A Conversation of Flowers
That moment when the old and the new seem to speak to each other. It is a wet and cool spring here in Boulder, keeping the blossoms on the trees longer than usual –much to my enjoyment.
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The Challenge of Sharing an Office: Side by Side
My husband and I share an office—a modest rectangular room in a small condo in Boulder, which is noted for its small apartments. Here is how we each occupy our own space. His side is so clean and Zen. Martial arts certificates are in a neat row on the surface of his desk, quiet, waiting.
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Containing Violence in the Language of Honor
I have been reading Thomas V. Cohen's Love and Death in Renaissance Italy, a fascinating study of crime reports, for the information they reveal about life and language in the 16th century (the setting of my WIP). Detailed handwritten depositions of criminal cases recorded the testimonies of everyone from the kitchen boy, the serving girls,
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On the Eve of Ash Wednesday: Prayer for Good Humor
My husband and I are preparing for Lent, but we are doing it in a peculiar fashion. After having been on the Keto diet for two months (and losing a combined 40lbs), my husband has discovered the world of keto sweets and non-sugar sweeteners. He ordered several of them, which arrived today — the day
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Dream Writing a Novel into Existence
Sometimes, it is much easier to dream a book than sit at a keyboard where the gossamer spell of an entire story shatters with clicks and spaces into a text. I can feel a whole book before I can speak it. Trust, perhaps? But then there is this waiting for the details to become apparent
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Comments From the Dream World
I woke from an early (really early!) morning dream where Max Fleischer-style cats were on a fence, saying, "I woke up too early, too late. "I can't decide if it was meant for my untimely rising, a description of my whole life, or the character I am writing in a new novel—all three fit.
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A New Year, My Birthday, and the Solemnity of Mary
"Hail, heavenly ladder by which God came down; hail, bridge leading from earth to heaven." Agathistos Hymn, Greek –6th century. It is a challenge to be born on a day so charged with potential and even more so to me, who was the first baby of that year in my city when I was born.
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When My Hair Was Woven With Duendes ll by Taiko Haessler
On the other side of Costa Rica, I discovered another restless forest spirit. On vacation from school, I traveled to Puerto Viejo, a beautiful, small village on the edge the sapphire–colored Caribbean sea. There I met Celia and her sisters living in a house on stilts, wedged between the rain forest and the shore. Between
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When My Hair Was Woven with Duendes by Taiko Haessler
With a stable economy, Costa Rica, a country roughly the size of West Virginia, can boast of an abundance of eco–tourists, surf shops, and newly planted Coca–Cola billboards. Natural wonders have made Costa Rica a study destination for biologists and scientists from all over the world. Stretched between the shores of the vast Pacific and
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Childhood’s Wound
When writing fiction about childhood and rites of passage, one can't escape the sorrow of maturation, the painful process of shedding one's skin to inhabit a new identity. Oral narratives evoke these transformations in often stark and vivid language: an armless maiden on a journey to become whole; the girl whose feet are battered