Reflections, Year's End

This has been quite an amazing year for writing, and for publication.  My collection of novellas, Dancing on Broken Glass, was shortlisted for the 2019 Eludia Award, though not published, and a story, "The Pinecone," was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Best of all has been traveling back to favorite places on the magic carpet writing weaves and sets afloat into the luring blue beyond, casting a spell by way of all the details that make up a physical locale, a state of being and of mind.  I've gone back to Salisbury and Old Sarum, to Durham, Lindisfarne, and Hadrian's Wall, to Lucca and Torre del Lago, to summers on the Russian River and in Santa Fe (that, fifty years ago), to one late October rambling around rural Virginia.  Back to Mills College.  Back to Mallorca's east coast:  an old town with medieval walls, a remote hermitage, and salt marshes alive with birds.  I've written too about the place I've come to live, the here and now of Santa Cruz—the ocean and the bluffs, the grand Victorian houses on Walnut Street, the dogwalkers, the shipwreck that happened almost on our doorstep last winter, the haunted Shakespeare grove up on the UCSC campus, Monarch butterflies, the old adobes just across the bay in Monterey.  My whole life is reflected in my writing, like the light of grace in this glorious winter pool.

image:  Walter Launt Palmer, The New Moon

Wayfinding

One of my short stories, "Wayfinding," has been published in the Fall 2019 issue of The Avalon Literary Review—available in print or as a pdf.

The spire of Salisbury Cathedral, which Hazel visits on a tour of southwest England, comes to represent her hope of redeeming the deeply troubled relationship between her and her son and granddaughters, a single solid, bright thing to sustain her as her life draws in, draws frighteningly toward its close.  The cathedral spire becomes a source of meditation and mediation for her.

"Hazel's intention, as she'd told herself over and over, was only to set free a wistful prayer, fragile as one of the Holly Blue butterflies found in old churchyards.  Palest blue wings with a small spattering of ink spots, embryonic words.  What she had loosed instead had been catastrophic."

image:  Weekend Notes

Dancing on Broken Glass

My triad of Mallorcan mystery novellas, Dancing on Broken Glass, was selected as a finalist for the 2019 Eludia Award, given by Hidden River Arts. The winner of the award will be published; my collection will look for another path into the world.

Tomás Mateo des Fonoll Vilalta is an unlikely detective who writes ghazals, plays the tabla, and cooks specialties unique to his Mallorcan home.  Three mysteries take Vilalta from one end of the island to the other.  The second two feature as well the detective's archaeologist partner Gritta Becker, who refuses to suffer fools gladly and can't forgive the Romans for having wiped out Carthage.

In Dancing on Broken Glass, the Basque gardener at a fledgling international retreat center on a hillside of restored windmills is found on the pool terrace with his throat cut, and the owner's sister Abigail Laurent is accused of his death, once the Basque Separatists have been ruled out and Abigail's treacherous suitor who leads the famous choir at the Sanctuary of Lluc.

In Whole Cloth, the young Algerian assistant at the weaving mill of Gritta's friend Serena Bâ has disappeared, leaving behind her treasured family heirlooms and a mysterious passport—belonging to someone looking just like Araby, but with a lion tattoo in blue calligraphy on her neck.  When a body turns up on the beach, Vilalta must disentangle the matter of identity to make sense of a young woman's violent death.

In Ungodly Romans, Gritta is reluctantly spending the summer teaching high school students at a field school for Roman archaeology in a medieval walled town across the island.  She becomes the prime suspect when her nemesis, the arrogant daughter of a hot-shot consultant for L.A.'s Getty Museum, is murdered in the ancient theatre where a very modern drama of love and jealousy plays itself out.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Ruins, Mallorca 2013

Writing Spaces

A good autumn chair, for writing autumn things.

image:  The Guardian of the Woods

Belons

A poem I wrote some years ago, "Belons," has been published in the Autumn Issue of Foreign Literary Journal, based in South Korea, and appropriately all about the lure of foreign places, life away from home, where cultures and identities blur, intersect.

The poem is set in Brittany, Locmariaquer, and then the wrong street in Paris (a kind of exile).  It's about oysters, broken megaliths, "memories almost, or almost hope," and refers to my favorite scenes in Erich Maria Remarque's Heaven Has No Favorites, a book I've loved for nearly fifty years.




image:  Paul Gauguin, On the Cliff (Above the Sea), Brittany

Writing Spaces

A week or two here would give me wonderful material, richly flavored as with smoked paprika, figs, not quite free of the voice of troubadours.  Jean Giono would be mentioned at least once, and villages in the mountains.  Honor, and dancing after dark, after the moon slips free of the lingering evening's lees.


image:  Chisako Hamaya, Dome, slatki dome

Green Flash

Another novel excerpt has been published, this "Green Flash"—in Hawai'i rather than Crete.

"All day she thought of the dark skin of the Polynesian dancer, Gabriel, knifing into the turquoise sunshot water with its black heart (son of Pele), the bright-sailed catamaran like a Hawaiian Icarus flying into the sun, saying “it’s better at dusk.”  The green flash that her father yearned for as the sun went, swallowed into night, the yearning color of salvationout in the region where mirages live."

The publisher is Silver Stork, in their "Solais" issue—"of sunlight."

image:  Green Flash, Pekka Parvianen, NASA

Writing Spaces

As summer wanes, I'm finding myself already nostalgic for this view, this chair, this perfect window opening on the garden, the stories that might be written (or spied) while sitting there.


image:  View from a Window, Spencer Frederick Gore

Show Me the Bust of Marcus Agrippa

Lowestoft Chronicle has published the (a)gripping story of one of my foreign quests, on the verge of the new Millennium, in their Fall 2019 issue, #39.

         And so, with fall coming, with trees and late afternoon light yellowing, turning to gold (no matter if it's fools'), let us travel to Rome.

         "But after all, Agrippa is not here.  The Etruscans are here—their finely granulated gold jewelry, their etched bronze mirrors—those things you’ve seen in the art books, and roomfuls more, laid out in all their mystery and splendor.  And in the garden there are heavy-laden lime trees, and a small café where you can sit and rest your blistered feet and imagine that you have turned the clocks back and returned to summer for a little while.  All that is here, at the Museo Nazionale di Villa Giulia, and for only 8000 lire (a single stroke of the delightful triple-zero key which I’ve fallen in love with on Italian ATM machines); but the marble head of Marcus Agrippa, builder of ancient Rome and second-in-command to Augustus Caesar, which we have come so many hellish miles to see, is not here. “We are Etruscans,” the old museum guard with his beetling brows and military bearing says dismissively."

image:  Vatican Museum - Hall of Busts, Saint Mary's Press

Hearing Loss

The gorgeous new issue of Catamaran has launched, and I am pleased to have a story in it—all about fear, the crippling fear of loss, and the power of music (and true love) to counter that.

In these excerpts, Marta despairs for her aging architect husband, and for herself, for what they have between them:

          "As Paul heard less and less, Marta was more and more consumed by dread, seeing no remedy at all.  Afraid of losing all the things they shared.  Afraid he couldn't love her anymore, with her essence taken away. Her words, her laugh, her always singing 'Day-O' in the shower.  The love of music that was in her bones like DNA." 

. . .

          "She grieved for him, knowing he would no longer hear songbirds, the oven timer, the thwok of tennis balls hitting the red clay court, the millions of butterfly wings like soft rain.  Couldn't hear her come home, or leave, or sit cross-legged on the big bed with its kantha quilt, playing the ukulele badly.  

            She felt that made her cease to be, like the famous old adage about a tree falling in a forest.  She'd vanished or soon would into the yawning chasm that had opened suddenly between them where there had been only pillowcase, sheet, talk of stone, water, ginkgo, old oak.  Inhabited spaces of words, of architects' materials."

The Girl Who Drew Bears

I am pleased to announce the arrival, in print, of "The Girl Who Drew Bears."  This story is included in Issue 7, "Between," of Severine, published this morning.

"Lately, it was paws.  Great, flat, slipper-like bear feet with five serious claws.  The bear's claw was a talisman often included in medicine bundles, Rowena knew; warriors wore necklaces of bear claws to bring them power and strength."



image:  Jackie Morris

Norwegian Wood

A short story from some years ago, "Norwegian Wood," has just been published in Sweet Tree Review, Volume 4, Issue III.

The "antagonist" in it sings the old Beatles song over and over, and makes doors.  "The house they rented was soon overrun with doors, cellular as a honeycomb.  They had Dutch doors both front and back, brass-inlay doors on all the kitchen cabinets, a teal door with a peacock's tail of stained glass on the medicine cabinet, and something that should have been on a Renaissance cathedral instead hiding the cluttered recess off the bedroom where they piled shoes and dirty laundry."



image:  thisoldhouse.com

Writing Spaces: Living Poetry

A few notes from a recent visit to Tor House and Hawk Tower in Carmel, on the ocean, the poetic domain of Robinson and Una Jeffers. The structures built of coastal stones brought up one by one from the beach (mornings for writing poetry, afternoons for hauling and situating stones).  Hawk Tower evokes the sixty-five Irish round towers from early Medieval times—originally bell towers and lookouts, or used to collect magnetic energy. The place is quintessential poetry—words everywhere.  On beams, over door frames, chiseled in stones, in the very fabric of the house and gardens.

A Welsh epigram, "Let the grandchildren gather the apples"; lines from The Faerie Queen; a motto in French, "Do well and let them talk"; another in Latin, "Lovers construct their own dreams"; Vergil's "Easy is the descent";

and on a stone in the garden, "County Mayo." The date of Thomas Hardy's death chiseled into a stone in the front room; a headstone for the English bulldog in the garden, honored also by a poem.

. cabinets of books

. an unabridged dictionary lying open, as my father's always did

in house and garden, pieces of stone or tile from all around the world:  tiny faces from Teotihuacan, lava from Mt. Vesuvius and from Hawaii, glassy obsidian, fossil shells, green Connemara marble (with Celtic cross), Big Sur jade, ballast from ships and slate from billiard tables, painted tiles on the garden path from Italy and Spain, Babylonian temple tile (recalling the many languages spoken by Jeffers's father and himself), fragments of Ossian's grave and of green ceramic from the Temple of Heaven in Peking, Roman mosaic from North Africa, a mill stone from a visit to Taos

. a Roman statue from John Singer Sargent, boy and dolphin

. a little worn stone goddess, Chinese

. gargoyles (rain gutters) on the tower

. the kitchen, also with a sea window, built over an Ohlone cooking site (fragments of abalone shell); a stone mortar and pestle also invokes them

. a Welsh dresser in the kitchen, with earthenware dishes (deep orange Jugtown pottery from North Carolina) and more mottos; a bell from the Carmel Mission

. in the dining room:

wood carvings by a gravestone cutter from Monterey

handmade floor tiles (pink dust from the soft tiles loosened by square dancing)

Una's grandmother's spinning wheel

a Narwhal tusk (evoking Una's unicorn)

. the moor gate and the sea gate

. map of Ireland marking the round towers

. the window beside the bed holding the ocean

. Una's desk for writing letters

. music everywhere, a melodeon in every room; playing a chord on the piano also played by Gershwin, Charlie Chaplin, Charles Lindbergh, James Cagney, Martha Graham

image:  Hawk Tower

Writing Spaces

image:  André Kertész

Writing Spaces (Lunar)

“The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.”

—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Image:  Arthur Beecher Carles - Silence, 1908

Writing Spaces

In summertime, writing the summer days that were.  I've just reread Rumer Godden's exquisite The Greengage Summer, sunshot, drenched with nostalgia and the taste of the ripe greengages.  For me it was apricots, and I've strung a hammock between two big apricot trees in a story (half finished) about the first moon walk and the summer day in Santa Fe when the child I was then watched the broadcast.



image:  E. Phillips Fox, A Love Story

Full Fathom Five

My first mystery has been published, in Issue #4 of the Canadian journal Black Dog Review.  (It's been said, "Her name is Christie.  She writes mysteries.")

"Full Fathom Five" is definitely cozy, rather than Noir (despite le chien noir of its setting), more about dogs and Santa Cruz, art and Greek archaeology, and the Shakespeare garden the retired detective is plotting, than about any horrific crime.

By pure coincidence, Sir Kenneth Branagh was planting a Shakespeare garden too in his most recent film, All Is True—good publicity, which I greatly appreciate.

Some of the dog walkers involved in the story can be seen here—

"Back outside on the oceanfront, Big Tom, an ex-Marine who reminisced from time to time about parties with Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia, told Gabriel he'd seen nobody in yesterday's early dark.  Contrarily petite and always stylish Marilynn, with her Shih Tzus, Xishen and Chenjinggu, which she'd told him translated as Joy God and Old Quiet Lady, agreed with the artist that there had been a pair of surfers on the beach.  Her sharp eyes missed little; she'd been a scathing columnist in Washington, DC much of her life."

image:  Black Dog Review

The Pinecone

     "Besides the drivers and the bicyclists, she was sick of joggers, power walkers, rollerbladers, and the people who rode around the Stanford Research Park in those pokey golf carts that always pulled out into traffic just ahead of her.  Also of the whole crowd that sat around outside Starbucks for hours with their laptops, drinking mucho grande double-decaf soy lattes with mandarin-pistachio-peppermint syrup.  She was sick of pretty much everyone around her—the WAH moms and the OB-GYNs who seemed to need the license plates to prove it, the ITS consultants and the CEOs.  

     "She was sick, indeed, of all acronyms, abbreviations, and the use of numbers for words, like 4 sale and 2 night.  She missed real words, examined lives, old-fashioned courtesy, Henry James novels, her mother’s homey Sunday pot roast, and lazy summer mornings inner-tubing on a slow green-hearted river in the heartland of the country, somewhere far, far from the coast."

I am very pleased to have this story from my days as described above (oops, sorry—from a purely fictional place and time) in Issue 8-3 of Cumberland River Review.

The Pinecone also received an Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Contest in 2016, though it was not then published.

image:  Roman relief showing a Maenad holding a thyrsus, 120-140 AD, Prado Museum, Madrid

Alien Corn

The inaugural issue of Orca is out, and my story "Alien Corn" is among those published in it.

From the middle section, I steal back these lines, transported once again to Italy—

She felt absolved, somehow relieved of guilt and obligation, by the loving welcome of the skeletal old cat in the dark of the late October garden near the Arno, between convent and blue palazzo with its quiet tribe of long, distinct Modigliani faces Adrian would show her the next morning.  She'd been undone by the lake air, she told herself again, kneeling beside the open window, open shutters in her room over the garden where somewhere the spirit animal padded through herbs, gave chase to dreams.



image:  Orca Literary Journal, Issue 1

Forest Avenue

In the Spring 2019 Issue of Birdland Journal, with the theme "A Matter of Character," pieces published include my creative nonfiction work "Forest Avenue," as well as wonderful stories by my good friends and long-time writing colleagues Rick Trushel ("Electric Twilight") and Jeanne Althouse ("Fallen Star").

Here's a brief taste of the madeleine that sends me back to that delightfully eccentric place I lived once, once upon a time:

Every year again, on Easter Sunday, the neighborhood children came in their new finery, flowered cotton dresses, ankle socks, and patent leather shoes, or little navy shorts and clean buttoned shirts, to hunt for Easter eggs in the huge, rambling yard across the street (Forest Avenue, broad as a boulevard), next door to the private nursing home where every morning the old man would come out bundled up and stand at the curb and holler at the street for maybe ten minutes, holler and holler, then go inside again. One by one, holding parents by one hand and little painted buckets or baskets by the other, they would come and lift the latch of the waist-high gate, vanish into the yard that was like an English cottage garden.

image:  Sylvan Beach House

The Broken Hallelujah

It's summer, and the summer issue of the Remington Review is out.

It includes (on page 6) my short story "The Broken Hallelujah," describing a stolen moment on a summer morning on a tributary of the Russian River, listening to the Emperor Concerto—a song without words, since the words have been taken away from Livvy and she longs for the days back home in the house she grew up in, her father's big Random House Dictionary open to "a handful of chance words—today maybe sanctum, sampan, samsara, sand-blind," while he types Sunday letters on a typewriter with the "e" and "g" out of alignment.  Strange stuff for nostalgia, maybe, but Livvy had defined herself by words, and she has hung her hopes on Leonard Cohen's quiet moment of redemptive song,
There's a blaze of light
In every word



image:  Claude Monet, The Seine River

Writing Spaces

I added this Tiffany window, River of Life, to a short story yesterday—set it on the wide adobe windowsill of a crumbling chapel in New Mexico, to catch the light.

Studio with Mimosa

Another post in The Ekphrastic Review, this a small bit on Bonnard's luminous conflagration Studio with Mimosa, from my still unpublished novel Nude Against the Light.

We got to see this painting again in London in March, at the Tate exhibition of Bonnard's work, and I had the awful impression that it has faded since I saw it first in France in 2000.  I hope I'm wrong, that it was a trick of the light.


image:  Pierre Bonnard, 1935

Writing Spaces

image:  Typist of the World!

The Accountant

"Once upon a time (though he couldn't have said which, anymore) there was an accountant, much like any accountant anywhere, from the days of the ancient Chinese with their beaded abacuses and nimble fingers to the futuristic post-modern age where sleek uninteresting machines take care of all those numbers for you."

To continue, see Twist in Time, Issue 3, just published.





image:  Ancient Origins

Bonnard in the Alps

A long-ago journey as if taken again, with the publication by The Ekphrastic Review of my creative non-fiction piece on Bonnard's vibrant altarpiece in a church near Mont Blanc, high on a mountainside of fruit trees and geraniums and old stone.



image:  Pierre Bonnard, Saint Francis de Sales

Writing Spaces

Light—still what I'm all about.

I agree, as always, with Mary Oliver, one of my favorite poets, when she writes "But I also say this:  that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive."

And like a toss of the dice, I come upon this reference to light and happiness (these in Venice) when I query my own writing:  "The bell to welcome the morning, tolling on and on again at first light.  Glass beads, like a rosary of quiet pleasures."

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Writing Room with Sunlight

Blue Monkeys, and an Octopus

Many of my favorite novels were serialized—

The Count of Monte Cristo, The Woman in White, The Portrait of a Lady, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Tender is the Night, and (by my namesake, that other Christie) And Then There Were None.

So it amuses me that my own endlessly long novel, set mostly in Crete, has been appearing in pieces, if out of order, in various publications.

"Blue Monkeys" was published by UK-based Belle Ombre in March (one Sunday morning as we sat on Hampstead Heath looking out at the distant London skyline and, closer, at fine dogs and their dogwalkers).  "Octopus" was published by New York-based Lowestoft Chronicle earlier in March. 

Both these feature Anna Oliver, a feisty 80, who all her life has done her damnedest to forget her Greek lover killed shortly after the German invasion in 1941, and to ignore the house he left her on the northern coast of Crete.

Another piece of Anna's story, "Naxos," will be published by Sweden-based Mediterranean Poetry.  For a taste of that, while waiting— 

"Anna laid a tart green against an impish red against a blue to knock the socks off you.  Saturated colors, wet on her fattest camelhair brush.  Painting caïques in the cove, on Naxos, sitting on a borrowed stool under a giddy great golf umbrella Marcella had also wheedled out of the hotel owner for her, with Metaxa written all across it, using the handy beechwood folding easel she had ordered specially for her Greek Adventure."

In the end I shall perhaps gather up all the pieces and tape them back together in whatever configuration they've landed, something fresh and surprising. 

image:  Blue Monkey Fresco, Palace of Knossos

She Who Hesitates

I'm pleased to have had my story She Who Hesitates published in The Wild Word, as part of their "It's a kind of magic" issue, Spring 2019.

This particular kind of magic takes place in Tuscany, in Montecatini Terme and Montecatini Alto.


image:  The Wild Word banner

Writing Spaces

All thanks to wonderful Catamaran for the reception and warm welcome to all authors Friday evening at the Santa Cruz Art League.  And for the gorgeous journal issue with a cover of stained glass.  I'm grateful to have my story "Vagaries" included.

Writing Spaces

The Mary Rose, one of the warships of Henry VIII, has found its way into a short story I'm writing—both as the name of my protagonist's best friend, and as a defiant tattoo.

Mary Rose has died, as the Tudor ship sank.

     "Gina showed up at the funeral with electric purple highlights in her chocolate brown hair, feeling so washed out, so little herself, that she knew she had to go overboard or simply go under.

     And as a result she arrived at her own surprise birthday party with her hair still shockingly purple, and the fragrant leftovers of a crawfish and indecently spicy Andouille sausage jambalaya in a huge paella pan, so her easily offended in-laws, there with a macaroni salad, in good faith, and a bucket of fried chicken, were even more taken aback than Gina was."



image:  Geoff Hunt, The Mary Rose under Sail