, sloths, and capuchin monkeys, and heard the unmistakable rumble of the howler monkeys disturbed by our noise.
There were cows in the clearings and occasional fishermen.
No crocodiles, though we heard there are plenty, as are the snakes.
The waterways our native guide took continue into the inner valleys of the Darien Peninsula, which leads into Colombia, and further into the Amazon region, to whose people the Embera are related.
Upon arrival, we were greeted by the villagers in beaded skirts and wraps, men drumming and women dancing.
Do they dress the same way when the tourists are not around? I doubt it. But it certainly made it special.
What was authentic though was to see a one-room classroom hut educating all of the village kids, watch bare feet stomping terra cota red earth in a circle dance, observe the artisans working achiote-colored grass strands into baskets and masks representing the jai, and others carving tree nuts into the netsuke-like figurines of the creatures of the forest.
My daughter and I bought these handicrafts for very little. You do not bargain with the Embera, we’ ‘d been told. They set their prices low based on the days of labor it took to create them. There is no overhead.
And we lunched on the plantains grown among the huts and fish from the river that had brought us to the village.
The Embera live on a government-deeded land in a semi-autonomous region of Panama housing many indigenous tribes. The village has no running water, and the electricity comes on for only several hours a day, via a generator. There are no plugs in the walls of their huts; the huts, in fact, have no walls, only elevated platforms and thatched roofs.
And yet, there is a pull to stay home, rather than move to Panama City, the modern, urban, financial heart of Central America. The village provides the basics, and the rhythm of life is slower.
I learned some things about the Embera beliefs from the local guide – a young woman who spoke both Spanish and Embera – and the village jaibaná (shaman) told us quite a bit about the traditional beliefs. Some of them are summarized in the “Embera” entry in the Encyclopedia of World Cultures (2019).
Emberá religion is centered on invisible forces called jai. These constitute the essence of things, natural phenomena, animals, and people. They belong to nature, and only the shaman (jaibaná) can see and control them. . . Illness occurs when these elements, which must be kept separate in everyday life, unite; they must then be separated anew by the shaman. The Emberá are emphatic in their belief that the jai are [not spirits, but] material forces or energies. They also believe in “mothers” or “root stocks” of animals—for example, the mother of fish, or the mother of peccaries.
A beautiful village and a memorable experience.
PS. Panama is famous for its wide variety of huacas, poisonous dart frogs, often represented in indigenous / pre-Columbian jewelry and pottery, as well as sloths and butterflies. All photos are taken in the Caribbean rainforest near Embera Quera.
© Lane Igoudin, 2023
Delighted to see my essay “Out of the Dark Depths” in the Winter 2023 issue of Parabola: The Search for Meaning.
The issue theme of this New York-based magazine dedicated to the world’s religious, cultural, and mythological traditions is “Darkness and Light,” and in my essay, I recount an unexpected spiritual awakening that occurred to me while swimming in an underground burial lake, a purported entrance to the underworld in Yucatan.
“We used to bury our people down there, at the bottom,” said my Yucatec Maya guide as he pointed at the cave’s dark mouth, dropping underground at a 45-degree angle. “We would keep them there for eight years, then remove the bones, clean them, and bury them in the ground outside for good . . .”
I did the first public reading of this essay at the annual group reading of the California Writers Club, Long Beach chapter – a warm, supportive group of local writers. (12/10/2022)
It was also mentioned in the winter 2023 issue of the CWCLB newsletter Currents.
Lambda Literary published and included in its December mailings my review of The Magician, Colm Tóibín’s novelized biography of Thomas Mann, Germany’s greatest 20th century writer – and a married and closeted public figure.
“Gay, artistic Thomas is born into a prosperous mercantile family [where] money is as self-evident and essential as water and sunshine. When, a few decades later, the post-war inflation evaporates the family fortune, his mother does what other self-respecting women of her class would do – take to bed and starve herself to death – because she simply doesn’t know how to live otherwise.” [. . . ]
I proposed to write this review for Lambda Literary because of my deep love for both writers. Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, and Death in Venice are among the finest works of fiction I’ve ever read. Toibin’s The Master, Brooklyn, and the lesser-known The Story of the Night are simply delightful. That said, my review points out some flaws in The Magician, and yet, it is a profound book which deserves to be read, a study of a life rich, complex, and meaningful.
Check it out and please 
support this wonderful organization.
Super excited: my travel essay “Out of the Depths of a Mayan Burial Cave,” based on a mind-opening spiritual experience in Yucatan, has been bought by Parabola (New York). Can’t wait to see in their Winter 2022/23 issue!
Parabola, also known as Parabola: The Search for Meaning, is a Manhattan-based quarterly magazine on the subjects of mythology and the world’s religious and cultural traditions.
Lane Igoudin | Author, Professor, Dad