"Kate And Ruby"

In "Venice Beach," Chico novelist Emily Gallo (emilygallo.blogspot.com) created a host of characters connected through the Southern California town's boardwalk and the mysterious denizen named Jed, an escapee from the Jonestown massacre.

In "Kate and Ruby" ($12.95 in paperback from CreateSpace; also for Amazon Kindle), the author picks up the story of Kate McGee, whose father Jed had helped. Kate is "a thin, fit, spry fifty-five year-old who looked like she hadn't aged in fifteen years. It also helped that she made sure there wasn't a gray strand anywhere in her pixie hairstyle."

Kate had married Martin, whose mother, Ruby, was a blues singer. Ruby had taken great offense at the interracial couple, and "Kate had never forgiven her for shunning her as a daughter-in-law just for being white." Though their love ran deep, the marriage ended in divorce when Martin eventually came out to Kate.

For Ruby, it was the last straw; she "practically disowned Martin for being gay" and didn't speak to him for three decades. Kate as well had moved on with her life, cultivating a desire to join the Peace Corps.

Then Martin dies of HIV AIDS, and Ruby, in her mid-eighties and unwell, is in San Francisco to tend to Martin's effects. When Kate gets a call from one of Martin's friends, she arrives and there is Ruby, who soon after has the first in a series of heart attacks. Kate and Ruby find their lives intertwined as Kate becomes the care-giver (and eventually the supplier of medical marijuana).

The story, told mostly in dialogue, shows how time's dailyness can bring change, as Ruby teaches Kate how to garden and Kate teaches Ruby how to use a computer--which Ruby uses to find Lawrence, Martin's fraternal twin. Then Kate must choose between a growing love for Lawrence and her Peace Corps commitment.

This is not the life Kate imagined for herself but, as Lawrence puts it (though neither are religious), "Man plans and God laughs."

The author is a scheduled guest on Nancy's Bookshelf, with Nancy Wiegman, on mynspr.org, Friday at 10:00 a.m., and will be doing a signing during the Thursday Night Market in Chico on September 15th.

“Meadowlark”

After writing a series of memoirs (“The Third Floor,” “Dreamscape In A Minor,” and “Rita’s Road”) Chicoan Judi Loren Grace takes a novelistic turn in “Meadowlark” ($16.95 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle).

It’s a compelling family saga spanning decades, told mostly by a woman who seemed to have the ideal marriage. Her husband Jim, “my security and friend,” is successful in the stock market; the couple, restless, “relocate to a small town called Dunsmuir and semi-retire.” Their daughter, Dana Bea, is headed to college.

In Dunsmuir, “my boring life magnifies and morphs into a lovely locked cage,” even as she reminds herself to “stay in the shadows … always glide through life unnoticed and detached. It’s the safest route.”

Tragedy strikes. Jim dies in her arms of a heart attack. Dana Bea is a frequent visitor and early in 1984, life for mother and daughter will take another unforeseen turn. A toddler is being abused in a neighboring house.

Later, when Dana Bea has left, her mother encounters the angry father searching for his child. Then she finds the toddler, a two-year-old, lying in the snow. She shelters the little girl and so begins a life of paranoia, a fear of being arrested at any moment for kidnaping a child. The girl is given the name Jessica, and Jessica later calls her savior “Nettie” (for being a safety net).

Dana Bea secures a fake birth certificate and the two make plans to move with Jessica to the coast and start afresh. There Nettie meets Sam, a former Texas Ranger, who helps shield Jessica from prying eyes. But is he just a plant? “With a pounding heart, I try to keep my fear in check. Worrying this is a trap.” Paranoia grows.

“We were not longing for adventure. Dana Bea and I closed our eyes and dove in head first, and in doing so we both did a full swan dive into a life of crime.”

Yet “Jessica is worth saving and protecting, and I will go to the ends of the earth to keep her parents from getting her back.”

The meadowlark sings, unseen, a peaceful song. But will peace ever come?

“Tina The Ballerina”

“Let me tell you the tale of Tina / Who became a great ballerina.” And so begins a bedtime story told by Carol Gray to her two young daughters back in 1967.

The original Tina was a stuffed elephant who was befriended by a baby doll named Betsy Anne. Gray “painted backdrops, constructed sets, and tailored costumes” for the characters, then “photographed her scenes and bound them into an album with the story’s text.”

Though the album has faded with time, and the daughters have grown, now Chico resident Gail Stone and her sister Lisa Stone of Paradise have brought the story to a wider audience.

“Tina The Ballerina” ($18.95 in hardcover from True Blue Innovations), by Carol J. Gray, features glorious full-page illustrations, based on the original album, by the incomparable Steve Ferchaud of Paradise. The book is available locally from Made In Chico, the Rabobank branch on Forest Avenue in Chico, Gallery Interiors in Oroville, My Girlfriend’s Closet in Paradise, and at tinatheballerina.online.

Tina’s elephant days are just too routine. “‘Surely life should not be so empty and boring, / Perhaps it will change if I go exploring.’” Soon, Tina meets a little girl named Betsy Anne who quickly incorporates her into Betsy’s family.

But Tina is forlorn. “Jumping rope was not such a treat. / Said Tina, ‘I seem to have too many feet!’ / Betsy said, ‘Try it. It’s really quite fun. / And don’t be discouraged, you’ve only begun. / If you try there’s nothing you cannot do, / Especially if someone has faith in you.’”

Betsy’s mother “sewed a blue dress with a frill” so Tina could go off to school with Betsy Anne. Tina is welcomed with great cheer, and joins Betsy in dancing class as they practice for a show. But more discouragement: “Before the mirror, on the eve of the dance, / Poor Tina surveyed her figure askance. / She noted each bulge and turned slightly green, / ‘But I’m positively elephantine!’”

Yet Tina didn’t want to let Betsy down, and persevered, and what happens next is the stuff of dreams.

Friends giggle with delight in the book, and readers will find the joy infectious.

“Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class On The Art Of Organizing And Tidying Up”

Books for getting organized continue to find an audience, and I’ve read many of them myself (though just where those books are I haven’t a clue). For Tokyo-based Marie Kondo, much of the advice those books offer is misplaced. Instead of focusing on cleaning room by room, and inducing guilt if you keep something, she has created the “KonMari method.”

On the heels of her bestseller, “The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up,” Kondo’s new book is really an encyclopedia of how to handle the various categories of stuff in one’s life, from how to fold turtlenecks and what to do with old greeting cards and stuffed toys, to “storing books attractively” and “putting memories of past lovers in order.”

“Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class On The Art Of Organizing And Tidying Up” ($18.99 in hardcover from Ten Speed Press; also for Amazon Kindle) begins with the six rules of tidying.

First, be committed; then imagine the kind of life you want to live (so tidying has a goal); “finish discarding first” (otherwise you won’t know how much room you’ll need); tidy by category, not room; follow the right order: clothes first, then books, papers, komono (miscellaneous stuff) and sentimental items; and, finally, “ask yourself if it sparks joy.”

That last is the key. Touch each item, “holding it firmly in both hands as if communing with it. Pay close attention to how your body responds when you do this. When something sparks joy, you should feel a little thrill, as if the cells in your body are slowly rising. … Remember that you are not choosing what to discard but rather what to keep.”

Even that lowly screwdriver in your junk drawer can spark joy once you recall all the scrapes it’s gotten you out of.

Tidying up is very different from cleaning. “Tidying,” Kondo writes, “is the act of confronting yourself; cleaning is the act of confronting nature. … You could say that tidying orders the mind while cleaning purifies it.” Tidy first—go on a tidying marathon, she suggests—and where you live will spark joy. Then keep it clean.

“Unflattening”

At the headwaters of Western philosophy, Plato warned us not to be taken in by mere perception. The images we perceive are but copies of copies, he said; only the intellect could “see” true Goodness or Beauty. The image is not the reality.

But would it be possible to intertwine words and images so those images push us to understand more deeply the reality that the words alone cannot adequately describe? That’s the goal of an extraordinary “graphic novel” called “Unflattening” ($22.95 in paperback from Harvard University Press) by Nick Sousanis.

Sousanis has joined the full-time faculty of San Francisco State University to teach “comics as a way of thinking.” Though it may sound like a prime example of misspent education, Sousanis’ book is a serious challenge to the status quo which, he claims, serves to narrow our vision and undermine our potential.

He draws on a nineteenth-century satiric novel called “Flatland,” by Edwin Abbott, in which “A. Square” tells of life in a two-dimensional world. He can’t imagine a world of three dimensions: A sphere passing through Flatland would only appear as an expanding and contracting circle. Similarly, we have trouble breaking through our “reliance on a solitary vantage point … a single line of thought … where we see only what we’re looking for.”

Instead, comic art can be used for crucial ends in bringing to our attention multiple perspectives in which “distinctive viewpoints still remain” but they are “now no longer isolated … (but) viewed as integral to the whole.” Sousanis uses the thought of scientists, philosophers, literary critics and artists to connect, as in a web, a phantasmagoria of images.

The bottom line? “Perception is not dispensable. It's not mere decoration or afterthought, but integral to thought, a fundamental partner in making meaning. In reuniting thinking and seeing.” Sousanis’ black-and-white drawings are choreographed with the text in minute detail and are never mere illustrations of the words.

In comics, when the eye travels from panel to panel as a conversation unfolds, time turns into space (the physical space of each drawing). If time is the fourth dimension, then comics can help us grasp a reality that A. Square could never even dream.

“How Was China?: Views And Vignettes From A Chinese Women’s College”

“Starry-eyed Victoria, the sentimental girl who had given me the Tang dynasty poem, had already shown signs of decline when I encountered her as a third-year student in 2003. … ‘Victoria! What happened to you?’ I inquired after I witnessed her sitting listlessly, day after day, in the back of the class. ‘Oh, teacher,’ she wailed, ‘I have lost my passionate!’”

Victoria, speaking in halting English, was one of Dodie Johnston’s students at Hwa Nan College for Women in China, “in a mid-sized city on the east coast, facing Taiwan.” Students at the trade school came to learn English, and each took on an English name (English instructors, who had come from abroad, found Chinese pronunciation difficult.)

Johnston traveled from her home in Grass Valley to Hwa Nan beginning in 2000 (she would return for five teaching semesters over the next decade). “Like Victoria,” she writes in her affecting memoir of Hwa Nan, “I had ‘lost my passionate.’ I needed to walk a different path as I entered my sixth decade. … Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Hwa Nan College was a tonic for my deflating self-esteem and lost sense of direction.”

In response to many who asked, “How Was China?: Views And Vignettes From A Chinese Women’s College” ($14 in paperback from CreateSpace) provides a nuanced answer that combines the history of the school, the lives of its students, and Johnston’s own experiences in the local neighborhoods into a work of “creative nonfiction.”

Johnston’s is a strong authorial voice, guiding readers into traditional Chinese culture, the impact of Mao’s reign (which shut down the school established by missionaries) and the re-emergence of Hwa Nan as a secular college.

Consider: There was no indoor plumbing in 2000, so squatting over holes was the order of the day; “toilet paper was not provided in most public toilets so we all carried our own.” Rural life in the area was crumbling; “when I told my 2000-20001 students I was from a small rural town in the foothills of northern California, they cringed with sympathy and condolence.”

Readers will be captivated by Johnston’s homage to Hwa Nan.

“The Book Of Strange New Things”

Scottish writer Michel Faber tells an interviewer for the Church Times that though he is an atheist, “I don’t see that as any credit to me…. I’m very sad that I lost my faith, and I’m very sad that it’s not there to sustain me in the sorrows that I’ve had to deal with in my life, particularly the loss of my wife.”

That makes Faber’s novel, “The Book Of Strange New Things” ($17 in paperback from Hogarth; also for Amazon Kindle) especially poignant. It’s the story of a young British married couple, Peter and Beatrice Leigh, he a pastor of a small church, she a nurse, who apply to a shadowy multinational organization called USIC in answer to the company’s call for Christian missionaries.

Only Peter is selected; they will be separated. In the world of the book, “separation” means Peter boards a spacecraft and “jumps” to Oasis, a planet unimaginable light years distant. His only way of communicating with Bea is through a kind of email system (no pictures).

USIC has established a base. Natives provide food called whiteflower in return for pharmaceuticals, but are balking without a pastor who can speak to them from the Bible, what they call “The Book of Strange New Things.”

An Oasan is a short, bipedal being; “their spindly arms and webbed feet merged in a tangle of translucent flesh that might contain—in some form unrecognizable to him—a mouth, nose, eyes.”

Peter grows distant from Bea, who writes increasingly panicked messages about a world collapsing around her. Peter can sermonize, but he is no novelist, failing repeatedly to convey to Bea his inner life.

The book is a quiet meditation on separation and the limits of (Peter’s) faith. “The holy book he’d spent so much of his life preaching from had one cruel flaw: it was not very good at offering encouragement or hope to those who weren’t religious.” Peter is torn between building the Oasan church and going home (in light of the horrific words of his wife’s final email).

Set against a science-fictional background, the book sensitively explores the meaning of faith and meaning where there is no faith.

“Supremacy

Chicoan and Butte College student Christin Lee writes me that her new young adult romance/urban fantasy novel blends her love of karate and passion for animals. The story begins in Texas but what is revealed later on is enough to shake the ground beneath one’s feet.

“Supremacy (Supremacy Series Book 1)” ($2.99 from Amazon Kindle; the author’s Facebook page is at https://bit.ly/29SwasU) introduces almost-eighteen Kate Parker, a high school student “blessed to live on five acres and have parents who supported her love of animals. She smiled to herself. Support maybe wasn’t the right word—tolerate would be a better description.” As a vegetarian, “she couldn’t bring herself to eat her friends.”

Kate is whip smart, a green-eyed beauty who can remember everything all the way back to her earliest childhood. Kate’s father, Larry, is a renowned psychotherapist very possessive of his daughter. If Kate starts dating she must first bring the guy to meet with her parents. Kate can only imagine how fun that interview would be.

Then Kate is smitten almost from the first encounter with a mysterious young man from Spain, Lucas, whom she meets in the woods, fussing over a broken motorcycle as she goes looking for a stray dog.

Lucas is nineteen, an exchange student attending the local university. “He looked like a striking model out of a fashion magazine. His ragged jeans fit perfectly, hugging every curve on his long legs.” Throw in “beautiful brown eyes” and a kind of electricity between them and Kate is a goner.

But this is no conventional romance. Lucas has anger issues, especially when it comes to protecting Kate from every hurt, real or imagined. If he can’t find her he almost spirals out of control. It's as if he were trained to do harm, to protect at any cost.

He sports a strange tattoo behind one of his ears, showing a “tightly clenched fist.” Lucas won’t explain, but Kate finds something on the internet halfway through the novel that turns her world inside out. Kate is part of a cavernous plot with millions of lives at stake.

The book is great fun, a well-written page-turner drawing readers into a new world of danger.

“Jump”

Though Chicoan Cathy Chase is retired from teaching English, she remains active by teaching a jobs readiness class at the Esplanade House and by writing a series of Young Adult novels about a world very like our own—with one big difference.

In the world of “Jump” ($8.99 in paperback from CreateSpace; also for Amazon Kindle), the first in a planned series, people have a habit of disappearing. That doesn’t mean they poof out of existence, but that they are electronically transported to another place, an authoritarian society designed to reshape the oddballs and ne’er-do-wells into compliant citizens.

Nona, the heroine, is fifteen. Her father died in a car accident; his passenger, Frank, was unable to save him, and now Frank is her step-father. Nona’s mother seems oblivious to the abuse Frank heaps on Nona; it’s clear that he wants Nona out of his life so he can have Nona’s mother all to himself.

Nona’s two friends, Spence and Jana, are inseparable, and when Jana’s Uncle John becomes one of the “disappeared,” the trio set out to find him. They have heard references to “jumping,” but no adult will talk to them about what it means.

Then Nona comes across an old notebook from her newspaper reporter father, and she learns that somehow jumping is connected with the mysterious Behavioral Science building in town, where Spence’s mom works. The trio manage to get into the building and there are the transporters.

Nona volunteers to go (“I’m the only one that no one wants” at home). Spence pushes the button. “I hear a loud windy sound near my head and lights swirl in my brain.”

What follows is a fast-paced adventure in a strange society, with plenty of cliff-hangers, as Nona tries to outsmart her minders, search for Uncle John (she finds more than she bargains for), escape those with terminator weapons (where you really do poof out of existence) and somehow get home. Often Nona is on the verge of giving up, but she learns courage with a little help from her friends. The message is clear: It’s not over until it’s really over.

There’s a satisfying conclusion, but loose ends remain for the next tale.

“Beaks, Bones & Bird Songs”

Roger Lederer, Chico’s own birder extraordinaire, is a scientist-observer who knows “it’s not easy being a bird.” “Of the many hours I have spent in the field, watching birds flying, feeding, resting, and nesting, I was most affected by those moments when I saw birds searching for food in blowing snow, sitting on the surface of an ocean fighting threatening waves, and flying in serious winds. I wondered: how do birds make it from hatching to adulthood?”

His answer is a book which gracefully mingles his own experiences around the world with what is known about birds (and what still remains a mystery). “Beaks, Bones & Bird Songs” ($24.95 in hardcover from Timber Press; also for Amazon Kindle) is subtitled “How The Struggle For Survival Has Shaped Birds And Their Behavior” (more at Lederer’s ornithology.com).

“Evolution,” he writes, “is a superb sculptor. Over hundreds of millions of years the machinery of natural selection has honed birds to pinnacles of near perfection, having discarded tens of thousands of species along the way that could not meet the challenges of the ever-changing earth.”

The ten thousand or so living bird species offer a welter of adaptive strategies. In seven chapters, Lederer considers foraging, bird sensory abilities, flight and feathers, migration, surviving in weather extremes, how and why birds flock together, and, finally, the influence of humans.

“Since the beginning of the industrial revolution the physical environment began to change at a much faster pace, leaving many birds behind. … Cities like Beijing and New Delhi are virtually devoid of avian life. …” Birdwatching, Lederer says, helps people “understand why birds need protection from human activities.”

Humans can help, even in small ways, such as installing windows “at an angle with the bottom of the glass further back than the top. This simultaneously minimizes the force of the impact as the bird doesn’t hit the glass straight on and the ledge formed at the bottom of the window provides a place for a stunned bird to recover.” 

Dozens of black and white photographs enhance the book, while every page offers insights into why birds do what they do, in their struggles and, yes, their nobility.

“Gridley Girls”

Meredith Carlin First was born and raised in Gridley. Though she lives with her family in Minneapolis and Sacramento, small town life was a formative influence, so much so that she left as a recruiter with Apple Inc. to write a (fictionalized) account of her growing up.

“Gridley Girls” ($17 in paperback from SparkPress; also for Amazon Kindle) is the story of Margaret (Meg) MacGregor Monahan in her freshman year at Gridley High in 1978. “My father’s father is Mormon … and my mother’s family went to the First Christian Church. You could say I’m half Mormon and half anti-Mormon. Sets things up for a very harmonious childhood.”

She has three older sisters. Her mom’s admonition: “Remember girls, Y-A-L. You’re a lady.”

Meg and the other Gridley Girls never give up on each other. In 2008, Meg is living in Sacramento and is helping her best friend Anne prepare for her wedding. Anne is nervous, and Meg can’t seem to forgive herself for betraying Anne long ago. “It wasn’t over a boy or a catty, teenage-girl prank. It was because of God. I broke the solemn trust of a lifelong friend because I was a misguided girl who was told a secret that I was incapable of hearing, let alone keeping.”

The two friends revisit their shared past in a tale that is at times outrageously funny and soberly honest. Think Erma Bombeck meets Judy Blume. “Let’s recap the second half of 1978, shall we? I graduated from eighth grade as a naïve, innocent girl alongside my best friends. … Then I started high school, got a boyfriend, got felt up, panicked, broke up with said boyfriend, became a peer counselor”—and heard the confessions of two friends that left her confused and vulnerable.

Readers will revel in the sounds and sensibilities of the seventies in this witty, poignant, and captivating novel.

The author is scheduled to be interviewed by Nancy Wiegman of Nancy’s Bookshelf on North State Public Radio, mynspr.org, on Friday, July 8 at 10:00 a.m.

Meredith First will be signing copies of her book on Saturday, July 16 from 11:00 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. at Macs Hardware, 550 E. Gridley Road in Gridley.

“An Empty Swing”

Chico writer N. J. Hanson probes the destructive power of revenge in a novel of paranormal horror, “An Empty Swing” ($18.99 in paperback from Tate publishing; also for Amazon Kindle).

Luis Chavez, a fifteen-year-old sophomore at West Point High School in an unnamed town, is drawn into a battle for his life when he meets a girl named Alice at the old playground in town. It is almost Halloween.

It turns out that Alice is dead, a ghost, a spirit hanging around the playground where almost a dozen children lie buried, the victims of a murderous child rapist still on the loose. She cannot pass into the “other world” until she is certain that her living sister, Cindy, is safe.

Cindy has taken the name Serena Ravenwood. “She was a junior, one year older than Luis, and the resident Goth chick. … She wore a long heavy coat and cargo pants with combat boots. The only bit of color at all was her bright red lipstick.” Luis is in the school library trying to figure out why he can see Alice when he meets Serena in the same section, and soon they realize who Alice is. Or—was.

Alice had been kidnaped, abused, and killed years before. Now, after Luis realizes he is a kind of “spiritual medium” who can see ghosts, he is drawn to the playground (and to Serena). Though the bully Butch is often the antagonist (he can see spirits, too), he’s not very smart.

Far more dangerous is Paul, the ghost of one of the children abducted, killed, and buried. Paul discovers he can move beyond the playground, can manipulate objects (like rocks and guns), and, feeling his power, murders his parents and brother (the fingers in the blender scene is especially sickening) and sets his sights on Luis (for taking away Alice’s attention). He even makes common cause with the molester.

It looks like Luis doesn’t have the ghost of a chance of escaping. But don’t count out the power of friendship. And love.

The author will be signing copies of his book Saturday, July 2 at ABC Books, 950 Mangrove Avenue in Chico, from 11:00 am – 3:00 p.m.

“Contracting For Services In State And Local Government Agencies”

Imagine a state agency wants to hire a private company to clean up a Lake Oroville beach area. How should that agency determine which company will provide the best deal for taxpayers? Cost is key, but “cheap” is not a synonym for “a job well done.”

Finding the best company to perform a service on the public’s dime is the focus of “Contracting For Services In State And Local Government Agencies” ($94.95 in hardcover from Routledge; also for Amazon Kindle) by William Sims Curry. The second edition of the book has just been published, and it updates “best practices” based on a 2015 survey of states, cities and other governmental entities.

Bill Curry is President of WSC Consulting in Chico; he is a Certified Professional Contracts Manager and served on the Professional Standards and Ethics Committee of the National Contract Management Association. His book provides not just guidance for agencies but online templates ranging from a “request for proposal” (RFP) to a Contractor Performance Report.

Chapters provide exquisite detail on healthy competition (Curry writes me that “reliance on sole source contracting during emergencies can actually delay the delivery of services and supplies”); setting up transparent communication; dealing with conflicts of interest; responding to protests; contract review; and how to rank proposals in the first place.

Curry shows how various contract proposal scoring mechanisms (from color coding to a 1-10 scale) fall woefully short. For example, if a group of contract reviewers using a 10-point scale tends to favor a range of 7-10 (7 would be “average” or acceptable), another reviewer could bias the result by using the full range, assigning a 1 here or a 10 there.

A better way is called Total Weighted Score, which involves using a 7-10 scale for subjective ratings and a weighted score for objectively determined items (like cost). The idea is for the RFP to say how much the cost or number of employees “counts” in the final determination. (I note that the Federal Department of Defense, which prohibits such scoring, should get a clue.)

Curry’s comprehensive guide is great beach reading--especially if your company is proposing to clean it up.

“From Ashes Into Light: A Novel”

Erika Lunder of Chico created Raincloud Press (raincloudpress.com) in order to publish the poetry of her mother, Gudrun Mouw. Since then she has taken on additional authors and has just released Mouw’s first novel, “From Ashes Into Light” ($27.50 in hardcover; also for Amazon Kindle). Mouw, born in Germany and now living in the Santa Barbara area, has taught English, yoga and meditation.

The story begins with twelve-year-old Ruth, in Salzburg, Austria on November 10, 1938. It is Kristallnacht, “night of shattered glass, broken bodies and broken faith.” But, as this novel of deep conviction asserts, this is not the final word.

Dachau ends Ruth’s physical life. “The row behind us drops with fumbling, crumbling sounds, as if there’s hardly any mass to the bodies. I hear other noises between gunshots, a moan, a quick cry ended with a shot, the cracking of bones. Bullets whirl fast and close. Something hits my back hard. So many shots fly at us, we bloom like red roses, our limbs falling to the ground. We spray in every direction. . . .”

But, as silence descends, “out of the dark comes a light of awareness. I am free. I am floating. I don’t need the body. The light grows and grows. Light pervades every fiber of my spirit. … Perhaps, time doesn’t pass. Perhaps, everything happens all at once. I might be dreaming, or I might be awake, gazing like a stranger at the globe that was once my home. Below, bodies are burning. Wings have risen from the ashes.”

Mouw’s story blends the spirit of the phoenix, reincarnation, Native American spirituality and Hasidic mysticism to unite, in a timeless realm, Ruth, Saqapaya (part of the First People at the time of Spanish conquest in California), and Friede Mai (German-born during World War II who faces suspicion in the US, but overcomes it).

In the end, hate is vanquished: Phoenix says of Friede, “I feel she is ready to take on the work of Saqapaya’s vision, my vision, Ruth’s vision, the vision of those who embrace a path of light and love.”

Nancy Wiegman’s author interview for Nancy’s Bookshelf, on mysnpr.org, is at bit.ly/1TZPYvz.

“Vista Del Mar: A Memoir Of The Ordinary”

Magalia resident Neal Snidow, who teaches English at Butte College, grew up in the Redondo Beach area of Southern California. He was an only child, and “well acquainted,” he writes, “with tropes of loneliness—the compulsive blank gaze at walls, window boxes, sea light, and the desert pleasure of empty sights and sounds.”

In 1996, in throes of mutual grief after his wife’s miscarriage, he took a tripod-mounted camera and black-and-white film and began photographing his old hometown, the commonplace “surfaces that, like the suburbs themselves, seemed ‘blank’ at first glance but on which could be seen a subtle patina of history as well, a trace of lost time within which some sort of answer to the present might wait.”

Thus begins an exploration of his family’s history and in mesmerizing words, by turns sublime, funny, and wise, mingled with dozens of images, the story is told in “Vista Del Mar: A Memoir Of The Ordinary” ($18.95 in paperback from Counterpoint; also for Amazon Kindle; for more visit vistadelmarbook.com).

Time in the book is never tame, swirling and jumping as Snidow pieces together a life of meaning. Family stories “gave me associations that lit the intertwining of memory and space until something called ‘history’ seemed to occur.”

“Somewhere in my mid-thirties,” Snidow writes, “in the 1980s, I began to get lost. … I drank too much, didn’t sleep well, and started to have blood pressure spikes….” But time “now looped on, doubled back, left the impression of its meander. ... For a period it was the fall of 1996 and we were beginning the adoption process. …”

The end of the book loops back to the start, only this time it is heady with an extraordinary coincidence surrounding the birth mother and a man who one lonely day decided to take black-and-white pictures of home.

A launch party and book signing will be held Thursday from 7:00-9:00 p.m. at 1078 Gallery, 820 Broadway in Chico. The event is free. In Southern California he will be interviewed on the art of memoir by his editor, Jack Shoemaker, at Café Society in Point Richmond on Friday, June 24 from 7:00-9:00 p.m.

“Stoner”

With the sounds of college and university graduation in the air, it seems fitting to notice a new edition of an extraordinary novel of academic life first published in 1965. Author John Williams tells the story of a nondescript assistant professor of English in the first decades of the twentieth century at a fictionalized University of Missouri.

“Stoner” ($14.95 in paperback from New York Review Books Classics; also for Amazon Kindle with a superb audio narration by Robin Field) presents the life of one William Stoner who taught at the university from 1918 until his death in 1956.

“Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now.” Yet, through the course of the novel, Williams draws out Stoner’s inner life and surrounds him with vivid personalities, like his mercurial wife Edith, their pensive daughter Grace, and Hollis Lomax, his arch nemesis in the English department. Then there is Katherine Driscoll, a younger teacher who becomes his lover.

In many ways Stoner lives a pedestrian existence, sometimes passive in his home life and university politics, sometimes passionate in the classroom when the subject turns to Medieval and Renaissance literature.

“He had come to that moment in his age,” Williams writes, after a showdown with Lomax that does not go well, “when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. … He took a grim and ironic pleasure … that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”

And yet this is a story about love. “In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”

Stoner’s life a failure? Well, yes and no, the novel answers. What did you expect?

“Hearing From The Father: Finding True Hope And Joy In A Broken World”

What should we know about an author? Native Chicoan Mike Mercer put it this way in an email: “Mike graduated from Rosedale, Chico Junior, Chico High, and finally went down in educational flames at eighteen - a victim of his own fly fishing passion - fleeing his Butte College schooling for a dream job at The Fly Shop in Redding,” his home. Then he adds: “Raised in a family that pursued God, Mike spent his first 40 years with no use of a Savior...until he did...”

“God reached down,” he writes, “and saved me from myself.” Later, he found himself in intimate conversation with God, who prompted him, directed him, admonished him in writing stories about living the authentic Christian life.

It's like knowing the person next to you is in agony and needs prayer, Mercer says. “Have you felt that immediate and incredibly urgent prodding to pray with them … not over lunch, not later that day, but right now? That is perhaps the best way I can describe how He shares these with me, as (often) urgent prayers; as reflections of His heart that He very much wants me to grasp….”

The pieces are collected in “Hearing From The Father: Finding True Hope And Joy In A Broken World” ($15.99 in paperback from Xulon Press; also for Amazon Kindle).

The chapters are thoughtfully and beautifully written; some blend fictional and real life experiences; others are reflections on the difficulty of living in a world in which devilish evil is very real.

In “Accept His Love For You,” an abused woman named Hope says, “We go through a scary time in our life and we are afraid; we worry, what if He doesn’t show up? Listen to me—if you are really living your life for Him, He doesn’t have to ‘show up’ … He never left!”

The final story is about a 40-year-old man who loses his job but gains a different kind of employment, a new purpose. Years later, “his life is defined by gratitude, and joy, and never once does he regret this choice, made all those long years ago.”

“The Long Goodbye: Khe Sanh Revisited”

In a book published more than a decade ago, “A Patch Of Ground: Khe Sanh Remembered,” Michael Archer told the harrowing story of his part in “the most protracted, costly and consequential” battle of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

It is also the story of his best friend, Tom Mahoney. They both enlisted in the Marines in 1967, and on July 6, 1968, under strange circumstances, Mahoney was killed by the enemy after he apparently walked outside the perimeter of an outpost established on a hill near Khe Sanh. The area was being evacuated and his body was not recovered.

“The place had been wrested fifteen months earlier from an entrenched North Vietnamese battalion in a bloody four-day battle that resulted in scores of dead and wounded, and was held at great additional cost of life as the linchpin to Khe Sanh’s survival. As the rhythmic popping of the helicopter blades receded into that July night, the agony of Hill 881 South finally came to an end.”

But Archer’s own agony did not end. He had to know if Tom’s final resting place could be located and perhaps his remains repatriated. His book helped him make connections, both here and in Vietnam, and the quest was on. The story is told in “The Long Goodbye: Khe Sanh Revisited” ($21.95 in paperback from Hellgate Press; also for Amazon Kindle).

Archer (michaelarcher.net) lives in Reno; his brother, Brian, is a Chico State University grad and managed Madison Bear Garden for a time; and one of the central persons in the new book is Chico native Steve Busby, who signed up for the Marines in 1967 only to witness Tom’s death the next year.

Part battlefield account and part detective story, the book chronicles frustrations with official government efforts, connections with Mahoney’s family, work with a Vietnamese psychic who claimed to be in touch with Mahoney’s “wandering soul,” and meetings with former enemies who wanted to honor Archer’s friend. The riveting story is brilliantly told.

Tom’s fate is prised out of the fog of war and there comes for Archer “something that had been missing for the last forty years,” a measure of peace.

“Before We Visit The Goddess”

“Spent two beautiful days in Chico,” writes American Book Award winner Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni on her Facebook page, “speaking/teaching at the WordSpring Writers conference at Butte College. … Drove through Yuba City, one of the oldest Indian American settlements in America. … Ate the most amazing locally grown strawberries!”

The WordSpring creative writing conference, held a week ago, coincided with the publication date of Divakaruni’s new book, “Before We Visit The Goddess” ($25 in hardcover from Simon and Schuster; also for Amazon Kindle). Born in Kolkata, India, she received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and now lives with her family in Houston, Texas. (There’s more at chitradivakaruni.com.)

Her new book is a series of intertwined stories of three generations of mothers and daughters. Sabitri makes something of herself in Kolkata, opening Durga Sweets, a shop named after her mother who had told her “go through life with your head held high.”

But family life is complicated, to say the least, and Sabitri’s daughter, Bela, turns her back on her mother and joins her boyfriend, who must escape India because of his politics, to marry him in the United States. Bela’s daughter, Tara, stung when her parents divorce, descends into drink and drugs.

The story begins in 1995 with Sabitri, now sixty-seven, writing to Tara, urging her to finish college. It ends, after many twists and turns in the chronology, in 2020, with Tara, about to take her mother to Sunny Hills and who, in cleaning her house, finds the photo albums. “The books are jumbled and in no chronological order.” The novel sorts its stories not by date but by theme.

“Do you want to know why I steal?” Tara asks her mother. “I take things that I should have had but didn’t get. … I steal them because there’s a big hole in the middle of my chest and stealing fills it up for a moment.” There are “big holes” everywhere in the lives of the three women, but family tragedy is tempered by the kindness of strangers and the true meaning of being a “fortunate lamp,” achieving something on one’s own.

Readers will savor the words, sweet and tart comingled.

“My Grandma Angel”

Lisa DeLaby is Director of the Office of Institutional Advancement and Butte College Foundation, but the Oroville resident is also a mother of five.

Amidst the joys of family life loss and grief can come without warning, and parents must decide how best to comfort young children. Books can play a significant role in helping kids verbalize their loss and direct their imagination more positively.

“My Grandma Angel” ($17.99 in paperback from AuthorHouse; also for Amazon Kindle) by Lisa Rhoads DeLaby, illustrated by Dan Drewes, is a tender story based on LeLaby’s own experience. Told by a young girl, it begins in tears.

“My grandma died suddenly,” she says on the first page. “I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye. She wasn’t sick, so I don’t know why she had to die and go to heaven.”

Then, “When I cried and told my mom I missed my grandma, she said it’s normal to feel really sad and cry when we lose someone we love. Mom gave me a big bear hug, squeezing me almost as hard as Grandma used to. It made me feel much better.”

Memories rush in, cooking and going to the movies.

There is something more. “The truth is, my grandma can now do things that she never could before. That’s because now she’s a special angel. I like to call her my Grandma Angel. My Grandma Angel can visit me in my dreams, now that she is in heaven.” And “she has all sorts of special powers.”

That cooling breeze? “That’s my Grandma Angel fanning me with one of her wings.” Rainbows are her way of saying hello. “During the day, I bet my grandma is doing good things to help others. She could be on a spy mission, saving the planet from harm, helping the Tooth Fairy, or sewing in Santa’s workshop with the elves.”

It’s the stuff of dreams, and in those dreams “Grandma and I can travel together anywhere….” “I’m happy that my Grandma Angel will always be in my heart and my dreams.” A series of questions on the last page asks about the reader’s own special angel.

Is that a smile I see?

“Death Comes For The Deconstructionist”

“Death Comes For The Deconstructionist” ($22 in hardcover from Slant; also for Amazon Kindle) by Daniel Taylor (WordTaylor.com) is a mystery. Who killed Richard Pratt, literary theorist extraordinaire?

Enter narrator Jon Mote, once one of Pratt’s students. Pratt’s wife hires him to investigate; she tells him: “I just feel like there’s something there to be seen that the police wouldn’t recognize if they tripped over it. I think you can help.”

So the quest begins. Mote is “on the wrong side of thirty-five, as our culture judges such things. I am separated from my wife, … living with my sister, who, despite substantial challenges, is far more acclimated to life than I am. … I get most of my opinions from cable television. … And, oh yes, I hear voices. They do not wish me well.”

His sister Judy, who has cognitive and linguistic disabilities, is the moral core of the novel. Her love for Jon goads him on when things go awry.

The first Mrs. Pratt recalls someone far different than the sophisticated scholar; “Dickie” Pratt grew up in the South and participated in the hanging of an African-American man (the local newspaper called it a “suicide”). After the divorce, he changed.

“He had converted to a new religion,” Jon realizes, “one that promised him a new kind of absolution from his sins, not least by dismissing the idea that there were sins to be absolved from. No fixed boundaries, no metanarratives, no sin, and voila, no guilt. It’s a game I am trying to play myself.”

This quirky and astute novel explores that “game” and what happens when the misguided deconstructionist finds freedom in “killing words.”

One who got angry at Pratt’s last lecture, Verity Jackson, tells Jon: “Dr. Pratt wasn’t just talking about Big Brother and God and most of the writers who have given me hope in life; he was also undermining Martin and Malcolm and Sojourner and Gandhi and anyone else who ever said, ‘This is wrong and things should be different.’ Words may just be play for him, but they aren’t play for people like me who depend on their stories.”

Verity, of course, means truth.

“The Game Warden’s Son”

Inspired by the success of his first book, “Badges, Bears, and Eagles,” Steven T. Callan is back with more. “The Game Warden’s Son” ($14.95 in paperback from Coffeetown Press; also for Amazon Kindle) “details over a half century of wildlife adventures and investigations, beginning with my storybook childhood as the son of a California Fish and Game warden.”

He spent his high school years in Orland, tagged along with his dad whenever he could, and became a warden in 1974. Later, he “spent the remainder of his thirty-year enforcement career in Redding.” You know he’d have stories to tell.

Callan (steventcallan.com) interviewed more than a dozen retired officers from Fish and Game (later renamed Fish and Wildlife). The stories, reconstructed from available evidence and memories, with a touch of “dramatic enhancement,” range from San Diego to Orland; Chico to Redding; and beyond.

He and other wardens wage a never-ending battle against poachers, whether abalone, bears, deer, eagles, and the list goes on.

Callan has a visceral reaction to depredation. He opened the trunk of one perp and “it took all of the professionalism I could muster not to turn around and slap the cuffs on the miscreant standing next to me. The entire trunk was filled with dead song birds: mockingbirds, thrashers, robins, meadowlarks, towhees, and a single male Bullock’s oriole”--all under legal protection. Why songbirds? “Birds like this are delicacy in old country,” says the man.

Then there are the “spotlighters” who “drive around shining their headlights or handheld, high-powered spotlights into the surrounding countryside until a pair of green eyes shines back. Bang! The deer is thrown into the trunk of a car or the bed of a pickup, and away they go.”

These are stories of wardens’ dogged determination, long stakeouts, and creative stings, all for the love of nature. As a tribute to Wally Callan, his son could do no better.

Callan is the scheduled interview guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf, with host Nancy Wiegman, this Friday at 10:00 a.m. on North State Public Radio (mynspr.org, KCHO 91.7 FM). He will be signing copies of his book at the Chico Costco on Saturday from 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m.

“Ishi Means Man”

Ishi “died of tuberculosis in 1916,” Thomas Merton writes, “after four and a half years among white men.” For the hundredth anniversary of Ishi’s death, Paulist Press has reprinted a small compilation of essays, written toward the end of Merton’s life, exploring the spiritual lives of the indigenous peoples of the West.

Merton, the influential Catholic writer, who died in 1968, entered a Trappist monastery in Kentucky in 1941. According to the Thomas Merton Center he became an activist in the civil rights and peace movements of the Sixties, drawing “severe criticism, from Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who assailed his political writings as unbecoming of a monk.”

“Ishi Means Man” ($9.95 in paperback from Paulist Press; also for Amazon Kindle) features a short introduction by Dorothy Day, who co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933 to promote her radical economic ideas. Some of the essays were originally published in Day’s newspaper, as was the title piece.

Merton’s reflections on Ishi are shaped by Theodora Kroeber’s “Ishi In Two Worlds: A Biography Of The Last Wild Indian In North America,” published in 1964. “The Yana Indians,” he writes, “(including the Yahi or Mill Creeks) lived around the foothills of Mount Lassen, east of the Sacramento River. Their country came within a few miles of Vina where the Trappist monastery in California stands today.”

Merton sees Ishi’s story as a “parable.” Facing attacks, Ishi’s people retreated into the hills. “The Yahi remnant (and that phrase takes on haunting biblical resonances) systematically learned to live as invisible and unknown.”

Writing during the throes of the Vietnam conflict, Merton contrasts “the spectacle of our own country with its incomparable technological power, its unequalled material strength, its psychic turmoil, its moral confusion, and its profound heritage of guilt…. What is most significant is that Vietnam seems to have become an extension of our old western frontier, complete with enemies of another ‘inferior’ race.”

Ishi never revealed his actual name. “In the end, no one ever found out a single name of the vanished community. Not even Ishi’s. For Ishi simply means MAN.”

If Merton co-opted Ishi for his own political agenda, readers may still find his words worth pondering.

“How To Be Here”

The blurb for a new book is from Chico’s Aaron Rodgers: “Rob Bell has an incredible energy in his writing that is contagious. … Listing all the ways in which Rob has positively impacted my life would take up too much space; so I’ll simply say that he has inspired me to live life with a deeper level of appreciation and to love people with a greater awareness of our connectivity.”

In “How To Be Here” ($25.99 in hardcover from HarperOne; also for Amazon Kindle), Bell, a former pastor and now host of the weekly RobCast podcast (robbell.com), offers, as the subtitle says, “A Guide To Creating A Life Worth Living.”

He remembers trying to write a book. “The blinking line on that blank page kept blinking, like it was taunting me. There’s a reason it’s called a cursor. We all have a blinking line. Your blinking line is whatever sits in front of you waiting to be brought into existence.”

“The kind of life you lead,” he writes, “what you do with your time, how you spend your energies—it’s all part of how you create your life.” To make his point, Bell uses Biblical stories (focusing especially on Jesus) and contemporary illustrations, all suffused with encouragement and humor, like the reference to his high school neighbor Tad, “the drummer for the band Puddle Slug (they later changed their name to Rusty Kleenex to, you know, appeal to a wider audience)….”

Bell explores (and exposes) the dead ends we find ourselves facing. How do we creatively deal with suffering, rejection, burnout? In nine sections, some with colorful titles like “The Dickie Factor” and “The Exploding Burrito,” the author proposes creating a life shaped by rest (the rhythm of the sabbath) with emphasis on the first step (“we don’t take the first step because we can’t figure out the seventeenth step”). So “start with 1.”

He introduces the Japanese word ikigai, meaning “your vocation, your destiny, your path. Your ikigai is your reason for being.”

“Try that new thing. If it helps clarify your ikigai, if it gets you up in the morning, if it’s good for you and the world, do it.”

“Illuminate: Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies, And Symbols”

In its quarter century, Duarte, Inc., a Silicon Valley design shop (with an office in Chico for a time), has often reinvented its services. CEO Nancy Duarte realized the creation of slide presentations for companies was just not sustainable.

Her TEDx talk on storytelling a few years ago garnered a million views, and Duarte scrambled to meet the demand for new designs. Recently, the company underwent reorganization, and that process, warts and all, forms the basis of Duarte’s new book, co-authored with colleague Patti Sanchez.

“Illuminate: Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies, And Symbols” ($32 in hardcover from Portfolio/Penguin; also for Amazon Kindle) is all about the journey of what the authors call “the torchbearer.” “Torchbearers,” they write, “communicate in a way that conquers fear and inspires hope.” (A book sample is available from duarte.com.)

Duarte is a visionary, but she admits that it’s hard to see how others might take her words. Enter Sanchez, who brings an empathetic understanding. Together they invite the leader to journey through the five-step “venture scape,” which is structured like a story. At the Dream Stage, “your travelers face a choice to stay put or believe they play an important role in making your new dream come true.”

But then comes the Leap Stage, a realization that the status quo is over. The Fight Stage means travelers must fend off opposition, only to be presented with the Climb Stage where they must gather their energy to “climb out of the pit.” The process repeats until the Arrive Stage where travelers “seize the reward you’ve promised and are celebrated for their efforts.”

All along the way, the book presents case studies of companies (from Chick-fil-A to Starbucks) and leaders who have used not just speeches and stories, but ceremonies (which “help travelers envision new behavior or purge old mind-sets”) and symbols (“visual, auditory, spatial, and physical means to create emotionally charged artifacts that remind your travelers of key moments along the venture”). Symbols can include images on a banner, bells, music, historic locations, hugs and dancing.

New dreams may be born. “When you discover a new ember,” Duarte writes, “let there be light.”

“The Boy From The Mountains Beyond”

Lynn Elliott, playwright and Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Chico State University, published a sweet tale in 2010 that only recently came to my attention. With illustrations by former Chico State student Luis A. Santos, the book is the story of Roye, “the master toymaker,” who finds a most unlikely protégé.

In “The Boy From The Mountains Beyond” ($10.95 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing), Roye remembers when travelers would stop and marvel at the toys: “Wooden rocking horses, … puzzles that covered the floor, and puppets of all shapes and sizes—all were bought in my toyshop and placed in the wagons that followed the carriages.”

And more memories: “After evening prayers in the Carmelite Convent on the hill, some of nuns stole down to the village and peeked through the window of my shop. They giggled as the flickering candles danced over the wooden spinning tops. … Then, while the children of the village slept on Christmas Eve, I stopped at every home and placed a special toy for each child beneath the Christmas tree.”

Now, though, the shop is empty. Roye’s fingers have become unusable since he threw a village child to safety as a wagon hurled down a hill and ran over his hands. Roye and his daughter Claire, cared for by the nuns after Claire’s mother died in childbirth, face an uncertain future--though Claire’s exquisite singing brightens the hearts of everyone.

But one November day Claire disappears into the woods and Roye sets out to find her. He sees her half-empty basket. “Beside it I saw Claire’s footprints in the snow. Then my heart froze. Next to Claire’s footprints were the unmistakable paw prints of a wolf forcing her forward into the forest.”

But the yellow-eyed wolf is a guardian, shielding a small boy who had run into the woods to escape a war that had taken his parents. The boy, Trystan by name, is carried into town, and, as time passes, wouldn’t you know it? He shows great dexterity with his hands, cutting and chiseling wood as Roye guides him. You can practically feel the joy, and the gift of the wolf.

“Peace Like A River”

I have to thank a longtime Chico friend, now living in Livermore, for recommending an extraordinary novel, a best seller when it was published in 2001.

“Peace Like A River” ($16 in paperback from Grove/Atlantic; also for Amazon Kindle) by Leif Enger takes place in the early Sixties, mostly in Minnesota and North Dakota. Enger, raised in Osakis, Minnesota, became a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio. “Peace” is a story of faith and doubt, of the miraculous and the mundane, bloodshed and redemption. And, oh, the words.

It is 1962. Jeremiah Land lives with his three children in Minnesota, Davy, the oldest at 16; Reuben, 11; and Swede, just 9. Told by a much older Reuben, looking back, the story begins with Reuben’s troubled birth and an account of the first of Jeremiah’s miracles.

The baby is not breathing, despite the best efforts of Dr. Nokes. Jeremiah smacks the doctor aside; “Dad turned back to me, a clay child wrapped in a canvas coat, and said in a normal voice, ‘Reuben Land, in the name of the living God I am telling you to breathe.’” And he does.

Why was Reuben allowed to survive, plagued now by asthma? “I believe I was preserved, through those twelve airless minutes, in order to be a witness, and as a witness, let me say that a miracle is no cute thing but more like the swing of a sword. … Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It’s true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. … When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.”

Yet the story is anchored to the earth and is shaped by the snowy landscape. One horrible night, as two bullies enter the Lands’ house, Davy is ready with his rifle, and kills them both.

There is evidence that this was not self-defense, and Davy is jailed, but escapes to the Badlands. And so begins a quest to find Davy. Justice and mercy co-mingle in a story as fragile as human life and as strong as Easter.