My Take on Holiday Sadness A huge hurt builds inside me. My father died on Christmas Day 1986. It is a familiar, old hurt. This past year freshly layered that hurt with new hurts and loss. All four of my brothers have passed on. One in 1998, another in 2005. Mom died in […]
My 2 Cents Worth on Parkland Florida
I feel the need to start #wombsplaining things, and I hope my smart writerly researching friends will do the same. 1. The medical system and social care network obviously let down a boy who grew up to become a murderer of 17 people yesterday in Parkland Florida. If you look at a picture of him, […]
Women Who Left Us in 2017
We lost so many strong, even iconic, women in 2017. And so many of them received little to no public media attention in this year of seemingly non-stop discussion about men. Maggie Roche, of the Roche Sisters, left us at age 65 in January. Here’s the NYT article briefly chronicling her music career. Mary Tyler […]
Six Years of Water Under the Bridge
Tucson in mid-late morning. I’m thinking about a small bit of the movie Jackie I which I watched at the Loft this past week. I’m drinking coffee and browsing for mention of the wanted posters created by Kennedy opponents in Dallas before the assassination. Trying to verify before publishing anything about it (Yep, I’m like […]
Poetry as Memoir
There are many ways to preserve relationships in written records. For those who have hundreds of pages of personal poetry, take the time to peruse what you have captured about family and events set in motion by family members as you create any retrospective about your life or family. Poetry often captures what prose cannot […]
Tucson, Five Years On
Lives changed as lives were lost five years ago today when Tucson changed forever. It was not the first time Tucson opened her arms and gathered survivors of mass gun violence to her breast to hold and heal families in her embrace. October 29th 2002 Robin E. Rogers, Barbara Monroe, and Cheryl McGaffic, all instructors in the U of […]