New Book review "Trailer for Rent"

24 August 2017

I have yet to have a public reading of "Trailer for Rent", (tho one scheduled for September 7, 2017) but the new book, a collection of short stories has sold so well just walkin' down the street carrying five books in my over-the-shoulder satchel, I have had to order three boxes just to keep ahead of the buyers. What a feeling of satisfaction. In about twenty books, I'll be opening that third box and start running them. I have a reading at the local library on September 7th, 6pm to 7pm.

My most prolific, and best student, when I was a creative writing teacher, Erin Mallon, now an adult and working on art projects in Switzterland with her new husband,  designed the cover and photo-shopped  a photograph of my 91 year old aunt as a child into the doorway of an Airstream trailer, holding a mandolin because after all, the book is called, "Trailer for Rent", and the heroine of the stories, eleven year old Redbud Jane Barrett, is smilin' big-time and wants to play the mandolin after she has saved enough money to buy one more than anything in the whole wide world. She lives at the Sunshine Motor Lodge Trailer Park, which is not as pretentious as the park's name seems to indicate. I spent a summer and last autumn writing and editing thirty stories about our heroine who, in this Young Adult set of stories lives in a rather decent trailer park, but still they're one of the worst places to live in terms of  American  living quarters. I'm gonna try and put the interview Carla Sarrett wrote for me for Amazon.com down below to give people an idea of what I'm planning P.R. wise.

 I have needed to write this book so badly for so long, as a gift to ten to fourteen year olds, though all the adults who have read it, love it, understand my goal, my gift to young people. These thirty stories
are a gift to myself, reflecting on child abuse, (yes, I was), parental alcoholism, child neglect, (yes) poverty (yes) and not always enough to eat or decent clothes when it was a peer necessity. Some of these things may seem unimportant; but to a child's self-esteem, they are crucial. I have readings lined up from Willits CA to Sacramento, so far.

When I get addresses, I'll post them.

The Idea of Friendship

The Idea of Friendship

One of the hardest things for me to accept is a friend deciding they don't want to be friends any longer. As if I am no longer important. And maybe I'm not... I remember the first time I was four and my parents were rather Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald stylish, so the other mothers in the tract home neighborhood didn't like my playing with their children. Almost as if my parents' behavior would somehow rub off from a four year old. Once when playing with some neighbor girls, their mother called for them and they stuffed me in the toy box and told me to be quiet until their mother went away.

I remember being in the seventh grade and having a crush on my journalism teacher who when I once walked into what I thought was an empty classroom, I found her crying on the window sill. I was so distraught with grief for her. A week later, was one of those stupid pep rallies and we were all required to sit on the bleachers and watch the cheerleaders flaunt their panties and watch the football players flaunt their tight ends. I saw my favorite teacher and said to my girlfriends, "Lets sit by Miss___________" . They called me Lezzie and walked away never to speak to me again in the six years we were at school together. I didn't even know what a lezzie was, but I did know i preferred  girls to boys. This went on throughout school and even after school when I lived in Berkeley, one of the finest Lesbian capitals of the world.

I believe I was too intense for most girls, even the ones who had the same interests as myself. I really wasn't interested in changing my preferences. I just wanted some friends. i preferred the daisy-like slender pretty girls which was my own description, and it was the more butch girls who wanted me.
What a dilemma. I was so lonely. The only thing i was sure of was that I was going to be a poet no matter what and in fact was one already, just then at 22, getting good at writing. And so I moved to a two room Depression cabin with cold running water, a wood stove to heat with and cook on and lived alone one hundred and fifty miles north of Berkeley. I wrote and wrote and wrote and learned and read and read and was so lonely I hitch-hiked into town for provisions once a month finally discovering the small country town I had chosen purely quixotically, was a town of lesbians. Sometimes loneliness guides us to where we need to go. Somehow I was seduced by a man and had two sons. The irony was not lost on me. There are maps and plans for people and one cannot always choose which map to follow; they are guided along whether they will or they won't.

One is the Lonliest Number

May 2017

One is the Loneliest Number


Loneliness is a terrible disease. I don't, do not, feel sorry for myself, but I do wish some things were different. I read books as a child about orphans and thought I knew what that was all about. Now that I am an orphan, I know my earlier notions were romantic stories I just read. I didn't actually know the absolute feeling of being a singular person in the world without bloodlines that go backward. Thank god I  have two grown children. No, I don't have the overwhelming need to have procreated in order to have continued my gene pool. But I do love the stories my grandmother told me about a relative who had walked the Trail of Tears and I always felt sad that the Irish came out so strong in my genetic make up. I think because there are so many Irish in the world compared to the Cherokee of my father's side. They were not well treated, but then, neither were the Irish. I love the Irish stories I heard as a small child. Poets have such a struggle taking sides, so I've decided I'm not going to. I am going to accept that I'm an Irish-Cherokee woman who knows how to eat out of the forest, weave a basket that can at least hold fruit or acorns, certainly not acorn mush or water and I can, or could before I had an accident with black ice and Winter, step-dance while rather drunk.

I've discovered I absolutely cannot live in a City. I become anxious immediately, so I've relished living for the last forty-three years in a town so small and many many of those years in the forest. I only moved to the outskirts of the town after my doctor told me that the heart condition I was born with would only worsen as I aged and I ought to be closer to a hospital, not that I would stay in one for any length of time. If I'm going to die, I decided as a teen , I would die in the woods, or if it's Winter, I'll die in my cabin with a fire in the stove. I miss my cabin, even if this town is so small and not filled with a  lot of people, it does have a brand new hospital. I want the MDs to continue patching me up and sending me home to read or write poetry on the tiny front porch and watch the deer come up the road to eat green things. I didn't understand that aging would be like this. I am going to be sixty-two in less than a month and I'm not done yet I holler out to the sky, the clouds, the rain, the wind.

I find myself rather furious with English teachers who told us Henry David Thoreau was such a purist. He may have built his own cabin, but i repaired mine built in the Depression days and he only lived in his for eight months. I counted it out. I have him over a barrel and isn't it just like a man to make a big deal out of living in the woods for less than a year and eating dinner every Wednesday night at Mr. and Mrs. Emerson's house and Sundays with his mother. He may have chopped wood, but I dragged a 1957 Chevy hood into the forest and filled it with fallen dead wood and never once cut down a living tree. Two scores on you Henry David!

I have a new book coming out in a few weeks and another one in, I hope,  a few months. The first one is thirty short stories and the second is a collection of poetry. I have in my file cabinet, four other manuscripts or is it five, that I want time to clean up the spelling, the phrasing and get them published as well. This has been my dream since I was twelve.  I only have five books published now and I'm greedy. I want to shout out to the world all the words I have collected over the years that translate into my heart's language. I remind myself I have to hurry. I also have to save my burial money. I don't know if my sons will bury me. I think they will, but I'm not sure I can rely on them. No one called me this year for Mother's Day. I had explained to my children that Mother's day was not a Hallmark Greeting card  holiday, but one that Julia Ward Howe, Author of Battle Hymn of the Republic  (get the dichotomy of that title Battle and then Hymn.) They often forget Mother's Day, my birthday, Christmas, what would be so strange about forgetting to bury a woman the County could just as easily dump in a Potter's field. I'm strong, and I'm not strong. My inside heart is all-giving, it's only the cardiac that is falling to pieces. Countless surgeries and now a pacemaker. Ever since I was ten I've had a heart condition. I was born with Celiac's Disease but no one knew it until my pacemaker kept getting infected. Thank god for my doctor of forty-two years who researched me til two in the a.m. and discovered that was what was making me so sick since I was two and started  eating 'people' food instead of baby food. I ought to have been born Japanese and lived on a rice based diet. The Celiac's is why I got breast cancer. You get sick, in the gut, then cancer (I lost my breast) and then you die. My MD saved my life again. When I was 19 and my heart was beating 300 times a minute he injected inderol right into my blood stream and I started dying. I saw Y'shua who told me to turn around and go back to where the schitzophrenic (sp) husband was holding the four month old son. This is why I love God. He saves me over and over. My body that is falling apart and isn't it supposed to do that when one gets to a certain age? I was born with so many things wrong with my body that I resent the fact that I cannot live like my Aunt Iris to 91 years old and publish all those books that are in my beautiful oak filing cabinets. If only ..If only...I refuse to feel sorry for myself. I refuse that emotion..And now I shall stop, because I'm starting to feel sorry for myself and I won't have it.