Will it Fly?
I often wonder if it would make interesting reading if I wrote about the indignity of being managed by and for machines. We may have bristled and, on a bad day, may still bristle, but we have been tamed to … Read More
Confession of a Bottle-Sick Novelist
Bottlesickness. “A temporary condition (often caused by shaking a bottle) that interferes with a wine’s fruit flavors,…alleviated with a few days rest.” Wine.com Dateline: Taos, New Mexico. One week from completing my six-week fellowship at Wurlitzer Foundation, I woke assailed … Read More
On Shapeshifting
On Shapeshifting: cost/benefit and peril In 1976, I got divorced, left the Digger community I had lived and worked among, abandoned my life in Aspen Colorado, and took my girls home to southern Ohio where my mother lived. Those condensed … Read More
Matrilineality
When you’ve grown up in a patrilineal tribe—where your family name comes from the father and ancestry is traced back through your father’s fathers, it’s difficult to imagine another way. Before the progenitors of the sky gods of three major … Read More
Humanifesto #3
“Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar was the basis for a popular belief that a cataclysm would take place on December 21, 2012. December 21, 2012 was simply the day that the calendar went to the next b’ak’tun, at … Read More
Textile & Dye Tour in Oaxaca on International Women’s Day
I spent women’s day evening in Tehuantepec, the capital of the infamous Tehuana women, among matrilineal people who speak Zapotec. The legendarily ballsy Tehuana women, from whom Frida Kahlo sprang, had several parades last night: one where hundreds of women … Read More
Susquehanna flood, community organizing–underwater in East Sayre
My partner in Reinhabitory Institute, Judith Thomas, was visiting the Penn-York Valley from the San Francisco Bay Area. I had told her my valley was a bioregionalist’s dream: in two states and three counties, between the Susquehanna and the Chemung … Read More
My reading & discussion of Burning Silk at Riverrow bookstore in Owego on January 15
A reading of Burning Silk by Destiny Kinal at Riverrow Bookshop in Owego Sunday January 15th, 2011 morphed into a discussion of the Persephone myth, a natural midwinter theme dealing with the maladies of SADD, depression, and loss of community. … Read More
The Big Daddy of all the Book Fairs: Frankfurter Buchmesse
As a spanking new press with one publication–Burning Silk, my first novel in the Textile Trilogy–and another in the pipeline, going to Europe to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair would have been a case of the intent of our grasp … Read More
Writers and Publishers Mix it Up in Europe: the first blog en route to the Frankfurt Book Fair
In the month that I am here in Europe, between three countries–Holland, France and Germany–half is dedicated to research and to writing on my second novel in the Textile Trilogy, Linen Shroud. I follow Carole Maso’s dictum that form should … Read More