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Seattle: A Blast from the Past

On a recent trip to  Seattle, in lightly falling snow, I took a  guided walking tour of the city’s mid-19th century “underground” origins: its musty subterranean passageways of abandoned toilets, pipes,  cast-off furniture and windows that once were the main first-floor storefronts of old downtown Seattle.  Like layers of fossils built one sedimentary deposit over another, the city’s hidden foundations are revealed. Approximately 25 square blocks of wooden buildings were either burned to the ground or flooded during the Great Seattle Fire of 1896.  What were once the first floors of thriving...

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“Departures”–“Between Life and Death”

For a guest lecture I am preparing for a  course, “Philosophy through the Movies”, I decided to select the Academy Award® Winner for Best Foreign Language Film of 2009,  “Departures”,  (Japanese title: “Okuribito”, lit. “a person sent out or dispatched”), a  look into the in-between of life and death.  What the Tibetan Buddhists would call “bardo”. Loosely based on Aoki Shinmon’s autobiographical book Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician (納棺夫日記 Nōkanfu Nikki), the movie opens with the main character,  Daigo Kobayashi,...

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BLOOD LOTUS: Discovering New Voices in Literature and Art

I discovered the online journal, Blood Lotus, while doing a Google search for submitting my short stories to small boutique journals.  While spending hours looking for  an appropriate fit for my edgy short stories about growing up with wounds, both healed and unhealed, I discovered this literary and quarterly gem.  Blood Lotus, established in 2006, with the belief everything has not already been written, has a mission to promote not only distinctive writing but also unusual art. Two poets, Stacia Fleegal and Teneice Durrang Delgado, are its co-founders. Stacia M. Fleegal (co-founder, managing...

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Eleven Tips for Women’s Memoirs on 1/11/11

Thousands of us love reading of all kinds:  fiction, history, memoir.  Sometimes all three are combined into one glorious book. We all know someone who is writing:  a novel, a blog, a series of poems, a mystery, children’s book, cookbook, screenplay and more.  And everyone knows someone in a readers’ or writers’ group.  Now there is one website which can fulfill the function of writers’ group, readers’ group, and how to get published in one URL.   The website womensmemoirs.com is for everyone who is a writer and/or a reader! Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler, the authors of the award-winning...

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“Wine Shop At Home”—The Art of Wine “Gifting”

It’s that time of year again, when all of us curmudgeonly folks have to think about that tired old ritual of gift giving.  Each year I try to figure out what to give—a thoughtful gift which will be enjoyed, something original or unexpected.  But, I think I am the world’s worst gift-giver.  I love any gift given to me, and I have very idiosyncratic taste so the conventional advice to give what you yourself would most like as a gift usually doesn’t work for me. Last year I discovered the online wine merchant, WineShop At Home, because our daughter, Maya, is so passionate about wine and loves...

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“Ascent Aspirations: Up, Up and Away!”

I recently discovered a gem:  an online art and literary journal, entitled Ascent Aspirations (www.ascentaspirations.com), based in British Columbia.  (It is also published semi-annually in print media—“hard copy”.) I love the fact that Ascent Aspirations’ mission is to give aspiring writers, poets, and artists a chance to present their work online.  All of us writers, artists, lovers of art and fiction, know that the world of art and literature is rapidly shrinking in “hard copy” format and is transitioning to a digital one.  Ascent Aspirations aims to do just that—ascend from analog to digital—for...

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