Gala 2021: An Evening with Carmen Maria Machado
Join us on October 14th for our annual gala, with keynote speaker Carmen Maria Machado.
Carmen is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”
NARAL Pro-Choice Minnesota was founded in 1966, making us the oldest abortion protectors in the state of Minnesota. We lobby aggressively at the Capitol, escort patients at clinics, and organize on college campuses across the state. Our work is more important than ever – evidenced clearly by the new abortion ban in Texas, SB8. This law bans abortion after six weeks, criminalizing 84% of abortions in the state, rendering Roe v. Wade obsolete. Statewide work has never been more important – we must protect Minnesota from bans like this. Not just for Minnesotans, but for all of the Upper Midwest, as our neighboring states are already introducing similar bans.
Anti-choice politicians are trying harder than ever to strip Minnesotans of these rights, but we will not back down, and we know how to win. Support NARAL Pro-Choice Minnesota and come to our gala this fall – let’s protect and expand abortion access for all of the Midwest, no matter income or zip code.
*Details to join the virtual event will be provided on October 11th – make sure to stay subscribed to emails, since that is how the link will be sent out. The silent auction will also be live on October 11th.*
Upcoming Twin Cities Volunteer Clinic Escort Trainings
Our monthly Volunteer Clinic Escort Trainings are back – with a virtual twist! Fill out our interest survey using this link below and we’ll provide call in information closer to the event.
For more than a decade, NARAL Pro-Choice Minnesota has trained clinic escort volunteers who help people safely into their local abortion provider. Clinic escorts are a friendly face and a safe barrier between patients and the anti-choice protesters who harass women outside of clinics. NARAL has trained hundreds of volunteers for our clinics – and we’re inviting you to become one of them.
Join us on September 14th, October 4th, or November 10th, 2021 via Zoom for a clinic escort training. Here, you can learn the history of clinic escorting, the logistics of working with Minneapolis providers, and how to handle clinic protesters.
Looking to escort in Duluth, MN? Join us on September 7th, 2021 via Zoom to learn about how you can become an escort at the WE Clinic.
After the training, you’ll have the opportunity to sign up for specific escorting dates.
Reproductive Freedom Book Club
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.
Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
Schedule:
- Wednesday, October 6th, 6:00-7:00pm, “The Husband Stitch”, “Inventory”, “Mothers”, and “Especially Heinous”, pages 3-124
- Wednesday, October 20th, 6:00-7:00pm, “Real Women Have Bodies”, “Eight Bites”, “The Resident”, and “Difficult at Parties”, pages 125-264
Where: Zoom online meeting (Info will be provided upon receipt of R.S.V.P.)