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Who’s in Rabbit’s House, begins with a challenging situation and ends with a surprise. The stories: Where There’s a Cookie; Barefoot on the Table; and Black Blob; all start with difficulties that are resolved in unexpected ways.
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 It was early afternoon on Christmas Eve, our first in the new apartment, our two-and-a-half-year-old son healthy after more than six months of illness. I celebrate Chanukah—lighting candles on the menorah and making latkes (potato pancakes). My husband’s Christmas celebrations always included a tree, fancily decorated with lights. I didn’t mind having a Christmas tree. What I did mind were the decorations—baubles, tinsel, and glitter. I understood his wanting a Christmas tree but we had no money to buy one. We could barely pay our bills. Still, Christmas without a tree was not Christmas for him. After pacing up and down the living room, more and more unhappy, he stopped and said, “I’m leaving. I’m going to get a tree.” I asked how he intended to pay for it. Ignoring my question, he stormed out.
 In 1990 I was in Budapest, Hungary, where I’d been invited to give a talk and workshop at an international conference on innovative teaching methods. As people milled around, registering, speaking in a variety of languages along with heavily accented English, I felt lost among the crowd—mostly men in dark suits with fancy briefcases. I was wearing a long pastel colored skirt and a white blouse with dangling earrings, carrying an embroidered cloth bag. While waiting in line, I picked up a conference program and searched for information about my presentation, legitimizing my presence.
I overheard a group of men behind me talking about the presenters, not paying much attention until I heard my name and then the title of my paper and workshop, “Imagemaking and Storymaking: Techniques to Develop Imagination, Creativity, and Communication,” with such disdain I felt like letting them know they were talking about me. I chose to pretend I hadn’t heard.  The university honors students walked into my classroom looking as stressed and anxious as if they were going to the funeral of a friend. None of their usual talking and wisecracking. I watched as they sat in the circle of chairs, wondering what was wrong. When everyone was seated, I told them, “Take out your paints and paint an image of ‘myself at this moment.’ Then write a few words that come to mind.”
When everyone had finished, I asked the class to hold up their papers so they could see each other’s’ images. There was a collective gasp. In every person’s painting there was a black blob, some larger than others—all prominent. They’d written words like: stress, fear, nervous, anxious, failure, hopeless, no use . . . |
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August 2024
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Nancy King is a widely published author and a professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she has taught theater, drama, playwriting, creative writing, and multidisciplinary studies with an emphasis on world literature. She has published seven previous works of nonfiction and five novels. Her new memoir, Breaking the Silence, explores the power of stories in healing from trauma and abuse. Her career has emphasized the use of her own experience in being silenced to encourage students to find their voices and to express their thoughts, feelings, and experiences with authenticity, as a way to add meaning to their lives.
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