I’ve been accused of being unable to understand because I’m a man. It was tempting to respond that she couldn’t understand my need to have a God the Father to relate to as a man who needs a role model and a complete positive (for the most part) male authority figure, and she couldn’t understand because she’s a woman. We are in a bind. But that cheap shot would have accomplished nothing. I still say that Biblical language is not exclusive, if rendered correctly.
The irony here arose in the case of a woman who was being criticized by a man for using Biblical language. Who should know more whether she felt excluded by its masculine nouns? As she said, it’s his problem.
~*~
Oh, my, this was all before some of my most important fictional characters were women.
In moving, I had no more need for a folder of return-address labels to the old house, many of them sent to me as fundraisers from various sources. They were really helpful back when I was submitting work prolifically to the literary mags, but lately it’s been mostly in paying the bills.
Among the labels were those from these sources:
The alumni association.
Sierra Club.
Amnesty International.
Grassroots International.
AAA.
Climate action.
Wildlife groups.
Resist.
Ones from a lighthouse series I had ordered. They were larger and impressive.
In my Freakin’ Free Spirits novels, Cassia’s father is a professional photographer who views the world in a unique spirit.
Now that digital technology has made taking pictures so easy and ubiquitous, everybody always seems to be holding their cell phones up for another shot.
Does anyone else miss the sound of the clicking shutter?
How do you find capturing photographic images affects the way you see events around you?
soon a dozen frontiersmen, each venturing out from the base camp as far as we can go through swamp and foothill within our own skulls where the bull moose and grizzly bear and horned owl call and sinister tribes compel strenuous rambling if we were to preserve our own thinning scalps, concede the unmarked route will force us to doubt our own skill and remove all excuses to others have beaver pelts or gold dust or speak of cannibals . affectionately
Situated near the center of New Hampshire, it’s the state’s largest lake and the third largest in New England.
It stretches about 21 miles and varies in width up to nine miles, covering about 71 square miles.
The lake contains at least 264 islands and has 288 miles of shoreline.
Maximum depth is 180 feet, augmented by a dam at Lakeport.
The center part of the lake is called the Broads.
The outflow joins with the Pemigewasset River to form the Merrimack, which heads south into Massachusetts before turning east to the Atlantic. Its waters powered many of the industrial mills along its way, including Manchester, Nashua, Lowell, and Lawrence.
The Native name translates as either “smile of the Great Spirit” or “beautiful water in a high place.”
Officially, it’s not a lake but a “great pond,” which the General Court has defined as a natural lake of more than ten acres. The state owns the beds of all the great ponds, making the surface public water.
Ice-out is a popular measure of the end of winter in the Granite State. It’s declared when the ice on the lake breaks up sufficiently for the Mount Washington cruise vessel to make it to every one of its five ports: Center Harbor, Wolfeboro (“the Oldest Summer Resort in America”), Alton, Weirs Beach, and Meredith. It’s also considered the beginning of boating season. The date has varied from March 16 to May 12.
It’s hard to spell. That’s why it’s often known as Lake Winni.
The three peaks of the Pawtuckaway mountains to the west of us are viewed here from the Garrison Hill tower. Well, the middle one is obscured by the tree. Still, they’re prominent points in southeastern New Hampshire, midway between the Seacoast region and the Merrimack River, with good views of Boston from the forest fire lookout tower atop the 908-foot South Mountain (left).
Growing up in the middle of America, I had little awareness of the extent of immigrant Greek influence in the New World, much less in my own hometown. These days, though, I see how pervasive — yet nearly invisible — it’s been, now or then.
My decision to have my first novel close with Cassia’s future father marrying into a Greek-American family was, in part, predicated on a desire to have his immersion in one ancient culture from Asia, Tibetan Buddhism, be countered by another from Western civilization, and thus Greece , blending both classical glories and some New Testament threads, which seemed appropriately symbolic.
It’s up to you to weigh in on how well it works in my novel What’s Left.
In the past decade, though, perhaps prompted by the annual community-wide festival our local Greek Orthodox church presents every Labor Day weekend, I’ve been connecting the dots and discovering how many Greek-Americans I’ve known over the years and how much the recent encounters have been enriching my own outlook.
As I wrote to one friend:
One thing that’s greatly surprised me is how little literature exists that relates the Greek-American experience. You’re too numerous to be so invisible. What’s up? Just look on your impact in Dover alone. Perhaps the best overall portrayal comes in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (a masterpiece, by the way), although the work is acclaimed mostly for its exploration of hermaphroditic genetics and identity. Along the way, he also does a knock-out job of nailing the Midwest where I grew up, another strand of literature that’s otherwise anemic. I am glad I’d finished the first draft of my new work before encountering his novel — he won the National Book Award and Oprah’s endorsement for good reasons. It could be too intimidating. Well, if he could go on to do such an insightful job with Quaker Meeting, as he does in his third novel, The Marriage Plot, maybe I’m not so out of line in venturing into yours. I hope. Oh, yes, I’m also glad I finished the draft before getting to connect the dots of your own family. You’d be ideal for the movie version.
~*~
Look around at the people you know. Tell us something (good, we hope) about someone of Greek descent.
~*~
I think she looks a lot like the young woman on the cover of the book, apart from Cassia’s Goth garb and makeup. Aphrodite, anyone?
Jnana's Red Barn 