Re-Finding Manazar

Photo of Manazar, thanks to Rosemary Madero

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A month ago I received an email with the heading “Manazar.”  I knew that name, but it had been over thirty years since I’d heard from him.  The email was from Manazar’s niece, Rosemary Madero.  She has been working with Manazar’s poetry and other writings, and she had come across my name.  She was excited because finally she had found me.  It occurred to me that my correspondence with Manazar (Manuel Gamboa) when he was in Soledad Prison near Salinas, CA, and we began writing, would be at Duke in the Women’s Archive, because they had all my papers and correspondence going back to the early seventies and through 1995.

I wrote to Laura Micham, who directs that archive, and she assigned one of her staff to find our correspondence and get copies to Rosemary.  Apparently, they’ve found a hundred pages of it, and it is now in Rosemary’s hands.  She’s very excited, and so am I.

I can’t remember exactly when Manazar and I began corresponding.  Paul Foreman and I began our poetry journal Hyperion, in 1970.  We also joined COSMEP (Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers) and by 1973 we were attending their conferences.  It could have been at the 1973 conference in New Orleans or the New York City one in 1974, but I learned of Joe Bruchac’s Prison Project, hooking up Cosmep editors with writers in prison.  I began writing to Manuel.  Those were tense times, a lot of social change–integration finally coming to NC, the Vietnam War.  Cosmep had many members bringing about social change, feminist presses, new Black presses, anti-war mags.  

A lot was happening for me personally, too, in1974-75.  In late 1974 I separated from my husband.  I had begun a small press distribution project called Cosmep South, and I was the paid project director ($2000/year).  I had also begun corresponding with a N.C. “prison poet,” T.J. Reddy, one of the Charlotte Three, put in prison for burning a stable of horses, which he did not do.  Our U.S. Justice Dept paid witnesses to testify against him and the two others, and then sent those witnesses to Mexico.  T.J.’s crime had been to try to persuade young black men to avoid the draft so they wouldn’t go to Vietnam.  I reviewed and praised T.J.’s book of poems in the local paper and, as a direct result, we were evicted from our rental farmhouse in Cedar Grove.  I found an apartment for me and the kids in January 1975 in Chapel Hill’s new Interfaith Council Housing.  There were only two white families; the other thirty-eight were black.  

By summer 1975 I’d been elected Chair of Cosmep.  I was also collecting N.C. poetry for our magazine Hyperion and setting up readings for local poets in Chapel Hill and Durham restaurants. Manuel wasn’t getting very many letters from me.

He awakened my interest in him in a big way when he answered a letter around 1975–I know I was already living in Chase Park–by saying that he looked forward to hearing from me in another six months.  That he had that kind of humor and patience while he was serving an indeterminate prison term woke me up.  I began then enjoying our correspondence more and taking it more seriously. 

The 1975 Hyperion, which had many N.C. poets, also had one of Manazar’s poems.  Several subsequent issues had them, too, in 1976, 78, and 80.  I especially love this one in two languages:

***

Steel and Justice

The convicts walk... and walk... and walk

the convicts walk in blue streams

back and forth (back and forth)

in and out of a nameless day

through four gates marked

“Time” “Sentence” “Penitentiary” “Solitude”

Rivers of eyes running through a sewer

of steel and justice

Rivers of marvelous colors submerged

inside a concrete rainbow

We are no longer individuals

they have made us one the size of all

and in time (and in time)

they will augment us more and more

until they make us one

the size of the world

Acero Y Justicia

Los presos andan...y andan....y andan

Los presos andan en arroyos azules

pa’ tras y pa’ delante (pa’ tras y pa’ delante)

entrando y saliendo de un dia sin nombre

por cuatro puertas marcadas

“Tiempo” “Sentencia” “Penitencia” “Soledad”

Rios de ojos corriendo por un albanal

de acero y justicia

rios de colores maravillosos sumergidos

dentro un arco iris de concreto

Y no semos individuales

nos han hecho uno del tamano de todos

y con el tiempo (y con el tiempo)

mas y mas nos van a aumentar

del tamano del mundo

***

Published in Hyperion 16, Focus South, 1980, the last issue of Hyperion.

***

One thing I had forgotten, and my friend Sharon Ramirez reminded me, I had visited Manazar at Soledad.  Rosemary also knew this. Sharon says, when I was spending some time with her in 1976, that I pushed her into taking me to visit him in Soledad, giving her some of his poems and saying how talented he was.  She took me.  I knew he left Soledad (Rosemary says in 1978), and I remembered that he went to work for Beyond Baroque, a literary organization in Venice, CA.  Its leader, Sandy, was at one or more of the Cosmep conferences.  From Rosemary I learned that in time he became an administrator at Beyond Baroque, that he worked tirelessly with young Latinos, trying to turn them away from crime and toward writing.

Rosemary is writing his biography and also bringing out a book of his poems, many not yet published.  After prison he called himself simply Manazar.  How glad I was to learn about him again and to feel that our correspondence had been important to him, that he had been so active helping other young lives.

I’m at the time in my life when it is very reassuring to know that things you did years ago bore fruit.  I’m very curious about those letters.  How good that they still exist, and that Rosemary is writing the story of his life and publishing his work.

***

Here is Rosemary and her "Journey to Manazar."

***

Raised by a single mother of seven children, I was born in the rough neighborhood of East Los Angeles in 1959.    My mother, Cenovia, was a musician—composer and songwriter—who endowed us with her talents.  When she divorced my father in 1965, music was her way to make what money she could, and she taught us to sing and play guitar.  We performed throughout the L.A. area at talent contests, church bazaars, dinner parties, and in church.  A Mexican Von Trapp Family, we had five girls and two boys, just like them.  I moved to Montana in 1981, living in East Helena, Glendive, Bozeman, and now, Missoula.

  

Writing is something I gravitated towards growing up, mainly bad poems.  I hoped one day to write fiction, I suppose following my mother’s example—stories instead of songs.  It wasn’t until I moved to Bozeman that I entered college in 1989 and received my BS in Business Management/Human Resources, with a minor in writing, in 1994.  I never pursued writing wholeheartedly and wasn’t dedicated.  Instead, I thought I should join corporate America and worked for United Parcel Service (UPS) from 1989—the same year I began college—to 2008 as an hourly clerk and package car driver.  Promoted to management in 2000, I worked as an On Car Supervisor and Human Resources Supervisor.  I left UPS because I’d grown tired of the “you’re a hero, but a zero” corporate cutthroat mentality.   With my then husband’s encouragement, I returned to college as a Post-Baccalaureate English major to finally engage myself in the passion I suppressed all those years:  writing.

This is when I discovered Manazar.  

My mother wrote me of his passing in 2000, but I didn’t attend his memorial.  If I had, I surely would’ve heard of his legacy from family and friends.  In 2007 I was in the biography section of Barnes and Noble and found a book, “Always Running,” by Luis J. Rodriguez, a memoir about the author’s life as a gang member in East L.A.  Intrigued, I bought the book and checked out his website where he mentioned my uncle.  I emailed Luis and he responded in kind.  He told me that my uncle mentored him in conducting writing workshops in Chino Men’s Prison and Frontera Women’s Prison and spoke of their friendship affectionately.   Though fascinated, my imagination wasn’t yet piqued.  

In 2008 after I left UPS, I decided to write my mother’s story of growing up in Chavez Ravine and the musical legacy she left.  She was Manazar’s counterpart.  Google searches kept popping up Manazar’s name, and in May 2008, his papers and materials were donated to UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Library.  I emailed UCLA, told them who I was and my curiosity about the collection.  They forwarded my email to Michelle Kholos Brooks, a friend of Manazar’s and literary executor, and she told me the archive included stories on my family, the Gamboas.  But life’s distractions and my unraveling marriage curtailed any further curiosity.

In the fall of 2009, I decided to write a paper on Chavez Ravine, and once again Manazar’s name surfaced in website searches.  I learned there was a documentary about his life as an ex-convict, poet, and community activist called Poetic License, but I couldn’t locate the film.  I also found he self-published a book, Memories Around a Bulldozed Barrio, but I was unable to locate that either.   I emailed Michelle and asked if she knew about the film and book, and she sent both to me.  Thrilled, I had no idea that my life was forever changed.

When I watched Poetic License, the man I remembered as a little girl, who visited my mother between prison stints, now had grey hair, was old, and resembled her.   In one scene, there’s a large framed wedding photo of my grandparents, which my mother lugged around until the day she died in 2004, and that linked me to my uncle.  I made it my mission to find out more and with a grant in hand from Montana State University, in 2010, I traveled to UCLA and the archive.

And there he was, inside eight grey boxes filled with poems, plays, photos, and stories of his childhood—ones my mother often told as well—in Chavez Ravine.  I ended up traveling again to UCLA in May and July that same year to scan and digitize all the material in the archive—over 3000 images!  

I asked the archive manager at UCLA if we could fire up Manazar’s Mac computer —to my knowledge, it had lain dormant for over 10 years—and sure enough there was his work.   It appeared that in the last years of his life, Manazar was organizing everything before he passed away.   All the files were saved using ClarisWorks, an obsolete software program, and we had to figure out a way to transfer them to my PC.  Thank God for thumb drives!!  One of the boxes in his archive was full of floppy disks and I purchased a portable drive and went through each floppy searching for duplicates from his Mac —121 disks to be exact!

I experienced several serendipitous moments going through his papers:  in one of the boxes, an article on Chavez Ravine and the Dodger Stadium debacle lay inside —I used this same article for my paper on Chavez Ravine.  For a poetry class in 2011, I compiled a chapbook of his poems thematically—barrio, prison, ladies, sketches, and reflections— he’d categorized them in his Mac using some of the same titles; and the list goes on.   

Because Manazar was writing his autobiography, there are details of my family’s life in Chavez Ravine—character studies on each family member, stories about my mother and Aunt Julia who performed as the Gamboa Sisters;  life in his barrio;  and shocking revelations on  incestuous relationships.  How could I not be intrigued?   I realized I needed to take my uncle’s work out of obscurity and have his poems published as a collection.  I am writing a hybrid memoir/biography on Manazar and that is what brought me here to the University of Montana in Missoula—it’s my thesis project.

At this juncture, the manuscript of Manazar’s collection is complete with an introduction written by me and a preface by the well-known Chicano poet, Jimmy Santiago Baca.  Deciding which poems to select was an arduous task and once selected, I had to determine what version to include—some poems have three or more versions.  I stayed true to his authorial intent in organizing the collection thematically,  and titled it An Elephant That Walks on Alphabetical Feet, a line from his poem “Paperback Dreams.”

As I continue my research for the biography and contact people who knew Manazar, such as yourself, it keeps me motivated to continue this project.  I’ve met many wonderful writers, poets, and artists he’s brought to my doorstep.  At a time when my world was falling apart and I was devastated at the ending of a 20-year marriage, Manazar was there guiding me, helping me to move forward into a new writerly life, and for this, I am grateful.

  

Review: Brave Hearts by Carolyn Hart

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Brave Hearts, Carolyn Hart.  Seventh Street Books, August 2013 (Amherst, NY).  Paperback: $13.95 ISBN 978-1-61614-797-6.  E-book: $9.99.  ISBN 978-61614-798-3.  267 pages.  Originally published in 1987.

Carolyn Hart says that her suspense novels are about courage, and we do, indeed, witness the main characters, Catharine Cavanaugh and Jack Maguire, summoning their courage in wretched wartime conditions, first during the London blitz; then in Manilla when the Japanese took control after bombing Pearl Harbor; and then on Mindanao, another island in the Philippines, where they, Catherine’s husband, Spencer, and a few other Americans took refuge in the mountains to escape the Japanese.

Most interesting to me was the emotional transformation that Catharine makes from a loveless marriage and ongoing grief for her baby son, to a new love that, in the beginning, is hard for her to trust but ends by helping her to endure privation and terror that would cause most of us to flee for our lives.  

When we look back sometimes at what we ourselves survived to emerge whole again, and think back in history to harsh and cruel conditions that human beings have managed to live through, we marvel at the resilience of the human spirit.  It is very manifest here.

The secret for Catharine and maybe for all of us getting through especially rough times is human love.  I remember reading the psychiatrist Victor Frankel’s Man’s Search for Meaning, when I was young.  He lived through several Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz and he attributes  his survival to his love for his wife, which he kept alive in his mind’s eye.

Spencer Cavanaugh, an American diplomat, is preoccupied with his career, which Catharine’s inherited wealth and her support with entertaining, have helped.  Now, in late 1941, he is sent to the Philippines to rescue the gold there.  He must take Catharine because the Philippine government needs to believe that the Americans aren’t worried about a Japanese invasion.  Spencer also loves outside his marriage, but his career and the gold he’s responsible for trump love.

For Catharine and Jack, love and being together trump everything else.  Catharine doesn’t love Spencer, but she feels responsible to help him, and this is hard on Jack.  Eventually she has to choose.  The harrowing wartime experience, plus Jack’s courage, ingenuity, and love hang in the balance until she decides.

I have enjoyed all three of Hart’s World War II novels: Escape from Paris (see blog for June 8) also re-issued earlier this year from Seventh Street, and Letter from Home (2003) (see blog for May 25, 2013).  Carolyn and I were both children in those war years (1941-45).  In a way that war shaped the rest of the century.  Its weapons, brutality, and its fights for preserving home, love, and peace are still with us.  Many countries in the world have since then known terrible wars and human suffering on a grand scale.


It’s bracing to be reminded of what human beings have managed to do to live and outwit dangerous foes and to keep love and hope alive.  That story never grows old, and we need it as much today as at any time in human history.

***

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Carolyn Hart is the author of 50 novels. Her 50th new novel - DEAD, WHITE AND BLUE, 23rd in the Death on Demand series – was published in May 2013. 

Recent titles include DEATH COMES SILENTLY, 22nd in the Death on Demand series. Forthcoming in October 2013 will be GHOST GONE WILD, 4th in a series featuring the late Bailey Ruth Raeburn, an impetuous red-headed ghost who returns to earth to help someone in trouble. 

LETTER FROM HOME, a stand alone novel set in Oklahoma, was published by Berkley in 2003. Gretchen Gilman is 13 in the summer of 1944 and working on the small town newspaper. Murder occurs on the street where she lives, changing her life forever. LETTER FROM HOME was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers at Oklahoma State University Tulsa. Letter from Home won the Agatha for Best Mystery Novel of 2003 and was a New York Times notable book. 

Hart was one of ten mystery authors featured at the National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington D.C. in 2003 and again in 2007. In March 2004 she received the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. She has twice won the annual Oklahoma Book Award for best novel. In April 2004 she spoke at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. on mysteries in American culture. She received the Ridley Pearson Award at Murder in Grove, Boise, Idaho, in 2005 for significant contributions to the mystery field. She has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Malice Domestic and the Amelia Award in May 2013. 

Hart is a native of Oklahoma City, a Phi Beta Kappa journalism graduate of the University of Oklahoma, and a former president of Sisters in Crime. She is also a member of Authors Guild, Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, the International Crime Writers Association, the International Thrillers Association, and the American Crime Writers League. She taught professional writing in the University of Oklahoma School of Journalism from 1982-85. She is the author of 50 mysteries, winner of three Agatha Awards for Best Novel, two Anthonys and two Macavitys. 

       

The Two Great Issues of Our 20th Century

Can you find the monarch (black and yellow) butterfly?

***

THE TWO GREAT ISSUES OF THE 21ST CENTURY

Some years ago it became clear to me that the two issues we must resolve in these times, if we are to survive as a human race, are: (1) understanding and accepting all other human beings on our planet.

It means welcoming diversity, changing hatred to love.  Then (2): taking care of our earth’s environment.  We must stop poisoning, deliberately, or through carelessness, our air, water, and earth, or we die.  Call it climate change or what you will.  We are ourselves, by our polluting habits, destroying the earth, our human home, making it harder every year to grow food, be healthy, live without fear of violent storms, lack of water, inadequate protection from whimsical heat waves and devastating cold.

In the books I have written and am now publishing, all of them, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, you will find these themes, these concerns.  Beaver Soul (now due out early September) is about discovering that the Cold war enemies I never questioned as a child, are human beings.  The first Russian I met in 1989, Mayor Korobov, so impressed me in our five-minute conversation through an interpreter, that I later told everyone I met: “The Russians are friendly!”

In the early 90s I made several trips to Russia, 1990, 92, and 95, and I hosted Russian writers here in 1992 and 93.  Beaver Soul records my early experiences, discovering new, dear friends in Russia.

Farm Fresh and Fatal takes up the issue of genetically modified seeds (GMO).  At the time I wrote it, I was only beginning to learn how scary food grown the GMO way was for human consumption. The seeds have been modified two main ways: (1) to protect the plant against weeds so the farmer can spray Roundup (weed-killer) and it won’t hurt the plant.  Then (2) to protect the plant from insects, the seeds are modified so that insects that eat the plants develop leaks in their stomachs and die.  This means, for human beings, that the GMO food we eat carries traces of Roundup and also can cause our stomachs to leak undigested food particles.  This sets off allergies.  Most corn, soy, sugar (from sugar beets), wheat, and rape (which gives us canola oil) is grown from GMO seeds.  90% of North Carolina’s crops are GMO.  The only completely “safe” food is now that which is grown organically.  

Furthermore, our local electric companies (Duke Power now owns all of them) and the local, largely rural co-ops which get their electricity from Duke) use Roundup under power lines to kill young trees and other vegetation.  This poison goes into our groundwater, and it affects pollinators.  Honey bees themselves don’t die when they visit flowers that have been sprayed with Roundup, but they take the poison back to their hives, and it gets into the honeycomb and soon the bees abandon their hives, and not in the usual way, with a new queen, so more honey bees are lost.  They aren’t our only pollinator, but they’re a main one.

Last time Roundup was sprayed across the road from me, I noticed fewer bees and pollinators in my flower garden.  I wrote to Central Electric Membership Corp complaining. No answer.  Recently I learned I could get no-spray signs from them to erect across from my house, so I went to their headquarters in Sanford and signed a paper and got two signs to put up.  Right now my backyard flower garden is full of honey bees, bumble bees, miscellaneous wasps, butterflies, and even hummingbirds.  I don’t want to lose them.  My vegetables and fruit trees need all possible pollinators.

We all need to work on taking care of our earth and its people.  I have a bumper sticker on my truck: Celebrate Diversity.  Let’s do it.  No time like the present to begin, especially since our now Republican-dominated legislature in N.C. is going the wrong way in these already difficult times, repealing good environmental legislation, and working toward fracking, an environmental disaster for our state, as well as attacking voting rights, unemployment, Medicaid–an all-out attack against poor people, and especially against African Americans.  It will take determination, courage, and ingenuity to get us into a healthy, safe twenty-first century, and I hope my books help.  That’s why I wrote them.

Beaver Soul will be available in early September.  To buy ahead and have it shipped: $14.50 (includes tax) to Judy Hogan, PO Box 253, Moncure, NC 27559-0253; to buy and pick up: $12.

Farm Fresh and Fatal will also be available for pre-sales in September (Oct 1 is pub date): to buy ahead and have it shipped: $20 (includes tax); to pick up,$17.

Review: Skulduggery by Carolyn Hart

Skulduggery.  Carolyn Hart.  With a new introduction by Carolyn Hart.  Seventh Street Books, Amherst, NY. November 2012. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61614-706-8, $13.95.  E-book: ISBN: 978-61614-707-5. $9.99.  176 pages.

Here’s a treat for mystery lovers: the earlier stand-alone mysteries and romantic suspense novels by Carolyn Hart.  Skulduggery was originally published in 1984, one of ten books that Carolyn said had seemed to disappear into a black hole before she began to win prizes for her Annie and Max Darling series set on a island off the coast of South Carolina.  Five Star brought out many of the early ones around 2000, and now Seventh Street Books is bringing some of them out through their Carolyn Hart Classics series.

Here is what Carolyn says about the difference between a mystery and suspense in her introduction to Skulduggery:  

***

I feel fortunate over the course of a long career to have written traditional mysteries, suspense, and romantic suspense. In recent years, my focus has been the traditional mystery but I recall writing scenes of derring-do with great pleasure. The traditional mystery celebrates goodness; the suspense novel celebrates courage.

What affords suspense? Tales of war, adventure, and, always dear to me, the hunt for treasure. I have always been fascinated by the idea of treasure. Treasure figures in a number of my books. A very particular kind of missing treasure inspired Skulduggery, the long lost Peking Man bones that disappeared in the early years of WWII and may have reappeared briefly in New York in the 1970s.

***

I have now read several of these early books, and I highly recommend them.  What did I especially love about this book?  I liked learning about the real situation in Chinatown in San Francisco in the 1980s.  The problems of the poor, many of them elderly, stirred my compassion, and I liked seeing compassion in the main characters as they encountered Chinese people in desperate straits.  I also liked the difficult decision the heroine, Ellen Christie, an anthropologist working for a San Francisco museum, had to make between following her intuitive grasp of the situation she was in versus turning away and choosing the conventional, “safe” way of putting her career first.

A young Chinese man, Jimmy Lee, follows Ellen and persuades her to come with him to see an old skull.  It turns out that she is sure, intuitively, that it’s the missing Peking man’s skull, the remains of which were found in China near Peking not long before World War II began, and then the Japanese invaded China in 1941, and these very ancient bones (Sinanthropus Pekinensis, the Chinese man from Peking) appeared to be lost after World War II was over.  There were several theories as to how they could still exist and possibly be in the U.S.

What creates the suspense is that someone in Chinatown learns about the bones Jimmy is trying to sell and their extreme monetary value.  This man sends his thugs to find them.  Both Jimmy and Ellen are at risk, but Ellen lets go much of her cautious, predictable lifestyle up to that point and not only trusts Jimmy and his brother, Dan, but joins them as they try to outwit this man who’s willing to kill to get to the bones.

The book also is a wonderful model for a woman who uses all her wits and resources to outwit a dangerous enemy.  For those who, as I do, like a little romance in their suspense novels, you will find that present, too.

I highly recommend this powerful book.  

***

Carolyn Hart is the author of 50 novels. Her 50th novel - DEAD, WHITE AND BLUE, 23rd in the Death on Demand series – was published in May. 

Recent titles include DEATH COMES SILENTLY, 22nd in the Death on Demand series. Forthcoming in October 2013 will be GHOST GONE WILD, 4th in a series featuring the late Bailey Ruth Raeburn, an impetuous red-headed ghost who returns to earth to help someone in trouble. 

LETTER FROM HOME, a stand alone novel set in Oklahoma, was published by Berkley in 2003. Gretchen Gilman is 13 in the summer of 1944 and working on the small town newspaper. Murder occurs on the street where she lives, changing her life forever. LETTER FROM HOME was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers at Oklahoma State University Tulsa. Letter from Home won the Agatha for Best Mystery Novel of 2003 and was a New York Times notable book. 

Hart was one of ten mystery authors featured at the National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington D.C. in 2003 and again in 2007. In March 2004 she received the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. She has twice won the annual Oklahoma Book Award for best novel. In April 2004 she spoke at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. on mysteries in American culture. She received the Ridley Pearson Award at Murder in Grove, Boise, Idaho, in 2005 for significant contributions to the mystery field. She has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Malice Domestic in 2007 and the Amelia Award in May 2013. 

Hart is a native of Oklahoma City, a Phi Beta Kappa journalism graduate of the University of Oklahoma, and a former president of Sisters in Crime. She is also a member of Authors Guild, Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, the International Crime Writers Association, the International Thrillers Association, and the American Crime Writers League. She taught professional writing in the University of Oklahoma School of Journalism from 1982-85. She is the author of 50 mysteries, winner of three Agatha Awards for Best Novel, two Anthonys and two Macavitys. 

       

Re-Learning To Be Intrepid

Judy's hens last winter, near their coop.  Photo: John Ewing.

***

I turned seventy-six the end of May, and for some months–a year or so–I’ve been aware of another aspect of aging besides forgetting names and words (which eventually float back up from the recesses of memory) and having to do various exercises for the sake of my lower back, my balance (standing on one foot), and my knees, circulation, and general health (walking).  What’s new is a tendency to be less brave, less intrepid, more vulnerable, less confident that I can do things I’ve always done without giving it a moment’s thought.

Sometimes it’s traveling.  Or it can be standing on a chair to change a lightbulb (will I fall off?) or simply coping with the nitty gritty problems that come along to plague mortals and test their flexibility and resilience.  The back door gets stuck in the closed position. The hens have discovered a way to get over their flexible string fence but not how to get back.  At first it was only two or three hens doing this and laying their eggs hither and thither in the orchard. 

Then one morning this past week, I found only six hens in the coop instead of thirteen (two were already committed to orchard living).  

The next morning when I went to feed the orchard hens, here came the missing nine.  I’ve stopped chasing them to get them back.  I don’t want to fall on my face.  I do check the fence for holes but no problems there.  I did not want to cope with this.  I took stock.

They haven’t bothered the blueberries, covered by bird netting, though they had laid some eggs under the blueberry bushes, sneaking in under the netting.  They may well help themselves to the figs on the lower branches that touch the ground.  They love figs.  So far no predators (six last year–a raccoon and five possums had come over the outer chainlink fence).  I think Robert’s goats, eating the weeds out behind the orchard have kept the predators off.  One of my chicken workshop participants, Lisa, suggested that goats nearby would do it, and so it has.

So I said to myself, what the hell, and I let down the flexible fence, laid it on the ground for about fifteen feet, so the hens could easily get into and out of the orchard, return to the coop to lay eggs, and if they wanted to roost in the trees, why not?  I’m sure it’s cooler.

They’re laying better than in many weeks and now all the eggs are in the coop nests.  They’re obviously happy, exploring every niche and corner of the orchard, finding bugs, eating grass and weeds, and some do roost in the trees as well as some in the coop.  So I solved that one.

In fact, I begin to see a pattern.  I was talking to my friend Gene about it.  He works with elderly people through Hospice, visiting them in their homes, especially when they live alone.  He says the elderly often find it harder to deal with these little unexpected problems that come up, that are part of living, and they tend to withdraw into themselves.  I didn’t want to do that.

I admitted that these surprise problems bother me, too, more than once.  I had several slow drains, and I know that I can use my plunger and get them unclogged, yet I postponed it from day to day, but it was also depressing me, as the chicken problem had been, too.  I don’t want to get despondent because some things that I did easily before are now harder.  I either have to muster more courage and/or grit and do them myself or ask someone to help.

I finally did solve the hen problem.  It’s a risk, but life for me, and for the hens, is risk.  I can live with their eating a few figs.  If they get eaten by a predator, I’ll have to rethink the situation. All six predators last year were caught in the hav-a-hart, and only one hen was killed.  I went to work and cleared the drains.  

By asking on our local Chatham Chatlist, I found a wonderful handyman named Jim Nitsch to fix the back door locks.  I had to be patient while he finished a big job and use my front door to go to the backyard, but he was cheerful, friendly, inventive, gave me choices depending on how much money I wanted to spend and did everything quickly and for a reasonable price.  

I asked a friend to put in the new lightbulb.  She thought it wise not to stand on chairs to change bulbs if my balance wasn’t perfect. My exercises help, but I sometimes lose my balance, though I haven’t fallen since I started the exercises.

Now I feel better about these dips my mind takes into feeling vulnerable or inadequate.  I simply have to go ahead (the sooner, the better) and do what needs doing.  Then I feel good, and I re-experience my own competence and courage.  Those qualities are still there in me, but I need to use them, not sit around stewing.  The sooner I act, the sooner those vague feelings of inadequacy will pass.  They do pass.


I want to live a long time, and something tells me life is going to get harder for Planet Earth-dwellers, given climate change and some other things already on our horizon.  I do want to live and write as long as I can, so I shall have to be intrepid and tough, canny and inventive, keep my close ties to others, ask help when I need it but challenge myself to solve clogged drains, chicken dilemmas, balance problems, and the ordinary round of life’s interruptions. 

Some of those surprises may well lead to more happiness than I can now imagine.  You never know.

***

Hens in winter, near coop, bare fig trees in orchard behind them. Photo also by John Ewing.

Farm Fresh and Fatal Pre-Sales

Cover image

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FARM FRESH AND FATAL, the second Penny Weaver traditional mystery novel by Judy Hogan

Publication date: October 1, 2013.  Pre-sales now!  See below.

Trade paperback: 978-0-9895804-0-3 $15.95
Ebook: 978-0-9895804-1-0 $2.99

When Penny Weaver joins the new Riverdell Farmers’ Market to represent their neighborhood garden, squabbles break out among the farmers about their places.  The county poultry agent tries to sort them out before Nora, the market manager, arrives, infuriating her.  Penny discovers that there may have been racism behind her friend Sammie’s almost not being accepted to sell her flower bouquets.  After the third market, the poultry agent is found dead of food poisoning, apparently from drinking the punch provided by Nora.  That and her fights with him cause her to be arrested.  Meantime Penny is skeptical of her daughter’s new sponging boyfriend, and her husband Kenneth confesses to being homesick for Wales.

Penny and Sammie work to uncover the real poisoner and to release Nora.  Derek, the lead detective and Sammie’s husband, wants them to stay out of it.  The poultry agent was unpopular with the quirky farmers, with the exception of the genetically modified seeds man and the baker/jelly maker.  Penny and Sammie discover that the poison was black nightshade, but which farmer grows it and who put it in the poultry agent’s punch?  The state ag department threatens to close the market if the case isn’t solved. 

Praise for Farm Fresh and Fatal:

Farm Fresh and Fatal features an appealing protagonist, an intriguing background, and well-realized characters.  Readers will enjoy these characters and empathize with their successes and failures.  In the tradition of Margaret Maron.  –Carolyn Hart, author of Dead, White, and Blue.

In Farm Fresh and Fatal Hogan serves up a complex dish that is flavored with community and family drama.  It is spiced with intrigue, finished with mystery and delivered right off the vine.
–Lyle Estill, President, Piedmont Biofuels and author of Small is Possible

Judy Hogan delivers again in her fearless Farm Fresh and Fatal.  Through a story built on a strong foundation of research she tackles difficult issues, all the while giving us a first-rate read.  And that authentic voice her readers have come to expect shines on every page.  
--Lane Stone, author, Tiara Investigations Mystery series.
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Judy notes that she likes to take up social issues in her mysteries, and this one takes up genetically modified foods.  She knows even more now about how dangerous they are in our food supply, using herbicides like Roundup and pesticides built into the seeds.  The only safe food now seems to be organically grown.  

Opening page:

Monday Morning, April 1. A fight broke out during the second market, but the opening day of the first farmers’ market in Riverdell went relatively smoothly. The third market was when the murder occurred. 

Penny and Kenneth were searching madly for snails in the lettuce when Nora Fisher, their new market’s manager, drove her yellow pickup in and parked near their garage apartment. “You go talk to her,” Kenneth said. “I’ll keep checking the romaine. The red lettuce was the hardest. All those curlicues.” He was moving slowly on hands and knees down the rows they’d cultivated with the rototiller only the night before. 

When Penny caught up with her, Nora was out of her truck and standing at the chain link fence that kept their neighbor Leroy’s chickens in the orchard. “These White Rocks yours, too, doll?” Nora wore faded blue bib overalls over a man’s white shirt rolled up at the sleeves. Her closely cropped curly brown hair gleamed in the sun. 

“Hi, Nora. Welcome to Greenscape. The chickens are Leroy’s, but he’s part of our operation. He has to work today. Mostly he has them like this, out in the orchard, to pick bugs and fertilize the peaches and apples.” 

“How exactly does it all work? Andy lives next door?” 

“Yes, he got us started when he became Shagbark’s first sustainable ag agent about three years ago.” She pointed to where she and Kenneth had been working. “Our vegetable garden takes up most of his and Jan’s backyard.” 

“Who’s the guy working in the lettuce?” 

“My husband Kenneth.” 

***

To pre-order: $17 to pick up signed copy (includes tax) to Judy Hogan, PO Box 253, Moncure, NC 27559-0253. $20 to have signed copy shipped.  Shipping before October 1, hopefully.  For more info: call 919-545-9932 or judyhogan@mindspring.com

Judy Hogan bio:

Judy Hogan helped found and was first president of the N.C. Writers’ Network (1983-7), as well as founding Carolina Wren Press (1976-91) and co-editing Hyperion Poetry Journal (1970-81).  She has published five other poetry books and two prose works with small presses.  She has taught creative writing since 1974. Her first mystery, Killer Frost, finaled in St. Martin’s Malice Domestic contest, appearing from Mainly Murder Press in 2012. Farm Fresh and Fatal is the second novel in her Penny Weaver series.  She will be reading throughout the Triangle area from her two new books this fall.  She farms and writes in Moncure, N.C.

web:  judyhogan.home.mindspring.com

judyhogan at mindspring.com

Wisdom Inside

 Waterfall photo by Richard Hayes.  Sometimes we have to live with inner waterfalls, of pain, worries, fear, or love, bounty, good fortune.  Any of these can throw us off track.  The poem below written seven years ago comforts me now, but I don't feel very wise at the moment.  I hope to be like that fishing heron, live with my inner waterfalls and keep my eye out for fish.

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GOLD INSIDE 15

September 17, 2006

I used to think of myself as resting on a pivot.

When something disturbed me, I leaned away

from my center; when I made peace, I returned

to resting easily on this inside pivot.  I also

described this experience of inner certainty

and balance as like standing on a shelf of rock.

From that deep place inside me any turmoil in

my inner world settled.  I could see what I felt

and knew what I needed to do.  But I don’t

remember having, until recently, this feeling of

repose, of my whole self being at rest, yes, on

a pivot, but less inclined to motion than what

rests on a pivot is.  Closer may be Plato’s metaphor

for justice in the state.  He compared it to the body

where every part is carrying out its work and is in

harmony with all the other parts.  It’s like that

but quieter.  All that I am–body, soul, feelings, mind–

rests like the natural world outside the window rests.  

I am inside the peace I feel; the harmony of my 

parts is what I’m living.  I do struggle, I have, I will.

This state comes as a reward for the struggle, for

the living out of what I know I need to do.  What

I do each day–and often it is hard for me to do–

makes possible this enjoyment, so quiet I can barely

feel it, so without motion, that it’s hard to say it’s

an emotion.  It is serenity, as in the prayer about

asking for the courage to change what can be

changed, the strength to accept what can’t, and

the wisdom to know the difference.  I am not that

wise yet, but something in me holds this wisdom

in its heart of hearts and sends me moments like

this, when I, as a being, am still, clear, peaceful,

at rest, serene at that level where a fountain rises,

illogical, miraculous, to water every parched place

in my soul, quiet every doubt, calm every worry.

The unrest will return, the striving to change

what can be changed.  I will lean far to one side

on the pivot, and have to take the shelf of rock

for an assumption I can’t prove.  But when an hour

arrives to give me rest like this, I’ll know that I now 

am who I need to be, the person my growing pains 

urged me to become, the full-fledged woman:

human, loving, wise.  

Judy Hogan