Sunday, February 21, 2016

Women's Lives Club

I've been wanting to write about this cool new club I've jumped into, and now, now we are officially in The Media! So. You can read about our new Women's Lives Club all prettied up and professional! Here We Are"Be A Part of The Smartest New Book Club" and this title is everything - these women are S  M  A  R  T  and interesting and it is so much fun to be inside the same books, having revelations, and jumping online to talk about it.

You're gonna want to join this.
You CAN join this - we are welcoming all and hoping to take the world by storm! We sold out Amazon and B&N in one day when the first book choice was announced. BOOM.

Rachel Syme, one of my favorite writers today, threw out a spontaneous idea on Twitter one day - and a month later here we are, finishing up our first book, having fantastic mass-follow-backs on twitter and generally feeling like the kick-ass Book Club that we are.

Take a coffee break and read my favorite piece from Rachel last year, and then let the selfies flow... SELFIE was a work in progress when I first followed Rachel, and she tweeted bits and pieces of her research, and her thoughts along the way. She had twitter selfie roll-calls where we dropped what we were doing and sent in ourselves at that moment, saying we are here, hi, this is my life. And it became captivating to see these moments in time, from all over the world. In SELFIE, reading about women with stories that were erased, simply because they were women born in a time that did not allow their personhood, moved me. Galvanized, I should say, as I told friends about it, shared it online and generally spoke only of SELFIE for weeks. (Thanksgiving in Cleveland was Selfie City, right?! Or Ussie, I should say!)

Fast forward to a January day on Twitter when Rachel said, hey, if I start a book club where we read about and celebrate women's lives, would you be interested? Um, hi. You had me at "book."
My heart thunders to learn about the women that have shaped and are shaping our world - and I feel so woefully uneducated on this topic, it is bordering on shameful.

It makes me very thoughtful about having grown up in a small conservative Southern town, with quite clear limits placed on what was taught and allowed into my life. I may have had full reign of the Brown Library, but what was even the extent of the biography collection at that time? I remember the orange-backed biography section - Ethan Allen and The Green Mountain Boys, Jim Thorpe, various Presidents and famous figures... If I read any women's biographies, they must not have been very memorable. I've tried to play catch-up over the years, always feeling behind and out of the loop when the names of remarkable women pop up. Like, how could I live this many years and not know about X?

It is the just-right time to connect and learn and I am ON IT. If you are feeling the spark too, then come on! Join the #WLClub. You won't regret it. Rachel is the  most thoughtful, kind leader one could wish for in such a club. And she takes a selfie like a voodoo master. Connect HERE to our Google Group, or on Facebook.