Will be posting at lauramchaleholland.com

Sorry for the inconvenience; I’ll be posting to www.lauramchaleholland.com from now on. Hope to hear from you there.

 

Shollenberger, a springtime delight

If you haven’t been to Shollengerber Park lately, you must go—and soon. While the ducklings paddle behind their mums. While Canadian geese honk and preen. While swans guard their cignets, barely visible through the reeds, and red-winged blackbirds burst into the sky like thoroughbreds out of the gate. You must go. Other season have their own beauty, when the sky is brooding and bleak or the land is parched and brown. But nothing compares to the birdsong and bustle of springtime with so many species carrying on as they’ve done for centuries. Even the beetles in the grass cavort like clowns. To walk through it, to listen and watch as the sun shines and the water ripples gently in the breeze is one of the great delights of the North Bay. And it’s free. You must go.

The entrance to the park is at Cader Lane just off of South McDowell in Petaluma. For more information about the park, see an article I wrote for examiner.com, Shollenberger Park, a haven for wildlife and people.

 

Celebrating the equinox

It’s the vernal equinox tomorrow, when night and day are approximately equal in length. I like the balance of that. And I like knowing it’s something ancestors of many ancient tribes now disbursed throughout the world, who never imagined such a thing as a blog, noted and celebrated well. I’m going to have coffee with Claire Blotter while listening to her read a few poems while looking out over the glistening San Francisco Bay. A good way to celebrate.

 

Gripped by Touch of Magenta

Linda Loveland Reid’s first novel, Touch of Magenta, is an ambitious work that tells two interweaving stories. Pegeen’s, which is set in motion in 1895 by a forbidden inter-racial love, and Corri’s, whose mother’s death in 1971 tilts the course of an unsettled life.

I found Pegeen’s journey spellbinding and well rendered, while Corri’s machinations annoyed me. And at 38, Corri seemed more like the baby boomers, who were just coming of age in that era, than peers in her own generation. But Pegeen’s fortitude in the face of multiple losses, and the way Reid was able to deftly set the stage in Gold Rush-era California and other locales, more than compensated for what I perceive to be incongruities in Corri’s character. Plus, where would we be if all fictional characters were sympathetic—can you imagine a good-natured Scarlet O’Hara?

I was moved by this book and cared about what was happening as the stories unfolded and converged. I’d classify Touch of Magenta as a satisfying read. If you decide to purchase the book, though, be sure to get the second edition, which improves upon the first.

Reid, who is also a theater director and figurative painter, is someone to watch. She’s not imitating anyone else; she trusts her instincts and experiments with language to paint scenes with words and create dialogue that is crisp and genuine. I look forward to reading her next book.

Note: I know Linda Loveland Reid slightly. We both belong to Redwood Writers, a branch of the California Writer’s Club. But the branch has about 140 members, and Linda and I have probably spoken all of three times, so I did not feel obligated to plug her book.

 

Absent from my own blog

I hadn’t realized how long it had been since I’ve posted in this blog. I was scattered, lacking focus, trying to do too many things at once (how many of us are prone to that in today’s face-paced, tempting world where so many intriguing things open up to us with just a few clicks at the computer?) so I’ve needed to regroup. I’m still in the process of sorting out commitments, but maybe instead of being silent, I’ll share the regrouping process, messy as it may be. One thing I’m dropping is writing for examiner.com. It has a built-in audience, but it’s not the right fit for me. I often figure out if something is right for me by trying it out, but when it comes to online publications or ventures, jumping in to test the waters and then out if it doesn’t click for you might not be the right way to go because there’s this digital start-stop trail you leave behind. I think the thing is to pick a way to make connections online and stick with it to build momentum. Some of us are better at that than others, obviously.

 

Good news

Two bits of good news:

My story “Invasion” is featured today at Every Day Fiction, www.everydayfiction.com.

I’ve passed the 50,000 word count for Nanowrimo 2009. Whew!

 

 

Story accepted by Every Day Fiction

I received an email from the editors at Every Day Fiction informing me that my short story Invasion will be featured on the site, www.everydayfiction.com, and sent to subscribers on Wed., Nov. 18. People can rate stories on a scale of 1 to 5 and make comments, too. E-mail subscriptions are free.

 

Beside suicide’s door: A guest blog

Lynn Henriksen invited me to do a guest blog for her TellTale Souls blog. She posted it today at http://telltalesouls.com/blog/. Much of Lynn’s work centers on collecting stories about the mother/daughter relationship. And through her workshops (some of which are done in collaboration with Kate Farrell), she succeeds in creating a very safe, supportive place for daughters to explore their memories and write keepsake memoirs about their mothers. She has also collected a number of such stories for a book, which her agent is shopping to publishers now. So, when writing the guest blog, my thoughts naturally drifted toward my mother, who, unfortunately, committed suicide when I was very young.

Lynn’s blog, which she updated frequently, also has book reviews, contests and links to interesting resources.

 

Shollenberger Park, such a fine place to go

Petaluma’s Shollenberger Park, opened in 1995, has long been a popular spot for nature lovers. And it continues to grow more enticing. An adjoining trail cut along Alman Marsh and stretching to Petaluma’s Marina was added in 2003; the Petaluma Marsh trails were opened in the summer of 2009, adding length and variety to a hike through this birder’s paradise.

With the addition of the Petaluma Marsh trails, which run around a state-of-the-art recycled water project, the area now comprises 250 acres of wetlands. And in this peaceful place, where dogs on leash are welcome, there is much to appreciate.

The wildlife is ever changing. All manner of birds—150 species, according to the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, are the stars here. Depending on the season, you might see thousands of Canadian geese waddling in and out of the water or bulrushes afire with red winged blackbirds. The variety is stunning: ducks, hawks, doves, hummingbirds, grebes, terns, plovers and sandpipers—the list goes on. Mammals such as jack rabbits, pocket gophers and river otters also thrive in this environment.

I’ve made a modest slide show to accompany this article that you can find at www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7978-Sonoma-County-Examiner~y2009m10d6-Shollenberger-Park-a-haven-for-wildlife-and-people.

 

A week of rich reading

To escape from my own writing, I’ve done an extraordinary amount of reading lately. And the last three books to keep me up when I should have been sleeping were “The Space Between Us” by Thrity Umrigar, “The Weight of Silence” by Heather Gudenkauf and “Girl in the Mirror” by Kate Farrell. They first two were “New York Times” best sellers put out by big publishing houses; the third was self-published by the author through Unlimited Publishing.

All three books address in different ways the plight of women in relationships with men who are physically abusive. I didn’t seek out this theme; it seems to have found me.

The first two books are novels that deftly pull you into their fictional worlds, illuminating the characters and the forces shaping their environments and decisions. Umrigar’s is especially well written with complex, conflicted characters realized so fully I found myself loving and hating them equally. Here’s a taste from the book’s first chapter. The setting is a hut in a Bombay slum (it’s back when the city was called Bombay), and Bhima is talking to her granddaughter, Maya:

“So what will you do all day today?”

Maya shrugs

The shrug infuriates Bhima. “Oh, that’s right, memsahib is no longer going to college, I forgot,” she says, addressing the walls. “No, now she will just sit around like a queen all day, feeding herself and her—her bastard baby, while her poor grandmother slaves in someone’s home. All so that she can feed the demon that’s growing in her granddaughter’s belly.”

If it’s blood she wanted, she has it. Maya moans as she pulls herself up from the floor and moves to the farthest corner of the small room She leans lightly on the tin wall, her hands around her belly, and sobs to herself.

Bhima wants to take the sobbing girl to her bosom, to hold and caress her the way she used to when Maya was a child, to forgive her and to ask for her forgiveness. But she can’t. If it were just anger that she was feeling, she could’ve scaled that wall and reached out to her grandchild. But the anger is only the beginning of it. Behind he anger is fear, fear as endless and vast and gray as the Arabian Sea, fear for this stupid, innocent, pregnant girl who stands sobbing before her, and for this unborn baby who will come into the world to a mother who is a child herself and to a grandmother who is old and tired to her very bones …

Umrigar’s is one of those books that will stay with me for a long time, one I might hesitate to loan for fear of not getting it back. Gudenkauf’s probably not so much, though I did enjoy reading it. It alternates point of view chapter to chapter, using at least six different points of view, which didn’t quite work for me. I found some voices to be more believable than others, and when I wasn’t believing the voice, I wasn’t absorbed in the world. It was a nail-biter of a story, though, dealing with sobering issues of addiction, violence, betrayal and forgiveness.

Farrell’s book is a different sort of work. It tells a modern story, shaped around “Psyche and Eros,” an ancient myth which some jungian analysts have said provides a pattern for feminine development. A novella written especially for teenage girls, the book was conceived as a teaching tool to help adolescent women apply wisdom from the myth to their own situations. The central character, Sylvie, is being stalked by her violent boyfriend, and she escapes to her godmother’s house in the country, where, among other kinds of support, her godmother tells her the story of Psyche.

A storyteller and librarian in addition to an author, Farrell has an ambitious mission: she wants to empower young women to love themselves and not tolerate anything approaching violence against them. She intends to use the book in workshops with adolescents and teach other workshop leaders to do the same. I could envision her also writing an accompanying workbook that would help her charges reflect upon the layers of meaning in both the myth and the modern story Farrell created to frame it.

It’s been quite a week of reading. Bravo to all three authors who, I believe, have succeeded, each on her own terms.