Crazy days here preparing for our multi-author launch party bash tomorrow evening, April 25, at Pfeiffer Winery in Junction City. Could have planned something easier and mellower, I supposed, but that's just not the style of the Writers of the Round Table -- which has...

To accurately express the intense feeling of holding a finished copy of my memoir in my hands is surprisingly difficult. When I try to find something to correlate it to, giving birth comes to mind. Even though I’ve never actually done that, I imagine the two experien...

It has been a week since International Women’s Day, but I am still in a celebratory mood. Mind you, I’ll find many a reason, and sometimes any a reason, to celebrate -- and I’m all about womanhood, though I can’t say I've ever celebrated Women’s Day outside of Italy,...

It’s wonderful to discover, and rediscover, a gem in your backyard. While attending the Seafood and Wine Festival last weekend in Newport, Oregon, I had the pleasure of rediscovering the amazing artisan cheeses of Oregon’s own Rogue Creamery.

Located in the Willamette...

“She paces so much she has sores on her feet and she still won’t stop.”

These are the words the owner of a 225-pound “elegant Siberian tiger” told a former Eugene Register Guard reporter while the writer was researching locally owned wild animals 1987. The tiger was ke...

Put yourself in the way of beauty.

In the movie version of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, the author remembered these wise words which her mother used to tell her. Words which became a mantra for the author as she hiked the PCT and called upon them to conjure and share...

Last week, a friend forwarded me Tara Parker-Pope’s New York Times column entitled Writing Your Way to Happiness (1/19/15).  It’s a concept which the Times seems to be pondering recently. Thanks to them, me too.

For a dozen or so years, I spent a good portion of my e...

Most of my friends and acquaintances know that I ran away with an Italian circus in my twenties, and some know that I have been writing stories about those years for some time. A few know that my memoir, Love in the Elephant Tent, will be published in May of this year....

Years ago, with the hope of getting more humor into my writing, I took a class called Stand Up and Make 'Em Laugh! with the fantastic Leigh-Anne Jasheway. To graduate, we had to perform the stand up comedy we'd written at a local theater. Sorry -- the first few minutes...