“Pumpkin Patch Surprise!”

Longtime Chicoan Lori Chergosky taught for the Chico Unified School District for thirty-four years. She writes me that in years past her teaching schedule allowed her to spend Octobers as “a farm guide for school field trips” at the Book Family Farm (facebook.com/BookFamilyFarm) in Durham or to take her classes there. She’s continues the practice in retirement and, at the request of Keith and Joy Book, created a souvenir storybook.

“Pumpkin Patch Surprise!” (independently published, with full color illustrations by Cheyenne Warthen) is available through Amazon as well as at the farm. It’s an homage to pumpkin patches everywhere.

“‘Surprise!’ says Dad. ‘Brenden, we’re going to the pumpkin patch!’ ‘Do we have to go today?’ I ask. ‘It’s our new tradition!’ says Dad. ‘But I just met Trevor, the boy next door. He’s coming over today to kick the soccer ball around. Can’t we just buy a pumpkin at the grocery store like we did when we lived in the city?’ I ask.”

But Brenden’s parents don’t want their son to miss out on “good old-fashioned farm fun.” “I whisper back, ‘What’s so fun about a stinky old farm?’ Dad says, ‘I can’t explain it. You’ll have to experience it!.’”

They see an amazing maze when they arrive, and then it’s time to feed the animals. “It tickles when baby goats eat from my hand. Watching pigs eat their favorite treat makes me laugh! They squeal and slurp as they pig out!” Behind the barn is a playground, including a hay pyramid. Is that a smile on Brenden’s face?

But now a big moment. A farmer asks Brenden if he’d like to collect an egg. Just reach under the chicken--What? “She says, ‘You’ll be surprised, it’s an amazing experience!’ I hesitate…and tell myself, don’t be a chicken!” He tries. And then, there’s the egg. “Talk about a fantastic surprise! It’s the most UNFORGETTABLE feeling ever!”

There’s another surprise when a certain visitor shows up. In the end, guess what?—it’s Brenden who wants to make it a tradition.

Chergosky reads her story at the farm this week through Friday for field trips at 9:15, 10:00 and 10:45 am. Call (530) 342-4375 for details.

“Magical Realism: Essays On Music, Memory, Fantasy, And Borders”

LA-based author Vanessa Angélica Villarreal joined a group of students at Butte College last week to present “Speculative Writing as Time-Travel to Heal the Present.” Sponsored by the Puente Project, helping “educationally under-served students enroll in four-year colleges and universities,” Villarreal used “Back to the Future” as a creative way to change the past to right the future despite the bullying Biffs of the world.

Villarreal expands on this in her “Magical Realism: Essays On Music, Memory, Fantasy, And Borders” ($29 in hardcover from Tiny Reparations Books; also in ebook and audiobook versions), longlisted for the National Book Award. 

She was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. The essays in the book trace her journey through challenging family dynamics, taking a job cleaning houses, marrying an unfaithful man, birthing a son, enduring a messy divorce, and eventually earning a doctorate at USC. 

Fantasy (which often in its world-building looks back at some golden age sullied by evil) and science fiction (which is forward-looking but tends to focus on apocalypse) helped her make sense of the abuses she endured. 

“Fantasy is a space safer than memory to process trauma and escape abuse into a world where the helpless are empowered by magic, friends are found among outcasts and survivors, and a hero will defend you with his sword until you find the hero was you all along.”

In nuanced analyses, Villarreal pulls back the curtain on the racialized and colonial stereotypes in much popular fantasy and science fiction, especially video games. And yet:

“Perhaps I am so drawn to fantasy because it is also the space of immigrant dreaming, the projection of the self into an impossible imaginary to bear the reality of the present one. Its central question: Forces larger than myself have estranged me from my home; what can displacement into new lands make capable in me?”

Readers will see the answer in this powerful memoir.

News: Brenda M. Lane, Napa author and contributor to “Chicken Soup for the Soul: Hope, Faith & Miracles,” will be signing her books at Barnes & Noble in Chico on Friday, October 24, from 11:00 am – 4:00 pm. 

“50 Ways To Enjoy Life More”

Barbara Stamps Kimball “contracted polio as an adult, which led her to a spiritual quest and personal growth.” So writes her daughter, Chico State Sociology professor emerita Gayle Kimball. In 2025 Gayle found the manuscript for a book Barbara wrote in the 1980s. “50 Ways To Enjoy Life More” ($14.99 in paperback from Chico’s Equality Press; also for Amazon Kindle) is a “memorial to her grace and inspiration.”

Each short chapter features encouraging stories, some from Barbara’s own life, that highlight aspects of a more positive view on life. In “The Magic of Praise” she writes: “Close your eyes and think of five things you can praise about your partner, your child, or your friend. Now write them down. When the time is apropos, pass on your honest positives to these individuals. Remember, ‘Now’s the time to slip it to him for he cannot read his tombstone when he’s dead.’”

The author draws on names readers of a certain age might especially be familiar with, including the “hugging professor” Leo Buscaglia; psychiatrist Gerald Jampolsky; writer Napoleon Hill (“Think and Grow Rich); est founder Werner Erhard; and Buddhism exponent Alan Watts.

Influenced by the writing of Ernest Holmes (“Science of Mind”) and Helen Schucman’s “channeled” book “A Course In Miracles,” Barbara’s source of encouragement flows from a religious/metaphysical view different than my own. 

She writes that “All the great sages, teachers, and wise ones down through the ages have told us of the importance of faith … in ourselves as part of God. … What you give out, positively or negatively, returns to you in kind, but it may not come from the same source. The law of karma (cause and effect) is as precise in its operations as the rotation of the planets….”

Yet many of her observations have a universal ring. “Each of us,” she writes, “has the choice to harbor old hates and grievances, like the famed Hatfields and McCoys, and carry them on our backs for years or we can choose to unload them and travel with a light and joyous step. The secret: love and forgiveness. Forgiveness brings new wings of freedom,” the freedom of a child.

“HIDEAWAYS: Within And Outside My Polygamist Family”

A Chico resident for almost half a century, Jerry Allred retired from a long career in education. His childhood, it turns out, was also an education—in hiding.

That’s because his father (born in 1906, murdered in 1977), was part of a fundamentalist Mormon group. “The year I was three, Daddy violated parole by moving our families to Colonia LeBaron, a ranch set in northern Mexico’s Chihuahua desert, to start a colony for Saints who were violating the laws of the land by living God’s holiest law of Celestial Plural Marriage.”

“HIDEAWAYS: Within And Outside My Polygamist Family” ($20 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) contains nineteen “creative nonfiction” stories imagined from family recollections, journals, and research. So while individual characters are not strictly historical, the fact remains: 

“Being the family’s eighth son and fourteenth child, I am one of forty-eight children born to Dr. Rulon Clark Allred and his seven wives. My mother, Mabel Finlayson Allred, was his fourth plural wife, and her identical twin, Melba, was also her sister-wife.”

Since the LDS Church had outlawed plural marriage in 1890 (and reinterpreted the 132nd Section of the Doctrine and Covenants), family members frequently hid, devised cover stories, and moved to places where they hoped to establish sanctuaries for persecuted Saints (Mexico; Elko, Nevada; Colorado), all to escape Church officials and the FBI vice squad.

Jerry’s coming into the world was a difficult birth indeed but Rulon’s ministrations (he delivered thousands of babies in his lifetime) saved both mother and child. Allred writes with great sympathy toward his father. “Daddy was convinced that his faith should be, and eventually would be, true for every person who ever lived, or else.”

Yet in his teen years Jerry departed from his father’s convictions. He was learning about evolution and could no longer believe as his father did that God had created everything “all at once” a few thousand years ago. With compassion and deeply felt emotion, Allred takes the reader into daily life and painful separations, an inseparable part of his own journey.

An interview with Allred, conducted by Nancy Wiegman for Nancy’s Bookshelf on mynspr.org, is available at tinyurl.com/2rnd4d79.