Between the Lines: Sleeping Tiger Awakes

by Zinta Aistars

for WMUK 102.1 FM
Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate



Between the Lines is my weekly radio show about books and writers with a Michigan connection. It airs every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., 11:55 a.m., and 4:20 p.m. (or listen anytime online), on WMUK 102.1 FM, Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate. I am the host of Between the Lines.

This week's guest: Dr. Anne Marie Ameri

Martha Obermiller of Denver, right, chants during a rally protesting the immigration policies of President Donald Trump, near the White House in Washington, Saturday, Feb. 4, 2017

CREDIT MANUEL BALCE CENETA / AP PHOTO

What does the average American really know about Muslims and the religion of Islam? For all that we hear in the news every day, misperceptions abound. But a Michigan writer hopes to change that.

According to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center, Islam is the second largest religion after Christianity, with 1.6 billion Muslims around the world. Approximately 3.5 million of them live in the United States. Muslims are the majority in 49 countries.

Anne Marie Ameri of Dearborn felt she had to write Awakening the Sleeping Tiger Within: Breaking the Power of Mainstream Media’s Portrayal of Islam and The War on Terrorism (2016) to address misperceptions.

“I couldn’t sit back and do nothing,” Ameri says. “There was biased and inaccurate reporting by those who are not Muslim and had their own agenda, telling us what Muslims believe, making up things like if you kill a person, you will be rewarded with 72 virgins in heaven. Actually, what our holy book says is that if you kill one person, it’s as if you have killed all of humanity.”

Ameri studied history and psychology at Henry Ford College and Eastern Michigan University before earning her doctoral degree at Wayne State University. She also studied law at the University of Detroit-Mercy.

CREDIT ANNE MARIE AMERI

Ameri decided to apply her research skills to writing the book, and to develop strategies for overcoming misinformation about Islam. She says people should stay informed using a diverse selection of media to get an overall picture. That way, Ameri says they will be better able to separate what is true from politically motivated propaganda.

Ameri says demonstrations around the country protesting the Trump administration's recent executive order banning immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries have been ...

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Between the Lines: Writing Through Cancer

by Zinta Aistars

for WMUK 102.1 FM
Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate



Between the Lines is my weekly radio show about books and writers with a Michigan connection. It airs every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., 11:55 a.m., and 4:20 p.m. (or listen anytime online), on WMUK 102.1 FM, Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate. I am the host of Between the Lines.

This week's guest: Fleda Brown

Fleda Brown

CREDIT FLEDA BROWN

Fleda Brown is a cancer survivor. Being a writer, she wrote her way through her illness and found that doing so gave her the strength and courage to get her through the journey back to wellness. Her book is called My Wobbly Bicycle: Meditations on Cancer and the Creative Life (Mission Point Press, 2016).

Brown’s tenth book, a collection of poetry called The Woods are on Fire: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), is due out in March, and most of Brown’s published work is poetry. She was Delaware's poet laureate from 2001 to 2007. But Brown's ordeal with cancer turned her toward prose.

Brown says writing about her cancer treatment as it happened, “Was a pretty darn important part of the treatment. I write all the time anyway, and I had a blog that I had started almost a year before the diagnosis. It had been mostly about writing. I didn’t write about the cancer at first, but after surgery, I decided it was so much the center of my life then that I might as well.”

The blog gained many followers and Brown turned her posts there into the memoir, My Wobbly Bicycle. She found that writing about her treatment helped her cope. She described her experiences with chemotherapy and radiation therapy; dealing with hair loss; and the fears and hopes that rose along with a new realization of her own mortality. And she described her recovery.

CREDIT MISSION POINT PRESS

“This became my most important writing,” Brown says. “I would lie in bed at night thinking about how I wanted to word something.”

As a part of her experience as a cancer survivor, Brown says she ...

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Between the Lines: Joseph Gross, Poet

by Zinta Aistars

for WMUK 102.1 FM
Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate



Between the Lines is my weekly radio show about books and writers with a Michigan connection. It airs every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., 11:55 a.m., and 4:20 p.m. (or listen anytime online), on WMUK 102.1 FM, Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate. I am the host of Between the Lines.

This week's guest: Joseph Gross

Joseph Gross

CREDIT ANGELA GROSS

Joseph Gross is the director of the Ransom District Library in Plainwell, where the kids call him “Mr. Joe.” But he’s also a poet and his first poetry collection, Everything at Rest is Waiting to Move, was recently published by Celery City Chapbooks.

“These are poems culled from the last five years or so,” Gross says. “As I put them together, I found a theme of change…Many of them were inspired by a class I took at Western for my MFA, with Bill Olsen."

Gross says Olsen helped him focus on poetry as he studied creative nonfiction at Loyola University with Dean Young before coming to Western Michigan University. Gross's stories, essays, and poems have appeared in a variety of national journals, including the Alaska Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, the Mid-American Review, and Redivider.

Gross worked as editor-in-chief at Atticus Review for some years. His approach to poetry then was not necessarily how well he understood a particular poem as to how deeply it moved him.

CREDIT CELERY CITY CHAPBOOKS

“There are poems that I’ve admired without necessarily being moved,” Gross says. “I tend to like poetry in which I can find my bearing rather than something that is so abstract that it’s difficult to find an entry point. That can be almost embarrassing to admit, but I can also say that I’ve been moved by poems that I can’t say I totally understood.”

Gross acknowledges that many people are intimidated by poetry, especially those more abstract and dense works that can be challenging to understand.

“Sometimes you have to ..."

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