Between the Lines: Erna's Life (Memories of a Latvian Refugee)

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 guests: Janice Whelan and Erna Roberts

Janice Whelan and Erna Murmanis-Roberts

CREDIT DAWN COCHRAN

Erna Roberts was only 22, and expecting her first of four daughters, when she watched Soviet tanks roll down the streets of Latvia’s capitol city, Riga. In the coming days, she would lose her home, her family would scatter, and the life she had known would be gone forever. Her mother, grandfather, and 16-year-old brother were captured and deported to Siberia. Her father went into hiding in the woods. Erna and her husband became refugees overnight.

The slim biography, Erna’s Life, by Janice Whelan, is the story of Erna Murmanis-Roberts, a 98-year-old Latvian woman who came to the United States during World War Two as a refugee from the Soviet occupation. Roberts now lives in Adrian, Michigan, where she met Whelan.

“Erna lives in an apartment building three houses down from my home,” says Whelan as she describes why decided to write the book about Erna Roberts’ memories. “I was a high school friend of her youngest daughter, Inara. Then I became adult friends with her third daughter, Zaiga. While Zaiga encouraged the writing of the book, eldest daughter Astride spearheaded the project. The girls had always asked their mother Erna to tell her story. But Erna didn’t want to talk about it.”

CREDIT JANICE WHELAN

Roberts’ four daughters were persistent. They convinced their mother, then 95, to tell her life story, and they convinced Whelan to transcribe it. A retired Adrian Public Schools language arts teacher, Whelan knew a good story when she heard one. She agreed to write the book for Roberts’ family, but found it that it held interest for other people too.

“Growing up next to Erna and her family, I had had no idea what they had been through,” Whelan says. “Erna didn’t want to talk about ...

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Between the Lines: Shaka Senghor

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: Shaka Senghor

Shaka Senghor

CREDIT CONVERGENT BOOKS

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2,220,300 adults are incarcerated in federal and state prisons. In 2013, the Michigan Department of Corrections reported a prison population of 43,704. The United States has the largest prison population in the world. And our recidivism rate is around 70 percent. “That’s another way of saying our prison system is failing 70 percent of the time,” saysShaka Senghor.

Senghor served 19 years in Michigan prisons for second-degree murder and wroteWriting My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison about that experience. Today, he's not only a New York Times bestselling author, he's also working for criminal justice system reform. Senghor speaks across the country at schools and universities about his experience. His TED talks about criminal justice reform have been viewed more than a million times and have been featured as one of the most powerful TED Talks of 2014.

Senghor works with a national bipartisan initiative called #cut50 to cut the nation's prison population in half by 2025. Oprah Winfrey has referred to her interview with Senghor as “One of the best I’ve ever had — not just in my career, but in my life…His story touched my soul.”

Senghor says, “I wanted to write this book so that people can experience what it is like inside our prisons without having to be arrested.”

Senghor grew up in Detroit, suffering at the hands of an abusive mother who herself was abused as a child. He adored his father, but he left when the marriage fell apart — twice. Unable to bear the brokenness of his family and the abuse, Senghor ran away as a young teen, living on the streets.

CREDIT CONVERGENT BOOKS

“I was around 13, 14, when I first entered the drug culture,” Senghor says. “I experienced everything that comes with that — (a) childhood friend being murdered, being robbed at gunpoint, being beaten nearly to death, and eventually, at the age of 17, I was shot multiple times while standing on the corner of my block.”

What Senghor didn’t realize at the time was that ...

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Plan on learning: Interns learn through experience

by Zinta Aistars
Published in Southwest Michigan's Second Wave Media
March 3, 2016

Interns at work in downtown Kalamazoo

That moment always comes, when the event planner must pull his or her hair out. 

Deb Droppers, instructor in the WMU School of Public Affairs and Administration, guarantees it. In her role as head of Kalamazoo’s Experiential Learning Center, or KELC, it is one of the many lessons she lets her interns learn the hard way—on their own, fistfuls of hair in hand, just before they get to work fixing the problem. 

“Oh, I love to tear my hair out,” says Droppers, with a chuckle. She earned a master’s of public administration from Western Michigan University in 1981. “I’ve been doing it since 1995, when I started The Event Company, and it was based on providing interns opportunities to plan events. Back then, we called them party planners. Today, it’s much more about business management.”

When she began her company, she operated out of her living room, forever apologizing to the students milling about in her house, helping her organize hundreds of events. The students didn’t mind. Her husband finally did. He offered to buy his wife a building to house her business.

Now located in the heart of activity in downtown Kalamazoo, KELC offers internships to juniors or seniors majoring in event management, communications, marketing, public relations, graphic design, or similar field of student study.

“From start to finish, the center has been student-led, managed and implemented,” Droppers says.

The center was an important opportunity to practice what is preached in the classroom. They’ve got the book knowledge. Now they’re putting it to use.”

Becca Shemberger graduated from WMU in 2015 with a degree in public relations, and she is grateful to Droppers and KELC for giving her the edge that helped her land her job as an engineering recruiter.

“Deb gives you direction, but then lets you do the work,” Shemberger says. 

One of her projects as an intern was to ...

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This story was originally published in the Western Michigan University Magazine.

Between the Lines: Memories of the Revolution

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: Holly Hughes

Women who performed at the WOW Café Theater on New York City's Lower East Side sometimes called themselves the "Uncooperative Cooperative." Holly Hughes was one of those women. She's said more than once that WOW saved her life.

WOW, or Women’s One World, is a feminist theater space that started in the early 1980's. It was, and still is, a place where many gay women like Hughes found both themselves and their art. WOW became the safe place where they could be who they are without judgment or persecution. At WOW, women who had long felt themselves to be on the margins of society could express themselves as rebels while developing lasting bonds of friendship and support. Their "uncooperative" selves found cooperation in each other.

Hughes is a contributing editor to Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café Theater (co-edited by Carmelita Tropicana and Jill Dolan). The book, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2015, is a collection of memories, play scripts, and photographs of WOW’s first decade.

“I was in New York for a couple of years before I found my way to the WOW Café,” says Hughes. “I saw a poster for a double X-rated Christmas party for women. I thought, 'wow, this looks fun and weird in a good way.' I went to the party and kind of never left.”

What Hughes found was a group of women creating outrageous work for the stage.

“WOW was so warm and welcoming,” she says. “It was my sorority. They were breaking the rules. I was looking for that kind of sense of community. Particularly a feminist sort of community.”

WOW was different than other theater groups in that no play was censored and no auditions were required. Any play got to the stage. Whatever members wrote was performed, no questions asked.

“The idea that was implicit in this was that people get better by doing the work,” Hughes says.

Hughes found that having that kind of acceptance fostered a daring creativity. While she had expected to work back stage, the Café was too small — “I think maybe it was 12 feet across,” Hughes says — to have a back stage. Instead, she found herself performing and writing plays of her own. She found that she liked it.

“When I say now that WOW saved my life — I ...

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Between the Lines: Novelist as Forger

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 guests: Dominic Smith

Dominic Smith CREDIT STACY SODOLAK

In some ways, Dominic Smith says novelists are like forgers. Both fake reality. Both create new worlds out of elements of the real world. In his fourth and latest novel,The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (Sarah Crichton Books, April 2016), Smith introduces readers to the world of a master forger, bringing history to life.

An Australian art history student becomes a forger as she takes on the task of replicating a painting by Sara de Vos, a 17th-century painter who lived in the Dutch Golden Age. She copies the painting for an art dealer of questionable ethics. But her work as a forger is threatened with exposure when the real painting is scheduled to arrive at the same exhibit at the same time.

Sara de Vos has only one painting attributed to her by name: “At the Edge of the Wood.” During a time when women artists were hidden or nonexistent, those few who painted usually chose still lifes as subjects. That might have been because women were expected to stay indoors, preferably in the kitchen or nursery. But Sara de Vos chose to paint landscapes. Her work is exquisite, as are Smith’s descriptions of it. And it is more than just a painting. It's a statement of rebellion over a woman’s place in the world.

Smith describes the painting at the heart of his novel: “A winter scene at twilight. The girl stands in the foreground against a silver birch, a pale hand pressed to its bark, staring out at the skaters on the frozen river. There are half a dozen of them, bundled against the cold, flecks of brown and yellow cloth floating above the ice. A brindled dog trots beside a boy as he arcs into a wide turn. One mitten in the air, he’s beckoning to the girl, to us…”

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Through de Vos’s work and her rule-breaking, Smith tells the story of the Dutch Golden Age, and of the struggle of single and widowed women to earn a living. He also illuminates the inner workings of the artist guilds of the time. And juxtaposed with today, Smith unveils the extraordinary skill and techniques that go into making a forged painting.

“I read this memoir by master forger Ken Perenyi,” Smith says. “It was calledCaveat Emptor, and I was fascinated by it. At one point, I emailed him, and that was one of the stranger moments of writing this book — emailing a master forger to have him authenticate a painting that was by a fictitious character.”

Perenyi responded, and he guided Smith through the finer points of art forgery. At least half of what a forger does, Smith learned, has more to do with ...

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