Home Editing Publishing Photography Writings Publicity Background
Highlights Communications
Writings

 

Pushcart-nominated essay and a novel on the Sixties Movement; novel of resistance in a near-future U.S.; AIDS in Yosemite (short fiction); poems of adoption reunion, history and peace.

God's Eyes

“. . . in clearing out the layers of false voices and destructive systems of a false society—in finding in the world and self what was liberating, life-protective, motherly, and coming to brief revolutionary (so to speak) fruition. . . ”  The classic, Pushcart Prize–nominated essay illuminates why the antiwar movement of the late 1960s changed each woman and man who lived it. Originally appeared, as "You asked 'What was happening then?'" in Vietnam Generation, vol. 6; a short form has appeared in First of the Month, no. 18 (summer 2007).
(Read more)

Mountain Women

“That was right after the London and Haifa Bombs finished off, you know, ‘civil liberties.’ You’ve seen the pictures—those old pacifists, with their hands still outstretched . . .  But by then, we had the base high up on Donner. We’d come down by darkness, right past those boulder whatnots, take out some army . . . ”
(Read more)

Time and Other Details

Poems , including OSPA winner “You!” the much-anthologized “Welfare Mother,” and other harrowing works on real-family life, death, time, struggle, and history.
       from “Itsy-Girls”: We put away to save the paper Torah./The golden reindeer’s antlers, itsy girl, are lost./ We put away the paper houses of Japan./ Make a museum of the footless tiny frozen shoes . . .
       from “Banks of the Nuclear Folks”: I asked my country to go to war/ just a little war, hey a tiny little war,/ a few little days, or a week or two more,/ down where the great Euphrates roars. . .

(Read more)

On the Trail in Yosemite

                 . . . “You working too hard there?” the little one joked. I'd said I was from Seattle.
                 “No—just emotionally difficult.” We kept puffing along, the whole time climbing back and forth up the granite-bordered trail. Then I decided to say it. “AIDS. I work with people with AIDS.”
                 “Hey, that’s hard.” She knew someone else, it turned out, in the field.
                 I told her I’d lost so many—that was how it seemed, then—“but now my closest friend is dying.” I stopped, for the trail began rising steeply, and we all put on sunblock . . .

(Read more)

Reaching Through

“In the white television lights, Leah saw Marines attack the demonstrator; the high-packed napalm truck sped past. They were dragging the person out in the light of the cameras, hitting him with nightsticks, but her feet would not move . . .”  In late-1960s Berkeley, an anguished young woman in the antiwar movement discovers new possibilities of peace and love.
(Read more)