Memoirous

Outside my French doors a light snow is falling, dusting the decks. The past few days have been gray, the skies leaden with nickel-colored clouds. Yet, I’m struck by the fact that I’m in nature, that I’m living this life. My here and now, despite the gray and gloom, includes red birds, the sounds of wind, dry leaves rustling, a disgruntled squirrel chirping. For so long I was closed off. I was in Chicago from the age of 23 until I left during the pandemic in 2020 I will be 65 this year. I never planned to be gone from nature that long. Chicago was supposed to be a one-summer commitment, a stop along the way, but at the end of my summer in 1982 I had to ask myself—Where is it I’m trying to get to, where am I going? I didn’t have a ready answer. I’d just graduated from Ohio University with a degree in secondary education—a career I wasn’t sure I really wanted to pursue. All I knew was this: I loved Jesus and I wanted to do good in the world. That’s how I ended up in Chicago at an inn...

In 2021 I took a course at Story Studio --the highly selective Novel in a Year with James Klise. One of  the workshoppers got a book contract and her new novel is due out this year. Good luck Maxine, Max, you hardly need luck, but fingers crossed for your writing path! PUBLICATION AUG 22, 2023 Cold Girls Eighteen-year-old Rory Quinn-Morelli doesn’t want to die; she wants refuge from reality for even a minute: the reality where she survived the car crash eight months ago, and her best friend, Liv, didn’t. Yet her exasperating mother won’t believe the Xanax incident was an accident, and her therapist is making it increasingly hard to maintain the detached, impenetrable “cold girl” façade she adopted from Liv. After she unintentionally reconnects with Liv’s parents, Rory must decide: will she keep Liv’s and her secrets inside, or will she finally allow herself to break? And if she breaks, what will she unearth amid the pieces? For publicity or ARC requests, please contact publicity@no...

I remember as a kid in the middle of the night suddenly deciding I wanted to lie down in an intersection of a busy road beneath a street light—just to see what would happen. This memory might need some context. I might have been out with friends doing stupid stuff. I wasn’t into drugs or drank. Nevertheless, we never ran out of dumb ideas. It might have been the randomness or a sense of power, of baiting fate that made me think lying down in a road was cool. It might have also played into my sensibility surrounding ruins, abandoned spaces. The sudden shift in a four-lane road now seemingly empty of traffic that called to me to occupy it. The feeling that the street lights still worked, still did their job despite the fact that whatever they were designed to do was not necessary at that moment in time. It was about time, this encapsulated “now”, an invitation to step inside. I took it. I can still recall the heat of the blacktop, the textured tarmac, the flashing colors of the s...

Not sure what is going on here . . . I’ve not had a sense of urgency with my writing for a few months. Perhaps, getting and losing an agent did something to my psyche. I’ve had several agents, now gone. Is it this feeling that I’m a loser? I really cannot point to a sales record and say I’m a good bet to anyone. But, always, in the past, I could safely attest, I’ll keep writing and producing and certainly something will stick. It has been my philosophy that the only thing that helps the current pain of not selling is to write the next book. I’ve been in a constant state of “writing the next book” for a while now. At the end of 2022 I did an assessment—what we all do, a looking back. On the homefront I’d managed to finally get my own place. This is after YEARS of communal living in small places. The fact that I now live in a Tiny House seems inevitable—but it wasn’t easy. And never once did it seem inevitable, a slam dunk, or even possible. The very idea that I’m sitting here in a...

In my last post I wrote about visiting the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art. At both I took in NEW exhibits. Of course, we ask ourselves: What is new? I’d venture to say it is art that speaks to us today and hopefully to those in the future. There’s nothing like a plague to drive people into the hands of God and into outpouring of their soul. I mean if you thought the end was near wouldn’t you want to express your innermost longings, desires—or to leave a message for the survivors? Kilroy was here . Medieval art is full of representations of the Black Death: corpses and skeletons. Along with interpretations of the Devil and demons. The macabre was a big draw. Like today: shock jocks pull in an audience and ratings. The church used such depictions to warn congregants against rough living and the vices. The seven deadly sins. Indeed, much of religion was a warning against instead of for living/life. Not a lot has changed. Fast forward to the worldwide p...

The first of the new year there is always so much hope. Then the days turn gloomy and dreary and the sweets are all gone. As it happened, I had four days off (slow season at bike shops) and my daughter didn’t need me to babysit, so I hopped a train to Chicago. I knew from living there that Chicago is just as dreary and gloomy, but the museums are mostly free. The visit was sandwiched with meeting friends at coffee shops and sitting for long hours chatting. Yesss!! I had so many conversations and meeting up with friends broken up by trips to area museums. There’s nothing quite like the slow feel of the Art Institute on a Monday winter afternoon. No one is in a hurry. There was no crowd around Hopper’s Nighthawks. The painting was just as lonely and isolated as the figures framed within. Surprisingly there were new additions to the galleries. I had the feeling that during the pandemic someone rooted around in the vaults and brought some new stuff to light. It appeared there were mo...

Readers of this blog, both of you, know that I’ve written in the past about tsunamis. There was something that drew me to the Christmas Day, Boxing Day event in the Indian Ocean those years ago—the sudden loss of life that resonated with the death of both my elderly parents and the subsequent opening of the will where I discovered I’d been disinherited. I was blindsided by the betrayal and greediness of my siblings. Just like those enveloped by waves, I was bowled over. I know the analogy is not the same. Those people died or at the very least were physically impacted. I was mentally and spiritually deluged. For me life has not been the same. Now I’m learning about rogue waves. A news headline at the BBC mentioned a passenger on a cruise ship bound for Antarctica had been swept overboard by a rogue wave. I had to investigate this phenomenon.   I’d first been alerted (no pun intended, maybe) to the idea by a post at a Facebook group about Old Chicago. Apparently in 1954 a ro...

I said I would try this year to put out some writing prompts. I’;ve been reading Peter Orner’s Still No Word From You, a collection of essays often inspired by books he’s reading, so in a fractured mirror or multi-layered memory where I’m prompted by something Orner’s written in response to something he’s reading: I give you—ticks. Again, a memory involving my father. I had a propensity to walk in the woods near our house (the woods was eventually plowed under for a highway bypass), and with all this walking I’d take a rest and lie down under the trees staring up at the sky or the underside of leaves. Later, at home in my bed after a shower trying to fall asleep, I might notice a lump behind my ear or attached to my skull. I’d go downstairs and there would be Dad reading by the light of a lamp or the glow of the TV—Hey, what’s this? I’d ask. A tick. This is before Lyme disease or the fear of catching anything from the bloodsucker. He’d get out his tweezers, maybe light a match ...

An Angel at My Table is an autobiography by New Zealand author Janet Frame and a film by Jane Champion released in 1990. The latter had a big effect on me. Maybe because of the scene where because of the anguish of her mental illness she’d submitted to have a lobotomy—which was stayed by news of a major literary prize for a collection of her short stories. For years Ms. Frame suffered from the misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. On the scale of personalities she was extremely shy and perhaps on the autism spectrum. She certainly had had a rough go if it growing up, losing two beloved sisters in two separate drowning accidents, as well as other disjointed and bitter family interactions. In the end, surviving all this, she turned into a prolific literary writer and was rumored to be on a list for the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature. What has stayed with me, at the end of the film, Frame emerges from a little trailer parked it would appear in someone’s driveway, perhaps a sibling’s or fri...

In the past two weeks I’ve had to explain to a librarian twice why I’m returning a ripped book. Jack just can’t get enough stories. He loves books to pieces. Literally, And it’s not just mischief or rampant vandalism—sometimes we’re right there in the room with him; he’s sitting on our lap—and that quick—he’s taken off the last page. He’s also to an age where he’s asking for us to read the same book over and over. Over and over. Again and again. It’s a board book, thus not a lot of pages. Even so, the idea of reading the same 10 pages for 15 minutes is hard to stomach. It’s like Ground Hog Day for toddlers; he loves it. Because mostly his reaction is also on repeat. At the end of the train book where it drives off the page: GONE! He responds bye bye. Each time. I come to anticipate not just the words but the feeling of loss, the end of the story. And his reaction. And gear up, to do it all over again. Freight Train by Donald Crews

As a kid I remember one time my father taking me someplace in the car—except, for whatever reason, we both lost track of the bigger picture, and he ended up just driving while I was lost in thought looking out the window. At some point I must’ve “woke up” and said, Where are we going? Dad didn’t know. We were miles past the library or the YMCA, places he often dropped me off. It was a bit humbling, funny, but also poignant: spending that much time together where everything felt okay.