MSI Press Blog

  Today's book excerpt comes from  Blest Atheist  by Elizabeth Mahlou. Defiance, part 2 My childhood contained two compartments: home and not-home. Not-home was a special place that I kept carefully separated to prevent the excesses of home from tainting it. Not-home was the place where I received validation, especially from teachers who encouraged me in many ways. Several of my elementary school teachers used me as a reading group teacher. Others encouraged my propensity for writing poetry and mysteries. Still others brought me whole libraries of books from their homes which I would inhale the way I had inhaled all the books in our small school library. My French teacher in high school encouraged me to write French poetry for our bilingual school journal. As even more validation, I won awards for public speaking, drama competitions, spelling bees, and other competitions that my teachers encouraged me to try.  I also won the city’s history-writing award. Years earlier, someo

  Today's book excerpt comes from  Blest Atheist  by Elizabeth Mahlou. Defiance  Physical abuse quickly became routine for us. We just expected to arrive home to a daily rain of blows, kicks, bites, deliberately inflicted sprains, or airplane rides.  We all feared Ma’s airplane rides. She would grab one arm and one leg and rotate in the middle of the room like a dervish, swinging us around and around in circles, allowing the free arm and leg to hit pieces of furniture one after another after another until she was out of breath and let us go. When she let go and we flew into the wall or the furniture, the impact was stunning, and often we lost consciousness from it. Not only were the airplane rides painful, but also they left us feeling dizzy and disoriented whether or not we lost consciousness.  As we got bigger, airplane rides became less manageable for Ma, and these were replaced with sled rides (being pulled down a flight of stairs by our hair). I did not accept that typ