Zero to Fifty
Zero to Fifty When I’m being interviewed, I often get the question, “When did you know you wanted to be a writer?” The answer is, it’s complicated. Not that I haven’t written off and on my whole life, I wrote a play in third grade, a reader’s theater in seventh, and there is a book […]
Invent Your Own Goddess
Invent Your Own Goddess When pagan author Donna Henes was almost fifty she developed a surprising habit. She began praising herself over even the smallest thing. “Good girl!” she would say to herself if she took the stairs instead of the elevator, or if she really did drink eight glasses of water in a day. […]
A Politically Correct Scapegoat?
A Politically Correct Scapegoat? Anthropologists have long debated the idea that targeting certain members of a society as “others” who don’t deserve care and respect has survival value for the group as a whole. If we assume that people have inborn tendencies toward violence, then focusing blame on a subgroup might support the cohesion of […]
Adjusting to the Now, Over and Over Again
Adjusting to the Now, Over and Over Again Last week I attended a conference in Santa Fe, Quest 2026, all about vivid aging for older women. One of the speakers was Kat Miller, a counselor and pro-aging activist who talked about falling in love with impermanence (“Crazy, right?” she said). Kat urged each of us […]
The Gray New Deal
The Gray New Deal My first published novel, The Gray New Deal, is appearing as I turn 63. In the novel, seven seniors who shared a college co-op in Austin fifty years ago reunite to create another co-op. Together, this intentional community navigates Trump 1.0 and the first years of the pandemic. They’re a diverse […]
Artificial? Yes. Intelligence? Maybe.
Artificial? Yes. Intelligence? Maybe. Years ago my son bought the house Marion Zimmer Bradley owned at the end of her life. She lived there in community with the writers who ghost wrote many of her later novels. Those books, published under Zimmer’s name to take advantage of her established readership, really did literally take advantage […]
