#laura freeman

[americangirlstar]

Claudie Wells illustrations pulled from Amazon, art by Laura Freeman.

[transformational]

presence d5 (ceramic stoneware) by laura freeman

[covergirlnay]

Video credit: @thewokemama

If you want to ban uplifting stories with people of color, just say that. Based on this list, my office library is in complete violation. 🤷🏾‍♀️😂 Oh well. All of my students love the books that I share with them. Especially the ones that they do not normally get to see. 🤓📚

[mtaartsdesign]

Award-winning illustrator Laura Freeman’s new #MTAarts poster “A Grand Connection” is a graphic introduction to Grand Central Madison. The artwork depicts a cross section of the active midtown transportation hub, highlighting levels above and below ground. Grand Central Terminal’s iconic cerulean blue sky ceiling and golden concourse clock fill out the upper level, with #MNR trains directly below. Suggesting the depth of GCM, the two bottom rows feature a #LIRR train, commuters, and the terminal architecture complete with a mosaic installation. Now offering East Side access on the #LIRR, Grand Central Madison will be a connector for both people and places.

[whatamigonnawatchtoday]

Weekend

2011. Romantic Drama

By Andrew Haigh

Starring: Tom Cullen, Chris New, Jonathan Race, Laura Freeman, Loretto Murray, Johnathan Wright, Sarah Churm, Vaxuhall Jermaine, Joe Doherty, Kieran Hardcastle

Country: United Kingdom

Language: English

[blackchildrensbooksandauthors]

🙌🏿New Picture Book!!!

A Voice Named Aretha

Katheryn Russell-Brown

Laura Freeman

Bloomsbury

Raised in a house full of talking and singing, Aretha learned the values that would carry her through life--from her church choir in Detroit to stages across the world. When she moved to New York City to start her career, it took years of hard work before she had a hit song. In the turbulent 1960s, she sang about "Respect" and refused to perform before segregated audiences. The first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Aretha always remembered who she was and where she came from. 

Available at👉🏿| Amazon | IndieBound

Find more children’s and young adult books by Black authors here

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[universitybookstore]

A wonderful new book from Heyday’s Fighting for Justice series, Arisa White and Laura Atkins, with illustrations by Laura Freeman, Biddy Mason Speaks Up.  Biddy Mason was an African American slave and midwife, who petitioned the court for her freedom, and became a wealthy Los Angeles landowner and philanthropist.

[marginalgloss]

The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite is a memoir written by Laura Freeman. Given that this is a book that explains how the author helped overcome an eating disorder by reading about food, initially I found the title concerning. Declaring anything a ‘cure’ has a couple of unfortunate associations: it makes it sound like a self-help manual, or some bit of nineteenth-century quackery (‘water cures’, etc). I was worried that the book would try to end by pressing its method on the reader. The media is flooded with cheap self-care solutions as a substitute for real treatment of mental health problems, and too often this becomes a way of transferring responsibility onto the shoulders of the sufferer. For young people today, breathing exercises and dietary hygiene are sometimes talked about as if they were a substitute for decent working conditions or access to healthcare. 

Happily, this book does nothing of the kind. In spite of the title, it never actually suggests that one could ‘cure’ anorexia via mouth-watering descriptions of food. Instead, it provides an appreciative survey of food in literature with reflections as to how the books mentioned became a part of the author’s life. Though reading did help with Freeman’s anorexia, there’s no attempt to turn this into a system, or to look at it through the lens of psychology or psychotherapy — and for that I was grateful. It makes no great claims. It is simply a considered expression of what worked for the author. 

Dickens is perhaps the keystone here. All the others matter, but it is to him the author returns again and again. There are two aspects to this: the lush, plentiful, homely descriptions of food and drink in his novels; but also the scenes of penury, both accidental and deliberate. Early on, Freeman is especially repulsed by those characters (so common in Dickens) who indulge themselves while deliberately depriving others. An important realisation comes when she realises that anorexia has a way of turning herself into one of those mean-spirited souls, with that same selfishness both created by and inflicted upon herself. How much better to be one of the good and the kind — the eaters, the sharers.

There’s a brisk streak of Britishness — mostly Englishness — that runs through this book. From Dickens to the poets of the First World War through to Laurie Lee and Patrick Leigh Fermor, most of the writers cited are part of a fairly familiar old school Eng Lit canon. Their names exude a certain sort of small-c conservative establishment quality. There’s nothing here to scare the horses. Rabelais is mentioned only because the author finds him repulsive. Virginia Woolf is the closest we get to modernism, and even then Freeman is initially only preoccupied with her diaries and letters; the novels come later. She admits to a certain tendency towards male voices in her writing, with a few notable exceptions (like the great American food writer MFK Fisher). For the most part there is a great deal of manly men eating manly food. ‘Niminy-piminy’ — a contemptuous descriptor for a certain effeminate primness — is frequently invoked, with a certain self-consciousness, as the antithesis of everything good here.

But if the book has a good deal to say about the gendered implications of its taste in food, it has little to say about the question of class. A couple of observations are offered: that it is often the poorest characters in Dickens who are also the most generous; and that so many of the writers she quotes weren’t cooks themselves, but had their meals cooked for them. Not much is made of either of these aspects. Eating as a necessary daily act is barely present here; eating anything is always special, always rarified. There is no sense of food as anything else. There’s a part of me which thinks perhaps this is always how we ought to think about food. But it seems irresponsible to forget that for many people, cooking is work first; and if we think about cooking as only the means to a delightful end, that might lead us towards thinking the work doesn’t deserve to be recognised as such. 

Cooking is only a small part of the pleasurable dynamic of eating in this book — it’s there, but it isn’t the main course (so to speak). If the book has a thesis you could summarise it as follows: that the generous eating of wholesome foods is a good in itself, but it’s best considered as a preparation for work to come. Eating not just for the experience of eating, but eating as a means of fortification, consolidation, restoration, before embarking on some noble labour. 

There is something disquieting in this. It isn’t so much that I disagree — my own feelings about it are more or less the same, up to and including a certain contempt for the ‘clean eating’ movement — but it is difficult to shake the sense of a conservative work ethic looming behind it all. If you want to work, you must eat, and vice-versa; gluttony as a relation of laziness is to be deplored. What if one person can’t work as hard as another – do they not get to eat as much? It’s an intense way of characterising food which seems like an evolution of those thoughts which prompted the original disorder: that every bite must in some sense have its final justification. But perhaps this is the only way to live with such thoughts. If you can’t get rid of them, you might as well turn them into something with which it is possible to live.