The 2024 Colorado Gold Writers Conference, The Next Chapter, starts today! I am looking forward to seeing writers I’ve known for years, greeting social media acquaintances, and making new friends. If this is your first time at the conference, be prepared for a rootin’-tootin’ non-stop weekend. You’ll go home exhausted, but you’ll also go home…
I recently read with sadness that the school district my children attended was restricting certain titles from the library and removing them from the classroom shelves. Two of the books, The Diary of Anne Frank and To Kill a Mockingbird, were required reading when I was in school and even when my children were in…
Recently, I took a class from writer Alli Martin called “Writing Advice You CAN Ignore.” It was sponsored by the Orange County Library and offered for free over Zoom. From the get-go, I made several inaccurate assumptions about the class (you know the old saying about assuming). My first faulty assumption was that the Orange…
One of my college English professors told the story of a British Shakespeare expert who carried a copy of The Riverside Shakespeare onto a plane. The plane was hijacked by a terrorist with a gun. The terrorist shot at the professor, who shielded his chest with the 1,923-page volume of Shakespeare. The bullet lodged in…
When my mother passed, I inherited her Hammond organ. My husband, both an engineer and a guitarist, welcomed it into our home, for it was the same model used by The Allman Brothers, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Pink Floyd, and other rock bands in the 70s. After doing some basic oiling and repair of the…