The Back To School Feeling Never Ends
Fall Thoughts It’s cliché but the September light just gets me every time. And this feeling of renewal. Fresh pencils, fresh pages. The metaphoric made real. I often dreaded school […]
Fall Thoughts It’s cliché but the September light just gets me every time. And this feeling of renewal. Fresh pencils, fresh pages. The metaphoric made real. I often dreaded school […]
The organization I belonged to during my teenage years had many names and many faces and continues to operate thirty years later. In Redding California, the public face of the organization was […]
First there was the silence, The years and years of silence. Then slowly there were a few stories. I let it slip that my entire alternative school use to go skinny dipping together. That I used to be some kind of radical. That I was writing a book. Then finally there was the book. Red Star Tattoo. And now, as though to make up for those years of silence there are so many conversations. Conversations about secrets and story telling, revolution and resilience, getting through and moving on.
Books had a prominent but complicated place on my mother’s side of the family. Books gave you status, proof that you were not ignorant. I always got the impression that part of the reason my grandfather chose to become a preacher like his father was because it was as close as he would get to being able to keep studying after high school. He was at various times a preacher and a travelling encyclopaedia salesman. But growing up my mother remembers being yelled at for reading by her mother, who felt she was being lazy. Books were an escape and that was both something to be desired or feared, depending on who you were.
I saw this on my walk today and thought about you. You were the blonde woman with the radiant smile at the writer’s retreat. Your smile, your hair, they were full and sweet and from your hand-knit sweater I can tell you are the kind of woman who brings people homemade bread and vegetables from your garden. It is that kind of place, this little island, and you are that kind of woman.
Thank you to all my sweet friends who have sent me photos of the book out in the world! Here are a few although I think there are still a few […]
The Writer’s Festival Incite series is a really amazing and free series of readings happening twice a month at the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library. I was lucky […]
It is still a little strange to see a childhood photograph sitting on a bookstore shelf. Sometimes I look at the little face on the cover of my book and I […]
The book launch party was so much fun! Many many thanks to the friends and family who sold books, tended bar and sang their little hearts out!