The movie Eat, Pray, Love lasted 133 minutes. Mindy Grossman turned it into a 72-hour shopathon on HSN featuring custom bangles, bedding, tunics, and tea sets. "This was the most amazing storytelling vehicle," she says. Partnering with Hollywood is at the heart of Grossman's campaign to broaden the network's audience, 4.6 million of whom are customers. "I never want anything to be too predictable."
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this is what i KNOW about the potential for Ant Bites. What I want to accomplish.
AntBites is my own script/manuscript---that emerged as an excellent film project. But I see it as the making of an international brand; the first ever of its kind.
i am inspired to see others have that imagining in other realms, other films...;)
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this is what i KNOW about the potential for Ant Bites. What I want to accomplish.
AntBites is my own script/manuscript---that emerged as an excellent film project. But I see it as the making of an international brand; the first ever of its kind.
i am inspired to see others have that imagining in other realms, other films...;)
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Ant Bites
Spirit, Price and Mood:
Portraits of a Journey; Fragments of a Life
My Life in Reportage/New Journalism
By
TruthPoet
(Melise D. Huggins)
Preface, An Introduction
“As an African woman, not even five feet tall, from the Caribbean, a former colonial subject, I was not to know anything. In fact, to some I am still not believed to know, I am not even seen, certainly not as an individual, but as a mass of black bother to be contained or put to work. How, then, do I break out of this confinement and declare with even a modicum of assurance that I am, and I know who I am, and knowing who I am is a start, a big gigantic step. It is this step that led me to write, but many of us write; it is this knowing of myself that led me to save and later share my writings. Caribbean women writers know; more important, they know what to know; that is what they write about, what they come to know as they write, the knowledge of the past and the present and the reasoning behind those seemingly arbitrary actions, the wisdom behind all the kiss-teeth, pointing of the finger, shaking of the heads, and hands on the hip that are indelible in their memories, and which take on a new reality when staged in their poems, their plays, their songs, their prose. One of their characters says and does something, and suddenly this puts everything in place. Knowing then, for some of us who are women from the Caribbean, is writing the memories, not necessarily the individual or the specific stories, but the collective dance of our people.”
Opal Palmer Adisa
Pg 106, Chpt. 9, I Must Write What I Know So I’ll Know I’ve Known All Along in
The Woman, The Writer & Caribbean Society – Essays on Literature and Culture
Ed. Helen Pyne-Timothy
Novel Synopsis
Can I tell (you) a story: Of a woman, man, boy or girl; a woman seeking to traverse assigned, confined, concentric and constricted circles, whether her name be Ruth, Marjorie, Marina or Ella. Regardless of name, for the premise to be true the woman must be Black African, her identity, politics, race and ethnicity socially constructed and defined. Then their must be the limitations of class, access and power. See for her reality is a constant social climb and clamor. Then I will tell you of her struggles to be seen as feminine, yet not be wanton, property for work, use, abuse or rape by another’s will. Only white and light women get to be feminine you see; ancient truths from the days of slavery.
From this background, there is much to tell of my emerging heroine, she, challenging notions solely from an internal dynamic and destiny. I negated to tell you of another obstacle. The woman is mature and experienced, well traveled, perceptive and knowledge, yet looks and sounds like a little girl. Understand do you, what this all means for life, fulfillment, and embrace, legitimacy, professionalism and community, happiness in existence in a patriarchal society, where men are wolves and other women are a centered female’s worse enemy. Oh, and I did not share that she is single and uninvolved. In this milieu, my heroine is searching still, as she approaches middle age, for her genius to be made manifest.
There is a story I will attempt to tell of a person’s solo journey to perform, maintain, contribute and remain well. The woman whom I want to know and want to share: I will draw upon her struggles, her accomplishments, her failures, her futile searches, as well as her joys, blessings and her family background. Then you will read this tale, talk, discuss and convert from paper to your life truisms. Where you wonder do these words and this attempt at a story come from: the threat of not being well and an unusual doctor I stumbled upon who asked me about
my life; telling me of the need to find structure, answers, purpose and activity out of all the myriad thins I do well. So maybe this story is an attempt to save me and to find support and help for my heroine; in a search for consummation, lest she strives on sojourning needlessly lonely.
As you read, be mindful that this is about enthusiasm, perseverance and salvation over talent and craft. I believe without a compass, this story in its structure and format may break, push and transcend borders. It may be a story written about writing, where there is no delineation between fiction, non-fiction, memoir, the short story, the novel, and prose poetry. It is a story written for the oral tradition, to be enlivened and integrated into current life, the one that you are leading, living, dying, and ignoring. In the end, what ever its form and diverse parts, it all frames one story.
“The question with us, in love, is to discover whether we have experienced conquest or surrender—or neither. Courage under ill-treatment is a woman’s theme, life-theme, and is of some interest, but not if there is too much of either.”
“Everything has come to me and been taken from me because of moving from place to place.”
“…I mourn and regret much…”
– Elizabeth Hardwick, Writing A Novel
A novel element of this piece is the changing name of the same heroine in different settings and episodes, meant to convey several messages. First, the similitudes of women and their stories, as well as between human beings; that in fact, one person’s story is the reality of another, save the insignificant factors meant to obscure and obfuscate. The names chosen are those known and of the author’s past. The names merge into traditional old-fashioned Caribbean monikers to bring into a bygone era through readers’ memories. Thirdly, the name changing signifies the claiming of our multiple truths and realities as well as that of shifting identities without it ever being about dishonesty, multiple personalities, buried parts of ourselves, for we are complex, some more than others. It is a validation of our multi-dimensionality.
Looking back in reflection, this book and writing is about me coming home, like the Sankofa bird, returning to get bearings, with which to move forward. These experiences are of my return to “this place” that is Trinidad and Tobago: what it was in my mind, heart and ideals; romanticized and heralded. Ultimately, if I have told a good story, the undertow of everything I write will be an amalgamation by which the reader will have an understanding of the culture, its people, its phenomena. Perhaps.
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