Chico novelist's tale of university freshman hijinks is something more

The story takes place, the narrator says, "at the U- of C- at D- in the spring of the year 196-" but the name of the school is not important; more important is that "a War was going on. . . . It was going on overseas in jungles and rice paddies. But every day there was increasing evidence that it was a real War, even though it had never officially been declared."

For Roger Osborn and his gaggle of freshman buds the war is a distant reality, though not the fear that some of them might be whisked away to fight in it. They must keep the draft board at bay and learn how to live together in Glen House, "the university's euphemism for the World War Two army barracks set under the trees like rows of gray two-story shoeboxes."

Such is the setting of "DeLancey's Stapler: Love, Lust, Duty, Doom, Rage, Revelation and Pizza" ($17.98 from AuthorHouse) by Dave Veith. The author writes me that he's retired, in his mid-sixties, and "originally came to Chico in '53, attended Chico High ‘62 and UC Davis ‘66, worked primarily as a systems analyst in the Bay Area, moved back after 44 years, married with four grown kids. My father Donald Veith taught English at Chico State. My mother Lois McDonald wrote several books on local history, including 'Annie Bidwell: An Intimate History.'"

The publicity release captures the scene: "Professors profess from the pulpits of various disciplines, a neon mermaid throbs in the night sky at the apex of the business district, and the latest Girl of the Month appears like clockwork in brazen glory on the wall above Roger Osborn’s Love Candle." Stapled there, one might add, by Lawrence DeLancey's stapler. There's a late-bloomer kid called The Gnat, who feels like one when he sees the immensity of the night sky. There's knockout Shelly Wenceslas and the beauteous young housemother Susan Thurlby to stir things up.

The book is like one of those crude college movies without the crudity (though testosterone abounds) and in the end it's something more, a meditation on the importance of comradeship in the midst of war or the shock of random events. Veith is a writer to watch.

Chico author presenting free workshop on teaching kids about money

Chicoan Kristan Leatherman is the co-author, with Jim Fay, of "Millionaire Babies or Bankrupt Brats?" ($24.95 in paperback from Love and Logic Press, Inc.). Fay is co-founder of the Love and Logic Institute (www.loveandlogic.com). Leatherman, a counselor, educator and facilitator, has taken the "love and logic" principles and applied them to the financial arena. The goal is to raise responsible children. "Love," the authors write, "allows kids the latitude to learn from their mistakes. Logic allows kids the latitude to learn from the consequence of those mistakes."

The book is available at www.MillionaireBabiesOnline.com or through the co-author at kristanleatherman@sbcglobal.net.

Leatherman will be presenting a free mini-workshop called "Raise Money-Smart Kids! Learn 3 Practical Ways to Get Started" on Thursday, January 15 at 7:00 PM at the Chico Christian School Multipurpose Room 401, 2801 Notre Dame Blvd. in Chico.

There are only two rules of "love and logic." In the first, "adults set limits without anger, lectures, threats, or repeated warnings." In the second, "When children cause problems, for us or anyone else, adults hand the problem back to the child in loving ways. We hand the problem back by replacing anger and lectures with a strong dose of empathy, followed by a logical consequence or by requiring the child to solve the problem he or she has caused."

The first part of the book is devoted to spelling out the principles of "love and logic" by teaching personal responsibility in the handling of money. The second part, "Raising Fiscally Fit Kids," builds on the first and examines spending, saving, borrowing, earning, investing, and sharing.

The book is replete with everyday examples of parent-child interactions and offers a wealth of sometimes surprising suggestions for handling money challenges.

Allowance, the authors suggest, is really about helping children spend money and shouldn't be given as payment for chores; chores, in fact, are renamed "contributions" and shouldn't be compensated if they're part of the daily family upkeep. If a kid flakes on cleaning his or her room, and mom has to do it, the child will receive a bill in the next allowance envelope. Think "consequence."

The bottom line? One day, when parents must rely on their children for care, those good fiscal habits will be invaluable.

The year in local books

Northstate writers and those with local connections were busy in 2008.

Novels reviewed included "Sweet Life" (Mia King), "More Truth Than Fiction" (Helga Ruge), "Love's Journey" (James Rozendaal), "Sylvia's Book" (Linda Kathleen Peelle), "The Cultivation of Weeds" (Emory Menefee), and "Fathead Goes To Chico" (Mitch Cox).

Poetry was well represented: "The Solipsist" (Troy Jollimore), "Places to Sit and Other Poems" (Tom Fuszard), "Donner: A Passing" (Shana Youngdahl), "Sustenance: Poems By Chico Poets In Celebration of the California Nut Festival," and "Walk Into the Wind" (Elizabeth A. Bernstein).

Memoirs? "Jailhouse Journal of an OB/GYN" (Bruce Steir), "Sweepings From Under the Rug" (Dick Cory), "Mourning Has Broken" (Jan Hasak), "Code Two 'N' A Half" (William W. Wilhelm), "100 Miles" (Daniel Thomas), “Flashbacks From Here and There . . . : Pages From the Journal of An Adventure Traveler” (Nick Ellena), "A Place in the Shower Schedule: 101 Favorite Columns" (Roger Aylworth) and "Travels With Cornbinder" (Robert Woods).

History, too: "Images of America: Durham" (Adriana Farley and Jan Holman), "Images of America: The Land of Orland" (Gene H. Russell), "Saga of a Mountain Meadow: A History of Bucks Ranch and Bucks Lake" (Scott J. Lawson), and “The Poetess of Song: The Life of Mary Shindler 1810-1883” (Linda Sundquist-Nassie).

For kids there were "Bigfoot and Joshua" (Bob and Peggy Bishop), "Engine Ed's Colorful Train" (Bonnie Worthington), and “To Grandmother’s House: A Visit To Old-Town Beijing” (Doug Keister).

In the religion/spirituality category: "Holy Cooperation!" (Andrew McLeod), "Animal Omens" (Victoria Hunt), "Together Under One Roof: Making a Home of the Buddha's Household" (Lin Jensen), "Children of Immortal Bliss" (Paul Hourihan, edited by Anna Hourihan), and "Living As Ambassadors of Relationships" (James Wilson).

Photography? "Teardrops and Tiny Trailers" (Doug Keister), "Everyday: A Yearlong Photo Diary" (Byron Wolfe), and "Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers" (Byron Wolfe).

And, finally, the old grab bag: "The Seven Personalities of Golf" (Darren Gee), "Costa Rica: A Global Studies Handbook" (Meg Tyler Mitchell and Scott Pentzer), “America’s Choice, America’s Shame: The Reality of America’s War On Drugs: ‘Your Children, Your Family, Your Nation’” (James C. Bettencourt), “Amazing Birds: A Treasury of Facts and Trivia About the Avian World” (Roger Lederer), and “Does W Stand for Worst? The Record of G. W. Bush” (Francis X. Callahan).

Read on!

Sacramento writer on building the Christmas community

The carols proclaim Jesus Christ, the God-Man, has come into the world. What are the economic implications for the way we live with each other? One writer says it's about cooperation.

Andrew McLeod, a recent Chico visitor who works for the Davis-based California Center for Cooperative Development, explores the Biblical roots of cooperative living in "Holy Cooperation! Building Graceful Economies" ($17 in paperback from Cascade Books). McLeod writes that he became a Christian as a teenager but "lost interest in religion" in his college years. He even began to see the Church as a hindrance to the kind of democratic managed organizations he was becoming interested in, such as the New Riverside Cafe in Minnesota, a vegetarian restaurant he and almost thirty others co-owned.

Yet McLeod began to realize that some of what the Bible said about community supported his interest in cooperation. He noticed the "blossoming interest in community building" within the "primarily evangelical churches" he has been attending. That led to the development of a Web site (www.bookofacts.info) and his book.

He recognizes that "Christianity and cooperatives have much in common, but they are not identical, and any attempt to bridge those differences should not gloss them over." Though he is admittedly not a theologian, McLeod finds a provocative picture of cooperation in the Old Testament in the prophetical call for justice within human society. In the New Testament Gospel stories Jesus talked about loving one another, using one's worldly resources to help others in need. The early believers shared what they had for the good of the community and operated with decentralized leadership.

McLeod's book is not without controversy. "The United States' wealth is the result of centuries of injustice," he writes, "and some atonement for that is necessary" including finding ways "to make do with less. . . . The Bible clearly shows that God would prefer that we organize ourselves in ways that share power and resources much more broadly than our capitalist empire allows. . . ."

Examples include the Mondragon cooperative system in the Basque region of Spain, the Jesus People USA movement, and offshoots of the "new monasticism" such as the Church of the Sojourners in San Francisco's Mission District.

Christmas is here. How, then, shall we live?

New novel has a Chico connection

Darien H. Gee is married to former Chicoan Darrin Gee. Some years ago the couple moved to Hawaii where Darrin operates the Spirit of Golf Academy and Darien (writing under the name of "Mia King") balances life as a mother of three with her growing reputation as an author. Her romantic stories tell of modern love, won and lost and won again, and are leavened with a love of food and a special recipe section at the end.

"Sweet Life" ($14 in paperback from Berkley) , featured by several book clubs, is a hearty confection. Paul and Marissa Price both have good jobs in New York. He's 44, she's 41, and daughter Pansy is eight. When Paul gets the opportunity to manage a company-owned resort on the Big Island of Hawaii, he paints a glowing picture of Paradise to a reluctant Marissa. Eventually, realizing she's being selfish, she gives up her job as a consultant and agrees to the family move.

But Hawaii turns out to a bit short of idyllic. When Marissa meets Paul's young and voluptuous secretary, Malia, her suspicions are raised, and she has a hard time adapting to the role of a stay-at-home mom living in a many-roomed fixer-upper house. Marissa has a rather frosty encounter with the company masseuse, Kavena, and her only friend seems to be Jane, the barista at the local Kava Java shop ("a ten-dollar-an-hour glorified coffee waitress who was sixty years old"), who sets Marissa down and says, "Spill!"

When Paul tells Marissa (on Valentines Day, no less) that "I just need to find myself" and asks for a trial separation, her world is upended. Divorce? But, as King reminds readers, things are not quite what they seem, especially when Malia, Kavena and Jane end up renting some of the rooms in Marissa's house to help her stay afloat. And so begins a transformation in Marissa's life.

Marissa not only finds herself, but more than she bargained for. The central theme of "simplicity" runs throughout the novel. "All her years with Paul," muses Marissa at one point. "They hadn't been bad years, just busy years. Too busy, maybe. Too busy to notice the good things."

It's a sweet story (with a bit of salty language) seasoned to perfection.

Former Chicoan on golf's personalities

Though now living in Hawaii with his family, Darrin Gee writes that he grew up in Chico, attended Sierra View Elementary and Bidwell Junior High and graduated from Pleasant Valley High School. An expert in "mental golf," he operates the Spirit of Golf Academy on the Big Island. His new book is "The Seven Personalities of Golf: Discover Your Inner Golfer to Play Your Best Game" ($17.95 in hardcover from Stewart, Tabori & Chang).

Gee bases his list on his own observation and is careful to add that "there are more than just the seven generalized personality types" and that "the individuals mentioned as examples of each personalty type are not necessarily solely and totally defined as such. In other words, this is all in fun." But it's fun with a purpose. Each chapter is devoted to one of the types, complete with a "golf profiler" questionnaire, a list of the type's strengths and weaknesses, and how those players with different types can make use of the type in question to better their game.

Take the Gamesman, exemplified by Lee Trevino. "He approaches each shot as if he's on the craps table in Vegas. . . . It's not the money. It's about the thrill." The Gamesman may be easily distracted, but is fun-loving and goal oriented. How does this help a non-Gamesman? Gee noticed that one client, Erin, was so caught up in making the perfect swing that "her stomach would literally ache" if it wasn't. Gee told her to "stop playing standard stroke play and play 'Hit till you're happy.' In this game, she could hit as many shots from the same place until she hit one that she liked." Eventually she put aside the intricacies and just played the game. Erin began "to hit her first shot exactly the way she wanted."

Other types include the Intimidator (Tiger Woods, naturally), Methodologist (Nick Faldo), Swashbuckler (the "go-for-broke" Arnold Palmer), Steady Eddie (Tom Watson), the Artist (Steve Ballesteros), and the Laid-Back (Fred Couples). The Laid-Back personality adopts "relaxed intensity," a "complete balance of maintaining your normal level of relaxation while heightening your concentration and focus."

The book is illuminating, even for non-golfers, in part because golf is like life. You gotta bring the right personality to it.

Orland couple tells a Bigfoot tale for kids

Bob and Peggy Bishop of Orland have not exactly met Bigfoot, but they can dream, can't they? What they have done is write a colorful story for kids ages four through eight called "Bigfoot and Joshua" ($9.95 in paperback from www.bigfootgifts.com). The story features full-color illustrations by the inimitable Steve Ferchaud of Paradise.

According to an authors' note, Peggy Bishop "is a retired kindergarten teacher" and Bob Bishop "has created and distributed Bigfoot souvenirs/gifts for more than twenty years." When I accessed it, their Web site was a work in progress, but offered not only the book but a "Bigfoot lives" pin and decorated shot glasses.

The story begins with young "Joshua, his sister Emily, and his Mom and Dad . . . going on a camping trip to the mountains." Camp setup is fun, but "that night Joshua told his family that Bigfoot lived in the nearby forest. Emily laughed and said there is no such thing as Bigfoot. Joshua knew she was wrong and he was going to find Bigfoot."

The next day Joshua slips away into the forest. When Joshua's parents find him missing, they call a Forest Ranger. "Emily told the Ranger that she believed her brother went to look for Bigfoot. Emily asked the Ranger about Bigfoot. He told her that a lot of people believed they had seen Bigfoot in the nearby forest. They said Bigfoot was very big, hairy and smelled badly."

The search is on for Joshua. As others join, Joshua himself is lost and scared. Suddenly he hears a noise, and there's a terrible stink. "Joshua knew that Bigfoot . . . was sometimes called the Skunk Ape." And then there's a giant foot. Bingo!

Bigfoot gets Joshua safely back to camp under cover of darkness. No one believes his tale the next day, of course, and Joshua wonders if the whole adventure was nothing but a dream. But not so. There are those--footprints.

A section of questions and answers in the back of the book tells youngsters that the story is not true, but it could have been ("if there was a real Joshua and a real Bigfoot") and that no one knows for sure if Bigfoots are real. One can dream, can't one?

Darkroom magic: Turning good holiday pictures into excellent ones

Grass Valley fine-art photographer Seán Duggan, along with co-author Katrin Eismann, are both Photoshop experts. The image manipulation software, made by Adobe, is the key, they write, to making good pictures great. Their expertise is shared in "The Creative Digital Darkroom" ($49.99 in paperback from O'Reilly Media). Lavishly illustrated with "before" and "after" examples, the book contains detailed guidance and there are dozens of sample files that can be downloaded from www.creativedigitaldarkroom.com. Readers can work along with the authors in using Photoshop and other tools to produce the best images possible.

This is a book for serious photographers. Its focus is not on cropping techniques and the repair of damaged images, important as those may be, but rather on tone and contrast, exposure control, color correction, sharpening and focusing, and special effects. The first part of the book covers what's required for the digital darkroom and how to get images into the computer by using digital cameras or scanning. Once a good image has been selected, subsequent chapters deal with how it might be enhanced, so the "good" becomes "great." The many tutorials along the way are geared for Photoshop CS3, though the techniques will work with other versions and even other image editing software.

But the book is more than a step-by-step guide. Imagine sitting down in the company of two master photographers who care most of all about what a picture wants to be. "Listen to the image," they write. "As you look at the image and consider what you can do to improve it, try to think in broad concepts rather than in Photoshop technical terms. . . . Try to imagine how making certain areas lighter or darker or adjusting contrast might change the image. The human eye is attracted to lighter areas and to contrast. How can such adjustments help to guide the viewer's eye through the image?"

In another part of the book they caution against "the call of the Photoshop siren that tries to convince us that with enough time, effort, and layers, we can fix the flaws in any image and rework the barely adequate into a stunning photograph."

Pick the best, and make them better, and along the way be thankful for such wise words.

Diplomat's wife remembers a European childhood

Chico resident Helga Ruge, born in Wiesbaden, Germany, is the author of the memoir "Flashbacks of a Diplomat's Wife" and a fictional story, "Wither the Promised Land." Now she turns to novelized autobiography in "More Truth Than Fiction: Growing Up in Europe Between the World Wars" ($11.95 in paperback from Clay & Marshall Publishing Company, available at local bookstores or by writing claymarshallbooks@sbcglobal.net). Her purpose, she says, is to "leave an account of my childhood for my family" but also "to share with readers everywhere what life was like in Europe during the early 1900s."

She notes that "the many events and experiences I write about are factual and, though their names are fictitious, the human beings in my story are very real. And because I find autobiography without dialogue dead and boring, I give voice to these people even though it's not possible to recall exact words spoken so many decades ago." The story chronicles the life of Peter Heimbach and his wife, Lisa, and their two daughters, Helen and Inga, from 1922 to 1938.

Living in Biebrich, a small town near the Rhine, the little family was not immune to the instability of post-war Germany. "Inflation was so rampant that every day brought new prices" and "many Germans were out of work and hungry." Peter spent "four years in an internment camp in Russia during the war" but returned, intact, and now had a job "selling pills for his company," a job which eventually would take him, and his family, to the Soviet Union, then Romania, and back to Germany.

Baby Helen (nicknamed "Helly"--for good reason, as it turns out!) is born in 1922 "just as the church bells rang in Christmas at six o'clock in the morning." Helen is forever wandering off, causing Lisa, especially, no end of grief. "Impulsiveness was the most natural thing in the world to Helly."

Ruge's apt descriptions of everyday life is intertwined with the growing threat of Communism (where Peter's co-worker in Russia is arrested for unfaithfulness to the revolution) and the unraveling of German democracy and the rise of the Nazis. The reader is drawn into the pulse of domestic life, squabbles and all, in a story that in the end is about love and grace.

Chico abortion doctor tells his story

Bruce Steir writes that "I attended medical school twenty-three years before Roe vs. Wade became the law of the land. The only position that I had about abortion back then was that my sister should have been allowed to have the choice to have a safe, legal abortion instead of having to go through the heartbreak of giving birth and then giving her baby up for adoption to another family." He adds that "abortion was thought of as a criminal act in 1957, during my senior year in medical school."

Steir was Medical Director for the Feminist Women's Health Centers in Chico, Redding, Santa Rosa and Sacramento for a dozen years in the 1980s and 1990s. In December 1996 he was performing abortions at a clinic in Riverside and he writes that "one of the women died that day. It was the only death I had ever been responsible for. Over the course of my career I performed somewhere around 40,000 legal abortions."

Sharon was 27 years old and in the second trimester of her pregnancy; apparently Steir had perforated her uterus. He writes that the County Medical Examiner "referred to the death as accidental," but that several weeks later he was charged with second-degree murder by Riverside County prosecutors.

Rather than pursue the matter through what Steir describes as a "lengthy and costly hearing with the Medical Board" he surrendered his medical license in 1997 at the age of 66. The criminal case drained his savings and, seeking to avoid incarceration, with the advice of friends and family he entered a plea bargain to involuntary manslaughter. But the judge sentenced him to Riverside County Jail for a year (6 months of which was to be suspended for 1000 hours of community service).

Steir tells his life story in "Jailhouse Journal of an OB/GYN" ($15 in paperback from AuthorHouse www.authorhouse.com). Though time "has a way of dimming the memory for some details," the book gives the reader a sense of a man with few regrets. "An existing pregnancy that is not wanted is an accident or a mistake," he writes. "It doesn't really matter which it is. People make mistakes and as long as they do there will be erasers on pencils and delete keys on keyboards."

New chapbook from Chico State University's philosopher-poet

Troy Jollimore, who teaches philosophy at Chico State University, won the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for "Tom Thomson in Purgatory." That book introduced a unique poetic persona, exuberant, unguarded, and bigger than life, and he returns in four of the fifteen poems in Jollimore's new chapbook, "The Solipsist" ($10 in paperback from Bear Star Press www.bearstarpress.com).

A solipsist is a skeptic about the existence of the outside world. In the title work, the poet seems to agree: "Don't be misled: / that sea-song you hear / when the shell's at your ear? / It's all in your head. // That primordial tide-- / the slurp and salt-slosh / of the brain's briny wash-- / is on the inside." At the end, though, a question is raised "that comes up again and again, / as to why / God would make ear and eye / to face outward, not in?"

These poems raise questions, contort the comfortable ways we (or some of us) think. "Tom Thomson Indoors" wants a doorbell installed. "The installation man didn't understand: / 'You want your doorbell on the inside, sir?' / Well, yes--didn't he grasp it? Only fair / that prior to intruding on't, he give / the world some sort of warning. (Not that world / had shown the converse courtesy to him . . . )"

The poet explores the inner life of "Regret." "I'd like to take back my not saying to you / those things that, out of politeness, or caution, / I kept to myself. . . . Yes, I'd like to take back / my not frightening the pigeons that day with my wild / protestations of uncontrolled love, my not scaring / them off into orbit, frantic and mad, / even as I now sit alone, frantic and mad, / racing to unread the book of our love / before you can finish unwriting it."

In "Penguins," the poet unwrites the poem: ". . . and all the penguins in Worcester Square / (for 'penguins' read 'pigeons') / have, like dodos, forgotten how to fly / (for 'fly' read 'do long division'). . . ." The same poem isn't the same.

Jollimore gets inside your head with some brilliant skullduggery.

Local metaphysical author on the "sacred wisdom" of animals

According to an author's note, Victoria Hunt "has studied metaphysics and earth spirituality for over twelve years. A third-level Reiki master and member of the British Druid Order, she teaches Celtic-based earth-centered spirituality. . . ." Her new book, "Animal Omens" ($15.95 in paperback from Llewellyn Publications) describes almost thirty "animal encounters" (nine from friends) which, she writes, may help people "reconnect with the world of nature" and through nature to the Spirit world.

Hunt will sign copies of her book in conjunction with the Chico Art Studios Tour this Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at Felver’s Corner Art Gallery & Antiques, 196 East 15th Street in Chico.

Each "encounter," such as seeing a crow in an oak tree or a toy snake in the park, is followed by an "Omen" section about the characteristics of the animal (Crow has an "ability to move undetected between the dimensions of time and space"; Snake symbolizes "death and rebirth") with guidance for what such an encounter might mean. Crow, she writes, points to change, and brings "a message from the Otherworld"; Snake says "you will soon shed some aspect of yourself that no longer serves you."

Hunt reveals something about her own journey, describing a "shift in consciousness" in the mid-1990s "as a member of a family of hereditary 'ultra-sensitives,' people whose senses are heightened beyond the normal" which may even include "the gift of levitation" in her bloodline. She talks about her spirit guide, Balthazar, and her experience with past-life regression, garnets and auras, the Fair Folk of the woods, and her service to "My Lady," the Goddess, who tells her of metaphysical "philosophies held for only the most enlightened seekers."

In her comments on the white tailed kite, symbolizing "powers of the mind," the author writes that "our inner being, in its truth and purity, is held back by layer upon layer of mind and body and subconscious chatter. We lie naked and vulnerable in the mud of fear, longing to be released, to fly above what we are in physical form, past what holds us back and keeps us chained."

Though Hunt's gnostic worldview is inimical to my own, we do share a common interest in learning aright from the animals.

Sweeps month for Dick Cory

Dick Cory is a Nebraskan through-and-through, even after calling Chico home for four decades. He begins his third volume of memoirs, "Sweepings From Under the Rug" (paperback; for ordering details contact the author at ubangarang@sbcglobal.net), by describing his dad's office. "In the center of Cory's Store in Alexandria, Nebraska was a roll top desk elevated by a one step high platform. My dad . . . would sit at this throne doing ledgers and ordering, when he wasn't waiting on customers, stocking shelves, or sweeping the front step. . . . As a youth, I loved that desk with its mysterious creaks, pigeonholes, and tiny drawers."

And now Cory has metaphorically cleaned out all the little drawers of his own and has gone through all the sweepings, and the result is an eclectic collection of reminiscences, political commentary, letters to the editor, short stories, poems, songs, and self-reflection.

He'll be signing copies "Sweepings" at ABC Books on East Avenue in Chico this Saturday from 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.

Never one to pass up a practical joke or harebrained scheme, in 1956, during the formal "Military Ball" on the University of Nebraska campus, he and some buddies (lacking dates) replaced all the bulbs on the sorority porches with red ones. "You get the connotation to those fraternity boys returning their dates to a red light district?"

In 1975 he and a friend tried to obtain a donkey for the annual Paradise Gold Nugget Days' Donkey Derby, but Betsy had other ideas.

These days he and his cronies meet every week at a restaurant as part of club "R.O.D.E.O." ("Retired Old Duffers Eating Out"). "We most all have wives to share trivial pursuits (that one will get me in trouble!), but not the camaraderie offered by the lunch bunch."

Cory writes that "I'm emotional. I get fired-up about causes such as winning Nebraska football games, environmental issues, injustices of humankind, nostalgic memories, and sad movies. . . . I can tolerate chaos and self-inflicted delays. These characteristics drive my wife, Jan, insane. . . . Old rusty vehicles, farm implements, windmills, and weathered paint on barns and farmhouses hold special fascination for me."

Cory, too, has weathered much, but he's not about to rust away. He's writing a murder mystery.

Local author, two-time breast cancer survivor, to speak tonight in Chico

As a patent attorney for a biotechnology company in the Bay Area, Jan Hasak's life was never to be the same when she and her husband Jim "found a painless tiny lump in my breast in mid-December, 1995. I had turned 43 just two months earlier." She tells her story in "Mourning Has Broken: Reflections on Surviving Cancer" ($17.99 in paperback from Xulon Press).

A Christian since 1989, and mom of three sons, she writes that "I had never experienced any significant personal suffering up to that point." That was about to change.

Hasak will be signing copies of her book tonight from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. at the American Cancer Society's "The Shop" on Mangrove Avenue in Chico. The event is called “Life By Chocolate” with chocolates prepared by Upper Crust Bakery and sponsored by Butte Community Bank. Admission is a $10.00 donation to The American Cancer Society’s fund raiser called “Making Strides Against Breast Cancer."

"My initial journey into the world of cancer was shrouded in mourning," Hasak writes, "the feeling of loss and grief over what could have been. But later I encountered a springtime of refreshing and blessing. This book is an account of that crossing through life-threatening challenges. . . ."

Hasak blends a deeply personal account of her experience of God's sustenance with details of her research. She provides the reader with invaluable reflections on treatment options, the value of vitamins and herbal supplements, support groups, and what not to say to those who have been diagnosed with breast cancer. With the removal of lymph nodes she faced lymphedema, a debilitating swelling of the arm as fluid accumulates. The author's book and Web site (www.janhasak.com) provide key online resources.

When a routine checkup in 2003 finds "another lump in the same breast in which the first tumor was discovered," she writes that "I felt that my body had betrayed me in a big way." Instead of a lumpectomy with the first diagnosis, she faced a bilateral mastectomy. And another round of grieving. "God does not condemn such feelings. But in contrast to the secular world, Christians are not to grieve as if they have no hope."

"Mourning Has Broken" is a compassionate and spiritually encouraging companion.

"Finding Beauty" author to appear Wednesday at Chico State University

Terry Tempest Williams is Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. A poet and naturalist, she lives in both Castle Valley, Utah, and Wilson, Wyoming.

Now, with the just-published "Finding Beauty In a Broken World" ($26 in hardcover from Pantheon), Williams offers an extended meditation on the endangered Utah Prairie Dog, threatened by developers, and on the genocide in Rwanda, taking pieces of shattered natural and human worlds and constructing a mosaic. "There is a way of being in the world that calls us beyond hope," she writes. "Mosaic is not simply an art form but a form of integration, a way of not only seeing the world but responding to it."

She will be appearing at Laxson Auditorium at Chico State University this coming Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. Sponsored by Chico Performances (www.chicoperformances.com), her presentation is part of the On the Creek Lecture Series. Tickets are $22 Premium, $17 Adult, $15 Senior, $13 Student/Child; for more information call the box office at (530) 898-6333.

"Finding Beauty" begins in Ravenna, Italy, where Williams learns the ancient art of mosaic, the controlling metaphor of the book. She writes that "I believe in the beauty of all things broken," and mosaics exemplify for the author an attempt to come to terms with the brokenness of the contemporary world. Her style is also a mosaic: thousands of short prose paragraphs, letters, poems, quotations, field notes (from several weeks spent in a 10-foot tower observing Prairie Dogs).

She writes in the New York Times in 2003: "As we find ourselves on the eve of war with Iraq, why should we care about the fate of a rodent, an animal many simply see as a 'varmint'? . . . Quite simply, because the story of the Utah prairie dog is the story of the range of our compassion. If we can extend our idea of community to include the lowliest of creatures, call them 'the untouchables,' then we will indeed be closer to a path of peace and tolerance."

"One million Tutsis were murdered in one hundred days. Their killers were neighbors with farm tools, machetes, and hoes." Today there exists a genocide memorial, housing bones. Tiles spell out "Let Us Remember." It is a mosaic.

Chico author Lin Jensen on the imagery of words

Lin Jensen is the founding teacher of the Chico Zen Sangha and an accomplished author.

Saturday at 6:30 p.m., as part of the Artoberfest celebration, he will present a talk entitled "Words Into Images: The Art of Painting Pictures with Language" and will read from his newest book, "Together Under One Roof: Making A Home of the Buddha's Household" ($16.95 in paperback from Wisdom Publications). The talk and book signing will take place at Avenue 9 Gallery, 180 E. 9th Ave., Ste 3, in Chico.

For Jensen, the "Buddha's household" encompasses everything. "Every object you and I touch is Buddha," he writes, "and every house--including a homeless shelter or a prison complex or the downtown mall with its sprawling parking lot--is the exact place where the Buddha takes up residence." This realization, he says, is not something reserved for Buddhist greats, but for "ordinary minds," which "Zen insists . . . is as holy as it gets."

Jensen's collection of short essays celebrates not only life's ordinary experiences but the human power of naming those ordinary things. "We fleshly, earth-bound creatures are writing a language of creation, word by word. . . . Putting names to things, rather than taming the world by substituting language for living fact, infuses the world with a wild wonderment known only to creatures who trade in words."

While we must not confuse words with the things they name, Jensen writes, nevertheless the naming suggests close attention to the world. Naming something "bestows upon the things of this world a quality of intimate observation that I personally equate with love."

Jensen uses his words to characterize Buddhism as "kindness" borne of the "knowing that nowhere does there exist a single separate self. The perception of no self is one of compassion, since compassion is not so much a matter of feeling as one of identification." This identification extends beyond the Buddhist community (the "sangha") to one that is "inclusive of all beings." All this is not easy, since "human lives are 'ten thousand beautiful mistakes' as the old masters liked to point out." Jensen's is Zen with scraped knees, zazen (meditation) with an itch. Still, "we find our voice each day in the words the universe utters."

M*A*S*H star and activist Mike Farrell slated for Chico visit Saturday

From a bit part in The Graduate, to eight years on M*A*S*H as B.J. Hunnicutt, five seasons of Providence, and a part in Desperate Housewives, shy Mike Farrell has realized a childhood dream of becoming an actor. As a kid growing in West Hollywood he delivered groceries to the likes of Groucho Marx, Jimmy Stewart, and Lucille Ball, but these days "the beef" is in his outspoken activism.

It's all detailed in the new paperback edition of "Just Call Me Mike: A Journey To Actor and Activist" ($16.95 from Akashic Books).

Farrell will be appearing in Chico for a book signing and free-wheeling question session this Saturday at 7:00 p.m. at the Trinity United Methodist Church, 285 East 5th St. Tickets for the free event are available from the co-sponsors, Chico Peace and Justice Center and Lyon Books.

Both George McGovern and Bill O'Reilly have praised Farrell for his honesty, and the book highlights Farrell's decades-long involvement with what he calls "people issues" ( including "equal rights for women and minorities, . . . the right of the disadvantaged to a social safety net, . . . and an end to the death penalty").

But Farrell writes that he is not a pacifist: "I believe in the right of self-defense, be it personal or national, but I also believe in finding peaceful resolutions to disputes and oppose war except in the face of the most dire national threat." One time, introduced to Nicaraguan Sandinista officials extolling the virtue of the socialist revolution, Farrell was sickened by the "triumphalism" and evasion when he ventured questions about how "people's lives were being improved." In effect he asked "where's the beef?" and found only the stuff one finds in a barnyard.

Married since 1984 to actress Shelly Fabares, Farrell believes 9/11 should have been treated as "a grotesque and inexcusable crime" rather than an act of war; "America's emotional tension found an outlet in the war in Afghanistan. And it played into the hands of media manipulators who transformed George W. Bush from an inept bungler to a war president."

Farrell's Hollywood stories are frequently funny, but the author never loses sight of his bottom line: "Everyone deserves what everyone wants--love, attention, and respect."

Chico novelist writes of the power of love

It begins with a softball game in Madison, Iowa in 1950; before the story ends a young man faces almost certain death far away in the Korean War. The story is a tribute to a young woman's love--as well as the survival teachings of one George Grey Eagle on the Blackhawk Indian Reservation. It's a romance built on the theme of acceptance of those who are culturally and religiously different than ourselves; after all, one character says, "If God can accept people in heaven from all faiths, then who are we to question whom God accepts?"

"Love's Journey" ($19.95 in paperback from Books by Mode, www.booksbymode.com) is by Chico CPA James (Jim) Rozendaal. Rozendaal will be signing copies at Lyon Books in Chico on Tuesday, Sept. 23, at 7:00 p.m.

The first-time novelist was raised on an Iowa farm and knows the importance of religious tradition in small-town life. And therein lies the rub. Tommy Van Haaften, just out of high school and working in construction, falls in love with Allison Jorgenson, a tall blond Swede completing nursing school at the University Hospital in Des Moines. But the Dutch ought not mix with the Swedes, at least according to family tradition. The two fathers are adamant that their children not marry "outside their faith."

The story is straightforward and the language (and the lovers) chaste and even polite. This is in part a tale of military heroism, but it's also the story of almost mystical intuition. Grey Eagle talks to Tommy about Allison: "Love is the driving force in the universe. Your connection to her will be your ticket back. So the stronger the connection, the more certain your ticket." To Allison, grieving over Tommy's distance, he says: "You need to find your own sense of knowing. And when you do, it will sustain you no matter what the external circumstances."

When Tommy is wounded, captured and beaten on the battle front, his mother feels similar pains. She remains confident of his return.

Along the way Allison is befriended by a newspaper publisher who takes an interest in Tommy's ability to withstand torture. Eventually his story is published and becomes a book entitled "Love's Journey." Those looking for a happy ending will find it.

Chico poet rests a spell, and remembers

An author's note says Chico poet Tom Fuszard is also "a corporate communications consultant, speechwriter, lecturer and speakers' coach," and his background shows in the clarity and directness of his work.

"Places To Sit and Other Poems" ($9.95 in paperback from Felicidad Press out of Chico) is a collection of remembrances. In "Regrets" the poet writes: "Not wise to dwell on the past, / they tell me, / but now I have the time." The time is spent thinking about "What I Learned When I Started to Listen": "That wars are fought / mostly by people / who had nothing to do / with starting them // That a lot of people / are afraid all the time // That much of the world / is in a mess / and a lot of it is because / nobody listens."

These simple words give the reader pause, especially on a day of national remembrance.

Many of the poems are personal, recalling boyhood memories. In "Bird," the poet writes: "I have no idea why / I took your life. // One thinks little / about things like that / as a boy of nine. // You were there / on your little branch / and I with my / puny air rifle / just shot and you fell / and bled in the leaves / and died. // It was not to test my aim, / of that I am sure. / I had killed hundreds / of bottlecaps, / executed dozens / of glass jars. // . . . I did not think about / eggs in a nest / waiting to be warmed / or fledglings waiting / to be fed / or another waiting / for your return / and never knowing / why you did not."

The opening poem, "Places To Sit," has something to say about a park bench, a barstool, a witness chair, and more. Including deep grass: "For people in love, mostly. / People who want to be / away from the crowd. / See, he's brought a little book of poems. / He will read some, and they will see / the depths of each other's eyes / for the first time."

This little book of poems remembers love.

Advocate of Hindu Vedanta to sign books in Chico

Anna Hourihan, publisher of Redding-based Vedantic Shores Press (www.VedanticShoresPress.com), has edited a series of lectures on the Hindu philosophical school of Vedanta which serve as a good introduction to the teachings of Hindu mysticism. Delivered by her late husband at the University of Guelph, School of Continuing Studies, in Ontario, Canada, the lectures are presented in "Children of Immortal Bliss: A New Perspective on Our True Identity Based on the Ancient Vedanta Philosophy of India" ($16.50 in paperback), by Paul Hourihan.

Anna Hourihan will be speaking and signing copies at Lyon Books in Chico, Wednesday, September 10 at 7:00 p.m.

The book begins with the claims of Vedanta, that "nothing exists except the Divine Being, or Brahman. . . . Truth is One; sages call it by different names. . . . The very nature of the Soul is divine: the Cosmic Self manifests as the individual Self or Atman. . . . The primary goal in life is to realize, through direct personal experience, the divine nature within our own self."

For the author, the ancient Hindu teachings of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita are "the most sophisticated of all religious writings" and "represent the seedbed of everything that is deep, universal and mystical in the world." Thus the mystical traditions of Islam (the Sufis), Christianity (especially Meister Eckhart), Buddhism (Zen), and Taoism are all "confirmations" of Vedanta teachings.

Though Vedanta accepts "all religions as valid," what Hourihan means is "not the truth in them but the truth in us"; that is, a religion is inspired to the extent that it helps convince the person that his or her Self is identical to Brahman. The path to such realization, the author says, is through meditation, the experience through which even ordinary persons gain "the awakening of our true self."

The ego-power of individuality, including a fascination with "occult techniques," must be eliminated; "we are not sinners seeking somehow to be saved but rather we are an unknown purity seeking to merge with the Unknown Purity."

Buddhists, Christians and Muslims may well be uneasy at Hourihan's reinterpretation of their doctrines, but read with discernment the book is a clear exposition of the claim that "The Self is all, and you are the Self."