“Ode To Hemingway: Three Stories And Ten Poems”

Ernest Hemingway, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, made his literary debut in 1923 with “Three Stories And Ten Poems.” He was unable to accept the Prize in person after surviving “two plane crashes in two days in the elephant country of Uganda,” resulting in a concussion from which he never recovered.

Retired Chico State business professor Curt DeBerg (curtdeberg.com) has spent decades on Hemingway’s trail, visiting the writer’s haunts around the world, detailing his many demons. Now living in Hendaye, France, DeBerg, 70, suffered his own plane crash in 2016: “I was pulled from the wreckage with a leg that would never fully heal.”

Rather than a memoir of the crash, DeBerg has crafted what he calls “a ledger of survival,” an homage to his favorite writer. “Ode To Hemingway: Three Stories And Ten Poems” (available in Amazon Kindle format from Paul Adrian Books), with sketches by Tony Ridgway, expresses not disillusionment with a world war (as Hemingway did), but rather with “the polarization of modern political rifts and the slow, grinding recovery of the body.”

The stories are very short, dark, death imbued. In an Interlude DeBerg defends his love of Hemingway’s writing, despite what critics might say (“Don’t let others tell you what should make you happy”). The poems (with explanatory notes) evoke emotional moments in DeBerg’s life, like when his brother, who he felt “small” around, showed up for him after his plane crash, which “changed something between us.” 

“Then the sky fell./ The plane went down in a Polish field./ The twisting carnage of the cockpit/ Broke the bones but hardened the spirit./ And you were there….”

In 2021, DeBerg “discovered that a Franciscan sister had preserved a copy of ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ bearing what are believed to be the last words Hemingway ever wrote—a personal inscription to the nun who cared for him in his final months.” DeBerg carried the book to the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm “and spoke at the ceremony” covered by the New York Times.

Two lives, intertwined, but with a significant difference. DeBerg’s “Ode” refuses to follow the way of despair.

“Tell The Chickens It’s Time For Bed”

“Grandma Nancy” (Nancy Pattison) has deep roots locally. She grew up in Chico and writes me that her father Bill worked with Sierra Gold Nurseries and her mother Maggie worked at Chico State Student Government. Nancy graduated Pleasant Valley High School in 1973. 

Now living in Talent, Oregon she has written “The Norse Prophecy Series” under the name Anna Pattison and, for kids, “Grandma Nancy’s Red Barn” coloring book and the picture book “Tell The Chickens It’s Time For Bed” ($13 in softcover from Berkano Books LLC), whimsically illustrated by Gwendolyn Janke, whose muted colors suggest the sun is going down.

The book uses the idea that all sorts of animals “who bring eggs into the world” need time to rest. In just a few bold words on each page, Pattison aims to snare young readers (or listeners) with the rhythm of the words, over and over, helping them see that night is approaching for them as well. They can act like all these other curious creatures and welcome sleep. 

“Tell the chickens it’s time for bed,” the book’s first page begins, with the second continuing: “they laid their eggs, now they can lay their heads” (flip to the next two pages) “Dow-Ow-Own Upon their feather beds.”

Sure enough, the full-page drawing shows a simple bed with a chicken roosting on top, obviously snoozing, with a few feathers (okay, a lot of feathers) wafting in the air. Colors are in the darker shades. You can see the moon and stars.

Next, the salmon, “having laid their roe” can now lay their heads “Dow-Ow-Own Upon their water beds.” The full page water bed never looked so inviting.

Then follow the bees, the seahorse, the cobras, the chameleon, the toucan” and—well, the kids: “Tell the children it’s time for bed. They’ve played today, now they can lay their heads “Dow-Ow-Own Upon their night-time beds.” (The little beds under the big tent seem quite cozy.)

There’s also a translation of the first four pages into musical notation, written by Nancy Chew, arranged by Chuan Choy, encouraging children to go “Dow-Ow-Own” into bed. All in all, an egg-celent idea, pairing giggles with bedtime. 

 

“The Psychic On The Jury: A Mel Walker Story”

When I met Sacramento-based writer and software engineer Brian C.E. Buhl at the Paradise Chocolate Festival, I figured he’d already know my name—not because of my fame as a columnist (ahem), but for his chronicling of a group of psychics called The Society of Supernatural Investigations—maybe he was one of them. If so, he held that fact close to his vest. Actually, upon further investigation, the group turned out to be fictional, emanating from Buhl’s novel called “The Repossessed Ghost.”

A key character from that novel is central to “The Psychic On The Jury: A Mel Walker Story” ($5.99 in paperback from Water Dragon Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle). Mel (short for Melchizedek) is a psychic, one who can see the past (unlike another psychic he meets who can see the future—with devastating consequences, but that’s looking ahead). 

When Walker gets a jury summons to appear in a Sacramento courtroom, “I spent the weekend worrying about it…. Serving on the jury itself isn’t such a big deal, but I had run-ins with the law. I had been a ‘person of interest’ in a murder, which I think is just a fancy way of them saying I was the suspect. What if showing up brought all those legal headaches back to the surface?”

That doesn’t happen but maybe something worse does. Walker is seated, Juror Number One, in a capital murder case. “They had me, a psychic that can talk to ghosts, sitting as a juror in a murder case. Incredible…. If they had the murder weapon and they let me touch it, I could pull a vision from it and tell them not only who the murderer was, but what they were thinking as they were doing it.”

One David Gomez is charged with stabbing his best friend to death after an argument. Long story short (the book is really a long short story), Mel can “see” who actually did it (not Gomez) but can he convince the jury? And what about the actual perp, who is in the courtroom? What will happen?

There’s not a ghost of a chance I’m going to tell you.

“Fault Lines: The Geography Of Love”

Susan Tchudi, retired English professor and co-host of KZFR’s Ecotopia, lives in Yankee Hill. A keen curiosity about the dynamics of blended families led to her multigenerational novel about Mark and Hannah Abbott, tracing their early years and then the lives of their children as both Mark and Hannah turn 70 in 2015.

In “Fault Lines: The Geography Of Love” ($15.99 in paperback from TurkeyTail Media Farm; also for Amazon Kindle), family members narrate their own chapters as the decades go by, though Mark’s chapters are conveyed by third-person narration since, Tchudi writes me, “it’s Mark’s growth and change we come to understand/focus on.”

Hannah says in 1997, age 52, “Honestly, it’s not been that easy, being married to Mark. It’s gotten easier. But he came into this marriage so fragile. I think in some ways, that’s what attracted me to him…. But that vulnerability was accompanied by huge insecurity, neediness, a hole in his heart that couldn’t be filled.”

Mark had become a psychotherapist in Sacramento. Hannah was a renowned artist. By 2015, “Mark and Hannah had been married for over thirty years and had come into the marriage with two teenagers each—Isla was his; Sarah was hers…. Richie was Hannah’s oldest child, one who had gradually, over time, come back into the fold.” Then there was Marcus, “Mark’s son, the drug addict.” 

Isla, age 42, puts it this way in 2011: “Sometimes I think our family is coming together and sometimes I think it’s falling apart. And I guess that at different times it’s both of those things.” Hannah is the moral center of the family—calm in the face of family chaos—but will face devastating news. Mark must come to terms with a family secret hiding from him in plain sight.

In her immersive story, Tchudi treats the triumphs and heartbreaks of family life with honesty and compassion. 

The public is invited to the book launch party on Sunday, June 7 from 4:00-7:00 p.m. at TurkeyTail Farm. In addition to readings from the book light refreshments (and wood-fired pizza) will be provided as well as music from the Blue Oaks Saxophone Quartet. Write susantchudi@gmail.com for directions.

“Three Fire Mountains: Stories Of Wildfire And Recovery In California”

“Wildfire traumatizes a community all at once,” writes Katie Simmons, former Disaster Recovery Director for the Town of Paradise, “leaving everybody reeling with shock and dealing with one another and themselves in a heightened emotional state.”

Now Deputy Chief Administrative Officer for Butte County, Simmons was part of the first Policy Fellowship with Stanford University Impact Labs over the course of two years, beginning in late 2023. “When I started the fellowship,” she says, “I didn’t plan to talk about suicidal thoughts, or my dad’s death,” or her chronic illness. Instead, “I planned to talk about fire through the narrow lens of data…. As it turns out, reckoning with fire is indistinguishable from reckoning with life, because fire touches every part of life.”

Simmons reckons with both fire and life in her extraordinary memoir, named for a Camp Fire memory her youngest daughter had as she saw it from Chico. “Three Fire Mountains: Stories Of Wildfire And Recovery In California” ($37.99 in hardcover from Springer) is a heart-rending account of recovery’s messy reality, told through individual stories as well as from a professional vantage point that contends with agencies at odds with each other.

Simmons presents a recovery triage tool, a host of questions dealing with the aftermath of a fire both for individuals and the community. She feels rage when Federal and State agencies don’t seem to understand the vast difference between urban and rural recovery (and what does recovery even mean?) and intact and destroyed communities.

There are some victories. “For both the Camp Fire and North Complex fire,” she writes, “I worked with staff to build cases for time extensions on FEMA Individual Assistance and we were successful.”

When the fire is out, “except for the destruction it has wrought and the landscape it has altered, the sky turns blue again and life goes on.” But trauma remains. “Fire recovery is like putting together a delicate puzzle wearing a blindfold and heavy gloves.”

“As we await the start of another fire year I wonder … how do we keep going?” We keep going, she writes, because of love. “My definition of recovery is love.”

“The Joyful Online Teacher: Finding Our Fizz In Asynchronous Classes”

It’s no secret that the Covid lockdown had a devastating effect on the educational development of young people. Overnight, teachers who had never taught online had to open the doors to “Zoom school,” not good PR for the online modality.

When Flower Darby spoke with online instructors at Butte College in 2025, during a daylong emphasis on “humanizing” distance education, she previewed some of the themes in her new book. “The Joyful Online Teacher: Finding Our Fizz In Asynchronous Classes” ($19.95 in paperback from the University of Oklahoma Press; also for Amazon Kindle) focuses on courses taught in Learning Management Systems (like Canvas, in the news because of cybersecurity attacks) and not live via Zoom.

“I wrote this book,” she says, “to uplift online instructors who may be feeling overwhelmed, undervalued, and depleted of joy in their work.” A veteran online instructor herself, Darby, Associate Director of the Teaching for Learning Center at the University of Missouri, concentrates not on the “how” of teaching online but the “why.” In spite of all the challenges, an online class can “promote thriving for all,” inspiring students and energizing instructors.

Drawing on the work of positive psychologist Martin Seligman, Darby takes instructors through the PERMA model of well-being: “Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment.” The book centers on developing positive emotion in students (yes, in asynchronous courses) as well as relationships. But it’s also aimed at the importance of instructor self-care in setting boundaries. 

Students want to know there’s a real person behind the computer screen, so instructors can share brief videos about themselves and their interests. They can respond to student email in a timely manner (though not 24x7).

Meaningful learning online takes disciplined effort and that’s a good kind of “friction.” But, Darby adds, “let’s create and teach online classes with an intentional effort to minimize the times when students feel alone, disconnected, frustrated, anxious, or bored. We’ll do a lot to support their success, and we’ll enjoy our work more fully, when we do.”

For instructors, the book is indispensable practical encouragement. For readers, it’s a way to see online courses in an entirely different light.

“Singing For Change”

In a series of novels, starting with "Venice Beach" in 2015, Chico writer Emily Gallo (emilygallo.com) has charted the lives of a group of unlikely friends. Many wind up at Dutch Bogart’s former pot farm in Garberville. The reclusive Dutch, a former Sixties musician, lives on song royalties. 

Among the “motley crew” is Buster Fingerpickin’ McCracken, a famed blues musician now in his eighties. When Dutch gets a call from “Playing for Change,” a charitable foundation “trying to spread music for social change around the world,” the opportunity to make a music video along the boardwalk ignites something deep in him, and he’s able to persuade Buster to join him. That’s when Dutch meets audio assistant, Vivienne, a reporter for the Haiti Liberté, and he is smitten.

The events at first seem prosaic in “Singing For Change” ($14.95 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle), but the reader knows from the start a horrific tragedy is waiting in the wings.

Friend Malcolm works in Venice at Café Gratitude. His wife, Savali, an LGBTQ+ activist, is Samoan, a third gender in Samoan society called Fa'afafine. They take in Graciela, just getting started in her teaching career, to care for their daughter, Aja. Through a turn of events, Graciela meets Clippers basketball star Elijah Knight and despite his complicated family dynamics, wants to see more of him. A lot more.

By coincidence, Vivienne, Savali and Elijah are all claiming their bags at LAX when they run into each other moments before the shooting begins. The gunman “stopped and studied the crowd milling around the luggage carousel, choosing for best effect. The one who towered over everyone, the woman in a man's suit. He pulled the guns out of his pockets, slipped in the magazines and started firing.” At least seven dead, the three friends severely wounded. Was the gunman targeting people of color? 

There is much more to the story. Dutch envisions a “We are the World” concert for gun control, and Gallo shows how it happens, complete with all the big name music stars, including Dutch. 

“To save our country,” he sings, “To do what’s right/ This is our time/ This is our fight.”