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June 1, 2025: Mary Carroll Moore

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With summer right around the corner, I’m excited to tell you about Mary Carroll Moore’s Last Bets, which takes place on the Caribbean island of Bonaire. I don’t know about you, but these days, I’m looking for books (and shows and movies) with strong female leads. And Last Bets has not just one, but two. I read it over a year ago, and Elly and Rosie are still with me.

Elly didn’t call herself a scuba diver, but she’d loved her first taste of diving on her last visit. She hadn’t imagined how silent it could be, deep in the ocean, just the sound of her own breathing…

Rosie loved to sit on the seawall and watch the line between ocean and sky blur to near invisible. As was their habit after dinner, her dad gathered his marks for the evening games, while she got herself an iced coffee and took her place on the rocky edge.

Elly comes to Bonaire from Washington, DC where her husband has recently died and her finances are nonexistent. She wants to get away but also to finish a painting and get paid for it. Rosie is sixteen and a thief, slipping into guest rooms at the resort where her father plays backgammon. If she doesn’t straighten up, she will be heading to boarding school (death) instead of the art institute (life). Freedom and art are on the line for both of them.

In the excerpt below, notice how Mary uses heat to add tension to the story.

It hadn’t been more than thirty minutes, tops, but the sun was out now, the air steaming. Elly already felt the heat building. She walked back to the apartment, inhaling the now familiar scent of hot pine and strong herbs, hoping she’d remembered to leave the window shutters open.

Throughout the book, Mary activates our senses thereby placing us in scene with the characters—from the scent of hot pine above to the waves pounding the beach below.

Outside the waves pounded the beach. The wind picked up, and it had cleared, as promised, the blue sky glaringly bright. [Elly] heard voices from the the bar, the lunchtime buffet opening; she should go get a sandwich, a salad, before they closed. Instead, she bent to lift the pastel stick from its foam nest. For a half hour, she lost herself in the simple choices of line, shape, and color.

Rosie’s sneaking around also adds tension to the story. Here she is in Elly’s room. “Behind the [bathroom] door hung a red silk kimono, the first hint of unique.” When Rosie finds the art supplies, she opens the boxes of pastels.

She hadn’t planned to do anything, just look. But suddenly her fingers were reaching for a stick of buttery yellow. She broke off a tiny chip. Again, with a carnelian pastel. She arranged the chips in a soft tissue, wrapped them gently, and stowed them in the pocket of her shorts. Then she replaced each broken pastel in its slot and turned the stick so the disfigured edge was hidden.

Elly would know. Eventually. Rosie didn’t know why she wanted that, wanted Elly even to suspect her, but she didn’t think about it. Owning something of Elly’s felt intensely important in that moment. Something they shared, like art.

Yet it wasn’t quite enough…

Backgammon gambling is the evening activity on Bonaire, but risk-taking is not limited to the stone tables. Elly and Rosie ignore the odds stacked against them, refuse to follow the rules, and set traps for each other. When we discover a hurricane is on the way (another layer of tension), it feels as if danger is everywhere, but Elly and Rosie bet on themselves.

Last Bets received a starred Kirkus review and was one of Kirkus Reviews’ Top 100 Best Indie Books of the Year!

Last Bets at the Atlanta airport

Mary is the author of two other novels. A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, which also features strong female characters. Kate and Red are pilots and estranged sisters from opposite sides of a fractured family. They are thrown together in a search and rescue in the Adirondack mountains of New York State when Red is framed for the brutal attack on the manager of her indie rock band. Qualities of Light, a YA queer novel, features sixteen-year-old Molly, who when tragedy strikes, must confront her own qualities of light and darkness. This novel was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards,

Since 2008, the same year I began Catching Days, Mary has sent Your Weekly Writing Exercises each Friday to subscribers around the world. She has taught at the Loft Literary Center, Grub Street, the Madeline Island School of the Arts, and has YouTube and Spotify channels. In 2011, her writing craft book, Your Book Starts Here, a product of those workshops, won the New Hampshire Literary “Reader’s Choice” award.

Although creatively she began as a painter, Mary’s website now tells you, “When I’m not writing, I paint. Mostly in plein air. I’m fascinated with the way light creates form, color, and luminosity.” Her paintings have been exhibited nationally since 2002, and are in permanent collections, including the Pacific Street Gallery in New London.

Mary is, or has been, a journalist, a songwriter, and a singer in a band. In the 1980s, she went from writing a food column for Sedona Life magazine, to writing cookbooks, to writing a syndicated weekly column for the Los Angeles Times, and then to writing two spirituality-self-help books. A 2007 New York Times article featuring Mary’s painting begins, “Mary Carroll Moore, a resident of Bridgewater, radiates such calm that it is hard to believe the extent of her accomplishments.” Almost twenty years later, I second that.

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Come back on JUNE 1st to read how MARY CARROLL MOORE spends her days.

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February 1, 2024: T Kira Madden

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If you’re interested in the different selves we’ve been or in childhoods and how they turn into adulthoods or in families and truth, and you haven’t yet read Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, T Kira Madden’s debut memoir published in 2019, add it to your list. After an author’s note and a preface, here’s the first sentence, “My mother rescued a mannequin from the J.C. Penney dump when I was two years old.” T Kira (no period) describes her mother as a “Chinese, Hawaiian, pocketknife of a woman.” Although the first piece is called “Uncle Nuke,” which is what T Kira calls the mannequin, the takeaway is that T Kira and her mother are wrapped in their own special world. Here, at the beginning, the author asks us to remember

[A]ll the reasons she [her mother] did anything–the wrong things, the strange things, the dangerous, the sublime–the reasons she does any of it, still, is to protect me.

What I love almost as much as the memoir is the story of how this book came to exist in the world–that T Kira had planned on writing a novel, but that after her father died, it was these stories that had to be told. The memoir rose up out of loss (“Just last week I had a father”). And it was written as an offering to others. As stated in the Acknowledgements, “because once, a little girl needed more stories like her own.”

When T Kira was nine years old, her grandmother gave her a typewriter and told her to write about her life. Instead, T Kira wrote about a girl named Joni Baloney who was just like her except she was “white and athletic and people tend to grope her.” After recounting a few of Joni’s exploits, T Kira added, “I can do things like that when I write–pluck any thread of want and create a whole world.” The pages of this memoir are steeped in want–in need and in desire. And each essay creates a whole world.

The writing is extraordinary–sharp sentences, descriptions that are fresh and alive, and honesty and heart in equal measure. Here’s one of those sentences. “The day stings against my arms.” And one of those descriptions, “fingers like ginger root.” Take a look at this sentence, one of my favorites for all it does.

[My father’s] eyes are wet and wide in that orange glow of night-road, that perfect combination of street lamp and moonlight that casts a terrific sadness, or wildness, on any face in its spell.

This next example shows the honesty and heart I was talking about. It comes after a middle school dance where the date turned out not to be a date, and it begins with her mother’s response, “To hell with middle school dances. We”ll have our own dance.”

The three of us dance in a circle, facing one another on the gum-bald carpet, snapping our fingers, throwing the dice. My father lets me stand on his feet as he shuffles and grooves. He holds me tight. He dips my body backward till the room tips over. He says, One day, you won’t even remember this night ever was.

A few years later, a wildly different situation but that same honesty and heart.

By nine p.m., almost a hundred people arrive at our Porn Star Party. Public and private school kids, a couple of dealers we know, the older boyfriends of girls in my grade… Harley, Nelle, and I take every shot we’re given… We lie down on my pool table and begin to kiss one another while the boys and men cheer us on.
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Cousin Cindy once asked me, What do you think love really is?
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I think it’s being able to kiss someone whenever you want, I said.
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I can kiss Nelle whenever I want. And I do.

There’s more, so much more. The memoir is also a story of addiction and trauma and family secrets…

If we’re lucky, we use our childhood and adolescence to try on different versions of our self. If we’re lucky, we get closer and closer to who we really are.

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award for lesbian memoir, and is now in development as a feature film.

T Kira Māhealani Madden is a Chinese, Kānaka Maoli writer, photographer, and amateur magician. Her gorgeous wedding was profiled in The New York Times. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in design and literature from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College. She’s also the founding editor of the journal No Tokens. Her debut novel, Whidbey, is forthcoming with Mariner/HarperCollins.

Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how T KIRA MADDEN spends her days.

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September 1, 2023: Sari Botton

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Sari Botton was born in 1965 and is Gen-X. I was born in 1957 and am a baby boomer. In her memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself… she writes about family dinners and mean girls and apartment therapy and living in NYC, and while the details of her life differ dramatically from mine, the takeaway is the same. She “came of age at the intersection of two conflicting attitudes: ‘should’ and ‘whatever.'” I did too. And she writes that “she was sidetracked away from” herself and only began to discover and own who she really was in her forties. Yeah, me too.

No one had coerced me into the life I was living. Far from it. I chose almost every detail–had desperately longed for, even campaigned for, many of then, including the genius idea of marrying almost criminally young… As I was embarking on adulthood, I somehow couldn’t see beyond the confining parameters of my little world, or find the courage to consider other possibilities beyond it.

So much of what Sari writes resonates with me. Like this section, from the foreward: “I remembered how little I know about the lives of my grandmothers…I remembered how much I relish reading books by women abut their lives. I remembered that my voice matters. I’m using it now, to take up space, to say, ‘I was here.'”

In the introduction to the memoir, Sari writes that she became a writer because she “felt like a weirdo.” And in fact, the subtitle of this, her first book as author, is Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. And a lot of this memoir does read like confessions, but the confessions of someone who is saying it to claim it, in order to put herself back together.

In “Leaving the Land of Make-Believe,” Sari writes about her parents’ divorce in the 70’s. “I felt split in two, one version of me only able to fit in with my friends on Long Island, the other specifically engineered to fit in in Westchester.”

In “Mean Girls,” she recounts falling out with girls in junior high in the 80’s and not having any friends, which led to her being wary of friendships with girls and women, which she’s still trying to get over in her fifties so she doesn’t have to deal with it in assisted living…

In “Confessions of a Closet Vocalist,” she writes about skipping gym class to sneak home and sing. “Connecting the dots between the creative weirdo I was as a kid and who I honestly am as an adult has been my great project of mid-life.”

In addition to this memoir, Sari is the mastermind behind Oldster Magazine, published over on Substack. Its tagline is “Exploring what it means to travel through time in a human body, at every phase of life.” If you’re fascinated by aging, as I am, then you’ll love reading Oldster. One of its many features is a questionnaire that Sari created–a fixed set of questions that contributors respond to from the vantage point of different ages. Here are a few of the questions: Is there another age you associate with yourself in your mind? What has aging given you? Taken away from you? How has getting older affected your sense of yourself, or your identity?

Come back on SEPTEMBER 1st to read how SARI BOTTON spends her days.

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July 1, 2022: Kirie Pedersen

Every day, I marvel that I get to live almost without sounds of civilization here adjoining the Olympic National Park, where I was born and still live on the same property. Instead, I sleep to the sound of waves on the cliff (May through October when I sleep in a tent right on the cliff), and eagles, seals, great blue herons, and myriad other birds in the wildlife sanctuary I left/created around my cabin built mostly of repurposed materials.

For those of you who don’t know her from the delightful comments she leaves after reading essays in this series, meet Kirie Pedersen. She’s published essays, non-fiction, and fiction in more than fifty literary and general interest magazines. More than fifty. I became aware of her writing because she read a story of mine back in 2013, came looking for me, found Catching Days, and left a comment. The excerpt above is from a letter she wrote me in 2019, when we were talking about our days.

I’m obsessed with where Kirie lives and where she writes. In a wonderful 2017 interview over at The Magnolia Review, Kirie describes her writing spot.

I work in a 10×12 foot hut I call Eagle Cottage because bald eagles nest nearby, and they cackle as I write. Eagle Cottage was repurposed from a 1924 schoolhouse that was being demolished… [It] is lined with journals, poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and books on writing craft. Close beside me are jars of colored pencils and fountain pens.

In that interview, you’ll find more lovely details about her process and her materials, and her Artist Chicken!

Kirie has lived a fascinating life. Earlier this year, I read a piece by her, entitled “Finding Pulali,” which was published in Sunspot Literary Journal. This piece is about where and how she grew up. Before I read it, I didn’t know what Pulali was.

Pulali Point sits pretty much in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula and is itself a small peninsula jutting into Dabob Bay, Hood Canal, and Jackson Cove. The geological formation itself dates from the Eocene Era and is about forty million years old.

I could spend this entire introduction talking about this one piece that is alive with form. Here’s the beginning.

For a graduate workshop, I entitled this “Essay in Twelve Genres.” Feedback: The word genre is phony, unnecessary, and insufficiently ironic, a pretension by someone fancying herself intellectual. I was, they suggested, using genre to seal myself up and be safe.
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I too was concerned by the word, but it is the idea that disturbs me. When I try to write about Pulali, I grope for a form that captures my birthplace, my home. I attempt essay, dream, play, story. Word made manifest. Word made flesh.

Kirie had a hard time when each of her parents died in a two-year period while she was living across the country, far away from this world, on the opposite coast in Manhattan. In “In a Dark Time,” she wrote about the despair and depression she suffered and how she brought herself back from it. This essay was snapped up by The Magnolia Review, prompting the interview mentioned above. “In a Dark Time” received the Ink Award, for being the piece that unified the entire issue. It also received a Pushcart nomination. The excerpt below shows the mind/body connection in a number of ways.

My previous despair returned full-force, and perhaps due to the depleted immune response grief can cause, a tooth abscessed, and I developed debilitating back pain. I’d tried my list of non-drug cures that final year of my mother’s life, but my practice was desultory. Now, flattened by physical and emotional pain, I became determined to survive.

If you’re looking for a peak into Kirie’s fiction, check out “Liberating Life,” a flash piece from Glossalalia, with an ending that just keeps echoing out… Here’s an excerpt from the middle.

In Buddhism, Paul said, there was a ceremony called Liberating Life. The monks gathered animals scheduled for slaughter, and they freed them. When the Mormons purchased a live turkey for Thanksgiving, the turkey wandered around the yard. Melissa asked Paul if they could purchase the turkey and talk the Mormons into buying one already killed.
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The Mormons agreed, and the turkey moved to the Buddhist side of the fence.

This essay, “Getting a Life–Coming of Age with Killers,” which was published in Under the Sun and which received a Notable Mention in The Best American Essays 2018, is a personal look at growing up in the same place in which Ted Bundy was murdering women. It’s also a solid piece of journalism about what was actually happening, as well as the realities of the death penalty. Here’s the first sentence, which starts with the personal.

“Ted got Brenda,” my sister said.

And here’s one more excerpt from the beginning so you can get a sense of how the journalistic voice mixes with the personal.

In my early twenties, every three or four weeks a peer in her late teens or early twenties disappeared. Brenda, a year behind me at Mt. Ranier High School, was number six. The women vanished from streets I’d walked that same day, from beaches where my friends and I sat to tan, from beds just blocks from my own, and from the campuses of the universities my sisters, friends, and I attended.

Kirie’s essay “Saving Paradise,” published in the beautiful Still Point Artists Quarterly in 2017, will be of special interest to those who love places that are disappearing.

The last thing on earth I wanted was to walk to the front of that room, but if I didn’t say something, I would forever lose my chance. “I propose preservation of Meadowdale as a wilderness,” I murmured into the microphone, voice thin and shaking. “A walking-only park where children can learn about the environment.”

Kirie earned an M.A. in fiction writing from Western Washington University, where Annie Dillard (!) was her thesis chair. Kirie also loves the writing of Ellen Gilchrist, another favorite of mine. She’s taught writing for gifted and talented inner-city students, elders, and others. Washington State commissioned and published her Writing Handbook for Teachers and Tutors (published in Spanish and English) and Teaching Creative Writing Using Native American Songs and Myths. Please check out her website–I love how she introduces each new publication with a few words about the piece and about the journal where it’s published. P.S. Click on the little white lines in the upper right to subscribe to her publication updates!

Come back on JULY 1st to read how KIRIE PEDERSEN spends her days.

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October 1, 2021: Bonnie Tsui

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Bonnie Tsui calls her 2020 narrative nonfiction book Why We Swim, “a love letter to water and to her lifelong relationship with the water and swimming.” Bonnie is a journalist who’s passionate about swimming, and I discovered her writing thanks to the series Readings by Writers hosted by Writing by Writers. During her reading and conversation, she said she was “way more interested in other people’s stories than my own.”

In Why We Swim, Bonnie tells the story of the Bajau nomads, the water-dwelling Moken, and the Icelandic swimmer Guðlaugur Friðþórsson. She tells the story of the samurai swimmer Midori Ishbiki and the story of Kim Chambers, who after a fall had to learn to walk again. There are stories of teams and practices and Olympic swimming. From the story of Dara Torres, here’s an excerpt that highlights Bonnie’s wonderful storytelling style.

Competition kept coaxing her back to the edge of the precipice, as Edgar Allen Poe called it. This time, the precipice was lane four.

Why We Swim is divided into five sections: survival, well-being, community, competition, and flow. About the last section, Bonnie writes, “Swimming is about the mind, too. To find rhythm in the water is to discover a new way of being in the world.”

But we do get a little of Bonnie in Why We Swim, enough to understand her deep connection to the water and to hold together a book on the stories of others who also love the water. Bonnie was born in Queens and raised on Long Island. Her parents met in a swimming pool in Hong Kong. Everyone in their family of four swam—until they were no longer a family. Bonnie is the only one who kept swimming.

I swam through the divorce. I swam through college. I swam from Alcatraz, on a dare. I swam as rehab from knee surgery. I swam across a lake at my wedding…Three decades of swimming, of chasing equilibrium, have kept my head firmly above water.

In the first chapter, Bonnie dives for abalone and surfaces with a six-pounder. “In my backyard later that day, I clean, trim, and pound the meat tender—yep, with a rock—cook it up over a flame, and feed my family of four a meal I’ve prepared entirely with my own hands and breath and body.”

Why We Swim is one of TIME magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 and is currently being translated into eight languages, but it’s not even Bonnie’s most recent book. Her first children’s book, Sarah and the Big Wave, about big-wave women surfers, was published a few months ago, in May 2021.

Before Why We Swim, Bonnie’s book American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods won the 2009-2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Best of 2009 Notable Bay Area Books selection. She has won awards for travel journalism and food journalism. She helped to launch F&B: Voices from the Kitchen, a storytelling project from La Cocina that shares stories from cooks and kitchens that are less often heard. Most recently, she received a 2021 Mesa Refuge writing residency and was selected for the 2021 Pamela Krasney Moral Courage Fellowship. Bonnie’s writing can be found in The New York Times, and Bonnie herself can be found at Pop-Up Magazine and other live storytelling events. These days, Bonnie lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how BONNIE TSUI spends her days.

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September 1, 2021: Greg Changnon

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Greg Changnon is a writer who is also a superhero reader. Currently, he’s a book-club facilitator for over thirty Atlanta-area book clubs. Which means he helps the clubs choose books, and then he reads the books, prepares discussion notes, and steers the conversations so all readers have a meaningful experience. It makes me want to be him AND be a reader in one of those groups. Ironically, I met Greg not in Georgia where we both live, but in Positano, Italy over a decade ago when we both attended the Sirenland Writers Conference.

For years, Greg wrote reviews and guides for the “Reading Room” column of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Here’s an excerpt from his November 2005 discussion of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. 

Is it possible that Spider and Fat Charlie represent two sides of a single person? What does Neil Gaiman seem to be saying about the duality of human nature? Possessing a mixture of wisdom and rebellion, the trickster figure, common to a variety of primal religions, represents the combination of good and bad. If Fat Charlie is the obedient and passive brother, Spider exists as the more spirited and conniving doppelganger.

Greg was featured in the 2013 September/October issue of Poets & Writers magazine for his innovative work infusing theater and playwriting into his classroom at The Paideia Schools in Atlanta where he taught for fifteen years.

Changnon, who graduated from SFSU with an MFA in fiction in 1977, started writing plays for his students a few years ago when, looking for a play they could work on, he realized that most of the scripts that would be appropriate for his students forced them to play adults. At the time, he was teaching Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451, so he wrote a loose dramatic adaptation that transformed Bradbury’s adult characters into teenage ones his students could comfortably portray. The result was so successful that he decided to write a new play for his students every year.

In Encore Atlanta, Julie Bookman mentions Greg’s 2015 play and goes into great detail about Slur, his 2016 play.

In 2015, the classes read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and created a piece called Only Us, about unsupervised students stuck in a school building during a “snowpocalypse.” Slur began with George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, about an Englishman’s efforts to turn an unrefined Cockney flower seller into a duchess.

Come back on SEPTEMBER 1st to read how GREG CHANGNON spends his days.

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August 1, 2021: Vivian Gibson

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Every year, Poets & Writers selects five writers over the age of fifty for a feature–which is how I learned about Vivian Gibson and her wonderful memoir The Last Children of Mill Creek. I love 5 Over 50–not only does it highlight an often ignored bracket of writers, but it’s so encouraging. Vivian was seventy when her memoir was published. So no one give up!

Vivian did not set out to be a writer, but in 2015, after retiring from forty-five years in the human resources field, she took a class at St. Louis Oasis, where at the age of sixty-six, she began to write stories about her childhood in a segregated part of the city that no longer existed. The city demolished Mill Creek Valley in 1959. Twenty thousand people were displaced to build part of a highway that would run from downtown to the suburbs. Her writing instructor encouraged her to submit her stories, and in no time, she was offered a publishing contract. In Poets & Writers 5 Over 50: 2020, she wrote,

I slept with my MacBook, a cell phone, a notebook, and my favorite pen. I had vivid memories in early morning hours, sometimes snapshots, other times full scenes in my mind. There were sounds and smells, emotions, and familiar faces I had to capture before they slipped away. I woke most mornings, without an alarm, at 4 AM, and wrote for hours.

I was a writer after all. I was always a writer, waiting to tell a dying community’s human stories through its last children.

Mill Creek Valley was one of the oldest parts of St. Louis–454 acres in downtown.

Winter or summer–no matter the weather, we stayed outside as long as we could. When the streetlights came on, Ferman and I had to go inside. The older kids had to be in front of the house, usually huddled around the light so that Mama could see them from the front window.

Along with her parents and brothers and sisters, Vivian lived on Bernard Street in her grandmother’s 800 square foot house.

Grandmama said that there were sundown laws that mandated people of color to be off the streets in the county by sunset. If she had to work late, her “white folks” (that’s how she referred to her employers) would drive her to the Wellston Loop to catch an eastbound streetcar back into the city.

Vivian’s mother worked from home–from the bed–to be more exact.

After Daddy vacated his side at sunrise, Mama would smooth the sheets and blankets, spread a muslin ‘drop cloth,’ and replace him with a tan, boxy leather suitcase she pulled from under the bed…The suitcase both served as a hard work surface and stored the tools and materials she needed… straight pins, tape measures, various sizes and shapes of needles…

In a small house full of lots of people, Vivian managed to find a spot of her own. (Of course she would one day be a writer.)

Halfway up the stairs that led to Grandmama’s rooms was my favorite retreat from the constant hum made by the ten people inhabiting three small rooms below. The worn wooden risers and treads of the steps created a perfect work desk for cutting out Betsy McCall paper dolls.

Vivian learned to sleep with her shoes, so she’d have something to throw at the rats if she had to go to the bathroom in the night. And she learned how to cook at an early age. Her corn bread recipe is included in the memoir. “[T]he crust rose slightly into a crispy ring of crunch. I’d know it was ready when a shallow crack in the center of the bread formed as the last steamy moisture escaped like a dying volcano.”

In Mill Creek, every aspect of life was labor intensive and time consuming. We boiled water to wash dishes, clothes, and our bodies; we built fires to heat the house, and walked everywhere we wanted to go… But we turned every chore into a game, a competition, or a lesson. Before we had a steam iron, clothes and sheets that needed pressing were sprinkled with water, rolled tightly, and placed in the refrigerator to be kept moist until ironing commenced.

Saturday night was spent getting ready for church on Sunday. But before church, breakfast…

Daddy’s homemade buttermilk biscuits: large baking pans full of browned mounds with fluffy white centers. We’d slather them with that good government-issued butter, drench them in Sho-is-Fine syrup, and eat them with thick slices of crispy, smoked jowl bacon.

As you can see, Vivian’s memoir is full of details that make not only Sunday breakfast but all of her childhood come alive on the page. To see old photos of the family and the neighborhood, check out Vivian’s website. And if you’re in St. Louis, you can visit the St. Louis Missouri History Museum where an interactive exhibit on Vivian’s family, titled “The Ross Family” has been part of the Reflections Gallery collection for eighteen years.

The Last Children of Mill Creek won the Missouri Humanities Council 2021 Literary Achievement Award. Vivian was also a contributing playwright of 50in50: Writing Women into Existence (2017), performed at the Billie Holiday Theater in Brooklyn, NY. She has two adult children and currently lives less than a mile from the historic Mill Creek Valley community in downtown St. Louis.

Come back on AUGUST 1st to read how VIVIAN GIBSON spends her days.

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November 1, 2020: Kathy Gunst

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The secret to making it through these last days that seem interminable… Rage Baking! Run to your closest independent bookstore for Kathy Gunst’s newest cookbook written along with chef Katherine Alford. You may already know Kathy from NPR’s Here & Now, where she is the award-winning Resident Chef. I read Rage Baking hungrily from cover to cover, wishing I baked.

Many women contributed to this wonderful book that is part recipes, part essays, and part gorgeous photos and where each recipe has a story to tell. “As you read through the essays you will get a glimpse into the way women use the kitchen as a place of refuge, healing, love, anger, sadness, and activism.” In the introduction, Kathy writes,

What the baking did was reset my focus for a few short hours. It became a balm, a meditation of sorts. Baking was a way of temporarily restoring my belief in the positive transformation of things–in this case, butter, flour, sugar, and fruit. Each day, as the political outrages piled up, my mind was absorbed in the precision and focus and discipline that baking requires.

Bianca Borge contributed her recipe for “Bloody Butcher Cornbread,” writing, “‘Bloody Butcher’ is a darn good metaphor for all sorts of things, whatever floats your raging boat. It refers to the name of an heirloom dent corn variety with deep red kernels, an American soil crop since the 1800s. When ground into cornmeal, the color is a subtle purplish red, and the taste is deeply nutty and earthy.”

Tess Rafferty writes, “The nice thing about baking is that you can actually see the results. You have a tangible product for your efforts, one that tastes delicious and fulfills our most basic needs: sustenance. And we all need something to sustain us right now.”

Elizabeth Falkner shared her recipe for “Power Muffs,” writing, “These muff(in)s are so packed with antioxidants and good-for-you nuts and seeds that you’ll feel your superwoman powers with a vengeance… Many of the things I cook and bake are meant to fight the powers that be.”

There’s Kathy’s Pineapple Upside-Down Spice Cake (The world is upside down and inside out and sometimes we just need a new way of looking at things), her Mango-Lime-Orange Curd in Meringue Nests (or Don’t Tell Me What to Do With My Eggs), and her Maine Blueberry Supreme Court Crumble…

Finally, a few of my favorite cooking tips:

1. If your cookies are are browning too quickly on the bottom, slip another pan underneath to insulate.
2. Don’t try to frost a warm cake; the frosting will soften and droop and you will be sad.
3. And the big baking secret: Confidence is your most important ingredient.

Kathy is a James Beard award-winning journalist and the author of fifteen cookbooks. She writes for the Washington Post, Eating Well, Wall Street Journal, Yankee Magazine, the New York Times, Food & Wine, and others. She also teaches food journalism and cooking. She lives in Maine, and we met in Provincetown back in 2006 while we were taking a writing course at the Fine Arts Work Center with Pam Houston (who contributed an essay to Rage Baking).

Stay well and…

On January 4th, a serious nor’easter hit Provincetown. The main problem was flooding, and my house is up on stilts. So I wasn’t worried. The power did go off, but Eversource got it right back on. The next day, a neighbor called. Giant ice cycles and blocks of ice had formed under the house. Yep, the electricity had come back on, but my heating system had not. When my friend opened the front door, it appeared to be raining inside. The deck had been demolished between Christmas and New Year’s for a planned rebuilding. So picture me opening the door nine days later–no sheet rock, no floor, no kitchen, nothing at all out the sliding glass doors except for the sad, empty ocean. It would be five months before things would be back to normal.

~

Thomas Lee Newberry

At five am in the pre-dawn darkness of March 9th, while I was staying at my neighbor’s house in Provincetown, a large bird landed on the balcony and began bellowing for all he was worth. The preceding days had been cold and harsh and devoid of birds. I almost got up to see what he looked like, but I was so cozy under the covers. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. My father had died at five am after a long struggle with Alzheimers. I wrote his obituary, which I had actually already started, but my sisters and brother and I (five of us) had a hard time choosing a photo. Finally I found one we could all agree on, and I made it black and white for the newspaper.

~

Evelyn Mason Newberry

On July 24th, the day before what would have been my parents’ 64th wedding anniversary, I was shopping at the Party Store, hoping to find some fun stuff to celebrate with my mother the next day. She had been in poor health for a couple of years–with difficulty walking, seeing, breathing. I texted my sisters, I’m not feeling it. Still, I managed to choose some plastic coconuts and leis–my parents had loved Hawaii. At the checkout, I asked about their return policy, not something I often did. My sister called a couple of hours later. My mother was worsening–the new pain medicine was not working and her breathing was more labored than usual. I was getting my hair cut when I realized that if she died that day, they would never have spent an anniversary apart. And she did it. Around six thirty, wearing a multi-colored tie-dyed t-shirt, she died peacefully, my sister beside her; minutes later, a rainbow shooting across the sky. I wrote her obituary but had no time to find a photo so my daughter offered to choose one. All five of us liked the one she chose.

~

It wasn’t until August 9th when I was going through photos for my son’s upcoming rehearsal dinner that I discovered the original photo from which my daughter had cropped my mother’s picture. Without any of us realizing it, my daughter had chosen the other half of the same photo from which I had chosen my father’s photo.

~

So that’s what’s been happening with me. This morning I updated my reading list. And now I’ve written something. Hope all is well with all of you. Send reading, writing, and life news from your parts of the world.

Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.
–David Bowie

This is sixty.

60 is more freedom than I’ve ever had. Really. It’s awesome.

60 is not just feeling the same but feeling better than I have in years.

60 is thinner skin–actually not metaphorically.

60 is loving my new MacBook Pro with touchbar a little too much.

60 is not yet having used age as a reason I can’t do something.

60 is wanting to do just as many things as I wanted to do at 15.

60 is wondering why, still, I’m preoccupied with freedom.

60 is starting to think hashtag before pound.

60 is having lived 21,900 days. Which doesn’t seem like so many. If anyone had asked me I would have guessed a person lived hundreds of thousands of days. But then math is not my strong suit.

60 is my own small house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the very tip of Cape Cod, as far as you can go without falling into the sea.

60 is wearing peace sign earrings and a nevertheless she resisted bracelet.

60 is having not as many days as I have lived still to live.

60 is googling life expectancy. Did you know the longer you live the more years they give you?

60 is 4 adult children—all off on their own—plus a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law, and girlfriends. And liking them ALL.

60 is four grandchildren. But we are not your mothers’ grandmothers; we are grandmothers who facetime from airplanes.

60 is, as Cal says, one day older than I was yesterday.

60 is walking in the women’s march.

60 is finally liking yoga.

60 is liking socks.

60 is contributing to the ACLU on a monthly basis.

60 is taking 3 prescriptions–for blood pressure, for eyes, and  for hypothyroidism.

60 is still loving to travel–all the movement and that moment the wheels lift off the ground.

60 is strength training twice a week.

60 is feeling happy.

60 is resisting.

60 is still wanting adventure.

60 is almost never wearing makeup.

60 is finally, finally finding clothes that are comfortable, that look good on me, and that look like me–black leggings, a short little black skirt, a long top, and these kick-ass black ankle boots. That is, when I wear something other than black exercise pants.

60 is more adverbs.

60 is 32 years of marriage and still liking each other. He still makes me laugh. 

60 is being born in 1957, the same year as Caroline Kennedy and Princess Caroline of Monaco.

60 is remembering each of the years and understanding that they add up to 60, that they add up to me.

60 is listening to my body instead of telling my body what to do. It’s resting instead of pushing. It’s eating more vegetables, doing qigong energy movements, and having my body say finally. It’s being amazed as, after a year of trying, the weight just falls off.

60 is listening to Sarah Jaffe’s Clementine, The Killer’s Human, the Branches Darlin’, and Roo Panes’ I Was Here…

60 is preparing to do one last revision on novel #4.

60 is knowing the correct form is to put the names of songs in quotes but liking the way they look in italics better.

60 is adding coconut oil, cinnamon, and turmeric to my coffee.

60 is using the word still a lot.

60 is 6 decades on this planet.

60 is gratitude for each of those days in each of those years.

60 is not yet 70 or 80 or 90. It’s not yet 100.

60 is spending a month in my small house on the water.

60 is being excited about the year ahead and the rest of the journey.

~

She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

–Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

THIS IS 60

X

this was 58

this was 57

Continued appreciation to Lindsey Mead for the inspiration.