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Guest Post: Ithaca Diaries author Anita Harris interviewed on NPR’s “Here and Now”

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Here and Now with Robin Young and Jeremy HobsonIn an interview with Lisa Mullins on “Here and Now” a daily program of National Public Radio,  author Anita Harris reflected on how her college years shaped her career path.  The interview, which aired June 11, focused on Harris’s book, Ithaca Diaries, a memoir and social history of her years at Cornell University in the 1960s.

Those years “gave me courage to start a newspaper and become a journalist,” said Harris about her time at Cornell.  “They gave me the courage to fight for social change through my work and my writing.  They have me the courage to work with students and help them understand better their own place in the world.”

Harris attended Cornell University during a time of racism and world turmoil.  In Ithaca Diaries, she writes about heavy topics such as the tearing up and burning of draft cards by students opposed to the Vietnam war and demonstrations for civil rights.

“There were all kinds of demonstrations and eventually all hell broke loose,”said Harris.  “At the university, nationally, and internationally students were demonstrating and even rioting all over the world.”

While Harris tried to focus on her studies and stay “sane,”  she also explored and wrote about Cornell’s dating scene, which was filled with “boys, and frats and football games,” she told Mullins.

Harris used her journals, letters to her parents, and Cornell’s independent student newspaper, the Daily Sun, to help tell her story, which takes readers on a coming-of-age journey from Harris’ arrival on campus  in 1966 with her pink suitcase to her graduation day, when she led a demonstration against the military.

“One reason I wanted to write the book was to understand what had happened and how it still affects me today,” said Harris.  “To this day, I think back to the events of that time.”

“Ithaca Diaries” can be purchased on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Ithaca-Diaries-Coming-Age-1960s/dp/0692294988.

Harris’ “Here and Now” interview  is available at http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/06/11/ithaca-diaries-anita-harris.

— Morgan Brittney Austin
Morgan Brittney Austin is a 2015 graduate of LaSalle College, near Boston.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.



Ithaca Diaries Intvu to be featured on NPR “Here and Now” Monday, May 25

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Book Cover 6x9 9-13-14 - CopyExcited to have been interviewed about Ithaca Diaries by radio personality  extraordinare Lisa Mullins.  A segment is slated to air nationally on NPR’s “Here and Now,”  on Memorial Day, May 25, 2015.  The  program airs live on WGBH Boston from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. Both in Boston and elsewhere you can  choose a live stream from WBUR or Click here for a searchable list of public radio stations that broadcast Here & Now.

 

According to the Here and Now WHere and Now with Robin Young and Jeremy Hobsonebsite, you can also:

Hear individual stories: Audio for stories in the first hour of Here & Now is typically posted by 2:30 p.m. EST. Audio for stories in the second hour is typically posted by 3:30 p.m. EST. You can listen to past shows by browsing or searching the archives.

Hear the whole show: You can stream each hour of Here & Now using the WBUR mobile app. A podcast of each hour is also available in the iTunes store, within hours of its air time (better time estimates coming soon). For more ways to download the podcast (not using iTunes), go here.

About Here and Now:
Here and Now is a live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with public radio stations across the country.  According to its Website, the program reflects the fluid world of news as it’s happening in the middle of the day, with timely, smart and in-depth news, interviews and conversation.

Co-hosted by award-winning journalists Robin Young and Jeremy Hobson, the show’s daily lineup includes interviews with NPR reporters, editors and bloggers, as well as leading newsmakers, innovators and artists from across the U.S. and around the globe.

Here & Now began at WBUR in 1997, and expanded to two hours in partnership with NPR in 2013. Today, the show reaches an estimated 3.6 million weekly listeners on over 383 stations across the country.

Ithaca Diaries posterAbout Ithaca Diaries
Ithaca Diaries  is a coming of age memoir set at Cornell University in the tumultuous 1960s. The story is told in first person from the point of view of a smart, sassy, funny, scared, sophisticated yet naïve college student who can laugh at herself while she and the world around her are having a nervous breakdown. Based on Harris’ own journals and letters, interviews and other primary and secondary accounts of the time, Ithaca Diaries describes collegiate life as protests, politics, and violence increasingly engulf the student, her campus, and her nation. Her irreverent observations serve as a prism for understanding what it was like to live through those tumultuous  times.While often laugh-out-loud funny, they provide meaningful insight into the process of political and social change we are continuing to experience, today.

Ithaca DIaries is available from Amazon, Kindle and the Cornell Campus Store.

Anita M. Harris is an award-winning writer, blogger, and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA. A new edition of her  first book, Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity, was published in 2014. 

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.

 

 

 



My first e-book purchase: Out for Blood…on Vampires, of all things!

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Just bought my first e-book…Out for Blood, by friend Margot Adler. She describes it as her “wild essay on why vampires have such traction in our culture and the relationship of all those things to power, morality and the fate of the planet. 
As explained ion Amazon,

 

Starting as a meditation on mortality after the illness and death of her husband, Margot read more than 260 vampire novels, from teen to adult, from gothic to modern, from detective to comic. She began wonder why vampires have such appeal in our society now? Why is Hollywood spending billions on vampire films and television series every year? It led her to explore issues of power, politics, morality, identity, and even the fate of the planet.“Every society creates the vampire it needs,” wrote the scholar Nina Auerbach. Dracula was written in 19th century England when there was fear of outsiders and of disease coming in through England’s large ports. Dracula – An Eastern European monster bringing direct from a foreign land – was the perfect vehicle for those fears. But who are the vampires we need now? In the last four decades, going back to Dark Shadows, we have created a very different vampire: the conflicted, struggling-to-be-moral-despite-being-predators vampire. Spike and Angel, Stefan and Damon, Bill and Eric, the Cullens – they are all struggling to be moral despite being predators, as are we. Perhaps our blood is oil, perhaps our prey is the planet. Perhaps Vampires are us. 

Margot , a great friend from NYC days and also my Harvard Nieman Fellowship,  is a long time NPR news correspondent, and the author of Drawing Down the Moon, the classic book on Contemporary Paganism, Wicca and Goddess Spirituality. She is also the author of Heretic’s Heart, a 1960’s memoir–recently republished as an e-book.

—Anita M.  Harris
Anita Harris is the author of Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity, and of the forthcoming Ithaca Diaries. New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and digital marketing firm she founded in Cambridge, MA.