¡AY, QUÉ LÀSTIMA!

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¡AY, QUÉ LÀSTIMA! by Linda Rodriguez

The men—husbands, father-in-law, cousins—sat in the living room on the flower-covered couch and armchairs or sprawled on the shag carpet in front of the televised football game, beer cans in all hands. The only differences from the majority of living rooms across America were the brand of beer (Dos Equís or Carta Blanca), the painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe above the couch serenely presiding over the laughter and profanity, and the Spanish phrases casually sprinkled throughout the Midwestern English.

“First down! Yeah! Let’s do it again! ¡Otra vez!”

The women, not unlike those in my own father’s family, sat at the kitchen table and stood at stove and counters, preparing meals and gossiping about absent members of the extended family in the same flat Midwestern accents sparked with Spanish phrases. “¡Ay, qué lástima!” was the most frequent. What a shame, or what a mess, or what a tragedy. It was used in all three cases with only a change in tone and the context to indicate which.

Young newlywed with feminist ideas (after all, it was the beginning of 1970, a new age), I planted myself defiantly on that floral couch at my husband’s side. I had grown up playing football with my many brothers. I could yell for a field goal or first down with the best of them. I was going to be an equal, not shunted off to the kitchen to gossip with the women.

And other than a frown from my forbidding father-in-law (who, I was convinced, hated me anyway) and a raised eyebrow from one of my husband’s older cousins, I encountered no real resistance. Most of the younger generation thought it was cool. Oh, I knew the women in the kitchen were shaking their heads, clucking tongues, and whispering about me.

“What can you expect if Mike marries some half-breed Indian girl? ¡Ay, qué lástima!”

So why did I give up my place in front of the TV and under Our Lady’s protective gaze to spend decades of my life in the steamy kitchen, patting out tortillas and clucking my tongue at the latest escapades of Manny, the drunkard second cousin once-removed (“Of course, he’s still a primo. His mother and grandfather are, aren’t they?”) and the no-good mujeriego that poor Lupe married (“¡Ay, qué lástima!”)?

I simply grew up enough to understand that the conversations in the kitchen were more than just gossip. There was always some of that, of course, but on the whole, what was taking place was of greater importance. That kitchen, as were so many, was the central hub of the web that was la familia, embracing not only distant blood relatives but godparents and godchildren, as well as in-laws of in-laws. In that kitchen, behavior was examined and evaluated, true, but usually through the lens of the good of the entire family. And the verdicts would later pass to husbands over meals or in bed back in their own homes.

“Jacinto needs to lighten up on that oldest boy of his. If Chuy can get a scholarship, why shouldn’t he go to college? One of his brothers can take over the shop.”

Over the years, as I added my own children to that family web of relationships, I learned to value the women’s kitchen-talk in a different way. Raised through my adolescence in the ultimate-individualist WASP world of my mother’s family after the divorce, I had made that competitive ethos my own, but this other way of granting importance to the good of the family and the community resonated with my early memories of my Cherokee grandmother and my father’s people. American society outside would always push the concept of each individual for himself or herself, but there was a place as well for these older ways, ways of considering la familia, the group, the tribe, trying to keep it strong and thriving, and trying to keep each member linked to everyone else in a web of love, loyalty, and concern.

Those children I gave to the family web are grown now. With so many of their second- and third-generation peers, they’ve moved away and live on the furthest fringes of the web. Like the tias who taught me to make tamales and enchiladas, along with more important things, I pull them back in as much as I can, reminding them of their obligations and ties to the family, nagging my youngest to call his prima who lives in his college town.

“But, Mom, I don’t know her! She’s not going to want to hear from me.”

“She’s Aunt Mary from Chicago’s oldest boy’s granddaughter. She’s family. Of course, she’ll want to hear from you. A friendly face in a town where she’s a stranger and brand new? Just give her a call.”

I see the same attitudes of wanting to ignore or forget family ties other than the immediate in others of my children’s generation. The media are full of voices telling Latinos to assimilate, but that’s something they’ve been doing quite successfully for as long as they’ve had the chance. The trick is to do that without losing the cultural and familial richness that is their inheritance, is in fact one of the many gifts Latinos have to offer Anglo America. That family closeness and consideration for the welfare of the community that is the extended family web has long disappeared from much of the Anglo American culture. If Latinos were to assimilate that… “¡Ay, qué lástima!”

 

Linda Rodriguez’s 13th book, Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging, was published in May 2023. She also edited Woven Voices: 3 Generations of Puertorriqueña Poets Look at Their American Lives, The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, The Fish That Got Away: The Sixth Guppy Anthology, Fishy Business: The Fifth Guppy Anthology, and other anthologies.

Dark Sister: Poems was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. Her three earlier Skeet  Bannion mystery novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, Every Last Secret—and earlier books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart’s Migration—received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. She also published Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop.  Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in Kansas City Noir, was optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Learn more about her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com or follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/rodriguez_linda or on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/rodriguez_linda.

Juliana Chacha de Cochiti, New Mexico de la cruz Aragón Fatula

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Dear Reader,

Fall 2023 has neared and it’s time to prepare for harvest. This year I made the choice not to have a vegetable garden. Climate Change has changed how we grow our gardens and try to conserve water during the scorching heat of summer.

My flowers are protected by an electric fence because deer herds roam through our yard and eat whatever they want. I had to plant deer-resistant perennials but the grasshoppers showed up and wreaked havoc on everything. Gardening used to be relaxing and therapeutic. Today between the heat, deer, drought, and climate change cause our fruit trees to bloom too soon when it warms too early and then get hit by freezing weather destroying the blossoms and fruit.

Change is good. I changed. I changed from a person who had no goals, to a woman with amazing goals to improve herself and others around her. When I was young I was tough and rebellious. I walked a razer-thin line teetering between law-abiding and loving criminals who did not abide by the laws. I had a human flaw. I wanted to be loved and I wanted a bad boy. I found several in my lifetime. Never a good fit they wanted a woman to keep them warm at night and I wanted a man to worship me.

In 1990, I finally met a man capable of loving and worshipping me the way I always wanted. The catch he wanted a woman to be an outdoorsman/woman. He wanted a woman to climb mountains, fish from boats on lakes, and hunt deer, elk, moose, and bear, but I like vegetables. He wanted a wife who would love his work ethic. I wanted a man who would rather be with me than hunting. We came to an agreement. He’d do his fishing, hunting, scouting, killing, and wild game as many times as he wanted. He’d leave me alone to write.

So he left this morning at midnight to hunt Wyoming for a month and a half and I rolled out the projects I’ve been putting off until I could have peace and quiet and solitude.

My husband calls and checks on me, but I am capable of taking care of myself. I look forward to my alone time to do whatever I want. My friends ask how do you do it. Don’t you get lonely? Not really. I have my novel’s characters to keep me busy. My characters enter my world and play out their lives in scenes in my head like a movie. I see what they are wearing, hear the music they listen to, smell the food they eat, and feel their heartbeats when they are excited, frightened, or depressed. My characters speak to me in my head and tell me their stories. I love my characters.

I’ve decided my mystery romance novel is a trilogy. I am finishing the first book before starting the second but I’m torn between wanting to start the next book and waiting patiently to submit and publish this first novel. I envision my characters growing older and traveling through time into a future filled with chaos.

My editor finished critiquing my first novel and sent me the revisions and suggestions. I quickly realized that I had a lot of work to do on my mystery romance. So I’m going to digest her suggestions. They are all great ones. She’s a professional and did an amazing job on editing. I’m going to work on another manuscript that’s been gathering dust and let this one steep for a few months.

In October, I’m headed to Albuquerque, New Mexico to lead a writing workshop with a couple of amazing women. I’ll dive into my mystery m.s. and get busy with the revisions. I’m looking forward to time away from home and the beauty of New Mexico. On the road trip from Colorado, I plan to visit my ancestors’ birth and burial pueblos and document and photograph the sites for a genealogy project I’m working on. I’ll tell you more about it when it gets closer, but it is called Native Bound Unbound and is an amazing opportunity to do DNA testing and trace my indigenous roots back in time to the 1700s. The path may lead me to write a non-fiction book on my ancestors and the struggles they encountered during the Indian Wars, the Mexican-American Wars the Civil War, and all the wars afterward. Keep checking the blog for more info on my amazing life tracing my Navajo, Ute, and Pueblo ancestors from New Mexico Territory to my Colorado home in Southern Colorado.

Thank you for reading my posts have a great end of summer and see you in September.

Juliana Aragón Fatula, a 2022 Corn Mother, women who have earned accolades for community activism and creative endeavors is the author of: Crazy Chicana in Catholic City, Red Canyon Falling on Churches, winner of the High Plains Book Award for Poetry 2016, and a chapbook: The Road I Ride Bleeds, and a member of Colorado Alliance of Latino Mentors and Authors, and Macondo, “a community of accomplished writers…whose bonds reflect the care and generosity of its membership.” She mentors Bridging Borders, a Teen Leadership Program for girls. No justice no peace.

Designated Parking

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By Barbara J Eikmeier

It’s back-to-school-time which means it’s time to paint the high school parking lot AGAIN. An annual tradition at our local high school, it’s a senior privilege.

My children didn’t attend this school, so I’m strictly an observer of the annual changing of the guard in the school parking lot – a local citizen enjoying the show.

I notice the transition while exercising on the school track. It starts on a weekend. Dad’s and daughters, small groups of teen boys, and threesomes of giggling girls in short shorts and tank tops descend upon the asphalt. They arrive with rolls of blue masking tape, cans of paint, and rollers with long handles. They mask frames and roll the first color of paint. As the days go by the art emerges as the rising seniors personalize their private parking spots.

Designated parking spots are everywhere. CEOs and company presidents have them. On military posts the Solider of the Month has one. I once saw one near the door in a JC Penney’s parking lot for “Mother to be”. But aside from a formal sign, they aren’t decorated.

I’m not sure how the seniors get the privilege but in my mind it’s a fundraiser – auctioned to the highest bidder, the money deposited to the Grad Night fund.

What I haven’t sorted out is why the seniors choose their particular spots. Oh sure, those coveted places near the entrance to the school make sense. A senior can push the snooze button every morning then whip into his prime parking spot and still be in his seat before the tardy bell rings. It’s a rational that I would use myself, given the chance. But what puzzles me are the random spots in the middle of the parking lot. Or those on the outer edges furthest from the door. Why there?

Google Earth image

 

A day or two before school resumes the parking lot painting wraps up. The masking tape is peeled away leaving a sharp outline well within the official white lines.

The colors are vibrant: Hot pink, sunny yellow, Black and Red, Go Lions!  The themes are as varied as the students themselves. Football player’s numbers in bold block letters, favorite car brands, pop culture icons such as Pokemon and, new this year, Hi Barbie, and of course “Class of 2024” everywhere. The trending themes, popular colors, and school pride splashes across the parking lot in a sort of “controlled graffiti”.

I never actually see the students – they’re in class when I do my laps on their track, but I sure enjoy the way they share their passions with the world in the form of a decorated parking spot.

As the months pass the vibrant colors will soften until the week after graduation when the parking spots will be painted over with black paint, the dark rectangles creating a clean canvas for the next batch of rising seniors.

Does your community have a quirky annual tradition that amuses you?

Barbara J. Eikmeier is a quilter, writer, student of quilt history, and lover of small-town America. Raised on a dairy farm in California, she enjoys placing her characters in rural communities.

Cruising into Danger book cover

Special Guest: Kari Lee Townsend

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by Sparkle Abbey

Today we’d like to welcome our friend Kari Lee Townsend to the blog. She’s going to tell you a bit about herself and share some info about the book she’s working on as well as what she has coming up. Welcome Kari!

Hi there. My name is Kari Lee Townsend, and I’m an author of several genres, but one of my favorites to write is the cozy mystery, especially paranormal ones.

Cruising into Danger book coverHave you ever been on a cruise ship? Today’s cruise ships are humongous compared to original cruise ships like The Love Boat. I love MSC cruise ships, but I took a Princess cruise ship
recently. The Love Boat was a Princess ship. How funny is that? During this particular cruise, I happen to be working on a cruise ship mystery. A lot of people know me for my Fortune Teller Mysteries, now known as The Sunny Meadows Mysteries. My newer Mind Reader Mysteries are called The Kalli Ballas Mysteries. Sunny is a fun, quirky psychic who uses fortune telling tools to predict someone’s future or see something from their past. The hero of her series is Detective Mitch Stone who is a serious, cynical sort, with a cast of eccentric characters in town. Meanwhile, Kalli is a fashion designer who falls and hits her head, giving her the power to read people’s minds, but only when she’s touching them. The kicker is, she’s an introverted germaphobe who doesn’t like to be touched. The hero of her series is Detective Nik Stevens who is a devilish extravert who loves to push her buttons. Kalli was adopted into a Big Fat Greek Family, while Nik is half Greek, which is Greek enough for the mamas to meddle in matchmaking. The cruise ship mystery I’m working on is called Cruising into Danger. It’s a crossover book between the two series. The two couples are on a cruise out of NYC to the Bermuda Triangle, where they meet and hit it off. Everything starts off great until mysterious things start to happen and then a passenger winds up dead on the return trip. The ship is on lockdown in the middle of the ocean with a killer loose on board. The detectives decide to use their skills to help wrap up the case faster, but they’re not the only ones who interfere. Sunny and Kalli use their abilities to investigate on their own, winding up in all sorts of sticky situations, causing both their families to meddle from afar.

Author photo: Kari Lee Townsend

I’m having so much fun writing this book. The exciting part is, a new spin off series of The Sunny Meadows Mysteries called Stone Investigations will be coming out next year. In that series, Mitch and Sunny have a grown daughter and son. Their daughter, Martina aka Tina, is just like her father. A serious private investigator. While their son, River, is a psychic like Sunny, who’s been backpacking across America with his blood hound Harley to find himself. Sunny convinces Tina to let River work with her, and they open Stone Investigations right in Divinity, where all the old favorite characters come into play.

Thank you for having me. I’ll give one signed copy of a paperback (winner’s choice) to a commenter.  Good luck!

 

Thanks so much for stopping by Kari. We can’t wait to read the new book!  And the new spin off series sounds like great fun! 

To find out more about Kari’s books visit her website at: www.karileetownsend.com

And don’t forget to comment in order to be in on the giveaway drawing! 

 

 

 

The Right Way to Worry –by T.K. Thorne

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There’s a lot to worry about.

The world is on fire. Literally and figuratively. It’s not the first time, of course, even though it feels like a unique crossroads of time.

I grew up under the threat of nuclear winter and the extinction of life on Earth. My family discussed what to do should the sirens go off (the sirens that now warn of tornados rather than a nuclear bomb headed our way). “Stay at school,” my mother said. Of course, there was no guarantee it would happen while I was at school. I spent a good bit of time wondering where we could hunker down and if we could get a lead shield big enough for the garage door to keep radiation out and what food we needed to have stored away. I still have the little booklet on how to survive nuclear fallout.

So, I know how to worry!

There also are more mundane issues to concern us. We worry about inflation and that gas prices are too high, or about deflation and that they will go too low. We are worried our investment dollars (however small) may not poof back into existence when they poof out. If we are working, we worry about the stability of our jobs or whether we picked the right career or the right mate.

Writers worry that our stuff will not be good enough, or read enough, or whether we will have “writer’s block” and not write enough, or we will write too much and have to cut … and (yikes!) what if we cut the wrong stuff? We worry that agents or editors or readers won’t love us or, if we are fortunate enough to have a success, we panic that the next project won’t be as good.

Then there are the really scary worries. We worry about politics and what will happen to our children, whether they will be able to live their dreams or end up in prison, in a fascist state, or under the thumb of a world-dominating Artificial Intelligence.

Pick a subject; we can worry about it. Everyone, except possibly the enlightened Dalai Lama, worries about something, more likely a lot of things. Worrying must have had some evolutionary value. If we never worried about having stuff in lean times, we wouldn’t have invented grocery stores…or shopping.

We plan in response to worry. If junior is smart, how are we going to pay for college? Better start saving early. If junior isn’t smart, we may have to feed him well into his adult life. Better start saving early. Some worrying (that leads to planning or working to make change happen) is therefore good. Excess worrying, however, causes stress, and stress is linked to everything from headaches to premature death.

Early man worried about placating emotionally unstable gods and spirits that rocked the world with floods, drought, earthquakes, and fire from heaven. They must have worried incessantly about what they could do about it until they invented shamans to tell them exactly when, where, and how much stuff to offer up. Of course, we are way beyond that now. I think it’s been days since I knocked on wood to keep from irritating the gods about something I said.

My 4’ 10” grandmother was a Professional Worrier. She was pretty much undiscriminating about the subject matter, but as I entered my teens, she worried in particular that my hair was not stylish, my cheeks were too pale, and my skirts were too long to catch a boy’s eye. She worried I would not marry a doctor and that some illness or accident was bound to befall me, probably at the worst time, (i.e., before I got married). Most of all, she believed I was oblivious about the importance of these things and so, she carried the burden of worrying about them on her own tiny shoulders.

On one family outing, we watched from a bank while my grandfather puttering around the lake in a small one-seater motorboat. Grandma’s palms stayed plastered to her cheeks for the entire thirty minutes he had fun.

She heaved a sigh. “I’m so worried about him.”

Grandma’s concern was always an expression of her love, not something to question, but that day I turned to her and asked, “Why, Grandma? Why are you worried? What good does that do?”

With a look of disbelieve at my ignorance, she said, “Because you never know!”

You never know. True. Something could happen. Anything could happen.

With a flash of understanding, I got it.

Worrying is magic. If you’ve worried about something, you’ve tipped the scales of fate, you’ve appeased the gods; you’ve knocked on wood. That’s why when you say, such and such could happen, you add a “God forbid” to the end of it. Grandma’s strategy, even if it was an unconscious one, was that you should do preventive worrying to keep something bad from happening. And if you weren’t diligent and hadn’t covered all the bases, something you hadn’t even thought about was sure to sneak up on you … and (God forbid) happen.

The Dahlia Llama sees all this in a very different light. He says that if there is a solution to a problem, there is no need to worry. And if there is no solution … there is no need to worry.

I, being my grandmother’s descendant, have developed my own, somewhat less enlightened, but workable, strategy: Refocus your worries. I like to worry about exactly how I am going to spend the money should I win a lottery. (You have no idea all the problems such a responsibility raises.) And speaking of responsibility, we could worry about starving people in Africa a little more often than when we are admonishing children to eat what’s on their plate. We could worry about the precious democracies that are under threat, not to mention the polar bear’s diminishing habitat and our chances for surviving on a planet whose thermostat has gone whacko.

But even responsible worrying can become stressful. When the You-Never-Knows of everyday life start to tangle my mind, I refocus on the scientific proclamation that our Universe is possibly a random bubble among many, and it could pop at any moment and annihilate the whole thing.

Now, there is something to worry about!

T.K. Thorne writes about what moves her, following a flight path of curiosity, reflection, and imagination.

July 2023 Summertime in Southern Colorado By Juliana Cha Cha de Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico de la cruz Aragón Fatula

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Dear Reader,

This is the story that I want to write and read. Something no one else can write. Only I can tell this story. It is my story about two talented Chicanas from Pueblo, Colorado who solve crimes and mysteries and run Emma’s Recovery House for women and children. L.A. and Eva Mondragón Private Investigators and social activists in Denver, Colorado honoring their mother by helping the unfortunate. There but for the grace of God, go I.

Summertime and living is easy. The tide has finally rolled out and we are beginning to enjoy the peace, quiet, and solitude of retirement and our golden years.

I’ve been working since I was twelve years old. My first job, babysitting, taught me how to take care of a baby, my nephew.

My second job, I was fifteen and pregnant, taught me how to clean and scrub toilets at the beauty shop owned by the only Latina beautician in town, Dee. She gave me my first office cleaning job.

Eventually, I gained employment scrubbing the toilets of the local doctors, lawyers, judges, and politicians. Their houses never seemed dirty to me, but I dusted, swept, vacuumed, mopped, and cleaned windows and bathrooms.

My mother cleaned houses, but she also ironed and washed the clothes of her employers and they gave my mom their children’s hand-me-downs and toys. Even though we were poor, we dressed nice and had great toys, bikes, sleds, skateboards, Suzy Easy Bake Oven…

The rich loved my mom’s cooking. She made the best tamales in the county. They gave her their children’s possessions as they outgrew them. We in turn gave our clothes and toys to the white family down the block because they were even poorer than we were in our family.

Mom and Dad taught us never to make fun of those poor white kids who wore our hand-me-downs. Our parents taught us respect, morals, ethics, honesty, kindness, and generosity, and gave us unconditional love. (Don’t know how I turned out semi-normal).

I worked through the summer of 1972 and by the fall, my friends had returned to high school sophomore year. I left my small hometown in Southern Colorado and moved to San Francisco, California.

The culture shock was minimal but the homesickness was maximum. I missed my family and my friends but not my hometown. I was thrilled to be living in the Bay area and enjoyed my fifteenth birthday, my boyfriend, and my baby boy. I had no clue what I was doing.

My California romance ended, and I returned to Colorado and my parents. I returned to my hometown high school and found my next job at the communication monopoly known then as Mountain Bell.

At sixteen I was the first person of color in my hometown to work at a major corporation like Mt. Bell as a telephone operator. Thanks to the Equal Employment Opportunity Act and Family Planning I was able to rent an apartment, buy a car, and support myself and my son and get healthcare for us. Mt. Bell also hired the first male telephone operator in the county. He happened to be gay but was closeted in our small, town of 99.99% Caucasian in 1973.

I celebrated my eighteenth birthday in the ICU in the hospital in my hometown after nearly bleeding to death in the ER restroom. I had an ectopic pregnancy that burst when I was packing to move to Denver. I lost my left ovary and fallopian tube and lived to tell the story.

I transferred to Denver and left my hometown. I was a customer service representative for Mt. Bell in their downtown Denver high-rise. I met people from all walks of life and became part of a diverse community. I loved living in Denver. I transferred several times to better-paying jobs and climbed the corporate ladder. I learned job skills and networked with coworkers from around the country.

I never gave up on my dream of graduating from college. I made my goal of a degree in English and Creative Writing a priority in my life. Eventually, I earned several degrees and my teaching certificate.

When my Dad died, I returned to my hometown to be near my mother in her golden years. I was hired by the school district and taught in the same building I had attended in my freshman year of high school.

I had come full circle, but I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to push myself. I challenged myself to write and get published. The year I graduated, Conundrum Press published  my first book of poetry, Crazy Chicana in Catholic City, a year later my second book of poetry, Red Canyon Falling on Churches, was published.

I graduated with honors from CSU Pueblo in 2008 at 50 years old, published two poetry books and a chapbook, The Road I Ride Bleeds, and decided to challenge myself to write my first novel.

I’ve always loved the mystery genre. I naturally chose to write a love story mystery. I don’t want to write a good novel. I want to write a great novel. I joined several national writing groups and networked with writers, editors, journalists, and publishers. I read books on writing by the masters: Stephen King, Ernest Hemmingway, Linda Rodriquez, etc.

I set my self-imposed deadline of July 15, 2023, to finish revising my m.s. I’ve been writing this novel off and on for five years. Stopping when life gets too crazy and starting again when I figure out how to survive the global pandemic, my son’s drug addiction, his heart attack, his stroke, his brain damage, and his death at fifty.

In December of 2022, my husband and I both had covid and weeks of illness. Then came the death threat to my husband by my nephew and the subpoena to testify against him in court.

One day I shook off all of the pain and grief and went back to work on my novel and worked harder than I ever had before. I realized with my son’s death at only fifty years of age that I could die at any minute from anything and needed to complete my book, publish my book, and then I could die, but not until then. I added to my bucket list: publish a great mystery love story and spread my message of diversity, inclusivity, peace, love, and understanding and do it with a sense of humor and dun dun dun, mystery.

Today I’m chilling. I’m waiting for feedback from my editor and her critique for revisions and submitting my novel. I truly have hopes of submitting to all the Latinx/Chicanx publishers. There are few but they do exist, and I want to start with them first. It also is important to me to submit with an LGBTQ publisher because many of my characters are lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, and queer and have important messages to teach about being marginalized.

Many of the women characters in my novel living at Emma’s Recovery House are recovering drug addicts, alcoholics, inmates, human trafficking victims, runaways, abused, confused, and used women looking for a new life, a new start, a fresh chance to survive in a world gone crazy. They have been judged, mistreated, abandoned, beaten, and ignored as worthy human beings with something to contribute to society. I want to tell their stories of wicked warrior women with survivor attitudes and joyful spirits.

Work Life Balance

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Work Life Balance

by Saralyn Richard

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

 

I was recently asked in a video interview what my work-life balance looked like. I had to laugh. I’m sorry to say I’ve never perfected work-life balance, and I’ve never really tried. While I’m a perfectionist in many things, anything that requires me to pay attention to time is a lost cause.

As a disclaimer, writing, for me, is not actually work. Being a writer is a long-deferred dream come true, so now that I have dedicated myself to telling stories, the work is joyous. When I’m working, I give my all to my work. If I’m writing a scene, I am lost in the zone of that scene so thoroughly that I don’t notice where I am or what time it is in the real world. This quirk has gotten me into many difficulties when I start writing close to times of appointments, meetings, or social engagements. I have to restrain myself from sitting down to work within an hour of any of the above.

The same is true when I’m spending time with friends or family. I give my full attention to them and strive to cherish every moment. Having been deprived of social interactions for so long, due to the pandemic, I appreciate in-person get-togethers more than ever. I don’t check my phone for messages or daydream about possible plot twists. I don’t lurk on the fringes; I jump into the middle with my whole heart.  I listen, I share, I laugh, I cry. I try to emulate my sheepdog Nana, who gives herself over to her people, completely.

If work and life end up being balanced, that’s a happy coincidence. So how about you? I’d love to hear how you address work-life balance.

Saralyn Richard is an educator and author of five award-winning mystery novels and a children’s book. Visit her at http://saralynrichard.com and sign up for her monthly newsletter.

“Tis the Season – The Voting Rather than the Holiday One

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‘Tis the Season – The Voting Rather than the Holiday One by Debra H. Goldstein

Have you ever noticed the increase in your emails or in list serv postings during the period before nominations are turned in for writing awards? Some requests are blatant – please vote for me. Others are more subtle – noting what the writer has written what of his or her’s that could be considered and asking those who read the post to “remind” everyone of their possible offerings. Some groups simply ask authors to respond in a given thread, others use data bases. The bottom line is that without a little “help” from our friends, there is no way any writer can be familiar with all the possible books/authors to nominate.

There are simply too many books.

That’s why, much as I hate the extra emails and list serv postings, I am grateful for those who compile lists (like Gabriel) or use databases (like the Guppies). These jog my memory and usually give me enough time so that I can read the works of everyone I nominate.

Two questions for you.  Do you, like me, prefer the lists and databases or are you okay with emails and list serv postings for all?  Today’s email brought an announcement listing the books up for the Killer Nashville Reader’s Choice Awards. The list includes my Five Belles Too Many. In the comments, tell me if you have a book eligible for consideration? Oh, and here’s a call to action: Anyone can vote for Reader’s Choice – follow this link, look at the list, and vote:

https://www.killernashville.com/killer-nashville-readers-choice-award or directly on the ballot here https://killernashville.forms-db.com/view.php?id=246688

Family

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I’ve been thinking about families lately. Specifically, two kinds of family: the kind we are born into and the kind we create for ourselves among the strangers we meet in the course of our lives.

I have a brother I love dearly. I never had a sister, but I was blessed with girl cousins who were close in age. As children, we’d play together like siblings. Holidays were always big gatherings, too. And when we got older, we stood as bridesmaids in each others’ weddings. Eventually, we moved away from our family homes and out of each other’s lives.

This week, some of my cousins came to town for an impromptu four-day get-together. From the get-go, I was struck by how easily we slipped back into sister-mode. Making lunch, shopping, and just sittin’ around reminiscing, the bonds between us are still there, despite the years we’ve been apart. It’s such a comfortable, validating feeling to be with them, those people who knew us way back when.

Almost a decade ago, writing groups and writing conferences introduced me to a different kind of family. After attending my first writing conference, I felt like I had finally found my “peeps.” Without these new sisters and brothers, my writing life would be one lonely enterprise.

I’m especially grateful to the angels among them who’ve taken a personal interest in my work. At times when I’ve been ready to tear my hair out in frustration, they come through with encouragement and sage advice.

When I was growing up, I imagined a writer’s life to be a solitary existence. I never imagined that I’d find such a nurturing community here. But that is exactly what happened.

I’m lucky to have all these folks in my life. Whether related by blood or by our love of books, it’s family that makes life worthwhile.

Gay Yellen writes the award-winning Samantha Newman Mysteries including The Body Business, The Body Next Door, and out later this summer, The Body in the News.

 

The Arts Are For Everyone!

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The Arts Are For Everyone! by Linda Rodriguez

A few years ago, I was giving writing workshops at a local high school on the wrong side of the tracks. These kids had already been through lots of trauma and stress, though they were only in their teens. These particular twenty kids, however, fell in love with writing, and it offered them a way to deal with broken families, broken hearts, and broken promises. They learned that on their own without me.

I was there to show them that writing can offer them even more. It wasn’t easy at first. Some of them started out prickly. It’s natural when life’s been a hostile environment to be always on guard. It took patience, but we got past that, and they wrote some phenomenal poems.

In the last workshop I had the joy of telling them that their work would be published in an anthology of Kansas City student writing and that they would give a public reading at The Writers Place, the city’s stand-alone center for writers and literature. They were pretty excited. This was a kind of validation that they almost never get. And since the poems to be published were from a workshop we did around identity and specific imagery, it was a special kind of validation. They opened their hearts on the page about the good and bad things in their families and their lives, and society said, “You are great just as you are!”

Out of the school population of 348, these twenty kids are winners. They may not be the only ones, of course, and they may not all go on to college. However, they have learned to use language to help themselves through tough times. They have learned to use language to form images of who they are and where they want to go, and that’s a prize of incomparable worth.

 

Linda Rodriguez’s 13th book, Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging, was published in May 2023. She also edited Woven Voices: 3 Generations of Puertorriqueña Poets Look at Their American Lives, The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, The Fish That Got Away: The Sixth Guppy Anthology, Fishy Business: The Fifth Guppy Anthology, and other anthologies.

Dark Sister: Poems was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. Her three earlier Skeet Bannion mystery novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, Every Last Secret—and earlier books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart’s Migration—received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. She also published Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop.  Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in Kansas City Noir, was optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Learn more about her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com or follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/rodriguez_linda  or on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/rodriguez_linda.