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“Crisply vivid, witty, and at once far-seeing and a-whisper with intimacies…a rare and splendid pleasure”- C.M. Mayo, Meteor

“…a wondrous collection that reminds us of states of being so fundamental they can only be described as holy.” – Juliet Patterson, Threnody


    

Shelley’s Blog

Mornings find us surfing the news.  Same ol'.  A tweet a day keeps the real news at bay.  I somehow think of Robert Benchley, time-worn member of the New York Algonquin group, along with Dorothy Parker and others.  I once reveled in that brand of humor, so sly, redolent, and droll.  Parker could wound with a feather and Benchley, well, Benchley never went over with my college students.  Too effete, maybe just too silly? Still.  I xeroxed copies of his "Decent into the Alimentary Canal," and "The Tooth, the...

It's time.  The fire lanes, I hear, have been ground; there are red flag warnings on the weather site.  California may be wet this year, out of drought threat, but the Texas Panhandle remains dry. It's time to go home.  To check the farm.  It's been on fire twice, once because the highway department truck dragged across high grass in the nearby bar ditch igniting the pasture. The other fire was on the land near town.  Someone apparently tossed a cigarette.  There are blackened out patches all along this...

When I discovered I was on the short list for the Sarton book award for memoir, May flashed in my mind.  Eighty years old, shock white hair, owl-eye glasses that looked probingly out at the world.  It was l992, on the occasion of her birthday; I'd been invited to Portland, Maine for a conference and reading in celebration of her special day.  It turned out that this was the last reading she would give.  She died in l995. The May Sarton book awards are given annually for memoir, contemporary...