Purse Strings WMR.FM

A gender-inclusive anthology of poetry and prose that addresses the physical and psychological act of being “grabbed,” or in any way assaulted.
The #MeToo movement, the infamous Access Hollywood tape, and the depraved and hypocritical actions of celebrities, politicians, CEOs, and other powerful people have caused people all over the nation to speak out in outrage, to express allegiance for the victims of these assaults, and to raise their voices against a culture that has allowed this behavior to continue for too long.
The editors asked writers and poets to add to the conversation about what being “grabbed” means to them in their own experience or in whatever way the word “grabbed” inspired them. What they received are often searing, heart-rending works, ranging in topic from sexual misconduct to racial injustice, from an unwanted caress to rape, expressed in powerful, beautifully crafted prose and poetry.
The writers represented here, some very well known, such as Rita Dove, Jericho Brown, Eileen Miles, Ana Menendez and Sapphire, as well as some newer voices not yet fully discovered, have mined their collective experiences to reveal their most vulnerable moments, and in some cases, to narrate moments that they have had previously been unwilling or unable to speak of. What results is a collection of emotional, hard-hitting pieces that speak to the aftermath of violation—whether mental, emotional, or physical.

Today's guest is Doris Weatherford, author of the new book Victory for the Vote. She has been publishing books on women's history for over thirty years. Her first was FOREIGN AND FEMALE: IMMIGRANT WOMEN IN AMERICA, 1840-1930. Published in 1986, it was revised and expanded in 1995. KIRKUS REVIEWS said of it, “absorbing chapters full of quotations from original letters and diaries…meticulous research, vibrant reading.” That book grew out of her questions in a course on immigration at Harvard, and her second book, AMERICAN WOMEN AND WORLD WAR II (1990), grew out of an argument between a WAC and a WAVE at an early NOW meeting in the Boston area. Both were written after Weatherford moved to Florida, where she has lived more than thirty years.

The World War II book also won good reviews, including this comment from LIBRARY JOURNAL: “Fascinating and immensely readable…General readers will enjoy…and will be amazed.” Weatherford has found the most amazing thing about this book to be the fact that it was translated into Japanese. Later books were AMERICAN WOMEN’S HISTORY: AN A-Z (Prentice Hall, 1994), which has some 700 brief essays on individuals, organizations, issues, and events. MILESTONES: A CHRONOLOGY OF AMERICAN WOMEN’S HISTORY(Facts on File, 1997) places women in the context of the nation's development, beginning in 1492 with the fact that Columbus used maps that he obtained from his mother-in-law.  She will be attending the Miami Book Fair this November – the 15th through the 22nd -- which can be live-streamed for easy and safe access.

Michele Molitor has helped thousands of clients break through barriers to success – she is an experienced Executive Coach, a best-selling author, Founder of Nectar Consulting, and a Rapid Transformational Therapist.

Pain into power with Sydney Williams. Today's Guest is a former collegiate athlete and competitive skydiver, Sydney, unexpectedly found herself on the receiving end of a Type 2 diabetes diagnosis, while grappling with unresolved trauma from a decades-old sexual assault, she set out on a mission: turn her pain into power. Two hikes across Catalina Island and 80 miles later, she founded Hiking My Feelings to help others tap into the mind-body connection and healing power of nature that helped kick her self-limiting beliefs and disease into remission.  Having more than 12 years of marketing experience with Fortune 500 companies and emerging brands, Sydney serves up her “truth juice” style of storytelling to break wide open tough conversations with practical, powerful content and experiences. Over the years, she’s been featured on the SXSW stage, as well as in Huffington Post, Psychology Today, US News & World Report, and numerous other publications. Today, she is the author of Hiking My Feelings: Stepping Into the Healing Power of Nature and travels across the country empowering others to summit their personal mountains on their way to becoming Well Beings.

Karen started Montanya about 11 years ago and since then she's built a rum brand that is distributed in 44 states in the US and in seven countries. Just this past year Montanya was named to two B Corp Best For The World Lists—Best Overall and Best for the Environment. Her premium craft rum distillery is located in Crested Butte, Colo. When Karen began the craft distillery Montanya Distillers in 2008, she was the only female in a male-dominated industry in the US. This impacted her ability to gain respect, buy materials, sell her products, be safe from sexual harassment, and be taken seriously in her work.

It also impacted the willingness of banks to lend her money, the willingness of investors to get involved, and venture capital firms to say yes. Karen watched male colleagues with smaller and less successful companies access resources regularly denied to her. Yet she persisted, stayed focused, and refused to let circumstances deny her success. Now, after more than a decade in business, her company produces double-digit growth annually, and she is one of the larger private-sector employers in her community.

Our guest today Julia Flynn Siler is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist. Her new book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Against Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in May of 2019. The New York Times Book Review named it an “Editors’ Choice.” She is also the author of Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure and the The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty. She will be at the Miami Book Fair coming up November 17-24. As a veteran correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek magazine, Ms. Siler spent more than two decades in the Europe and the United States, reporting from a dozen countries. She has covered fields as varied as biotechnology, cult wines, puppy breeding, and a princess’s quest to restore a Hawaiian palace’s lost treasures. A graduate in American Studies at Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Ms. Siler began her career as a staff correspondent for BusinessWeek, working in the magazine’s Los Angeles and Chicago bureaus. She wrote stories on everything from White Castle “sliders” to the roiling futures markets for the New York Times. By taking classes at night during that time, she earned an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. In 1993, she was awarded a fellowship to teach business journalism in Prague, where she organized a speaker series at the Center for Independent Journalism, a not-for-profit organization supported in part by the New York Times Foundation. Ms. Siler then served as a London-based staff correspondent for BusinessWeek, where she was a member of BusinessWeek reporting teams that won a National Magazine Award, a Deadline Club award, as well as other honors. As a longtime London-based foreign correspondent, she wrote about family business dynasties, millionaire dons at Oxford and Cambridge, and Virgin founder Richard Branson, among other subjects. Toward the end of her years in London, she joined the Wall Street Journal as its European management correspondent, traveling throughout the region to report stories. During that time, she did post-graduate work in finance at the London Business School. After returning to the U.S., one of the first articles she wrote for the Wall Street Journal was about the turmoil within the Mondavi family’s wine empire. It ran as a front-page story in June of 2004. That story led to her book The House of Mondavi, published by Penguin’s Gotham Books in 2007. A New York Times bestseller, it was honored as a finalist both for a James Beard Award and a Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished reporting and is now in its twelfth printing. Over the years, Ms. Siler wrote many feature stories for the Wall Street Journal out of its San Francisco bureau, and helped produce WSJ.com videos to accompany some of these stories. Her critically acclaimed second book, Lost Kingdom, was also a New York Times bestseller. Ms. Siler was a 2013 recipient of the Ella Dickey Literacy Award, named in honor of a beloved librarian, and was honored at a ceremony in Missouri in April 2013. In August of 2016, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Ms. Flynn Siler a “Public Scholar” grant for 2016-2017 to support her forthcoming book, “The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown.” In June of 2017, the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism announced that Ms. Siler had been awarded a Mayborn Fellowship in Biography to support her new book. She was also named a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Greater Good, where she spent the fall of 2017 completing her manuscript. Ms. Siler is a longtime member of the San Francisco-based writing group North 24thWriters, whose members have published fourteen nonfiction books as well as hundreds of articles and essays in major magazine