Hillary Clinton Archives - Ann Hedreen, Writer Teacher Filmmaker

At the Edge of the World

therestlessnest2019-11-07T15:31:55-08:00Categories: brain, dementia, feminism, politics, Uncategorized, women's rights, writing|Tags: #Election2016, #vigilance, Alzheimer's research, Alzimpact, children's defense fund, Heather Wood Rudúlph, Hillary Clinton, Nicholas Kristof, Rebecca Solnit|

This is where I am: on the sandy, foamy, whitecapped edge of America. Last time I visited this beach, I wrote about the epidemic of earthquake fear then sweeping the Northwest, following the July 2015 publication of Kathryn Schulz’s New Yorker article, “The Really Big One.” Maybe it’s just as well to be out on the wide-open Washington coast when the big one hits, I speculated. It would all be over pretty quick: one big, obliterating tidal wave. Boom. And here I am again, feeling like the Big One did just hit us. It didn’t wipe us out. Yet. But it shook us to our core; challenged assumptions we’d held for months; changed the way we see ourselves and everyone else. Now we’re all rummaging through our psychic wreckage for salvageable scraps of energy, optimism, drive. We’re sorting useful anger from destructive anger. We’re demanding of ourselves that we learn to understand the people we quite recently referred to as Haters. We’re exhorting each other to eat, sleep, exercise, hug and read about a hundred articles a day. I have been reading a lot, and I’m sure you have too. Here are a few post-election essays I’ve found really useful: Dame Magazine's Don’t Tell Me to Calm Down, by Heather Wood Rudúlph ; Rebecca Solnit’s essay in The Guardian, Don't Call Clinton a Weak Candidate, and, for when you’re ready to stop keening and take constructive action, New York Times' columnist Nicholas Kristof’s A 12-Step Program for Responding to President-elect Trump. But I’ve also been thinking often of Hillary [...]

#Election2016: Countdown

therestlessnest2019-11-07T15:32:29-08:00Categories: family, feminism, human rights, politics, Uncategorized, women's rights|Tags: #Election2016, Donald Trump, Finland, Hillary Clinton, immigration, Somalia, voting, Wellesley College|

It has never, ever felt so good to seal and stamp an envelope as it did after I filled out my ballot last week. Sure, I miss the old ritual of going to my local polling place, but sitting down and getting it done at home, good and early, felt great. Especially this year. Of course, especially this year. And now I’m going to tell you a few of the people I voted for. I voted for the third graders I tutor in an afterschool program. One of them told me last week he was “so scared Donald Trump was going to win.” The others all chimed in. “We’re scared too!” “I hate Trump!” All of them are from refugee families; most come from Somalia. I wondered what they’ve been hearing at home. Can you imagine how horrifying it is to watch this election unfold, if you’re a refugee from anywhere—but especially from a Muslim country? I also voted for another refugee: Henry Grundstrom, my great-grandfather, who, according to his naturalization papers, “foreswore his allegiance to the Czar of Russia” to become a United States citizen in 1898. Henry was from Finland, then under the Czar’s thumb. If he had stayed, he would have faced conscription into the Czar’s army. What would he have thought of allegations that Russian hackers could be trying to influence this election? I voted for Viktor Warila, my other Finnish great-grandfather, who staked a homestead claim in Montana in 1910 and raised six children on the windswept bench lands between [...]

Imperfectionism: a manifesto

therestlessnest2019-11-07T15:33:14-08:00Categories: feminism, politics, women's rights|Tags: chocolate chip cookies, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, perfectionism, Presidential debates|

Here’s what gave me joy during the first presidential debate: Hillary Clinton’s smile. Sure, she might’ve practiced in front of the mirror, and I don’t fault her for that. As she told Donald Trump, she believes in preparing, both for the debates and for being president. But what her smile signaled so effectively was something else, something I would call her new imperfectionism. It’s no wonder she looked so joyful: if you’re Hillary Clinton, it must be a great relief to have moved beyond the futile grind of flat-out perfectionism. And I think we women can all learn from her. I’m not arguing that she was not brilliant that night. She was. But her tone, her ease, and best of all that bemused, transcendent smile told me that not only is she confident and ready to govern, she is now beyond inured to the type of male posturing in which Donald Trump invests all of his strategic energy. This is an important trait in a first female president. It is one she has honed over the decades, especially as Secretary of State. While Trump has been sharpening his negotiating skills by belittling tenants, employees, contractors, and beauty pageant winners, Clinton has been steadily building her ability to hold her own with hard-to-handle men, from her husband to five-star generals to heads of state. Remember when she was first lady, and she baked those cookies just to show she could? That was perfectionist Hillary, responding to a media pile-on that was all about how uncomfortable the country [...]

The Journals Project

therestlessnest2019-11-07T15:34:34-08:00Categories: faith and doubt, family, feminism, parenting, politics, women's rights, work|Tags: Democratic Convention, Hillary Clinton, journal writing, memoir, Obama|

This may look like July 2016 to you, what with the political conventions, heat waves and all. But if you ask me where I am on any given afternoon, I might say 1994. Or 1992. Or, not too many weeks ago, 1978. It is the summer of the Journals Project: the season I re-read my hand-scrawled life, transcribing not all of it—that would be WAY too brutal a task—but some important scraps. Morsels. I began keeping a journal when I was 13, so I have a lot of years to get through. The good news is that I did not (and do not) write every day. Sometimes I’ve skipped whole months, or more. But it’s taking me a while, because—sort of like eating Thanksgiving dinner—I can do it for no more than an hour or two at a time. There are only so many rich, nostalgia-laden bites a girl can take in one sitting. My self-imposed assignment is to look for anything having to do with God, faith, loss of faith, doubt, mortality and/or the meaning of life. It’s research for my next book, known for now as The Observant Doubter. Me being me, there’s a generous sprinkling of all of the above. In my very first volume, I wrote by candlelight, and used a fountain pen: a smudgy, spill-prone choice for left-handed me. But I can still remember the clink of the pen in the bottle, the scratchy sound of the nib, the smell of the ink. In the beginning, I wrote a LOT about [...]