“Blind Curves: A Woman, A Motorcycle, And A Journey To Reinvent Herself”

An organizational change expert in the corporate world, Linda Crill (lindacrill.com) found herself, at age 57 and widowed, wondering “What now?”

When her husband was diagnosed with mesothelioma cancer, “in our last eleven months together,” she writes, “we grew closer, bonded by our deeply shared mission of his survival and finding ways to enjoy each day.”

She not only felt grief at his passing, but grief about losing her old self. She tried to patch a new self together: “I redecorated parts of my home—more modern, playful, and colorful—reflecting an expression I had modified when we married. Slowly, I developed new interests—knitting scarves, soul-stirring music, and adventure travel.  On the one-year anniversary of being alone, I was surprised to find myself more miserable than ever. The grief hadn’t subsided. Instead it had grown and was raw and unending.”

What was needed, she found, was not a patch but whole new way of approaching the world. And it turned out to involve a Harley, a group of three companions, and a road trip of 2500 miles from Vancouver to Mendocino and back. It’s all there in “Blind Curves: A Woman, A Motorcycle, And A Journey To Reinvent Herself” ($16.99 in paperback from Skyhorse Publishing; also in audiobook and Amazon Kindle formats).

Now a Chicoan and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute instructor, Crill’s adventures in learning to ride a Harley, and having one fall over on her, are told with humility and grace. Once she passes the DMV test the real test comes in learning to ride with her companions over rough roads and hairpin turns, always looking Fear in the face. Who knows what lies just past that blind curve?

As Crill becomes more skilled as a rider, clad in her leather gear, her chosen watchword is “VROOM!”; the trip, she writes, “changed something inside me as I processed my fears about surviving with the excitement of riding. A resilient ‘new’ Linda was reinvented by riding through the blind curves of this journey.”

Crill’s journey (including being a cancer survivor) is a beautifully-told travelogue of the outer and inner world, a delight and inspiration.

“Government Contracting: Ethical Promises And Perils In Public Procurement (3rd Edition)”

William Sims Curry, the “Principle Consultant” of WSC Consulting in Chico (wsc-consulting.com), found in his research that “95% of the 2021 research participants were using anomalous formulas to evaluate proposed pricing” of goods and services private companies wanted to sell to various government agencies.

So, in the third edition of “Government Contracting: Ethical Promises And Perils In Public Procurement” ($74.95 in hardcover from Routledge; also for Amazon Kindle), Curry proposes 48 best practices for avoiding corruption in the public procurement process, where public institutions spend tax dollars buying from private suppliers.

Curry guides those professionals in government responsible for procurement through each stage of the process, from surveying the field to see what’s available before any bids are requested, through evaluating proposals to awarding, managing, and closing out contracts. Without the proper controls and oversight things can go wrong ethically--and quickly; the book’s “public procurement corruption wall of shame” lists almost 50 issues, including “abuse of power,” “favoritism,” “suicide,” and “slovenly conduct.”

The book is full of bad examples; in 2017 the Justice Department reported that UK-based “manufacturer and distributor of aerospace, defense, marine, and energy power systems Rolls-Royce Plc, agreed to pay approximately $800 million in total to the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil for bribing officials in exchange for the award of government contracts.” This is more than a little oopsie.

Curry points to the use by the Department of Defense, in evaluating proposals, of “adjectival, confidence-assessment, and color-coded scoring” which makes the system ripe for gaming. Government officials can fiddle with their confidence-assessment, for instance, to ensure “a favored contractor wins the contract.”

Instead, Curry advocates for “total weighted scoring” in which proposals are scored numerically and there is “numeric weighting of proposed evaluation criteria.” That, he says, “leads to precise identification of the contractor offering the best value to the government and deters procurement corruption.”

The book also explores the ethical minefield of gratuities. Is it okay for contractors to provide government officials with coffee and pastries? Maybe, but not in government offices. 

Well, how about furniture? Uh, no. 

Escort services? You’ve got to be kidding.

“Red Skies (Aftermath)”

A mystery lies at the heart of the second book in the “Big Joe Carson” trilogy from longtime Chico resident David Dirks, now Brentwood-based. In the first, “Particle Beam (For Such A Time),” by Dirks with Dennis E. Jones, it’s the 1980s, and a tremendous explosion rocks the secret Hans M. Mark National Laboratory near Fort Wayne, Indiana. When the proverbial dust settles, it becomes clear the Department of Energy facility, and its super-secret particle beam weapon, are the victims of treason and espionage.

And so, in “Red Skies (Aftermath)” ($10.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) by David H. Dirks, an investigation results in “apprehending Department of Energy’s HMM Lab lead scientist Horatio Glen Knightsen and accomplice Castle Marks….  While directing one of the decade's most significant Star Wars projects, Knightsen sold the plans for the top-secret Tesla Particle Beam weapon to the Israelis for $15 million.”

Knightsen has cultivated some very powerful friends and while he and Marks remain free the lab itself is on the verge of closing without Congressional approval of a new project. The folks from Grumman, military sticklers who rankle the lab’s engineers with their insistence on weekly psychological tests, are put in charge during the reorganization. A new laser weapon program gets the go-ahead, but Senior Engineer Joe Carson comes to recognize more is going on with Knightsen than meets the eye.

His beautiful neighbors, twins Sunny and Bunny Valencia, undercover US Marshalls (whose father had run a Colombian drug cartel) “found the two traitors on a yacht in the Azores and successfully extradited them back to Fort Wayne to await trial.” Carson, on administrative leave, joins the twins, and private investigator Rick Stone (who is secretly recording Knightsen and Marks), to sail Big Catch, Knightsen’s ship, now US Treasury property, from the Azores to Florida.

Investigators had found $10M dollars in Knighten’s Credit Suisse account, meaning $5M is missing. The ship is attacked and later sunk. Would a rescue operation find the missing money? And, tragically, Stone is found dead—but did he really commit suicide?

While the novel hints at answers, it also sets the scene for more revelations in the final book.

“The Boy Who Earned His Magic”

Three schoolyard bullies hold Howell Evans, twelve (almost thirteen), upside down by his ankles. It’s just another day in the town of Mount Shasta, where Howell lives with his parents and sister. Tormented by Bully Harold Bully, Pug the Pyro, and Sloppy Jack, Howell hears them howling and chanting “Witch, witch, your mother is a witch. Hunt her down, tie her up, and toss her in a ditch.”

This particular day, however, Howell has a series of strange encounters, including a Latino boy who cannot see; a creole girl who cannot hear; a Navajo girl with a great wolf; and an unsettling man in black whose eye patch glows. Then comes news that Howell’s mother, Rhiannon, named after a Welsh princess, has been in a car crash in the Sierras driving home from New Mexico. 

Howell’s eccentric uncle Tal (who drives an old VW van) explains all the weird appearances mean “they” have his mother and Howell must ride with him to find her—and prepare for the mysterious “transfer.” Otherwise the evil Drygoni will win. 

The tale is told in “The Boy Who Earned His Magic” ($15.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) by Chicoan Lynn Elliott, playwright, novelist, Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Chico State. Originally published in 2020 as “The Crossingway,” the book has now also become a teleplay.

The script won monthly honors from the London Indie Film Festival in Best Family/Children’s Film, Best Feature Script, and Best Television/Pilot Program or Series categories. If Elliott “earns his magic” and the series is produced, it will make for a phantasmagorical ride.

Born in Wales, Elliott notes in a talk that when he emigrated to the US in his twenties he wanted to know more of the “magic” of indigenous cultures that seemed to emanate from New Mexico, “a land of desert landscapes, howling wind witches, a ghostly woman in white…. A land where people ... still live with their tales and stories of the battles between good and evil … in this mysterious land with its ancient cliff dwellings and deep, haunting canyons.”

Welcome, dear friends, to “the place between here and there.”

"Sierra Blue"

Though a longtime Reno resident, prolific writer Suzanne Morgan Williams (suzannemorganwilliams.com) has fond California memories of visiting her great aunt in Oroville, and of Redding, where her husband proposed.

In her latest novel (for ages 10-15) a ninth-grader tells her own story--wanting a new start, like a new year, only to realize she brings her “old self” along for the ride. Wanting to escape cruel words, she is fully capable of using cruel words herself.

So it is with fourteen-year-old Magic Kendall. She just wants to hide. At her school in Tillamook, Oregon word is out that Magic is psychic. She sees colorful auras around humans and other animals—from rats to horses—and is plagued with dreams of future events which have a habit of coming to pass. When an opportunity comes to help her great-aunt Leah recover from an accident in the High Sierra town of “Ibis Springs,” she figures time away will let the cruel jokes die down.

But all her psychic powers little prepare her for what lies ahead, and especially the deep connection with a thoroughbred filly named Mountain Rose whom Leah is preparing for the racetrack, and who Magic renames “Sierra Blue” ($15.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle).

Leah is training therapy horses now, and Magic learns to help with riders, each with some form of “differentness.” Then, one stormy day, a terrible vision engulfs Magic as she bicycles out to the highway to get cell service. She is thus on the scene when the horse trailer with Mountain Rose, being transported by sixteen-year-old T.J. and his dad, hits ice and careens off the road, severely injuring the horse.

Magic is able to call 911 and, after the vet arrives, crawls into the overturned trailer to comfort the horse and, sensing her aura, guides even the vet in Blue’s rehabilitation. “I could see that she was a blue roan with a dark mane and tail. And those amazing, blue tinged eyes.” When Blue is well enough to race in Los Angeles, another horrendous premonition means Magic must confront Blue’s uncertain future. 

Williams’ novel is a wonderfully immersive story of self-discovery, friendship--and new directions.

“Lassen & Shasta California Ski Atlas: A Photographic Guide To Skiing California’s Most Iconic Volcanoes”

Though I may get out over my skis pretty frequently, they are only metaphorical. Dexter (Dex) Burke, on the other hand, knows the real thing. According to a news release, “Burke was born and raised in Bend, Oregon where he fell in love with backcountry skiing in the Three Sisters Wilderness. That passion has led him to ski all over from California, Oregon, Washington and beyond.”

Burke, with help from SWS Mountain Guides, has just published a stunning full-color, 10x10-inch “Lassen & Shasta California Ski Atlas: A Photographic Guide To Skiing California’s Most Iconic Volcanoes” ($32 in paperback from alpenglowpublishingstudio.com). “The goal of this book,” Burke writes, “is to keep things simple and give you the quick 411 on skiing around Lassen Volcanic National Park and Mt. Shasta…. Consider this book the ‘Cliff Notes’ to skiing some of the area’s best descents.”

Most all of the full-page overhead images—did I say stunning?—were taken by Burke in the late spring of 2023 after the extraordinary snowfall. He cautions backcountry skiers that “most, if not all, the ski lines mentioned in this book are avalanche paths. The slopes can and will kill people.” Take avalanche classes, know how to use your equipment, go out “with someone who actually knows that they’re doing, not just an internet buddy. Seriously, don’t die; dying sucks.”

That said, the atlas provides 17 access points, verified to work with Google Maps, along with dozens of routes (and the page numbers where they’re shown). For example, in the Mt. Shasta region Konwakiton Chute is 2800 ft. downhill; it’s 5 miles and 7700 ft. uphill from Clear Creek trailhead at 6500 ft. And there, on three pages, lies the Chute in all its snowy glory.

Each image is labeled with key features; on one of the pages showing Konwakiton Chute there are labels for Mud Creek Bowl, Sargents Ridge, and the I-wouldn’t-go-near-that-if-I-were-you area called Avalanche Gulch. The images of Lassen Peak are especially breathtaking.

This book, and a companion volume, “Trinity Alps California Ski Atlas,” are a snow skier’s delight. And delightful for those of us more into sno-cones.

“Waiting On The Word: A Poem A Day For Advent, Christmas and Epiphany”

“We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,” writes poet and Anglican priest Malcolm Guite, “But he is with a million displaced people/ On the long road of weariness and want./ … His family is up and on that road,/ Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,/ … The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power,/ And death squads spread their curse across the world./ But every Herod dies, and comes alone/ To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.”

This portion of Guite’s poem, “Refugee,” commemorating the Feast of the Holy Innocents on December 28, reminds readers of “what might be called ‘the shadow side’ of the Christian story, … a season that looks back at the people who waited in darkness for the coming light of Christ and yet forward to a fuller light still to come and illuminate our darkness.”

For Guite, who has performed in San Francisco and other US (and UK) venues, poetry can “help us restore that quietness, that inner peace, that willingness to wait unfulfilled in the dark, in the midst of a season that conspires to do nothing but fling bling and tinsel at us….”

“Waiting On The Word: A Poem A Day For Advent, Christmas and Epiphany” ($15.99 in paperback from Canterbury Press Norwich; also for Amazon Kindle) provides reflections on each poem so that the revelatory words of a John Donne lie clear before the reader. 

Contemporary poet Luci Shaw, in “Kenosis,” writes of the babe: “So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door,/ broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash,/ wept for the sad heart of the human race.”

Advent brings joy, too; Guite includes his sonnets “written in response to the seven Advent prayers known as the ‘O Antiphons’” addressing Christ “by the mysterious titles found in the Old Testament, particularly in Isaiah: ‘O Wisdom!’ ‘O Root!” ‘O Key!’ ‘O Light! ‘O Emmanuel!’” For December 19, Christ is the “root of Jesse,” but more: 

“For now is winter, now is withering/ Unless we let you root us deep within,/ Under the ground of being, graft us in.”

“Nothing Gone Missing”

Ridge-area novelist Brian T. Marshall takes the reader to London and Berlin as two unlikely friends track down “Nothing Gone Missing” ($12 in paperback from missppelled press; also for Amazon Kindle). Which turns out to be really Something.

First up is Errol Walker, a cop, “a DI for London Metro,” who is a little too free with his fists. Suspended, he introduces himself as “Error.” “Well,” he tells Trile Chandry, a Pakistani man who will become his buddy, “it was supposed to be Errol—Errol Flynn and all—but who wants a name like that? And then with the way I was always screwing things up, flunking out at maths, somebody came up with Error and it just seemed to stick.”

Now to Trile. “Actually, back home,” he explains to Error, “it is two syllables, not one. Tree-Lay. But once I moved here, I got tired of telling people they were saying it wrong. And so I decided, along with a new home, I would have a new name too.” So, yes, Trile and Error.

Trile works in Receiving at a mysterious firm called Tyler-Downs. What does Trile “receive”? “None of us really know.”  One day he happens to see something very strange changing hands. Shortly thereafter his boss is fired. Something isn’t right.

Meantime, Error quietly drops in at the station and finds a fellow cop going through the missing persons files. Error notices Christian Matterly is missing. Matterly, he’s told, is “some high mucky-muck over at the Tate. Apparently he’s some genius at fleecing the rich, getting them all to contribute.”

Somehow Tyler-Downs, Matterly, and the Tate gallery are all connected. Before it’s over Trile will find and hide the something that is Nothing (to gaze at it is to almost lose oneself in darkness) which will then go missing again, and Trile will be incarcerated (“Outside it is the day called Thursday. Inside it is just now. A day that is just like all the rest, so it doesn’t deserve a name”). Error must put the plot pieces together which turns out to be an art.

It's a delightful romp proving once again that he who has a Tate’s is lost.

“The Golden City: A Story Of Love, Loss And Triumph Spanning Generations”

Anthony (Tony) Colburn, who ran track and field under coach Larry Burleson at Chico State, graduated in 1974. Now living in North Carolina, Colburn has turned his love of the Bay Area, Lake Tahoe and the old goldfields of Nevada into a historical novel focusing at first on San Francisco around the start of the twentieth century.

But that’s not the end of the story. His characters, intertwined with real events, leave a legacy that is only realized very much later. “The Golden City: A Story Of Love, Loss And Triumph Spanning Generations” ($14.95 in paperback from Luminare Press; also for Amazon Kindle) refers not only to San Francisco but to a massive ferryboat. 

As Matthew and Julia discover in our own time, “There were a number of boats built right in the city along the water front south of where the Bay Bridge is now. The ‘Golden City’ was one of those vessels; a classic double ender with a coal fired steam engine, side paddle wheels, with a large ‘walking I beam’ transferring power to the wheels via a huge single piston.”

Our hero, Matthew Donohue, is born in Carson City, Nevada, in 1885, of an Irish immigrant father and a mother who is a housekeeper to a womanizing US Senator. Matthew has periodic visions of horrific scenes yet to come but, after working as a ferryman at Lake Tahoe, decides to make his fortune in San Francisco. There he meets Julia, the young daughter of parents who own a music store. 

The first part of the book seems sweetness and light, as Matthew is determined to impress Julia’s parents (who hold working-class Matthew, part of the Golden City’s crew, in low esteem) and ask for Julia’s hand in marriage, planned, it turns out, on the day of the big quake.

The novel turns dark in its description of the subsequent fires and the loss of life, and there’s a mystery about the fate of a gold bar Matthew possessed, with many more hidden aboard the ferry. Only a hundred years later is the truth revealed—by another Matthew and Julia. 

It’s 24-carat fun.

“Setting Sun Story, Book 1: Awash In Jealous Freedoms”

“I grew up here in Chico,” Doug Hufford writes me. “From a young age, I've been interested in storytelling.” What began as a short story writing project at Pleasant Valley High School is now a series of novels (published and planned) portraying a strange fantasy otherworld very different from our own, and yet perhaps not so different.

“Setting Sun Story, Book 1: Awash In Jealous Freedoms” ($18 in paperback from Douglas Hufford Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle) is more than a sword-and-sorcery tale full of dangerous visions and powerful magic. “As my ‘adolescent “whys”’ ended I was able to look back on my teenage, and later on, early adult mindsets with a critical lens…. I hope that this sort of post-modern, tragic, transcendentalist approach to such a story could act as an inspiring place for folks to get a fresh view of their own lives.”

Hufford imagines a great spired city, Baustas, ruled by powerful Deacons who are answerable to a mysterious figure called “the Savior,” that is a bulwark against the “Savages” outside. Baustas is “Place of Peace,” an “ark” to carry its inhabitants from the present world, bathed in the constant red glow from the sun and moon, into a future world of light.

For the Prophecy to be fulfilled, the Deacons must raise up a cadre of Chosen along with fighters called Patriots. Young Adam, as the story opens, may be one among the Chosen, but it is unclear whether that is his true mantle. Adam thinks those within the city, “blessed by a divine Savior,” are “refugees from reality.”

The Deacons say the “world outside is … a place forsaken,” and “the Baustians … should be able to cure the world of its disorientation. Cleanse the Chaos, and heal it all.” But only a few, the Deacons and the Chosen, “have ever left this place.” 

Elsewhere in the story, young Erin and Rain, brothers in arms, discover a mechanistic world underneath Baustas, and together with Jun, a young woman of mysterious origins, must face the implications of free will in a real world not controlled by the Savior. A cliffhanger ending awaits Book 2.

“Sunrise Gratitude: 365 Morning Meditations For Joyful Days All Year Long”

“You are amazing and your dreams matter,” says the entry for November 21. “You are here for a reason. There is purpose to your life. Even if it’s not clear what it is, your soul knows. What if you paid attention to your deepest desires and gave them room to breathe? Imagine if you took a step to make those dreams come true and the courage that would build by taking that jump into your destiny!”

That daily affirmation touches many of the themes in “Sunrise Gratitude: 365 Morning Meditations For Joyful Days All Year Long” ($19.99 in hardcover from Rock Point) by Emily Silva Hockstra. The author, a Chico State grad, left a corporate job to become a life coach (soulsadventures.com), “helping women harness their bravery to bring their gifts into the world.” 

Now living in San Diego with her husband, Silva explains that “I was not a morning person” until “something shifted, and I started to enjoy my mornings. I find the stillness before the day begins to be a time of contemplation, silence, and beauty.”

Each single-paragraph meditation, she writes, is meant to give readers “encouragement, inspiration, and something to think about each day.” Full-color seascapes appear throughout the book; Silva writes that in the morning, “seagulls are singing their morning songs and the air is crisp. I am pausing to offer my sunrise gratitude….”

Storms come, of course. “When a misunderstanding occurs, respond in love. Love heals. Communicate from the heart with loving intent” (January 12). “Let hope enter when doubt arrives. Even if you don’t know how things will work out, know that the universe hears your deepest desires” (March 10). “The things we wish weren’t happening are actually creating resilience and a new level of wisdom” (August 6).

Though my own theological commitments don’t align with Silva’s worldview, there is nevertheless in her book a spirit of thanksgiving for life itself that readers of many stripes can celebrate.

For Silva, “Gratitude is an antidote to stress…. The more you can find moments of gratitude, the easier it is for your mind to release fearful, anxious, and stressful thoughts” (December 15).

“Extraordinary Women With Cameras: 35 Photographers Who Changed How We See The World”

Darcy Reed, Petaluma-based author and Chico State Theatre Arts grad, wants to introduce kids ages 8-12 to some of the most creative women photographers in world history. Pairing with illustrator Venessa Perez, Reed accomplishes her goal with a quirky and colorful book, “Extraordinary Women With Cameras: 35 Photographers Who Changed How We See The World” ($16.95 in hardcover from rockynook.com; also for Amazon Kindle).

Unexpectedly, there are no photographs in the book; instead, each photographer receives a short biography (one or two paragraphs) along with a whimsical, full-page illustration of the photographer herself, with a key quote if available. The idea is to invite readers to find out more; to that end there’s a QR code and link to a page listing each photographer and an associated website (a Wikipedia page or artist’s site).

The book is not just about exploring, it’s about doing. As Reed says in the introduction: “We’ve included some fun photo ideas for you to try and new photography terms for you to learn. We hope this book inspires you to pick up your own camera and start snapping interesting photos. Who knows? Maybe your work will be featured in a museum or book one day!”

Among the 35 are some familiar names, such as Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) whose “photos of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression and prisoners in Japanese internment camps during World War II made sure Americans would never forget those tragedies.”  Vogue and Vanity Fair photographer Annie Leibovitz is here as is Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), LIFE magazine’s first woman photographer and the first “woman allowed in combat zones during World War II.”

But the book is also replete with perhaps lesser-known photographers from around the world, including Dulce Pinzón, a contemporary artist that Forbes dubbed “one of the 50 most creative Mexicans in the world”; “her iconic … series featured several immigrant workers in New York City dressed as superheroes. Her goal was to highlight the invisible ‘superheroes’ people encounter in everyday life.”

Reed adds: “Take a photo of someone you think is an everyday superhero and share it with them!” Now, where’s my phone?

“Distant Finish”

Commander David D. Bruhn, U.S. Navy (Retired) is the consummate naval historian, publishing more than two dozen books on the topic. But the Chico resident, and Chico State grad, also has running in mind—as in “road racing,” road, trail, and relay racing.

He’s now completed a trilogy “devoted to competitive running in northern California in the 1970s.” “Toe The Mark” focuses on Chico’s high school running programs; “Stride Out” turns its attention to Chico State; and the final book in the series, “Distant Finish” ($29 in paperback from Heritage Books, Inc.) covers “road racing” from the Bay Area northward.

“Distant Finish” is co-authored by Jack Leydig, who not only served as the president of the West Valley Track Club but published 81 issues of the Northern California Running Review from November 1969 to Spring 1981; the story of running in the 1970s draws heavily on this “bible of the sport.” 

Each chapter presents stats and stories for a single year. There’s an appendix and index, and 176 historical photographs. The cover shows “Mad Dog” Bill Scobey of Humboldt State College, who in 1970 told a reporter he averaged running 125 miles a week on “dedicated” weeks;  and Luanne Park, “a 1978 Chico High graduate” who ran for Butte College in 1980, achieving a time of 2:11.07 in the 800 meters, “number one … on the college’s all-time Top 10 List.”

“Bob Darling was the San Francisco Olympic Club’s second runner in the 1969 Bay to Breakers with a 28th place finish…. In autumn 1969, Darling became Chico State College’s second-ever All-American in the sport of cross country with his 14th place finish at the national championships.” The book closes with how Darling got the bittersweet nickname “the Rocket.”

“Readers who ran road races in northern California in the 70s,” the authors note, “may well find their names in this book.” The decade began “just before the ‘running boom’ spurred by Frank Shorter winning the gold medal in the 1972 Olympic Marathon…. The so-called running fad that developed during this period never slowed down once it laced up its shoes.” As Darling writes in a foreword, these “distance runners blazed the trail for future generations!”

“Carl Sandburg: American Experience”

In 2019 Redding playwright-actor Max Walter created and performed “Spirit of Carl Sandburg: The People’s Poet in His Own Words.” It’s now been transformed into a selective anthology, with thoughtful commentary, of Sandburg’s work across some “six different fields of writing.”

“Carl Sandburg: American Experience” ($15.95 in paperback from Larado Publishing; also from the author at pprmkr1@gmail.com) presents Sandburg (1878-1967) as one who, “through his poems, songs, and the telling of Abraham Lincoln … helped Americans discover their national identity.”

Perhaps best known for his epic poetic cycle, “The People, Yes,” and the six volume biography of Lincoln, Sandburg also collected folk songs in “The American Songbag” and wrote “Rootabaga Stories” for children (where, in Rootabaga County, it’s “Over and Under country. Nobody gets out of the way of anybody else. They either go over or under”).

In 1950, in a preface to “Complete Poems,” Sandburg wrote that he still aspired to be a writer. “I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.”

Sandburg is plain spoken, especially in his poetry, seeking to walk in the footsteps of Walt Whitman, whom he called “The Poet of Democracy.” As is Sandburg: “One of my theses,” he writes, “hovers around the point that the masses of people have gone wrong in the past and will again in the future—but in the main their direction is right.”

As a Chicago-based reporter he covered the race riots there in 1919 and in 1965 was honored by the NAACP with a Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Sandburg defined poetry as “a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.” 

But the one who told us, sweetly, that “The fog comes/ on little cat feet” is also the one who writes, in a poem discovered in 2013: “Here is a revolver./ It has an amazing language all its own./ It delivers unmistakable ultimatums./ It is the last word./ … And nothing in human philosophy persists more strangely than the old belief that God is always on the side of those who have the most revolvers.”

“Dangle Him Purposely: An Autobiographical Novel”

“I admit I spent three decades practicing law,” Chicoan T.B. O’Neill says on his website (tboneill.com). “Trial work did allow me to fight the old battles of my youth (primarily against authority of any kind), and it provided a treasure trove of material that writers search for tirelessly.”

But he also finds treasure in the story of his early life. His poverty-stricken grade-school years, in the 1950s, with a dysfunctional family always on the move, are narrated in “Timmy: A Boy, An Era, A Family’s Desperate Journey,” part of the “A Mile Beyond” series.

The second in the series, “Dangle Him Purposely: An Autobiographical Novel” ($13.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle), brings Tim into the 1960s and the Vietnam War era as his family settles in Chico. Told in the third person, the story divides sharply in two; hijinks, fistfights, and sexual escapades fill Part I, “Vignettes of Adolescence.” 

Ah, Chico. “By 1959, the year Tim’s family arrived, a smug optimism pervaded the town. A big election filled the airwaves with Camelot approaching, Y.A. Tittle and John Brodie were throwing for the 49ers, and rock and roll rumbled over KPAY and KHSL.”

Part II, “War and Ruminations,” brings Tim to a strange battlefield; though he yearns for direct combat, his work with psyops means befriending local villagers and showing them cartoons and John Wayne movies. In this part the hijinks, fistfights, and sexual escapades are shrouded in Tim’s first-hand experience of the idiocy of the war. Friends die trying to make inconsequential gains. Locals plead with the Americans not to abandon them; Tim knows they will.

“Then came snapshots of recent memory—of the legless ARVN’s belly oozing, of dead American boys laid out like lumber, of ducking from crackling AKs, of . . . emotions at full throttle, colliding like atoms in a particle accelerator. His reaction was swift and uncaring.”

O’Neill cautions readers not to look for a happy ending, though toward Tim’s time of discharge he is reading the classics and mulling some kind of legal career. In elegant, riveting, sometimes graphic prose, O’Neill chronicles how he became himself, the result of all that dangling.

“The Broken Chain: The Ravenwood Hauntings Book 2”

It’s ten days before Halloween. For Tamika Little, 11, her dreams recall a horrific incident at the hands of an abuser. “A long, slimy tongue slithered out of its fang-infested mouth and slid across her face, leaving a trail of saliva in its wake.”

But though Tamika, in an unnamed city somewhere near “California State University,” awakens to a world like our own, it is a world where ghosts are a thing, and where Tamika, her soon-to-be older sister Serena Ravenwood, her boyfriend Luis Chavez (who can see ghosts), and, unexpectedly, the bully Butch Rodgers (who can see human auras) must band together to stop a string of murders.

Prolific Chico writer N.J. Hanson continues the horror, first told in “An Empty Swing,” with “The Broken Chain: The Ravenwood Hauntings Book 2” ($12.95 in paperback from Ink Drop Press; also for Amazon Kindle). As the events hurtle toward October 31, Hanson’s sure hand guides readers into the lives of the main characters and their interconnections.

On a dark roadway leading out of town, a Buick LaCrosse stops and Trisha Silverton, 18, tries to get away from the unnamed abuse from her three “friends,” Joey, Tony, and Samantha, but it’s too late. When Tony bashes her head repeatedly against the pavement, killing her, haughty Sam takes her opal necklace and purse to make it look like a robbery, and they all speed off.

But Trisha’s ghost is not pleased; the necklace is imbued with murderous energy to exact revenge, no matter who stands in its way. Tamika’s mother is taken over by the necklace to wreak the executions, and psychic Morgana tells the teenagers they must find the ghost behind the killings after four murders in three days.

“The pendant's fluorescent green, white, and blue opal stone glistened in the moonlight that fell through the window. The chain started to move. At first, it was just a small twitch, a few links of the chain, then it began to crawl. The necklace crept along the floor, slithering like a snake under the door and down the hall.” 

A string of murders, and murders by a string. Beware the jewelry box.

“Haunted San Jose”

Elizabeth Kile, Chico State grad, longtime San Jose resident, and lover of ghost stories, fields a passel of them in “Haunted San Jose” ($21.99 in paperback from The History Press; also for Amazon Kindle.)

“I am a believer in ghosts,” she writes, “but I also consider myself a skeptic, looking for rational explanations and relying on common sense. But there are things that can’t be simply explained away, and a couple of experiences have convinced me that there is something beyond our realm of normal understanding—the very definition of paranormal.”

Yet, she admits, “part of the pleasure of sharing ghost stories is in the telling, not necessarily in the believing. If a story is compelling and frightening enough, does it matter if it’s true? Probably not. We can continue to scare ourselves with stories we know are implausible, but out of respect for those who came before us, we should also acknowledge the historical record.”

That’s precisely what she does in telling the tales of local landmarks, including the “Winchester Mystery House,”  whose “stairs to nowhere” have a decidedly non-ghostly explanation. 

But there are schools, like Del Mar High, where “legend has it that … a boy was murdered by his best friend. Witnesses who have been on school grounds in the middle of the night say that if you listen carefully, at 3:15 a.m., the time the murder was supposed to have occurred, you can hear a boy screaming for help, his cries echoing across what are now the athletic fields.”

Readers will find stories about haunted hotels (like the Sainte Claire, with the sound of high heels clicking on—the carpeted floor), parks (like Alum Rock Park, haunted by cannibals), roads (where spectral figures visit drivers on Hicks Road), and private homes (like one where “a teenage girl with blonde hair” walks through closed doors; Kile suggests this is a “residual haunting … a spirit performing actions she carried out when she was alive”).

Kile debunks many of the stories as urban legends once she investigates the historical accounts (and there’s an extensive bibliography) but makes room for spiritual energies to manifest themselves in odd ways, all in creepy good fun.

“Religion And Public Health During The Time Of COVID-19”

“Our most basic contention,” write editors Joel Zimbelman and Andrew Flescher in a new collection of scholarly essays, “is that the pain of the pandemic in its first three years … was exacerbated by the disconnect between the public health, national political, and broad media discourse on the one hand, and the rich reflections and insights of various religious communities that span the globe, on the other.”

Zimbelman, from the Chico State Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities, and Flescher, a former Chico State colleague now Core Faculty in the Public Health Program at State University of New York at Stony Brook, have brought together ten essays (and their own introduction) all dealing with the role religious traditions played in the worldwide response to Covid.

“Religion And Public Health During The Time Of COVID-19” ($73.58 in hardcover from MDPI Books) is also available as a free open access PDF at mdpi.com/books/book/7780. Other Chico State contributors include Donald Heinz (“COVID-19 and Religion”), Daniel Veidlinger (co-author of “Exploring the Benefits of Yoga for Mental and Physical Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic”), both of the Comparative Religion Department, and Aaron Quinn, Department of Journalism and Public Relations (“The Arbitrariness of Faith-Based Medical Exemptions”).

The essays concern the humbling proposition of balancing religious freedom and individual liberty with public policy directives. Veidlinger asks whether the benefits of yoga outweigh risks of practicing in a tight-knit congregate setting, and Heinz, surveying the conservative evangelical resistance to mask mandates, wonders about the government’s “ability to bind the Christian conscience.”

“I was not immediately prepared,” he writes, “to interrogate these conservative oppositions to government further until I reflected on the unending calls for resistance and non-conformity in my own Christian leftism.”

Finally, Ellen Zhang, from the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Macau, in China, focuses on “COVID-19, State Intervention, and Confucian Paternalism.” The Confucian ideal is not government treating adults as children, but government earning the trust of people. That can allow vaccine mandates since people live in relation to one another and questions of harm transcend the individual.

Those interested in public health policy should grapple with these essays.

“Unfatally Dead: To Thaw Or Not To Thaw?”

Wayne Edmiston graduated from Chico State College in the 70s; now living on the Central Coast with his wife, Jacque, they teach Science of Mind principles as ordained New Thought ministers with Centers for Spiritual Living.

In an homage to his late wife, Sherry Plaster Edmiston (1944-1989), Wayne has crafted a tale mixing fact, fancy, and a heavenly bureaucracy, all centered on the fate of one Walter Elias Disney and his sidekicks Mark Twain and soul-in-training Eepia, who tells the others that “art, science, and religion are interrelated, part of the Universal triune.”

Disney died in 1966, but his body was cryogenically frozen. At the same time, “a place known to all who have passed into the wild blue yonder, Heaven’s Creative Department is headed up by Walt Disney himself.”

As the angel Gabriel makes clear, Walt has a choice. He can remain or return to his body to be resuscitated and, if all goes well, bring his creative spark to new generations. “Unfatally Dead: To Thaw Or Not To Thaw?” ($14.99 in paperback from WEDmiston Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle and audiobook formats), adapted from a 1986 screenplay, is indeed the question.

In order for Walt to decide, he, Sam Clemens, and Eepia are sent to various venues to see what has transpired after their deaths. Eepia in the beginning remains a shimmering presence, while Disney and wise-cracking Clemens take on their human forms and keep altering the timeline by interacting with others.

The trio flits from Haight-Ashbury in 1968, to Menlo Park in 1973 (where Clemens takes a bite out of an apple and hands it to a young man at a garage sale named Steve Jobs), to Disneyworld, to Hurricane Katrina—their presence mystifies (especially when they suddenly disappear)—and inspires. 

A girl named Sherry finds inspiration. “The gigantic screen zeroes in on the young cartoonist they had just been discussing. In the bottom left corner of the screen, a time stamp indicates the year, 1957, when the young girl was enrolled in a junior high school reading classroom in Chico, California.”

Walt’s decision? Readers will need to join the wild ride that rivals Mr. Toad’s.

“You Can’t Complete Me—But I Can!: A Self-Love Story”

Hayley Kaplan graduated from Chico State with a Masters in Social Work, became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, and is the process of recovering from a lifetime of codependency. She learned through a series of painful attachments to half a dozen men in her life that “to desire love is perfectly normal and healthy, but healthy and normal gets lost when we go searching for external love as our primary source of identity, worth, or purpose.”

She tells her story in a brutally candid memoir, a thoughtful, sometimes humorous and even hopeful account of her progress when, as a married woman, she began an affair with a married man. “You Can’t Complete Me—But I Can!: A Self-Love Story” ($12.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) is a journey of humbling self-discovery. (Kaplan has also published a workbook with the same title, drawing on her professional training and using significant quotations from her memoir.)

Too often, she writes, when we want to express our “authentic selves” we learn instead to “grin and bury it,” so “when you’re desperate for love, you behave in desperate ways, and that tends to attract one-sided relationships.”

When she met “Dax” online in her twenties, he was “peace incarnate” after compulsive gambler “Chuck.” Yet “our communication styles … contradicted each other…. Waiting for Dax to complete a sentence was like waiting for a scab to heal…. I was a neurotic, multi-tasker who wanted to do things lickety-split, and it would take Dax longer than a minute to count to sixty.” So they got married.

Seven years later, after Kaplan had given Dax a back scratcher gag gift “for that seven year itch,” she and an acquaintance, “Leo,” became emotionally involved. Leo was married, and Kaplan was torn: “How do you hurt someone as kind and as loyal as Dax? You don’t. But then, how do you turn your back on a love as rare and true as my love for Leo? You don’t.”

There are painful but needful lessons ahead as what is buried is exposed, and what is exposed can, with help from others, bring some measure of completeness.