It was a gray foggy day in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, but no one told the azaleas! These were blooming in the Japanese tea garden today, along with the white/pink cherry blossoms on the trees, pale pinks and yellows on shrubs everywhere. Glorious!

Well, there goes another great writer.  We’ve lost many in recent years and I miss them all.  The idea that no further words will come from those pens, those keyboards, those minds, saddens me.

Of course, new writers will emerge—they always do—but I still miss the tried and true.

One of my favorite Achebe quotes:  “One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.”  A testament to his courage and his writing.

Today, I’m off to my second group meeting led by Ellen Sussman, novelist and mentor.  We are writing a “novel in a year,” which really means “first draft in a year.”  We have until Dec. 31 to write what we write and she will review the drafts and provide feedback in early 2014.  This, of course, implies that we are writing daily and building many pages.  Life intervenes, but I’m plugging away at it.  It’s funny how you want to write, but so many things get in the way.  Discipline–a must!  Periodically, I plan to blog about the process.  Right now, my characters are wandering around without a meaningful plot, but Ellen has suggested that it’s okay to have them do that for a while.  They’d better shape up soon, though!

I just spent two wonderful days at a workshop led by Jeffrey Levine.  Not enough time–of course!–but a fabulous group of people and an amazing experience.  Rejuvenating, re-energizing, the true form of re-creation.  Jeffrey is generous with his time and talent and the participants were all wonderful writers.  Jeffrey and others like him are the backbone of small press publishing in this country, the proselytizers of poetry and unique work for all of us, and the people who make sacrifices to ensure the independent voice is heard.  We cannot be grateful enough.

The fall of Lance Armstrong is a reminder that we are all part of creating the culture that enables such deceptions to exist and survive for long periods of time.  While “the truth will out” eventually, at least so we presume, the reality of this story is that it is our story as much as Lance Armstrong’s.  I think of this man fighting to beat cancer, pressured by celebrity to feed the myth that everyone wants to hear, and I wonder at the burden he carried for so long. He talked of his own flaws, but are they so different from ours?  Maybe we think we’re better than that, but I’ve never been a celebrity nor have I ever been at such a pinnacle of perfection in anything to have been tested in the ways he must have been tested.  In the end, we all know, deep down, that we are capable of cheating and bullying.  It goes on in schools, in sports, in every day existence.  Once anyone tips over into either one of these less-than-desirable qualities, those qualities take on lives of their own and must be fed.  We live on stories and we want myths, but we need to remember that we are human and that stories illustrate who we are, but are not necessarily narratives we should compel someone to become.  We all bear some of the responsibility for this story.  Let us all learn from it.

An opportunity came up recently to explain how my book, Meditation on Woman, came into being.  My piece was just published in American Athenaeum review (http://swordandsagapress.com/American-Athenaeum.php#) and it gave me the opportunity to think about how my life led to my book.  I came to understand that I’ve prepared all my life to write this book, not just since I began the actual writing process.  It is my hymn to woman and has become more important to me lately as the news reports stories of how women continue to struggle for their basic rights.  Our sisters in Afghanistan seek to be safe and receive a basic education; our sisters in India protest against rape and strive for protective legislation; our sisters world-wide face enormous challenges.  We have a long way to go to achieve equity.  May my book contribute in some small way to promoting woman as a complete and full human being.

I was privileged to be interviewed by Thelma Zirkelbach, blogger of WidowSphere (appeared Dec. 20, 2012), about my contributions to the book On Our Own, poems which also appear in Evening Sun: A Widow’s Journey, which I hope will be published next year.  Being invited to participate in interviews that are broadcast and heard is a gift.

Yesterday, with Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra, I sang Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, and will do so again today.  We dedicated this series of concerts to our long time choral director, Arlene Sagan, who died this past summer, but all I could think of were the children in Newtown, Connecticut and Chenpeng, China who have been gunned and knifed and know too much of the dark side of the world already.

Private ownership of firearms is banned in China; children there lost fingers and ears, a gruesome tale, but they lived.  Even in light of the deaths of 20 children in the U.S., the pleas for gun control in this country are not spurring our Congressional leaders to discuss policy.  Their focus may be the fiscal cliff, but the precipice we face every day in view of mass gun ownership in this country is an abyss into which 20 of our children just plummeted.  Gun control–now–is the only answer.  End the stronghold of the NRA.  People may kill people, as the NRA continually says, but they do it with guns.

All I can do is go on singing.

The New York Times listed the roster of the Newton dead on the front page this morning.  The children were 6 or 7; the adults ranged from their 20s to their 50s.  In China, the day before the Newton shooting, a young man knifed 22 small children and 1 adult.  Our children died; China’s children didn’t.  We MUST get rid of the guns.  I will never understand the lack of gun control in this country.  Never.

It’s singing time!  It’s been six weeks since my last post because I’ve been so busy at work, but now it’s time to balance it out with singing.  I enjoy belonging to two radically different choirs–a small one of approx. 16-20 people and a large one of 180-200.  It offers the opportunity to sing different music.  I sing with Bella Musica on Dec. 9—Mozart’s Vespers (Confessore), Josquin des Prez, Brahms, and a modern piece by Ann Callaway.  I sing with Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra on Dec. 15 and 16—Mozart’s Mass in C Minor.  Dec. 24, I join in singing carols at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church (Walnut Creek), a church I’ve never visited before.  Such fun!