This video will give you an overview on searching and filtering your results through Laurier Library's Discovery System Omni. Starting from the Omni Search box on the Library's homepage, you can search for books, articles, and other library resources. Simply type in what you would like to search, and click on the Search Omni button. By default, Omni searches what is available at the Laurier, Waterloo, and Guelph libraries. But you can expand your search to include the print resources at all 18 Omni libraries across Ontario. Search results are sorted by relevance by default. You can change to sort your results by date newest, date oldest, title, or author. In Omni, you can apply different filters to narrow your search. Filters are located in the left column next to your search results. You can filter by availability, resource type, publication date, subject, author creator, the items physical location, journal title, and language. In Omni, you can apply one filter at a time by clicking on the highlighted text when you hover over a filter. Alternatively, you can set multiple filters at the same time using the checkbox of a filter. For example, I can limit my search to find only items that were published in the last five years with a few selected subjects. And then click Apply Filters to have them tick and effect all at once. Active filters show up at the top of the left column. Click on the X on the right side of an individual filter to remove it. On the other hand, you can lock one or several filters so they stay in effect through multiple searches. Click on the left side of a filter to lock it in place. Or, the Remember All Filters button to lock them all at once for your current search session. That's an overview on searching and filtering your results with Omni. For more help with using Omni, please visit library.wlu.ca. help.omni. If you have any questions, please ask us at library.wlu.ca. help.us.


Hi everyone, I'm Joe for jaspyscasebrakes.com, coming at you with 17-18 Panini Donneress Optic Super Value Rack Pack One Pack Break Number 21-22. I think it was actually supposed to be 22, but it just kind of happened like that, and so we just left it. All right, so we're going to give away some opulent spots in this, and I think there's not too many opulent spots left. That'll happen tomorrow, but yeah, that'll happen tomorrow, but at least we're going to give away some spots tonight in 17-18. So let's do the break first. Big thanks to these folks right here from John down to Robert, and all the teams are in right there. So let's do the break itself first. Three and a four, eight times for each list. One, two, three, four, five, and eighth and final time. There's eight right there. Tim down to, yeah, I get pumped sometimes, Thomas. Tim down to Patrick, three and a five, eight times. One, two, three, and eighth and final time. We've got nuggets down to Miami Heat. All right, here's the first half of the list right here. This is 17-18, right? Super Value Rack Pack. I'm going to get the right one. Yeah, Donneress Optic. There you go, with the eyes on the front. So this is the Tatum Wookiee here. So there's Bill with the Celtics. Could be interesting. All right, so let's, no trade windows in these little filler breaks. So let's just move on. Oh Rex, you're going to get three to six inches of snow on Monday and Tuesday. Yeah, it's pretty cold here too, Rex. I know, yeah. I'd like a little snow. That'd be wild. Some snow on the beach would be wild. There's that print out right there. There's Devon Reed, Rated Rookie. Jared Allen, Rated Rookie. All right, nothing's too crazy. Drew Holiday, Michael Kidd Gilcrest, and Doug McDermott. All right, nothing too wild there. But of course, the whole point of this is not, it's not this pack, is to try to win those opulent spots. So it's going to be top 14, nearly half the break after nine, five into four, nine times. Good luck. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and ninth and final time. After nine, so from 15 down to 30, my apologies. Congrats to the top 14 though. Kevin Tim, Luiz Al, Logan, Louie, Billy, Kevin, Matthew, Louie, Louie, Luiz Al, Louie T, Louie T, and Thomas R right there. So there you go. You're in that opulence break, which will go off tomorrow, jaspyscasewrakes.com. Bye-bye.


Looking at the income tax formula, we're still focused on line one, that being income, remembering that the first half of the income tax formula is in essence an income statement. A strange one, however, where we have income up top, we've got the equivalent of expenses being deductions to get down to the equivalent of net income, that being taxable income. Our goal to get taxable income as low as possible, and therefore when focused on the income line, we're looking at different things and seeing whether or not it is income, and if it is, is it something that we have to include as taxable income. When we look at the actual tax form, we're focused down here on line five, where we have the pension and annuities. We have the taxable amount and the A and B on the form. We'll take a look at the forms in more detail in a future presentation. When we look at the form given to us to report the income, it'll typically be a 1099R. Now remember, this is similar to what we saw with the IRA side of things, in that the government's going to be trying to incentivize. This is why it's important to kind of understand the rationale for the law, because it'll be easier to memorize what is going on if you can think about what the government is basically trying to do, and that is they're trying to incentivize us to say for retirement the idea being that people are usually good at short-term decision making, but not so good at the long-term decision making, and therefore the IRS is going to try to nudge us through the tax code to get us to behave the way they want us to, basically, because that means they're going to try to get us to give a tax benefit at the point in time. We put the money in to some kind of retirement plan, and then when we take it out, we might have a taxable event at that point in time. Now, they often have the leverage on the employers, remember, because they're the people that are going to be paying the employees, and they have the deduction side of the transaction. So oftentimes, in this situation, it would be a benefit kind of program that could have tax implications for us if we are, say, an employee. So the employer might have a 401k plan or a 403b plan or something like that, and we're going to take our money and put it into that plan, and in so doing, when we put the money in, there's going to be a reduction to the line one on the W-2 form, typically, and therefore we will not be paying taxes on it because it was basically removed from income on the W-2 form when we put the money in. If we don't have a 401k plan with the work, then we might go to the IRA. That's when we go to the IRA, and that's when we can't reduce the income line on the W-2, but rather we take kind of a similar kind of technique with an above the line deduction. So we'll talk more about that in future presentations. Right now, we're focusing in on the distribution, taking the money out of the retirement plan. Now, note that a retirement plan is not something that the government invented, some new tool that you use for investments. The government isn't good at creating investment tools. What the government's going to do is say, we're not going to hit you when you put the money into the investment tools, meaning we're going to give you a tax break if you use your investment tools, the normal tools, putting money into a mutual fund, stocks and bonds, typically, but it's going to go under the umbrella of an IRA. So all they're doing is saying, now I put it under the umbrella of an IRA, using the same investment tools you probably would have invested in anyways, even if there wasn't any kind of incentive to do so, that would be tax incentive. And then they're going to give you this tax benefit when you put the money in. And then when you take the money out, that's when you're going to get hit possibly with the tax and possibly with the penalties and interest. Now, remember, the only reason you would put it under the umbrella of a 401k plan is because of the tax benefit, because you are restricting your money by putting it in there, because that means that you can't take the money out unless you want to get hit with a penalty. So you can only take the money out under certain conditions that typically being once you're in retirement age, so that you're not going to be hit with the penalty. So we would expect older people to typically have more of these form 1099 Rs representing their income, because they're past their working years. We would expect then to have the amounts be taxable, but have a distribution code that would be a normal distribution. So we wouldn't be penalized. If it was taken out early, then you might have a distribution code indicating that you're going to be penalized for taking it out. The distribution codes are here, which you could see on the actual form of the 1099 Rs and the instructions related to it or the back of the form, typically, where you can look it up the IRS website when you look at the form.


If you're doing a job now that you hate, then you have to view it as kissing a frog. Just kiss a few frogs towards meeting the prince, but don't ever mistake a frog for a prince.


15 controversial life hacks Eating paper to stay full longer Using dryer sheets to clean mirrors Using baby oil to remove makeup Using mouthwash as a deodorant Using hair straightener to iron clothes Using nail polish to seal envelopes Using cooking spray as a hair styling product Using baby powder to extend the life of a razor blade Using ketchup as a facial mask Using white vinegar as a natural laundry detergent Using mouthwash as mouth rinse after brushing your teeth Using hair spray to remove stains from clothing Using baby oil as a tanning oil Using rubbing alcohol to remove permanent marker stains Which of those life hacks have you actually used and actually worked? Comment below


Hi. In this video, I'll introduce a package that can help us investigate the growth and evolution of the dependencies of CRANK packages. If you go to the page on CRANK that lists all the packages, you will find quite a few that enable us to manage dependencies on our home machine. Most of these packages have the prefix PKG. Another useful ones include PACKRAT, DEEPDAP and PACK. The package CRANKDAP is not intended to reinvent the wheel, but more for analyzing the package dependencies from the VIRT eyes view. Therefore, we have created functions to obtain different kinds of dependencies, both as a data frame and as a graph object. We focus on the two functions that return dependencies of all packages. The function GETDAPAllPackages returns all types of dependencies of all packages in the data frame. The summaries on the right show the total number of packages and the total number of dependencies at the time of this video being recorded. As we have used this function to collect the data over the last two years, we will look at how the dependencies have grown over the years to the number at the bottom. This is a breakdown of the dependencies into different types and in the forward and reverse directions. A few observations can be made from this plot. First, imports linking to and suggests have grown steadily, but depends has gone down before going up again. This may have to do with more package these days preferring imports to depends. Second, there is a big jump for all the turquoise lines in February 2020, which represent reverse dependencies. I think this is due to external reverse dependencies being included from that time point. The third observation is that there are visible differences between the forward and reverse dependencies. To examine the differences, we first remove the intersection, which is the black line in each plot. After doing so, we found that the forward dependencies include defunct packages, while the reverse dependencies include external packages, such as bioconductor ones. So if the assignment line is higher than the turquoise line, it means that there are more defunct packages in the forward direction than external dependencies in the reverse direction. And this is the case for depends and imports. Going further than just looking at the total number, we can obtain the network of dependencies using the function gets graph of packages. We can see that there are almost 5000 packages with over 8000 depends between them. Also, this network is, as expected, a directed acyclic graph because of the nature of strong dependencies. If we plot this network, you can see quite some clustering of packages into various communities. Of course, this is not the complete picture as we have only used the type depends. But this gives us a glimpse of the ecosystem of cranked packages. We also look at the distribution of the network degrees. The out-degree is not very interesting, but the in-degree seems to follow the power law, which has been observed in some other real-life networks. What can be done next is the modeling of the growth of the dependency network by improving our current analysis on two ends. On the data end, we will include all three types of strong dependencies. On the modeling end, we can investigate how new dependencies are created and if the preferential attachment model is a suitable model. Because it is a model that leads to the power law degree distribution in networks. Thank you very much for listening.


and we are going live on YouTube. Hello and welcome everybody. Thank you all for coming to this month's edition of Poem Jam with Poet Kim Shuck. I'm John Smolley and I'm a librarian with the San Francisco Public Library. While we're waiting for everyone to join us, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you about a few of our upcoming literary programs. On behalf of the Public Library, we want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Ohlone Tribal people and to acknowledge the many Romitush Ohlone Tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands on which we reside and work. Our library is committed to uplifting the names of these families and community members and we encourage you to learn more about First Person Lines. Next Wednesday, October 20th, the Library's Formel Center in partnership with the Brooks Smith presents a panel discussion facilitated by author Matilda Bernstein-Sickermore. Sickermore will discuss her new anthology between certain death and a possible future. We are writing on growing up with the AIDS crisis with contributors Robert Birch, Keiko Lane, Aaron Nielsen and Andrew Spielding. On Thursday, October 21st, SFPL presents readings from Joaquin Legaspi's newly reprinted poetry collection. Legaspi was a poet, artist, community worker, organizer and important figure connected with San Francisco's Manila Town International Hotel Community from the 1920s to the 1970s. And on October 25th and 26th, New York author Carla Coneo Dia Vicencio will discuss the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans from the volunteers recruited for the 9-Eleven Ground Zero Cleanup to the homeopathy botanicas in Miami that provide limited healthcare to nonceses. So this ends my introductory announcements. I'd now like to turn the microphone over to our program's host, Kim Shock. It can wake him. Thank you, John. I am so excited about tonight's reading and I can barely contain myself. We have the enormous pleasure in the San Francisco Bay Area of having a lot of different communities of poets and hopefully one overarching community, but all of our communities over the last couple of years have been going through it, whatever it is at the moment. And the pandemic did not end some of the problems which started before the pandemic, including some storms and some drama and some problems. And so I've been trying to touch on communities that, I don't know, I've been trying to touch on different communities just to remind ourselves that there are some things, but also that there's an enormous wealth of incredible poetry that's available to us. Anyway, I'm babbling a little bit. I am in awe of pretty much all of these, but in fact, all of these poets who are reading tonight and I'm only gonna talk for a little while. So our first poet is Tony Aldarondo and rather than doing, as people know that I do, rather than doing the overly formal introductions and saying all of the incredible things that Tony has done, Tony became really part of my family while QR Hand was ill. We knew each other before that, but he really kind of landed firmly in my family at that point, an incredible heart with one of my favorite voices of any poet in the area. So please welcome Tony Aldarondo. Thank you so much. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. QR Hand would've loved this. Music is poetry. Poetry is music. Come on a journey with me. Poetry is the mission in San Francisco. Si tan unido, si tan gozando, y tan bailando, la hay payahoy, payahoy este pobe tatay, a la misión, cantal mi canción.  This one's dedicated to my heroes. And there's a lot of you in the Zoom room tonight. I speak in lengua franca, local poets of my heroes. The art exhibition of the dead in my head of Picasso's Frida Kahlo's and Miro's. I've got the spirits of dead poets in my head when I close my eyes I see them. Like last night they sold out an open mic at the Oakland Coliseum. Miguel Pinheiro tocando lo cuero. Pidi Tomás reciting verses. Frida Kahlo pintando, Frida Kahlo on stage with her colores and love disperses. With her colores and love disperses. Yo tengo Walter Mercado living deep inside my head. Me dijo poetas nunca mueren porque dejamos libros to be read. As long as those words come alive, the poet is never dead. As long as those words come alive, they said the poet is never dead, is never dead.  I want what I cannot have, I want what I cannot see. I want the world and eternity. I want to run wild, run wild and be free. I don't want no one, no one bothering me. I want a ticket on a jet-blue plane. I want to listen to break-up music without feeling pain.  I want to know how homelessness could exist in a rich-ass city like this. Most people live every day like it's a second Christmas. I want back my old neighborhood. I want back my youth. I want to be angry. That's the truth. I want some justice. I want no lies. I want no funerals. I want no cries. I want all men to experience the blind. I want them to see that beauty's in the mind. I want back the memory the police beat out of me. August the 14th of 1993. I want back those memories. I want back that knowledge. They beat me so bad. I had to drop out of college. I want to know who, what, where, why and when. When the good life begins and the hood life ends. Want to know. Who, who are you? Do I know me? Do you know you? Do any of us really even want to know the truth? Or are we just afraid, afraid of the truth? You know some say the truth can really hurt. Others say the truth will set you free. Whatever that means. My father who walked out on his wife gave up on life. Looked his little girl in the eye and said goodbye.  The good boy gone bad. The bad man gone mad. A strung out dope fiend in a rush to reach the pearly gate. Am I Catholic Baptist gay or am I straight? Who am I while I find out too late? Am I a santero? Convito? A daíno? Or just some Puerto Rican spic? Some spic filled with grief. Am I high? Am I low? Or just some guy you call bro? Yo, yo! As if I was John Doe. I have a name too, you know. Where am I to go? Play a part of the new status quo with a new revelation. And what shall be my occupation? Who am I? Can anyone save me? Or if I reach out my hands for help? Will you just enslave me? Latinos are the colors of the rainbow. I said the rainbow, yo. Latinos are Blanquito, Negrito, Triganguito and Afro. Afro-listic, realistic, simplistic, always mystic, always real. Really real, sometimes too real. Always told we love to steal. So some Latinos become violent. So violent we grow violent. And almost everyone we know is violent. Others become angered. So angry and angered, some have become ch-ch-dangered. Or misinformed, uninformed and uniformed into the penitentiary. Right into the next century. Others misinformed, uninformed and uniformed into the war.  Latinos, I can't take it no more. I said the U.S. military. What were first on the front lines, first to die than we have to bury?  Were used in the U.S., abused in the U.S., confused in the U.S. And told, we are last in the U.S. Come on system, confess. We've been infected, rejected, corrected and almost never, almost never elected. Yet always selected to clean, clean, clean, clean, clean.  We are the Latina nannies that wipe the mielda out of el presidente's grandchildren's drawers.  Latinos, Latinos are runaway slaves, immigrant slaves, modern day slaves with eyes open wide. And no place to hide. Latinos risk their lives to reach the U.S. And can't come inside. Latinos fought in every war and served this country with pride. Were here, there and everywhere, tall, short, balding, even Indian looking with long hair. We rock Ben Davis' pants, love music and dance and were born to romance. Latinos can become what we dream. Latinos can become what we dream. If given a chance. Latinos are stars, sports stars, movie stars and superstars like Celia Cruz. Latinos influence people around the world like Orquesta de la Luz.  We are doctors and teachers of colors. And engineers, people like Clemente, of the best pilots. We are hívaro de la montaña and we were born all to zero. There is my slave Borinquen, how I love you. Te llama puerto rico, pero no hay mucho dinero. Te amo, te amo, te amo y me encanta. Y en el nombre de Dios si poesía, Latino se levanta. We are poets. We're in your neighborhood. We're not that hard to find. We'll massage your temples, touch your hearts and educate your mind. We are poets. We can take pretty words, put them in a poem and plant a mental seed. Or we can take unpretty words when we're filled with rage, put them on a page and make it bleed. We are poets. We can put words together describing an aroma and make you think that page was scented. We are poets. The reason the exclamation point was invented. We write, recite and perform. We never, ever conform. It's the way we poets know. Damn well we were born, pushed out performing and crying since birth our hearts already broken and torn. But we as poets, we can take pieces of broken words and turn them into spoken words and give a broken heart a fresh new start. Take a young child's broken dreams and mend them with spoken seams. We are poets. Blessed and filled with words, we create with words, relate with words, transform and relocate hearts and minds with words. We are poets. We say things like five times five divided by pi equal the number of rainbow stars in the sky and have you ask, why? We are poets. It's simple mathematics times dramatics factored into a poetical third eye. And the answer in the back of your mind's book is even simpler. We are poets. Ay, ay, ay. Love making keyboard breaking erotic poets. We can make a pen, make love to paper and make it hum. Make words intoxicate your mind like a strong Puerto Rican rum. We are poets. Filled with laughter, tears, joy, imagination and patience, we speak at the open mic at presidential inaugurations. From our hearts the words flow, through our tongues, mouths and lips, those words magically know where to go. In our heads the poets of the dead are awoken. We speak from our hearts with the voices of the broken. We are poets this much we know. We give birth to words, touch mother earth through words and that open mics open our mouths and pour out our hearts through words. We write then rewrite then double check the last rewrite because we know the last rewrite is the one that has to be right. We are poets. We share our breath with words and we will write and recite till our death with words. We are poets. Thank you so much. You always make me so happy. Thank you so much. Our next reader has Manny Martinez. And it is the first time I have the great pleasure of having Manny at one of my microphones but I have heard him before and you guys have something coming. And you know there was a little bit of mention before we started and it is happening in the room to other people that this is family. Manny I need you to know every single other reader in this group recommended you. Manny Martinez. Oh, I'm hella nervous. Thank you so much, Kim. And I've got to, you know, I've got a shout out of Acha for nurturing me, and never giving up on me. I love you. All right, I'm going to start with a new piece and then take it from there. It's called Poor Reakin. Poor Reakin. Quick to love, quick to judge with a verb. Shooting stars envy for how it moves mountains and crushes internal organs.  She breathes and breathes knowing her needs or your needs.  Some white too, but history teaches us not enough. The truth seldom reaches us. So your desarroyo sometimes screeches to a halt and it isn't your fault. It is not your fault. No es tu culpa, no es tu culpa. Punieta no es culpa tuya. The blame rests on the shoulders of men believing they were giants above it all close to Christ with loaded brains and loaded guns and small hearts and tiny souls tricked into thinking they were doing God's work. And maybe they were.  Tender and hard when you have to be rebellious survivor by nature. You tame your God given demons through rhythm, religion and other myths.  The master's plan is that you never forget who has claimed the title, who is signing the titles, who is at the root of all evil, who is most masterful at manipulating hate and hierarchy, the apparatus and the status quo. Perhaps there's something to this as above so below. What do you know? It doesn't feel right. That's what you know. In the center of your humongous spirit, you know we've been wronged. You know it hurts. You stay strong and proud and brush off bendito comments because you've learned that bendito el mano joelete. Besides, what are you going to do? The revolution isn't for you. Right? This one is called. Wow. This one's called fragmented. It's a combination of a short story and a poem. The call for lights out bounces off marble floors and pale walls. Darkness comes in intervals, in a padded room, a wiry dark-skinned man with a gray and goatee lies awake, memorializing his fallen comrades. They were from the diaspora, gringos with blood ties to Caribbean towns bearing Taíno names, Yabucoa, Calle, Macau, Arecibo, Guayama, colonizer cursed. Their true names were placed with the names of their ancestors oppressors, Sanchez, Torres, Garcia, Kolondres, a lost tribe of glorious brothers and sisters called to take back what was stolen from them. They believed they were chosen. In his youth, an American white man in uniform once asked him his full name and he told him proudly it was Mario Jesus Cora.  Stung, he told the man he was Puerto Rican. Same difference, the white man said. As he aged and read and listened, he learned the meaning of that phrase, the acknowledgement of that what is said, thought or believed isn't necessarily true or altogether accurate but that ultimately what makes it untrue or inaccurate doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things because nobody really cares. He understood it is America. Before I know it, the rock is leaving my hand and landing forcefully on the left side of the policeman's head. The impact brings him to his knees and he drops the gun. Run for your life, I yell. And that's exactly what my boy Eugene does. Word on the street is that justice is defined by impartiality and objectivity and a rigged system of definitions. So I sprint toward the other officer and kick his gun as hard as I can and watch it disappear into a storm during opening. I bellow a great big laugh and then I run, I run down 19, make a right on Brian and keep on going until my lungs burn. Once safe I text Eugene to make sure he's okay and I can't stop grinning.  And then it dawns on me that he didn't see my face and I'm bent over consumed and giddiness. I'm an anonymous Avenger. I want my cape to be purple. Earth, wind and fires, fantasies blaring through the clouds. Eugene is dead. Whatever the headlines, another unarmed, unwhited man is dead. And damn it, if he doesn't look like me. Again, he's shown in a picture taken for his yearbook, toothless smile, eyes already suspicious of it all, gleaming with the fire and promise within, collared shirt, bought at Ross, his steals, tie in a maroon velvet jacket his mom found on the sales rack at Urban Outfitters. After asking Omar at the corner grocery to please wait until next month for what she owed. His name is Eugene, born of a certain you broke and betrayed, marked before being America's like heaven except when you're being shot, caged, beaten, berated, belittled, blamed, bullied, some cops really do enjoy hurting black and brown folk. But if you ask who could possibly enjoy doing something like that, you're asking the wrong question. I think of myself an idealistic pragmatist, a patriot, except when grandma asks whether I'm Puerto Rican or American that of course I say Boricua a la muerte, abuela. She doesn't quite get the concept that Puerto Ricans are American citizens. Isn't it about power? Eugene was always better than me at standing up to races. He said the U.S. is an unmovable object being slammed by the unstoppable forces of change, evolution, and good old cosmic karma. And I am a law abiding minority except for in my soul right in the center of my essence is a bit of reckoning, recklessness of a patient knowing another bullet off his shoulder another in his chest then he's drifting away his life draining out before him as he disappears forsaken another day in America the dream, the experiment, the melting part of humanity simmering under the violent flames of isms it burns the touch to taste high emerge from my hiding place swish go my nikes on the puddle pavement I shout hate is a bullet in my belly okay I think I got thank you this one is I'm trying to pull them out as I sueño contigo this one's gonna go in Spanish first and then English Borinquen sueño contigo aunque irme de ti fue lo más que yo quise sueño con tu palo de mango cual la fruta yo subía a buscar o recogía del piso o tenía a pedra Borinquen sueño contigo porque tu rayo de sol y sal de tu mal jamás me han dejado han colonizado mi pier de ti yo nunca hablo mal pero que no me hablen de tu de tu política entonces si que no Borinquen sueño con tu pasado, tu futuro y tu presente sueño con tu gente humilde y guillou ansiosa y tranquila feliz y infeliz toh a la misma vez gente que no tiene que conocerte para darte todo lo que pueda darte gente que te falta en el alma por machete, bate, pistola, chancleta música y letra o lo que encuentran nadie usa los reculchos disponibles como el Borinquen mirada al capugia Borinquen sueño contigo por las lecciones que me enseñaste por ti se cuando da un break a alguien y cuando decir mira chico no jodas más como tener orgullo en mi trabajo y como mandar a alguien a la venta del carajo como pararme firme en mi orgullo y mi identidad como seguir palante para atrás ni para coger impulso Borinquen sueño contigo porque algo en mi sabe que lo nuestro no se ha terminado me llama, me llamara me ha llamado, me ha arruinado para cualquier otra patria y en mi momento más sublime o más en necesidad de esperanza contigo es que sueño Borinquen Borinquen a dream of you though loving you was all I desired I dream of your mango trees whose fruit I climbed for picked up from the ground or stoned Borinquen I dream of you because your rays of sunlight and the salt of your sea have never left me they've colonized my skin and my soul I never speak badly of you but please don't mention your politics or your health system because then it's on Borinquen I dream of your past your future and your present humble and proud, anxious and calm, happy and miserable simultaneously people who don't need to know you to give you everything they got people who will break your soul with a machete a bat, a pistol, flip-flops music and lyrics or whatever they can find because nobody uses their available resources like a borinquen check the al capuria Borinquen I dream of you for the lessons you've taught me because of you I know when to appease someone and when to say yo get the fuck out of my face how to have pride in my work and how to stand up for myself and stand firm in my pride and my identity how to keep going forward because there's no going back not even to gain momentum Borinquen I dream of you because something in me knows that what we share isn't over you call me, you've called me you will call me you will ruin me for any other country and in my most sublime moments or in desperate need of hope I dream of you Borinquen thank you I think that's all I have thank you so very much thank you so very much and I want you to know something this has never happened to me before I've had several texts about your reading while you were reading that has never happened before that was awesome thank you so much for being here oh wow our next poet is Susanna Preve-Perez who I feel like we know each other we haven't spent a whole lot of time in the same rooms together but I feel like we do know each other we've performed together sometimes it always really rings for me so welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome Susanna thank you Kim, thank you for putting this together and you're right this is Familia it's beautiful to be here tonight and I'm going to start out with some family poems this first poem I wrote to my son and it's called Sancocho my son full hand of fingers long when the DMV made him fan all of his names on a table like a gin rummy flush he asked what were you in part thinking what we were thinking was to paint the map of your being in such bright letters you would never lose yourself never lose us nor your grandparents, tus abuelos your great grandparents, tus mis abuelos as you walk in a world where accent marks are seen as rubble to stumble on and the role of an R in aberration we stamped you with the world of my ancestors or what we knew of it after a genocidal war destroyed the stettos of Europe and yanked those roots from the soil we gave you my paternal name which may not really be my father's name or my father's father's name but a name a clerk at Ellis Island approximated a name that in Russian may have been pravda meaning truth the truth is hidden in an uprooted name we hold on tight to our names always seeking the truth itu papa stamped his name and his roots on you and on me too in Boston ever present on birth certificates marriage licenses and as you well know me driver's licenses Perez is like Smith in the Spanish speaking world but here instead of the beautiful cascade of syllables it is Perez is parade into Perez in English speaking mouths never let them tell you how to say your own name it is yours it is yours and puppies and now mine it belonged to a vuelo mateo who lived in a wooden house with no hot water and mocha itu visa vuelo who walked those fertile hills barefoot cracked souls caked with red soil itus tatara vuelos whose names were scrawled on the front page of a bible with a pencil sharpened by a machete your roots spread deep and far in a land whose sweetness was sucked by canya veralis and colonizers roots spreading like woody lianas and flowering vines in a yunque roots that spread to the halls of our home shape glistening socai in our brains thickly seasoned braid of blood meeting like bomba drums strumming like a balalaika spreading like verbs in our veins this next piece that first piece is from my book hurricane's love affairs and other disasters this next piece is not in that book it is an essential piece so shizue's book anthology this is a poem of remembrance from my late husband jose perez and it's called a mi querido negrito en su día december 11th arrived enrobed in fog in the warm cocoon of a cantaloupe room you painted before you became one with the wind your ashes dancing above aguadilla born in that place of little waters though some say aguadilla is not spanish but tayino for garden hijo de palmas orchidias y olas de mar crashing on ivory sand your song ran along stone rivers, río piedras where you grew sweet mangoes bursting as they rained upon your flat cement roof I place a slice of that fruit like a heart upon your altar and a flag of your beloved borinquin unfurled black and white in a sky like leche de coco that once fed your vibin' flesh in el cielo in caranublado your soul still bright veins the gift of you like rivulets of molten gold so continuing with the theme of family I'm going to read a poem to my titi-sara called od to titi titi-sara could squeeze juice from a dime and when she ran out of dimes titi could suck sap from a centavo they say oil and water don't mix but titi knew how to water aceite vegetal make it last to her next paycheck titi opened her triple locked door embraced me in her freckled arms aquí tienes tu casa siempre as soon as I settled I skipped to the market café y queso, piña y parcha slipped fine spanish olive oil into my cart succulent frill for her cupboard por qué comprarse tanto she quizzed as I hauled in the shopping her voice the tone of her short copper hair you gonna eat all that she asked we're gonna eat all that I replied storing the rice with a wink of my eye titi cooked arroz con candules plato no frito pechugo de pollo steeped in sofrito no sooner than plates were laid on the table we heard tuk tuk tuk at the door buen día sarita Olga from down the hall in house dress and shawl to borrow some olive oil se me haces el favor cierto césara jumped like an athlete poured half her flask of oil in a jar toma she said with the grace of a dancer as si fue titi if titi had two dollars she'd give one to atacato trembling on the corner spend days and nights aiding the ill but where was the aid when titi got ill after Maria knocked out electric left her seen agua eating canned tuna to learn testines jammed where was the aid stuck in her building car soaked to chassis and hurricane surge pallets of water left on a runway while titi and thousands withered with thirst titi died in a hospital del maestro surgery soiled by darkness and heat dancing barefoot with angels al campo santo as si fue titi the shoes she left too huge to fill stand empty frente al capitolio and the white house lawn silent witness to what went so wrong of many of the hurricane poems I have in my book and if the hurricane was not enough a year and a half later Puerto Rico was hit by a year long series of earthquakes hit the south and this poem is about that as well as accumulated trauma it's called cartography of the Caribbean once during the discovery map makers placed Borinquen at the center of the new world North America not fully explored was mapped like a snake dangling above the island renamed Puerto Rico for riches the Spaniards found the snake grew voracious teeth gold was devoured ore became sugarcane then petrol pharmaceuticals at tax haven a post hurricane clearance sale Sevende signs seen everywhere so it sounds like old news when geologists explain shake after shake of earthquake swarms the North American plate is pushing hard against the Caribbean apretando till fault lines jolt rocks explode and Borrecos with frayed singe nerves feel they're about to implode houses built on pillar legs fall to their knees schools collapse like tents of cards thousands of people sleep under the stars afraid they'll be crushed by their homes in every blackout chafes half healed wounds remembering a year without light months without water weeks of waking to tell your daughter eat your rice, mi amor no hay nada mas cascades of disasters reshape inner landscapes like swarms of quakes reshape Puerto Rico's topography in just 15 days the city of Ponce sunk 15 feet slid westward towards the setting sun and via the rosaries Guayania woke to find Punta Ventana shattered porthole in the stony cliff now jagged row of teeth in Inguanica point of entry when the U.S. invaded in 1898 the ocean trembles on the shore a woman watches a meteor streak across the sky her house is a mound of rubble but she's still standing listening to the cookies singing in the mangroves I have two more pieces these are not from the book this one there's all four of us our bilingual poets were also all from New York and I see a lot of New York in the house so this is for this is for y'all it's called Cucifrito at Midnight we were leaving Luisaida not the town of Luisaida and Puerto Rico's northern shore where Simarón has escaped slavery's chains there was no sea of surging water in front of us just an ocean of concrete still radiating heat despite the midnight hour we were leaving Luisaida not la calle Luisa that runs through Santurce were sent of sofrito drifzan sea breezes that same smell was in the air but the breeze that carried it was thick with car exhaust despite the midnight hour we were leaving Luisaida New York's alphabet city where Avenue C is sometimes called Avenida or Luisaida by Boricua's living in Puerto Rico's other capital Avenue A could be for Alviso Avenue B for Betances and Avenue C for Coño Que car están las rentas so Boricua's took that bloody neighborhood turned abandoned buildings into homes where familiars could live and grow we were leaving Luisaida to catch the train to Long Island la ultra isla the 1 a.m. from Penn we should make it, no problem city blocks speed by walking in Manhattan on a warm summer night but then we saw it blinking neon signs sounds of salsaluras in patitas chicharón or rejas rabo de cerdo all glistened in a flashing red light mira payar cuchifrito food from home steeped in larga tradición scraps cast off by los ricos made delicious by los bobres made whole again Puerto Rican soul food in the middle of Nueva York in the middle of the night with a train to catch the train we were leaving Luisaida the Luisaida in a city that never sleeps where one can eat cuchifrito at midnight and make time and distance disappear we were leaving Luisaida and the pleasure of finding el sabor de sus raíces in the city of steel made the two hour wait for the next train worth it and I'm going to close with a short poem, a love poem from the island of Puerto Rico it's called no small love and it's after Sonia Sanchez's poem this is not a small voice this is no small isla you see this 33 by 100 miles splash of green this island is large, long a syncopated song sizzling crimson flamboyan this is no emerald speck you see floating between two twirling seas africa and spain twirled daíno dna and new migrations grew this is not a flash of light drifting in a jet black night this is lonely cordillera canya plantain cascade of calloused hands this is no small love you see this land of myelo el topo y don rafael parcha flavored verse, plumeria scented breeze this love is a porous arc of palm trees pours itself on bami's skin like waterfalls on obsidian this love figure eights its hips unlocks rusted gates drips warapo from its lips this love is where I am hermana negrita mami mi amor you see this is no small love gracias wow Suzana's work is one of some of the poetry I recognize who wrote it even if it comes to me without a name on it it's one of those things that's like I can't judge a contest with you in it because I absolutely know it's your work there's no mistaking it thank you so much lady I've been thinking how to introduce Soacha since we started and we're a whole different kind of family this lady and I I answer the phone when she calls me when I am not answering and I actually have a true story about that somebody there we are let's get this thing going here I headed back to the bay I'll head back to the bay okay I did please mute Bill okay anyway so when my daughter passed Soacha called me and talked to me and said some comforting things and some difficult things and some heavy things and I was like I'm not going to blame the phone when she called me but I answered the phone for her we've known each other a long time I believe that we started really getting to know one another when we were both involved with he reading in benefit of the people in the ninth ward after the after the that caused that and we started working together then pretty regularly and ended up with a lot of readings together and I love this lady she knew my adopted mom and she's a legend and that's the end of your introduction Soacha she said this is familiar this is a real deal and folks know the story and we don't have any more children so I adopted a couple and both these young men Manny and Tony are my babies and it's always wonderful when you can get the babies and some other woman has to deal with the labor pains and the stretch marks so these are both my babies I'm very proud of and Soacha is my sister and I'm grateful all of you came out to support us because somebody else did something about the mission I used to live in the mission and the mission is not the place I used to live in I cannot believe when I go down the streets in the mission what it is now what it isn't I should say so this is the tears of a crazy old lady Akithoy another old lady dishing out healing doses of age poetic tears and laughter from Picante handing out mega-servings of delicious ambiente dulce spiced with muralista I'm here a relic still a wreck laughing at our new age naval-staring neighbors who live trying to intellectually digest El Salvador del Pueblo while pricing us out of what's ours at the cost of losing their souls and all their profits trying to cure their too hot to swallow jalapeno induced indigestion y bingo Naticando now an old lady serving out huge portions of sensitive mysticas the real soul food and heaps of poesina que me quema y ganas en fin my will fortified by la lagrimas of an army of ancestors inspired unbending and fully aware our new age naval-staring neighbors may have priced some of us out of the neighborhood but we keep coming back Naticando knowing that we shall never never ever colonize our spirit out of la misión this next one is called listen to the rain for junque and I cry just thinking about it because Maria 8 I mean it just chewed it up and I still see what it was and I guess our great-grandchildren will see it be that again because mother nature doesn't stop so and I apologize and who I think are listening from they were saying they were listening for my I can't play it and this will make it a mess so anyway this is listen to the rain for junque and where they he always listens I say always listens but never hears the music for junque too busy always rushing running taking always taking but never taking time enough to listen to the rain to hear her sacred song to feel the magic for junque I say they came suffering a cute gringo they will never know more than just another rain forest more than a beautiful tourist trap more than just one more romantic now with more great potential for the cultural expansion of McDonald's bulletproof hamburgers have you ever really listened to the rain the magic the the the the listen listen listen to the rain is a fertility dance try to make you hear the music is strong enough to live for a tree and maybe even die to be free did you hear the magic sombra de anelas listen listen listen to the rain that whispering in your ears that a shower with your pride let her lead you to the magic of junque that the rhythm of the rain burn like fire in your blood. Have you ever stopped and listened? Listen to the rain. Listen, born equal. Listen, listen to the rain stop. Listen, listen to the rain born equal.  This is called talking about La Musica. I'm a music nut for all those that know me, though that already so. But listen, this is talking about La Musica. I'm talking about La Musica. My music, La Musica corriendo por mi seso, escuchando la music de mi sueño. Ay, music, una comida de la vez. I said I'm talking about music. La Musica sagrada, sweet music, precious music, Musica caliente y la cachao en puente. Like patato y totico en caco, talking about sea cruise. Ay, bendita luz, el fuego de tito, rurrigues, cortijo, migalito, valdez. Can't leave out papina, lube, Johnny Ventura, Machito Graciela, Hector Rivera, Garcia O'Mara on my brain, talking about flying, flying high on music, crying, dancing, laughing music, freedom music, living for more, more music, my music, I mean, Musica preciosa. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, ha! When along comes senor planchao, pelado, pouring buckets of rain on my son chanisiendo. Let me turn off that mess, chewed into the mud and the stuff died with the last supper. Tu tu cupla, cupla, tu tu cupla, cupla. La Musica, mi Musica y compa, pienso que tiene cacahuate en la cabeza, en vez de cesos cacahuates, sino cuates, cala loco con su temen, another brother bites the dust. I gotta have it. I said, can't live without it. Talking about while on course on muntuno la plena, while here in La Bomba for days and days and days, don't take your rainy lack of pride elsewhere, papi triste. La gente me dice la merengona, toe a blando de la Musica, sweet, sweet, sweet precious music, music, Musica de la, la Musica sagrada, got beautiful bed, I've come to run wild inside my brain, got a grana, senor racing como loco through my veins, just ain't got no time for no pelado, so drain your dig. A toe a blando de la Musica, talking about great music, soulful music, pulsating, pulmering music. Mi Musica, Musica de la gente, street music, a blando de la Musica, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet behind shaken music, magic music, always music, a blando de la Musica, la Musica, la Musica para siempre jamás. I'm a musician, I've been a musician since I was a little kid and I come home real late and this is written for the street kids. And it's in my book which is in the chat if you feel like it, go to get yourself a copy of the book, it's called street children of the night Chiquitito de la noche en aquel lugar. Black and brown children of the night que ya no saben nada que garras ni dito de la caixa. Que Dios morinnitos, whose ideas have got, whose ideas of having fun got swallowed by the darkness. If I could I would wrap you in sunshine, would hold you close and fold you in these arms and crests whatever's left to the child in you with lullabies. I would like to cover every inch of you with home cooked surface theme and that they sell by contest. I want to fill the hole that hurt Doug. Take my hand and I assume defining through the fires of health for you and with you through the mugre of disrespect. I'm a hard-headed kind of lady and I just can't see myself giving up on you. Solo lo que solo you and I para nosotros, solo todo lo que I refuse together by history por lo bonito, los sueños, arrobados, like spiritually in the maze of our destiny origin. Mis negritos, mis pequeños, carajeros los necesito. The truth is I know I need you y yo sin ti, soy nada. And if I had a chance, I refuse to turn you loose to you with so in love with yourself and self-destruction with disintegrate under the pressure of your presence and you were so secure, my love for you and so sure to splendor you had become that even the sun would lay aside its arrogance just to get a chance to reflect with brilliance of your essence and bask in the bold truth of your integrity. En ti, y voy a verar real y yo sin ti no existen ni un sendero de la esperanza, I will say, can they see you? My beautiful wild lotus flowers, if I could, I bathe you in a sea of rose water, I convert your ways of pain into an ocean of pride and faith, y yo te piro dame, y yo chan si, please, please, please let me in. I promise you the very best I can, even if I have to wake the dead and conjure up our ancestors' breath.  So together we can wash away the centuries of emasculating doubt and defeminizing lies and have a little fun and learn to play a brand new game called demolishing walls of self-hate. Children of the nightmares, milito de la cajia, I want the stubbornness of my love to help you turn all the lights inside your soul, cui, cui, cui, cui de mi sangre. I will not allow the streets of any city to steal you. You, like a lotus blossoming in the nightmares, kere yutas, alma de mi existencia, I will not let the cesspool linger, make a fast food, happy meal of your dreams. Chiquito de la esquina, you are our only wealth, you are the most beautiful part of me and I'm not about to let you go.  Aduo sitho, per dito de la noche, if I could I would pave your path with starters and massage your mind with a steady dye, just how important you are.  It's my job to remind you on a daily basis, this crazy old lady is here to stay, I'm still here. I say I'm here, staying and praying and praying and staying and staying and praying and praying and praying and praying and praying mi sialito negri dito de la noche, I'm talking to you. Can you even hear me? It's all tomorrow that you're thrown away. Can you just ni ni dito de la caja? I'm still waiting a stubborn old lady with a heart full of love standing in the shadows and waiting on who you could be, waiting for you to finally see me waiting to wrap you in a blanket of sunshine. How much time do I have? I'm lost, how much time do I have? You can read another poem. Okay, this one is called Daughters of the Drum. Every year there was, and hopefully it'll happen again before the pandemic, the International Women's Drum Festival, and I did a workshop there every year called When Ancestors Speak for Rhythm and this is for all the women that came to born the drum, it's called Daughters of the Drum. We were born the drum. Somos hijas rítmicas, we were conceived in rhythm whether we knew it or not or wanted it or not, it was and has always been about upholding la clave en la alma. The beauty and sanctity of the rhythm that created us, the rhythm that is us. Somos el latido de la naturaleza, the rhythm of our mother's labor pains announced our coming and it's always the rhythm of our breathing that lets the world know we're alive, me don't know. Vellias fuers amíticas pero picosa spíli.  Somos la censia de la rumba and even our sacred mother nature dances rhythmically through the seasons every single year, keeping the rhythm of our lives in balance. Our universe is an inescapable symphony, rítmicas sagrados held together by vibration by the sound of the sum of us. The always right one time magical, rhythmical timelessness of us. Somos la fiebre y apasionada de la rumba, the heart of bebop and cubop was born in us. It's created creation's gift to us. Somos el corazón del tambor, born in the womb of creativity and undeniable rhythm personified. Wake up world, wake up, wake up, me don't know, listen, listen. We are your children and we were born to drum. Please check out my thing there, get the books of everybody you've heard this evening, come and support here in the name of Manny Martinez, Susana Prevapérez, Tony Agarondo, please come and support us because that's the only way we can exist and we'll give you a dose of vitamin B flat if you come and check us out. Thanks for listening to my words. Thank you so much, Avacha. And thank you to all of the readers who Avacha just named. Thank you also to the San Francisco Public Library that indulges me and lets me do this sort of thing with very little oversight. Thank you, John, for being the conduit for this and thank you for all of the people in the audience. If people missed it, it's been recorded. I imagine it's going up at some point and you can catch it again. And even if you didn't miss it and just want to see it again, it's going up. So thank you all. Next month we've got, we're not at our usual date. It'll be the 18th, if I'm not mistaken, November 18th. And it's going to be an array of Native American women, including Linda Noel, Georgina Marie and Denise Loeso. And everybody's either a former laureate or a current laureate somewhere. So that's going to be a great reading too. Thank you all for coming. And we are done for the evening. Really. Thank you everyone. Going back to November 18th. Woo hoo. Thank you folks in Zoomland and YouTube land. All right, see you soon.


My name is Laura Preil and I studied at the University of Newcastle between 2004 to 2007 in a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English. Since graduating, harnessing that education and the power of writing has taken me all over the world. I've held senior content and communication positions at some of Australia's top global companies and I've also been able to fly around the world to produce content in cities like LA and London. But my biggest achievement has been to start my own business, LEP Digital, right here on the Central Coast. Our business unsurprisingly specializes in copywriting and content production. So today I thought I'd share with you my top four copywriting tips to use in the online environment. So no matter where you work, what industry it's in, having these tips in mind and becoming a better writer is paramount to success. So as part of these four tips, I'm also going to tell you what not to do in copywriting. So the first one is lackluster headlines. So how do you write copy that converts? You need to answer people's objections. And headline is everything. It needs to address the specific buyer problem. It needs to be clear, concise, it needs to speak with a natural voice and it needs to avoid any sort of technical jargon or complicated language. David Ogilvy, famous admin, said that five times as many people read the headline than the body copy. So if your headline or your email subject is dull, the audience won't read on. So the trick is to spark curiosity without giving away the whole story. Make it emotive, make it relevant, timely and punchy. Humour never goes astray. Use play on words. Unexpected one-liners are always good ways to grab attention. Crime number two, self-centred copy. This is by far the biggest thing we see in our business in writing and no doubt you've done it before, purely accidentally of course. There's a really good quote that I like to reference which is, content marketing is really like a first date. If all you do is talk about yourself, there won't be a second date and I think all of us can remember a time where we had that experience where the person just banged on about themselves and didn't ask us a single question. So the biggest issue I see in web content is that it's all about me. It's company centric, it's weed driven and it's copywriting that turns the business owner on but turns potential clients off. Business owners think that marketing and sales copy should be all about their business but it's not. When a visitor gets to a website, they don't care about the company. They only want to know what the company can do for them. So it really needs to be clear and customer focus both in the copy and the menu items. There is a great female writer and entrepreneur in the US called Marie Folio, whom I look up to and she's a copywriter as well and she talks about it brilliantly in that it's called to her the spotlight theory meaning that in content either the spotlight is on the business owners or it's on the customers. So if the spotlight's on you, the focus of your words is likely on your passion, your cleverness, your goals. However, when you shift the spotlight over to your customer, the focus of your words is on the people that you serve or the people that you're communicating with, their problems, their aspirations, their goals. So I'm going to share a quick example here. So this is a real website and by Dr. Cheryl who's a relationship advisor and it says Dr. Cheryl is the go-to modern-day guru of mind for loving which probably doesn't mean a lot to us. We're probably thinking what is this? What is this website? It's all about the business owner and it doesn't contain a benefit or hook for the customer who's likely on the site because they need some serious relationship help. But the point is that if they're coming to this website because they're in trouble, they're saying I need help with my relationship. They're probably not saying I need a mindful loving guru. So you might be asking what's the fix? Well, using this spotlight method coined by Marie, we can write some new headlines that are more customer-focused. It could be as simple as need relationship help. Let me get your love back on track. It could be get the passionate, playful relationship that you want. I'll show you how. Or relationship in trouble. Let's get your love life back on track. So instantly we see how these headlines are more customer-focused than Dr. Cheryl focused and therefore become better at doing their job. So feature-driven web content has its place in a lot of the sales copy that we read today. So we see it a lot in electronics or software or in the final stages of when you're trying to buy something and you're trying to weigh up what certain features are in some products than others. But the issue with feature-driven copy is that it doesn't generally connect with people on an emotional level. People make decisions emotionally and only then do they rationalise them logically. So if your communication, web content, social media content, letter, whatever it is is filled with uninspiring lists of facts and figures, it won't result well. You probably won't have many people buying your product or taking action as a result. So a much better way to look at it is to be benefit-driven. So find out what the benefits of the product or service are for your intended audience and tell them. So for example, does your product or service make their lives easier? Does it make them healthier? Does it make them wealthier, sexier? And if so, how? Turn those features into benefits wherever possible. Really good writers find a way to empathise with their readers to build trust and rapport. And this involves looking a lot more deeply into the problem that your product or service solves and showing empathy. So the last crime to keep on top of is vague copywriting. So what do I mean by vague copywriting? Well, I'm going to show you an example here. It's pretty hard to tell when you look through here. A lot of this is very generic. Nothing really pinpoints what they do. So what this is, is a business that hasn't clearly defined. It's what we call in advertising a unique selling proposition. So what are you actually selling and why is it unique? Why should I care about it? Why should I read about this? And this sort of writing is done by people who may be uninformed or simply lazy. They just don't have the skills to communicate more clearly. It's often fluffy. They don't differentiate from one company to the next. It's often so indistinguishable. It can really be applied to any competitor with few or no changes. So you can simply lift this copywriting off this website and put it on another website and it'll work just fine because it doesn't say that much. So a good way to combat this, if you do come across it, might be at the company that you work at, is to explore and research how your company differs. So how you offer something that's unique from the competitors. For instance, if your company is small, maybe they're really quick to deliver. Maybe they care more. Maybe they provide unmatched personalised service. Whereas if a company is large, maybe the benefits of that is that they offer all services under one roof. Maybe they have a national support network, vast resources, personalised care providers. So what the point of all of this is, is that if you're not making an effort to tell people why you're the best choice, you'll really be deemed as a commodity, which results in low conversions and it attracts really cheap and non-loyal customers to your site. So you could also apply this if you're looking for a job as well. If you're too vague about what you do and you're too similar to what everyone else is saying, you may not get the job that you really want. So really this can be applied as I said to any riding exercise. So those are my top four tips. I hope that you found them valuable. Big thank you to the University of Newcastle alumni team for giving me this opportunity to talk with you today.


We're giving the money to individuals and teams in the community if they have ideas for what they think would be a needed project in our area. We're focusing on Pike County, but it does have to be under the umbrella of promoting diversity, acceptance, and tolerance.


Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Whatever you're listening. This is Davisville on KDRT LP 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm Bill Buchanan. I'm the host. Thank you for tuning in. Each year, you see Davis chooses one graduating senior to receive its university medal. The prize recognizes excellence in undergraduate studies, outstanding community service, and the promise of future scholarship and contributions to society. This year's medalist, effectively, the top student from a graduating class that includes many thousands of accomplished students is Jumana Isso. She is an English major who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and country of Jordan. And among other things, she wants to study fiction involving climate change. Like all of our recent shows, we're doing this by Zoom, so the sound quality isn't what you get in the studio, but the gist of the show should be intact. Jumana, thank you for appearing on Davisville today. Thank you for having me. First, congratulations. You know, tell us about the moment when you learned you had received really this extraordinary prize. What did you do when you heard the news? Thank you. I was interviewed pretty late on in the quarter to the point where I didn't really know if I was still up for the university medal because I didn't know in normal quarters if you figure out this later on that you are the recipient of it. So after interviewing, I thought that it went really well. And two days later, I received a call from the university that said, Do you know the news yet? And I was like, No, but if it was bad news, it would be really sad that I received the call first, but then I got an email that said, You're the university medalist effectively. I called my parents in there in Jordan. So the time zone was a bit off, but they were really excited for me. Did you end up waking him up in the middle of the night? I think yeah, it was it was nighttime for them. I don't think I woke them up, but receiving a call from me that late, they knew that it must be like news of some sort, but they were really excited for me. Yeah, I can imagine. That's quite a phone call to get from the campus. You know, have you heard the news yet? Yeah. Like, maybe. They were like, Did you receive any emails today? And I was like, No. And they're like, So you don't know the news yet. I was like, This would be really depressing if I didn't get it. You know, I guess we should explain a little bit the process for winning the medal. It isn't simply that you have the highest grade point average or anything like that, right?  I mean, the academic senate gets involved as I understand.  No, we had, I think each college has its own set of awards and you can win the award but still have to be nominated by the college. So I'm not sure who else was being interviewed for the university medal but I'm assuming that it would be the top student in engineering, ag science, bioscience, etc. All of whom I'm sure are very accomplished students to get to that level. So your parents are in Jordan. Were they able, and you just graduated from UC Davis, you know, there wasn't a physical ceremony this year because of the pandemic. You know, were your parents able to participate in your online graduation? So, I was a bit confused by the format of our online graduation and I sent links but the way that it worked was we had kind of short clips by the chancellor and the deans of the colleges and you can just click on the slide. So it wasn't so much as they participated but I mean I sent links to people that wanted to be involved in it but yeah it was a bit different this year obviously and I'm glad that they didn't buy tickets to come to the US way early on. So how did you, you grew up in California and in Jordan. So how did you come to grow up in both countries? Yeah, my dad went to college in the US, he went to Chico State and so I was born in the US and they had kind of work and connections in the San Francisco Bay area. And then when we were, when I was six, we moved back to Jordan for work and then spent five years there, moved back here, spent three years here, moved back there again, moved back here. I spent part of high school here, hence why I went to a UC and kind of was able to stay in California but it was, I grew up in both places because it was a lot of back and forth. You know, I would think that would be interesting to different countries and back and forth so that you can almost compare you know high school in Jordan, high school in California. Yeah, very different, well hardly different countries and education systems. It's, it was a bit weird to jump back and forth between them because I spent ninth grade in Jordan and I was taking like biology, physics and chemistry all at the same time and then I would come back to the US and each science was like a year of your high school experience like you took biology as a freshman and then you ended your high school experience with physics and so I was like why isn't everyone just taking all of them at once. This is the IB kind of protocol for foreign country. So you majored in English at UC Davis. Why did you choose English? I've always loved reading and literature and especially in high school I started to realize that this was the subject that I was drawn to the most. But when I was applying to college, a lot of people were kind of scaring me out of choosing my passion as a major because they're like what about financial security or how are you going to get a job or what do you plan on being like you need to look into what an English major can lead you to. And so I applied to all the UCs and CSUs as an undeclared major. And then once I got to Davis and I took my first English class, I declared English because I realized that I yeah I do love it and I'm not going to be scared away by what people say about it. That's a very common debate discussion I say this, I have two daughters they're out of college now, but certainly among their friends that very question you know do you study something that draws you, or do you have strictly a financial consideration. And, you know these days a lot of the language or a lot of the discussion seems to favor things like STEM, you know being very practical, but you know it was English and you did very well at it. What do you want to do with it. What do you want to do, not with your degree necessarily but I mean where do you want to go with your life. That is the question that I've been trying to get answering. And only because kind of with everything happening in the world right now, I know that even having set plans doesn't necessarily mean that your life is going to go on a specific course like I know a lot of friends who are in the business who have had internships since their junior year which guaranteed them jobs after graduation, and now they're in the position where they don't know if they have their job, because of everything happening in the world and because of, you know, the kind of crisis that we're going into after graduation. So, I've been wary about designating a career for myself post grad school, but also because I don't really know, I think that choosing to apply to Cambridge was when I talked to Francis Dolan about it, I was saying, and if I don't get financial aid, I won't go and then I'll figure out something else. And then I got the scholarship, and now I have financial aid and I was choosing to go there, and it became that while I'm there I will decide what I'll do after, or if I really enjoy my master's program maybe it'll turn into a PhD, etc. We should explain there that you, among other things, you've earned a full right scholarship at the University of Cambridge which is where you're going this fall in England, you know, assuming things go as intended. Yes, the Gates Cambridge scholarship. We should mention Francis Dolan too who also appeared on the show several years ago. She is a professor at UC Davis, an English professor. So she was someone you took several classes from, I believe, right? She was sort of a mentor to you. Yes, yeah, she has been a great support system and mentor for me, and I just kept wanting to take classes with her whenever I saw her name pop up on a syllabus for a specific quarter, and I turned to her for advice, even for applying for the University Medal, or for the Letters and Sciences nomination that Len led to the University Medal, and for grad school and what I could do after and what I could use the English major for. So she's been very helpful with that. So you've got a couple of interests that have, I'm sure there's more than two, but a couple that have surfaced in the initial campus articles about your awards. That's refugees and also climate fiction, meaning fiction where climate change is part of the story, not that climate change is fiction. Tell us about those. So why, why do those draw you as subjects? I started with issues of refugees and displacement. I'm Palestinian, even though I grew up in Jordan, and that's because of displacement. So my family, both my mom and my dad's side had to go to Jordan because of the war. So my issues regarding refugees have always kind of interested me because it's very close to home. And so when I took my first human rights class through the University Honors Program, I started to volunteer with Article 26 backpack, which focuses on kind of guaranteeing that refugees can still document their past years and education through a cloud based app. And so when I focused on that throughout college, even in English classes, there's always still issues of human rights violations that appear in our literature, whether it be about like World War Two or the Vietnam War. And so everything that you read will have social issues embedded in it. And so when I looked at human rights violations and issues of refugees, I realized that in the next 50 years, ecological refugees are going to be increasing wildly because of floods or islands disappearing or being displaced from their homes along the coast. And that's not really an issue that people see as climate change as a human rights issue.  And so when tackling my thesis and turning to climate fiction. I wanted to knit those two issues together. But I also didn't really know what climate fiction was until last year when I took a climate fiction course with Professor Tobias Manili. I, I obviously love literature being an English major but I wasn't aware that there was a genre dedicated to climate change and representing it through these non realist modes. Yeah, in fact, I one of the articles I read on UC Davis talking about your interest, referred to as Clifi. I wasn't familiar with that term either. Climate fiction, I understand, but I wasn't aware that it become so defined as already have acquired that nickname. Oh yeah, sci fi and Clifi. Your honors thesis he wrote was about African futuristic works in climate fiction. Right, so tell us about those. I mean there's a, there's a specificity there that I find interest. Yes, so I kind of discussed how the climate crisis is this crisis of culture and imagination, in terms of you have to transform your literary approach to adapt to these change circumstances in our world and the Anthropocene, because we're trying to translate climate change into this lasting story, but we can't really represent climate change through realism, you can't put yourself in the eye of the hurricane or discuss nature as its own kind of agency of matter without turning to non realist modes and just that I examined do turn to non realist modes and they specifically use the structure of myth in their works and all of them are linked by the fact that they are black women. And when I started looking into their works, a lot of people labeled them as Afro futurist, because they turn to this future world, where they're reimagining a land changed by climate change or the climate crisis, as well as still representing the social issues that black women and black people face in the world, because they don't just go away when you're imagining climate change. And that's what interested me about Octavia Butler she has a lot of interviews in the science fiction world where people tell her to put away the Rick quote unquote race issues, because she's talking about sci fi and how can you have that alongside the technological changes but what I think what's great about the works that I've kind of tackled is that they show the change circumstances due to this extreme weather events and apocalypse, essentially, but still focus on how, you know, racial to bring is still an issue, genocides and wars based on race, as well as climate change or an issue, they bring the two concepts together to show that climate change and human rights violations are one in the same. So what interested me about them I didn't necessarily choose them going into it knowing like these are all black women but when I finally decided on the books that I would be writing about for my thesis. It kind of came to me when I was discussing it with my thesis advisor Professor Manili that all of them are black women all of them use myth why is it that these African American authors are using myth. So are there really US writers that you're talking about here are these writers actually in Africa. Yes, native native core for is Nigerian American I believe, and she has spent summers in Nigeria and lived in the US and so she's kind of like me in that way but Octavia Butler African American. Are you interested in writing fiction yourself climate fiction. I don't know. I haven't really tried to write climate fiction, or any kind of fiction throughout college has mostly been kind of literary criticism. But I mean it's an interesting path and obviously researching the neurological methods and talking about all these authors would allow me to see what works and what doesn't and kind of approach it from a new angle, possibly discussing the Middle East and climate change but I haven't I hadn't as I said I hadn't given much thought to post grad school quite yet. Well, you've got plenty of time obviously if that's something you want to pursue. We are talking with Jumana Eso. She is this year's University Medalist at UC Davis which means she is considered the top under top graduating senior this year. The program is a Davisville and bill Buchanan and this is on Katie RT. Refugees a big subject with you as well and Jordan is a country of 10 million with about 745,000 refugees. I was reading this according to United Nations, and I think that's a big number in a country of that size. These are mostly from the Syrian war, but there's also a climate change angle here too, I believe right. Definitely. I think that Jordan, especially without this strain on its resources doesn't really have much resources to be spreading around because the location with drought and this kind of limited land space where refugees are having to huddle into tents and now with Corona to there's a lot of risk for refugees in all countries but specifically in the Middle East. I think that Jordan is kind of the push for my discussion of refugees in the climate change narrative, specifically, because there are major barriers for refugees in new environments but in places like Jordan where the citizens themselves don't have that much leeway for resources, refugees kind of get placed into this. You can't really find the words for it. Well it's it's it's enormous. Obviously it's not a problem we can solve in a minute or two but what would help. Do you think with refugee crisis. Yeah, I mean what would help, what would help address this. I am not really sure what would help tackle. I mean like in general with refugees or specifically in the Middle East. I know that there's obviously a myriad of issues that leads to people being displaced from their countries and so I know that to stop this issue entirely you'd have to tackle climate change. I mean you have to find the root cause of wars and then see, you know, everything happening in these countries and focus on it bit by bit and so I'm not really sure what would help in this scenario. I know that with the Syrian Revolution a lot of people have started to link it to rising temperatures, displacing millions of people into the city which then led to conflicts in the city. Hence the revolution but it's not entirely climate change and so I can't say once we solve climate change there will no longer be wars and refugees, but yeah. And certainly too I mean it's a it is a big problem. I'm thinking one of the purposes of literature I suppose is to illustrate conditions problems in such a way that they that other people can understand them. Yes, it's just a frame of reference for people. And I think the fact that I'm so drawn a fiction it's also this the sense suspended disbelief in terms of it is a real issue and you know that you can imagine something like this happening in the real world, especially with fiction that's based on climate change or wars you know that it has happened but the story itself is fictional so you have this level of remove where you can not be immobilized by it. And I think that's what's interesting as well about climate change fiction because there are utopias dystopias apocalypse is everything in between but you aren't necessarily in this world that's fully on fire at least not yet. And so it either gives you a future that you can imagine that's hopeful where we adapt and where we've stopped emissions, or possibly one where we go on business as usual and realize now you know the world is underwater and what have we done to it, because I think that this speculative futureity is, it's a part of climate fiction but it's also just a part of the news, like if you read an article that's like the Arctic might fully disappear, and it's already melting right now but this could happen or the probability of this occurring is this much all of it is speculating because we don't really know what's going to happen in the future we're just basing it on what we're doing now, but we could, in a week, completely stop emissions or we could, as soon as this pandemic is over completely go back to how we were before. So I think that the merits of using fiction for climate change is because we are also engaging in fiction making in our news and in everyday life when we're trying to imagine a world in the future, altered by climate change. You know, listening to you right now I think you've just made a pretty good argument for why an English degree is worth pursuing. Thank you. So it's partly to grapple with things, whatever the issue may be it's a chance to grapple with these larger questions and as as a culture as a world, work them out I don't want to get too high fluting here but I think that's, I think that's always been one of the purposes of the humanities is to think and figure it out. I was discussing this with my thesis advisor recently because I was in a human rights and climate justice class, and for my final project I chose to talk to everyone about climate fiction, although the class is kind of a policy, I are themed human rights class where we discussed law policy, universal declaration of human rights and so a lot of people were like why fiction. And so I gave them my own response but I turned to my thesis advisor way after and I was like, I didn't know what to say to all these policy majors about why fiction and he said, Well, our world is organized around narrative. And as policy majors, they should know that if a president wins an election it's because he has the most appealing story. And we all are crafting stories for people, and kind of also selling our stories to others. And so, when someone turns you says why fiction, well this is just another kind of story. I think that that's important to articulate social issues, climate change, issues of refugees, displacement. I mean, my, some of my favorite narratives helped me figure out the scale of the issue like exit West by my son Hamid. He talks about kind of refugees and displacement but he uses magical realism, where there are doors in a world and you open them and you can get into a different country through it, which it's very cool and it kind of relates to my thesis in terms of using non realist modes but it's also a way of thinking about borders and how they're imagined and how we divide countries arbitrarily. It's, it's very interesting to think about how fiction has oriented the way I think about social issues. We have a few minutes left, I wanted to ask some questions that are sort of more prosaic but, but given that you've accomplished at this level I think people might be curious in your answers and one of them is simply, how did you manage to achieve everything that you needed to do to achieve at this level. Several years ago I talked to one of your predecessors as a metalist and I'd have to actually go back and listen to it but part of it was I think she avoided social media or at least Facebook. And I think her brother cooked meals for from time to time. Point was, those are small details perhaps but that they sort of gave some insight into how she organized and you know that's one of the questions is how do we all get everything done. That was something really quite remarkable and I'm curious if you have any advice or how you manage to achieve at this level. I think that it has to do with the fact that I actually love my major. And so when it came to choosing my majors classes every quarter, I would look at the description and see what most interested me. If I saw in a British novel to 1900 I immediately chose it and it was also helpful that the professors were amazing and the TAs and the resources that I had at Davis helped me achieve what I did but also with GE classes I did the same thing I wasn't going on Davis websites and seeing you know easy a or what's the best class to take if you don't want to try I would just see what interested me and the interest helped me try harder. And I also, I know it's weird to say but I like to sit down and kind of read for class and do my writing and a lot of people in college were like, I'm just going to skim this book or sparks notes it and just try to do as well as I can on this pop quiz but I would read to read and then it would help with the quiz when I remember the things that I do. In terms of community service and the other factors that led to the university medal that's it's also the same you know with human rights issues and refugees. The professors about their programs after taking their classes and decided to volunteer for them it wasn't necessarily like I need this many hours of community service for the university honors program requirements or doing something as a means to an end it was because I wanted to do the things and it became this thread woven throughout my research and it helped me and other factors and I really like to connect issues like if I'm taking an environmental science class I would connect it to the essay that I was writing in an English class even if it was British novels in the in the 18th century somehow there is an ecological lens that you can take with this so I'm big on connecting my classes together so it helps that I choose things that interested me during college. So you were interested in I believe I could summarize what you said that you saw real purpose to it I mean it engaged you personally but you also saw value in it and then that really propelled you. Exactly. You chose you see Davis because why you could have gotten a lot of schools I mentioned. I think as a California resident it was really important to me to also choose pragmatically because you have in state tuition with a lot of schools. I know that's not a glamorous answer. It doesn't need to be glamorous just a little bit the time left I did want to ask besides the education. What else will you take with you from Davis. I think that the relationships that I fostered with my professors. I'll continue to develop after leaving UC Davis because even during this really hectic quarter I've had professors that aren't even teaching classes reach out and say would you like to zoom in just talk about life or let's you know meet up for a socially just walk and and just talk and chat and it doesn't have to be about school or about grad school or about the future and I think that I was surprised choosing UC Davis that I managed to talk to my professors in this way because it's a school of over 35,000 kids and a lot of classes are big lectures even English classes I've taken you know shakes here where there's 90 other students in the class and you don't assume that the professor will even know your name. Let alone like recognize your face and yet here I am kind of leaving the school emailing all these professors saying this is when I'll be leaving Davis I really love to see you or. And it's been, I think this is one of the big things I'm going to take away from Davis and also one of the most surprising. Well, jimana thank you very much for talking with us today we've been talking with jimana he so who just graduated from UC Davis with a degree in English she's the university medalist this year jimana thank you for being on the show. Thank you so much. This is bill Buchanan on Davis Phil on kdrt. Thank you for listening.