Postmenopausalzest

Cookies for Christmas, a Holiday, or a Rainy Day

2012-02-19T11:19:00.000-08:00

Grandson, seven years old.

***

Christmas or Holiday Cookies, or A Rainy Day Activity
The cookie recipes come from Joy of Cooking, but the icing came from Mother. I changed the gingerbread one to make it healthier. It’s great for small children, as they can model it. I have done these recipes, first with my children, since Amy was five, and then with my grandchildren, since they were two or three years old. If they can model clay, they can do this. I remember Amy’s twins, age two and a half, sitting in front of the oven while the cookies baked. Children are very entranced by sprinkles. So when the cookies are cool, frost them and then use decorative sprinkles, colored sugars, etc. If you use the egg white brushed on before baking, use the colored sugars. Both recipes I usually double and store in refrigerator for awhile first.

***

Gingerbread Men
Preheat oven to 350 (when you’re about ten minutes from baking)
Blend until creamy:
1/4 cup butter or shortening
½ cup brown or white sugar (or some of both to make up ½ cup)
Beat in:
½ cup of dark molasses (I have used both cane and black strap–unsulphured)
Sift:
1-1/2 cups all purpose flour (or new Super Sprout organic flour from Lindley Mills–whole wheat, sprouted and milled to a fine flour. You may be able to get it through a coop; in Chatham, you can buy it from the mill in Snow Camp area.)
1/4 cup of soy flour
Resift with:
1 teaspoon soda
1/4 teaspoon cloves
½ teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ginger
½ teaspoon salt
Mix with:
1-1/4 cup whole rye or wholewheat (organic).
Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture in about 3 parts, alternately with 1/4 cup of water, if you roll the dough, or 1/3 cup water if you model the dough.
Bake on greased cookie sheets. Watch carefully–depending on thickness, 8-15 minutes.

***

Sugar Cookies
In Joy of Cooking, they are called Sand Tarts, but they’re much better than regular sugar cookies.

Sift:
1-1/4 cups of sugar
Beat until soft:
3/4 cups of butter (1-1/2 sticks)
Add sugar gradually. Blend these ingredients until very soft and creamy.
Beat in:
1 egg
1 egg yolk (save the white for brushing some cookies and then adding colored sugar)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon grated lemon rind
Sift before measuring:
3 cups all-purpose flour (you might try the Super Sprout, but I haven’t yet)
Resift with 1/4 teaspoon of salt.
Stir the flour gradually into the butter mixture until the ingredients are well blended. Chill the dough for several hours.
Preheat oven to 400.
Roll the dough until very thin. Bake on greased tins about 5-8 minutes, depending on thickness.

***

Lemon Butter Frosting (Icing)
Cream 1 stick butter until soft
Add alternately:
1 pound of powdered, confectioners’ sugar, from sifter
2-3 Tablespoons of lemon juice (sometimes one lemon–fresh is best, but you can add a little of the bottled lemon juice if most of it is fresh)
1 tablespoon of grated lemon rind.
You add a little sugar, then a little juice, and get it to a creamy, spreadable but not too soft consistency.

For variation, you can use orange juice and grated orange rind, or 1 teaspoon of vanilla and milk for liquid, e.g., for chocolate cake.

Let the cookies cool completely; then frost and decorate. If you want to make Valentine’s or Easter cookies, etc., the children can draw valentines, bunnies, etc., and then use a knife to cut around the shapes on the dough. They’re fun to make, and they taste good, too.

***

Granddaughter, age 9.

Marcia Herman's Sipping My Garden

2012-02-12T09:59:00.000-08:00

Cover image of Marcia Herman's Sipping My Garden.

***

My book, Sipping My Garden, was a labor of love—for the herbs, for delicious drinks, for lovely illustrations, and for gardening and gardeners. This is how it all began—my sweet affair with sipping my garden… The preface tells the story of how I met my friend in Provence and what I learned from her about her plant gathering, drying, and making of herbal teas. For many years as a child she had watched her grandmother gather and dry herbs and blend them into delicious mélanges and now I was to learn to share this across the ocean in America. Except for the occasional cup of peppermint tea, I realized for herbal teas we all bought those boxes with names like Zinger, Bed-time, and Peach Peppermint instead of sipping our own gardens.

So, I began researching the herbs and perfecting an easy, foolproof, and quick way to make herbal teas from plants that many gardeners already have growing. There are chapters on the method of making the teas (tisanes strictly speaking since these are herbal decoctions), plant lists, recipes, resources, and what to do if you don’t have a garden. The book is beautifully illustrated by a local artist, Emma Scurnick, and one from the west coast, Nan Feagin.

A sample recipe: Peppermint-Lemon Grass Tea

¼ cup dried peppermint leaves
A heaping tablespoonful of dried Lemon grass
Pinch of green tea
Two stevia leaves if a little sweetening is wanted

This, as well as any other recipe with dried leaves, may also be made with fresh herbs using larger amounts.

Place in teapot or stainless steel cooking pot and pour 6 cups of near boiling water over the herbs. Let steep 30 minutes to several hours. Strain and pour into a pitcher and enjoy hot or cold all day.

Thank you, Marcia E Herman
Chatham County, NC

www.seedpodpress.com. It retails for $16.95. It makes a great gift book. Maybe for Valentine's Day! In Chatham County the book is also available at Chatham Marketplace, New Horizons Trading Company, Lyn Morrow Pottery, and Cooper Mays Pottery.

How to order:

Sipping My Garden may be ordered from

This is a pitcher of rosemary, sage, and green tea, one of the recipes in Marcia's book.

Bio:Marcia E. Herman is a lifelong gardener and lover of herbs who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. In addition to a full time career in pediatrics and public health, she has studied the science and lore of herbs for many years and assisted with the establishment of the Medicinal Garden in the Mercer Reeves Hubbard Herb Garden at the NC Botanical Gardens. Marcia lives in Pittsboro, NC, in hearing distance of the Haw River.

Comments on the back cover:

This delightful book will be sought by all converts to the locovore movement. I’m glad for the book’s suggestion to consult local references about what herbs will grow in any given area.　 And if growers and herb enthusiasts will follow the simplified plant identifications and precautions, then they will find the pleasures of teas harvested from their own gardens.　 It doesn’t get any more local than that! 　Al Cooke, Extension Agent, Horticulture, Chatham County Center, N.C. Cooperative Extension

The plant kingdom provides us with so much--shade and color, changing seasons, endlessly varied forms in the shapes of leaves, and fragrance, not to mention the basis of our food supply.　 That plant diversity harbors another secret: plants are a virtual library of interesting compounds, many that evolved with the animal kingdom and so are able to interact with animal physiologies, including our own.　 Marcia E. Herman’s writing, in an easy-to-read way, shows how this chemical diversity furnishes us with a great array of teas and gently leads us into its emotional, medicinal, and aesthetic pleasures.　 This lovely book will open your passion for these delights.　 Dr. Peter S. White, Director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden, Chapel Hill

Marcia rightly looks to herbal teas for leisure and pleasure. I think of herb teas as the best of medicines. Leisure and pleasure are good medicine, and phytochemicals are good medicines. Here’s to your health, sipping your garden teas.　　James A. Duke, PhD, Author of The Green Pharmacy (Rodale 1997) and distinguished alumnus, University of North Carolina,　 Chapel Hill (1948-61) thegreenfarmacygarden.com

Marcia Herman, happy herb gardener and herb tea expert.

Review: Current Affairs by Lane Stone

2012-02-05T08:50:00.000-08:00

Cover photo of Current Affairs: A Tiara Investigations Mystery

***

Review: Current Affairs: A Tiara Investigations Mystery. Lane Stone. Mainly Murder Press, 2011. Trade paperback: $15.95. ISBN: 978-0-9836823-2-5. 237 pp.

What strikes me most about the debut mystery, Current Affairs, is its humor. A few pages in, and I was laughing out loud. Remember those early Evanovich mysteries? Here is Leigh Reed, a new voice, a Southern Belle voice, who doesn’t take her Georgia Beauty Queen status or her relatively affluent lifestyle very seriously. Leigh and her two best friends, also former state beauty queens, Tara Brown and Victoria Blair, have formed Tiara Investigations. Their cases consist mainly of helping married women document their husbands’ infidelity. They have not yet told their husbands.

They interview prospective clients at their favorite restaurant, the Cracker Barrel, usually over the breakfast specials. Their fees are reasonable, and often it takes only an hour of their time, once the wife has alerted them, to follow the "cheating, lying, sneaking" lovers, take a few photos, and later give them to the wife.

They use three throw-away cameras, to make sure they get those photos, and are usually accompanied by their three standard Schnauzer dogs, which provide protection in case they get in over their heads, which they soon do, when the husband they are to follow, is shot dead in front of their eyes, and another husband they’d nailed as fooling around is the investigating officer. He, and many other characters in this book, are regularly overwhelmed by their unpredictably zany behavior, dogs or no dogs.

Another paradoxical and so human aspect of this new mystery series is that Leigh is protesting the Iraq War, and her husband, The General, whom she loves passionately, is busy fighting that war. This is a great book for breaking stereotypes, and for fun, but it has a serious side as the Tiara women, hunting for the killer of their client’s husband (she loved him), invade the high-tech world of military weapons research and development.

Here’s a book without a dull moment but with a bone-deep honesty that draws you in to identify with characters willing to be fully themselves, outrageous behavior being their natural mode.

Look for the next Tiara Investigations, hopefully coming soon.

***

Author website: lanestonebooks.com

Order from mainlymurderpress.com, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Ingram.

***

Lane Stone lives in Sugar Hill, GA and Alexandria, VA. When not writing, she’s enjoying characteristic baby boomer pursuits: hiking in various countries and playing golf. Her volunteer work includes raising money for women political candidates. She’s a proud member of both the Chesapeake and Atlanta chapters of Sisters in Crime.

***

Lane Stone, author

Review: Frankie Bailey's Mystery Novels

2012-01-29T08:42:00.000-08:00

The cover of Frankie Bailey's 2011 mystery, Forty Acres and a Soggy Grave.

***

Beginning with her first novel, Death’s Favorite Child, I found parallels with my own books. [Hard cover: ISBN: 1-57072-145-9. Trade paper: 1-57072-146-7. Silver Dagger Mysteries. Overmountain Press. Copyright 2000]

Lizzie Stuart, Frankie’s amateur detective in this traditional mystery, is visiting Cornwall when she meets the first man she has been seriously attracted to, John Quinn. My Penny Weaver meets her lover, Kenneth Morgan, while she’s on vacation in Wales, in my first mystery.

Penny is white and Lizzie is African American, but both have the ability to see people as people first and look past skin color, culture, educational background, etc. In Death’s Favorite Child, the murder victim works at a small family-owned hotel near the beach. In Sands of Gower the dead woman on the beach is a guest at the bed and breakfast house where Penny is staying.

Frankie is gifted at exploring all the nuances of Lizzie’s feelings.

After reading the first four novels in the series I have a strong sense of Lizzie’s character. She has become one of my favorite amateur detectives. She’s quite human, debates within herself a lot, but wherever there’s a mystery or a puzzle, she’s drawn like a magnet. She has to find out, and she takes risks which drive Quinn nuts and anyone else worried about her safety or wanting to protect her. When she’s close to solving a puzzle, she absolutely can’t let it alone.

The second, third, and fourth novels [A Dead Man’s Honor, ISBN: 1-57072-171-8, 2001; Old Murders, ISBN: 1-57072-218-8, 2003; and You Should Have Died on Monday, ISBN: 1-57072-319-3, 2007, all in the Silver Dagger series] take place in Virginia, primarily at Piedmont State University, where Lizzie teaches Crime History in the School of Criminal Justice. Frankie herself teaches Criminal Justice at SUNY-Albany. She grew up in Danville, Virginia, and her fictional town of Gallagher is located on the Dan River.

In these later books present day murders are solved as well as murders that took place many years earlier, for instance, the murder of lynching, which is a more inclusive term than the hanging of a man by a mob, without his having the benefit of regular court trial. "The victim of a lynching might be hanged, burned, shot, and/or drowned. He--more rarely she–might also be tortured and mutilated. The majority of lynchings occurred in the South and border states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." [A Dead Man’s Honor, p. iv.]

There is a cerebral, almost serene, quality to these books. We take in all kinds of information not generally known, are taken inside horrifying events and have a front row seat as we learn what "really came down." We may know intellectually that human beings are capable of savage cruelty when they are afraid, greedy, jealous, protecting their position or image, keeping things from changing, but here we take it in easily, naturally, swiftly, as our own experience. Frankie’s passion is focused on taking us there so we witness these realities for ourselves.

In A Dead Man’s Honor we go back to 1921 in Gallagher, when a black man was shot, assumed to have killed the white doctor in town. This event has personal meaning for Lizzie because her grandmother had witnessed this lynching and left town on a freight train the same day.

Another African American professor in Criminal Justice is found dead. Is there a connection between the two murders? In Frankie’s books it’s likely. Old murders cast their shadow into the present. History is not dead.

Old Murders continues that theme, as Frankie researches a young black woman sentenced to die in the 1950s after killing her employer. Meantime a Maine developer is persuading the town council to let him build shops, condos, etc., along the river front, and a local developer is furious. A lawyer involved in the arguments between the developers also defended the young black woman at her trial in the 1950s.

In You Should have Died on Monday Lizzie decides to find her mother, who left town shortly after she was born. Lizzie was raised by her grandmother, who had died a few years earlier. Hester Rose had only bad things to say about her daughter Becca. Lizzie has hired a private detective, who finds people who knew her mother in Chicago, where Lizzie heads. The trail then leads to Wilmington, N.C., and to New Orleans. The old crime happened in 1968 and involved Black Panthers, the Chicago Mob, and Becca.

I found myself easily caught up in this fascinating, complex weaving between old murders and new murders, and I was pulled along, not only curious myself but worried about what Lizzie was getting her courageous, risk-taking self into this time. The plot web is always satisfying; the characters and places, alive.

What I especially enjoy and feel a kinship with is how Frankie handles race. There is no undercurrent of rage or resentment against white people or white Southerners because of the way they treated slaves, tenants, maids, or the whole black community then or now. Rather there is a presentation of many individuals, including Lizzie and Quinn, as human, as sometimes deeply flawed, sometimes showing courage and insight one gazes at in wonder.

I want to be there, I find, in every scene, hear every argument, puzzle over every new event and where it fits into the whole tapestry. I have put down each book satisfied, but eager to read the next one.

I myself hope to do something similar as a white woman who has often crossed the racial divide that persists in this country. I also wish to reveal the humanity that lies in us all, the courage and the stupidity, the sublimity, and the dark blood-lust.

Frankie "sees" in the way I want to in my books. You’ll be glad you read her books. They go way beyond mystery stories. They carve a place for themselves out of that elusive, rock-hard quarry we dig in to find the truth about our humanity and how to live well while we’re here on this earth.

***

Forty Acres and a Soggy Grave, A Silver Dagger Mystery from The Overmountain Press, Johnson City, TN, 2011. Trade paper: 978-1-935692-010. $13.95. 216 pages.

In this, her fifth mystery, Frankie Bailey puts her heroine into a weekend gathering of four ex-military friends, their wives and girlfriends, who are, for the most part, richer than she is and also hold high-powered jobs. We witness how Lizzie Stuart handles this complex situation in the context of the Virginia Eastern Shore, where the historical remnants of slavery and black tenant farming are still part of the landscape, with the more recent addition of Hispanic migrant workers, who are generally treated with suspicion and contempt.

Over and over Lizzie is made uncomfortable by the behavior of the others, and by Quinn, too, to whom she’s now engaged. He’s hiding things from her, and he’s also lying to her. I find I admire Lizzie’s combination of courage and discretion in a nearly impossible situation.

I once realized that what century you are living in can change with where you are geographically. To go into certain parts of the rural South is to return to the mid-nineteenth century, or even to the Middle Ages, when there were lords of the manor, knights back from foreign parts, and serfs, i.e., farm workers attached to the land who were essentially powerless economically and politically.

In this novel, the centuries mix and match. Lizzie, as a professional crime historian, becomes fascinated by two graves from the 1940s at the edge of a bean field, and visible from the highway: Rachel Robinson (1929-46) and Rachel’s Mother (1910-46).

When Lizzie looks in a folder Quinn had hidden from her, she finds a clipping about another death, in 1989, of a former soldier who had tried to kill her baby and then had killed herself. As usual, Lizzie has to find out about these deaths while she tries not to rock the boat at the beach house party. The boat not only rocks, a storm of strange and inexplicable events pursues her and Quinn from the beginning of the book.

I like the way Frankie opens up Lizzie’s mind to us, as she takes in the not so subtle assumptions among the house party about race, faces her mixed feelings and yet hangs on–both to Quinn and to her determination to find out what’s going on. Again, past and present intertwine, and the plot is slowly unraveled, until, with one jerk, the whole behind-the-scenes picture is revealed, and the puzzle pieces fall easily into place.

If you haven’t read Frankie’s novels yet, you are in for a treat.

***Frankie Y. Bailey is a criminal justice professor and mystery writer. Her non-fiction books include African American Mystery Writers (2008). Forty Acres and a Soggy Grave, the fifth book in her mystery series featuring crime historian, Lizzie Stuart, was released in July 2011. She has completed the first book in a near-future police procedural series. Frankie is a former Executive Vice President (the chairperson of the board of directors) of Mystery Writers of America. Currently, she serves as President of Sisters in Crime.

Website: http://www.frankieybailey.com/
***

Frankie Y. Bailey

Review: Michele Drier's Edited for Death

2012-01-22T11:58:00.000-08:00

Cover of Michele Drier's Edited for Death, first mystery novel.

***

Edited for Death. Michele Drier. Mainly Murder Press, 2011. Trade paper, $15.95. ISBN: 978-0-983682-1-8. 221 Pages.

Smart, classy, and genuinely entertaining. The clever puzzler, taut and tense, nails the high-stakes reality of a devoted journalist on the hunt for blockbuster story. Breaking news: this mystery is a winner!
----Hank Phillippi Ryan, award-winning author.

***Amy Hobbes, Managing Editor of a small northern California town’s newspaper, the Monroe Press, and her best reporter, Clarice Stams, follow leads as to why several deaths are connected to the hotel Senator Robert Calvert, also dead, owned. The local Sheriff, Jim Dodson, in Marshalltown, where the Senator was the dominant force, appears stumped. He shares enough information to keep Clarice busy writing articles and to get Amy’s curiosity aroused and her research instincts triggered.

In order to understand the present, the women must explore the past. With the help of an old journalist friend, who does art news for a San Francisco paper, Amy begins to see connections and is more hooked than ever when the Senator’s nephew also dies at the hotel.

Edited for Death has a lively, clipped, fresh style; the narrator, Amy, a strong voice. The metaphors are exactly right, the dialogue is zesty and entertaining, but the deeper Amy delves, the more serious the subject matter, because Robert Calvert served in the U.S. Army in World War II and was among the troops which liberated Auschwitz and uncovered the tragic remains of the Jews murdered there.

I like Drier’s honesty, both in her humor and in the tragedy behind the events that led to the present-day deaths. The book is light and solemn by turns, and every touch feels right. The characters are well-fleshed out and fully human. The mystery is carefully plotted to keep us both intrigued and guessing until the very end. My hat is off to Michele Drier and Mainly Murder Press for a zinger of a first novel. Now we need the next crime Amy Hobbes’s instincts tell her she must investigate.
***

Judy Hogan. I admit that Mainly Murder is also to be my publisher, but I'm choosy about the books I believe in and review.

***

Michele Drier was born in Santa Cruz to a pioneer family and is a fifth generation Californian. She’s lived and worked all over the state and has called both Southern and Northern California home. During her career in journalism — as a reporter and editor at large and small daily newspapers – she won awards for producing investigative series. She lives in the Central Valley with cats, skunks, opossums and wild turkeys.

***

Edited for Death is available from www.mainlymurderpress.com, from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Ingram.

Thank you, Martin Luther King, Jr.

2012-01-15T16:48:00.000-08:00

Judy's desk with cosmos late last summer, computer to the left.

***

THANK YOU, MARTIN LUTHER KING
I associate Martin Luther King with flowers. Also with living in Chase Park, an interracial apartment complex set up following the Civil Rights push in Chapel Hill, by the Interfaith Council. It was new when we moved in January 1975, seven years after King died. He was only thirty-nine when he died in 1968. And all he did for us!

My children and I were in the white minority in Chase Park. I learned more about what lay under the surface of the black experience in the South than I had before. Later, I asked my children what they had learned from the three years we lived there.

Not all their experiences were good. Sometimes the black kids picked on them, but they also formed friendships. I remember when I heard Tim, then in first grade, talking with his friend outside the front door in black dialect. I smiled. Tim was already bi-lingual. All my kids said they learned that there were good and bad people of every skin color. A good lesson.

Here’s a poem I wrote in the 80s, thinking back to 1968, Spring, Berkeley, California. It’s from Sun-Blazoned, Sunbury Press Books, Bronx, N.Y., 1983.

Sun-Blazoned VI.2.
I never knew cherry blossoms
until I lived in Berkeley.
I never felt them until the spring
that Martin Luther King died,
and Amy’s babysitter, whom she called her grandma,
died of cancer. I hadn’t known
she was ill, but Amy knew, and said
how she hurt, and aspirin didn’t help.
Her back hurt anyway, nothing helped.
Drifting petals on the warm air
were spring’s tears.
Just as Christmas is green
in a barren month,
so cherry petals tell of loss and hurt
in the most optimistic one, in April.
Now you tell me–every time the subject
comes up–that you are sure
the cherry blossoms will no sooner open
than a hard freeze will come along
and turn them to brown plastic.
Is it so hard for you to believe
that loveliness may escape harm?
That cherry flowers may have their time
of full and eager openness,
that day after day of easy breezes
and benign air may waken all their senses,
until they grieve naturally,
losing what they must lose
to fulfill their time
and their place in that time?

The Snake Jones Mysteries--Michael A. Mallory and Marilyn Victor

2012-01-08T08:16:00.000-08:00

Michael A. Mallory and Marilyn Victor, the authors of the Snake Jones zoo mysteries

***

THE SNAKE JONES MYSTERIES
What I like about Michael A. Mallory and Marilyn Victor’s zoo series is that I learn a lot about animals which normally live in the wild, their nature and needs, and also the complex habitats and care that they need when confined in a zoo. I also like the character, Snake Jones, and her Australian husband, Jeff, who both work for the Minnesota Valley Zoo and also for a TV series called Zoofari.

The plots in their first two books are intricately developed and satisfying to unravel. I can identify with the main characters, and I like their priorities: caring for the earth and its wildlife, working at jobs they love and coping with the multiple surprises that a giant saltwater crocodile or an extra large Red kangaroo can provide.

There have been movies and books about the much maligned wolf of the forests of the northern U.S. and Canada, but I learned about the behavior of wolves who had bonded with human beings when puppies.

Death Roll came out from Five Star in 2007. A death roll is what a crocodile does when he gets a victim. He can leap out of the water, and then, once he has gotten his meal into "a bone-crushing grip, he drags it into the water, rolling over and over until he drowns it. Then he’ll stuff the carcass under a log or a rock to rot and eat at his leisure." [Death Roll, p. 37].

Unfortunately, the zoo director ends up in a death roll during the zoo’s major fund-raising dinner. Snake and Jeff’s friend and co-worker is accused of pushing the director in, and Snake sets out to prove his innocence, despite her old boyfriend, the police detective, trying to keep her out of it. The more Snake uncovers, the more dangerous it gets for her. So many people disliked the director, and they all had things to hide.

The second in their series, Killer Instinct, came out from Five Star in 2011. Snake, with others of the Zoofari crew are filming at the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota. Some wolves are raised there, and the public can see and learn about wolves up close. Other wolves in the wild are tracked and cared for as needed in a large wilderness area.

When some of the wild wolves are shot illegally, the Center has a team of Wildlife Investigators working to find out what happened and who killed the animals. Then a suspect is murdered, and Snake is pulled into solving both the wolf and human deaths.

This is a refreshing series for its focus on wildlife and all the education that is seamlessly slipped in for readers in addition to the fun of knowing characters comfortable with these animals and dedicated to preserving their species and habitats.

Check out their website: www.snakejones.com and their blog: http://zofari.blogspot.com
There’s a newly released trade paperback editor for Death Roll, now available from Amazon.

***

Marilyn Victor, an animal lover since she could walk, was a volunteer at the Minnesota Zoo for many years and shares her home with a revolving menagerie of homeless pets she fosters for a local animal rescue organization. She has been president of the Twin Cities chapter of Sisters in Crime, a national organization devoted to promoting male and female mystery writers. She works in the risk management department of a construction company when not writing or rescuing wildlife.

Michael Allan Mallory works in the Information Technology field and is an avid animal lover. He volunteers at the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota, is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and was an associate member of the American Association of Zoo Keepers. He lives with his wife, Cathy, and two dynamo cats in a suburb of Minneapolis.

***

Julia Spencer-Fleming and New Year's Poem

2012-01-01T11:21:00.000-08:00

Judy's Decorated Night-Blooming Cereus, with Christmas gifts. December 2011

***

Have you ever read the mystery novels of Julia-Spencer-Fleming? I reviewed her newest book, One Was a Soldier (2011) on this blog back on February 19, 2011. Here is good news. Her first three novels, In the Bleak Midwinter (Jan 3, 2012), A Fountain Filled with Blood (Feb 2012), and Out of the Deep I Cry (March 2012) are being re-released in a new paperback version this year as well as in e-books, on sale for $2.99, in the first three months of this year. For more info: http://juliaspencerfleming.com/bookshop.html#one

Julia is one of my very favorite mystery writers now. Her stories take place in the small town of Millers Kill, NY, and the main characters, Claire Ferguson, an Episcopal priest who has been a helicopter pilot in the Army (and is again between books 6 and 7), and Russ Van Alstyne, who is head of the town police department, fall in love. But Russ is married, which keeps them apart, at least in this series.

These books break stereotypes about priests, policemen, and many other things. She takes up interesting and timely issues in our culture today, like immigrant labor, development, unwanted children, and what happens to returning veterans from Iraq/Afghanistan. She’s worth reading. I can’t wait for the next one, number 8.

***

Here's your New Year's Poem. I wish you all a lovely, challenging, worthwhile, happy New Year.

***

THE TELLING THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING

"If one woman told the whole truth about her life, the world would split open."
– Muriel Ruykheyser

I.

December 4, 2011

Truth can be as harsh as the rows of needle sharp teeth
in a possum’s mouth or as unassuming and graceful
as slender stems of grass gone to seed, every single
seed like a tiny Christmas light, and bunched stems,
a glorious blaze, if you have the eyes to see light
where it’s so subtle and delicate you might miss it.
He said, "I like your blood pressure. I like your
baking your own bread, I like your writing." This
from my doctor of twenty years, because I’m
healthy, active, both follow his advice and argue
when I disagree. My new banker looked at my
credit report, which the big bank described as
having "serious delinquency." The trouble spot
was my college student loan, which I’d paid off
four years ago, as the credit report showed. But
the big banks behave strangely these days.
I like my new community-oriented bank, so no
loss there. He said, "I wouldn’t even worry
about it. I’d give you a loan today." There are
other signs lately that I’m valued as I am,
truth-telling and all. Enemies are out there,
and fools abound in every age. But here is a
good place to be planted, to do my writing,
grow food, feed my friends. Any sword is
heavy to lift and hard to wield effectively,
especially the sword of truth. I remember
the ancient Zen wisdom about the butcher
who kept his knife sharp. He cut only
between the bones. Hacking at bones
when you cut up meat means the knife dulls,
and you waste your effort. The same with
people. Wait for the exactly right moment,
when their openness appears, and they are
eager to hear what you have to say. Then
speak as softly as the grass seeds do even
before the light illumines them. Then your
truth penetrates the heart and lodges itself in
the soul. This is spiritual truth. Sometimes
we have to be very patient indeed before
we can speak our truth. Meantime honesty
begins at home. It doesn’t have to be
brutal. Ask yourself what you feel, note it
down, tuck it away. Time changes all
things. Certain truths take longer to mature
and rise to the surface in ourselves and in
those we love. If the connection is good
and true, be content that it is there. More
may arrive in the fullness of time, or not.
But you have known and loved him, enjoyed
his laughter and your own. Be content.
Life showers Her gifts on those who live
well, fulfill the purpose for which they
were born, and go out to meet others with
their hands full, their heart warm, their
smile genuine and freely given.

To Be Oneself

2011-12-25T08:33:00.000-08:00

Chesapeake Bay Sunset photo contributed by Sharon Ewing

***

The Telling that Changes Everything II

December 11, 2011

Being who you are won’t fix
everything, but it is something
each of us can do, whatever
our circumstances. We can be
killed, maimed, have lies told
about us, but our truth will
shine into their darkness,
whoever they are, whatever
their intentions. Their humanity
is as frail and needy as our own.
They also have the choice: to be
who they are or betray themselves,
the worst evil there is, and so
often not named in our world,
more and more confused about
what matters. It goes back to
steamrollers. When I told that
professor I was dropping out,
he, who’d said he didn’t know
if I had a mind for literature
but I certainly had a heart
for it, said to me: "The steamroller
will get you." Our society now
has so many steamrollers and so
many already flattened people
who act like cardboard cutouts of
themselves. But why not be a grain
of sand? In time the steamroller
will get you, too, but you might
contribute to the clogging and
malfunction of one machine.
When the machines fail, maybe
the cardboard cutouts will remember
they’re human and speak their
truth. What other weapon do we
have that is as potent a catalyst,
as sure to defeat pomposity and
power seized by the small-minded
and those frightened by their own
shadows? Let the shadows out of
Jung’s dark closet. There is plenty
of light to dance in, and our
suffering, paradoxically, can all
be felt as a necessary part of
self-hood and a happiness that,
if not eternal, won’t easily be
destroyed, even if we die. You
see, the ecstasy the true self
experiences is outside time, and
it’s contagious. It doesn’t need
steamrollers to make its point.
It relies on light–the Light that
is the Universe’s way of being,
the Light we were all born to
see and to live by. We may
stagger in our darkness,
but if we move confidently
forward, we’ll see the gray light
of Dawn, then the yellow saffron
of her mantle, the rosy fingers
with which she lights our day,
and what, then, will steamrollers
matter to such tough-spirited,
joyous individual grains of sand?

The Christmas Cactus in the Kitchen Window

2011-12-18T11:53:00.000-08:00

***
The Telling that Changes Everything III. December 18, 2011

The Christmas cactus in the kitchen window
snuck up on me. I did notice that its
floppy stems were putting out buds at the
tips, but suddenly on this cold December
morning, with frost heavy on the chickweed
and making the feathery weeds enchanting
in their hoarfrost bonnets, it achieves
full bloom. It gets summer heat and wintry
blasts since it faces west. The cold is as
necessary as the sun to its health and
well-being. There was Ruth Pope, years
ago, whom I visited with my baby girl,
who took me into her dark bedroom
to see her cactus blooms. Mine lives
and blooms in a lighted room, but it
does need that cold. The slender,
many-layered, deep pink blossoms
seem far too exotic for my simple life,
yet here it lives, sandwiched between
the compost bucket with its eggshells
sticking out and the cobwebs on the
other side, but nothing in the created
order looks less dismayed. Pink
is such an exultant color. I do have
my moments of pink, or call them
heightened consciousness, when
the words take off, or the sky has
streaks of yellow and rose after the
sun has swum below the horizon.
Most days are essentially ordinary,
following my daily routine, reminding
myself of chores and things to finish
before nightfall. Some mornings I
feel disconnected even from this
ordinary world, like being up too
high and unable to get my feet firmly
on the ground. Proust said, as we age,
the stilts we walk on get taller until
we can no longer balance, and then
we fall and die. The stilt consciousness
passes once I’ve fed the hens, made a
fire, eaten toast, drunk my lemon-ginger tea.
There’s another state, the one I hate the
most, of fear. So many things I never
thought about, simply doing them,
risky or not. Now I have to summon
courage for a late night drive or before I
venture by car along unfamiliar roads.
Something in me that once was tough and
unconcerned, now quails, imagines
being lost, alone, cold, far from home.
I have to remind myself that I’m canny,
that people have always helped me,
that I may be scared, but "inside fear
is courage," as Mindi wrote in her book.
True, I am rewarded for getting myself
down from those stilts and back on
terra firma. I write poems. My
Christmas cactus blooms.
.

And the Words Came Early--Deborah Meyer

2011-12-13T08:57:00.000-08:00

Photo of Judy Hogan by Deborah Meyer

***

And the Words Came Early by Deborah R. Meyer

Judy Hogan lives in a rich world of words.

They are in the poetry and prose books tucked into the nooks and niches of her Moncure home.

They are in her head, tumbling around, waiting for their chance to be put to permanence.

They breathe on the pages of diaries and her numerous unpublished manuscripts.

They flow effortlessly out of her as she teaches workshops and classes around the Triangle, inspiring fledgling writers to forge ahead, inspiring seasoned writers to explore their untapped resources.

But it was just one word that she used when asked what she felt when she received an email this past October notifying her that one of her fiction manuscripts had been accepted for publication.

"Ecstasy." Hogan said.

Anyone who knows Judy will not be surprised that her work is so highly regarded but will be astonished to learn that the accepted manuscript, titled Killer Frost, is a mystery novel.

Since she arrived in North Carolina in 1971, Hogan has been helping to advance the state’s state of poetry as she was also writing her own. In 1969, Hogan was living in Illinois, and a friend, Paul Foreman, who lived in Berkeley, where Hogan had worked on a Ph.D. in Classics, suggested they found a poetry journal. So Hyperion was born.

When Hogan moved to North Carolina, she began including North Carolina poets. In the mid-70s she started organizing readings for poets.

"The women’s movement brought some angry stuff out at first but there were just a lot of women starting to write. So I started collecting women’s poetry and with a grant from the National Endowment from the Arts I published a women’s issue of Hyperion in 1980. Then in 1981 I published an issue with Southern poets," Hogan said.

Foreman, by then living in Austin, Texas, had started in 1970 Thorp Springs Press and Hogan would send poets to him. Foreman suggested that Hogan, who was living in Chapel Hill, should start a press in North Carolina and in January of 1976, Carolina Wren Press was born.

"I published Jaki Shelton Green. I left in 1991 but under my editorship we did 33 books, including one children's book. We did a play, but I was most interested in the people coming up around the fringes of the establishment. I wanted to publish the people that weren’t fitting into the place where there was already a lot of help," Hogan said.

She helped to found the North Carolina Writers’ Network in 1984 serving as its President until 1987.

Born in Zenith, Kansas, Hogan discovered the joy of writing when she had to spend a year in bed at the end of the first grade due to rheumatic fever. "Mother brought me lots of library books and then I started writing little stories and drawing pictures. That was the beginning. I was building my own imaginary world I guess. I told my father when I was 10 I was going to be a writer," Hogan said.

She was 14 when she began the habit of keeping a diary, which she still does today, filling about 200 pages a month. This includes some emails that she keeps. "You tell some things in letters you don’t say in your diary," Hogan said.

Hogan recovered from the effects of rheumatic fever but never from word fever. She said her first published piece of poetry was in the Hyperion if you didn’t count her church bulletin when she was 13. "It was a poem about being an adolescent," Hogan said.

She has published five books of poetry with small presses and two prose works.

Through a lovely, chance encounter, Hogan began a lifelong friendship with the people of Kostroma, Russia. Her first visit there was in 1990, and Hogan said she feels a great kinship with the Russians. "They care about their souls. We had such terrible images of Russians from the Cold War. Every image of them was grim and hostile," said Hogan, who found this was the opposite of truth.

In 1980, Hogan began reading mysteries before she went to bed. This habit was noticed by the landlady of a bed and breakfast that Hogan would stay at when she went to Wales some summers to write poetry. "I would walk on the foot paths of the Gower Peninsula and find a spot to sit and write."

In 1990 she sprained her ankle there and had to spend a few weeks in bed. Like the year of rheumatic fever recovery, Hogan discovered something new about herself. "My landlady said I should write a murder. So I started plotting it then and set it in her bed and breakfast with Mrs. Merritt in it. Her fictional name is Evelyn Truelove. She always had opinions and made a good character," Hogan said.

The heroine of this first novel is Penny Weaver who has gone to Wales to get away from her responsibilities for a while. She falls in love with a Welsh policeman. They get around the transatlantic issue by spending six months in Wales, and six months in central North Carolina in a fictional town of Riverdell, county of Shagbark. The town according to Hogan has elements of Pittsboro, Saxapahaw and Moncure.

Is Penny Weaver Hogan?

"Pretty much," admits Hogan.

Like Hogan, Weaver works against things that bother her, like unsafe nuclear waste. One of the mysteries takes place in the local farmer’s market. Hogan has grown food she sold at the Pittsboro Farmers’ Market. Now she is a regular customer, taking some of her homegrown produce to trade for things she can’t grow.

Hogan has written eight mysteries that feature Penny Weaver and is about to start her 9^th. The Killer Frost manuscript is the sixth in the series and was a finalist in the Malice Domestic contest. Despite this achievement, no agent answered Hogan’s queries about representing her. So using her own knowledge of small presses and the knowledge she has gained being a member of Sisters in Crime, an international organization she joined in 2007 that promotes "the professional development and advancement of women writing crime fiction," Hogan became her own agent. In early October she sent the manuscript to Mainly Murder Press in Connecticut.

The book will come out on September 1, 2012 and cost around $15.00 though it will be available on Nook and Kindle for $2.99.
Without giving too much of the plot away, here are the delicious opening words of Killer Frost.

"It was a love that came upon her out of the blue, which she knew she would never understand or be able to explain to anyone else, not even to Oscar and especially not to her husband."

There is murder of course, with the setting being St. Francis College where Weaver is teaching remedial classes in composition.

Gene Dillard became good friends with Hogan while taking her poetry classes. Dillard said, "I think Judy stands as a good representation of someone who hasn’t lost the excitement of life. There is always something new and exciting around the corner for Judy. That is something we all can strive for."

Hogan’s backyard is home to an orchard, a garden, and 14 chickens. In 2010 Hogan had 600 pears on her pear tree. She canned 23 quarts of them, froze many, and made pear preserves. She bakes her own bread and makes soup, freezing her bounty for when the garden is fallow. She lives on $1000 a month.

She needs her food to eat so this does take up some of the routine of her days. But it is the words, the writing that get the most time. For without that, Hogan would starve.***
Debbie Meyer lives in Pittsboro, NC, on a 17-acre farm with horses, pot-bellied pigs, dogs and cats, and her family. She works in science publishing and writes about art and animals, two essentials in her life.

***
A shorter version of this article appeared in the December issue of Chatham County Line, and is used by permission of Debbie Meyer and Julian Sereno, CCL editor.

OUR DEBBIE

Michele Drier's Edited for Death

2011-12-04T11:29:00.000-08:00

Photo of Michele Drier, whose book Edited for Death came out recently from Mainly Murder Press. She's blogging for me today. JH

***

Michele Drier was born in Santa Cruz to a pioneer family and is a fifth generation Californian. She’s lived and worked all over the state and has called both Southern and Northern California home. During her career in journalism — as a reporter and editor at large and small daily newspapers – she won awards for producing investigative series. She lives in the Central Valley with cats, skunks, opossums and wild turkeys.

Her most recent book is the traditional mystery "Edited for Death", available online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

To entice you: Amy Hobbes never expected to solve anything tougher than a crossword puzzle. When she left her job as a journalist in Southern California, she planned to give the adrenaline a rest, but her next job, managing editor of a local newspaper, delivers some surprises. After a respected Senator and World War II hero dies, and two more people turn up dead, the news heats up. Both victims had ties to a hotel owned by the Senator’s family. With the help of reporter pal Clarice and the new man in her life, Phil, Amy uncovers a number of shadowy figures, including a Holocaust survivor who has spent sixty years tracking down Nazi loot. It’s a complex and dangerous puzzle, but Amy can’t walk away until she solves it.
Visit her website at www.micheledrier.com

***

Writing a Wrong

I write. I’ve written news stories, magazine articles, white papers, grants, solicitation letters (not THAT kind) and in the last two years, two novels.

Even though I didn’t set out to write for a living, I liked explaining things to people. I could have chosen teaching, but instead I chose being a journalist. Ranging from a staff writer at the San Jose Mercury-News to the Executive Editor of the Manteca Bulletin, I left and came back to my newspaper career a couple of times.

In between stints in the media, I made a career of managing non-profits agencies, large and small. And there, I wrote grants, position papers for government departments, draft legislation, annual reports and fund-raising letters.

So I guess I’m a writer and because of that, over the years, I’ve threatened to write Strongly Worded Letters to a variety of people. One most recent was going to go to my local Congress member about the TSA personnel at Sea-Tac Airport. I’d flown up from California to watch my youngest niece graduate from high school and packed a new can of hair spray.

Nobody at my originating airport (large, metro, international) batted an eye. They waved me through, but on my return flight, I was asked to pull up my sweater (granted, it was bulky—so am I), was wanded and pulled over to have my carry-on searched. Turns out the can of hair spray, which breezed through in one airport, was a no-no in Sea-Tac and, after 20 minutes of rude and invasive orders by three TSA people (including one who asked "Can’t you read?") I was given the choice of buying a baggage check for the hair spray ($25), taking it home (!!!) or throwing it away ($15), I was out a new can, humiliated, and embarrassed in front of about 150 strangers.

Now, I’ve traveled a fair amount, including three trips to Europe after 9/11. I watched luggage being blown up in De Gaulle in Paris, had my purse searched on a flight from London to Dublin and been politely questioned by English security after coming in from Greece. In all of these cases, the questioners were polite and explained what was happening.

The Sea-Tac experience was going to be a Very Strongly Worded Letter.

By the time I got home, I simmered down. No letter was written. But I haven’t forgotten the incident, the people or my humiliation.

As writers, we all have these incidents. Sometimes it’s years of humiliation or anger at a person or event. Sometimes it’s just an everyday occurrence that steams us. What we do have, though, is an outlet for our feelings of anger, humiliation or frustration.

We write about it.

Maybe it’s using that person’s name in your latest book for a nasty.

Maybe it’s putting your characters in a situation and letting them blast away at the know-nothings who acted as pompous fools.

Maybe it’s using the event as a springboard for a short story or novel.

We’re lucky because using the incidents as fodder for our storytelling allows us to write the Strongly Worded Letter in a form that reaches a broader audience.

I haven’t yet figured out where I’m going to use my TSA experience, but in some future book, the protagonist is going to run across these rude people and get even. Maybe they’ll get fired, maybe an irate traveler will punch them out, maybe their supervisor will get tired of complaints about them and publically castigate them. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but something surely will, and I’ll have my cold dish of revenge without endangering anyone!

What a great way to communicate and write a wrong!

***

Sara Sue Hoklotubbe: Review and Interview

2011-11-27T09:11:00.000-08:00

Sara Sue Hoklotubbe, author of Deception on All Accounts and The American Cafe.

***
Sarah Hoklotubbe’s Cherokee Mystery Novels

Tony Hillerman about Deception on All Accounts: "A dandy mystery novel. Don’t miss it."

Sara Sue Hoklotubbe’s mystery novels, set in the Tahlequah region of northeastern Oklahoma, fall into the tradition of Tony Hillerman and Margaret Coel, whose books Sara admires. If you like their writing and learning about another native American tribe in the twenty-first century, the Eastern Cherokee, originally in the mountains of North Carolina, but forced to take the "Trail of Tears" to Oklahoma by Andrew Jackson in the early 1800s, you’ll enjoy Hoklotubbe’s books.

Deception on All Accounts came out from the University of Arizona Press in 2003 and is the story of Sadie Walela, who was a bank teller in the small town of Sycamore Springs. One morning she makes the decision to go into the bank alone, although it is against the rules, because no other employees have turned up, and she needs to open the vault and then open the bank on time. A robber had hidden inside and makes her give him a huge amount of cash from the vault, and then he kills another employee when that man disobeys the robber.

Not only do we have the mystery of who the robber was and how he can be identified and brought to justice, but we learn about Sadie’s life on her farm, with her beloved wolf-dog, Sonny, her horse, Joe, and her Uncle Eli and his wife, Mary, who live nearby and stand in for Sadie’s parents. Sadie, her aunt, and her uncle live on Indian land portioned to their family when Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma.

Sadie not only goes through the trauma of the robbery but is suspected of colluding with the robber. Then she’s promoted at the bank. Her whole relationship to the bank management is confusing and depressing.

The plot moves quickly, and the book’s title is more than justified. I identified easily with Sadie and wanted to cheer as she worked her way through the various land mines on the path at the bank.

Tony Hillerman and Margaret Coel both lived close to and respected the tribal people they have written about, but Sara is Cherokee, and we learn much about their traditions and ways in present day Oklahoma.

Sadie returns in The American Café (2011, University of Arizona Press). Having inherited some money, she buys and opens a café that had once belonged to her great aunt. She keeps its original name, The American Café. Before she can get the café ready for customers, a Creek man named Red and some sawmill workers who come in regularly for their morning coffee present themselves. Their response to her telling them she’s not open yet is to offer to make coffee and then help themselves. Before they leave, a woman whom the men claim is looney comes in with a shotgun and threatens Sadie, calling the café a "godforsaken den of sin." The men help control her, and Sadie checks the shotgun–no bullets.

Then Sadie learns that Goldie Ray, the woman who had sold her the café, has been killed, and Sadie is pulled into unraveling the problem of who killed her.

I highly recommend Hoklotubbe’s series. I learned about it last April at the Malice Domestic Convention for mystery fans and authors, at the "Malice Go-Round" event, when new authors circulate, telling a roomful of people about their recently published mysteries, in a 90-second spiel.

***

I asked Sara to answer some questions about her writing. Thank you, Sara.

***
Interview
1. When did you begin writing? Why?

I started writing in 1997 when I got married, moved to a new state, and couldn’t find a job. With extra time on my hands, my husband encouraged me to do something I’d always wanted to do – write. I invested in a couple of writing courses at the local community college where I made contact with other writers and published my first newspaper articles. A few years later, I started on my first book.

2. When and why did you begin writing mysteries?

I didn’t set out to write a mystery, it just turned out that way. I wanted to write about the inequalities women suffer in the banking business, something I had personally experienced for over twenty-one years. However, as I began to write and the story unfolded, the characters took over and before I knew it I had a murder mystery on my hands.

I think Tony Hillerman inspired me to write mysteries. I could hardly wait for the release of his next book. I felt like I knew Chee and Leaphorn personally and loved learning about the Navajo and Hopi people. As a Cherokee citizen, I wanted to write about my people and set my books in the middle of the Cherokee Nation where I grew up, and I wanted to tell realistic stories void of the mythical stereotypes that show up all too often in books about American Indians. I believe reading books by authors such as Tony Hillerman and Margaret Coel have helped me do that.

3. Are you writing a series or a stand-alone? Explain your basic idea for your series.

I am currently working on the third book in the Sadie Walela Mystery Series. Sadie is a Cherokee woman who seems to always end up in the middle of a murder investigation. Her friend Lance Smith, also Cherokee, is a police officer who lends his expertise to solve the crime, while Sadie has a tendency to root out the reason the murder happened in the first place.

4. Tell us about your journey to publication with this book.

Soon after I finished the manuscript of my first book, Deception on All Accounts, I attended a gathering of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. As a novice writer, I had already had several unpleasant exchanges with agents and editors that had left me wondering why I had bothered to write anything. No one seemed to be interested in what I had written. At the awards banquet, I approached the winner of the Writer of the Year award and asked him how he had published the fiction book he had written about a small tribe in the southern United States. He gave me the name of his editor at the University of Arizona Press and suggested I send a query letter. He thought they might be interested in my work because it was about Native people. I sent the query and they asked for my manuscript. Six months later they offered me a contract.

Needless to say, I was ecstatic. They also published my second book, The American Café.

During this whole process, I discovered something very important – rejection doesn’t always mean your work is bad. While it is of utmost importance to submit quality work, it is of equal importance to make a connection with the right publisher. I like to think of it as two pieces of a puzzle that have to fit together correctly in order to make a complete picture. It is futile to submit to publishers who have no interest in what you write.

5. Why did you choose to write about the topic, community, issues you chose?

The first rule of beginning writing is to write about what you know. I write about the Cherokee people because that’s who I am. While my books are mysteries, I like to think they go deeper than that. When my readers turn the last page of my book, I want them to feel like they learned something about Cherokee life, about relationships, and hopefully about themselves.

Some of the issues I’ve written about are discrimination, pride, love, jealousy, family secrets, and veterans with post traumatic stress disorder. These are not Cherokee issues, these are people issues. Everyone should be able to relate to them.

6. How have you found it to be published? Share that experience.

It’s surreal. I don’t know if I will ever get used to opening a package that holds the advance copy of a book with my name on the front of it. When I scan the pages and see my words, I get emotional every time. I feel so unworthy. Writing is very hard work for me, but the reward of seeing my book in print is like a dream come true.

7. Do you have comments from readers or reviewers you’d like to share?

I continue to be amazed when I receive praise from readers who took the time to send notes to me through my publisher. It is extremely humbling and I have saved each and every one.

My favorite review for The American Café came from Margaret Coel. She wrote:

"An absorbing mystery that draws the reader into the rich history, culture and landscape of Cherokee Country. The American Café has all of the twists and turns expected in a first-rate mystery, but those are only part of its charm. A gifted storyteller, Sara Hoklotubbe writes of family, the fragile ties that bind people together and the links to the past that are always just below the surface of things. Compassionate and wonderful!"

Another great review came from Library Journal:

"Great characters and an authentic Native American setting make this second series title a good pick for Tony Hillerman fans."

8. What other books have you published and where, when?

The books I have published so far are: Deception on All Accounts, 2003, and The American Café, 2011, both published by the University of Arizona Press.

9. Do you have a work in progress now? Is it part of a series?

I am currently working on the third book in the Sadie Walela Mystery Series and my goal is to have it ready to submit by the end of the year.

10. If you belong to Sisters in Crime, and/or the Guppies, has that been helpful? How?

I have been a member of Sisters in Crime for several years and I especially appreciate the support and information they provide for both published and unpublished mystery writers. I enjoy their newsletters and blogs, and their research about the current state of the mystery publishing business is invaluable. I highly recommend membership.

11. What benefit to you has it been to go to mystery conferences like Malice Domestic?

Malice Domestic, Bouchercon, and Left Coast Crime are all great fan conventions. The formats are similar with an array of panels on every subject imaginable as it pertains to mysteries. I have served as a panelist at all three conventions and enjoyed meeting other authors and fans.

I participated in the "Malice Go Round" this year and it was great fun. We had to pitch our newly published book to potential readers in only a few minutes, one table at a time, in a banquet room full of tables. Each author handed out bookmarks, postcards, or something unique, hoping the listeners would keep it and then seek out their book. I was pleasantly surprised to hear from several people later who either bought my book or found it in a library as a result of my presentation. What a great way to meet new readers!

12. What else would like to say about your books, the next one in your series?

The working title for my current work-in-progress is Giggle Hill. It tells the story of Sadie’s neighbor, an elderly Cherokee man and WWII veteran named Buck Skinner, who disappears and is then accused of murder. Sadie’s attempt to prove Buck’s innocence uncovers more about her neighbor than she could ever imagine.

A Healthy Mind

2011-11-20T10:50:00.000-08:00

Judy during a chicken workshop, spring of 2011.
Photo by Sarah Cress.

***

The ancient Greeks emphasized a healthy mind in a healthy body as a human ideal. We know now that a healthy body promotes a healthy brain. Our brain is not, in my view, exactly the same as our mind, but the brain is the mind’s base, its mode of operation certainly. If we lose our brain, our minds are helpless.

Aging brings most of us new experiences of forgetfulness. Not only: where did we put our car keys, but what was it we walked into the kitchen to do? Or what is the name of that woman or that author? One successful author I know said bluntly: "I’m having trouble with nouns."

Sometimes I can’t remember an adjective or a verb either. I know the meaning, but the exact word won’t come to me. I’ll open a thesaurus and look for similar words, and usually I’ll find it or it will come to me. In fact, most of the forgetting I experience is because the memory is delayed. If I relax, the word will float in sometimes in a few minutes, sometimes a day later.

One explanation I heard was that we have so much stored in our brains that our filing cabinets are full, and it takes awhile to retrieve a name or a verb. Fortunately, the kitchen errand usually comes back to me once I’m in the kitchen.

These experiences can make you wonder: Is my mind going? Am I getting dementia? I’m sure I’m not since generally my memory and muse (Memory was the Mother of the Nine Muses in Greek mythology) are both healthy, active, and constant companions as I write books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.

An article in AARP Magazine, March/April 2010, page 39 ff, "Boost Your Brain Health," revealed new information about our brains: "An accomplished mathematician in his early seventies consulted [his doctor] after struggling with calculations, and after his wife noticed he was getting cranky. [The doctor] put the mathematician through a battery of tests–and the man got top scores on all of them, including 30 out of 30 on a memory test and a whopping 140 on his IQ test. So when [the doctor] saw his brain scan, he was stunned: it had all the markings of full-blown Alzheimer’s disease.

"Usually people with such profound brain changes can barely carry on a conversation....An answer, many scientists believe, is ‘cognitive reserve’: the combination of a person’s innate abilities and the additional brainpower that comes from challenging the mind. Studies show that diverse, mentally simulating tasks result in more brain cells, more robust connections among those cells, and a greater ability to bypass age- or disease-related trouble spots in the brain."

Here are some recommended lifestyle habits/routines for a healthy brain:

1) Walk and talk with a partner.
2) Vary your routine. Novelty stimulates neural connections.
3) Be a lifelong learner.
4) Play.
5) De-stress. Focus your mind and relax.
6) Imagine. Include creativity in your day.
7) Socialize and make new friends.
8) Eat right–a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and fish.
9) Work with your doctor to keep blood pressure, weight, blood sugar, and cholesterol in check.
10) Shun gimmicks. Rely on challenging new habits.

You can get a reprint of the article by calling 866-888-3723. You can find it on line at AARPMagazine.org

I do walk alone. I see people to talk to usually over a meal. When I teach, I see more people more often. I talk to people in the post office, in stores, to my neighbors, and I have some regular email friends.

I do love my routines, and I hate it when I hit interruptions like a problem with my chickens. A predator came into the orchard midday last week and killed a hen. Or my car breaks down, or I get sick. I do work to avoid such crises by being proactive, taking good care of my hens, my car, and my health. When the problems arise, and they always do, our brains can get to work at solving them.

Here’s where the mind and attitude come in.

It doesn’t even occur to me to stop keeping hens. I begin to "brainstorm" on solutions. I ask my growingsmallfarms listserve for advice. I ask people who understand dogs about possible guard dogs for the hens. Getting a new dog would be a major challenge at this point in my life, plus expense, but I’ll do that rather than give up my hens or put them back into the orchard without a good solution.

If my car is fixable, I get it fixed, even though it’s sixteen years old. If I’ve gotten sick, I do everything I can to get back to full health, and if need be, I change my lifestyle: more exercise, stop drinking coffee, more servings of fruit and vegetables daily.

The mind can throw up its hands and despair or set the brain to work on a solution.

All human beings have problems. Wise human beings accept that there will be problems, some within their power to solve, others beyond their control. That’s why the Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer is so potent: "Give me the courage to change the things I can change, to accept the things I can’t change, and the wisdom to tell the difference."

The first thing we can change is our attitude. I know too many people my age who accept the changes aging brings as inevitable, steps closer to death. They expect to have a stroke or a heart attack. When they have new problems with legs, feet, knees, hips, they bow to the inevitable or expect doctors to solve their problems with medicine or surgery. Obviously sometimes doctors are needed, but we can often improve our own health even when we’re old.

I was having twinges in my knees twenty years ago. A man who worked in fitness told me to walk more. My doctor also kept urging me to walk farther. "The more exercise, the better. Walk two miles instead of one." So I have been walking, and my knees rarely have twinges.

I eat less–small, more frequent meals, and I stopped my bedtime snack. I gave up coffee, and now I can tell better when I’m tired. It was a silly reason I finally worked on losing weight, but that also helped my knees. I’d bought a dress I liked for my son’s wedding, but I needed to lose ten pounds for it to fit comfortably. I did fairly easily: less food, more walking, and I’ve kept that up.

It may be harder to change and try new things as we age.

Sometimes I’m scared, as I was about attending the Writers’ Police Academy in High Point last September. But I summoned my courage, got help with directions, and did it. I got lost twice, but I found my way. Then, not only did I have the reward of an excellent program, from which I learned new things to help me in my "after fifties" career of mystery writer, but when I wrote up my experience, the editor of the National Sisters in Crime Newsletter, In Sinc, asked to quote part of my blog on her article on the Writers’ Police Academy on page one of the December issue of In Sinc.

It has been true all my adult life that, by taking on my problems (I do have a stubborn streak), by learning to "invent in desperate circumstances" (Sartre’s definition of a genius), I have not only found new solutions but have become more confident for the next time. My "reach" out into the world grows with each new challenge taken on.

I can’t always solve my problems myself. But that means asking help, and I do. I give to others what I can, and they give to me. Within reason, other people like to help.

When I had a small press, I needed so much help. I was always trying to find money, volunteers, or ideas for finding money or volunteers. Yes, people said no. So I learned which people might give money; which, time; which might give me a ride or might have ideas for solutions. I always emphasized that they had a choice: "If you want to. If it’s convenient. Or maybe you know someone?"

It’s hard to ask, but we forget that most people like to help if they can.

Yesterday Eric offered to paint the fascia boards on my house. Debbie was here to take photos for her article on me and my new book. She realized, too, that I’d need a good photo for the promotion of the book. I didn’t even have to ask. I accepted both offers gratefully. Their six-year-old daughter, Beckett, who had been shy yesterday afternoon, gradually tuned in to the spirit of what was going on with the adults.

When I asked her to draw me a picture to put on my refrigerator, she did. Now I have a handsome Thanksgiving boy turkey, with very colorful feathers, smack dab in the middle of my refrigerator.

Humor, too. Don’t forget that a healthy mind sees humor and can laugh, not only at the foibles of others, but at one’s own.

As Simple and Holy as a Bouquet of Cosmos

2011-11-13T12:24:00.000-08:00

Bouquet of Sensation Mix Cosmos on Judy's desk October 2011.

***

THAT INNER CIRCLING SUN XXX. October 23, 2011
In That Inner Circling Sun VIII. I wrote:
My path is clear now, and straight.
My all-too-human body has its twinges
and its doubts about all that I still plan
to accomplish, which is why that inner
sun must carry the workload and egg me on.
My greatness is an unknown, and yet I
feel it settle comfortably into the driver’s
seat, turn the key, and tell all the other
passengers: "We’re off."

In That Inner Circling Sun XIV. I wrote:

Lonely you
may be. You venture farther than most
writers want or dare to go. Your life is
lived inside a safety net around this work
you do of heeding every impulse of the
Muse. She leads. You follow. It doesn’t
get simpler, or harder, than that. Stay
where you are. Write and grow food.
Help people when you can’t say no.
Love your life, your work, every strand
that connects you to others and to your
world, where birds and other forest creatures
are as at home as you are now, here.

***
Let it be as simple and holy as a bouquet
of Sensation Mix cosmos, cut in a
neglected meadow, blown sideways,
then growing upward, living now,
so briefly, in a honey jar, their stems
drinking water but never fast enough
to keep them from dying. Pale lavender,
purple that is nearly red, pink--pale and
dark--white–with curving stems, buttons
ready to bud, but never with petals as
free and perfect as those that drew
their life direct from the soil, the last
heavy rain, and the south-moving sun,
A tangle of winding stems, spidery
leaves, they speak of freedom, careless
joy, and seed that persisted. The field
was bush-hogged, and they rose up
as if it had been cleared for their
benefit. Then the sweetgum saplings,
blackberry briars, tall feathery weeds
competed for space, soil, nutrients,
but they waved aloft their elegant
pastels, living and dying with equal
grace.

The fact is: I await sun.
The morning fog was warmed until
it disappeared. While they waited,
the hens groomed their feathers
back to gleaming white, huddled
for warmth, with enough space
to allow such circumspect cleaning,
like nymphs in the wood of Artemis
bathing around their goddess. When
I’m among them, they circle around
me. I’m taller, more powerful, but
Bringer of Food, Rescuer when
Lost, Speaker to their early morning
reluctant scratchy voices and their
last murmurs of contentment as
they settle at night, their dinosaur
toes gripping the wooden bars,
where they’ll sleep, and if it’s cold,
with feathers fluffed for warmth.

To put it another way, I wait upon
the Muse. If I’m a queen in the
human hive, it’s only because I’m
Her servant, desolate when she
disappears, fully alive when she slips
in again, whispering words I hadn’t
expected to hear so soon, which,
of course, subtract my power in order
to enhance hers. Servants do try to
outwit their masters. They sometimes
succeed. Oh, I can argue, and I do.
Postpone, if I don’t push it too long.
I can languish, and I do, when she
absents Herself. But then the sun
returns, it catches these variations
on the royal purple theme and
makes them glow with inner light,
and my soul becomes illumined,
too. So it becomes win-win. After
that, can I possibly believe that aging
will conquer me, or death do me in?
may be. You venture farther than most
writers want or dare to go. Your life is
lived inside a safety net around this work
you do of heeding every impulse of the
Muse. She leads. You follow. It doesn’t
get simpler, or harder, than that. Stay
where you are. Write and grow food.
Help people when you can’t say no.
Love your life, your work, every strand
that connects you to others and to your
world, where birds and other forest creatures
are as at home as you are now, here.
writers want or dare to go. Your life is
lived inside a safety net around this work
you do of heeding every impulse of the
Muse. She leads. You follow. It doesn’t
get simpler, or harder, than that. Stay
where you are. Write and grow food.
Help people when you can’t say no.
Love your life, your work, every strand
that connects you to others and to your
world, where birds and other forest creatures
are as at home as you are now, here.

After the Backyard Chicken Workshop

2011-11-06T10:48:00.000-08:00

This photo of my hens was taken last April by Sara Cress, a professional photographer. The hens are two years old, laying well, and in their new feathers. I love them! The poem comes after the October workshop.

THAT INNER CIRCLING SUN XXVIII. After Chicken Workshop. October 9, 2011
Earlier in poem X of this book I wrote:
Yet we flourish. The Muse speaks.
We eat well from food we grew
and saved. Time opens its huge
flower. We live closer than ever to
the end of our lives, with maybe
four/fifths of our work done, and
yet we see inwardly and outwardly
into the souls of others, better than ever,
and some few see us well enough
to love and nourish us.

Then in poem XV:
May Creation’s awesome power enliven
my every hour and hold me steady
on my course, comforting, like a
frightened dog in a thunderstorm,
every nightmare my depths send up
to warn me that I’m getting old.

And in poem XXVI:
It isn’t size that matters
or whether people notice you all
the time. It’s that you live, you
flourish, you do the work you’ve
cut out for yourself every day.

It isn’t how I’m seen, but how I see.
I picked up his bored, discontented air,
wondered why he was here if he didn’t
want to learn, wondered what he saw
as others, their eyes alive with curiosity
and later gratitude, asked questions,
stared at my hens as if to memorize
every motion of their chicken behavior.
The hens fled their curiosity but returned
to peck at the corn and oats I tossed out.
That one’s not tuning in, feeling contempt,
making some judgment I wouldn’t like
but, more importantly, will make him
sick if he doesn’t let go his refusal
to see what might make his life bearable,
even pleasant. Was I seeing my enemy
then, Despair? I’m moving into
Erikson’s last stage of human maturity:
ego integrity versus despair, which
hovers in the wings, picky, discounting
whatever I’ve already achieved, throwing
wet blankets on my scheme to flourish
into and through my nineties. But the
upshot of these inner wrestling matches
will be enhanced surety, an unerring
confidence in my worth and sense of
direction. Remember: your life goes
well, and smoothly runs the river that
was once merely an intermittent creek
bed, leaf-strewn, susceptible to drought,
at times a dirt path, then a gushing
flood, hoisting heavy debris out of
its way. Even doubters and nay-sayers
notice things. Will he remember
something from his hours in my presence,
see chickweed spring up in his own
lawn and let it grow to feed his hens?
Will he revel in an omelet prepared
with fresh onions, herbs, and cheese,
eaten with new laid eggs? Will he
notice the ever-changing life around
him when he stands in a field? Will he
hear bird call, chicken gabble, soft
wind rustling grasses gone to seed?

A BOOK CONTRACT FOR KILLER FROST

2011-10-30T08:39:00.000-07:00

We've had lovely warm October days. These cosmos came from the meadow behind my garden.

***

A BOOK CONTRACT FOR KILLER FROST
Thursday morning I received an email from Judith Ivie of Mainly Murder Press, offering me a contract for Killer Frost, the mystery which won a finalist place in the St. Martin’s Malice Domestic First Best Traditional Mystery Contest last March. Perfect. I did try agents on the first and third mysteries I’ve written, and on this one, too, but I returned to the small press world as the most comfortable for me, and this does feel so comfortable.

I’m surprised and stunned. This news sends me in a whole new direction. I’m the same, and my plans and my books are the same. Now I have other people out there answering. People will be reading these mysteries I’ve labored to write. They’re only part of my work, but I’ve put myself fully into them. It may be nine months before Killer Frost is out–late August, or later. Besides a trade paperback, my book will be on Nook and Kindle. I’ll get royalties, for which I’ll have to work. But I’ve promised to work on selling it, and I will.

I turn seventy-five in May of the year my first mystery is published. I feel ecstatic, beside myself [ek+stasis = standing outside]. I think I’d rather get a book published than get married again.

My book will soon go out into the world, "launched in a place of sufficient depth." Old Proust shapes me still. Why is it so very important to me now to have this book published? Identity is knowing who you are and being comfortable with that person. But it is also being recognized by others as who you believe you are.

This acceptance, and Mainly Murder’s enthusiasm for the book, means to me that I am recognized as the writer I believe I am. I have had people like my poetry and my PMZ Poor Woman’s Cookbook. But I haven’t published a novel before, and it is a way to reach a wider audience. So now, if I work at it to get attention to this book, I think that wider audience will respond. I hope to stir up word of mouth, which is the best possible marketing tool, if you can once get it going. I want this book to be a best seller for Mainly Murder. I’ll do my part.

It feels like verification that I haven’t been putting myself on, that I’m a good writer, one that people will want to read. It balances me and my whole life. I can lean more on my writing economically. What I want to be for a reader looks like it will come true. It isn’t only my imagination. I have the power to reach people, stir their feedings, and maybe even influence their behavior, with my words, which are as true and from my heart as I can make them.

So much rejection, but finally my words are slipping through the hedge. I’ve always thought of publishing as finding the hole in the hedge and slipping through. I’ve been through the hedge a little bit before with my poetry, my cookbook, my articles in our community newspaper, Chatham County Line, but now I’ve found a bigger and more promising hole and slipped through that.

What will I find on the other side? Mostly likely, not riches. If I can earn a little to supplement my social security and farm income, that is all I ask. I’ll find happy readers. I can already tell. My mechanic wants to buy a book. My friend Gene wants two copies. Terry, to whom I was once married, wants to read it on his kindle. Lucy wants to buy it and says, if I’ll have a big party, she’ll bring a cake. Yes, definitely, Lucy, here at my farm.

I hope there will be library reviews and sales. Suzanne, my reader, is excited. She told me it was the most political novel I’d written yet, and that’s saying some. It will stir things up. I think I can cope.

I’ve had a lot of identities: mother, wife, editor/publisher of a small press and a poetry journal, organizer in literature, environmental activism, and local politics. I’ve been a teacher of school children, out of school adults, and college students. I’ve been, and am, a small farmer. I’ve been a secretary, delivered newspapers, worked as Postmaster Relief in a village post office, worked in customer service, babysat, cleaned people's houses. I’m a grandmother and a great grandmother, a friendly neighbor. I’ve been a writer since age seven but an especially prolific one since age fourteen, and I’m a published poet, but I haven’t before leaned on my identity as an author, and I will now be a published novelist.

As well as readers on the other side of the hedge, there will be the other authors, and some of them will like my writing and give me a boost in this new world of being a published novelist. I’ll have a new kind of camaraderie. That has already begun. Other Mainly Murder authors are welcoming me to their ranks. I think some of the mystery authors I especially love will write blurbs for me. I’m going to ask my favorites. See what happens.

There will be critics, too. Some will be dismissive and cutting, but I think some will like what I write. I might even be praised. I’m pretty tough now. Let them cut. I’ll keep writing books. I’m going to enjoy this. You know what? I’m not even scared. As Winnie the Pooh once said, "It’s different when the hum inside you is outside and has other people looking at it." I’m not afraid of that. Also, for some reason, I’m feeling very generous and gracious toward everyone.

You begin one way, in one form, and you change. You end up in a different place. It’s still you, but it’s a more unified, purpose-driven, complete you. It’s the you that was potential made actual.

Review: Louise's War by Sarah Shaber

2011-10-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

Sarah Shaber. Louise’s War. Severn House, Surrey, England, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-7278-8040-6. $27.95.

Sarah Shaber, a Raleigh writer, whose five Simon Shaw mysteries I enjoyed, has a new series set during World War II in Washington, D.C. Louise’s War, the first book, introduces Louise Pearlie, a young widow from Wilmington, N.C., who has a job as a clerk in the Office of Strategic Services, an earlier version of the CIA.

When I visited Washington in 1983, I was told by a government employee that everyone working for the government was paranoid. This was also true in 1942. Louise learns that her loved college friend, Rachel Bloch, is in trouble in Vichy, France, the puppet government set up by the Nazis.

Jews are being arrested and sent by cattle cars to "work camps" in Germany. The message to her office concerns Rachel’s husband, who’s a skilled hydrographer. He promises to help the allies, if only his family can be evacuated out of France to safety. Bloch knows well the currents off the Mediterranean coast of Africa, where the Americans will soon be fighting the Nazis, and the U.S. very much needs this knowledge.

In the beginning of the book Louise feels quite powerless. She’s desperate to help Rachel, but what can she do and who in the Office of Strategic services is trustworthy? She finally takes the Bloch file to her boss, but then he dies and the file goes missing.

Gradually our shy, newly independent heroine gets braver. Her vivid imagination torments her as to what awaits Rachel and her child, if she’s left in France, and also reminds her of her own fate–prison?–should she be caught breaking the very strict OSS rules in her schemes to rescue Rachel.

Meantime, life goes on at Two Trees, the boarding house where Louise lives and where she meets Joe. She feels an electric attraction to Joe, which both thrills and terrifies her. She accepts a date with Joe and then learns he’s not the teacher he’s led her to believe. He’s leading a secret life. In fact, most of the people she meets are.

The D.C. political and government culture of the forties during the early phase of the war is as vivid as the homey details of the boarding house, where Dellaphine is cook and housekeeper and manages delicious meals, despite the rationing, even hand-made ice cream. The housekeeper’s daughter’s ambition to get a higher paying job working for the government is harder for Dellaphine to understand.

The backdrop for the whole book is humid heat–by day and by night–at work and at home. This is before air conditioning, or "refrigerated houses," as they were called, and only the very rich had them.

As Louise takes bolder and bolder risks, with men and with rule-breaking, to find the missing file and help her friend in France, I wanted to cheer, even while I held my breath.

Shaber knows her history, has made vivid exactly what Washington was like, from the big boys like FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, to the new independence and opportunities emerging slowly for women and Negroes. This is a fascinating read, a book to savor long after you’ve turned the last page.

Judy Hogan

Gulping Courage

2011-10-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

THAT INNER CIRCLING SUN XXIX. October 16, 2011

Marcel Proust in Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson, p. 111, writes:
For the true reality of a danger is perceived only in that new thing, irreducible to what one already knows, which we call an impression and which is often... summed up in a line, a line which contains the latent potentiality of its distorting fulfillment...
　

In That Inner Circling Sun XI, I wrote:

I wanted fame after my death, not before,
but time has ripened both me and my words.
My vision self is ready to show herself
more widely, to take new risks. If any one
thing is getting lost in our time, it is
integrity, being an integer, a whole,
knowing leaf to stem to root what one
believes, who one is, and practicing
always careful attendance on the Deep Source
of our human wisdom.

In That Inner Circling Sun XXVI, I wrote:

Oak trees have a quality
of being there–simply, quietly. Their
canopy protects, shades, delights.
Their roots undergird my house, and,
in their aging, they let go the limbs they
no longer need, that don’t enhance
their present, glorious well-being,
their unique and faithful, even modest,
loveliness.
***

More fears than ever in my life before,
but more calm certainty, too. I gulp
courage like fresh air. So far I breathe,
my blood circulates normally, my
body remains nearly as resilient as
in my youth, and my spirit is more
aggressive, determined, unwilling
to concede defeat to the fleabites
of prudence that might prevent me
from fulfilling my vocation. Maybe
this is the sacrifice Proust talked
about when you become willing,
even ardent, about living your own
life all the way to the end for the sake
of your life’s work.

Suppose one day
he did ask me to marry him. I wouldn’t
say no. I’d say, "It’s too late. We’re
already married. Didn’t you notice?"
The inconceivable does sometimes
occur, but only if we pay very close
attention. So I give my fears only
cursory attention. I won’t be foolish,
but life is all risk anyway, and the
closer I walk to my own death, the
greater the risk. Perhaps my body
feels obligated to remind me. I take
note, but I remember all the things,
people, books, poems, loves I gave
birth to because I treated my fears
like ground mist and kept walking.
A wise woman once said, "Your
next fifty years will be better, if you
don’t put a lid on yourself." Twenty-
five of those years have nearly
passed me by, but I still have
twenty-five more to live and write,
if I’m lucky, and if I don’t blanche
at obstacles and detours. I know
how to follow a crooked path,
how to reassure my own soul as
well as the souls of others. Perhaps
that, simply, is why I’m still here.

If One Young Woman Finds My Words Help Her...

2011-10-08T13:58:00.000-07:00

Jubilant sugar snap pea vines from last spring.

***
THAT INNER CIRCLING SUN XXVII. By Century Creek. October 2, 2011
In response to a comment on my blog, Mindi wrote: Judy, your poetry comforts me, grounds me, and encourages me to think that there is a little sanity left in this world. It feels softly contained, in the way that the day is contained by the mystery of the night. Being of a very small family, and having no grandparents after I turned 12, all my life I have wished for wise elders in my life. It just occurred to me that in the brief but important ways our lives have touched, you have become that to me: an elder I look up to, who lives a life I truly admire and aspire to, who represents something of what I’d like to be when I’m older. Earthy, poetic, compassionate, inspired, strong, zestfully honest. Thanks for your wisdom. Mindi

The cold makes a change. The roots
of the creek bank tree still hold its soil
in place, but the trunk leans across, dead,
lichen-covered, upper branches broken and
scattered. The water in the creek holds
still, except for where the sunlight hits the
surface, blue-grey, with orange shadows.
I sat here weekly for so many years,
memorized this creek and its slowly
dying tree. Now time, wind, relentless
rains have changed nearly everything.
I walked my woods, tying purple cloth
markers to find my way surefootedly
to the boundary trees, nailed up "no
trespassing" signs. My neighbor cleared
land a few feet away. Logs litter the
spaces. In my woods, trees have died
and fallen, but forest life flourishes.
I need these woods here, growing,
dying, for respite, comfort, wisdom
in my elder days. If only one young
woman finds my words help her, it’s
enough. Brain health, I read, is related
to exercise of mind and body, doing
new things, having good friends,
creating. Memory changes its speed
and rhythm, but words still flow
unbidden. Here among the litter of
leafmold and dead branches, moss
catches sun and turns the soil green.
Slender grasses root themselves
and nod to the wind. Maple and oak
saplings take root. I am rooted, too,
and waving my branches high where
the wind soughs and blows.

Writers' Police Academy

2011-10-01T14:21:00.000-07:00

This is a photo of self-heal growing last spring in my herb garden--the big leaves near the bottom of the photo. It makes a useful tea for colds and allergies. I put it here to remind us that, in the natural world and in our human society, we have that which heals as well as that which destroys.

***

WRITERS’ POLICE ACADEMY.Last summer I impulsively signed up for the Writers’ Police Academy, directed by Lee Lofland, the author of Police Procedure and Investigation: A Guide for Writers. With a foreword by Stuart Kaminsky. Writer’s Digest Books. $19.99. ISBN: 978-1-58297-455-2. I belong to Sisters in Crime (SinC) and they were offering a scholarship. High Point (near Jamestown) is about sixty miles away, a possible commute for me. So I signed up: $145, including the banquet.

Most mysteries involve the police, and mine do. My series heroine, Penny Weaver, a mid-fifties American poet, falls for a Welsh policeman in book one. In the second book, she meets a local Sheriff’s Department detective when her landlord is murdered.

I’ve tried to learn about police procedures both in a North Carolina county and in Wales. I bought Lee’s book, and I corresponded by email with a Welsh detective a few years ago. But this promised to be the most helpful yet, and I enjoyed telling my friends and adult children, "I’m going to a police academy in September." Then I would say, "It’s for writers."

As the weekend drew near, I became more anxious. I reminded myself that, when I was about 40 and Chair of the small press organization COSMEP, I’d driven into downtown Philadelphia in the middle of the night, two sleeping children in the backseat, trying to find the friendly small press person who was putting us up for the night. I was anxious then, but this was worse. Age?

The police academy was held in Jamestown, at Guilford Technical Community College, where I’d never been. I got out maps. I googled directions. I wrote to Lee. A very kind librarian, Nancy Metzner, wrote back to call her cell phone if I got close and couldn’t find the Public Safety building. Lee and Nancy both emailed campus maps. I’d be coming back after dark and leaving in the dark both Friday and Saturday. We were to have rain all weekend, and the crime scene was "rain or shine," so I took my new rain jacket with hood, made sure the animals and chickens had what they needed, put extra clothes and some tunafish sandwiches in the truck for lunch and supper, and set off Friday morning at six.

I got lost for awhile near the college, but eventually I found the building, got registered, and chatted with other folks who’d commuted.

My first choice of the Friday morning workshops was the Crime Scene Investigation with Bill Lanning. Heavy rain began as we left the gazebo shelter to trudge uphill to the shallow grave site. My rain jacket was not waterproof. The manikin named Sonya’s body was mostly exposed. There were pieces of paper scattered around, receipts, a cigar butt thrown on top of her. She was covered by a tent, but we weren't.

Bill told us that digging a deep grave was too hard and time-consuming for most killers, so shallow graves were common. Also, even if the earth were smoothed off afterwards, the soft earth tends to sink and form a concave pattern. Some killers cut up bodies to save having to dig a grave. If wrapped in plastic (to hide odors) it doesn’t decompose as fast. If there are skeletal remains, often scattered by carrion-eating birds and animals, it’s very hard to identify the deceased. Flies can lay eggs in minutes. Ants also eat bodies.

Fortunately I did have a change of clothes in my pickup, but many folks, coming by bus from the hotel, were wet and cold the rest of the day. We got a dose of the difficulties police face.

Bio-terrorism. Dr. Denene Lofland (Lee Lofland’s wife).

Denene has been working for years in labs that supply information to the government, especially on drugs to counter the likely diseases that could be used to kill people, destroy food sources, water supplies, and to create fear. Compared to conventional and nuclear weapons, such weaponized germs are cheap to manufacture and distribute. Besides anthrax, which can be in water, food, or air, where it’s the most lethal, there is smallpox. Children haven’t been vaccinated against this for some time because it’s theoretically wiped out except for some labs in U.S. and Russia.

Other potential weapons are: salmonella, the plague (Black Death), staph, viruses, fungi, parasites, Q Fever. Not all kill everyone, but they can make you very sick for weeks, and most available vaccines against those threats go to the military. Many of these germs, e.g., the plague and anthrax, exist naturally in the wild. One quart of Botulism germs, which are created when canned vegetables spoil, could wipe out the whole population of the earth.

Handcuffing and Arrest Techniques. Stan Lawthorne and Corp. Dee Jackson.

It’s very easy to buy handcuff keys, and criminals may hide them in pens, bullets, wear them on necklaces or even in their penises. Most cuffs used now are metal, but sometimes flex cuffs are used in arresting a lot of people at once. Don’t cuff a very dangerous suspect with hands in front, as, if he’s limber, he may be able to get out of them. Leg shackles were advised, but not hog-tying as they can die in custody if so tied and left face down. Now they lay them on their sides if they wear handcuffs and leg shackles.

Pepper spray and Tasers are used to subdue suspects if command presence and verbal instructions don’t work. Guns only if absolutely necessary. If suspects are high on cocaine or PCP, their hearts may explode from the Taser electrodes, since the drugs send the heart rate high. Such a drugged state is called "excited delirium," and the authorities have to get them medical attention as fast as possible.

Plaster Casting and Fingerprinting. Susan Powell.

If you have footprints or tire prints at a crime scene and you want to make casts, you can use dental stone, which sets fast. Then you look for the class characteristics, e.g., size, make, model, style, type of shoe or tire tread, as well as for individual characteristics: wear, cuts, microscopic debris picked up on them. Often emphasized by all the forensic instructors was: everywhere you go, you leave something and take something away with you. If the impression is in sand, Susan dampens the sand first and uses hair spray to firm it up.

In Fingerprinting I learned to dust with magnetic powder, lift fingerprints from a tile and from a glass jar with tape, and then release them onto a piece of paper or a film, examine them under a microscope for their type, sub-group, and individual characteristics. The three main types are arches, loops, and whorls. Most of mine were whorls with the bull’s eye formation. Each finger is different. Our basic fingerprints don’t change from womb to death. Not even identical twins have the same prints. You then enter as many characteristics as possible, ideally12-15, into the AFIS police computer system, and possible matches are returned, even from a partial. A Nazi War Criminal was convicted in recent years from his fingerprints on a 1944 postcard with the help of laser lights.

The Psychologist and the Sleuth. Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D.
Katherine gave a presentation to the whole academy. She has published forty books. She has articles regularly in the Sisters in Crime quarterly newsletter, In Sinc. She does psychological and legal investigations for parental fitness, sexual harassment, research competency, as well as consultation at crime scenes, death investigations, profiling, jury selection, and sentencing recommendations.

She does careful observation of suspects and others, reading body language, noticing micro expressions. She can list behaviors and traits, narrow down leads. What she does is not scientific. From a potential pool of suspects, she can give a high probability as to which one is the most likely. This is probability analysis or an educated hypothesis. Psychological autopsy is done after the crime is committed. She can develop a profile, using victimology, evidence of psychopathology, abnormal psychology, etc. She notices whether the murderer was organized or disorganized and can recognize the signs.

Psychological autopsies can settle criminal cases, ambiguous deaths, estate issues, malpractice, insurance claims. In solving murders, often the psychological elements are overlooked or treated superficially. She was present throughout the conference, always gracious. A real gift to have her with us.

Women in Law Enforcement. Sgt. Catherine Netter.
Catherine supervises a shift at a Guilford County jail. She also led the jail tour on Thursday night. She passed around her duty belt, without the gun, and we felt how heavy it was. Clothes are designed for men, so getting a shirt that fits comfortably and allows for boobs isn’t easy. That isn’t the only extra challenge police women face. Going to the bathroom involves more undressing than with men. She finds her male counterparts often worry she can’t back them up. But males on the street may underestimate her. 60% of police working in detention are women, who, generally, keep things quieter. The mothers of male inmates were often the family disciplinarians. If you’re attractive, your job is easier. She relies on her brain and her command presence. The word spreads if you’re good at subduing rowdy prisoners. 99% of running a prison is good communication. Ten men are compliant and respectful for every one who isn’t, and usually those have a history of domestic violence.

She ignores vulgar language. She’d rather work with males, and it’s an advantage to be black, as 90% of inmates are black. "The way you start is the way you end," she said.

The Role of Digital Evidence in Criminal Investigations. Lt. Josh Moulin, Task Force Commander of High Tech Crimes for Southern Oregon.
80% of the cyber crimes Josh investigates are child pornography and abuse cases. 45% of the men interested in child pornography have abused kids. This was perhaps the scariest thing I learned. The police sometimes find thousands of child pornography photos on one cell phone, computer, or other digital device.

This task force includes people from local, state, and federal (FBI, Homeland Security, ICE (Immigration and Customs)) organizations. A child abuser has an average of 13.5 victims, and most are not detected. They have a backlog of cases, but they give significant time to education, e.g., programs at middle schools.

Cell phones are often used for drug sales. They have a $20,000 machine that can crack passwords when they input biographical data. They can track emails, websites, even texting with cell phones.

It will get harder for them when people use more distance file saving, i.e., through cloud computing. He can get things from Facebook. There are people on Craig’s List setting up sex. Once they do have digital evidence, it stands up in court. They now have mental health resources to help them deal with this very difficult material.

Cold Cases. Dave Pauly, Sirchie Fingerprint Labs, and Dr. Katherine Ramsland.
In 1990 a group of forensic scientists started a cold case review group called the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dave and Katherine are in it. For a case to be considered, it must be at least two years old, no longer being investigated, but have solvability. They meet monthly with the original investigation presented to them, and then they brainstorm.

Cases go cold for many reasons: administratively it may not have been considered important enough, there wasn’t enough personnel, or for socioeconomic reasons. Another reason is witness error because the witness provided only incomplete or misleading information. The investigator can screw up. If the suspect seems to have an alibi, that can throw them off. In fact, 97% of suspects are mentioned to the police in the first thirty days. There may be too much data or not enough evidence. The investigators sometimes conduct a poor interview. You should begin in a friendly way, but you must keep a certain distance. Gradually make the suspect more uncomfortable by allowing long silences, etc.

Usually the murderer is in some relationship to the victim. Cases get passed off or the investigator takes a new job. "We suck at communication," Dave said. "It makes a difference if someone cares and keeps pushing."

Women’s Personal Safety and Protection. Corp. Dee Jackson.
Dee was determined that we would learn to avoid situations that might prove dangerous, get fit, and deal effectively with potential aggressors. She made us chant: "We fight dirty to survive." She gave us handouts and we practiced three moves that would tend to disable someone approaching us who made us feel "icky." We practiced on rubber dummies. (1) Run up to him and hit him hard with our palms on his ears. (2) Run up to him, grab his head and knee him in the groin. (3) Run up to him and grab clothes, hair, head, and claw him down his face.

She had us run in place for one minute. Such a dangerous encounter usually takes three minutes. She said she’d die on the spot rather than let someone take her off and her family never see her again or know what happened. "This is 2011," she emphasized. "I want to read in the paper that you put someone in the hospital."

I’m going to do more exercises and be more careful. Dee praised me when I clawed that son of a bitch!

Banquet Speaker. Christopher Reich.
Reich’s newest book, Rules of Betrayal (2010) was on the New York Times Best Selling list. He had a job with a Swiss Bank. They had a visit from a U.S. investigator, urging them to be suspicious when large amounts of cash were deposited, transferred, or withdrawn. When the investigator left, their director told the employees, if they ever talked to that man, they’d be fired instantly, for that cash experience happened frequently.

Reich had never written a novel, but he told his new wife he was quitting his job to write it. He had literary agents fighting for it, but then he had to revise it many times. It made the New York Times list, but his second book did less well, so they wanted his huge six-figure cash advance back. He had spent it. He was given three months to write a new one. This idea came from meeting General Tommy Franks and hearing about the secret work he was doing in Iraq. That book had publishers competing and came out number three on the New York Times list.

His advice to us: Have faith in yourself and get yourself planted in your chair (what Elizabeth George calls "bum glue.").

Sunday Morning Panel to Debrief and Ask Questions about our WIPsExperts Present: Lee Lofland, Dave Pauly, Josh Mullen, Richard McMahan, Catherine Netter, Dee Jackson, Sandy Russell, Marco Conelli, Mary Grace Tomecki, his fiancee, who is Fire Commissioner in a Long Island community.
McMahan described a reverse sting, where they set up a storefront undercover to buy drugs and firearms. They had fifteen cameras and many operatives there. They learned that guns had been stolen not far away, and they were brought right to them, and then they arrested the suspects.

Dave Pauly told more about the Vidocq Society. You can google "The Murder Room" to learn about it, and there may be a television program coming out about it soon.

Catherine admitted she found her work exhausting, mentally and physically. It’s aging her prematurely.

Dee told about the first man who ever hit her (it hasn’t happened again!) when she was military police in the Marine Corps. He was in the "excited delirium" state and came at them holding a door he’d wrenched off the hinges. He put the door down and punched Dee, breaking her nose. Her partner, who had climbed on the man’s back, yelled to her to help him. They even hit him with the door. He was finally subdued.

Mary Grace, who’s short and slender, told us how she deals with the four fire chiefs under her and all the men and women under them. "Go prepared. Don’t ever let anyone push you around. You have a moral obligation to do your job, hold your ground. [Dee threw in: "Never cry."], understand their needs, but never assume respect. You have to earn it."

I asked a WIP question about whether my Welsh detective could be used by a N.C. county sheriff’s department, and the answer was no, unless in some emergency, rule 15A405, which allows deputizing, or if he were an American citizen, properly trained and certified as a police officer.

Lee then asked: "Have we ruined your WIP?" I said, "Yes."

Some other women asked me afterwards what I was going to do. I said I’d think about it. Actually, I’m going to send Kenneth to my fictional county’s police academy. Lee confirmed by email this is possible. One thing he’d have to learn is to handle a gun.

There were some gun questions, and we learned that, because a gun is wet, it doesn’t mean it won’t fire, and also that the proper way to hold a gun in a situation where it’s needed, is to point it down, safety off, bullet in chamber.

Plain clothes police detectives also carry guns, handcuffs, pepper spray, and Tasers.

***

With another Guppy (the Great Unpublished Sub-Group of Sisters in Crime), Elaine Douts, I contributed most of the above to the Guppy Newsletter, First Draft, emailed to us October 1. I’ve had some days to write and think about my experience. I’m very glad I went. I can see new and interesting possibilities for my Kenneth character because he works as a regular deputy. A lot is more specific now, less vague. That’s sure to be a plus. I also plan to put a woman police person in my next novel, and thanks to Catherine Netter and Dee Jackson, I know a lot more about what that’s like.

On a personal level, I will be more aware of taking care of my personal safety and health. I’ll be adding some new exercises to my daily routine. I’m very glad I found the courage to drive myself to GTCC for the police weekend. Many of the harsh realities which the professionals deal with daily got through to me.

Dee emphasized: "This is 2011." She wanted us to live longer, be safer. She said, "People love you, care about you. I want you to be safe." I tell you what, if a man messes with me now, he’s looking to end up in the hospital!

***
Also at the academy, which is held yearly, people may be able to do the jail tour or a ride-along, with your name drawn out of a hat. There were more course options than I had time to take. The High Point Public Library helped with local arrangements and registration. The college’s Criminal Justice Department, notably Sandra Neal, also helped out with local arrangements and made sure we found where we needed to go. Everyone was friendly and helpful. A police academy happens there on a regular basis. Our experts, and the 140 participants, many because of the Sisters In Crime scholarships, came from all over the country. Very worth doing! www.writerspoliceacademy.com JH

September 22-25, 2011. Guilford Technical Community College, Jamestown, N.C.

Louise Penny: A Trick of the Light

2011-09-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

This is a photo of my scarecrow named Hope. She's not so good at keeping the weeds at bay, but she does well with keeping the crows out of the vegetable garden. I have to do the weeds.
***

A TRICK OF THE LIGHT by Louise Penny. Minotaur Books, St. Martin’s Press, New York. September 2011. 339 pp. $25.99; $27.99, Canada. ISBN 978-0-312-65545-7.

In her September newsletter, Louise Penny wrote that this book "is perhaps my most autobiographical," i.e., she went deeper and revealed more of herself than she ever has in her previous six novels. A Trick of the Light, as well as her other novels about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec City Surete and the village of Three Pines, near the Vermont border, is a mystery, and it’s best to read the series in order, beginning with Still Life, because there are strands in each book that go back to earlier books. But of course you can start anywhere.

I found Louise’s The Cruelest Month (the third in the series) in my local Pittsboro (NC) library. I was drawn to the title that echoed T.S. Eliot’s "April is the cruelest month" and to the lovely cover photo of lilacs. I loved it.

Then I met Louise at Malice Domestic Convention in late April 2009. I found her and her husband, Michael, open, friendly, gracious. Later that spring I interviewed her by email for the Sisters in Crime Guppy [great unpublished mystery writers] newsletter, First Draft. See my post of May 29 [click on May on the right side of the page]. I watched her get the Agatha for that novel, and another Agatha for Best Novel this past April for Bury Your Dead. She has won an Agatha four times, more than any other traditional mystery writer, as well as many other awards, like the New Blood Dagger, Arthur Ellis, Barry, Anthony, and Dilys. This September she made it into number four place on the New York Times Best Selling Novels list, and she has just received the Macavity award.

My own form in the mystery genre, and my favorite mysteries to read, are also the traditional mysteries, where the sex and violence are not too explicit, where there are a number of suspects. But I also love, love most, when relationships are explored, when the author digs deep and reveals wisdom about the complexities of the human heart, and this, to me, is Louise’s primary territory. She enters the dark side of our human nature, the anger, hatred, resentment we all feel at times, and in this book, where the causes of such dark feelings are nearly impossible to forgive. If I had to use one word, I’d say this book is about forgiveness, and I mean that word to be at the other end of the spectrum from anything trite or automatic.

This is the kind of forgiveness that is essential for us to master in order to be fully ourselves, fully mature human beings. To hate, brood, resent, however much such feelings are completely understandable, and in one way even necessary, as we protect ourselves from people who wrong us, who clearly and deliberately do us harm, is to inhibit our health and well-being. Socrates said: it is better to be harmed than to harm others. Jesus said: forgive others their trespasses against us. In therapy we learn that our own lives don’t flourish until we can forgive our parents, and, as Erik Erikson says, mother our mothers and father our fathers.

One organization is famous, apart from religions and their various denominations, of focusing on forgiveness and making amends to those we have wronged: Alcoholics Anonymous and its sister group Narcotics Anonymous. I have had three people close to me who pulled themselves out of addiction through A.A. I myself have been to their meetings and to Al-Anon, for relatives of alcoholics, and I’ve done the twelve steps myself.

It surprised me that A.A. turns up in A Trick of the Light. Yet it makes sense. Alcoholics, to heal, must both forgive and seek forgiveness, or make amends for what they did wrong. For many years I treasured a radio alarm clock given to me by a dear friend to make amends. Two new radios have replaced that one, but my friend’s spirit (he died in 1993 of cancer) is still part of my radio alarm clock, which I keep tuned to WCPE’s classical music.

A Trick of the Light takes place in Three Pines, with our familiar cast of characters: crotchety Ruth, the old poet; the B and B and bistro owners, Olivier and Gabri, who make sure that there is always delicious food–comfort food and comfort furnishings; and the therapist who is now a bookstore owner, Myrna.

Clara Morrow has her first big solo show of her paintings at the big Musee in Montreal, with a launching party and another at her home. Her husband, Peter, struggles with his jealousy. He was supposed to have a solo show first. He can barely stand to hear all the congratulations pouring in. The reviewers give her heady praise, but the next morning, an old friend, who’d been very cruel to Clara when they were young, is found murdered in her garden.

Inspector Gamache brings his team to the village to investigate. They question artists, dealers, and gallery owners in the art community, as well as the villagers, in search of that particular resentment that led to this death.

Another thing I love about this series is that Gamache is a good man. He suffers, but though sometimes he’s discouraged, his wisdom and love don’t fail him, and he keeps his hope, very much a secondary theme here. Is it hope that Gamache sees in the eyes of Clara’s portrait of old Ruth, or is it a merely "a trick of the light"?

I recommend Louise’s series to all my friends, whether they usually read mysteries or not. There is so much modern literature about despair and full of cynicism. Certainly, in our world today, in our country, in our local communities, it is easy to despair, to be angry, to give up our hope, to refuse to forgive. But I keep in mind Soren Kierkegaard’s idea that the opposite of despair is willing to be oneself. Louise Penny helps me do that. Check her out at www.louisepenny.com

This is a picture of Louise Penny and her beloved husband, Michael.

Judy Hogan

Art is the Most Real of All Things

2011-09-11T17:12:00.000-07:00

My stand of okra, producing about 12 pods of okra a day. Here, in bright mid-day sun. Late August.

THAT INNER CIRCLING SUN XXV. September 4, 2011

Marcel Proust writes in his book, The Prisoner, which Carol Clark translated, on page 346:
Sometimes I thought that the reason [why Vinteuil’s music was more true than all known books] was that the things we feel in life are not experienced in the form of ideas, and so their translation into literature, an intellectual process, may give an account of them, explain them, analyze them, but cannot recreate them as music does, its sounds seeming to take on the inflections of our being, to reproduce that inner, extreme point of sensation which is the thing that causes us the specific ecstasy we feel from time to time and which, when we say ‘What a beautiful day! What beautiful sunshine!,’ is not conveyed at all to our neighbor...

In The Past Recaptured, in the Moncrieff translation., page 1001, Proust writes: So that art is the most real of all things, the sternest school in life and truly the Last Judgment.
　
September sun slows earth’s pace. Figs swell
with more deliberate sweetness. The omnipresent
weeds go to seed. The air cools enough
to ripen raspberries, but afternoon sun
is lavished on the okra pods. My human
pace picks up. In a week I’ll be teaching
again. I had a somnolent summer writing
my novel, harvesting and preserving food
for winter needs. Darkness draws in
at both ends of the day. Some plants
flourish and some die. Mysteries abound.
There are so many reasons that exist and
remain unfathomed, and in nothing so
much as in our human connections. It
is easy to feel neglected, forgotten, alone,
but we never are. Our life continues all
around us, its strands more far-reaching
than we easily imagine. A woman who
took photographs of me and my hens
stops by on an impulse to buy eggs.
A spider lily I planted years ago springs
up in a neglected flower bed in its own
time, even though I’d forgotten to clear
space for it. The cardinal joins me when
I’m picking figs, the hens raucous below
me, he, alert to the full ripe ones as
much as I. I live, I flourish, I write
the story I have to tell, my very own,
the only one that matters now in my life,
but, when I’m gone, its fruit will be
well-distributed and rise unbidden in
other souls far from where I live now,
but already magnetized and waiting
for whatever wisdom I can hear and speak
as my pen moves across the page.

Mourning Lucky

2011-09-04T08:45:00.000-07:00

I took this photo of my Italian Honey figs last Sunday. I've been selling them and other, smaller figs since early August to Chatham Marketplace, our co-op in Pittsboro, N.C. Sadly, Tuesday, last week, August 30, the next door dogs both died, Lucky, born in late 1999 and Spud, born about August 1, 2002, the same age as Wag. I was especially attached to Lucky and wrote a poem for him back in 2002, by my creek.

***

THE SPILL OF THE BLUE-GRAY LIGHT 2 By Century Creek
For Lucky, the dog next door
December 16, 2001
Enough water to push the leaf drift
but not to reach roots below grass level.
Still no berries on the holly, but clean air,
trees calm, quiescent, while they wait for
winter rain. We will take what we can get,
but we long for days of hard, steady rain
soaking through all the layers to the water
table, bringing the lake up to the trees at its edge,
brightening the forest greens, preparing frogs
and bulbs for spring.
The dog lies in my arms,
declares for the thousandth time that he is
my dog. Okay, Lucky, creek bank muse,
faithful when my faith wavers, I choose you
since you choose me. May you live a long life,
full of dog joys.
I do not think about my age
any more than a tree would. I’ve adapted to the
increasing crotchets age brings, but I work as
steadily as ever. The main change in recent years:
I rest more and worry less. And I have riches
I couldn’t have counted on, much less aimed for:
enough money, a good house, land, trees, a creek,
a garden, and an orchard. Chickens, if I choose.
I have a dog named Lucky who chose me, and
Emma declares when we sit in the vet’s office
that I’m his co-owner. Lucky, lying in my lap
beside the creek, promises she’s right, that he has
been my dog for the two years it took me to figure
this out.
I’m like this tulip tree that anchors the creek
bank and houses small mammals, hosts pools
of water even in drought, over a hundred feet
in the air now, confident that the new season will
replenish what the old season took away.
And who will love me of the two-footed species,
man to woman? They cast their shadows on my life
but approach no nearer to the dragon woman who
lives by a creek. Maybe Lucky is a messenger
of some as yet unwashed-up Odysseus. In my lucky
grab bag perhaps there is one more surprise,
another richness added to my bounty, a new kith
added to what is now my circle of known and loved
kith and kin.

Interruptions

2011-08-28T16:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we got the outer edges of the hurricane Irene, 200 miles to the east of us. The winds were steady all day, but not a problem right here. Still, this morning, what a relief for plants, trees, birds, creatures, and people that Irene had gone on her way. Here's a photo of the zinnias from my garden that I picked the night before, in case the zinnias were ruined. But they are doing well. The day, mostly indoors, did make me think about interruptions, and I dug out a poem I wrote during an ice storm in January 1988 in Saxapahaw. Enjoy.

***
A VILLAGE THAT FELT LIKE HOME I. January 2, 1988
These interruptions come: ice on the
twigs and branches or on the electric
wires has caused a power outage.
The village, though it’s still light,
deals with darkness. The houses
were not built to let in light, but
they can do without electricity.
The log in the woodstove still hums
and cracks, putting out heat, if not
light. The gas range warms toast
and a tea-kettle. The woodstove will
keep the tea warm. At nightfall
there are candles, the flashlight,
and a kerosene lamp. All strong
enough to read by, as is the daylight
right beside the door, but I will use
this time to savor the moment any
interruption gives.

Perhaps life is just that:
interruption. The divine interruption of
the gods, if we have the wits to see it
for what it is.
The interruption itself
gives us only a temporary dislocation,
a brief reminder of what we do and do not
have. Then the lights return, and we
experience relief. Creatures of routine
that we are, we welcome back the evidence
that things are back to normal. The refrigerator
resumes its hum; the page of the book
is easy to see again. The kerosene lamp
is now extraneous. But something lingers
in the consciousness. We almost feel like
turning out the light to recreate that
darkness we saw something else by. The glow
from the wood fire was more potent then;
even the tea in its red kettle held more meaning.
To eat toast in the dusk of late afternoon,
to suspend the usual; to allow in the new,
the unprecedented thought was pleasurable,
nourished our spirit some way we do not quite
understand now that we are back to the way
a book turned down at the place, a red teapot
sitting on a black woodstove, the next pine
log on the stove mat, and the sooty shovel handy
for rearranging an occasionally irrepressible
fire–have their ordinary look back.
Outside the trees are iced; twigs, pine
fronds, the webbed juniper; individual grass
blades; the leaves of turnips and spinach;
stalks of green onion; wild privet bent
to the ground.
Everything is still ordinary;
still its same grey or green or brown self.
Except that down from the sky came ice,
and rain that iced what it touched. Drops froze
under the eaves and coated the steps. I took
the dog her food, and saw the grey-white look
the deeper woods have, and are likely to have
tomorrow when the light returns. Full light,
when it comes, will cause a radiance among
all those iced limbs. An iridescent momentary
beauty. Not quite natural; beyond routine; yet
given, inexplicably, when seen; or missed
because of the preoccupied condition of the mind
accustomed to things that stay put and are,
in some sense, known, or at least, familiar.

It is the unfamiliar I am learning to
have courage about; the moments not
easily shrugged off. Another point of view
would call them epiphanies, find them
sacred, even these dark ones, and even
when no place can be found for them
in a just order of things.

But I wonder
if the gods don’t laugh at us when,
time after time, they cause us a small but
significant interruption, and all we can
think about is getting the lights back on.

The Reward of Healthy Aging

2011-08-22T18:25:00.000-07:00

These are my hens in a photo taken last April in the afternoon of my backyard chicken workshop by Sarah Cress. They look very clean then, a little more bedraggled now as the summer wears down, but as raucous as ever when I'm picking figs. they get the spoiled and bird-pecked ones.

***

THE REWARD OF HEALTHY AGING
I realized this weekend that I’m more attuned than ever before to my past, my present, and my future. It’s a curious sense. As if past, present, and future were somehow blended in me now. I don’t feel there is any hurry, in one way, to do the work I need to do, and yet each day I feel I must keep to the plan for each day and do the chores I’ve noted down as urgent. If I don’t mow now, it may rain again, and I’ll be back where I was, having to wait for it to dry out. Or if I don’t pick the vegetables and make the stews for the winter, I’ll be wasting time and money, which are closely connected for me.

I don’t want to have to earn money to buy food–beyond the minimum–so, by growing and preserving food, though it takes time now, I "earn" both good food and time later, when I want to have as much time as possible to write and publish my books.

Will people want to know about me after I die? It’s hard to believe, but I think they will. Am I about to start living with that consciousness, too, now? Maybe.

Bach’s cantata this Sunday morning is about getting ready for Judgment Day. ["Give an Account of Yourself. Word of Thunder."] It’s vigorous, joyful. I guess, in my own way, that’s what I’m doing–getting ready so that, when I or anyone else looks back on my life, they can see that I did my work, fulfilled my purpose in life as I saw it. There will be people who misunderstand, who don’t "get it." But my own opinion of myself and my accomplishments is what I count on. A few others will "see." I hope to get enough books published to have a small, interested audience, which will slowly increase, even after I die, or maybe especially after I die.

When I look at all I do in one day, how I move, with relative ease, from my writing to the farm and preserving work, I feel grateful that I can manage so much.

When I think back on my life, all my passions, to love and to care for other people, to put other people’s work into print, a basically kind and pleasant personality, but determined, and as Daphne Athas said, "indefatigable." Not giving up easily on people I loved or projects I thought were important, though learning not to let people manipulate me and letting go when it felt time to let go, of people, of projects. I got the Roadmap classes funded between 1981 and 1990, kept Carolina Wren Press afloat, threw myself into Russian projects and visits. My life is relaxed and calm now, comparatively. Now the passion goes into my writing and growing food to sustain that. I’m glad for all that is behind me, my past. I carry it lightly now, but all that I learned from that voyage in the world I must tell now, find words and forms to tell it.

Is it presumptuous to think people will want to know all about me and read my books when I’m gone? I don’t think so. Does it change anything if I assume this? In some ways I already have assumed this. In my will I said I wanted to have this house turned into a museum. That was outrageous on the face of it. But this goes farther. I think now I can be a model of a life well-lived, as well as carefully recorded and documented in all my writings.

Not a perfect life. I have my weaknesses, errors, my blind spots, but a life worth emulating. How to live well and happily and feel that you are living the exactly right life for you, the life that fits you like a glove, that feels like it was "meant to be." You feel you have a purpose, and you’re living it out to the best of your ability. Doing your work, being honest in your relationships, loving, forgiving, where that is possible, keeping your inner eye clear. I do see better than ever, both myself and other people, and I’m still learning. Interruptions and surprising turns still come, and I cope. Fortunately I have coped so far with both my body’s problems and new emotional challenges that come along.

I think sometimes about how my neighbors have and still do help me. Tuddy, with his mowing, Robert, taking care of my machines, like the mower, and they and Emma also seeing to the hens when I have to be away. Many other people help me in myriad ways. I am pretty independent, but not wholly so. But that, too, is very much part of how I live my life.

I think it took me this long, seventy-four years, even to get this glimmer. I’ve had other glimmers before, of course, but this one is truly a reward for aging well. The result of these new insights, or renewed insights, is that I can conceive my life as a whole better now and see the threads running through it, the strands of meaning woven together.

A knot is tied, or maybe a braid of all the various activities and projects, loves, children, books, poems, garden, animals, chickens–all of it. It’s me and my context, my place in the scheme of things, my part in the universal order. Not that I know the details, but I sense my place better, or more of what has been in me from the beginning has risen up so that I’m more fully conscious of it.

My basic plan isn’t changing. It feels like what I’m doing now is what I need to be doing. It’s getting reinforced though with a stronger sense that I’m on the right track and that it all counts–everything. I go on being who I am, the writer and the human being I am, with my struggles and coping, when they come, and my simple enjoyment of the food I grow, cook, preserve, and share.

It’s reasonable for me to be less active in the community and see fewer people, have less social life, write more, give the farm more attention, be more whimsical. I’ve adapted in these months to having so much time alone. I think I can keep my morale up now, and keep doing the work, and I think I’ll be able to do it and even finish it before I die.

From Judy’s journal entries of August 20-21, 2011.

Summer is Spaghetti Sauce Time

2011-08-14T17:58:00.000-07:00

This is a photo taken by Vera of a church on the Volga River not far from Kostroma.

***

I've been making stews, soups, and spaghetti sauce with my garden's glorious bounty of tomatoes. I had to remove a turtle who was nipping them a week ago. I put him near the wood pile, but today I found him or his friend in the orchard, trying madly to get through the chainlink fence into the garden. I didn't help him. I've never seen a turtle work so hard. So I left him to it.

I put the plants off the ground in cages this year to help with such problems as turtles, but the cages fell over because the plants were so heavy with fruit. So I hammered stout sticks in the ground to support them, but along came a big wind and blew even those over, mostly. Then I'd planted this Russian variety of a winter squash (Kabochka, which is Russian for squash), and I didn't provide enough space or climbing place for it, and it decided to run over the tomato plants, including the few remaining upright ones. Still, every time I go out, I find tomatoes to bring in. So here is a recipe for spaghetti sauce. I recommend Roma tomatoes, but any will do, especially freshly grown in your garden.

***

Judy’s Vegetarian Spaghetti Sauce
In a big pot, e.g., a Dutch Oven, saute 2 or 3 large (or equivalent) chopped onions and sprinkle with 1 teaspoon ground black pepper.

Add 1 or 2 large chopped sweet bell peppers, stirring occasionally.

When these are soft, add 2-3 minced garlic cloves.

In a few minutes, stir in one small can of tomato paste, watching it so it doesn’t burn.

Add cut up tomatoes, either from your garden (Romas are my favorite) or from 3 large cans.
You can add a little water (about the same amount as the tomato paste–I use the can to measure and get the extra paste out).

As this simmers, add 2 T parsley, or more, if fresh
2 T oregano, or more, if fresh
2 T sweet basil, or more, if fresh
1 Bay Leaf
Pinch of thyme, or more, if fresh
Salt to taste

Simmer at least one hour, stirring occasionally so it doesn’t stick.

You can blend it to make a smooth sauce, but I love the chunks of tomato in it, as is.

Serve over any kind of spaghetti pasta. My favorite is Vermicelli, with slices of Mozzarella cheese, then the sauce on top.

Make it in the summer with as many fresh ingredients as possible, and then freeze it for the winter.

Note: Tomatoes are now said to be especially healthy, helping prevent certain cancers, reducing cholesterol, risk of heart disease, osteoporosis, even diabetes. Per AARP magazine [July/August 2011], tomatoes contain "lycopene, a powerful antioxidant that works by neutralizing free radicals (errant oxygen molecules that cause cellular damage in the body)." So eat more tomatoes! Be healthy, happy, and wise.

Foster Robertson: Thoughts on Being an American Poet

2011-08-08T18:32:00.000-07:00

Foster Robertson, photo by Holly, 2010

***

Foster and I met in 1967, toward the end of my graduate school years in Berkeley. She was studying Art History, and we got to talking, walked home together, liked each other. I shared a poem called "Bougainvillaea Vision," and she gave me a photograph of red Bougainvillaea. I gave her copies of a little family/friend newsletter I did called The Kanga-Roo News. Out of that grew our poetry magazine, Hyperion, which Paul Foreman and I edited, after we met because of Foster. She and Paul live now in Austin, where they’re having a terribly hot, dry summer, with fifty consecutive days of temperature above 100 and no rain. Her garden is a desert, and she’s a devoted gardener. Of course, she’s grieving. She wrote, after answering the questions below: "Levertov is someone I am reading just now, not an influence. To name poets who have influenced me seems like naming the stars of the sky." She closes the note:

I came for something.
I left with something.
They were not the same something.

She published a book in 1970 (San Marcos Press), called Soundings. She wrote once in a poem the words "the earth of ordinary intercourse," a phrase I’ve never forgotten, also this, in her poem "Thanksgiving, of Indians."

Inside a cavity of flesh
a petal
carved of hours of sunshine
rips.So, herewith, the thoughts of Foster in Austin during a difficult American summer. Judy

***
Foster Robertson: Thoughts on Being An American Poet

1) When did you start writing and what motivated you?

Around the age of sixteen was when I started writing. I wrote to communicate and to share experiences, to share perceptions of wonder, insights, and troubles.

2) Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?

The list the poets who influence me would be very long. When I started writing Edna St. Vincent Millay and Emily Dickinson were among the poets I read most thoroughly. Recent resources include Czeslaw Milosz, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Josephine Miles, Denise Levertov, Rilke, Robert Creeley, Tao Qian, and Su Shih among hundreds. I explore contemporary American poetry with mixed regard, often finding treasure in new work, but not as often finding a contemporary American poet I treasure whole and return to frequently.

3) How important is 'everyday life' to your work?

Flora and fauna encountered immediately and everyday are essential to my work. I avoid the first person point of view and aspects of consumer culture which would inhibit access across cultural divides.

4) What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?

Expression of the subject through object and action are the goal.

5) Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?

American, European, Chinese, and Japanese poetic traditions celebrating the natural world and friendship.

6) What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?

Pursuing publication.

7) What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?

I explore the varieties of the human condition through reading fiction, studying art history, and reading writing on literature by writers.

8) What is ‘American poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘American’ poet?

American poetry is the collective, un-selected gathering of all poetry written in America in the American idiom or translated into English.

9) What is the current state of American poetry, as you see it? How do you think American poetry might best develop in the next ten years?

American poetry may explore more musical sound patterns.

10) How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in the U.S. and/or at an international level?

Song writing is influential and occasionally deeply poetic. Lyric poetry is the unnoticed garden that rests the core.

My Part

2011-07-31T18:35:00.000-07:00

This is my painter friend Aleksei in Kostroma, Russia, in winter.

***

Our heat wave left us today, as rain came in, blessing us with coolness. I've been thinking about how people turn up in our lives and change us. Even our children can do this, and certainly our old friends. I tell myself not to worry about things going wrong, because along with the unpleasant surprises, there are often good ones we also couldn't have predicted. I didn't get to this blog until fairly late Sunday night, so I'm giving you a poem written last summer when we also had weather much too hot.

Two very nice things happened yesterday that I couldn't have predicted: Kaye Barley posted a blog I wrote for her MeanderingsandMuses blog on Why I Write Mysteries, and she gave me a very nice intro, which perked me up. check it out--for July 31: http://www.meanderingsandmuses.com/

Then my daughter and her two children went with me to see a children's play, "Little Red and the Riding Hoods" at our Snow Camp Outdoor Theater, about 45 minutes from where I live. It was a good outing. The children enjoyed the play and showing their mother around the historic site of early Quaker settlements in the Haw River Valley. Their mother shared some early memories of my mothering that I'd forgotten, like how I made her cinnamon toast to get her out of bed in the morning.

Now here's the poem. Enjoy. Look for those unexpected surprises that are good! Judy

***
THAT INNER CIRCLING SUN V. June 27, 2010
Without water the daylilies bloom, but
the pear tree begins to die. This relentless
heat tests all living things. I feed the
chickens weeds, put electrolytes in their
water, keep the dog inside more, spend
minimal time outside to water and pick
what few fruits the plants produce.
The chickens keep laying, the cucumbers
and blueberries ripen, the first figs.
I make leek and potato soup, gather
the ingredients for bread and butter
pickles, and water morning and evening.
I see gold finches perched swaying on
the orange and gold cosmos, eating seeds,
while bumblebees pollinate fervently.
We have too little or too much rain.
These violent weather shifts teach us
humility. I wake with words in my mind,
words I never say aloud: "Who will
take care of me?" I know the answer:
I will, and these helpers who appear
out of nowhere before I need them,
these emissaries, these divine messengers.
Something about me that I don’t fathom
makes them help before I ask. All I
have to do is my part. The Universe
will see to the rest.

Judy Hogan

Commitment

2011-07-24T18:27:00.000-07:00

My dear friend Nadya at her dacha near the Volga, picking flowers.

***
THIS SACRED WAY 1. September 21,2008

–Walden, Henry David Thoreau, p. 25-26

The equinox air cools the fruit,
slows both ripening and decay.
Summer breathes out her relief,
hitches her skirt above the knee-high
grasses and retreats to a forest glade
to doze. She’ll rouse later, when the
leaves shimmer gold and red, to warm
the late figs and raspberries. I let her go
and welcome chilly mornings, early dark.
The turning earth, revolving sun are
friends to my old age. Not everyone
who adds years adds wisdom, but the
earth does if we know how to read her.
What does it mean to align oneself with
the Universe’s rhythms, to serve God,
to know oneself, to love wisdom, to be
like water? The answer resides in the
daily rituals of listening, serving, giving,
adapting to change–some barely
perceptible, some sudden, catastrophic.
I feel my frailty more these years, but
my limbs are sound and whole. My work
in garden, orchard feeds all my hungers
and keeps me universe-aligned. This
yellow blaze of September suns along
the roadside companions my daily walk
to keep all my moving parts working
smoothly. They make any way sacred
with their artless beauty, their earth-rooted
light. Our future is unknowable because
we shape our fate. Even catastrophe can
be molded into a way of loving and learning.
May everyone and everything teach me.
Then my every thought and act will count
in the long history of the Universe. I’ll be
an indisputably important grain of sand.

Judy HoganThe cost of a thing is how much life is exchanged for it.

Joanie Mclean: Questions for an American Poet

2011-07-16T14:10:00.000-07:00

Poet Joanie McLean, Silk Hope, Chatham County, N.C.
***

Joanie McLean’s response to Questions for American Poets--see below for new book info: Place, July '11

1) When did you start writing and what motivated you?

I never had a conscious intention to write poems. In my 40’s I found myself in a pretty dysfunctional work environment but couldn’t see a way out. My desperation built to quite a pitch. I’d been encouraged to journal as a problem solving technique, to clarify my priorities. One day a poem came; it was about how tiny and inconspicuous are the keys to our "handcuffs." It was a powerful revelation, literally changed my life. I left my corporate job within a few months to work with my partner in her native plant nursery. And I’ve been receiving poems ever since.

2) Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?

I’ve always been an insatiable reader, but for most of my life I had read poetry only occasionally and was not conscious of being "inspired to write." I believe I’ve read everything ever published by William Faulkner, some of it two and three times, and I’m working towards the same with Virginia Woolf. I find many novelists’ writing immensely poetic: Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, Margaret Elphinstone, James Galvin, Haldor Laxness. Once I became interested in writing poems, I read any poetry I could get my hands on – a pretty eclectic mish mash. The poets I enjoyed immediately and kept going back to include Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Frost (for their rhythm and music), W. S. Merwin and Derek Walcott (for their images and clarity), Dickinson (for her wisdom), Mary Oliver and Gunilla Norris (for the familiarity/resonance of their subject matter).

3) How important is 'everyday life' to your work?

Essential. For me, being present and focused on the nuances of ‘every day life’ is what brings poems. In my experience, the sacredness in our existence is found in the garden or the kitchen or hanging out the laundry.

4) What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?

Subjectivity provides the edge, the challenge to my writing. In my experience, poems come to me rather than from me, but they are still reflections of my (subjective) experience. So all of the so called craft –editing, rewriting, reworking—is to couch the poem in words and lines that will move it beyond the subjective, out into the world -- ideally to the universal.

5) Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?

Yes, I think my poems fit pretty easily into the lyric tradition. I’ve also read references to and analyses of Nature poets and Spiritualist poets and feel something of a kinship with them (e.g., Jane Hirshfield). Doreen Gildroy has a wonderful column in American Poetry Review called "Poetry and Mysticism" where she discusses the writer’s life, the contemplative life, and poetry as the voice of the mystic. I’m not claiming membership in such an exalted group! But I do see in my poems as an attempt to understand our "relationship with the eternal," as Tony Hoagland puts it.

6) What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?

The "publishing thing." I can get really caught up in needing that external validation. Many great poets have acknowledged and written about the danger of writing to get published, how this can be deadly. I find that to submit my work effectively can be extremely time consuming and can just suck up all my available focus and energy. So I keep little scraps of paper around reminding me that the poems are what matter, publishing is just a game of chance. Getting those rare acceptances is still pretty euphoric for me, though.

7) What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?

I read criticism because it helps me understand the thinking and perceptions of other people who love poetry. I have a book called Close calls With Nonsense in which the literary critic Stephen Burt helps us understand and appreciate inscrutable modern poetry. I want to know what anyone can possibly see in those poems that leave me out in the cold! And I’m reading Proust with Judy Hogan’s class. I feel like Proust has given me courage: he writes about the ineffable – with no apology!

8) What is ‘American poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘American’ poet?

Despite all the hoo haw about globalization, I think that American culture is still unique. And our culture is inescapable, indelibly imprinted on us. So I would say that any poet who has grown up or lived extensively in our culture necessarily reflects America – good, bad, or shameful as it might be. Yes, I am definitely an American poet.

9) What is the current state of American poetry, as you see it?

My formal education and work experience are in the sciences, and my education in American literature is woefully lacking. So I hesitate to offer an opinion, but I sense that the poetry that gets published and noticed in America today is deeply cynical and reflects the loss of a sense of wonder; there’s no dialog about solution or hope, no sense of the ideal. Being "meaningful" is corny. But—out here in the hinterlands among all of us poet nobodies, poems are still being written in hope of saving the world.

How do you think American poetry might best develop in the next ten years?

Poetry needs to take up responsibility for changing the course of human history. It’s well suited for this task, and there’s nothing else available that is. If we think political leaders or technology can save us – we are real suckers.

10) How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in the U.S. and/or at an international level?

(See previous answer) Great writers and artists throughout history have said that Art can change the world. And in fact, I see Art as the only force or leverage that humans have against moral and spiritual decay. Who knows what constitutes "rock bottom" for any particular society, but I often imagine that I’m walking in the footsteps of some Roman woman around the year 450. We might somehow keep our cars on the road, our thermostats set at 75, and our sushi restaurants in business for another few decades. But those are pretty low rent goals for a society. I believe poetry’s relevance is its potential to turn the tide and bring us back into sync with our world and our universe.

Here’s a quote I like from Lewis Thomas, physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, author of Lives of the Cells: "We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way through in the centuries to come, and we shall need not just science alone. For perceiving significance where significance is at hand, we shall need minds at work from all sorts of brains–mostly the brains of poets, of course. The poets, on whose shoulders the future rests, might, late nights, begin to see some meanings that elude the rest of us."

***

I met Joanie McLean several years ago. She’d begun writing poetry and wanted my feedback. I’ve been amazed at how good she has become in a fairly short time. I asked her to answer these questions for American poets, and I give her answers above. When she asked me to give her a comment on her second book, I wrote the following:

"Joanie McLean’s Place poems hover close to that inchoate mystery which is the natural world, both inside and outside of us. She so articulates the interconnections between herself and the wild animals, woods, and skies that she helps us see our own earthly experience freshly."

Here’s a little about her book and the events that follow its publication this month.

***
Joanie McLean lives in Silk Hope, a small farming community in the North Carolina Piedmont. Her poems have received several awards, including a McDill Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society, Poetry Council of North Carolina awards, and two first prizes in the Fields of Earth poetry competition. She has published two chapbooks, both with Finishing Line Press

UP FROM DUST (2009)

PLACE (2011)
Available for @ $14.00 through the author:
the publisher: http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm amazon.com. 　
Upcoming readings:

August 1, 2011 - Interview on WCOM Radio’s "Carolina Book Beat," 10:00 a.m.
August 28, 2011 - Reading at McIntyre’s Fine Books, Pittsboro, NC, 2:00 p.m.
http://wcomfm.org/ [click "listen on line"] December 15, 2011 - Reading at Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC, 7:00 p.m. ***
js-mclean@earthlink.net

Interview with Mystery Author Marilyn Levinson

2011-07-10T18:17:00.000-07:00

Mystery Author Marilyn Levinson

***

Because I joined Sisters in Crime back in 2007, and then the Guppies subgroup (the Great Unpublished), I came to know Marilyn Levinson on the GuppyPressQuest list, those of us looking to publish our mysteries through small presses. I learned that Marilyn had also been a Malice Domestic finalist, and she, too, had failed to get a publishing contract with a big house, even though she, unlike I, had an agent. We had both turned to the small presses, and she found success with a couple of small e-presses, doing electronic books. I asked her to give us more information about her books and her publishing experience. Here’s what she has to say. Her new e-book is called A Murderer Among Us, and is available on Kindle (at Amazon.com), Nook (at Fictionwise.com) Hard copies may be found at http://bit.ly/kOZgcz. Her website is:
http://www.marilynlevinson.com/

***
　When did you begin writing? Why?

I was an avid reader from the moment I learned to read, which is probably why I started writing stories in the third grade. I still have that notebook filled with stories. I began a novel -- a mystery, I believe -- but since I hadn’t plotted it very well, never got beyond Chapter One.
When and why did you begin writing mysteries?

I’d published several books for children when I started writing mysteries for adults. Actually, I first wrote two romantic suspense novels, then switched to mysteries. Why? I can’t say. I love mysteries because there’s a puzzle and an element of suspense. Why is someone so determined to get rid of someone else, he/she’s willing to do away with that person? And, of course, there’s the satisfying resolution at the end. Justice is served, in most cases.
Is A Murderer Among Us your first mystery? When did you write it? Is it part of a series?

A Murderer Among Us is actually the second mystery I wrote. The first will be published in the spring. I wrote A Murderer Among Us a few years ago. My sleuth is older, kind of like me.<g> Lydia is a widow, which I’m not, and was CEO of her own company, not me, again. She has two grown daughters who always seem to need her mothering. (I have two sons.<g>) I think we write more autobiographically in our first novels. And yes, I’ve written a sequel, called MURDER IN THE AIR.
Tell us about your journey to publication with this book.

I’d sent this book out to traditional publishers and agents. No one seemed interested, so I set it aside and wrote more novels. Then I decided to try epresses. I sent this ms to Wings ePress, and heard back a few weeks later, on April 9^th, that they wanted to publish it June first. Wow! A wonderful editor went over the ms, which she felt was very clean. No changes were necessary.
Why did you choose to write about retirees in a gated community?

Good question. I live in a gated community with people of all ages, though many are senior citizens. I chose a retirement community because I feel these days we older folk are vital and full of life. Also, older people have more secrets in their past, which make for interesting characters.

How have you found it to be published by an e-book publisher? Share that experience.

I was pleased that my book came out so quickly, and that it had a great editor and that I had input into the cover -- something I never had with my children’s books. I discovered I had to contact reviewers, do guest blogs, get my name out there. But that’s pretty much what my friends who are published with traditional houses have to do. I was disappointed that the eversion of my book didn’t go immediately to Kindle, as that’s where esales are.
Do you have comments from readers or reviewers you‚d like to share?

Two Wings ePress authors who offered to read and review my book gave me wonderful reviews. Both mentioned not being able to put it down. Fran Lewis has reviewed my book, loved it and has instructed me to send her all future books to read and review. I’ve just sent a PDF copy to a reviewer in Australia, so the book is getting around. And a fellow children’s book writer called today to tell me how much she loved my book, and that she’d mailed it to a mutual friend.
What other books have you published and where, when?

My other books are: AND DON’T BRING JEREMY (Holt) out of print; A PLACE TO START (Atheneum) out of print; THE FOURTH-GRADE FOUR (Holt) out of print; RUFUS AND MAGIC RUN AMOK (Marshall Cavendish) was selected by the International Reading Association and the Children’s Book Council for "Children’s Choices for 2002 out of print; and NO BOYS ALLOWED! (Scholastic) -- in print since 1993.
Do you have a work in progress now? Is it part of a series?

I’ve just completed MURDER THE TEY WAY, which is part of a series. The first book in the series, MURDER A LA CHRISTIE, was a 2010 Malice Domestic finalist. My sleuth, Lexie Driscoll, leads a Golden Age of Mystery book club, and gets many of her clues from mysteries she reads with the members of her book club.
Tell us your experience as a member of Sisters in Crime, and GuppyPressQuest, in particular. Has that been helpful? How?

I must have joined Sisters in Crime over ten years ago, because I remember being part of a critique group with fellow Guppies then. Did I mention I LOVE the Guppies and have wonderful Guppy friendships? In 2010 I attended Malice for the first time, and came away knowing I wanted to form a Long Island chapter of Sisters in Crime. Months later I co-founded the group with my friend and fellow author, Bernardine Fagan. Currently, I’m the Prez of LI SinC. As for GuppyPressQuest -- I’ll be sending out MURDER A LA CHRISTIE to small presses, so I look to GuppyPressQuest as the very source I’ll be needing.<g>

What benefit to you has it been to go to mystery conferences like Malice Domestic?

For me, the biggest plus was getting to meet fellow Guppies. Next year I’ll have two mysteries to promote.
What else would like to say about A Murderer Among Us?

I think it’s a quick but provocative read. It’s about new beginnings, murder and mayhem, secrets, and relationships. I love writing relationships, be they romantic, friendship, familiar.

Living to Work instead of Working to Live

2011-07-10T18:03:00.000-07:00

Nadya's fruits and vegetables, village on the Volga in the summer.
***

THAT INNER CIRCLING SUN XX. May 29, 2011

Quotation from Dorothy Sayers's essay: "Why Work?" 1947.

... Work is the natural exercise and function of man–the creature who is made in the image of his Creator...work is not primarily a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God....his work is the measure of his life, and his satisfaction is found in the fulfilment of his own nature, and in contemplation of the perfection of his work...every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature...we should no longer think of work as something that we hasten to get through in order to enjoy our leisure; we should look on our leisure as the period of changed rhythm that refreshes us for the delightful purpose of getting on with our work... We should all find ourselves fighting, as now only artists and the members of certain professions fight, for precious time in which to get on with the job–instead of fighting for precious hours saved from the job....

For Sam and Marie

A sunflower volunteered among the pea vines,
and by the time I was feeding spent vines
to the hens, it began to open its gold disk,
facing East, not toward the greatest sun
source, which is west in the hot afternoon.
Like me, it stands alone. I have friends,
but who else makes obeisance to my deeply
planted Inner Sun? She said, "I know no one
who lives closer to Sayers’s idea of doing
one’s true work, and that’s a compliment."
I was startled that she understood, when I’ve
wanted new words to tell the old tale of
"serving God." What else is it but that,
and yet the God word often builds fences,
and I like to take down barriers that hold
people apart. Doubts circle, too, like
the mosquitoes that find my bare arms
and legs when I water vegetables in the
evening air. I return to my vocation,
rather, three of them: writing, teaching,
farming. I write as I breathe. Words rise.
I can turn a field of sunflowers in my
direction with "news that stays news"*
and is more needed than ever: "Be who
you are. Live the life you are meant to live.
Let Truth dwell in your inmost being."
When I teach, I stir fire in those who also
write and wish to live more dedicated
to their work, make time for their infant
vocations. Do we recognize a call to do
our own work well in our time? If we
listen, we can hear it. So much din
in our world, but we know how to quiet
din. Humankind is good at shutting out
the querulous, demanding voices when
we choose to. The hens rush toward me,
raucous, when I appear on the back porch,
but they can wait while I pull the weeds
to be their afternoon tea break. Everything
can wait while we still our souls to listen.
"Growing one’s own food is more noble
than to be religious," asserts the Talmud.
A deeper truth lies hidden there: to dig
and weed, to assure the plants have
food and water they need, to observe
weather shifts and note insect pests,
to harvest at the right time, to feed
ourselves "power vegetables," as
Melissa convinced her children she
was growing, is to be handmaiden
to the great earth cycle of death and
resurrection, of the awe-inspiring
transformation of seeds to plants
many feet high, carrying, for our benefit,
their life-sustaining fruits. I live to write
and teach. I have enjoyed many kinds
of work, but only I can write my books
and find my words. Only I can establish
and protect a life that nourishes me
and my work. Only I can have this inner
certainty that, sooner or later, my words
and my life, as lived, will matter, will
feed that field of sunflowers turning in
my direction, while I, quietly, persistently,
face East, toward the Rising Sun, or some
would say, toward God, that Inner Sun
I call my Deep Self.

* Ezra Pound’s definition of literature in The ABC of Reading.
***
I've had some trouble posting Marilyn Levinson's interview, so I'm trying this one first. Hopefully this one will "publish" and then Marilyn's. JH

What It's Like to Be an American Poet

2011-07-03T18:01:00.000-07:00

A sustainable Chatham County Farm. Look Delicious? It is.

***

A local poet, Chris Bouton, emailed me some questions she’d found and thought interesting. Thanks, Chris. It gave me a jumping off point for today’s blog. If you are also a writer, try answering these questions, substituting writer for poet, if need be.

***

1) When did you start writing and what motivated you?

I began writing at age 7, when put to bed with rheumatic fever for a year–stories and their illustrations. I had a lot of time on my hands. I began writing poetry at age 13, when my feelings became much stronger and bewildered me. I wrote to understand myself better. I still do.

2) Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the
writers you read now? What’s changed?

I remember, in choosing my own books from the library, age 10 on, that I felt like there was something missing in all the books I read. I decided I’d have to write my own books to put that missing quality into books. What was it? My best guess is that it was my own way of seeing the world. I’ve always been interested in subtle and unusual perceptions about the natural world and human beings.

In childhood I read Louise May Alcott (I identified with Jo in Little Women, Nancy Drew mysteries, Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry, Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden). In high school my English teacher, Mrs. Francis Dunham, gave me a long reading list to do and also read everything I wrote and critiqued it. On the list were classics, like Lorna Doone, Jane Austen, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights. I also read The Odyssey in a simplified version, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, T.S. Eliot. She made us write short in-class essays every Monday. She suggested I write in blank verse, like Shakespeare, and soon I was doing that easily and without working at it. I also read Thoreau and Emerson under her. I loved Walden. I still do. I try to simplify my life as much as possible. My early poetry was in response to the natural world and to my feelings. It still is.

T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were important for my poetry, as Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust for my prose writing. Curiously, I think Homer was a huge influence–he’s the Western literary beginning for both songs (poetry) and stories (fiction).. He always made me feel like writing, and my present normal narrative poetry writing mode is loosely based on Robert Fitzgerald’s meter in his translation of The Odyssey.

I was able to read Homer in Greek in college, and eventually read all of The Iliad in Greek the year before I began graduate school in Classics at U.C.-Berkeley. Pound’s ABC of Reading gave me a reading list, which I later used to frame the writing courses I taught (Roadmap to Great Literature for New Writers) in the Durham and Burlington public libraries. I still get my students reading classics in writing courses I teach.

I’ve read widely in the classic poetry, early 20^th century, and internationally, modern Greek poets, Ancient Chinese, Neruda, Lorca, Russian like Akhmatova, Esenin, Pushkin, and Mandelstam. Mostly now I read poetry in connection with classes I teach. Proust and Woolf have also influenced my poetry, Sappho, Catullus, Chaucer, many more.

Apart from classes, I read mysteries and since 1991 I’ve written them, seven to date. I write a poem normally every Sunday morning, books of 30 poems, each poem having a number. The current book, excerpts being on this blog from time to time, is That Inner Circling Sun. I’ve written probably forty books of poetry now, only five of which are in print. I give poems away at the weekly Pittsboro Farmers’ Market and also email them to friends.

3) How important is 'everyday life' to your work?

Everyday life is very important to my poetry. I have often sat outside, by a creek, river, or sea, to write, and everything going on in my life and mind and the world around me can come into the poems. If there’s a drought, it gets into the poem. If I have a new grandchild, that’s goes into the poem. I quote what people have said to me, positive and negative. In recent years imagery from my farming comes into the poems. I used to write a lot about love. Now I write more about what I think. But years ago Charles Eaton praised my poetry for containing "thought felt things."

4) What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?

Like Proust, I believe in trusting the deep places, or what he would call subjectivity. I call it the Muse, and trust that the Muse will send up what I need to write about.

5) Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader
cultural or political movements?

I do feel that I’m part of the literary tradition, but I also tune into cultural and political realities. I like what Eliot said about how a fine new writer’s work becomes part of the tradition and subtly rearranges all the other writers in that tradition. I hope my work will do that one day.

6) What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?

For American poets, the hardest part, for me, too, is being generally unacknowledged. It’s possible to publish one’s poetry through small presses, but it’s still uphill work, especially if you’re not writing like most people around you are. Americans generally aren’t reading poetry, but I have found that some people read mine who don’t normally read poetry, including farmers and customers at the farmers’ market.

George Seferis, who won the Nobel Prize, said he was content if he had three readers. I have more than that, and I am content, but I would like to get more books in print, and I need to work on that.

7) What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?

All reading is important, but maybe especially rereading Proust with a small group of people, as I am in 2010-11, is important now. We finish the whole book by Thanksgiving this year. It reminds me of my vocation as a writer as well as stimulating images and perceptions. There’s nothing like Proust for a serious writer, in my opinion. This is my third time through the whole book, and each time I see new things, learn new things, benefit immensely.

8) What is ‘American poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘American’ poet?

American poetry is what American poets write. I am very much an American poet. I’m not always proud of my country’s behavior to its own citizens or to those in other countries, but in the very best sense of the word, I am American in style, ideas, spirit, commitment to truth and justice, outspokenness, plain speaking, no nonsense, and I have friends in all "classes" in this country, from the rich to the poor, educated to self-educated, and in all the various ethnic groups. I love our diversity.

When abroad, I’m aware that everywhere there are hurtful prejudices based on origins, education, background, language, religion. Here we are in the midst (still) of a great experiment. Can we live together in a peaceful society? Can we all live together on the planet, without destroying it or each other? I hope my writing helps break down stereotypes, emphasizes the love that should tie people together, and brings to light real truths, important truths about human life here and now. That to me is being an American.

9) What is the current state of American poetry, as you see it?

Generally speaking, in Pound’s thoughts, we are in an age where the language of poetry is in good condition, and a lot of people are writing poetry. Perhaps we are entering now the age of poetry he called "watered down." But few now are writing outstanding, memorable poetry that speak to the hearts of everyday experience, to those who don’t write poetry but would like to have fresh insights and understanding for their own lives.

Once someone told me she couldn’t put my book down. That was Light Food. Recently, at the Farmers’ Market, a customer told me his wife cried when he read her my poem. Those are the rewards I’m looking for. I think that’s what poetry is supposed to do: speak to the heart and mind, help us see freshly our own experience.

How do you think American poetry might best develop in the next ten years?

Those who are serious about their poetry writing would be advised to read in the classics of all cultures, to travel, to learn about other people’s lives, to realize that the poet, potentially, is at the peak of the arts, since her work involves music, words and meaning, and imagery. And, if she’s wise, she can speak to the minds and hearts of all. I’d love to see American poetry develop in that direction. Some very good poets are writing, but most of those aren’t getting much attention. Maybe gradually they will. I hope so.

10) How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and
culture in the U.S. and/or at an international level?

Poetry, though difficult to translate, can reach across all the barriers people put up to keep others out, because it is essentially about feelings and about what it’s like to live in this world with other people. So of course it’s important to our society and culture, and to cultures and societies everywhere. Poets are sometimes loved and given adulation, sometimes hated and killed, and sometimes ignored. But if they get their words on paper and preserved in books and libraries, maybe it’s not so bad to be ignored in the short run. Better than getting confused by adulation or killed for speaking the truth.

Successful Aging

2011-06-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

This is Ksenia, with lilacs a little while back. Her mother, aunt, and grandparents are all painters.

***

THAT INNER CIRCLING SUN XI. January 16, 2011

Successful aging then means we let
our visionary Self drag our resisting,
comfortable, stubborn self that hates
change, far enough to see a new landscape
and join in the general rejoicing. I do
love to be here, work, write, rest, see to
the hens and the crops. After years the
wider world beckons, not this time
to explore and learn from, test myself
against, but to win the friends of
my books, my private visions and
secret knowledge set afloat in a place
"of sufficient depth." My words, too,
like Proust’s, will have to win their way
in that farther world that stretches way
beyond what even I can imagine. Yet
out there are souls hungry for food I’m
able to prepare, feasts few have tasted,
and no one enjoyed to the full. I
wanted fame after my death, not before,
but time has ripened both me and my words.
My vision self is ready to show herself
more widely, to take new risks. If any one
thing is getting lost in our time, it is
integrity, being an integer, a whole,
knowing leaf to stem to root what one
believes, who one is, and practicing
always careful attendance on the Deep Source
of our human wisdom. Each day is
full to overflowing. Yet I keep up.
Even postponed tasks eventually get
done. Aging tempts one to be lulled by
routine, and the memory, too, is dulled
by repetition, by having no new tasks.
We may acquire new brain cells and keep
all our cells and their telomeres happy
and thriving, if we can bear to consider
change, upset what is familiar, uproot
ourselves now and then for good reason,
be persuaded to try the new for the sake
of our oldest, truest, deepest knowledge
and conviction. It’s no good to see visions
if you can’t help others see them, too, or
have words pour freely out upon the page
if no one ever reads those given words.
You have become rich, and it is time now
to give your riches away. Don’t worry.
This won’t impoverish you. Rather,
the little pot will continue to boil up
porridge, the caldron fill and fill again
with the gleaming gold of true words,
sincerely spoken, memorable, necessary,
and lasting longer than you yourself
will last. Do it, be it, cease to worry.
Whatever comes, in whatever disguise,
will bless you now and forever.
　
[I don't think I've posted this poem before. My son has been visiting, and I can't say I'm on top of my life yet, but soon. JH]

Transformation

2011-06-19T08:35:00.000-07:00

This is my nine-year-old dog Wag, in her homemade box safe house. If she's in it, nothing can hurt her.

***

Every day I must –Leyline 13
risk or die, care or grow stale, earn my place
on earth or yield it to others. To live well
is to love and to labor, else we leave behind
no sweet, flesh-ripened fruit.

Excerpt below from Proust and Pears, written in late 2010.

I’ve been looking over the earlier parts of this book. I haven’t looked back much as I wrote it because the momentum of my Muse and what I wanted to say has carried me forward like a stream of water after a good rain, but, even browsing now, I see that it all fits together. It makes a whole. I am producing fruit, and this particular year has been especially propitious for fruit. Just as the pear tree produced its hundreds of pears, so have I written so many hundreds of new pages.

I laughed in places–over my visit to Anna White and her choosing the wrong foot to diagnose. Over thinking that Proust, living in his cork-lined room, would not have had the privilege of opening the hen house door to see a hen in a foot deep hole she’d dug looking for tasty bits on the coop floor.

My life is all adventure. Since I began this journey of "my own self," I have had many adventures. I’ve challenged so many people and situations, but I’ve had what it took to do it, to risk poverty, disapproval (of parents, friends, children, teachers, and other authority figures).

A professor at Indiana University, whom I liked, when I told him I was dropping out of my graduate courses in Comparative Literature, said I was asking to be run over by a steamroller. I don’t know how many times people have told me something couldn’t be done, and I’ve done it. Recently, at Central Carolina Community College, in 2008, the administrator in charge was sure there was no way there could ever be a Creative Writing Program there. Then she herself seemed to be the biggest obstacle, but we did it.

Go to Russia without money? Travel alone? I remember sitting with my too heavy duffle bag in the Leningrad train station at 8 A.M., in 1995, on a cold September morning, before me the mural of Lenin arriving in Moscow in 1918, to declare that the Revolution had succeeded, while I waited, cold, hungry, and getting sick (the train had been chilly and drafty) for Larissa to fetch me to her apartment. She did come and then everything was okay.

I’d had to call her, and the person on ticket duty told me I had to have Metro tokens to use the phone. In despair, I asked the policeman, and he got me the tokens. Thanks goodness. Then I could only leave a message with Larissa’s daughter. Would she get the message?

How Larissa nursed me with sage tea and hot milk with butter and honey, once we got to her apartment. No one bothered me while I waited for her, and yet I felt so alone, so alien, and yes, so scared.

When you take the risks I take, you come at times to such moments of doubt, even torment. Yet I’ve passed through them all and been a better, stronger person for it. I think of going to Robert’s, next door, when finally this house had closed, twelve years ago, and I had the key, to tell them I finally had the land, and being met at the door by his son, a big, burly young man who seemed both hostile and angry. Earlier, there had been Emma, Robert’s wife, who had said, "She’s like us." And her three-year-old grandson, Demetrius, who had run up to me and hugged my legs. I got through that.

I’ve had so many good people help me over the years, believe in me, respond to my writing, my spoken words, my efforts to do something worthwhile.

It doesn’t matter now that some people hated or distrusted me. Robert’s son smiles on me now, and his family have been so good to me the last twelve years. The administrator writes to thank me when I help publicize the Creative Writing courses at the college. I sometimes change people’s minds about me. Some I never do, but so many people have loved and valued me that I would not have had reach out to me had I not taken the risks I took and encountered the hostility I encountered.

I call it transformation, when you go into difficult situations that need healing and have an effect–often by treating people well and sometimes by fighting with them.

Proust and Doctors, Me and Doctors

2011-06-12T18:04:00.000-07:00

My new meadow from May 2010, with bird feeder. 30 pines came down to put sunlight in my orchard.

***
THAT INNER CIRCLING SUN XXII. June 12, 2011
It is a marvelous thing that medicine should be almost as powerful as nature, should force the patient to stay in bed and, under pain of death, to continue a treatment. By this time, the artificially introduced disease has taken root, has become a secondary but true illness, the only difference being that natural diseases can get better, but never medical ones, for medicine knows nothing of the secrets of cure.

There is in our body a certain instinctive sense of what is good for us, as in our heart of what is right, which no doctor or medicine or theology can replace

We may acquire new brain cells and keep
all our cells and their telomeres happy
and thriving, if we can bear to consider
change, upset what is familiar, uproot
ourselves now and then for good reason,
be persuaded to try the new for the sake
of our oldest, truest, deepest knowledge
and conviction

If we build
our ordinary life so as to honor Her,
[our Muse] won’t be able to stay away.

If your conscience is clear and you remember
your own story, even after interruptions and
delays, the Muse will unlatch your back storm
door, left open to take in cool morning air,
stroke the cat rising to her touch, and settle
at your computer to add her own two cents
to every written word.

Once, when younger, we could fling
caution to the winds and cross those
boundaries of common sense and good
health: stay up all night, neglect our
teeth, luxuriate in rich desserts, be lazy
when we felt like it. Age teaches
consequences, the sooner the better.
Some gates are locked now, and we
venture out at our peril. Extra exertion
is possible if we rest well afterwards.
Our body will assist more than once in
reminding us with twinges in our knees,
toothaches, flashing lights where they
shouldn’t be, or indigestion after rich
food. Be grateful for these flashing
yellow hazard lights. Use your whole
self, think hard, work at those weeds,
plant more seeds, water burgeoning
fruit, relish fresh beets in butter,
blueberry pancakes swimming in syrup,
a fresh herb and onion omelet with
cheese. To be blunt, aging means dying,
a slow process in a healthy being–
inevitable, but nothing to fear, in fact.
Our whole life is one amazing process.
We arrive at fruit-bearing age, acquire
nourishment and water, the gardener’s
care and attentiveness, else no small
knobs that signal figs break forth as
summer pours down hot sun and enough
rain to give us hope. We guess at our
trees’ needs and our own. Tree or self,
the inward working lies hidden, but
we have healing light in us as well as
clouds that send no rain. "The body heals
itself," one doctor told me. If we let it.
If we calm our frightened heart and wait.
　–That Inner Circling Sun. XIX.That Inner Circling Sun XII. –. –That Inner Circling Sun XI.. –Proust, The Prisoner, p. 168. –Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark, p. 165

The Divine Breath

2011-06-04T11:16:00.000-07:00

Nadya's apples (growing in a village near the Volga, in Russia)

***

The Divine Breath? I found an interesting passage in Maslow.

.... it looks as if there were a single ultimate value for mankind, a far goal toward which all men strive. This is called variously by different authors self-actualization, self-realization, integration, psychological health, individuation, autonomy, creativity, productivity, but they all agree that this amounts to realizing the potentialities of the person, that is to say, becoming fully human, everything that the person can become... ¹
He says that some of the objectively describable and measurable characteristics of the healthy human specimen are:

1. Clearer, more efficient perception of reality²***

That’s all I’m doing, becoming the best person I can be. To do that, I must attend to my intuitive sense of what it is possible for me to do and to be. I must do my best, not run away or have false modesty.

Both Dante and Proust had had major visions–perhaps coming to them a little at a time–and the unconscious or Muse was giving it to them. They had, originally, in some sense, "seen" the whole.

That has happened to me, too, now, and is why I’m writing these books. What else can I say about that? What is it like? How is it different from my poems and my novels and how I’ve written them?

I was thirteen when I began self-consciously to write about my feelings–poems and diary–when I felt inside like a writer, when it became less of a choice and more of a necessity. I still didn’t fully believe I was a writer until my mid-twenties, when I resolved it by saying, "A writer is one who writes."

Now I know that a "great" writer is one with a vision, with a "call" so strong that other things must take second place, while I do, as Proust believed, "what only I can do." It is also one with a "hexis," as Jacques Maritain calls it, or a Muse: an inner state of being, a Gift as Lewis Hyde names it, or in Maslow’s framework, now that I have this ability to create, I must use it, and that is far more urgent than publishing it, or even typing it, and also more urgent than political activity or most of my social life.

I don’t know what will be in each chapter. I wonder if Dante knew who would be in each circle of hell before he wrote it. Maybe. Proust seems to have had a design for his cathedral book. I can’t say that I have a specific design. I’ve chosen titles for the books and the chapters, sometimes before I knew what would be in them. I never knew exactly. I take a phrase sometimes from a poem. I’ve done that a lot with this book.

When I wrote "The Divine Breath" as the title for this Chapter Twenty-One, I didn’t know what I’d write about for sure. My whole activity here is because of a mysterious and divine "breath," spirit, wisdom, deeply planted in me, which knows better than I do what I need to write about, what I have to say, and what other people need me to say. I need to write these things, and I trust that other people need me to write them for them. I am a messenger of this "divine breath" or Muse/Understanding/Flow of Words and Insight.

The Breath fills me and spills over. It makes me happy. I have been happy a lot and supremely happy on many occasions, but this is a fairly rare kind of happiness. I’ve felt happy before, and often, when words flowed, when enlightenment came to me as a gift, I had no way of predicting or forcing. I could only listen and wait, but when the words came to me, I must write them down. It was easy to rejoice and be fed by the experience itself, as well as by the new insights.

Sometimes it happened when writing a short poem. Sometimes, when writing a longer work, a diary novel, or a scene in a novel. What’s different now is that it’s bigger and more inclusive. It’s also a fusion of my daily life, including some of the interruptions, worries, reassuring moments, and surprises I experience day to day with a whole lifetime’s accumulated way of framing my experience and seeing the world. I can’t evaluate it from the outside, but, I guess, Proust couldn’t either, and his book got rejected by all the publishers, so he paid to have it printed, and then he won the prestigious Goncourt Prize, and Gide, one of the editors who’d rejected it, realized his mistake, his very stupid mistake.

I can’t know if other people will appreciate what I’ve done, and appreciate, I mean, in Henry James’s sense, to "appropriate, to make one’s own."

But I can do what I feel I have to do, which I have my whole life long. I’ve made errors because of inexperience or trusting people I shouldn’t have trusted, or because I was blinded by my own suffering, but I have followed my heart, my deepest sense of what I should do, even when it made no rational sense to me, even when it flew in the face of other people’s advice or pressure or attempts to control or change me.

Now I am rewarded. My whole experience and the wisdom that has accrued from it rests like a kind of sunken Atlantis in my mind, and I am writing it out, lifting it into the light of day, floating it a little at a time, and relatively effortlessly, to the surface, where everyone can see it–a task not unlike Proust’s or Dante’s, and yet my very own.

As I said before, I am now that writer I wanted to be. This may take me years, but the work is very worthwhile.
***
Excerpted from Proust and Pears: The Fourth Farm Book (unpublished)

2. More openness to experience.
3. Increased integration, wholeness, and unity of the person.
4. Increased spontaneity, expressiveness; full functioning; aliveness.
5. A real self; a firm identity; autonomy; uniqueness.
6. Increased objectivity, detachment, transcendence of self.
7. Recovery of creativeness.
8. Ability to fuse concreteness and abstractness.
9. Democratic character structure.
10. Ability to love, etc.

Interview with Louise Penny--Mystery Writer Par Excellence

2011-05-29T18:34:00.000-07:00

"Valley of the Roc" by Julia Kennedy. I traded eggs and bread for this painting, which hangs now in my living room.

In 2009 at the Malice Domestic Mystery Convention in Arlington, VA, I met Louise Penny for the first time, and I'd recently read her book The Cruelest Month. I interviewed her by email for the Guppy newsletter, First Draft, and she has given permission to reprint it now. Since 2009, she won Best Traditional Novel of 2010 and of 2011, Agathas for The Brutal Telling and Bury Your Dead.

A recent notice on DorothyL, a mystery lovers' list, by Kaye Barley in Boone, declares about her new one, due out in August 2011: "A Trick of the Light is stunning, and, yes, it is the best one yet. How does she keep doing this? And continually top her own work? I have no idea other than the fact that she must be one of those angels walking the earth we hear about from time to time. She is, in my opinion, a writer of the very rarest kind of talent." I agree, Kaye, and right now she's my favorite of the contemporay mystery writers. Here's the 2009 interview. Judy Hogan

***

Louise Penny Interview
Louise Penny lives in Quebec with her husband, Michael, and is the internationally best-selling author of the Armand Gamache mysteries, Still Life, A Fatal Grace/Dead Cold, The Cruelest Month, and A Rule Against Murder/The Murder Stone. Her fifth book, The Brutal Telling, will be published in October 2009.
Before turning to writing, Louise was a journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Her books have won the UK Dagger, the Canadian Arthur Ellis, and in the U.S. she’s won the Anthony, Barry, Dilys, and the Agatha for Best Novel two years in a row, the first author to do that in almost 20 years. Her latest novel made the New York Times best seller list.
www.louisepenny.com
***
Interviewer Note:
***
1. When did you first write mysteries? And why?

I started writing my first mystery in 2001,though I’d actually quit work at CBC radio in 1996 to write, then immediately developed writers’ block. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, "She is clever to do that–and to suffer it for five years."

It was horrible! I realized I was trying to write the wrong book. So I regrouped, looked at the stack of books on my bedside table, and saw there Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, Michael Innes, and realized I needed to simply write a book I would love to read. And so I did. All my literary decisions were selfish. I chose characters I’d want to spend time with, a protagonist I would marry, and a mystery that wouldn’t leave me petrified in bed. Indeed, my books, while clearly mysteries, are actually about friendship and community, about love and goodness.
2. Tell us about your road to publication. I think you’ve written that it wasn’t easy.

Blech, it was horrible. I was an international failure... If I could have had my manuscript shot into outer space, I’d have been an intergalactic failure. No one wanted it. The objections were three-fold–the "traditional mystery" is passe, the protagonist is too content, not enough people are killed. Never mind the agents and editors who just thought, generally, it stank. Feeding my 3 am certainty that everything I do is a piece of crap. And I’m fat and ugly and stupid, and often late. You can see how much fun this process was for me.

In fact, I almost shoved the manuscript under the bed for some poor surviving relations to find 30 years from now, after my death...to toss away. Then I was, unexpectedly, short-listed for the Debut Dagger sponsored by the CWA in Britain, and my life changed. I didn’t win, but I did find my agent out of it. And suddenly the novel no one wanted became the novel everyone wanted. That was STILL LIFE.
I was so taken by my experience, and upset at the thought of many wonderful mystery writers who were also turned down and might have given up, that my husband, Michael, and I have started (with the Crime Writers of Canada) a Best Unpublished Crime Novel competition.
3. Why are you committed to the traditional mystery (which a lot of Guppies write)?

Well, honestly, I wish I could say it was a moral or even creative choice. Frankly I love them because I read them. There’s a comfort I crave and appreciate in traditional mysteries. There is also, I believe, a great deal of scope and depth to explore the human condition. Murders in cities are dreadful, terrible. But I often think a murder in a village is worse. Because you’re killed by someone you know. The betrayal, the violation, is complete. And the suspects soon realize someone isn’t who they seem. There is, in fact, a stranger among them.

But, more than anything, I’ve found in my life a desire for peace...especially when my job was particularly stressful, when my life was falling apart, when the world proved less kind, less gentle, less loving than it might have been. I crawl into bed with my gummi bears and diet coke and a traditional mystery. And for a few blessed hours the world is right.
4. Who are your favorite authors, past and present, and why?

Agatha Christie–perhaps more for nostalgia than any literary value, but I do still adore her.
Michael Innes--a British author of the Golden Age...wonderful, literate mysteries...often extremely wry.
Dorothy L. Sayers–I had a crush on Lord Peter, and hated that horrible woman who stole him from me. Harriet something. Tramp.
Reginald Hill–his characters are brilliant, his settings so well described...his crimes central but rarely too graphic.

But my favorites are:
Georges Simenon–the Maigret books. Wonderful, crystalline in their clarity, each a short, sharp gem...a stunning evocation of France in the 1950s.
But mostly, Josephine Tey. Stunning writer. Clear, concise, often funny, always "true." I adore all her books, but my favorite (while Daughter of Time is close) is The Franchise Affair.
5. What do you tell people when they suggest you write "literary novels."

I tell them I do. And I tell them I haven’t yet begun to explore the depth or breadth of mystery novels. I’ve grown weary of being asked that, with its implication that I don’t but the questioner feels, if I apply myself, I might be good enough to. A sort of implied compliment. And I need to explain, gently, that simply because mystery novels have a structure doesn’t make them less literary. Haiku has a structure. Sonnets have a structure. That’s the challenge. To both occupy and transcend the formula. To live within the strictures while rising above them. No one would suggest sonnets are lesser poems because of their rigid structure. Would anyone suggest Hamlet was a lesser play, or Macbeth, because at their heart they deal with murder?
6. What routines/rituals do you have for getting your writing done?

I’m extremely disciplined. I write every day that I can, which amounts to six days a week, often seven. I get up at about 7 am, am writing by 8:30, and for the first draft I set a minimum word count for the day. When I’m just beginning a new book, I set it quite low, so as not to scare myself off. 250 words a day. Then 500, then up to 1,000. These are minimums. Because I’m quite competitive, I almost always exceed them. Sometimes this takes three hours, sometimes five. I have, however, come to appreciate that quality, not quantity, is what counts...so I’d rather hit my word count and feel good about the day’s work than write 5000 merde-like words. Though I don’t always, of course, feel good about my day’s writing. Probably about 60 percent of the time as I struggle through the first draft.
7. How do you handle/cope with the public attention and your need to work on your career that goes with being a published and prize-winning author?

That’s an excellent question and one that I never considered when yearning to be a writer, though not a day goes by I’m not keenly aware of how lucky I am. Again, I find I need to be extremely disciplined, and get things done right away...otherwise everything piles up and my stress goes through the roof. For instance, I began work at just before 9 am, editing book six, and it’s now 9:20 at night, and I’m still working, answering your questions. But if I don’t, when will I? Tomorrow will be no easier. And compared to the work I used to do, compared to the work that most people do, this is bliss. How wonderful when my job involves editing my own book, and answering smart questions for smart people?

Having said that, I have grown better at declining invitations–I say no to things at least once a day–and fighting for my precious writing time, because nothing else exists if the books start to get bad. In fact, I’d stop writing. I couldn’t imagine doing that to the readers, or the characters whom I’ve grown to love.
8. How did you feel when you won Best Novel Agatha at Malice Domestic 2009, when two other nominees, Anne Perry and Julia Spencer-Fleming, had been your mentors/supporters?

You know, I felt deeply grateful to them, but I also know that sometimes the sun shines on me and sometimes it shines on someone else. That happened to be my turn, but Anne’s and Julia’s and Rhys’ and Donna’s books were all superb, and it could just as easily have been them. And I would have happily applauded. It felt natural to accept, just as it would have felt natural to congratulate any one of them.
9. In the U.S. there is rather a harsh climate among the big publishers with emphasis on books, like thrillers, with violence and weird behavior so it’s surprising to me that you have been so well-published and received here. Have you run into any difficulties with agents or publishers being unsympathetic to your good characters like Gamache and Clara or reacting negatively to the cozy qualities of your Three Pines village and its rituals, which I love.

Well, as I mentioned, the climate was definitely polar to begin with. And I cannot for the life of me explain what changed except great good luck and the fact that I think publishers might not totally appreciate the longing among us all, American, Canadian, British, French, etc.,for community and belonging and friendship. For a world not ruled by sarcasm and cynicism. And brutality. A world where goodness exists. The readers found the books and turned the series into what it is. I’m extremely fortunate in my publisher, Minotaur Books in the US! And my editor, the wonderful Hope Dellon. They understand the books and support them. But I know they were also a little surprised at the success. And no one was more surprised than I was. But the success is uniquely due to the readers, who spread the word. Which I why I write a blog and respond to every email I possibly can...so people know how grateful I am. Not only in word, but in action. At the age of 51 they’ve given me my dream.
10. Do you seek feedback from others after you have a good first draft? How do you handle revisions?

Not after the first draft...my first drafts are real dog’s breakfasts. Characters disappear halfway through, new ones appear. Names change, subplots disappear. Yech. A great deal of the shape of my books and my characters comes out in the editing. I love editing. I’ll do at least two edits before showing it to anyone...and even then it’s generally just my husband, Michael, and my brother, Doug. And they’ve been instructed to tell me, "God, Louise, it’s brilliant!!" Then I send it off to my agent and fight nausea for two weeks.
11. What is it like to work with your St. Martin’s editor (Minotaur Books), Hope Dellon?

Oh, I’m so glad you asked this question...she is bliss...on every level. Not only does she completely understand what I’m trying to achieve, she knows how to bring the best out, of the books and me. I don’t respond well to bullying, to sharp retorts, to commands. I need to be handled carefully. I wish it was different and I had a thicker skin, but I don’t. Not when it comes to my books. Each takes a year to write, after having thought about them for about a year before beginning. I don’t need someone whacking it and me, with a figurative frying pan. And Hope never does. Her notes are clear, diplomatic, thoughtful, and kind. And always constructive. Any thought and suggestions I don’t agree with we discuss. Some she sees my point of view, some I see hers. We always agree, amicably.

Hope is one of the truly creative, great editors today. Anyone who gets her is lucky indeed. She has made every one of my books she’s worked on better. And made me a better writer in the process. I so enjoy her company, in fact, that Michael and I had dinner with Hope and her husband, Charles, in New York earlier in the summer.
12. You have at least three major audiences in the U.S., Canada, and U.K. Are they all responding in a similar way to your novels or do you see differences?

I see quite striking differences. In the UK I think they’re still viewed as quaint village mysteries, which surprises me. The setting is definitely a village, and the people are definitely kindly, for the most part, but that’s the most superficial reading of them. There’s an emotional and philosophical underpinning that both the American and Canadian readership seems to get, but the UK doesn’t. They’re often referred to as "cozies" there, while here, I think, for the most part people have realized they aren’t exactly that. Still, happily, the readership is strong, and while I’d love everyone to read the books I meant to write, I am happy they’re giving pleasure.
13. Tell us a little about your fifth book, The Brutal Telling, due out in October.

I decided after The Cruelest Month, which is the third book, that Three Pines really couldn’t sustain every novel. And as a writer, I also wanted to explore other terrain and characters, while retaining Chief Inspector Gamache...so I decided every second book would be set, for the most part, away from Three Pines. As a result A Rule Against Murder (The Murder Stone –UK and Canada)–book 4--was set on a nearby lake. But book 5– The Brutal Telling –is back firmly in the village. What a pleasure it was, too, to be back with all the familiar characters. Peter and Clara, mad, brilliant Ruth, Myrna, and of course, Gabri and Olivier. In The Brutal Telling we find out more about Olivier. Who he is, what brought him to the village, his history, and the secrets he carries that finally come creeping out. A body is found in his bistro, and the investigation takes Chief Inspector Gamache deep into the forests around Three Pines, and across the continent, trying to solve the murder. And yet, all avenues, all clues, all the evidence points back to Olivier. Until all his secrets are stripped away in a final, brutal, telling.

I’m very excited about this book!
14. How do you approach promoting your books, beyond your email newsletter, going to conferences, and accepting invitations to read/speak?

Well, I do things like this, and my daily blog. And I ask readers to tell friends and family. And I realize how powerful the internet is and social networking. Many readers have huge influence on their own blogs and websites, or they have access to others...and the ability to spread the word. So I ask them to please, if they feel comfortable, to do that. I also go on whatever book tour Minotaur Books wants to send me on, and my other publishers. Book tours are quite tiring. While it’s clear the publisher doesn’t want you to actually drop dead while on tour, they do want to see how close they can come. Midnight flights, early morning interviews, late night events. And when I get tired, I remind myself that this is the dream, this is what I wanted, what I asked for, and what I am lucky enough to get. Who else gets to have an audience as an office?
15. Do you think about your readers as you write? Knowing now more about who your fans are, does that affect your writing?

No. I only still ever write what I would like to read. One great moment of awareness for me was that, after almost a lifetime of thinking I was special and different (and better) than others, I realized I was just the same as everyone, and everyone was the same as me. If I liked something, chances are lots of other people liked it. If most people like something, chances are I will, too. I am not, and never will be, a pioneer. I realized, if I was yearning for a peaceful village filled with croissants and café au lait, with kind friends and thoughtful, funny conversation–then others might be, too.

People ask if Three Pines exists, and I have say, no, not physically. But I think of it as a state of mind. When in the harried, sometimes harsh, world we choose kindness over cleverness, when we choose goodness over cynicism and sarcasm. Then we choose to live in Three Pines.

We all create the village.
16. What do you believe the goal of art is? Per Alexander McCall Smith, it’s "to help us to live better." [The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, p. 170]. Do you agree with that? In short, what do you hope to achieve in your mysteries, beyond entertainment?

Personal peace. And if others find it, too, while reading the books, I’m thrilled.
***
Judy Hogan is an enthusiastic Guppy, who founded Carolina Wren Press in 1976. In 1984 she helped found the North Carolina Writers’ Network, serving as its president until 1987. She has published five volumes of poetry with small presses and two prose works. She has written seven traditional mystery novels featuring Penny Weaver, a poet and amateur detective, and Kenneth Morgan, a Welsh detective inspector, for which she is seeking an agent through AgentQuest. A freelance editor, she is also a small farmer. Email her at mailto:judhogan@mindspring.com. Check her web page at http://judyhogan.home.mindspring.com/
Louise Penny’s books and her story to publication help me believe in my still unpublished books. I treasure the fundamental human tone/reality in her mysteries. Movies these days, and many books, emphasize excessive violence and sex, and general weirdness. I remember the movies of the 1950s, where human suffering and joy, human problems and their solutions were the focus. These same problems have been endlessly interesting to us since the first recorded stories and songs. They are the great human dilemmas of love, loss, growing up, growing old, our fears, hates, loyalties, prejudices, failures to be and do what we aim to, and our successes after overcoming many obstacles. It’s called the human condition, and it’s still news, and Louise Penny knows how to open it and so engage us that we can relish every sentence, every scene, every real human dilemma. Her books are, to me, simply delicious. I want to eat the food, know the people, solve the crime, be there. Thank you, Louise, for sharing yourself in the interview below. Judy Hogan

Malice Domestic. Part II. Clues and Tidbits

2011-05-20T19:00:00.000-07:00

When I drove up to DC for Malice in late April, I left my beets, peas, leeks coming into their own.

REPORT ON MALICE DOMESTIC: PART II. CLUES AND TIDBITS
It’s easy to be overwhelmed as a mystery fan, much less as an author, when you go to a conference where over 150 published mystery writers are trying to interest you in their books. Most I’d never heard of. I’d learned some names from my fellow Guppies, who were moving from unpublished to published status during 2008-10. I’d read and enjoyed books by Liz Zelvin, Jeri Westerson, Sandra Parshall, and Krista Davis.

My very favorite mystery writer right now, Louise Penny, was there and carried off her fourth Agatha Award teapot for Best Traditional Mystery of 2010. Nancy Pickard was there, and I’d read all of her books and recently enjoyed another Kansas novel, The Scent of Rain and Lightning. Carolyn Todd, whose books with her son, under the name Charles Todd, I love, did the Agatha Tea interview.

Sue Grafton was quietly the star of the show. I think most of us had read her alphabet series. She was so open and down to earth. She wrote Kinsey Milhone books to create a life different from her own, as she married young, had children, baked her own bread, now has grandchildren, and chickens, and every year she attends the Kentucky Derby. She asked for a tip as to the winner, and my new friend Sasscer gave it to her.

I chose panels which had writers I already liked or topics that interested me. I was too engrossed to write much down, but I’ll share odds and ends, snippets of encouragement and insight.

The Guest of Honor was Carole Nelson Douglas, whose costumes suggested a gypsy and whose book covers, displayed on the Malice Program, featured black cats and sexy women. I wasn’t drawn to her, but she said one thing that stuck. "You have to reinvent yourself," which she has often done, and she has written and published 60 books. She has hit roadblocks many times but found her way around them.

My first event was the Malice Go-Round. We sat at round tables, eight of us with two authors at a time, who had books out in 2010, and then about forty or fifty of these authors played musical table, and moved in pairs, table to table, to give us 90-second spiels about their books and hand out bookmarks. Of the ones I’d never heard of, one stuck out for me, and she didn’t have a book mark: Sara Sue Hoklotubbe, who is writing a series about Cherokees living in Oklahoma. She is in the tradition of Tony Hillerman and Margaret Coel, and she herself is a Cherokee who grew up in Oklahoma. Her first one is Deception on All Accounts. Website: www.hoklotubbe.com I tried to imagine what it would be like to rush table to table for an hour and a half and give a 90-second spiel. They were very good-humored about it. There’s a waiting list to get to do this!

Louise Penny interviewed Janet Rudolph, who received the Poirot Award for her support to the mystery community. Louise rather put her on the spot by asking why she’d never been invited to one of Janet’s soirees at her home in the Berkeley Hills. Janet has spent twenty-five years teaching, writing, editing, producing mystery events, and organizing the first international group for mystery readers. She also has a website for this org, Mystery Readers International, which also gives out the McCavity Award. Under that organization’s aegis, the quarterly Mystery Readers Journal, is published. Louise asked her why she didn’t write mysteries, and she said, because she didn’t think she could take the criticism.

At the Friday evening panel of those women who were up for the Agatha Best Novel, I was struck by how at ease they were with each other. They all hoped to win, but yet they joked and showed real affection for each other. Donna Andrews, also the Toastmaster, Louise Penny, Nancy Pickard, Hank Phillippi Ryan, and Heather Webber. Nancy joked that she wished she had Louise’s husband, who was sitting beside me on the front row. He didn’t react, but Louise glowered when two others said the same thing. Afterwards, I said to him, "Do you think Louise will win?" "Yes." She did.

On Saturday I went to the First Novel Nominees panel, moderated by Margaret Maron, who also lives in central North Carolina and all of whose novels I’ve enjoyed. She read a short excerpt from each book, a very nice way to open these new authors to the readers in the room. I had sampled two of them before the conference, and I’d already picked Sasscer to vote for. I knew the story behind Avery Aames (real name Daryl Gerber), who did win the Best First Novel Agatha. Her cheese shop mysteries were a three-book deal offered to her through Agent Jessica Faust by Berkeley Prime Crime. The publisher gave her the "hook" or setting, and she wrote their series rather than her own. Curious to me, but several other Guppies got similar deals.

Being bombarded, on the panels, too, with writers I had known nothing about, who used the panel to court fans, I think of how I felt when I first went to Pacific Grove, CA, as a young pregnant woman, in my 20s, already determined to be a writer, and all the new people I met, dozens of them, were writers or artists.
It made me feel without a place. Where and who was I to think I had anything to offer? At the convention I wondered how my book, should it be published, would find its place in this non-stop hoopla. It was reassuring to talk to mystery fans, when I encountered them, often up near the front of a room, going in early to get a good seat, as I had, and we compared notes on which authors we liked.

I want to believe I write more like the mystery authors I admire, but time will tell. Ultimately, it comes down to readers. I want my books to be loved. Funny, all the hoopla, but ultimately it means me sitting by myself, creating, inventing, playing, as Sue Grafton calls it. In the article on her in the program as well as in her interview, she stressed "trusting the Shadow."

"Ego is a writer’s enemy. I can’t write when I’m sitting there worried about my editor, wondering if the critics will hate the book, wondering if my readers will complain, wondering if my fans will be bored. All good writing comes from Shadow, which is Ego’s opposite. Shadow holds our intuition, energy, imagination, insight and humor. Shadow also holds our rage, our pettiness and our secret, mean-spirited response to the world. Shadow is the child in us and all she wants to do is play. I have to remind myself over and over that writing is not about money or sales or fame or glory or recognition. Writing is about play. Writing is an expression of our souls and our innermost selves. That’s a lesson I have to learn anew every day when I sit down at my computer. So far Shadow is winning out over Ego, but I’m the one fighting to keep her on top." [Interview by Hank Phillippi Ryan]

All these hints and experiences help me somehow, but still the best part was the people. Besides Sasscer, Diane, and Kendel, I was able to have quiet lunch in a nearby Quizno’s with Gloria Alden, also a small farmer and a Guppy, and we’re of an age. We’ve corresponded a lot by email, sharing children, farm, and writer dilemmas and joys. Important, too, were the quiet chats with fans, many of whom come a long way for this, and seeing my favorite mystery writer, Louise Penny, carry off another Agatha Teapot. Look for more on Louise next week.

Zesty Women: Sasscer, Diane, and Kendel at Malice

2011-05-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

Sasscer Hill, with George Strawbridge, Campbell Soup heir and major owner of champion horses, (left) and Hall of Fame trainer Jonathan Sheppard (right), at Kenneland Race Track, Lexington, KY., October 2010.

Malice Domestic Mystery Convention, Bethesda, MD, April 29-May 1, 2011–Part I, People.

I’d been to Malice in 2009, when I knew no one except, by email, certain Guppies, the Great Unpublished subgroup of Sisters in Crime, which I’d joined in late 2007 to help me get my mystery series published. Some of the Guppies were getting published, and I’d read some of their books.

I had also recently read Louise Penny’s April is the Cruelest Month, set in the French Canadian village of Three Pines, and I had loved it. She was one of the Agatha nominees for that very book for Best Traditional Mystery of 2008, and I sat next to her husband during one of the panels and told him how much I admired her book. After the panel, I also told her and said I was especially interested in how she had handled having her hero, Inspector Gamache, be a good man. My heroine, Penny Weaver, is a good woman. The challenge is to keep them human.

What I learned from Louise’s books (Bury Your Dead was the current Agatha a nominee and A Trick of the Light will be released in August 2011) is that a truly good character, with a minimum of flaws, to be believable, has to suffer. Meeting Louise, and later, interviewing her by email for the Guppy Newsletter, First Draft, was the highlight of the 2009 conference for me. She won her second Agatha that year, and her third in 2010, then the fourth Agatha for Bury Your Dead at the 2011 Malice.

Malice is a three-day mystery convention, having this year about four hundred people in a big Bethesda hotel, and at least a hundred and fifty published writers, famous, not so famous, and probably fifty writing but not yet published, and it can be overwhelming. I had so many impressions, which it took me awhile to sort out. I’ll do this report in two installments.

What made it especially worth going to Malice 23? People, three in particular. At the Saturday night banquet, the Agathas are announced for Best First Novel, Best Short Story, Best Children’s/YA Book; Best Non-Fiction book, and Best Novel of 2010, as well as the winner of the Malice Domestic First Best Traditional Mystery Contest, which would be published by St. Martin’s Press.

This year, in late February, I learned that I was a finalist in that last contest for the sixth mystery in my series, Killer Frost. I had tried the contest seven times, and I was elated. But by the end of March, I was certain I hadn’t won, as I hadn’t heard anything from St. Martin’s, and I knew that a winner in a recent year had received a phone call in late March. I had already been querying agents, and I had some interest from them, but not as much as I had hoped from being a finalist. But I was going to Malice, in any case.

Diane (left) and Kendel (right), moderators for our Guppy Press Quest listserve.

During the reception before the banquet Saturday night, I chatted with Kendel Flaum and Diane Vallere, who moderate a relatively new Guppy listserve called Press Quest, which I’d joined. I’d had better luck with small presses that publish mysteries. Of the six presses we’d learned about through interviews Diane and Kendel had arranged, four had requested material from me. They all passed, but I’d been more encouraged than I was after three years of agent searching.

Kendel and Diane were startled, apparently, to realize I was in my 70s, not my 40s, given my energy. Kendel confided that she, too, had been a finalist, and her agent had been able to learn that she wasn’t the winner, but Kendel thought maybe the winner didn’t know until it was announced at the banquet. Also, at the reception, when I spoke to Carolyn of the Charles Todd author duo, she also said she thought the winner learned at the banquet, which began immediately.

I was thrown into turmoil inside. Was this possible, that I might still win? Common sense flew to the winds. My emotions rattled around loose like marbles being shaken inside a cup. I had nowhere and no time to get a grip.

Sasscer Hill, author of Full Mortality.
But I’d chosen to sit at Sasscer Hill’s table for the banquet. Sasscer’s novel on horse racing, Full Mortality (see my blog posted May 8, immediately before this one), was up for an Agatha for First Best Novel of 2010, and I’d voted for her. Convention members vote for all the Agatha awards. I hadn’t yet read her novel, but I’d read a short story of hers in 2008. I’d ordered her novel, but it hadn’t arrived by the Thursday I left for Alexandria, to stay the weekend with my friends Sharon and John, and go to the convention by Metro. Nevertheless, based on her short story, I was sure the novel was good.

Sasscer welcomed me to her table. She confessed to wanting to go into the bathroom to scream–she was so nervous about the Agatha--and I confessed I’d gotten unsettled because two people had told me the winner of my contest might not yet know. So we consulted each other and compared notes on the two asparagus spears laid neatly on our plates beside the fancy chicken and beef entrees, and a very small scoop of mashed potatoes, not to mention the gnocchi appetizer–some kind of dumpling, I figured out by tasting--smothered in a tomato sauce. I don’t think Sasscer tasted hers. She was suspicious. The fancy chocolate dessert with raspberries (Chocolate Pots du Creme) was good.

Then the Agathas. Louise won Best Novel for the fourth time–a record. Another Canadian, Mary Jane Maffini, won Best Short Story. I did not win the Malice Domestic First Best Mystery and a publishing contract with St. Martin’s. Linda Rodriguez, for her novel Every Secret Thing, won, and Sasscer did not win First Best published mystery, although another Guppy did, Avery Ames, with her cheese shop mystery, The Long Quiche Goodbye.

But Sasscer and I may have made more of a bond because we didn’t win. When I got home, her novel had arrived, and I have now read it. After you read my review, you’ll see what a winner it is, Agathas or not.

This is a horse Sasscer bred and raised, as a one-year-old, name of Out Smarten, with flowers in his mane.

So sharing that suspense with Sasscer was worth the convention. I reminded her that the fact that we were writing about what we cared passionately about, was what mattered, not the prizes, and comforted myself in the act of comforting her.

Sunday we got to hear Sue Grafton be interviewed by Julie Smith, a writer she’d known since her youth. Sue was charming, down-to-earth, easy to love. I had talked to her once, too, when she sat near me, and I told her I’d read all her books, from A is For Alibi through U is for Undertow. Sasscer and I had agreed to how much we loved chickens at the banquet, and Sue talked about how she now had chickens, how much she loved them, how she and her husband made gourmet food for them so they wouldn’t get bored, and how the chickens climbed the fence when they carried it out to them every evening. After the interview was over, Sasscer and I both rushed up to tell Sue about our love for chickens, too.

Sasscer, age 6, with her rooster, Whitey. Caption: "Get Your Own Chicken."

At that interview, and at the Agatha Tea afterwards, I got to sit with Diane and Kendel, such warm, lively women, and I felt cherished. I’ve learned that I enjoy new places and situations most when I feel valued. I’m pretty sociable, but my introverted side comes out, as does that of many writers, I think, in such a big convention, so I’d spent a fair amount of time alone in the crowd, but here I was with two women with whom I shared our common struggle to get published, and we all three liked and valued each other.

We laughed when, at this big Tea, lavishly provided with cake, sandwiches, and other goodies, coffee or decaf, no tea came, as Kendel and Diane had requested, until toward the end, when they were offered an elegant box of tea bags to choose from, but it was another fifteen minutes, and the tea was over, when their hot water finally arrived.

Agatha Christie herself couldn’t have been more surprised than we were at the hotel’s failure to provide the chief ingredient for Afternoon Tea. Next time, will these lively women ask for decaf? Will we all have books about to be published by then? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Someone once told me that the closest ties are made with people you go through something hard with. So I think I’ll always feel closely connected to Sasscer, Diane, and Kendel.

Left to right, Diane, Kendel, Judy, and unidentified mystery fan waiting for Sue Grafton interview, front row!

Full Mortality: A Nikki Latrelle Racing Mystery by Sasscer Hill

2011-05-08T18:24:00.000-07:00

Midsummr at Hoganvillaea Farm: White Rock Hens, Zinnias, and Cosmos.

Full Mortality. Sasscer Hill. A Nikki Latrelle Racing Mystery. Wildside Press, Rockville, MD, 20850. 2010. 176 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4344-0398-8. A Review.
The cover of Sasscer Hill’s first mystery novel, Full Mortality, proclaims it "America’s answer to Dick Francis." I was never one to become involved with horses, and I surprised myself a few years ago when I went through every Dick Francis novel I could get my hands on. I even found a few in the Kostroma, Russia, regional library.

This claim about Full Mortality is true. I never figured out how Francis kept me racing through his pages, but I recognize the same mysterious pace and constant tension in Full Mortality as Nikki, a young jockey, once a run-away from an abusive step-father, pulled me from one danger to another, revealing her physical and spiritual courage, and what I can only call grit–the same grit I find in Sue Grafton’s character Kinsey Milhone.

Yet the voice, the story, and the characters are very much Hill’s own creation. This lonely, compassionate young woman stumbles into the middle of con men, insurance and betting scams, and grieves over every abused horse. She can set aside her errors about people, who betray and mistreat her right and left, and risk everything she has to save a horse or bring a killer to justice. She rises again every time she is deceived or knocked down. She simply won’t give up.

This novel was nominated for an Agatha in the recent Malice Domestic mystery convention in Bethesda, for the first best traditional mystery novel of 2010, and deserves a wide audience, beyond the world of horses and racing. Sasscer Hill not only knows her horses, but the human world that surrounds them.

What I love best are the relationships of trust and love that Nikki builds with the rather gruff horse-trainer Jim, for whom she rides and occasionally snags jockey jobs; her friend Lorna, who had been in a reform school and is slowly pulling herself up because of her love for horses. Nikki helps her with a difficult horse, but Lorna has her turn to rescue Nikki. Then there’s Mello, the black man who knows horses in a way that goes beyond intuition into mysticism. He claims Nikki’s horse is the same fabulous horse that won races years earlier. Nikki is spooked at first but comes to trust Mello, who never lets her down.

I like the way Hill breaks all the stereotypes. Reading this book is fun but at the same time, deeply serious and moving. Here’s a mystery author who writes with her heart in her mouth. Read her. For more about Nikki and Sasscer: http://fullmortality.blogspot.com

Judy Hogan, Hoganvillaea Farm, Moncure, N.C.

*** I will soon post my thoughts on the Malice Domestic conference, where I enjoyed the awards banquet sitting beside Sasscer Hill. JH

Hens Keep Things Lively at Hoganvillaea Farm

2011-04-20T18:31:00.000-07:00

Two of Judy's hens curious about that photographer Sarah. They look out of one eye at a time.

I was surprised when Cindy Ramsay, Central Carolina Community College’s Director of Continuing Education in Lee County, asked me to do a chicken workshop with the focus on a small urban or backyard flock. I’d been keeping chickens then for seven years and very much enjoyed my small flocks. I’ve been intent on raising as much of my food as possible and then having a few cash crops, so raising chickens made sense: handy protein and egg money.

It proved a sharp learning curve. I had to overcome a lot of fear: that the chickens would die, that we wouldn’t get the coop and yard ready in time (they grow fast) and that they might start eating each other; that predators would kill them, etc. But they didn’t smother each other by piling into a corner (it helped to have a horse tub with rounded corners); they didn’t eat each other, and I learned, if one was getting picked on, to separate her out for awhile, and we built coop and yard so as to be secure against the multiple predators: foxes, raccoons, possums, rats, snakes, dogs, hawks, owls, etc., and none died from disease.

It was hard when I had to decide to have some killed, for they were attached to me as I, to them, but my neighbors helped me, and I got through that. So, yes, though I was no expert, I had acquired some experience, knew the resources, and agreed to do the workshop in the fall of 2010.

Cindy Ramsey offered it in Sanford because a recent law allowed keeping chickens (no roosters) inside the city limits.

It turns out that quite a few municipalities now allow chickens, plus, with the interest in healthy local food, my own passion for my chickens isn’t unique. My small flock, renewed with new chicks every three years, is a break-even proposition, as the feed costs almost as much as the egg money can pay for, but I have wonderful fresh eggs in my diet, and they make other people healthy and happy, too.

Teaching is one way that those of us in our PMZ years can give to those younger and share what we have learned, whether about chickens, living, literature, or any endeavor to which we have given time and attention and learned to be at ease.

To my second chicken workshop on April 9 this year another writer came, Ruth Eckles, and she wrote about the experience. I okayed her bringing a photographer to the afternoon farm visit, so Sarah Cress joined us here at my Hoganvillaea Farm, which is, essentially, my backyard, since lawn, where chickweed grows profusely in the spring, the gardens where I grow vegetables, herbs, and flowers, and the small orchard, plus my house, the coop and yard for the hens, are all on half an acre.

I was pleased with Ruth’s report and thought Sarah’s photos added the exactly right visual images. So try this blog and enjoy: http://www.durhamprofiles.com/?p=121

Chickens help us keep our sense of humor!

Taming the Dragon

2011-04-17T18:34:00.000-07:00

This is Mrs. Pearl Crawley, a dear friend from 1998 until late 2010. She was 96 when she died, and she was a wonderful mentor to me those years, with her loving wisdom and service to others.

***

THAT INNER CIRCLING SUN VIII. November 7, 2010
Those who produce works of genius are not those who spend their days in the most refined company, whose conversation is the most brilliant, or whose culture is the broadest; they are those who have the ability to stop living for themselves and make a mirror of their personality, so that their lives, however nondescript they may be socially, or even in a way intellectually, are reflected in it. For genius lies in reflective power, and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.
–Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve, p, 129.

When I was younger, late thirties, I learned
that inside me was an inner circling sun
guarded by a dragon. The image stuck.
I’ve tamed the dragon, but no one else has.
It means I’ll be alone now. Odysseus
has left and returned many times, and yet
I remain alone. He could make one more
homecoming, but it seems unlikely.
Meantime, my spirit gathered up the four
corners of my archetype, like folding a
sheet and putting it away. It was a guide,
a series of stepping stones or street lights
I followed along a dark way, from one
pool of light to the next, learning to trust
what lay ahead when I had to walk blind,
one step at a time. It is worth everything
to stand where I stand now. Even as darkness
grows more gloomy in the outer world,
where I once worked with so much passion
and energy, the light in my center burns
brighter, intensifies its swing around its
orbit. Can my written words help?
A black man I’d never met before,
working near me at the polling place,
says that if I write books, "We’ll read
them."

We don’t know how our words
will survive all the hazards of the
twenty-first century, when our human
race has yet to learn care for our planet
village or to imagine the inner landscapes
of people different from ourselves. A few
spirits who can see are all that is needed
to turn us from the weather disasters with
which our polluted air and sea begin
to punish us. Poverty makes friendships
stronger. We still, sadly, learn the hard way,
a truth Sophocles knew centuries ago:
we have to suffer before we learn. Wiser,
we pay more attention to our inner Spirit’s
words and to the love our fellow beings
give us. Even dogs, cats, and chickens
sometimes can’t get through. Obliviousness
is not the worst crime, but it can damage
the love others bear us when we don’t
deserve it.

My path is clear now, and straight.
My all-too-human body has its twinges
and its doubts about all that I still plan
to accomplish, which is why that inner
sun must carry the workload and egg me on.
My greatness is an unknown, and yet I
feel it settle comfortably into the driver’s
seat, turn the key, and tell all the other
passengers: "We’re off."

Judy Hogan

The Creative Mind: Restlessness

2011-04-08T12:34:00.000-07:00

This is a shot in early spring of Winfield Farm in Randolph County, NC, near the Chatham County line.

One of the interesting things about my life is how I have responded to periods of restlessness. These rainy days make me restive, but I’ve learned how valuable such times can be. In fact, my finding creative ways to fill the time when it hangs heavy probably began when I was seven and put to bed for a year with rheumatic fever.

My mother home schooled me for the second grade. We lived across the street from my school, so she brought home the lessons. She also read to me and my younger sister every night, once we were ready for bed. She brought home many books from the library, and I read them.

But time still hung heavy, so I began to make up stories and illustrate them, and she always praised them. That set in motion my becoming a writer. By fifth grade I was writing longer stories and knew I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

I’ve noticed, as an adult, that, when I’m in a situation where things don’t turn out as I’d thought they would, and I suddenly have time, that I will invent things for myself to do. In 1990, when I went to the Gower Peninsula of Wales to spend three weeks with Mrs. Merrett at her bed and breakfast home, I had been there only a few days when I stumbled on a footpath about a mile from the nearest village, and sprained my ankle.

I limped back and was able to call an ambulance. They took me to Swansea Hospital and treated me free, gave me crutches, though no ice. My plan had been to ramble about the cliffs for many miles every day and find beautiful spots to sit and write poems. This had to change. I was essentially stuck in bed. Mrs. Merrett coddled me, but what was I to do?

I had some library books, and I wrote a few poems, but I still had a lot of time. I’d brought with me but not yet read Jacques Maritain’s Poetic Intuition in Art and Poetry. So I set myself to read that, a highly philosophical work, and in it I found the best articulation and understanding I had ever read of the creative process, of my own creative experience, as well as a lot of good advice for living with, and taking care of, my own "poetic intuition."

I also, at Mrs. Merrett’s suggestion, "Why don’t you write a murder?" began plotting my first mystery, The Sands of Gower, although I didn’t write it until the following summer. Toward the end of my time, I did get out to the nearby cliffs and write some new poems for my book, Lightwood Knots.

In Russia, in 1992, when I spent a month in two different Houses of Creativity for Writers, Peredelkino and Komarova, I again had time to fill. Expeditions to Moscow and St. Petersburg, to see the sights, often fell through. I made new friends at Komarova, and we had an interpreter living in the dorm with us. The writers there were more interested in us than they had generally been at Peredelkino.

By then I spoke a little Russian and could read it with the help of a dictionary, and I had one with me. I decided to translate some of the poems from books I’d been given by these new writer friends, and that made me even more itneresting to the writers there. Our young interpreter, Yelena, checked them for me. That led, too, to two women poets translating some of my poems and the book published in Russian by the Kostroma Writers Organization, Beaver Soul.

My restlessness disappeared in all those situations, and I was happily occupied.

There are days off and on in our lives when our routine breaks down, and for one reason or another, we suddenly have some free hours we don’t normally have. When that happens to me, I’ve learned to say to myself: "You can do anything you want to do." I almost always want to write.

So these last few days I’ve been restive, since I couldn’t do my usual farm chores–only a few of them. But my evenings have been free, and I knew it was an opportunity to write, so I have been writing, and I’ve had more discoveries and insights than usual.

I’ve learned to treat my feeling of my mind being empty as a sign that something in me wants to rise up and be written about. It’s clear to me now that this restlessness may also be a precursor to new creative work, to better than usual writing.

Laughter for Zest

2011-04-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

This is a painting by Nikolai Smirnov, which I treasure and use on my desktop. It's a Russian peasant's farm, and although my farm is quite different, in the meaning, purpose, simplicity, and love I feel for my farm, they are the same farm.

I have a strong fourth house, astrologically speaking, which is the "home base" house. I have there two planets, both in Aries–Venus and Saturn. Venus has, I suppose, made me impulsive in love. Saturn made me serious. I still am deeply serious, but I laugh more and more freely, as I get older. Maybe that is also Venus. I laugh aloud sometimes when I’m reading and something strikes me as funny.

I didn’t laugh much as a child. I remember, at age thirteen, getting the giggles, when we were playing Hearts, and not being able to stop. I was both embarrassed that I’d lost control and delighted that I could so laugh. At age seventeen, when I was editor of the high school newspaper, and James, another "brain,"–he now works as a physicist--and I were stapling the April 1 edition of "The Sooner Cub." We had April Fool jokes in it, but we got the idea of stapling it on all sides so it was hard to open, and we got the giggles. The students took the joke well, as they struggled to access their mimeographed sheets. I had never so laughed and been so silly, especially at school.

Laughter is good medicine and another thing that helps us age well.

Once, when I was teaching a "Roadmap to Great Literature" class in the 1980s in the Durham Library, a student asked me how I’d learned to laugh at myself. I didn’t know the answer, but I said probably it was because I’d suffered so much. After awhile, you have to laugh.

When my three adolescents gave me fits, I certainly suffered, but when one, who’d run away twice, wanted to come home because he was living in a tent in his friend’s backyard, and it had been raining a lot, and the mosquitoes were driving him nuts, I laughed.

The mistakes we make, the things we forget, and many other of life’s little glitches can feel so tragic, but later, if we’re lucky, we can laugh. That’s the gist of what Carolyn Heilbrun said about some marriages: when you realize you can’t get unmarried, if you’re lucky, you laugh.

Laughing at ourselves is especially beneficial and can be healing, can freshen our perspective and take the dreariness out of a rainy day.

We can all be pretty silly at times–over-estimating or underestimating our ability to do something or how well we’ll cope.

When my new and first flock of chickens stayed out in the pouring rain instead of running for shelter, I read in a chicken advice book that they could drown, so I ran out to rescue them, and when they saw my umbrella, they fled. I put down the umbrella and was drenched, of course, and still had no luck getting the chickens to shelter. They didn’t drown. I don’t do that any more. If they want to stay out in a thunderstorm or when it’s hailing, I let them. I can laugh now at my mistake. Something about chickens tends to set off these absurd encounters. One of the blessings in my life?

When I carried into their coop for the first time a big bag of feed, they went into total panic and flew wildly all around the coop. So we learn and then if we’re lucky, we laugh.

Maintaining One's Health and Energy into the Seventies and Beyond

2011-03-26T16:16:00.000-07:00

This is a photo of a rare Brazilian iris called Mericus or Apostles sent by my friend Sharon in Virginia

A lot of people have asked me: where do you get your energy? I don’t know the exact answer, but I can tell you the things I do that contribute to it. First of all, I learned a few years ago about telomeres. They’re part of our cells. If our telomeres are happy and doing their job of replacing cells as needed, our body keeps thriving. If not, we begin to die.

You’ve noticed that some people as they age remain healthy and vigorous; others begin to "fail," as my mother used to say. I believe my telomeres are happy. I still work hard, doing farm work, one to four hours a day, depending on the season. Right now, in the spring planting season, after I walk one and a half to two miles, I spend about three hours digging (I farm with hand tools), weeding, watering, but I break it up.

I learned from Frank Lloyd Wright, who was active and creative into his nineties, the trick of varying my activities. So I write first thing, then walk, then check e-mail, then go dig for fifteen-twenty minutes, then do something quiet in the house, then dig another short time; then eat lunch and read a book (presently Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now but often a mystery novel), then dig another short time; then work at teaching preparation, editing, or my own writing for two hours, then have yoghurt and read twenty minutes.

Then more outside work, 4-5, with a break if it’s digging, to check email. Then read a little, eat some fruit; then wash the accumulated dishes, which I’d rather do before than after supper, because I love to sip my tea and read until 7; then outside awhile, depending on the light. Then two hours writing. Then last email check; then read, bath, bed. I sleep seven-eight hours normally, and even if by 11 P.M., I’m very tired, I sleep soundly and wake refreshed.

Attitude makes all the difference in our motivation. I have so many things I want to do before I die. I feel good. Off and on, I have minor problems (crippled toes, corrected by good shoes), poison ivy (inevitably, but once mistaken for shingles), a repeat mammogram, but the spot was a tiny cyst, not cancer).

A couple of years ago I had touch of flu, despite flu shot, aggravated by a smoking woodstove (lesson learned), so one morning I couldn’t breathe and had to be taken by ambulance to the Emergency Room. The nurse on duty, seeing me come in, said, "You’re going home." He had correctly assessed that I wasn’t very sick, but I had to have all those expensive tests (EKG, chest x-ray) to prove it.

Fortunately, my regular doctor understands that I’m in quite good health, sees me accurately. I argued him out of hormone replacement therapy, and now he says I was right. I recently argued him out of cholesterol medicine, when mine was borderline, and he himself researched in The People’s Pharmacy books about oat bran and red yeast rice. I already put oat bran in the bread I made and ate it as a hot cereal for lunch in cooler weather. I began taking 1200 mg of red yeast rice a day, and my cholesterol came down.

I’m a passionate person, and I like to save money so as to save time to write. I’m still working for living at nearly seventy-four, but it’s teaching, editing, and farming, all of which I enjoy, and they balance each other. We have to use our minds and bodies to keep them in prime shape. When I tell my doctor about some of the gymnastics I go through to pick figs that are out of reach or to re-set the chickens’ flexible fence and untangle all the poles and strings, he says, "Good! Good! You’re using your muscles." And "I wish all my patients were farmers."

For me the hardest part is getting started. Once I get seeds in the ground, begin a poem or a book, I’m committed. I have to finish it. My friend Sharon in Oregon said to me, when we were in our forties, "It’s important to have something to look forward to every day." I look forward to my morning diary with (now) cocoa and toast, yoghurt and fruit. For years it was coffee, but I let that go recently, and I do sleep better. I preserve that early morning time, even getting up earlier if I have to leave the house early for an appointment.

But I need a healthy life in order to do all the writing I still have to do. I have learned by reading, especially in the AARP magazine, the qualities found in people aging well, and I think these things are true of me, and I nourish them.

1) I enjoy my life.
2) I’m still working and enjoy my work.
3) I get exercise almost every day.
4) I sleep well.
5) I like other people and help them when I can. I’ve learned to know better when they need to learn to help themselves.
6) I feel spiritually connected to the larger world around me, to the deeper world within me.
7) I have friends to whom I can speak freely, and I have people in my life who cherish and value me, and a few who hate me, but I don’t dwell on them. I do tend to speak my mind.
8) I can concentrate on reading, on thinking, on writing, and forget where I am. I experience the Muse, when words flow easily as if of their own accord.
9) I don’t regret anything for me about my life, because I learned from everything, especially from my mistakes and my suffering. I am sorry that my mistakes caused my children to suffer, but they’re all grown now, sturdy, competent, learning as they go, too.
10) I can adapt and cope. It’s not always fun. I hate car problems, escaping chickens, hard freezes which destroy a whole year’s fruit corp, or sudden illness, which means I have to go to the doctor. But I do what I need to, and then I write about it. The interruptions and problems often stimulate my best writing.

I pay attention to my body, rest when tired, don’t overeat, and now I don’t eat after supper, as I sleep better. I also attend to my moods. If I get discouraged, I write about it or talk to a friend. Mostly, I’m cheerful and content with my life. I wish to get more books published, and I work on that.

I also wish for a partner/lover, but I’m fine on my own. Perhaps I’ll get some of these wishes and maybe not. But I can appreciate and enjoy what I do have: my little farm, overrun by violets at the moment–so beautiful, if only most of them weren’t in the vegetable garden. I also have my writing, a life-long commitment, a real vocation, and more time now to do it and attend to publishing it.

My family–children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren–is dear to me, and it’s always a joy to hear from them and see them, but they have busy, interesting lives of their own, and so do I. I have good friends, nearby and through e-mail, and good neighbors–we help each other. I have no complaints. I may be poor technically, as far as money, but I know I’m rich. I have what I need and all the riches that money can’t buy.

Penny Weaver bakes gingerbread

2011-03-13T18:35:00.000-07:00

These boys are good friends of mine, fishing in Finland, where the water is clean, recycling is a serious business, and they have very few nuclear plants. Below is an excerpt from my third mystery novel, Nuclear Apples? Penny Weaver is making gingerbread.
NUCLEAR APPLES? Prologue: September 15, 1992
Penny Weaver dragged her 20-pound bag of rye flour out of the freezer, got soy flour from the refrigerator, and lifted down a quart jar of black strap molasses. With curtains of rain falling and her housemates out this Friday evening in September, she could take over the shared kitchen and fill it with the aroma of ginger and cinnamon. She had loved transforming a rainy day with gingerbread when her kids were little. Now, in her post-menopausal zest phase, she baked for pure pleasure and to think what she could do to help Cathy’s husband, Rick, who’d been arrested for murder.

His arrow had been found in the heart of P.R. Whopper, the public relations executive of their local public utility company, Carolina Power Development Corporation, nicknamed by local residents CPD, by which they meant: Certified Public Darkness.

Clearly Rick had been framed. The fact that he was African American and had been going after CPD for years didn’t help. Their group, ACTNOW (Against Continued Transporting of Nuclear Objectionable Waste), had unnerved CPD with their campaign to prevent more storage of hot nuclear waste at the plant 10 miles down the Haw River from Riverdell. Rick had educated their community group about the dangers of additional storage of "hot" rods in water.

Julia Spencer-Fleming's mystery One Was a Soldier--Review

2011-02-19T07:15:00.000-08:00

One of my very favorite contemporary mystery writers is Julia Spencer-Fleming. Another is Louise Penny, then old favorites: Laurie King, Elizabeth George, Susan Hill, Sara Paretsky. I was able to receive an advance review copy of Julia's new book, and I met her in 2008. She's a warm, thoughtful, compassionate woman, and her book is amazing. Here's my review:
***
Julia Spencer-Fleming, One Was a Soldier. A Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mystery. Minotaur Books. St. Martin’s Press. Publication: April 2011. ISBN: 978-0-312-33489-5 $24.99.
Who would have thought it possible to combine an anti-war novel and a mystery? We certainly have more and more contemporary mystery authors taking on social issues, but even so I was surprised at the courage and inventiveness Julia Spencer-Fleming exhibits in her new and seventh mystery in the Millers Kill series, One Was a Soldier.

We aren’t in combat or in Iraq, except in memory, but we meet five vets, including Clare Fergusson, returning from Iraq, in a therapy group offered to help them adjust to being home and dealing with the residual emotional issues that hang around much longer than the time frames of the actual military service.
The novel is structured around this support group, and the subplots, as we follow each member’s conflicts with being back, are skillfully and subtly put into their places in the main mystery plot like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, as we untangle who did what, why, and how. We read to learn how these five, some of whom we’ve known in earlier books and some whom we meet here, will cope with their families and loved ones and in their workplace, but we get key information at the same time to all the puzzles that hover around these characters.

Why is it an anti-war novel? Because we live through the excruciating emotional aftermath of having done military service, as a surgeon, a helicopter pilot, a guard of prisoners, a financial specialist, and a soldier who early lost his legs. All five struggle with basic, very powerful human emotions: despair, rage, shame.

This novel is different from the other six, bolder, insistent that we come to know personally what the men and women of our armed forces suffer afterwards. One has lost his legs, but the others seemingly can pick up the lives they had been leading before, only that doesn’t prove easy.

For instance, we’ve known and loved Clare, Episcopalian priest and helicopter pilot, who is always doing something to offend somebody in her parish, but now we get a close-up view of her as a newly returned major, wading into the aftermath of a bar fight as one in command, and trying, despite nightmares and her reunion with Russ, to pick up all her parish duties at once, as well as help out in the emotional crises of her fellow soldiers in the support group.

The group itself doesn’t begin promisingly, but gradually the vets come to each other’s support. Not much has changed in the small town of Millers Kill, but the vets have changed and must change again in order to be truly at home. Addictions, memory loss, nightmares, the temptation of suicide, and the illegal activity one was pulled into "over there" all make for agony, whose only cure is the love of those they love, but each one is walled off at first, trying to do it alone, trying not be vulnerable or needy. The overriding realities here are that war leaves deep scars, both the seen and the unseen, and that love can sometimes heal even those.

I recommend reading this one after reading the other six novels, beginning with In the Bleak Midwinter. Interestingly, I had heard Julia Spencer-Fleming say, at a reading in 2008, when novel six came out (I Shall Not Want), that she planned only one more in the series, but this one hints at more Russ and Clare books to come.

Despite its being different, the town characters are all there, in the police department, the church, and the new hotel and spa. The love story that has pulled readers through six other books engages us here, too. There is no dearth of conflict for any of the soldiers, including Clare.

Be prepared to be taken in hand by a masterful, passionate storyteller and to learn, as well, what we all need to know as citizens about what our country is asking of its armed forces, many of them National Guard, in Iraq.

Judy Hogan, Moncure, N.C.

Penny Weaver: Post-Menopausal Zest Woman

2011-02-14T12:30:00.000-08:00

Russian hollyhocks from Nadya.

***

Excerpts from The Sands of Gower: A Mystery Novel
Maybe this summer on Gower she would find a real partner, who wouldn’t mind her poetry. She scared men off when she let them know she was interested, especially if she wrote them a poem. Fifteen years out of a miserable marriage, and she still hadn’t found a new love. Of course, she had goals of her own. She wasn’t going to waste her post-menopausal zest years hung up in some man’s idea of how she should serve his needs. She’d wasted too much time already doing that.

Her three children were launched now, theoretically, and her ex-husband, whom she was very sure that she did not want to remarry, could be held off more firmly. She could focus on herself, create more time for her poetry. She did want to remarry. She had often argued that it was possible for a woman to have both a marriage and her own quest plot. Now was her chance.

... . So she kept coming back. Her youngest child, Sarah, had just gotten married, and she was rewarding herself with two months this time. Evelyn, who, each time they said goodbye, wondered gloomily if she’d ever see her again, as she was 75 now, had agreed to give her her favorite single room. She could write a whole book of new poems and settle into the more human rhythms she always found here.
Only herself to see to. Only her teeth to worry about getting brushed; only her money to be sure not to lose. As they turned into the village of Pwll-du, she felt the familiar tug of that wonderful time alone. She would write. She knew it. The words were already taking on a presence in her mind. Judy Hogan

The Gift-Giving Circle

2011-01-29T14:28:00.000-08:00

Nadya's apples and plums (village near Kostroma on the Volga)

One of the ways I enjoy my post-menopausal zest years is that I have by this time in my life, after living below the poverty line for years, and rarely above it, developed a community of people around me who help me and whom I help. I wrote about this in my 2009 holiday letter. This will also give you a feeling for my daily life and the rich bounty of people and their gifts that are part of it.

What strikes me most about 2009, which was a harder year than usual, were all the gifts I received. It’s true that, if I’d needed less, I’d have been given less. In a period when the world and our larger American society, are so focused on the ills of the market economy, I’m struck by how effectively the gift economy has worked for me this year.

I first became consciously aware of the two economies when I read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift 20 years ago. It’s primarily about the artist’s gift. His theme is that, when we have been given a creative gift–and as practicing artists and writers know, that’s mysterious–although we may sell our created works or our creative talent in the marketplace, that is not essential. What’s essential is to give that gift away. "The gift must always move." At the time I read The Gift, I was teaching the free "Roadmap to Great Literature for New Writers" program in the Durham and Burlington libraries. I had received Humanities "gifts" to teach, and the students, having received the gift of the classes, wanted to give to me. They gave me time and money for my Carolina Wren Press, a coffee pot, plants, strawberries, a lake cottage for a week, a lovely cup with a drawing of Penelope at her loom, with a whip painted on the handle, a tribute to my determination to have them read good books and write well, to "get them off their asses."

Then I realized how, all my life, beginning as a minister’s child, I have lived more in the gift than in the market economy, as most cultures in our world still do. When I visited Russia first in 1990, I was immediately struck by the intensity and extravagance of their gifts. If they had two eggs, then my son Tim and I should have them; if they succeeded in getting ahold of some candy, it was ours. We came home, heavy with gifts, tangible and intangible. That set off my desire to give back, which I did for the next ten years, writing grants, hosting Russians through the Kostroma Committee of Sister Cities of Durham, but the Russians, who had less, generally, than I did, and I lived simply, always outdid me.

Still the gifts kept moving. They still do, and my life continued as part of the gift economy, specifically in my first owned home in Moncure, in my largely African American neighborhood. I knew no one. My students came often to clean up the yard, paint and finish the house. I was given an old wood cookstove by B.D. Goolsby, my friend Elaine’s husband, who died October 12, and my student then (now published novelist), Dawn, and her husband, Jim, helped move it here, and today, as winter’s chill moves in, it is radiating heat, stocked with wood split by Gene, and more wood is outside, prepared by Terrie and Cheryl, who tell me, "Call when you need more."

I’ve had many small but frustrating challenges this year, and my friends and neighbors have rallied round. My son, Tim, visited in June. On his way back from the beach in my tried, true, but aging pickup, the fuel pump went out. We got it towed, and my faithful mechanic, Al, who sold me this truck in 2003 and has kept it running, as Al has kept all my old vehicles on the road since the late 80s, happened to have on hand a used, working fuel pump, which he installed, saving me considerable.

I asked Emma next door if she could give me a ride out to Al’s, and she said I could use their extra car, so Tim and I easily retrieved my truck, and I also got my baking done that week. Emma and Robert, my nearby neighbors, have helped me in countless ways over the last eleven years. Robert and his nephew Tutty, have killed chickens for me, mowed, weed-eaten, raked, fixed the mower, and I am always invited to come get a plate at their big family gatherings. One of their friends, Chainsaw, has brought me wood several times. At Christmas I share this holiday letter with the folks who gather on Robert’s porch to talk and laugh or to play horseshoes in the yard in good weather, and several have showed up at Christmas with gifts or to give me a hug.

Emma and Robert's dogs, Lucky and Spud, announce and inspect all my visitors. Robert and Emma have looked after my chickens and cat when I go out of town. Robert recovered slowly after several surgeries and chemotherapy, from his cancer. Now Emma is having surgery on her neck and has a long recovery ahead. I’ve offered to help in any way I can, but, just as with the Russians, I don’t expect to win in the "gift wars." The point, I’ve learned, is not exactly equal exchanges but that the gift keeps moving.

There are times in every life when people need us in ways we can’t refuse. We know we have to respond. True, too, that not all gifts are wise. They can be a subtle use of power to control or given without love, from guilt or an exaggerated sense of obligation. We can learn to tell the difference. Our best gift to someone in emotional pain may not be to rescue but to listen.

Other small crises this year--financial, car, farm--set off unexpected help. Doug replaced my computer with one he’d built and keeps up with my various computer glitches. Karl (taking time from Those Democrats) helped me prop the peach trees, heavily laden with their new crop, repaired the back door and the toilet, and would take only food in exchange.

Sharon and John up in DC area hosted me, as once they hosted Russians from Kostroma, in Alexandria, when I attended my first Malice Domestic mystery conference in Arlington in early May, and Sharon not only gave me bag lunches but initiated me into the mysteries of the Metro, which I rode to the conference each day
.
Again this year I baked bread in The Bread Shop, with its helpful, cheerful staff, and took my extra figs, herbs, eggs, to the Pittsboro Farmers’ Market. I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped this year, but the other farmers were generous traders, so my leftover bread helped me bring home vegetables, fruit, meat, goat cheese. My cukes gave out early, but Andrew’s made possible bread and butter pickles. Next year I hope to have other outlets for my extra produce, and already Angelina’s Kitchen wants me to make some breads for her and says she’ll always buy my zinnias and cosmos.

All these gifts create a feeling of opulence. Money can’t ever give you that degree of feeling valued and cared for that such gifts do. I already know that Angelina will give me more than I can ever give her, because every time I go into her take-out restaurant, she gives me delicious food: spanakopita (spinach pies), a lamb giro sandwich, amazing chicken soup.

I do have to think more about money now, what I can not spend, and how I can earn what I need most effectively, so that I use my abilities and don’t get exhausted. I’ve always lived simply and benefitted from the gift economy, but it strikes me now that those Americans who don’t remember when most of us had barely enough and many, not enough, in the 30s and 40s, may not realize the riches all around them, if they begin, even in their poverty, to give what they have.

All gifts don’t lift the economic burden, but all genuine, heart-whole gifts lift the spirit of those who give and those who receive. This can make all the difference. This is a truth that people all over the world, most of whom have much less than we Americans, even now, know in their bones and hearts. It is how they cope, how they find joy in straitened circumstances. Judy Hogan

Not Getting Sick

2011-01-23T17:44:00.000-08:00

My Russian friend Vera, with wild flowers.

***
NOT GETTING SICK
It’s how most of us think of health. Health is from the word heal and related to the word whole. In our American culture there are many things that tend to make us sick. Poor diet, even though we have the opportunity to eat better and more wisely than most of the world’s peoples. A stressful life style. Relying a lot on medicine.

There was a time when doctors solved disease by bleeding all their patients. In the Middle Ages. That seems laughable to us now. Fifty years or so ago they cut out the offending organ–tonsils, uterus, whatever. Now we are inundated with medicines. A young medical student told me that drug companies regularly took them to lunch. He told of how there is now a very expensive medicine for, say, high blood pressure, when the patient had had one almost as good, but the new one may cost five times as much.

Of course, some people do need medicine, but I question every medicine they want to give me or people I’m helping in a hospital. For instance, both during and after menopause, good doctors wanted me to take hormone replacement therapy. I gather that the research showed that it helped women with preventing heart disease and osteoporosis. But later research has also shown that it may increase your risk for cancer, and that an active woman may avoid both heart disease and osteoporosis. The logic of statistics doesn’t necessarily mean that you will benefit from the medicine the doctor wants to prescribe.

Also many doctors prescribe medicine for depression when it may not be needed. At this time in my life, at age 62 [I’m now 73 and it’s still true], I take no prescription medicines, which always surprises medical people. I do take a multi-vitamin (organic) every day, and I deliberately eat a balanced, vegetarian diet most of the time. I understand that the human body needs exercise. I have had to work on myself to make that part of my daily routine, but now it is for 30 minutes a day. I miss a day occasionally, but I average six out of seven days.

My staple is a complete protein bread of rye and soy. I was fortunate in being diagnosed with Meniere’s disease in my late 20s, which by my late 30s, led me to seek lifestyle advice from doctors and others. This is a syndrome of the inner ear. When it hits most severely, you feel that you are being whirled around. You grab hold of whatever you can to prevent yourself (as it seems) from being thrown around. The only thing you can do to stop it is lie down flat. If you persist, you vomit.

I learned to prevent my Meniere’s disease by walking, leading a less stressful life, eating well (less wheat when they told me I might be mildly allergic to it), getting plenty of vitamin C and the B vitamins. I do this with lots of brown rice and organic rye-soy bread (Bs) and yoghurt and orange juice every day (Bs and C).

Soy-Rye Bread (Complete Protein)

In a very large bowl, as the sponge tends to rise up over the sides, put 1/4 cup of black strap or other molasses, honey, brown sugar, or other sweetener.
Add 2 cups boiling water (you may use purified or spring water, as I do) and dissolve the sweetener.

Add 3 more cups of water and 4 cups of rye flour, using a whisk to beat it in. It should be a thick gravy consistency. Then add (when it’s warm but not hot) 2 T of active dry yeast (or 2 cake yeasts or packages of yeast). Mix in well. Cover with a piece of plastic (I use a grocery store plastic bag), then a towel. Let this rise for 1-12 hours. You can do it overnight. The sponge dough strengthens the yeast and gives the bread a slightly sour taste.

Add 1-1/3 cups of soy flour with 2 T. salt, beating well; then 1-1/3 cups of bran or oat bran with 1/4 cup of oil or olive oil; then add about 6 cups of white, bread flour (unbleached, if you can get it–whole foods stores often have it). I add flour, several cups at a time until dough gets stiff and hard to mix. Then, still in the large bowl, I knead it, adding as little flour as possible. It’s sticky, and throw in a little flour and keep going. Experience makes it easier. Knead it about 10 minutes until it’s elastic. Then cover it with the towel and let it rise about an hour until it’s double in bulk.

Divide into 4 loaf pans, let rise another hour or so until double in bulk, and bake at 350 degrees F. for about one hour. You can’t ruin it or hurt yourself by having a piece when it’s hot! The loaf is tender and gets a little smushed. Oh, well. It’s wonderful hot. It keeps well in the freezer. You can store it sliced and remove slices as needed, or store in halves and remove a half at a time. It’s best fresh–no preservatives. This bread is the secret of my success! I live on it.

From The PMZ Poor Woman’s Cookbook, p. 11-13.:

Pleasure

2011-01-19T14:04:00.000-08:00

PLEASURE

That's sage in bloom in my herb garden from last spring. Sadly I lost it last summer. Have to begin again from seeds.
***

I have often been surprised by people telling me that they didn’t understand how I could be so disciplined in general, and, in particular, about getting my writing done. The fact is that I have strong desires. And I give them their head a lot. So I love to write, and I have built my life around that love. My approach to getting sick is to indulge myself before I get so sick that I can’t enjoy it. It saves time. If you get very sick, then you can do nothing and you have to work harder when you get well.

I try to make my life pleasurable. I give myself rewards if I need to do things I don’t much enjoy. Sometimes on weekends I make a dessert to have when I write, because it seems to help me write to feel self-indulgent. People who are dieting are urged to separate eating from activities. But if you want to write, you need rituals that are pleasurable around it. So I combine writing with food and drinks. I drink my morning coffee when I write in my diary. Or, on weekends, I might make one of the following desserts. Note that I make them healthy, too, so that my indulgence, though it feels wicked to me, is actually good for me. This is one of the many tricks I play on myself. But they work!

If you make banana bread, applesauce cake, brownies, chocolate chip cookies, try substituting for each cup of white flour, 2/3 cup of rye or whole wheat flour and 1/4 cup of soy. You’ll need a little less than a full cup, because these flours (rye, whole wheat, soy) are heavier. I use this substitution in everything that has in it strong flavors, like chocolate, spices, etc. It also works quite well with muffins, banana bread, etc.

GINGERBREADBeat 1 cup of shortening (or butter or 3/4 cup canola or other vegetable oil), add 1 cup brown sugar, and blend, then 2 eggs, then 1 cup of molasses (black strap or cane). Separately sift and mix 2/3 cup of soy with 1 t. salt, 1-½ t. of baking soda, 1 t. ginger, 1 t. cinnamon. Mix this with 2-1/6 cups of rye or whole wheat flour. Then add in 3 parts, alternating with 1 cup of boiling water, stirring after each addition, to the shortening/oil mixture. Pour batter into a greased 12 x 16 or two 8 x 8 inch pans. Bake at 350 degrees F. for 35 to 40 minutes. Delicious warm or cold. Especially on a rainy day.

I want to thank my followers and those leaving comments to cheer me on. A new venture is both exciting and at times overwhelming. As to what I used to do when I awakened by hot flashes during the night, I would throw off the covers and go back to sleep. By day, I'll take off the layers I needed to for comfort.

But the biggest thing is seeing menopause as normal and prelude to the best time in a woman's life, which in Russia they call the "baba summer." You become a baba at 40. Probably Americans at 50, kids raised, more time for us. Their name for Indian Summer is Baba Summer. Enjoy your baba summer, expect to live well, actively, healthily for a long time, and you probably will. After the 20s, the rest of our lives depends on our attitudes, which goes for men, too. Men welcome here, too. Zest can begin for men, too, around 50. Why not? Judy Hogan

First Postmenopausal Zest Blog

2011-01-15T18:51:00.000-08:00

Back in 2000, when we had our big snowstorm in central North Carolina, that stranded trucks on the interstate, landed two feet of unexpected snow on our roads that most of us don’t know how to drive on when there’s ice, and then for weeks, after the snow melted by day, the black ice returned at night, I used the time to write a recipe book called: The PMZ Poor Woman’s Cookbook. Eleven years later, we are having a series of snowy, icy events that tend to keep me housebound on my small farm more than I would wish. The chickens look at the icy ground and won’t go out, or they don’t’ like the cold wind. So they sit around and dig great holes in the straw on the coop floor, and wait for me to bring them warm water and bread scraps or anything interesting. So I decided to start a blog, my first venture into this new world of social-networking. I was nudged in this direction, too, by promising to a small press called Mainly Murder, which is reading one of my mystery novels (Haw) for possible publication, that, if they would publish it, I would do a blog. Haw features a mid-50s poet who is in the PMZ phase of her life, her kids out of the nest, her hormones at peak functioning, with a new zest for adventure.. I myself am 73, healthy, enjoy my life, stay active both physically and mentally, and have had 20 years of post-menopausal zest. So here’s to the zest phase of a woman’s life. I’ll share my thoughts and experiences, and maybe in the comment sections, you’ll share yours. I’ll include a recipe from my cookbook each time I blog, too, for fun. Here’s how the cookbook began:

"Genius is the ability to invent in difficult circumstances." Jean Paul SartreThis cookbook is in response to comments and questions from my friends about how I managed to do the things I did on so little money and to their requests for recipes. It’s aimed at women about to enter menopause, completing it, or past it.
We know from the Japanese experience that women go through menopause more easily if their diet contains soy. I have for years put soy flour into bread and other baked foods. I also learned that you go through menopause more easily if you are a little overweight (the extra fat helps, which is probably why the body is so determined to add those extra pounds in middle age), if you get plenty of exercise, and have an engaged, active life. I did, and do, and menopause was easy for me. I also had heard the phrase "post-menopausal zest" and loved it. So here’s to the zest phase. It’s true, especially if you eat a healthy diet and enjoy your life. As we age, our attitude is everything.
I’ve included in this book my ideas and reasoning for my own lifestyle to stimulate your thinking. These recipes are also to give you ideas. A starting point. You probably have lots of your own favorite recipes, but maybe you never thought of adding soy to baked foods or need new ideas for some healthy, delicious snacks that would give you pleasure and fewer empty calories.
I hope that men and younger women will also enjoy these ideas. This book was fun to write. I hope it is fun to read. The cost is a contribution to my life as a working writer, and I have self-published it. I’d love to know your reactions. If you want to buy it, you can mail me a check for $12, and I’ll send you the book. PO Box 253, Moncure, N.C. 27559-0253
919-545-9932 <judyhogan@mindspring.com>
Banana BreadLen Randolph, a dear friend, gave me this basic banana bread recipe, and I’ve modified it to be even healthier. Buy those bananas that are put on sale because bruised or black. Then freeze the good parts (they can be very soft, but remove anything that is actually spoiled or bruised) if you don’t want to bake right away. Thaw and mash just before you’re ready to mix the dough.
3 ripe bananas, well mashed
2 eggs, well beaten
1-1/3 cups of rye or whole wheat flour
½ cup of soy flour [powdered soy milk could also be used]
3/4 cup of sugar (can be part brown and part white or all of either)
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ cup coarsely chopped walnuts (you can also put in ½ cup of currants or raisins, either one of which ought to be shaken with a tablespoon of flour before adding to batter. This will help keep them suspended in the batter so they don’t sink to the bottom of the pan and burn).
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a loaf pan (do not dust with flour). Mix the mashed bananas and the egg together in a large bowl. Stir in flour, sugar, salt, and baking soda. Add the walnuts and blend–do not beat. Put the batter in pan and bake for one hour. Remove from the pan to a rack or to waxed paper on a level surface where air can circulate around it gently. Serve it warm or allow it to cool entirely.
Variations: add 1/4 cup drained, crushed pineapple or ½ cup of chopped dried apricots or ½ cup of fresh apples (tart), chopped, or dried apples.
Notice that this bread has no fat in it. I special order 20 pounds of organic soy flour through my local Chatham Marketplace Coop in Pittsboro, N.C., but your coop can probably get it for you, too. Let me know how I am doing so far on this new blog venture. The photo is of me in early December with one of my hens. Judy Hogan"The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates, 400 B.C.