Some Things You Keep

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      I admire those who have the courage to write a memoir. I don’t. Memoirs are so raw and vulnerable, like an open wound you can’t stop picking at — but what if you could write your way out of the bloody hellishness back to where you started, before circumstances caused your life to take a serious misstep into the abyss? In Some Things You Keep, JJ Landis goes for it, baring her soul along with many of her missteps.  It’s a messy, emotionally exhausting place to be, except it’s not because it’s how her 6th grade self dealt with the trauma of her mother’s suicide: by spending a decade ignoring her own feelings.

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The Code

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The Code

Have you dabbled in numerology, but found that the numbers never add up right? Are you enamored of feng shui, but find its overgeneralized process coupled with its rigid application and innumerable fixes to be indecipherable? Have you tried tarot, but found its mystical approach too impossible to quantify in your 3-D existence? If you answered yes to any of the above, then have I got a book or you.   Read more here…

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The Magnolia City Interview

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Magnolia City — The Interview

I first met Duncan Alderson when I signed up for a fiction writing course at the Rabbit Hill Writer’s Studio. Duncan started my writing career by giving me a place to learn the art, and explore the craft. He also jump-started my social life as a newly-minted Lancastrian where I attended parties at the house Duncan shared with his wife, Isabelle, mixing it up with other writers, and their eclectic friends, and drinking Isabelle’s famous Sangria (hands down best ever!). We’d sit under the trees on the patio adjacent to a pasture where sheep grazed on the Amish farm next to their house, a little slice of paradise right there in Central Pennsylvania, talking about writing and life. Duncan sometimes brought in outside writers to teach at the studio and I learned the art of screenwriting at Rabbit Hill. Over the years, he influenced an entire group of writers, me among them, giving us a “safe house” and I know I am not the only writer to be grateful for his stewardship and tutelage. A former Waldorf school teacher, Duncan cannot resist the pull of teaching, and many of us write today because of Duncan’s wisdom and generosity of spirit. So it’s exceptionally gratifying that he’s finally given himself permission to set his teaching persona aside and pursue his own writing interests. Alderson realized one of his life-long dreams with the publication of Magnolia City, and as a former student, I am ecstatic for him. Please enjoy this interview with my friend and mentor, Duncan Alderson.   Read more here…

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Magnolia City

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Magnolia City

Magnolia City, Duncan Alderson’s first novel reads like Gossip Girl for the South. Experience the glory days of Houston in the 1920’s, the days that gave the city its oomph, its architecture, and its arrogant charm, when oil barons ruled the roost, flapper fashion was on top, and alcohol was underground, but available if you knew where to get it. Glamour was every girl’s best friend and Esther “Hetty” Allen, a descendant of Houston’s founding fathers, had a steamer trunk full of it. On a fast track to marry the city’s most eligible bachelor, Lamar Rusk, heir to the Splendora oil fortune, Hetty had a spot at all the best tables and on everyone’s guest list, living in extreme comfort, the life of the super rich.   Read more here…

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Excerpt from “The Quality of Light”

 

Quality of LightThe summer months have arrived which means it’s time to make your summer reading list.  Have I got a book for you.  “Six Sisters” has a little something for everyone.  Please enjoy an excerpt from, “The Quality of Light.”

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6000 Days of Us – The Interview

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6000 Days of Us — An interview with Rosina Rucci

You say in the forward of 6000 Days of Us that your son inspired you to write this book, that you wanted him to know your history. Has he read it and if so, what did he say about it?

He has not yet read it and tells me that it make take him a long time to be ready to do so. That’s fine. My need was to reveal my inner-most thoughts, loves and feelings to my one child with whom I share a deep and visceral bond and constant, open communication.

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6000 Days of Us

Unknown-1To me, opening a book, especially one I’ve been anticipating is like opening a gift from a friend, and when the book was written by a friend and explains in detail years of old mysteries, things the friend never had the time or nerve or stamina to explain, then that’s 6000 Days of Us, by Rosina Rucci. Compelling in ways that only the most personal, gut-wrenching stories can be, 6000 Days of Us is told with such heart and determination that you forgive the way it jumps around, forgive that it’s over before you’re ready, forgive that the author takes no pains to prepare you for the inevitable; she simply places it in your lap, leaving you to look with wide eyes and think, “wait, did that just happen?”

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The 19th Annual

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[photo by Steve Miller]

The 19th Annual

Man seeks permanence in an impermanent world through ritual and tradition. Birthdays, Christmas, the Summer Solstice, these are the yardsticks against which the passing years are measured. And for our little group who have called ourselves “The Whales” ever since we rented that dilapidated beach house in Cape May Point, New Jersey soon after college, the one with the whale sculptures, whale weather vanes, whale pictures and whale statuary everywhere, Memorial Day weekend has become one of those traditions.

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Bee Serious

Bee Boxes

When I first moved to Central PA over 20 years ago the honey bee abounded. The little suckers were everywhere and that made sense because Lancaster County is home to the most fertile, unirrigated soil in the country. Because of its bucolic nature, people began moving here in exponential numbers, resulting in the decimation of why they came in the first place: open space, much of which is being plowed over, not for crops, but for a familiar sight on the American landscape – single-family home housing developments.

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Home Is Where Your Honey Bee

Honey Bee

[I previously posted a version of this essay in my former blog.]

I never really thought much about bees other than the ones hiding in my soda can during family picnics and never had that warm fuzzy space in my heart for them the way I do for my felines. Bees aren’t fuzzy and warm and buzzing is no substitute for purring. That all changed when I met my husband, Scott. He’d kept bees for two decades so I’d inherited a hobby by marriage.   Read more here…

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