Dear Reader

Dear Reader Column - October 22, 2024

Dear Reader,

Today's guest author, Ginny Kubitz Moyer, loves writing historical fiction set in her native California. Her first novel The Seeing Garden, which brings to life the vanished world of the San Francisco Peninsula's great estates, won a 2023 "Foreword" INDIES Book of the Year Award (Silver in Historical Fiction). After teaching high school English for 26 years, Ginny now writes full-time. An avid weekend gardener, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, two teenage boys, and one rescue dog. You can visit her website at ginnymoyer.org. 

A Golden Life, Ginny's new novel, is set in 1938. Frances Healey is the secretary for a Hollywood movie producer who is making a film about the life of Kitty Ridley, a famous stage actress who disappeared from the public eye in 1895. When the real Kitty Ridley, now ninety years old, writes a letter insisting they cease production of the film, Frances and her boss go on a road trip to find the actress. As they drive north to the Napa Valley and meet the fascinating and formidable Miss Ridley, emotional journeys ensue, for everyone involved.

Ginny is giving away, advanced reader copies of A Golden Life, to five readers. Be sure to enter her drawing, email: https://ginnymoyer.org/contact/

Welcome to the book club Ginny…

The Power of the Puzzle

When you're navigating the complexities of adulthood, there's a power to rediscovering things you enjoyed in childhood. For me, this happened with jigsaw puzzles.

For Christmas 2019, I was given a delightful puzzle of vintage Nancy Drew covers. My husband and young sons and I eagerly sacrificed the dining room table to the cause, and as we sat there on those late December days, heads bent over the scattered array of pieces, it occurred to me that there was something quite special about a puzzle. I like playing games as a family, but in a game you're competing against each other. With a puzzle, you're working together on a shared goal. That was, quite simply, very nice.

Since then, we frequently give each other puzzles as gifts. Our teetering stack of them reveals a great deal about our various interests: there's the Sherlock Holmes puzzle, the Jane Austen puzzle, several Star Wars scenes, one celebrating the National Parks. We typically do them over long weekends or holidays. They still bring us together.

But I find that puzzles also send me into myself, in the best possible way.

As an author, my most compelling ideas often come when I am doing something mindless, like pulling weeds or washing dishes. The same thing happens with puzzles. Surveying a table of pieces, looking for one with just a hint of green on the edge, trying it out: that doesn't require deep thought, so my imagination can run wild, generating plot ideas and solving issues with characters. When I'm spinning on a project, puzzles are a terrific way to get un-stuck.

Aside from the authorly benefits, there's something innately physically pleasing about a puzzle. I love all the sensory aspects of it: the little sound the pieces make as you spill them out of the box; the lovely satiny feel of each piece, its edges sharp but never dangerous; the various colors, which you have to study so closely; the joy of feeling two pieces slot together so snugly.

And in all the busy-ness of life, when it's easy to feel pulled in various directions, I find something inherently hopeful about finishing a puzzle. After all, what is a puzzle but bringing order out of chaos? There's a deep satisfaction that comes when a scattered mess gradually resolves itself into a clear picture. Whether that picture is a lovely lakeside scene or a light saber battle, it's a delight that never, ever gets old.

-- Ginny Kubitz Moyer

Ginny is giving away, advanced reader copies of A Golden Life, to five readers. Be sure to enter her drawing, email: https://ginnymoyer.org/contact/

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - October 15, 2024

Dear Reader,

Today's guest author, Kimberley Woodhouse, is the bestselling author of more than forty books which have earned many accolades including, Booklist and Publisher's Weekly starred reviews, along with a long list of awards. A popular speaker/teacher, she has shared in person with more than two million people at over 2,500 venues. A lover of history and research, Kimberley often gets sucked into the past and then her husband has to lure her out with chocolate and the promise of eighteen holes on the golf course. Married to the love of her life for three-plus decades, she lives and writes in Colorado where she's traded in her hat of "Craziest Mom" for "Nana the Great."

Kimberley's latest book 70 North, is part of her popular Alaskan Cyber Hunter Series, and is another intense thrill ride in this epic cybercrime series based on real-world possibilities.

Enter the drawing to win one of three copies of 70 North, send an email to [email protected] and please be sure to include your address in case you're a winner.

Welcome to the book club Kimberley...

The Color of Change

A few weekends ago, my family and I were itching to get out of the city and take a break. It's been a busy season for all of us in one way or another. So a weekend of exploration was just what we needed. We decided to visit Leadville, CO, a tiny town nestled at the foot of Mount Elbert, Colorado's tallest mountain. It's also the highest incorporated city in the US at two miles high. This town is full of charm, history, and beauty. Everyone was so friendly and helpful as we enjoyed shops and good food, while trying to breathe at ten thousand feet in the air.

But the best part of our trip, and our primary reason for traveling, was to take the Leadville Train and see the glorious fall colors. And glorious they were! The train ride was almost three hours and was one of the most relaxing adventures I've had in a long while. The mountains burst with a stunning collection of yellows and oranges, with bright spots of red dotting the hills.

As the scenery slipped by, I was struck by the thought of how beautiful change can be. Now, don't get me wrong. The last ten years of life have been fraught with change. Upheaval is more like it. My dad has passed away. I've moved three or four times now. (I've lost count, honestly. LOL.) My children have moved all over the country. (Though now we are all together again in the same city.) Life has been full of amazing highs. However, lately, the valleys have seemed overwhelming. It's been difficult to see them as beautiful.

But these trees naturally submit to the change that comes to them. Life and death. Growth and dormancy. Things we all know and learned in science class. They let their leaves dance in the breeze with an elegance and grace not found anywhere but nature. In that moment, the beauty of simply letting change happen washed over me.

Little did I know a couple weeks after I got home, I'd be facing another huge adjustment. Life has thrown another crazy curveball. But instead of fighting it, I want to be mindful to take a breath. This change will bring about so much joy in my family's life. And rather than getting sucked into the frenzy of details and to-do lists (though, I do love a good to-do list), I'm determined to embrace the change. Soak in the moments of happiness, levity, and life.

In this autumn season, I'm determined to embrace the colors of change.

-- Kimberley Woodhouse

kimberleywoodhouse.com

Enter the drawing to win one of three copies of 70 North, send an email to [email protected] and please be sure to include your address in case you're a winner.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - October 8, 2024

Dear Reader,

Today's Guest Author is Karen Barnett, the award-winning author of nine historical novels including When Stone Wings Fly and the Vintage National Park Novels. As a former ranger with the National Park Service, she enjoys a unique perspective on our country's greatest scenic treasures.

In Karen's newest release, Where Trees Touch the Sky: A Redwood National Park Novel, Marion Baker leads the charge for redwood conservation until a chance meeting with the son of a timber baron presents her with an impossible choice. Nearly 50 years later, polio-survivor June Turner is determined to live up to her aunt's reputation by becoming a ranger in the newly established Redwood National Park. When aspiring filmmaker Adam Garner asks her to collaborate on a documentary about Marion's groundbreaking work, the secrets they uncover may put the family legacy--and June's dreams for the future--in jeopardy.

Karen is giving away five copies of Where Trees Touch the Sky to five readers. Drop her an email: [email protected] and be sure to include your shipping address in case you're a winner.

Please welcome author Karen Barnett to the book club…

POTTY TALK

My kids are in their twenties, and I'm very conscious of the fact that they frequently "clean up" their language when they're around Mom and Dad. Cussing is commonplace amongst their generation, and they find my use of creative replacements hysterical. They roll their eyes when I blurt out "crudmuffins" after stubbing my toe. I still remember my own mother saying, "Oh shhhh-sugarfoot!"

As a young mom, I was convinced that protecting their little ears from "potty talk" was pretty high on the list of things I was supposed to do. We stuck to G-rated movies, listened to clean music, and hustled them out of the playground when roving bands of foul-mouthed teenagers showed up.

Near the end of a busy summer, we made a special trip to the local children's museum, The A.C. Gilbert House in Salem, Oregon. I was waiting outside the bathroom stall when my six-year-old called out, "Hey, Mom, there are POTTY WORDS on the wall in here!"

I remember thinking--honestly, in a children's museum of all places? "Just don't look, honey."

"I can't help it. It's right in front of me."

"Well, hurry up and try not to pay any attention." I made a mental note to say something to the volunteer at the front desk.

"But Mom..." My child's voice grew shrill with excitement. "There are pictures, too!!!"

"That's it." I banged on the door and rattled the latch. "Let me in, right now!"

A minute later, I was standing in front of a detailed schematic of the inner workings of a toilet. Every piece was labeled in neon Comic Sans--flapper, siphon, float ball, and more. They'd taken colorful language to a whole new level.

I nearly wet my own pants, I was laughing so hard. There were indeed potty words on the wall. The best kind.

Neither of my kids grew up to be plumbers, but in time they matured enough to make their own choices about language. I appreciate the fact that they respect us enough to not use curse words around their dad and me, even if we wouldn't be terribly shocked anymore.

And thanks to the children's museum, both have an elementary understanding of the inner mystery of toilet fixtures. I'm going to count that as a win.

-- Karen Barnett

Enter the drawing for one of five copies of Where Trees Touch the Sky. Drop her an email: [email protected] and be sure to include your shipping address in case you're a winner.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - October 1, 2024

Dear Reader,

Nadia El-Fassi is a half-Moroccan, half-Australian author of spicy romance and fantasy. Best Hex Ever, her debut novel, is a cozy fantasy romance set in London. It's about a kitchen witch cursed to hurt anyone who falls in love with her.

By day, Nadia El-Fassi is a commissioning editor at Orbit Books. She has an addiction to iced coffee, period dramas, buying D&D dice and watching horror movies. Nadia lives in London with her husband and their perfectly round cat.

You could win one of five copies of Best Hex Ever. To enter the drawing send an email to: [email protected] and put BEST HEX EVER on the subject line. Please be sure to include your preferred mailing address!

Reach out to Nadia via: https://www.instagram.com/nadiaelfassiauthor/

 

The first time I made couscous with my mother I was eleven years old. Cooking the weekly couscous in a Moroccan household--even one that wasn't in Morocco at all but south west London--was a rite of passage. You cooked it on a Friday evening, and it would last until Sunday lunch.

It was just the two of us, and she set up a stool beside the kitchen counter for me to stand on, and we began the hours-long ritual of making couscous. Don't let the store-bought packets fool you, authentic couscous needs to be steamed and then sifted and then steamed and sifted until your kitchen windows are so foggy that you can't tell what time of day it is outside. It is the ritual of the recipe as much as the food itself that matters.

My mother showed me how to sprinkle water onto the couscous before we put it back to cook; how to sift through it with my hands, not too forcefully so I didn't squish or break the grains, but with enough force to remove any clumps. I remember the way my mother held up the reused jam jar that contained saffron strands that we had carried back in our luggage from Morocco earlier that year, and how she explained to me that it was such an expensive spice we had to use it sparingly. I remember that afterwards, the tips of my fingers were stained yellow and I had to rub lemon juice on them over the kitchen sink.

As the couscous steamed, we sliced carrots, onions, turnips and courgettes. Earlier that afternoon we'd bought a leg of lamb from the butchers. The memories of this day are etched into my mind as the last day of the 'before' life. The following day, the results came back from hospital; my mother's cancer had returned. I would still have another eight years with her, and we made many more couscous tagines together, but from then on cancer existed in the background of every memory, a third party at every meal.

Lately, as I approach a decade without my mother, I find myself taking down the jar of saffron strands from my spice cupboard and digging out my steamer from my clutter of pans. I feel the ghost of her hands as we sift the couscous together. Knowing her, she'd probably decide to sit at the table, drink a coffee, and lecture me about my scant use of chilli.

-- Nadia El-Fassi

You could win one of five copies of Best Hex Ever. To enter the drawing send an email to: [email protected] and put BEST HEX EVER on the subject line. Please be sure to include your preferred mailing address!

* I hope you enjoyed reading today's guest column. Start writing, because your story could be featured in one of Suzanne's daily columns, if you're a winner or Honorable Mention in this year's Write a DearReader contest. Cash prizes, rules and deadlines, along with last year's winning entries, read all about them at: https://www.dearreader.com/contest2024/index.html

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - September 24, 2024

Dear Reader,

Today's guest author, Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily mysteries has been on the New York Times bestsellers list. The daughter of two philosophy professors, she studied English literature and medieval history at the University of Notre Dame. She and her husband, novelist Andrew Grant, live on a ranch in southeastern Wyoming.

Tasha's new book in the Lady Emily series is Death by Misadventure... Lady Emily must solve a string of high stakes accidents while trapped in a lavish villa in the Bavarian Alps.

Contact Tasha via: https://www.tashaalexander.com/contact

You could win one of three copies of Death by Misadventure Send an email with MISADVENTURE on the subject line and your preferred shipping address (in case you're a winner) to: [email protected]

Welcome to the book club Tasha Alexander…

Is there anything better than realizing you're reading one of Those Books? One you know you won't be able to put down, one you know you'll never forget, one your friends will grow tired of being told they have to read. One you know that you'll never be able to read in the same way again.

Books change. It matters where we read them, when we read them, what's happening in our lives at the time. As the always-brilliant David Mitchell says in Number 9 Dream, "A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it."

When I was ten years old, I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time. I loved it, but was utterly flummoxed when Lizzy turned down Darcy's first proposal. A BOY LIKED HER! Did she not understand this rare and mysterious event might never happen again? Sure, he was a little difficult, but he had some qualities (Pemberley) that deserved careful consideration of their own. Lizzy's decision baffled me. Mind you, I never objected to her refusing Mr. Collins.

Since then, I've reread Pride and Prejudice more times than I can count. It's my comfort book equivalent of macaroni and cheese. But as I got older, the way I evaluated the story changed. In college, I rejoiced when Lizzy turned down that arrogant, pretentious twit, Darcy. High time he got what was coming to him. Later, I came to see that neither Lizzy nor Darcy was without significant flaws, and I could understand both of their positions. My emotional reaction to the book altered as my own circumstances and experiences formed the way I think.

In a way, you get a new book with each re-read, but you can't ever recapture the magic of the first time, when the story and the style and the perfectly-crafted sentences took you by surprise. That's an enchantment like no other.

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas blew me away when I first read it. It pulled me out of a long slog of disappointing reads. I've gone back to it more than once and loved it differently each time. But, boy, how I wish I could experience the magic of falling in love with it all over again. How about you? What one book would you like to read again for the first time?

-- Tasha Alexander

https://www.tashaalexander.com/contact

You could win one of three copies of Death by Misadventure Send an email with MISADVENTURE on the subject line and your preferred shipping address (in case you're a winner) to: [email protected]

* I hope you enjoyed reading today's guest column. Start writing, because your story could be featured in one of Suzanne's daily columns, if you're a winner or Honorable Mention in this year's Write a DearReader contest. Cash prizes, rules and deadlines, along with last year's winning entries, read all about them at: https://www.dearreader.com/contest2024/index.html

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - September 17, 2024

Dear Reader,  

Today's guest author Helen Molesworth's career has spanned the global gem and jewelry industry, from roles with leading auction houses to academia. She was a jewelry specialist for ten years at Sotheby's and Christie's in London and Geneva, where she handled sales of global importance, including the private collection of HRH The Princess Margaret. As a gemologist and jewelry historian, she has been professeur d'histoire du bijoux in Geneva, managing director of a gem academy in Hong Kong, and most recently senior jewelry curator at London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

Helen's new book is, Precious: The History and Mystery of Gems Across Time. A renowned jewelry expert recounts her career working with nature's most extraordinary treasures--gemstones--and traces these rare jewels from ancient Egyptian records through the high-stakes auctions of today.

Reach out to Helen via https://www.helenmolesworth.com/contact and please welcome her to the book club. Authors love to hear from readers.

When I was six, I fell in love. Not with a boy, but with an amethyst geode: the most perfect pool of glittering, spiky purple crystals. I was convinced I had discovered an unknown and alternate universe. But before I could properly explore my new love and my new world, my godfather (the bearer of this beautiful thing) had taken it away and hidden it on top of a dry stone wall, out of reach of my desperate little fingers. I was devastated, and as soon as adult backs were turned, I scrambled up after it, pulling the wall down on top of me and breaking my leg. I never saw my amethyst geode again, but I never forgot it. Gems would be become my waking passion.

Forty years later, I find myself intrigued by several themes in life. Discovery and disappointment, two of the greatest highs and hurdles in life; loss and survival, the inevitable struggles that so shape us; but above all, passion and obsession, the highs that drive us through the pleasure and pain. My amethyst geode revealed them all.

To most, passion is considered a calling, and obsession a folly; to find the one is a blessing, to fall foul of the other is a curse. But the line is fine. They both seem a bit like falling in love: it can hit you out of the blue, but once you realise what you have in front of you, you can't stop thinking about it. That is when it starts crystallising into something tangible and magical, and it becomes a choice. Just as we pursue the career, the professional passion of our life, so too love is something that will only last if we really work at it.

They say if you find a hobby you like and spend ten minutes every day practising it, that within a year, you will be better at it than 95% of the rest of the world. Both passion and love are just this--commitments, for something we choose to make a daily, central part of our lives. You may love something or someone, but it's only when you work at it, that it works. Passion and love are the greatest choices we get to make in our lives, even if every now and again you break a leg chasing after them.

-- Helen Molesworth

https://www.helenmolesworth.com/contact

* Have you started writing your entry for this year's Write a DearReader Contest? Celebrating the contest's 20th year, it's an opportunity for your entry to be featured in my column. You'll find all the info about cash prizes, rules and deadlines, along with last year's winning entries. Read all about it at: https://www.dearreader.com/contest2024/index.html

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - September 11, 2024

Dear Reader,

It's time for this month’s Penguin Classics!  

I have a copy of this month's Penguin Classics book up for grabs for one lucky reader, so be sure to Start reading this month's title, Orlando by Virginia Woolf and enter to win your own copy.

(Notes from Penguin Classics:)

A collectible hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf’s pioneering novel about a time-traveling sixteenth-century nobleman who wakes up in the body of a woman, with a new foreword by Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

First masculine, then feminine, Orlando is a young sixteenth-century nobleman who gallops through the centuries, from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to Virginia Woolf’s own time. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey—a nobleman, traveler, writer? Man or... woman?

Start Reading this month's Penguin Classic and enter to win your own copy.

 

You don’t need to be a writer to enter my annual Write a Dear Reader Contest. The contest is writing for fun. Write about your pet peeve. (Mine is a sticky refrigerator handle. I grab the handle to open the door and Yuck, something is stuck to the back of the handle!)

Write about your pets. I have four cats and they have trained me. They each want to eat when-they-want-to-eat, and of course they each have different tastes…

”Do you want chicken and gravy, salmon, or pate today?” No kidding, I stand there in front of the cat and ask that question! It’s gotten so out of hand I’m considering handing out a menu questionnaire for them each to fill out for the upcoming day.

I’d love to read your entry. Write about anything, but start writing.  To read last year’s winning entries and information about rules, deadlines and cash prizes, go to: https://www.dearreader.com/contest2024/index.html

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - September 10, 2024

Dear Reader

Today's Guest Author is KL Cerra. As a licensed marriage and family therapist, K. L. uses her writing to explore the complexities--and the darker sides--of relationships. She lives with her husband in a small beach town outside of Los Angeles. When not writing or seeing clients, K. L. is likely walking her Boston terrier or exploring the local botanical gardens.

KL's sophomore novel, Under Her Spell, is a gothic suspense novel following a young woman, Liv, who returns to her small New England hometown to investigate her childhood friend's disappearance. In the process, Liv becomes entangled with her friend's roommates: the witchy owners of a bridal boutique who have their own dark definition of "happily ever after."

Reach out to KL at: [email protected]

Please welcome author KL Cerra to the book club.

 

As a kid, I had a thing for bugs. Not all bugs, mind you--it was the praying mantis that had me enchanted. I doodled praying mantis heads and collected mantis figurines. I spent my weekends camped out in the backyard collecting mantises and "training" them: having them climb up and down my arms (and ignoring the nips of pincers when they inevitably came).

I'm not sure what it was about the praying mantis that got me. Admittedly, there's a certain majesty to that alien-like, triangular head that moves on a swivel, those intense globular eyes. In any case, when Halloween rolled around, I convinced my mother to make me a praying mantis costume, complete with papier-mâché pincers, iridescent wings, and a rather creepy-looking mask featuring our best approximation of a mantis's grasping mouthparts made out of pipe-cleaners. I got some strange looks while trick-or-treating ("Oh! You're...an alien?") but I don't remember being fazed.

Back at home, I'd taped a handwritten sign to my bedroom door: "Entomologist at Work." I decided I wanted to study to become a proper bug-scientist when I grew up. But then, something disturbing happened. As I grew older, my interest faded, as I'm sure often happens to kids formerly into something like dinosaurs or space. I went many years without seeing a praying mantis in the wild. And when I finally spotted one in a courtyard of my college dorm, I was alarmed to feel something akin to...fear.

What had happened to me? I used to scoop these creatures into my hands and let them crawl all over me, and now, as a nineteen-year-old, I was recoiling from the strange-looking insect. It made me sad to think that repugnance had snuck in to replace that sense of wonder: I was afraid of something that had become so unfamiliar. Then again, maybe that just comes with the territory of growing up.

My husband and I are expecting our son in September, and as I write this, I catch myself wondering what it might be like if he were into bugs. Not that I'm excited by the prospect of my kid bringing handfuls of cockroaches into our condo--please, no--but maybe it'd be cool to see insects through a child's eyes again, to relearn how to feel awe instead of reflexively reaching for a fly-swatter. And if he really wanted a papier-mâché roach costume for Halloween...well, I think I could come around to that.

-- KL Cerra

[email protected]

* I hope you enjoyed reading today's guest column. Start writing, because your story could be featured in one of Suzanne's daily columns, if you're a winner or Honorable Mention in this year's Write a DearReader contest. Cash prizes, rules and deadlines, along with last year's winning entries, read all about them at: https://www.dearreader.com/contest2024/index.html

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - September 3, 2024

Dear Reader,

Today's special guest, Ava Glass is the author of the espionage series Alias Emma. Ava Glass is a pseudonym for a former crime reporter and civil servant. Her time working for the government introduced her to the world of spies, and she's been fascinated by them ever since. She lives and writes in the south of England.

Ava's new book is The Trap. British spy Emma Makepeace races against the clock to stop the Russians from carrying out a high-profile assassination in this gripping thriller.

Join Ava's book club and win free books on her website: www.AvaGlass.co.uk, or follow her on social media: @AvaGlassBooks

Welcome Ava!

Moving Away

I didn't consciously choose to become an expat, although when I was hired by a London publisher in 1999 and moved to Britain, I joked to my friends that I was an economic migrant. In reality the plan, as I explained to my parents, was to work in London for two years, and then return to the US and settle down.

Although I didn't know it yet, that wasn't going to happen.

I arrived at Heathrow on a cool September morning, and spent two hours at immigration having my visa checked by a kindly older man who never once gave the impression he doubted my paperwork while also keeping me standing at his desk until my feet hurt. When I finally reached the baggage department, my suitcase was making its thousandth solo spin on the luggage carousal and everyone else from my plane was long gone. My adventure had begun.

That afternoon, after depositing my bags at my new place, I walked around my east London neighbourhood for the first time, and fell in love. Over the coming days, I would fall in love with more than that.

I loved my job as an editor and writer, and I adored London, and more than that--I fell madly in love with Britain. I liked its winding one-lane roads, and its soft constant rain, and the way everyone handled a crisis with steady lack of hysteria. As if it would be silly to get excited about something tiny like a bombing or a riot.

Sangfroid is one of my favourite descriptions. It comes from the French: 'sang froid' or 'cool blood.' The British had the cool blood I needed in my life.

I liked the changing of the seasons, from lukewarm summer to chilly autumn, when my feet crunched on a carpet of fallen acorns and golden leaves tangled themselves in my hair. Later, I was fascinated by winter at this northern latitude where the sun set in mid-afternoon and the moon rose at four o'clock.

I had always lived a peripatetic life. My parents moved constantly when I was a child, and as an adult I'd emulated them, living in four states in the five years after I'd graduated from college. Each move was interesting and brought me new friends, but no place ever truly felt like home. In fact, I wasn't certain I knew what home was. Home was an illusion.

England felt like home. Home had found me at last.

-- Ava Glass

www.AvaGlass.co.uk

* I hope you enjoyed reading today's guest column. If you're one of the winners, or your entry is an Honorable Mention in this year's Write a DearReader contest, it will be featured as a guest column. Cash prizes, rules and deadlines, along with last year's winning entries, read all about them at: https://www.dearreader.com/contest2024/index.html

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - August 27, 2024

Dear Reader,

Cynthia Reeves, today's guest, is the author of three books of fiction: her new novel The Last Whaler the novel in stories Falling Through the NewWorld and the novella Badlands. 

Her lifelong interest in the Arctic began in childhood reading tales of doomed Arctic explorers. But it was her participation in the 2017 Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition, which sailed Svalbard's western shores, as well as two subsequent residencies in Longyearbyen, that have inspired her writing since then. In August 2024, she will circumnavigate Svalbard aboard an icebreaker carrying a hundred artists, scientists, and crew.

Cynthia shares more about herself at: cynthiareeveswriter.com.

Five signed hardcovers means five lucky readers will win a copy of The Last Whaler...an elegiac meditation on the will to survive under extreme conditions. To enter the drawing, go to: https://www.cynthiareeveswriter.com/contact Please put DEAR READER on the subject line.

Why Maine?

Hand in hand, my father and I walked past the sold sign and his childhood home, the old cape where he grew up an only child on this remote farm in South Hope, Maine. We paused in front of the barn, now a skeleton of timbers. The door, silent on its hinges, stood open as if to welcome us one final time. Within, emptiness yawned in the very place his father tended to the last of thirty years of four o'clock, winter-dark mornings, milking his brindled heifers while outside, moonfall gilded the distant blueberry ridges copper-gold. 

Did my father imagine, as I did, his father perched on a stool, pulling udders in rhythm as milk filled a tin pail? Did he see my grandfather's grip falter, hands calloused by years of back-breaking labor, how quietly he lay down to still his restless heart as a thin column of milk rivered the hay? Did he hear the lowing of the cow whose udders yet ached, a whole vocabulary of loss in that sorrowful sound?

As a child, I'd summered on my grandparents' farm at the end of their gravel road, surrounded by dense poplars and hemlocks, framed by hills bearing the blueberry bushes we bent to harvest each August with scoop-like rakes. Breakfast was always piping hot blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream, afternoons spent swimming in the frigid waters of nearby Hobbs Pond, and evenings passed in rooms heated by roaring fires, even in summer. Nostalgia rooted in me the hope that the farm would pass down, generation to generation.

It wasn't to be.

But.

After a lifetime in the Philadelphia suburbs, I moved with my husband to Camden, Maine, to an old sea captain's house eight miles from my father's
childhood home and across from the harbor where my grandfather laid the granite walls that hold back the rushing waters of the Megunticook River as it spills into the Penobscot Bay. People wonder why we retired to one of the coldest of the United States. I wonder, too, when I'm shoveling out from the umpteenth snowstorm or leaning into a fierce maritime wind. The consolations are many, however: Driving past the old farm now reached by paved roads. Sharing meals with my father's friends--one just turned 92--as they tell stories of growing up in the 1930s and 40s with Dad, now gone five years. And most often, walking the carved and mortared stones beside the falls where my grandfather once knelt, icy water sluicing over his numbed hands, on the living side of the Megunticook.

-- Cynthia Reeves

cynthiareeveswriter.com.

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Suzanne Beecher
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