“Flip the Script: A Teen Novel About How Today’s Choices Unlock the Power of a Skilled Career”

Norm Nielsen, the former CEO of Chico Electric, has teamed with retired journalism and communications instructor Mark Powers to tell the story of three ninth-graders on the way to making life-changing career decisions.

Nielsen and Powers have established a nonprofit, Industry for Education (industryforeducation.org), which establishes partnerships with local high schools. The goal is to bust the stereotype that the trades are for those who can’t measure up to college work.

“Flip the Script: A Teen Novel About How Today’s Choices Unlock the Power of a Skilled Career” ($12.99 in paperback from deTello Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle) shows what happens when the trio find themselves in a course called CTE (Career & Technical Education) Foundations. 

Kai Cruz just sort of reacts “as life comes.” His best friend, Zoe Martin, is highly disciplined with a top college in view. Her rival, Ethan Cole, has an air of condescension about the whole trades thing. Their teacher, Ms. Maddox, wants them to think about “flipping the script.” Instead of just living day to day, hoping something will work out, “what if you start by asking: What kind of life do I want?” 

As you develop an answer, “you can work backward to make choices now that get you there. That’s what I mean by flipping it. Instead of just reacting to life as it comes, you start designing with intention.” The choice isn’t either/or: “college and the trades are tools, not labels.”

The book focuses on a field trip to “Everline Electric.” Electrical provides entry-level, technical, and professional careers. These are whole-person careers—you have to know reading, writing and math—and there’s no college debt. (Each chapter includes thoughtful questions and helpful resources.) The story takes the trio step by step into appreciating (or, in Ethan’s case, at least acknowledging) that the trades are a viable choice for those who want to put in the work. 

In the end, as Zoe says in her presentation, don’t “confuse prestige with purpose…. Purpose is knowing why you get up every morning, knowing your work matters, knowing you’re building a life that fits you.”

“MAGA vs. The Bible: The Unbelievable Contradictions”

In the summer of 2025 a little book of quotations appeared that sparked a two book response by a Chico publisher. With a provocative title, “Jesus And Trump: The Parallel Sayings” aimed to show (as the Amazon page notes) that “Donald Trump and Jesus Christ have brought similar teachings to their contemporaries.”

Among the examples given: “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes” (Mark 9:23) and “I like thinking big. If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big” (Donald Trump, Facebook, November 21, 2016).

Presuming the book’s message is intended “unironically,” the two co-publishers of Chico’s Quoir Publishing (quoir.com), Keith Giles and Matthew Distefano, have fired back with quotation books of their own. The first, “Trump vs. Jesus: The Unparallel Sayings” (published December 2025), asks the question: “What if we placed the words of Donald Trump and the words of Jesus side-by-side and simply paid attention?”

The second book, just published, is “MAGA vs. The Bible: The Unbelievable Contradictions” ($10.99 in paperback from Quoir Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle), which puts quotes from MAGA adherents alongside passages from the Bible. For example, “Saying no to President Trump is saying no to God” (Trump spiritual advisor Paula White-Cain in 2025); “To you it was shown so that you would acknowledge that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him” (Deuteronomy 4:35).

Trump’s Truth Social post from April 2026, in which he used an expletive to warn Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz (or else), is contrasted with one of of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9).

For Distefano, the real mission of Jesus (as told in the Gospels) centers on “revolutionary love”; “championing the least of these”; being a “servant-leader”; and “anti-wealth” (the wealthy must not oppress the poor). 

“To my mind,” he writes, “Jesus Christ and Donald J. Trump could not be further from each other in philosophy, ethics, morals, or basic human decency…. If we care about resisting the antichrist distortions infecting our national life, then we cannot ignore what is being spread in Christianity’s name.”

“Cruisin’ The ‘Nade: Coming Of Age In The 1960s In Northern California”

For longtime Chicoan Michael Halldorson, “my ‘coming of age’ began in September 1959 when I, and other Chico Junior High School graduates, moved on to Chico High School to begin our sophomore year. It ended in June 1969 upon my graduation from Chico State College.”

In between, “a three-year hitch in the Navy in the mid-1960s, serving aboard a destroyer off the coast of the Republic of Vietnam, marked an interlude in my studies at Chico State.” He adds, in a winsome memoir, that “one of my first priorities upon returning to college was to learn how to do all the new dances with all the bitchin’ moves that had come out while I was overseas. This would also be, I believed, a good way to get a girl.”

Though he played sports at Chico High, he mostly focused on “cars and girls”; his co-author, prolific Chico writer David Bruhn, supplies background material on some of the great athletes who emerged (like MLB pitcher Nelson Briles) and offers historical insight. Together they make “Cruisin’ The ‘Nade: Coming Of Age In The 1960s In Northern California” ($23 in paperback from Heritage Books) a must-read for those who want to know what makes Chico Chico.

Chapters cover the explosion in 1962 which “destroyed a Titan 1 missile and caused extensive damage to its silo … north of the Chico Municipal Airport.” 

There were the hot rod races by high school kids on the Esplanade. Halldorson and others “tooled around,” “honking at girls and honking at friends. Once downtown, the typical route was to start by the college and cruise out to the A&W Drive-in and back.” His first car “was a 4-door 1953 Chevy.” His second: “a 1950 Olds painted metallic blue. I got in in 1963….” 

The book covers the Chico draft protests in 1968, concerts at Chico State (Lou Rawls, The Grateful Dead, Johnny Cash), and more.

Halldorson studied art at Chico State under world-renowned printmaker Janet Turner; spent time in the Netherlands with M.C. Escher; and was named a Chico State University distinguished alum in 2019. 

Took some time, but he “came of age.”

“Unmasked: A 90 Day Journey For The Traumatized Heart”

Chico Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Natalie Stromberg (natalierstromberg.com), with a Master’s degree in Psychology from Chico State, knows the reality of trauma. During a missions trip to Thailand for her church, she spoke with human trafficking survivors. “I encountered a familiar brokenness in their stories,” she writes, “one that mirrored my own wounds from years of silenced trauma, cycles of revictimization, and a childhood marked by sexual abuse.”

In “Unmasked: A 90 Day Journey For The Traumatized Heart” ($15.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle), Stromberg has written a deeply insightful Christian devotional filled with compassion, gentleness, and love. Each short entry offers a reflection on a key Bible verse and a prayer for the day. Slowly, slowly, day by day, the reader is asked to “look beneath the masks that once kept you alive.”

She writes “to the wounded inner child who walked these ninety days with trembling hands and guarded hope—you did not walk alone.”

“Trauma,” Stromberg writes, “often convinces us that we are invisible, unheard, or unworthy of care. Yet God turns that lie on its head. He does not dismiss your wounds or rush you past your grief. He bends low, draws near, and honors the depth of your sorrow. His presence does not erase your past, but it redeems it, weaving even your most hidden anguish into His story of love and healing.”

Trauma, Stromberg says, lives in one’s mind, body, and spirit. In a personal reflection, she notes that “Therapy became a sacred place for me to gently challenge” the lies trauma tells. “The body remembers what the mind tries to forget. I discovered that healing required movement, breath, gentleness….” And her spirit—“the deepest place—needed permission to trust again. Scripture, prayer, and honest conversations with God reminded me that I was never abandoned, even when it felt that way. God met me not in perfection, but in presence.”

The book focuses on that deepest place. “The chains of trauma, shame, and fear do not have the final say—Jesus has set you free, and now,” she writes, “you walk in the unstoppable power of that freedom.” 

“Lilith And The Holey Man”

Sam Smith, computer programmer, finds himself at Museo del Prado in Madrid viewing Hieronymus Bosch’s extraordinary triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights—“full of naked figures, fantastic creatures, and giant strawberries and birds which were symbols of sexuality, and imagery that has entertained and confounded viewers across five centuries.”

He notices a young woman on a nearby bench. “It was hard to ignore what was obviously very long red hair stacked atop her head like a malformed mound of cotton candy held together with a trio of chopsticks.” And, Sam adds, “I have an attraction—my friends say fatal—to red haired women.”

So begins the propulsive story of “Lilith And The Holey Man” ($13.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) by Chico writer/photographer Doug Keister, his forty-ninth book. It is love at first sight; a kind of lightning bolt hits them both, and soon the mysterious woman, whose name may be Lilith, is in Sam’s hotel room, lying atop him, as both experience transcendent sex.

Earlier, looking at the section of the Bosch painting depicting Hell, Lilith tells Sam, “I think human beings are full of holes. All of us…. I think a lot of people are afraid of loving someone then being rejected, so they fill their love hole with things like money and power and control…. And random sex.”

The two are drawn to the legend of Lilith from a medieval Jewish text called the Alphabet of Ben-Sira, where God creates Adam’s first wife, Lilith, not from his rib but from the dust of the earth, like Adam. The two are equal, but soon quarrel, and Lilith disappears. Legend makes her the “other,” Eve the subservient one.

Lilith leaves Sam’s room to attend to an errand, but never returns. What follows are alternating chapters as both Sam and Lilith attempt to find each other with little to go on. Years pass, but Keister has a lightning bolt or two left to throw. 

Afterward, the author chats with the reader, showing how Bosch’s painting may point to Lilith; opening up the legend all the way to Cheers; and how the holey in all of us might be filled.

“Midstream: A Life Remade In 50 Swims”

Sacramento writer Kate Washington (kawashington.com), who grew up in Chico, detailed in her book “Already Toast: Caregiving And Burnout In America” how suddenly, unexpectedly, she had to become the caregiver for her husband Brad, whom she married in 1999, after he faced aggressive lymphoma in 2014; in his mid-40s, he needed a stem-cell transplant. 

Now the rest of the story. Though Brad survived, the marriage did not. A year-and-a-half away from her 50th birthday, Washington writes that her life “felt constrained and constraining, dull and joyless, full of doing for others while neglecting myself.”

So she “hatched the idea for what I came to call the 50 Dunks Project. My plan was to get in fifty different natural bodies of water before turning fifty in October 2022…. However I got in the water, I hoped it might dissolve my midlife stagnation.” The liberation process is told in “Midstream: A Life Remade In 50 Swims” ($27.95 in hardcover from Beacon Press; also for Amazon Kindle).

Both Kate and Brad were PhD’s with English degrees and they had two daughters. Kate was devastated when her mother died by suicide, and Brad’s new job meant Kate had to take on childcare responsibilities. And Brad’s cancer did not so much as change everything, but revealed a dark truth: “Our tendrils were diverging well before Brad was sick, with separate interests and the pull of careers, but afterward it was like we were strangers.”

During the Dunk Project (and counseling) it became clear the marriage wouldn’t survive. All 50 swims are listed, though only some key encounters with the freeing waters are given in the chapters. Dunks include Salmon Hole in Upper Bidwell Park; Bear Hole; One Mile; Butte Creek. “I had become embodied again,” she writes, “after years of alienation.”

With great insight, Washington confronts “my fears and dissatisfaction with myself and my choices.”

Kate Washington is Nancy Wiegman’s guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf on Northstate Public Radio, mynspr.org, Wednesday, July 15 at 10:00 a.m., repeated Sunday, July 19 at 8:00 p.m. The Bookstore in downtown Chico will be holding a creekside book launch party and author signing July 23; contact the store for details. 

“Race To Resurrection: A WWII Historical Thriller”

Northstate author Doug Aiken “started writing in his sixties…. His father served in WWII and while he returned home, he died a few short months later,” leaving Aiken, according to an author’s note, with “a ghost for a parent and a lifetime of unanswered questions.” So, over almost a decade, he imagined the fragments of history he had about his father showed not a mythical hero but rather a complicated man far removed from myth.

The invasion of Normandy in June 1944 did not end the war in Europe, yet D-Day was a turning of the tide toward an Allied victory. Aiken imagines a young man, Lieutenant Henry Anderson, contributing his part in a super-secret operation beginning in 1943. He abandoned his pregnant wife for the good of the cause and, decades after the war, returned to Wisconsin under the strangest of circumstances to introduce his son, now grown, to the father he never knew.

The story is told in “Race To Resurrection: A WWII Historical Thriller” ($14.99 in paperback from RO Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle). Germany’s V-2 rocket program at Peenemünde, being developed by scientists including Wernher von Braun, threatens the Allies with destruction. Security at the facility is overseen by SS-Oberführer Wolfgang Korbach and, it turns out, Henry Anderson, who speaks fluent German taught him by his grandmother, looks exactly like Korbach.

The plan is Mission Impossible audacious: Spend weeks training Anderson to “become” Korbach, matching all his little behavioral quirks, and then, since Korbach was recovering from shrapnel wounds at a facility in Portugal, switch him out, so that the Korbach that returned to Peenemünde was really Anderson. Against all odds, it works. Though Korbach is a notorious womanizer, Anderson vows to remain true to his wife and son, though she had been told he had been killed. Yet all bets are off when he meets 23-year-old French national co-worker Angelique Dubois.

The ethical quandary will hold readers spellbound in this mesmerizing tale which, 45 years later, will see Henry, and Wolf, show up in Wisconsin at Henry’s grandson’s wedding, each claiming to be the real Henry. 

Full of surprises, Aiken has written an unputdownable tale.

“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.”

“Getting It Write: (Mostly) Unpublished Writing 1974–2025”

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved to write,” writes Chicoan Stephen Metzger, who taught writing, literature, and journalism at Chico State from 1982-2010 and composition at Butte College from 2010-2018. He’s also been a freelance writer since the early 80’s, successfully publishing some 500 pieces in all kinds of publications. Yet some of his work, “despite my highest hopes,” never saw the light of day.

Until now. Welcome to a miscellany of humor, essays, poetry, commercials, and one-act plays (which entertained Chico audiences in the early 2000s), works “that I didn’t want to disappear.” A breezy read, “Getting It Write: (Mostly) Unpublished Writing 1974–2025” ($20 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing) is an antidote to the terribly serious business of real world events. 

Metzger’s cockeyed sense of humor and twisty points of view may explain why he failed repeatedly to win the famed cartoon caption contest at the New Yorker magazine (despite his entries being “way funnier” than the winners). But never mind that. He’s out to serve the public with “This Week’s Pets,” a list of “abandoned pets” needing “loving homes.” 

Take Arnold: “a spunky young Rottweiler/German shepherd mix, trained to respond to German. He knows ‘Fassen!’ (‘Attack!’) but is still learning ‘Aus!’ (‘Let Go!’). Arnold would do well in a home with an English-German dictionary, a heavy-duty cage, pepper spray, mace, a taser, and a six-foot steel pole with chain.”

Have a go at a riddle poem: “Blinded, I show you/ Nothing.// Undressed, I show you/ Mountains, back yards,/ Sunsets.// From outside: lamps, sofas,/ Kitchen sinks.// When I come clean/ You can’t see me./ You feel my pain.” (The answer is in the following: wodniw.)

He offers serious advice: “Remember that there are smart people who disagree with you and stupid people who agree.”

There’s language advice, too, from Metzger’s “The Writer’s Way” textbook: “Trust me here: when in doubt, use ‘who’ instead of ‘whom,’ since ‘whom’ when it should be ‘who’ sounds way worse than ‘who’ when it should be ‘whom.’” An example: “This is my brother, whom loves to fish. (Wrong: And sounds really stupid.)”

Metzger’s drollery abounds, for whomever needs it.

“Stumpy”

Every spring on the National Mall in Washington, DC, the cherry trees bloom to the delight of millions of visitors. Some of the trees, though, because of rising waters of the Tidal Basin, decayed and died. Yet one Japanese cherry tree, though hollowed out, continued to blossom. When the National Park Service had to remove the tree in 2024 to fix the seawall, which was failing, cuttings were taken to the U.S. National Arboretum for later replanting. The famous blossoming tree even had a name.

Longtime Chicoan Karen McHenry tells the story of “Stumpy” ($19 in hardcover from Kismet Publishing), a lyrical children’s book for ages 6-10, from the tree’s perspective. The colorful illustrations by Tommy Hardman, where pink blossoms predominate, bring Stumpy to life. 

A tourist sensation during the day, as night comes Stumpy is alone with his thoughts. “It is silent now, except for the lapping of the water at the sea wall and the rattling of leftover autumn leaves twirling past. Stumpy gazes out over the Tidal Basin that has been his lifelong home and wonders what becomes of cherry trees when they are cut down. He shudders, knowing that it isn’t the chill breeze blowing around him. He was once a robust, sturdy tree. Now, he is scrawny and crooked and hollow inside.”

Yet Stumpy continues to bloom and a visiting bird calls Stumpy “the Little Cherry Tree That Could.” What’s more, says the bird, “People see you as a symbol of perseverance—because you refuse to give up. That is why they come to take your picture, and put flowers at your roots, and play music for you.” Those words “warm Stumpy’s hollow core, down to his chilly roots.”

Later a mysterious voice tells Stumpy that it’s too late for him to be moved; he must be cut down. What will happen then? The voice responds that clippings from Stumpy will be replanted: “You will live on, not only in people’s hearts, but in new trees. … The Sakura Japanese cherry blossoms are a symbol of a life well lived. And you, Stumpy, are a symbol of that, too.”

May McHenry’s pitch-perfect story tug at your heart and blossom into resilience.

“100 Years Of Ridin’ Wild! Red Bluff Round-Up, 1921-2021”

The Red Bluff Round-Up is “the largest three-day rodeo in the United States.” As Josie Smith writes, “The Round-Up is more than a rodeo. It’s a living, breathing testament to the quintessential true grit spirit of Tehama County, its sense of community, and the determined resilience of the American West.”

As memories linger after the Round-Up each April, they are added to its extraordinary history, which Smith, a board member of the Tehama County Genealogical & Historical Society, has compiled with the help of many hands. “100 Years Of Ridin’ Wild! Red Bluff Round-Up, 1921-2021” ($79.95 in large-size softcover from Chico’s Stansbury Publishing) is available at the Red Bluff Round-Up Mercantile Store, 649 Main Street, Suite 1. The store is open Tuesday through Friday from 11:00 am – 5:00 pm and Saturday from 10:00 am – 5:00 pm.

Each chapter covers a decade of the Round-Up, full of personal stories. There are hundreds of black and white and color photographs and a century of champions. “I took one year out of the picture business to go into rodeo,” team roper and actor Ben Johnson noted. “My dad was a world’s champion, so I wanted to be. I won the world’s championship in team roping (1953), but at the end of the year, I didn’t have $3. All I had was a wore-out pickup truck and a mad wife.”

Radio announcer Bob Tallman put it this way: “Pick a road, any county road. You’re going about 40 miles an hour in your pickup. At that point, jump out, and try to tackle a mailbox. That’s steer wrestling.”

It began October 6, 1921. That day, Tehama County Day, “the first day of the Red Bluff Round-Up, private businesses closed at noon so people could enjoy … the opening of a four-day rodeo program put on by the newly created Red Bluff Round-Up Association. The Red Bluff Daily News enthusiastically declared: ‘Red Bluff Rodeo Starts With A Whoop!’”

The book is a stunning achievement. 

Give the last word to bullfighter Felix Cooper, who noted in April 1974 that “If the whole world was full of rodeo people, it would be a good world.”

“The Heyday Of Willie, Duke, And Mickey: New York City Baseball’s Golden Age Amid Integration”

Robert C. Cottrell is Professor Emeritus at Chico State in History and American Studies, but he’s also a consummate baseball historian. In “The Heyday Of Willie, Duke, And Mickey: New York City Baseball’s Golden Age Amid Integration” ($38 in hardcover from Bloomsbury Academic; also for Amazon Kindle), Cottrell focuses on an unmatched era in Major League Baseball.

“At different points during the mid-1950s,” he writes, “Willie Mays, Duke Snider, and Mickey Mantle were each viewed as not only the greatest center fielder but the finest player in the major leagues, in addition to being a candidate to eclipse Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record.” The statistics are all here, but so are the stories.

“For the four years—1954-1957—featured in this book,” he adds, “Mays, Snider, and Mantle vied for supremacy among New York City center fielders as their teams strove for and reached the pinnacle of American sports at the time. Each was proclaimed, for one year at least during that critical period, the very best player in the game as he led his respective team to a World Series championship.”

The Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers  “exuded star power befitting their sporting prowess and New York City’s preeminence.” 

Yet Cottrell’s story “is also that of the game’s far too belated integration, its reticence in pushing back against the American nation’s racial divisions. The decision by some in Organized Baseball to sign Robinson, Doby, Campanella, Don Newcombe, Paige, Minnie Minoso, Irvin, Mays, Aaron, and Ernie Banks to contracts paralleled the budding civil rights struggle to rid the United States of hateful, hurtful, poisonous Jim Crow edicts and discriminatory practices.”

In fact, “only recently have Negro League games, according to MLB, been acknowledged as on par with those of the major leagues.” In postwar baseball, the Negro Leagues began to “wither,” as Cottrell writes, “tempered by the introduction of Black players into the National and American leagues….”

Cottrell also documents the painful moves of the Dodgers to Los Angeles and the Giants to San Francisco. 

All in all, it’s inside baseball, a paean of praise to a beloved game, warts and all.

“The Family Liar: A Novel”

Teri Kanefield (terikanefield.com), with a law degree from UC Berkeley and a degree in fiction writing from UC Davis, now lives in San Luis Obispo. She writes me that her “husband lived in Los Molinos. We spent lots of time in Chico because my stepdaughter was in a production of Annie at the Chico Theater Company.” All the while, for more than forty years actually, she wanted to tell a story based on her life in a horrendously dysfunctional family.

Though she changed names, “telescoped events, combined minor characters, and left out a lot,” she drew on “letters, diaries I began keeping at the age of twelve, and memory…. To borrow Emily Dickinson’s phrase, this novel is my letter to the world.” 

“The Family Liar: A Novel” ($18.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) is a kind of mystery story told by Natalie; in later life she is determined to discover the reasons her father, Jack, was mostly withdrawn and passive while his wife, Natalie’s mother Lenora, operated as a master manipulator, turning family member against family member. 

The couple married in 1959 “at United Hebrew, St. Louis’s reform temple. After the wedding, they rented a one-bedroom apartment four miles from Jack’s television repair shop.” Natalie was born a year later.

When she was eight, a game of pennies taken from her father’s piggy bank went awry, and her mother, “impatient with my explanations, said ‘I can see you are a liar, but I’m not going to spank you. Your punishment is that from now on you will be known as the family liar. We will always know who the liar is. Once a liar, always a liar.’”

The family, including siblings Carly and Teddy, moved to California when Natalie was ten. Natalie could hardly wait until she turned 18 to leave. On her own, virtually ignored by her family, which was breaking apart, Natalie contended with the nagging question: Is it all my fault? Am I bad?

The story, raw in its emotions and psychologically astute, offers a kind of answer to Natalie’s mystery and, as a result, a powerful transformation of Natalie herself and, perhaps, even the reader. 

“Author Of Creation: Free Will, The Trinity, And The Restoration Of All Things”

As Christians around the world contemplate the promise that in the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter morning all things will be made new, one may wonder what such an audacious claim actually means. My friend and colleague, retired Butte College philosophy instructor Ric Machuga, proposes an answer in “Author Of Creation: Free Will, The Trinity, And The Restoration Of All Things” ($34 in paperback from Cascade books; also for Amazon Kindle).

For Machuga, it’s a matter of “faith seeking understanding,” and thoughtful believers as well as others interested in the Christian story, and whether it “hangs together,” will perhaps find unexpected (and delightful) answers to some of the most perplexing questions: What is a free will? What is the soul? Who is God? What is Jesus? What is belief? With so much evil in the world, how can God be all-powerful and truly good? Who will be saved?

Though philosophically astute, the book offers a vast variety of everyday examples to make its points, drawn from tennis, biology, the lottery, and an author and the author’s book. In fact, Machuga argues that the best way to understand God is not as a “Supreme Being” (the biggest dude on the block) but rather as a divine author with creation as his “book.” 

God is like Shakespeare, and creation like Hamlet. So it’s mistaken to think of God as a Divine Craftsman within the universe, part of the cause-and-effect chain, and better to recognize that God created the universe with time, not within time. 

Shakespeare intimately knows Hamlet, but Hamlet, of course, knows nothing of Shakespeare. Similarly, humans know nothing of this unknowable God except that in the Incarnation “God (the father) writes himself (the Son) into our story and then sends the Spirit who teaches us how to read what God wrote.”

In the end Machuga proposes what he calls “trinitarian universalism,” that “this God both can and will choreograph our free choices to bring all creatures to a glorious end…. A Supreme Being can’t ensure that ‘all shall be well’ without violating human freedom.”

Easter hope, then, is a sure and certain promise.