ALOHA! Another year has transpired, a year in which the key words of my literary life have been: LOSS, RESISTANCE, and COMMUNITY. I unexpectedly lost my best friend this year, my bestie since we were both 10. Her name is Cathy Colman, a poet, who, in January, became a refugee of the Pacific Palisades fire. While her rented cottage miraculously survived, her landlord ...

How did this happen?  My short story, “Toltec on Haight,” became a novella at 31,000 words! Inspired by my own Beatnik uncle, an avantgarde filmmaker, abandoned before birth by his Mexican actor and filmmaker father, the most famous Mexican film director of the 1940s, Emilio Fernandez, it is a story of a troubled and talented man searching obsessively for his ...

SEPTEMBER 13: WHAT THE BODY HOLDS: ITS SHAME & ITS PLEASURE The Women’s National Book Association – SF Chapter and The San Francisco Mechanics Institute, co-hosted a reading and discussion with myself and Isidra Mencos, Barcelona-born author of the memoir, Promenade of Desire. Here is a taste of what I had to say about what the body holds:After spending many years writing ...

I was the oldest, but my brother was born 11 months after me. Which meant my mother stopped breastfeeding me so as to nourish her new arrival to the fullest extent. (The female body is miraculous that way!) Her entire body and psyche started honing in on the human who would come next. Something similar happens when an author’s second ...

And what an incredible ride it has been. I have grown both older and younger, wiser and more in love with the human heart. I can’t believe everything that has happened, actually happened! Or that I have done all that I have done!!  Here is a brief recap:  Photo credit for all photos: Michaela Lawlor *I gave 25 readings, 16 ...

THE MAN WITH EIGHT PAIRS OF LEGS WAS SELECTED BY THE WOMEN'S NATIONAL BOOK ASSOCIATION (WBNA) AS A GREAT GROUP READ!  The annual list features 20 books chosen by a committee of 46 readers out of hundreds of submissions. According to the WBNA announcement, “books were chosen for their literary merit and for their ability to promote meaningful discussions.” WNBA was ...

I want to first pay tribute to the world’s on-going efforts to champion free speech, but particularly when it comes to the free expression of art: novels, poems, theater, visual art, dance. I stand in solidarity with Salman Rushdie, an internationally known novelist who has, for decades, been a leading voice against censorship, and who was severely stabbed four days ...

FOR STARTERS: What a pleasant surprise to find my book recommended in Stanford Magazine, along with these other dynamic, diverse Stanford alumni! NEW RELEASES THAT INSPIRE US, they wrote, and mailed the magazine to thousands of alums! (I wrote for the Stanford Daily in 1970, covering anti-war marches and sit-ins, and worked one-on-one with Pulitzer-prize-winning Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, my sophomore year.) Thank ...

Yes! It was 24 degrees Fahrenheit in Madison when I arrived last Friday. And it snowed two inches on the first day of April!! Mamma mia! In Chicago, the cold rain chilled all exposed parts. In Wisconsin, the wind felt Arctic! But the storm is also a metaphor: I have been performing THE MAN WITH EIGHT PAIRS OF LEGS non-stop for nine ...

THE BOOK TOUR:  Well, the rubber really did hit the road. I did six book events in February. I have seven book events in March. Five in April. And I just found out I will be presenting on a featured fiction panel during the Bay Area Book Festival the first week of May! My book tour will take me to a number ...

On this day, the day before the public launch of my book, this is how I feel. Exhausted after juggling dozens of balls in the air for months – details, people, dates, queries, correspondences, posts, promotions – and grateful for the many incredible people I have met along the way, which includes, most recently, reviewers and event directors at bookstores across the ...

I am freaking out over here. To say that this has been a long time coming is an understatement. I read my poems at public readings in the late 70s, produced a couple of short plays in the mid-80s. A single mother with an eight-year-old, I published Journey into Motherhood: Writing Your Way to Self-Discovery in 1996 followed by a national book tour, ...