My mother passed in 2022. For a variety of reasons, we did not go through my parents' house until last summer. I spent a week up there with four of my siblings, emptying drawers and closets, shredding papers and going through the effects of two long lives.  Not only was the house full of stuff, my parents also had a huge shop crammed with tools and a basement stacked with boxes. Even after the week we were there, a few things turned up. One find was this tine, which my brother discovered in the basement (we did not have time to go through every box down there).

A tine (pronounced tee-nah) is a traditional Norwegian box constructed of bent wood. Often they were used for carrying food--like a lunch pail. You open it by pulling the little ear-shaped handles at the side, which flexes the wood so the lid comes off. 

My grandmother was a folk painter, her work inspired by traditional rosemaling. In her kitchen, she painted the cupboard doors with flowers and had a round table with a sunflower in the middle. When I was a girl, her kitchen was one of my favorite places. (I wrote a bit about her painting in a previous blog post).

My mother had a sewing tine like this that my grandmother painted. This tine is not my mother's--hers had a different design and also had a broken side handle. I'm speculating that this tine may have been my grandmother's personal tine. However, we don't know. We don't even know for sure that she painted it, although it looks very much like her other work. My mother's is signed, and this one is unsigned.

I remember my mother's tine--not just the outside, but her tomato/strawberry pincushion, and especially the collection of buttons scavenged from old clothes. I loved to slide my fingers over the smooth buttons, squeeze the sandy-textured pincushion, fumble the thimble onto my thumb. So for me, getting this tine stirred up many memories. 

Because this tine was found after the week I was at my parents' house, I didn't get it until this Christmas. I planned to use it as a sewing tine myself, but I was unaware until I opened it that it was still full.

But why the little ballet dancer figurine, like one broken from a jewelry/music box? Why the lightbulb? And can I even take these things as relics of hers, since I am not 100% sure this was her tine? 

Getting this tine reminded me of how mysterious the lives of others are. No one knows anyone's full story. My grandmother died when I was in college. My parents, who might have been able to positively identify the tine, are both gone. 

My father's younger brother, my uncle David, passed over a year ago. He was a photographer and became a caretaker of many family photos. One of my cousins uploaded old photos he scanned. There are many pictures of my grandparents as well as of my father and his brothers. But the photos contain many more photos of people I cannot identify. And even the ones I can recognize are in contexts I can't fathom. Where and when and why were they taken? It's all mysterious.  

Writing fiction is a way to try to understand others as well as myself. But it's all guesswork. I could make up a story about why my grandmother saved that broken ballerina figure, but it would be fiction. Everyone I could ask is gone.

This picture from that trove of scanned photos is my grandmother as a young woman. It captures some of her humor and liveliness and the flair of a budding artist.​

2024 was a hard year. The presidential election sat hunched over the months like a looming storm cloud. None of us knew what kind of storm was coming, but we all had fears. The atmosphere made it difficult for me to concentrate. Sometimes I was able to put my fears aside and do some writing and submitting. Other times the atmosphere overtook me, and I an existential dread filled my head like static. 

And once the election was over, the dread became a kind of mourning for the hopes I had cherished, for the idea of my fellow Americans that I had to let go. One way I got through the first Trump term was telling myself that most Americans had not wanted this outcome. But in 2024--even after the courts have declared him a felon and a rapist, even after he encouraged his followers to invade the capital to overturn an election--so many people stood up and declared that was exactly what they wanted. It was a dark time. 

I start out every writing year with the hope that I will be more disciplined and focused, but I'm giving myself a bit of a pass for 2024. 

Even so, I DID manage some writing and submitting. Not as much as I hoped, but enough to get four stories published. My great thanks to the journals Microfiction Monday and the Eunoia Review for publishing my work. 

For those of you who didn't catch them when I originally posted them, here are the stories that I had published:

• "Across the Street from the Good Life," Eunoia Review, September, 2024
• "Let's Say," Eunoia Review, September, 2024
• "Can't Be too Careful," Eunoia Review, September, 2024
• "Inheritance," Microfiction Monday, February, 2024

And as for the coming year, I hope as always to write and submit more than I did the previous year. In 2024 I accomplished that, given that 2023 was a very low time for my submissions. 

Art is one of the ways we deal with dark times. I sing with two choruses, and this fall both directors tried to provide comfort and build resilient hope with their music selections. In the same way, reading and writing can be great sources of comfort and hope. My goal for 2025 is to do more of both, to nurture the sources of creativity that provide inspiration and energy to fight for a more just world, and to provide needed refuge from the fight.  

Here's to all of us continuing to do our needed work in the world in the coming year. 

"Across the Street from the Good Life" was inspired by a monthlong visit to San Francisco a year or two ago. We were staying in Potrero Hill, a cute neighborhood with mostly two or three story houses. It has a little downtown with some shops and a handful of restaurants and fairly easy parking. The little business strip had most things we could want: restaurants serving French, Peruvian, and Cajun food, sourdough crust pizza, a coffee house, a bookstore, and a grocery store called The Good Life. 

The Good Life was a great little store, with top-quality food--including bread from a favorite local bakery, meat, fish, produce, and fresh flowers that actually looked fresh. It was so much more pleasant than driving to the crowded, dismal Safeway.  However, the grocery was a little pricey. My brother, who lives in Potrero Hill, said of a friend of his: "He lives across the street from the Good Life, but he can't afford to shop there."

Well, the phrase about living "across the street from the good life" just seemed like it had to be a story.  That the good life was right there, visible but unattainable.

From Potrero Hill we also had a good view of the downtown skyscrapers, which seemed close but were a pain to drive to--also a bit unattainable.

The characters and situations of the story are all imaginary. Also, the prices in the Good Life; by the time I wrote the story, I was back home and had to make all the details up. I feel a little bit bad about potentially maligning a great neighborhood grocery store. I can only claim creative license. 

Many thanks for the Euonia Review for offering my story a home. 

My story "Let's Say," like a few other recent stories, started from a prompt. The prompt was a simple one: to start the story with "Let's say...." It's not so different from a prompt I used to use with my students, to start with "I remember" when they were working on personal essays. 

I used a similar technique in my story "When," from a few years ago. I just started the first line with "When..." and kept going. 

Some people think of these kinds of stories as gimmicky, but I don't. I think of it more as an organizing principle.

And of course, a story that start's with "Let's say" can end up anywhere. In my case, for some reason I thought of my neighbors down the hill who have a very nice yard with a pool and firepits and enjoy entertaining. On hot nights when my windows are open, I can hear the parties. The idea of parties you can see or hear but can't attend interests me--probably dating back to my first reading of The Great Gatsby in high school. Other people's parties have an allure, because you can imagine all sorts of fun and drama going on at them. 

I did imagine some drama, and the result is "Let's Say."

Thanks for the Eunoia Review for publishing the story, and for writer Meg Pokrass for the prompt. 

Over the summer, I sent three flash fictions to Eunoia Review. To my surprise, they accepted all of them. So I had three flashes published in quick succession. 

The first one, "Can't Be Too Careful," came out the same generative workshop as my story "Inheritance" that was published in Microfiction Monday. 

The prompt was a photo of an old woman wearing a helmet next to a girl who was putting on a helmet, with a theme of overprotection. And somehow the first line that came to mind was "Grandma lives in a glass house." I don't know if it's because you might realistically need a helmet in a glass house, or because overprotectiveness is one step away from paranoia. It was just where my mind started. So that's where I started my story. Though I don't always (or even usually) keep the first sentence I write as the first sentence in the story, I did this time. 

A hundred people can look at the same picture and write a hundred different stories inspired by it, because every writer's mind goes to a different place. 

My thanks to writer Meg Pokrass who provided the prompt. 

I have a new story up at Microfiction Monday Magazine, "Inheritance." 

2023 was a slow writing year for me. So slow, that I didn't bother with my usual end-of-year blog post.  For most of the year, I wrote nothing. As the year continued, I did manage to write a few short pieces, but didn't submit anything until the fall, and then only a few pieces.  So it's not surprising that I didn't have much to summarize at the end of the year.

However, in November, I participated in a microfiction writing group run by Meg Pokrass, a well-known flash fiction writer and teacher. Every day she gave us a prompt, and the assignment was to write a microfiction, defined as a story under 300 words, from the prompt.

It was magical. I churned out a ton of work. There was only one problem: I found it almost impossible to confine myself to 300 words.  I have written a lot of flash fiction (often defined as under 1000 words) but my stories usually run a bit longer than 300 words. Some of my stories ended up being 500-1000 words. Some ended up being well over 2000 words. One might eventually turn into a novel.

Because these stories turned out to be so much longer than the word limit, I had trouble finishing them in a day. I have been spending the months since editing the stories I wrote that month and finishing the ones I ran out of time to write. 

Of all the stories I wrote, only one sprang forth as a true microfiction.  In fact, it is quite short--consisting of a mere three sentences. I tweaked it a bit and sent it to Microfiction Monday, a magazine that had published one of my stories before. That story, called "Possum," I wrote on a post-it at the AWP writer's conference. 

I sent out "Inheritance" on the last day of 2023. So, I guess it counts as a win from last year, even though it didn't get accepted and printed until this month. 

I hope that some of the other stories from my November writing blitz find homes in the future. If so, I will certainly let you know! And maybe I'll feel like writing an end-of-year post next year. 

Every year arrives as a package full of unknowns. I have felt that way especially since the pandemic--just that planning ahead can be futile. Circumstances change, and with them, my feelings.

A year ago my year-end post reflected the fact that I had done little writing and almost no submitting in 2021. It just didn't make me feel good.  The pandemic had left me with few reserves for dealing with downturns, and little desire to expose myself to the cold winds of rejection.  

But a funny thing happened after I wrote that post.  I decided to dip my toe into submitting again, submitting five pieces a month. That put me off my old pace of sometimes over 100 submissions a year, but I thought it was doable. And thankfully, I started getting acceptances almost at once!

I had flash fictions published in several journals this year:

• Bears in New World Writing
• Gingerbread in Ghost Parachute
• Bats in Anti-Heroin Chic
• Wild Turkeys in The Summerset Review
• California Turnaround in The Flash Fiction Forum's beautiful print journal

This list of acceptances is all the more heartening as I only kept my resolution on submitting for four months, managing 27 submissions for the year.

My mother died in May, and after that, I never got back to submitting, or writing much. Once again, I just didn't feel good. Writing comes from the heart, and my heart was sick. Other events (such as COVID) also occurred, further sapping my physical and mental energy.  Writing and publication require fortitude, and my fortitude was needed elsewhere. 

However, I made a lot of music in the fall and winter, performing with four different groups in November and December.  Time and music are both healing, and I hope for a more productive year in 2023.

I'm so pleased that my story "California Turnaround" was published by Flash Fiction Forum. The magazine is beautiful, and contains not only fiction, but art from Works/San Jose, an art and performance space in San Jose. 

Flash Fiction Forum is a reading series for flash fiction. I've participated a few times in person. During the pandemic, I did a virtual reading of my story "California Turnaround."  You can see me (wearing a red hat)  in this collage from zoom. 

I got the idea for "California Turnaround" at a concert by musician Peter Case. If you are not familiar with him, not only is he an excellent songwriter, but he is (as Dave Alvin said in a joint show once) quite a "raconteur." Peter Case told a story about going on tour with an early band, driving a dicey truck for hours on end because a girl had given him some "California Turnarounds," pills that would allow someone to drive all the way to California, turn around, and drive back again. 

The term California Turnaround delighted me, so I decided to write a story using it. It's a first person story told by a young woman who has been driving 27 hours straight, strung out on California Turnarounds, on her way to a new life in Los Angeles. Because of her mental state, it was a fun story to read to an audience, and I'm glad it's been published by the fine folks at Flash Fiction Forum. 

I am very pleased to have my new story "Wild Turkeys" published in the Summerset Review. 

I got the idea for this story while out walking in my neighborhood. For those of you who don't follow my Facebook or Instagram, during the pandemic I stared taking walks and posting a picture from each walk on social media. So, one day when I was a block or so away from my house, I saw a flock of wild turkeys.  

Turkeys don't frequent our neighborhood (you are FAR more likely to see turkey vultures), so these turkeys caught my eye. They were in the yard of a house. I wondered if the people in the house happened to look out the window and see the birds, and if they did, what they would think. 

So I wrote a story about it. 

I am so pleased to have my flash fiction "Bats" up at Anti-Heroin Chic.  

​A story I heard at church inspired this piece. I attend a historic church (built in 1891) with an old-fashioned bell tower. At one point (before I attended), the church had bats in the belfry. One day Valerie, a senior lady with a British accent, described the excitement of having a bat fly down into the church during the service. It perched near a petrified teenager.  Valerie picked the bat up and carried it outside.

The church has re-homed the bats, but the story lives on. 

I took that story and made the teenager the rescuer, because I wanted a character who felt as out of place as the bat was. 

The art at the top of this page is an assemblage made by mystery writer John Billheimer, a member of my writers group. We have a tradition of giving holiday gifts based on the writing we've done during the year. He gave me this gift in 2019. Because of my pandemic submitting slump, the story did not find a home until this year.