Tag: Writing

Long, long ago and far away…another place, a different time

Jennie and I just got back from a four-day visit with friends in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We stayed in the Las Campañas area, home of one of the three couples that made up our traveling group. It was a beautiful place on the high mesa, populated by piñon pines and surrounded by the Jémez and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges. The sunsets were otherworldly, intensified by thunderheads and the occasional lightning strikes. The day temperatures fluctuated from the mid-seventies to the high eighties—perfect weather for the seven-thousand-foot elevation.…

Musing of a poet on the rim of the world

I recently submitted a poem to the Morton Marcus Poetry Contest…I did not win the poetry contest—however, I did get an email from the sponsor, Catamaran Literary Reader, informing me that they were “releasing” my poem back to me. (I hadn’t realized they were holding my work captive, but I felt a strange sense of comfort upon its return, like getting your coat back from the hat-check counter on a dark and stormy night!)…

On Writing about Strong Women

Literature is full of classic novels portraying strong female characters. Titles like Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice, and My Ántonia, to name just a few, have graced old and new bookshelves for many years. History, as depicted in both fiction and nonfiction, has been shaped in large part by women—women with strong voices, convictions, and fortitude who have influenced every part of human existence. This demonstration continues today and no doubt will continue in the future. Check out contemporary novels like The Covenant of Water, Songbirds, and The Secret Life of Sunflowers if you’d like to read about extraordinary female protagonists.…

A while back, I built a Little Free Lending Library

A while back, I built a Little Free Lending Library. You know the kind: a boxy receptacle with shelves, a pitched roof, and small swinging glass door housing used books on various subjects.…

A poem about the Ohlone people

While writing and rewriting some poems recently, I realized I never wrote a poem about the Ohlone people that inhabit my novel. In so many ways, I want to pay tribute to them and yet not speak for them. It’s not for me to define their worldview, I can only attempt to pass on a few things that I’ve learned in studying their culture, of which so little is actually known. The following is a modest attempt to capture a small part of their consciousness. Perhaps it also speaks to some current thoughts in our lives today.…