In the Spaces

I    Have Always Been With You Artist: Shiloh Sophia WIDOW'S WALK, A NOVEL · FRIDAY, JANUARY 5, 2018 A sense of loss followed me like a shadow all my life. Real loss. Actual dead and gone kind of loss. Maybe it’s like that for everyone; who can know unless they tell you? From early childhood I knew I’d have to do something about this haunting or it would eat me up. There’s an old 16 mm film of me as a three-year-old circling the tiny grave of a bird that died--a tiny yellow chicken that my neighbor Minnie Osborn gave me from her coop. I’m performing a kind of ritual, like a priest circling the altar with incense. You can see the tears on my cheeks. As life goes on we lose a lot of who and what we love, those people and things that make us what we are. Maybe every experience of love continues as a part of us. Maybe we are made of the bits and pieces of the content of every moment we’ve lived--all we’ve seen and heard and touched and smelled, every gaze, embr...

The printer’s proof is in the mail on its way to me. And here is the book’s cover with Shiloh Sophia’s painting. To my eye She is the perfect image of the Widow in all her paradox. She is the meeting place of opposites: the fiery annihilation of all that was formerly known, meeting the transformation in the present moment; the interpenetration of all colors and forms; the stillness of inner being with the evolution of new life; the suffering heart out of which grows the Tree of Life; the breath of Divine Spirit from which emerges the personal story; the sacred Rose, woman’s mandala of integration and wholeness. She is Wisdom, the brilliance of love, truth and beauty. After examining my options for publication and balancing them with my understanding of how my writing life fits into the variations of energies in this world, I’ve chosen to continue publishing independently, using CreateSpace as printer, and John’s and my CyberScribe Publications as my publishing imprint. Since 198...

MORNING INSPIRATION AT CASA CHIARA The options for publishing WIDOW'S WALK seemed to be three: 1. A big publisher such as I had for ALTAR MUSIC, but this would require getting a new contract with my former Literary Agent. 2. A small literary publisher with a long queue of already accepted manuscripts. I was told to expect a 3 to 4 year wait. 3. Independent Publishing. The agent didn't even acknowledge receipt of the manuscript. I was told by a writer-friend that non-response is the new normal. Maybe that is true. I'd promised myself that I wouldn't spend too much of my precious and limited time trying to find a new agent. And I really like Independent Publishing! Marketing is difficult for me, but even the large publishers now expect authors to present a marketing plan. So...I will learn. And I brought up my Amazon.com /CreateSpace account. They have acted as printer for six of my books, and I've enjoyed the process. The only problem is that I haven't so...

The light and shadow, solidity and wisp, Autumn. I had more brilliant pictures of Fall color more intense than any here since I arrived eighteen years ago. But this one captures best the complexity of my readers' comments and the effect they have had on my re-write of Widow's  Walk. Five talented and generous people have now read my first draft, and a few more are right in the middle of it. Already their comments are giving the narrative more depth and filling it in where I took too much for granted. I spend from three days to a week or more with each reader, returning to the narrative through their eyes, listening as deeply as is possible for me to their questions, suggestions, confusions, reactions. Each reader has his or her unique gift that motivated me to request their assistance, from personal experience with the flow and content in this novel, to a particularly accomplished sense of literary structure, to a creative ability with language, to a habit of reading contem...

The Vanishing Point Here's a photo snapped at sunset off the Oregon Coast while my author husband and I were spending a few days on a writing retreat. My new novel, Widow's Walk, had just reached a scene in which the main character, a widow, is instructed to look into the vanishing point. How could I communicate how terrifying this was for her, but at the same time, compelling? John and I had just finished an early dinner at the Asana Bistro and returned to our cabin to sit on the bench while the sun went down. We'd watch for the green flash. But what I saw was something that, because of the story I've been trying to tell for months now, felt even more stunning. I was looking right out over the ocean at was was clearly the vanishing point. The clouds, the water, the point of light, all those colors around that SPACE just shook me with a realization that I needed, somehow, to get into my book. Twice in this life I have been widowed. I know the secrets that widows...

Carol in the Hand of God My friend Carol died yesterday. She'd been ill for a while and was on dialysis, but none of us thought her passage would come so soon. She already was on her journey from this world to the next when I took this picture of storm clouds at sunset Tuesday evening, just hours before her death the next day. At first I saw only the amazing combination of clouds, rainbow and color. And I saw the strange burst of light. But not until yesterday evening, after I heard she had dropped her body and was on her way, did my eyes adjust to see that Hand formed by the clouds. Nor did I see that the light seemed to have a human form, leaning foward, a spirit taking flight. Carol? Some of us do this--see the Virgin Mary in the ice crystals on a window, Jesus in the bark of a tree. Normally we'd see ice; we'd see the tree. It's the timing that makes the difference. It's the coming together of two realities, normally disconnected, but suddenly one even...