Marbles

Another story, "Marbles," has been published by the excellent Typishly (who, as I've said, I love not least for their perpetuation of the serif!).

This is a new addition to my collection of stories inspired by aphorisms, which includes "Swallows" and "Moss" (co-winners of the Literal Latté short-short contest in 2012), "Pishing" (published by The Walrus in 2013), "She Who Hesitates" (published by The Wild Word in 2019), and "Milk" (to be published by Minerva Rising this spring). 

Its heroine, Tess, is accused of having lost her marbles, and she agrees that "she had lost quantities of marbles, more than she could count," but "in some incalculable calculus all of the losses added up to make her what she was."  And what she wants now, instead of marbles, is the fairy tales she's illustrating happily,

"animals with magic powers, gray ocher wolves and burnt umber owls; women healers in carmine cloaks; genies curled like unctuous snakes in natural sienna pots; flying Turkish carpets of blackcurrant red with Rumi verses stitched around the edge, ready to dart off on transforming quests.  She wanted Fionnoula, their soft-coated Wheaten terrier, at her feet as she worked; to drink white peony tea from the stoneware noodle bowl she used as a teacup; to see the cottage garden out her window, with its leggy chives and echinacea, lamb's-ear, Russian sage, wild indigo, and pale pink hollyhocks.  To be at home, finally, fabulously, after so many years being somewhere else."

Writing Spaces

A favorite bookshop in Monterey.  

Windows, inside and out, a place of reflection, liminal and transportive.  The writing's not on the wall, but in and on the window.




image:  Christie B. Cochrell, January Window

January Term

"January Term," a story started long ago and finished recently has been published by Typishly, a stylish online literary journal (which, true to my own heart, believes in serifs, in this heathen age of sans!).

It all begins with Ariel, named for Shakespeare's "tricksy" spirit—

         "As Lucy fought her way out of the Super Shuttle outside Meadow Hall two days after the New Year, a great gray cat quite nearly landed on her head.  In class last fall she'd learned that Coleridge called drama a willing suspension of disbelief, the audience agreeing to set aside their critical faculties in order to be entertained.  And so she chose to be enchanted by the falling cat, all fur and canny turquoise eyes, as by a blazing comet foretelling the coming of kings, and didn’t mind that it almost hit her.  (Missed her by a whisker, as her Grandma Verna waiting tables back in Des Moines would have said.)

         The cat in turn was perfectly oblivious to Lucy, as to the cry of 'Ariel!' directed at it from above, and sauntered off with imposing disdain into the emerald-green grasses in front of the old dorm."

image:  Collage, Christie B. Cochrell

Writing Spaces

A safe fortress of words, against Weltschmerz and mind-muddle and ignorance of things like Cartagena's door knockers and the stained-glass demons of Strasbourg Cathedral.  A bright castle of words, reaching and reaching up into the sky, and flying immense wind-filled flags from its turrets.  An apothecary's shop of words, healing the heart and soul, fragrant with balsam fir and bearberry, with chicory, elder, fennel and goat's rue, with Jamaican dogwood, juniper, linden, and lovage, and, always, with my often written-about sage.

image:  Nigella Lawson, English food writer — from 100 Famous Authors and Their Writing Spaces

A Siege of Herons

My second mystery, "A Siege of Herons," has been published in the January 2020 issue of The Mystery Weekly Magazine, and is available in print and in Kindle format.

This is the fourth story featuring poet/detective Tomás Vilalta and his archaeologist partner Gritta Becker, set on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca.  (Read about the other three here.)

In this, Mireille Cabrol, a well-known Mallorcan artist with a remote family tie to Cezanne goes missing, and Vilalta traces her to the Medieval walled town of Alcúdia, and nearby S'Albufera Natural Park.  There, while painting purple herons and other exotic waterbirds, the painter has reportedly stumbled across bird traffickers and subsequently vanished.  The trail leads Vilalta still further into the wilds of the island to an old hermitage where Mireille was last seen, in the company of a young woman with the look of an exotic bird the artist has for unknown reasons befriended.

I offer this small taste to whet the appetite:

         He'd brought home with him a postcard of one of Mireille Cabrol's paintings, which he studied while the stew simmered. Gritta got up, stretched, hugged him, poured them wine from a bottle of good moscato, and picked up the card with curiosity.

         "Purple herons were significant in Egyptian mythology," she told him. "Associated with creation, renewal, the Phoenix."

         "Maybe Mireille Cabrol made that association too, if it's well known," Vilalta mused, interested. "She seems determined to show the Phoenix rising from the fire." He told Gritta about the devastating fire, and the artist's studio with [canvases of herons everywhere like] upswept purple flame.

            He dished the mussels and broth into bowls, the rustic brown clay dishware saturated with intense turquoise recently purchased from a fabrica north of Palma, and they went out to the arbor to eat, among the herbs and aloes and a mass of purple bougainvillea.

image:  Purple Heron, Matt Brady, eBird

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