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Everything I Knew About Claudia Brown

By R.A.Davis -
Sunday, September 8, 2013 I first heard of Claudia Brown when I was about 8 weeks pregnant and nauseated by the smell of oxygen. I had already had one extremely disappointing visit with an Ob-Gyn out in Waimea (grimy carpets, dead-eyed nurses, and a dismissive and distractingly attractive male gynecologist). I was taking my toddler for a walk along our little gravel road to see the horses (don’t breathe: horse-sweat, hay, grass, animal hair, poop) and feed them papayas (don’t breathe: too pungent, too fleshy, with an overripe kerosene off-gas). We ran into our neighbor and her leaping and spinning three year old, who was tanned to mahogany and naked except for a tutu.   The little girl pointed at her mom’s watermelon-sized belly. “HIS NAME IS POPCORN!” We chatted about birth and doctors and midwives, I told her how much I had loved the midwife-run birth center on the Big Island and how unimpressive my visit to the Ob-Gyn had been. She said, “Oh, you’ll love Claudia,” and dash...
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Growing Kids Brains in Trauma Soil

By R.A.Davis -
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So we lived on an experimental ag station and there were all these crazy stories about the poison they dumped out into the soil up there-- whole outbuildings that the older workers were like, uhhhhh, I wouldn't walk over there. And definitely don't let your kids go over there. And maybe don't eat the fruit from the trees that grow there. But, you do you. It stressed me out. But it was practically free housing on Kauai, on a 100 acre farm where I could see 20 waterfalls on the face of Waialeale every morning from my (crumbling) front steps. So that's where we lived. And if that contributed to my two Kauai-born kids' later freaky auto-immune disorders... well, fuck. I don't know.  So now we no longer live on an experimental farm where we know the terrifying history of pesticide and herbicide-- we live in a suburban subdivision where who knows what the soil has been through? hah hah oh dear. ANYWAY SO We also live in grief-land. And even though this grief is acquir...
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Eh hem, I'm *published*! Go read my essay: "A Live Coal" in Exponent II Magazine

By R.A.Davis -
Do you know that there is a whole rich ecosphere of Mormon feminism? And it's been fermenting and mossing and mulching and growing and sprouting and reseeding along for 50 years? My mom, way back in the late 70s, was the kind of feminist it was possible for a 20 year old Mormon from Provo to be. She saw the face of God and called her Mom. These ladies were her pals. The Exponent II Magazine was founded in 1974 as a-- what is the appropriate gathering place for Mormon feminists? A Foyer? A Forest? A Grove? And these amazing women have been holding conversations and each other for decades. When the Mormon church opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, and fired BYU professors who talked about Heavenly Mother, and disfellowshipped ladies who wanted to come to church in slacks, and fought same sex marriage, the Mormon feminist forest floor was the soft mulchy place where people came to fall apart and be nourished and regrow. And I just had a piece published there! It is in the volume on th...
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