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Iowa is Drowning


Our upcoming holiday to Iowa has been derailed by Mother Nature‘s abhorrence of controlled waterways. I find it very interesting that after decades of damming and digging and piling and filling in, water still manages to go when and where it pleases in my home state.

During the 500 year flood of 1993, I was living in Des Moines. To this day drenching rain, the kind that wipers on your vehicle can’t keep up with, gives me creepy-crawly feelings of dread. We had day upon weeks of this rain. Between rain and the humidity, the outdoors and summer became distant memories. The whole ordeal reminded me, then and now, of the Bradbury story, All Summer in a Day. It was that kind of relentlessness. Noah weather. Old Testament stuff. Read Full Article

Discovering my Inner Germaine Greer at Girl With Pen


I have never taken to the label of feminist. An interesting quirk because I know that most people would label me one with ease, but I found them and their message to be limited mainly to the elite. The women who lunched set or those who worked for self-enrichment as opposed to the paycheck for which I and most of the women I knew worked.

Feminism had too many sub-groups. It reminded me more of high school with the pretty girls versus the band girls versus the jockettes versus the home ec crowd. Forgive my stereo-typing, but we women haven’t quite got it together as far as working together for our own common good goes.

But what is our common good? That’s the thing. Read Full Article

A Rejection Letter with a Twist


I mentioned some time back that I had submitted a sci-fi story that I have been working to a Canadian magazine based out of Edmonton. Not the kind of magazine that I suspect many of my gentle readers read being science fiction and fantasy based, never the less I was fairly excited and optimistic. The story I sent is the first in a series of inter-related shorts that will tell a whole story once they are all complete. One of the pieces was recently rejected by the annual acrostic contest. I wasn’t surprised. The story isn’t “stand alone” enough for a short story format that insists on being told using the letters for the alphabet for the first word in each line and just 26 sentences long was too intriguing to pass up. The story wrote itself and I am very proud of it. Read Full Article