Writings in Progress
The arc of writing can be long, especially of books, especially if you work as JB does, inching along a bunch of different projects.
Here you can read chapters of JB’s works in progress. All touch on aspects of activist culture and activist life in the belly of the beast.
The author is always happy for encouragement and almost always pleased to receive constructive suggestions.
Margaret’s Big Family
My novel-in-progress, Margaret’s Big Family, is directed toward upper elementary and junior high levels, although I hope to engage a broader readership interested in delving into the experience of a child becoming exposed to neighborhood activism and discovering her connection to folks she had thought very different from herself.
In the early eighties when the present wave of gentrification was picking up steam in her Washington, DC, neighborhood, nine-year-old Margaret learns that some of her neighbors are fighting a building owner who wants to evict the tenants and convert their building to condominiums.
She and her little brother end up participating in the struggle and tangling with the old owner, creating a sidewalk stand in the tradition of Lucy from Peanuts, and discovering new ways to think about family.
Chapter 1 introduces the main character, Margaret, and something of her world:
The Educacion of Julia
In The Educacion of Julia, nineteen year old North American transplant Julia plunges into the radical student movement in the Mexico City of the seventies, a milieu that is exciting, inspiring, compellng and not without personal risks.
Love pulls her ever deeper into in the turbulent counterculture and colorful lives of her working class friends, inspiring her activism and eventually forcing her to make difficult choices in her politics and her love life as she seeks to forge her own path.
The chapter below is Chapter 7, “The Lost City.” Julia and her friends visit a shanty town of peasants from the state of Oaxaca forced off their lands by corruption and greed.
As she attempts to carry out a government study, Julia learns a great deal more than the answers to the survey questions, an eye-opening experience that pushes her from spectator to participant in popular movements in Mexico.
