Bookstores
January 30, 2013 § Leave a comment
Dear readers,
At the risk of continuing shameless self-promotion, I’m wondering if any of you have favorite independent bookstores you’d like to tell me about?
I’m trying to get my act together in terms of marketing my book, since I’ve been fairly lackadaisical about it up till now – admittedly, because it makes me feel silly to promote myself. But you know? It’s not about me. It’s about the story, which in many ways isn’t even solely mine. Because the story is the product of so many life experiences that the world generously offered me, so many people I came into contact with, the space to daydream throughout my childhood, and the inspiration and creative nudges of so many other writers and their books.
There are lots more readers our there that I’d like to have access to this story. So I need to get over myself and figure out how to get this book in their hands. Girls who love horses have just gotta read this story.
So. As I explore more venues, what bookstores would you like me to know about? Could you provide me with the name and either the web address or street address so I can send them a reader’s copy? I’d be grateful!
I’m working on an author website right now – another thing I’ve shyly hung back from. I’ve got quite a bit of fine-tuning to do, and I need some fancy pictures of myself (and maybe some horses?), but keep checking back to get the link in a few weeks.
Other than that – what have you been reading lately? I’ve been alternating between Michael Pollan’s Second Nature and Holley Bishop’s Robbing the Bees and Rodale’s Ultimate Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. It is fun to sit on the couch with three open books and to keep picking them up in intervals.
Bouts of Rain
November 10, 2012 § 2 Comments
I woke to heavy rain in the middle of the night. Well, early morning, really. The late evening hours had dragged into midnight and when at last I stumbled upstairs I lay in my bed surrounded by all the dark of loneliness. My poor dog, my faithful companion, is getting arthritic in the evenings, so I hadn’t urged her to walk up the stairs. I didn’t want to hear her whimper. It is always odd not having her there, though, the warm body of a creature who cares for me. My gratitude for dogs really cannot be expressed. Dogs love so willingly.
The rain wasn’t falling then, in the minutes of thought on my pillow, imaginings of another life with more people in it, more dogs, perhaps, and a horse or two. Daydreams can be a solace but at the times when they collide with the very reality of reality they can be horrid, a painful contrast, a look at what can’t be compared with what is. We all have these times, don’t we? When what’s good in our lives fades, and can’t be seen in the pressing gray of disappointments, and we are too tired to fight against the way we feel, and part of it is that we want the right to feel this way, after all.
In between sleeping and waking the rain started, pushed by wind, seemingly in fits and starts, heavy and light. The dog whined at the bottom of the stairs, so I went and got her, and felt glad for her. She snuggled up next to me and then, warm in the fleece and down, I wondered if the rabbits were sheltered enough. I dreamed of one of them chewing through his cage and escaping. I woke and thought perhaps they really ought to have more to protect them from the rain, but it was late/early and that rain fell heavy. I thought about it and then the rain subsided a little and feeling like a guilty, lazy person I pulled on muck boots over my pajamas, strapped on a headlamp, and went out into the eery blue. My plucky rabbits stood up on their hind legs to see me, and the two I had worried about were more damp than they should be. I propped wood against and over their cages and gave them little strokes on the forehead. “Poor darlings.” Though it wasn’t that cold. Thank goodness.
Back upstairs. Back to bed. In the slow morning the neighbor dog came over with her joyful wriggle of being. I started a fire. Put on the coffee. Watched the dogs play in their mouthy way. Decided I would write, because that is part of who I am, a part I can have some level of control over, no matter where I live or what I do or how I feel.
So then. So it is. Almost always, when I make the space to write, I can feel my very self start to settle, to orient itself within the tumble of this world. Writing, before it became a discipline, a major, a career move – before all that, writing came from a little girl’s instinct, a sort of unspoken and unidentified sense that this was something I could and must do. Pen in hand, fingertips on a keyboard, images becoming words becoming story – here is one of the ways that I remember who I am. Here is a partial fulfillment of the person a Very Good Creator made me to be. Yet without pressure; pressure gets pushed aside, and perfection is not the point, or the goal, or the reason why. Here I find my old, hopeful self. Reminding me: Do your gift. And keep dreaming. Bring as many dreams into reality as you can.
Where Go the Boats?
August 12, 2012 § 2 Comments
Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
With trees on either hand.
Green leaves a-floating,
Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating–
Where will all come home?
On goes the river
And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
Away down the hill.
Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.
– Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses
Perception
May 11, 2012 § Leave a comment
“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.” -Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Embracing the Sky
March 13, 2012 § Leave a comment
Reader-friends. I’ve been remiss in not telling you about my older brother and his amazing book. So here’s the story.
My brother Craig is a young man, college graduate, and remarkable poet. His body challenges him with the trappings of autism and mild cerebral palsy, but his mind is just as sharp as yours and mine. In 2000, he took a year off between high school and college to write a book of poems. (I get to claim a little credit here since I was the one to suggest he do so!) And not long into the following year – his first year of college – Jessica Kingsley Publishers in London, England, picked it up. I still remember that phone call from my mother: “Someone’s publishing Craig’s book!”
For a guy like Craig, who struggles to communicate with speech but sails forward in writing poems and papers by typing, with support, on a computer keyboard, having a book get published is a major victory – and a chance for the rest of the world to hear him as he really is. These are poems beyond disability because they allow readers to see not the outside guy but the reflective artist inside.
Having completed his degree in English literature, he’s hard at work on a second collection of poems these days. I’ve been spending time with him during these at-home days and listening to the new ones come forth. Remembering that voice. And realizing how some of you have yet to discover it!
So, let me encourage you to have a look. Here’s a link: Embracing the Sky by Craig Romkema.
Perspective
March 12, 2012 § Leave a comment
But then we did not think of ourselves as poor. We did not accept it. We thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich.
-Ernest Hemingway, “A False Spring,” A Moveable Feast
Leif Enger and the outlaw journeys
January 7, 2012 § 1 Comment
I must put in a word for Leif Enger. Not as if he needs a word put in for him, by me; his debut novel, Peace Like a River, established itself as a bestseller years ago. I actually am reading this one second – as many times as I stumbled across the book while going to college, working in a bookstore, generally hanging with literary sorts – I didn’t, for some reason, feel the need to dive in with everyone else. (Sometimes I am contrary and refuse to read what is most popular. I did the same with Angela’s Ashes. Years later I picked it up and scarfed it down with the right combination of sorrow and appreciation.)
Enger drew me in, instead, with So Brave, Young, and Handsome, a novel which, you might guess, got me with its title. But it wasn’t about dashing young cowboys as I suspected on first glance. Instead it follows a postman, a family man named Monte Becket who’s had a one-hit wonder of a book and is trying, and failing, to write another. He happens to meet an older, gentle, drifter of a man who turns out to be a former outlaw. And this man has a dream, and it is of the wife of his youth, and he feels that he needs to go and find her and apologize for the past. So our postman-narrator gets invited to accompany him, and what adventures follow!
As much as the plot is rollicking and suspenseful enough that it tugs you along, what I (having spent most of my twenties trying to understand and practice the craft of writing) kept feeling so terribly happy about were two other things: (1) that his characters are colorful, believable, unique, and endearing – you want to spend time with them; and (2) that he uses language with such understated skill as he goes about unfolding his story. Beautiful, as one who has read and listened and practiced and revised extensively can make a story – can structure phrases, sentences, and moments. All throughout I would find myself pausing and even catching my breath, because that is what happens when something goes beyond what you expect, even when you have high expectations, with the deftness and subtlety of the perfect extra detail, the unexpected observation.
So I went to the horse barn raving about So Brave, Young, and Handsome. My boss was about to go off for a trip and needed something to read, and in the airport she found Enger’s other book, Peace Like a River. She sent me a text after skimming the first few pages, telling me how excited she was to read it; when I ran into her next the first thing she said to me was, “Love the book!” And when she finished she lent it to me. And now I am reading with the same kind of reaction I had to the first – hunger for the story, gladness to be reading, thankfulness for the kinds of writers who remain true to their art and yet, somehow, have also managed to make their work accessible to the general public (a feat that seems to be trickier than one would hope, and a source of frustration for many writers, who are torn between writing something with meaning or writing something that will sell). This story follows a boy named Reuben, and his sister and father, as they head West looking for the brother and son who has become a 20th century outlaw. I love this family. I want to know them. I feel as if I do.
Read his books! That’s all I’m saying.
Here are links to where you can find them, or your library likely has them:
P.S. He’s a Minnesota writer. Which is even better.
Riding the Neighbors’ Horses – Ebook Release!
December 13, 2011 § 8 Comments
Hey everyone! My juvenile fiction novel is available as an ebook as of today!
You can purchase it here:
The book will also be available in hard copy, hopefully later this month or early next year. Updates and excerpts to come!
Synopsis:
When twelve-year-old Susan Abbot befriends Nan and Ralph Whiting, the children of the horse trainer down the road, she has the chance to ride some of the best horses in Minnesota. But her desire to ride conflicts with her father’s distrust of horses – and the next-door neighbors who own them. In a golden 1920s summer, Susan reaches for independence, and finds she must weigh her relationships alongside her dreams.
Kinds of Honey 