A few weeks ago, I met the lovely photographer, Lila Cupolo Bausch, and her equally lovely assistant, Lisa Cupolo in the Secret Garden in Central Park outside Huntington Beach Central Library. I needed new headshots. I’ve overheard too many of my snarkier writer friends gossip about a fellow author’s appearance (as in “wow she doesn’t look at all like the picture in her book”) so I’ve tried to keep my public photos current.

Not glamourized though, although I’m not opposed to a little smoothing out of the wrinkles. My goal is to look like myself, and I think Lila did a wonderful job of capturing exactly that.

Here’s a lineup of my headshots since 2021. Apparently, I like scarves.

The latest photo is post-cataract surgery, which means that I don’t need to wear my glasses all the time, unless I really need to see. Which means that I’m constantly looking for my glasses.

Even though I don’t particularly enjoy having my photo taken, all of these sessions have been fun— especially compared to my first experience. Back in 2020, I chose a local photographer, who shall remain nameless. When I arrived at his garage studio, he said, “Let’s bang this out,” which is never a good conversation opener.

He proceeded to stand me in front of a white screen, turn on several blinding spotlights, and made sure to tell me that his camera lenses were extremely high tech and could capture every pore.

It was terrifying and, unsurprisingly, the results were awful. Luckily, I’ve since found folks who know what they’re doing.

Gracias Lila and Lisa!!

Garrison Keillor wrote about portrait photography in a recent Writer’s Almanac. In 1829, French painter and physicist Louis Daguerre found that if he coated a copper plate with silver iodide, exposed it to light in the camera for 20 to 30 minutes, fumed it with mercury vapor, and then fixed it with a salt solution, he could capture a permanent image, which he called “daguerreotype.”

“Subjects had to sit in blazing sunlight for up to half an hour, trying not to blink, with their heads clamped in place to keep them still. It’s not surprising that most of the early daguerreotype portraits feature grim, slightly desperate faces.”

Speaking of grim, slightly desperate faces, observe my relatives pictured above. These women also have grim backstories. Ida was married to a member of the white supremist Red Shirt group and Martha and Tillie were both wives of “planter/enslavers.”

(Full humbling disclosure. When I searched my Google drive for “grandmother” pictures, Google mostly offered photos of me. Sigh.)

Early photography might not have been comfortable for the subject, but it was hazardous to the photographer. Many early photographers became ill and eventually died from mercury poisoning.

Owning a bookstore is mostly hazardous to one’s finances. Like many book lovers, I’ve dreamed of owning my own store, but until I started volunteering at LibroMobile in Santa Ana, California I never thought about the required capital investment, the rent and utilities due every month, the inventory to be tracked, the toilet paper to stock, and the bathrooms to clean.

Anaheim’s Booktown USA recently closed its doors after 23 years. Owner Thomas Pesce learned on June 20, 2026, via certified mail, that he’d need to vacate the building in 60 days which meant finding a place to put 30,000 books in two months. Even though the building’s owners didn’t respond to Pesce’s call and text about the situation, he has nothing disparaging to say about them. He had a month-to-month lease which meant all along he was on shaky ground.

LibroMobile is also in a precarious position. As reported by cultureoc.org, this weekend’s LibroMobile’s 10th Anniversary Weekend LitFest will either be a fundraiser or a closing celebration.

There is much to celebrate. Since 2016, owner/unpaid operator Sarah Rafael Garcia has remained dedicated to her mission of “cultivating diversity through literature and the art in Santa Ana and the broader Orange County region.” The store has morphed from a pushcart to a stairway, to a 190-square-feet warehouse, to the present brick and mortar home on Bristol Street in Santa Ana where it regularly hosts special exhibitions, arts education programs, community events, and a food pantry that supports more than 40 local families.

But, as Culture OC reported, “last year, the bookstore had to stop paying their youth workers and transitioned to being entirely volunteer run. García says it costs about $135 daily for someone to run the bookstore, and since at this point, they are often making less than $50 daily in books sales, they are losing money every day. The LitFest fundraiser, which has a still-unmet goal of $25,000, is a last hope to raise enough money to stay open through next year and be able to pay its workers at least half the time.”

Garcia is of course always ready to pivot. She’s currently transforming an electric golf cart that will eventually travel to various book popups at locations around Orange County.

Bravo Sarah! You can donate here.

LibroMobile has always generously included my novels on their shelves, and I am very grateful. If you purchase books directly from the store, you’re also helping keep LibroMobile in operation and I’m very grateful for that too.

There's a southern accent, where I come from
The young'uns call it country.
The Yankees call it dumb
I got my own way of talkin'
But everything is done with a southern accent
Where I come from-

The song “Southern Accents” is one of my favorite Tom Petty recordings. In his wonderful memoir, Heartbreaker, Mike Campbell, lead guitarist for the Heartbreakers, calls the song “a masterpiece. . . a standard that was universal and deeply personal at the same time.”

The song is on Tom Petty’s sixth studio album, also titled “Southern Accents” and recorded in 1985. It was supposed to be a concept album about the South. Mike Campbell remembers that the idea was to depict “the life of one troubled young man among thousands, dragging the deadweight of the South’s mythology into a bleak uncertain future.”

But that concept got a bit muddied when English musician and producer Dave Stewart (of Eurythmics fame) started working with Tom and the band kept tapping out endless lines of cocaine. During one frustrating recording session, Petty infamously smashed his left hand against a wall.

The album may have failed as a solid Southern concept record, but Petty certainly stuck to the idea for the tour. He used his personal Confederate Flag on the tour book and on the interior of the original album, lit up a giant electric Confederate Battle Flag behind the band during performances, constructed plantation like marble columns for the stage, and wore a topcoat lined with a Confederate flag.

Tom Petty was a white boy who grew up in the white South. As Michael Washburn said in an interview in the LA Review of Books, “Petty’s South, however unconsciously it might have been, was deeply indebted to the sociologically sophisticated theory of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.”

By 2015, Petty had changed his tune slightly. But the Confederate flag is actually racist, and Tom really should have gone around the fence a lot sooner and taken a better look.

Speaking of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, last week, I paid eight dollars for a copy of this 1937 Pulitzer Prize winner at the new used bookstore in Huntington Beach. The novel has some interesting mold specks, but is in otherwise good condition, all 1,037 pages of it.

I didn’t intend to read the book. I thought it would be a prop for future social media posts about my new “southern accented” novel. Gone With the Wind is the favorite book of the protagonist’s mother in my new novel. She names her daughter after Olivia de Havilland, who played the tragic Melanie Wilkes in the movie version.

GWTW’s author, Margaret Mitchell, was born in 1900 and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She was ten years old before she learned that the Confederates lost the Civil War. Scarlett O’Hara, like my protagonist, Olivia, is seventeen years old when the novel begins.

I’ve written my fair share of “unlikeable characters”, but Scarlett O’Hara is the poster child for selfish, clueless, naive, privileged behavior.

And then there’s the rampant racism laced through every page, the countless derogatory ways to refer to people of color, the incessant revision of history, and the dedication to the mythology that “enslaved people loved their enslavers and never really wanted to be freed.”

Particularly horrifying these days, considering that this is the way our current administration wants to rewrite our country’s history.

Southerners love their mythologies, particularly their silverware mythologies. Most Southern families have narratives that include someone hiding the silver from the dreaded Yankees. My mother claimed that the Yankees left her family’s silver behind because her great grandmother played Dixie on the piano.

There’s no evidence this is true, but I always loved this silver berry spoon. I think my mother inherited it from her mother, but I’m not sure and there’s no one left to ask. I found the matching pickle fork on eBay.

This is the repoussé pattern, one of the twelve patterns of the “Southern silverware zodiac,” according to Maryln Schwartz, author of A Southern Belle Primer. Schwartz says Southerners look at silver selection as closely as some might study horoscopes.

The backs of the two pieces above are engraved “S. Kirk and Son—Sterling.” In 1815, Samuel Kirk was a silversmith in Baltimore, Maryland. He’s credited with introducing repoussé—a technique of forming patterns in relief by beating or pressing from the reverse side—to America around 1828.

So . . .pre-Civil War—right? But Kirk made coin silver with his two sons until 1914, when he switched to sterling, and then he made sterling silver with only one son after 1932, which means these pieces were forged well after the Civil War.

Another Southern myth bites the dust.

I’m also reading They Stole A City by Lauren Collins, which retells a dark story of a massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina that eliminated a prosperous Black community of lawyers, educators, elected government officials and entrepreneurs.

On November 10, 1898, white Wilmington supremists issued a “White Declaration of Independence, gunned down scores of Black men, chased their families into hiding, marched to City Hall, and overthrew the democratically elected, multiracial local government at gunpoint.

Collins traces the impact of this massacre and military coup through the generations and legacies of four Wilmington families whose diverse descendants include Lara Trump and Michael Jordan. Kirkus Reviews called the book “An urgent work of reportage and historical research that lays bare structural racism past and present.”

Collins’ book is not an easy summer read, but then, neither is Gone with the Wind.

Something to look forward to as this summer ends: LibroMobile’s upcoming Weekend Litfest. The entire weekend is terrific and I’m especially excited about the panel on Saturday afternoon featuring my friend Lisa Alvarez and the VIP reception Saturday night featuring my handsome hubby.

Gracias to all of the sponsors, especially the Sadlers.

The Weekend Litfest is August 21st through the 23rd at LibroMobile, 1150 S. Bristol St., #A3, Santa Ana, CA 92704. Tickets on sale here.

Be there! And buy some books. It’s fundraiser.

Purchase The Lockhart Women

Purchase Those People Behind Us

Yesterday after working at my writing desk for a few hours, my husband thought I’d just come back from the gym. “You’re glistening,” he said.

It’s humid in Southern California these days. We’re wimps I know, but we also don’t have air-conditioning.

Growing up in the Carolinas, my people didn’t have air-conditioning either. We had screened-in porches and fans to sit in front of. I remember long afternoons playing Monopoly with my brothers and sipping iced tea.

This summer, when I’m not at my writing desk, I’m most likely sitting in front of a fan reading and possibly sipping an adult beverage. Here are a few Riley recommendations, all with connections to my own forthcoming novel.

• Orphans of the Living, by Kathy Watson, is about a family’s early 20th century quest for home and redemption in the racist American South and West. My new novel features a similar quest and setting.

• What the Trees Remember, by Abigail Cutter, is set post-Civil-War near Lynchburg, Virginia where one of the main characters in my new novel was born. The lead character in Cutter’s book is named Alma, my mother’s name (in real life!)

• We Are Bridges, A Memoir by Cassandra Lane, is about a woman rescuing her great-grandparents lives from erasure and is also set in the early-20th-century South

• Kin, by Tayari Jones, is about the complexities of being a woman in the American South. I especially love the cover artwork of honeysuckle and kudzu.

I’m especially excited about celebrating my favorite bookstore’s 10th anniversary next month.

The LibroMobile Weekend LitFest kicks off Friday evening, August 21st, and ends on Sunday afternoon, August 23rd, with the announcement of the new Orange County poet laureates.

These are ticketed events, but you can also buy the entire package for $75, which includes LibroMobile's paletero book cart tote, pin, and sticker (a $46.25 value), and a $10 discount on a new book! Sign up here for all or part of it.

• Friday evening, August 21st, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm there’s a local author mixer, featuring Israel Moya, Lila Riesen, Alexis Jaimes, Ron Gonzales, Susie Yi, and Theodore Chao.

• On Saturday, August 22nd from 9 to 11 am there will be a Community Arts Forum featuring representatives from OC Mutual Aid, VAALA, CSO Orange County and UC Libraries.

• There are two afternoon workshops on Saturday, August 22nd from 12 to 2 pm, one for teens lead by Sailee Charlu and one for adults led by Elvia Rubalcava.

• From 3 to 5 pm on Saturday, August 22nd, there’s a BIPOC panel featuring Roger Reyes, Alexa Vasquez, Lisa Alvarez, and Alkaid Ramirez.

• At 7 pm until 9 pm on Saturday, August 22nd, there’s a VIP after hours cocktail party featuring my husband, Steve Camarillo, Jarli, and Ruby Castellanos.

Thanks to generous donations from the Frida Cinema, Ron Gonzales, Santa Ana River Brewing, Common Corners Brewing, Arte Publico Press, Travel Santa Ana, Reggie Peralta, Luella L. Reyes, there will be snacks and drinks at each event.

It’s all in support of keeping LibroMobile open.

If you can’t attend the LitFest, consider making a donation. Book sales are declining, funds and grants have disappeared, the rent still needs to be paid, and we need to celebrate ten years of this community treasure—the only independent bookstore in Santa Ana, California.

I had a fun chat with Marla Miller on her podcast Marla Miller Talks to Authors & Content Creators. Marla is the author of two novels, leads writing workshops, had a byline at O.C. Register’s lifestyle magazine, and was a founding editor-in-chief of an O.C. coastal lifestyle magazine.

Marla’s podcast is focused on “second career” stories and she gave me a chance to talk about my writing journey, my postal career, as well as one of my favorite topics, the similarities of writing audit reports and fiction.

You can watch and/or listen here.

What are you reading this summer? Write back and recommend something and I’ll enter you in a drawing (US readers only) to win an eBook of The Lockhart Women or Those People Behind Us.

Stay cool.

Riley recommends award-winning journalist Gabriel San Román’s new book Days of Dissent, Revolts, Strikes, and Rebel Histories which offers a compelling story of resistance for every 365 days of the year.

The February 8th entry caught my eye immediately because it concerns the Orangeburg Massacre in South Carolina. I’ve done a deep dive into that horror story because it’s part of my new novel. We traveled to Orangeburg last year and visited the South Carolina Civil Rights Museum, founded by photographer Cecil Williams, who documented the massacre’s violence and brutality. We were lucky enough to meet Mr. Williams at the museum.

On February 8, 1968, highway patrolmen opened fire on two hundred unarmed Black students protesting a “whites only” bowling alley near South Carolina State University in Orangeburg. Three young men were shot and killed, and 28 people were wounded, mostly in the back as they were running away.

The 1968 Orangeburg Massacre was largely ignored by the press for several reasons. The Massacre happened within days of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The students killed at Orangeburg State University were Black, and the shootings occurred at night, leaving no compelling TV images.

The Kent State Shooting two years later received far more media coverage.

Not Their Citizen

Citric Acid, An Online Orange County Literary Arts Quarterly of Imagination and Reimagination just published an excerpt from Sarah Rafael Garcia’s excellent “unintentional collection of micro-essays titled, “Not My President, Notes from a First-Born U.S. Citizen Or a Child of Immigrants in 2026.”

Garcia is the author of numerous books and essays. One of my favorites is SanTana’s Fairy Tales.

Garcia begins her micro-essays with Jimmy Carter and ends with the current occupant. These essays may be micro, but they are powerful. Garcia writes:

“Maybe I know very little about the presidents before Carter because this country never accepted me as a real citizen. Maybe I don’t care to know more because I never felt proud to be their “citizen.”

These essays also made me reconsider the presidents during my own lifetime

Not My Presidents Either

When I was born in 1952, “the buck stops here” Harry Truman occupied the White House. Hopefully my last president will not be “the buck goes straight in my bank account” current occupant.

I don’t remember Truman or Eisenhower, but I do remember the concern over JFK being a Catholic. I was in sixth grade when he was assassinated. I remember his successor, Lyndon Johnson, lifting his beagle by the ears in the White House Rose Garden, sparking a national outrage.

We had a beagle then. I didn’t like it either.

These days the Rose Garden has been paved over, the current occupant has no pets, and there’s much more to be outraged about besides assaults on beagle ears.

I campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 but was politically disillusioned when RFK won the nomination. After RFK was assassinated, after the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, after Hubert Humprey was the nominee, and after Nixon won, I remained disillusioned for a long time.

I was twenty-one and backpacking across Europe by myself when Nixon was impeached, trying to figure out how to talk about Watergate in French. I didn’t pay much attention to Gerald Ford except when one of the Manson girls tried to shoot him, but I liked Jimmy Carter, mostly because he reminded me of my father but also because the Allman Brothers backed his campaign.

There wasn’t much to excite me about Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton, or GW.

I was in Lincoln Park in Chicago the night Obama won the presidency. The celebration was a thrill to witness. Obama wasn’t perfect but he still seems like a breath of fresh air, compared to his successors.

As the L.A. Times reported this week, the current occupant, Number 47, has spent months waging an unusually aggressive campaign to reshape how states run elections. He’s pushed the Department of Homeland Security to compile a list of citizens in each state to help determine voter eligibility and he wants the Postal Service to decide who can receive mail ballots.

Not My Postmaster

The new Postmaster General, David Steiner, a former Waste Management CEO who has also served on the board of FedEx, is happy to implement #47’s demands. Steiner recently told Congress that if a state declines to furnish the federal government with its absentee voter list, the postal service will not mail election ballots in that state.

As you likely already know, I had a long career with the post office. It might be genetic since both of my grandfathers were railway mail clerks. Railway mail clerks were considered the elite of the postal service, respected for the demanding nature of the work and the rigorous training required. They sorted letters, newspapers, and parcels while the train was moving, were expected to know all post offices, rail junctions, and local delivery details, and be physically able to pull a mail bag off a hook at stations without stopping the train, while simultaneously dropping off bags of outgoing mail.

My jobs at the post office were nowhere near as physically demanding but I also respected the folks I worked with. We had a mission to accomplish. We had to get the mail out.

The Postal Service is legally required to deliver mail to all addresses in the United States as addressed. This obligation ensures that no American is left without access to postal services, making it a critical part of the USPS’s mission to “bind the nation together.”

U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani blocked #47’s plans, for now anyway, stating that the Postal Service does not have the legal authority to determine who can vote by mail and how.

Postal unions are also fighting back. The APWU said: “Postal workers take our commitment to public service seriously. We are proud to keep America’s mail moving and to treat it with the seriousness and respect that every postal customer deserves. That is especially true of election mail, and as postal workers, we are proud to have helped hundreds of millions of Americans exercise their right to vote by casting mail-in ballots.”

Stay Tuned.

Not Exactly My Kind of Book Festival

I joined a group of local authors last Saturday for a “Pop Up at the Pier Seal Beach Community Marketplace.” It was basically a craft fair so it shouldn’t have surprised me how many folks answered the question, “What do you like to read?” by saying, “I don’t really read.”

After all, they weren’t there for books. They wanted crafty things.

Besides, the number of people who read just for fun is declining every year. In America right now, fewer children than ever are reading for pleasure, even though “regularly reading for pleasure is scientifically proved to improve mental well-being, increase empathy and protect against dementia.”

The festival was still fun. I hung out with writer friends, sold a few books, and talked to a lot of interesting folks, while occasionally gazing at the Pacific Ocean.

Not a bad gig at all.

I encourage you to consider your mental health, the possibility of dementia, and the decline of empathy in this world, and keep reading.

Please keep reading.

Those People Behind Us

The Lockhart Women

When I started working at the post office in Santa Ana, California in 1974, the first thing I bought myself was a decent stereo system and the double album, “The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East.” I’ve loved this band since their inception, witnessed them live many times, and hold them responsible for my hearing loss.

In recent years we’ve visited “The Big House” in Macon, Georgia where the band, their families, and road crew lived from 1970-1973. And we’ve been to their graveyard at Rose Hill Cemetery twice.

My new novel includes a similar band of long-haired white musicians with a Black drummer in the late 1960s. It’s set largely in South Carolina, where my people come from.

In case you don’t know, the Allman Brothers started out in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1969. They were one of the first interracial bands to tour the segregated South, they helped Jimmy Carter become President, and they are credited as being the architects of “Southern Rock.”

Google’s definition of Southern Rock, slightly tweaked by me: “a subgenre of rock music that emerged in the American South during the late 1960s and early 1970s, characterized by a high-octane synthesis of jazz, electric blues, country, and boogie-woogie, frequently driven by twin or triple-lead guitar attacks, multiple drum sets, extended jam sessions, and working-class, Southern cultural storytelling.”

I’m partial to working-class Southern cultural storytelling myself.

I’m also a fan of the Allman Brothers deep respect for Black musicians. When Duane and Gregg Allman were in in high school in Daytona, Florida, they met a Black musician named Floyd Miles. Gregg credited Floyd with teaching him how to sing and Duane credited Floyd for turning him on to the guitar playing of Jimmy Reed.

The Allman Brothers were careful to announce the names of the original blues artist into the microphone before performing their songs. When they were on tour, if drummer Jai Johanny Johanson, aka Jaimoe, wasn’t welcome at a food stop, the band didn’t eat there either. And, unlike many rock and blues bands (Led Zeppelin anyone?) the Allman Brothers listed songwriter names in their album credits.

A new documentary, “Gregg Allman, The Music of My Soul,” is perfectly titled. Gregg Allman’s soul was steeped in music as well as loss, trauma, grief, addiction, sorrow and eventual reconciliation and redemption.

Gregg Allman’s father was shot dead by a hitchhiker when Gregg was two years old and his older brother Duane was three. In order to support her family, Mama Allman put her boys in military school. Gregg grew up feeling abandoned. He idolized Duane—for the first 23 years of his life anyway.

Duane Allman was 24 when he died in a motorcycle accident on October 29, 1971, four days after the “Fillmore East” album pictured above was certified gold. Bass player Berry Oakley died the following year in an eerily similar motorcycle accident. Gregg Allman spiraled into alcoholism and drug abuse. He went to rehab 15 times and married 7 times. He finally quit alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes cold turkey, had a liver transplant, was diagnosed with liver cancer, and died in 2017. He was 69.

Four months before Gregg Allman’s death, the Allman Brothers’ drummer Butch Trucks, committed suicide. Guitarist Dickie Betts died in 2024.

Jaimoe is the only surviving original member.

As the Guardian reported in a recent review of the documentary, “if trauma underlay Allman’s music, the way he used it as a singer, songwriter and musician couldn’t have been more rousing, creative or cathartic, something the performances in the film make abundantly clear.”

Author Jesmyn Ward has also experienced loss, trauma, and grief. She nearly gave up writing after a drunk driver killed her brother, Hurricane Katrina destroyed her home state of Mississippi, and her partner and father of her children died suddenly just before COVID.

I’m so glad she didn’t give up. Her new collection of essays, On Witness and Respair, is wonderful. The word “respair” means the recovery of hope after a period of despair. I think we can all use some of that these days.

Ward credits Mississippi as “the place that inspires me. These are the people, the community, my family, my extended family. They inspire my work and inform the stories that I tell…I felt like working as a writer and living as a writer in Mississippi would keep me honest, because I'm living around the people who I'm writing about.”

Here’s to keeping honest.

I’ve done a few Canvas Rebel interviews in the past. They interview artists, creatives, and entrepreneurs, and ask some good questions. Plus, I like being part of anything that includes the word “rebel.”

This latest interview was centered on “learning a craft” but they also asked me what was most rewarding about being a creative.

I said, “the best part is when someone reaches out and tells me how much they loved my book, how they recommended their book club read it, how they passed it on to their friends and family. My first novel, The Lockhart Women, just celebrated its fifth birthday. My second novel Those People Behind Us will be three years old in October of this year…My novels are still sparking conversations and for that I’m very grateful.”

Thirty-two years ago this month, there was an infamous white Ford Bronco cruising across Southern California freeways. The Lockhart Women were there too.

This novel is not about the passenger in the Bronco. It’s about three women navigating relationships, financial hardships, divorce, regrets, and bad decisions. I have some free eBook versions of the book. If you’d like one, write me back and let me know where you were on June 17, 1994.

My novels are available wherever you like to purchase books, and always on the shelf at Libro Mobile.

For which I am grateful.

I’m also grateful to Rose Molina who gets all the credit for spearheading local indie author events like this “Pop-Up at the Pier.” I’m joining her next Saturday, June 27th, from 11 am to 1 pm at the Seal Beach pier.

Come by if you are in the area and talk books with us.

I love a good writer’s guide, and Neal Allen’s and Anne Lamott’s Good Writing, 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences is exactly that. You might know Anne Lamott as the author of Bird by Bird, which I always recommend to new writers, along with A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, and Steering the Craft by Ursula Le Guin.

I’m using the Allen/Lamott’s tips to continue revisions of my new manuscript, in particular, Rule #33, Write the Hard Stuff First. A writer friend just gave me some feedback on a chapter in my novel about a beloved brother dying. She said it needed more and she was right. I didn’t want to write that chapter at all, and I didn’t write enough because I hated to have to kill him.

My niece suggested I read They Were Her Property, White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, because she knows my new book is a fictionalized version of our family’s American Southern history, and she also knows I’m a person who wants to get the details right.

She’s the same. It’s genetic.

There’s a strong mythology (instigated by Southern women) that Southern belles were much too delicate to be involved in such sordid business and therefore had no responsibility for the brutality of enslaving human beings because that was something the menfolk handled.

Jones-Rogers destroys this narrative.

It certainly wasn’t true in the family documents I’ve found. My female relatives independently inherited, bequeathed, bought, and sold human beings without asking permission from their male family members.

In an earlier draft of my new novel, I described an antebellum home as having “a peculiar odor of rot and remorse.” The phrase had a poetic ring to it, something I always aspire to, although Anne Lamott would likely cringe and remind me of rule #5, “Don’t Show Off.”

But after reading Jones-Rogers's book, I realized I’d violated my own rule—that good fiction must tell the truth. “Remorse” isn’t the right word. Slaveholders resented their loss of property after the Civil War, but they were never remorseful.

A traditionally published white male N.Y. Times best-selling mystery writer just reposted on Facebook his “rules for publishing.”

“Don’t ever pay anyone to publish your book. Don’t pay to enter contests. Don’t pay for a Kirkus review. Before you consider self-publishing, or marketing your book to real publishers, you should really go back and rewrite the manuscript.”

I am a big fan of going back and rewriting manuscripts, but I don’t appreciate the snark in his calling a publisher “real.” I can only assume he means one of the big five traditional publishers—Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, Hachette Book Group, or Simon & Schuster—when there are plenty of smaller, respected hybrid and independent presses that are equally “real.”

I’ve spent the last months querying a few dozen independent presses. For example, the wonderful Red Hen Press.

Here’s what’s going on there according to publisher Kate Gale:

“We lost the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. We lost three of our largest donors, who made up 20% of our funding. Then the local funding went to fire relief…Last year, the fires blew the roof off our press. Then there was flooding. Then thieves climbed onto the building and cut out the copper from the air conditioning units. They might have made $200 for the copper. The units cost between $50,000 and $60,000, that claim caused our insurance company to cancel us.

By July 1, 2026, we need to decide how Red Hen continues.”

Most indie presses are currently struggling. They have historically relied on grants and endowments, but those days are behind us.

Yet still, I persist. The majority of presses I’ve queried haven’t rejected me—so far. One press has asked for a full manuscript.

One press returned my manuscript with a note (see above) that they are inundated with submissions. I’m guessing they don’t have available staff to read through their stack.

I also assume the 100 percent AI generated rejection email I received from another press was similarly due to lack of staffing.

Several presses have requested that I resubmit again at the end of the year.

How much patience do I have?

I’ve read a lot of data lately that indicates hybrid publishing is the future. Why? Traditional publishing (with one of the Big Five Publishers listed above) requires significant upfront investment by the publisher.

Editing, design, printing, distribution, and marketing all carry increasing costs that must be recouped through sales. Traditional publishing also requires an author to have an agent, an impressive media platform, and a guarantee of robust sales.

Hybrid publishing changes this equation.

Brooke Warner, publisher at She Writes Press where I’ve published both of my books, predicts “we’ll see more and more independents bringing hybrid into their programs, cutting traditional deals when they think they can earn out, and asking authors to shoulder more of the risk when it’s not a sure bet. This is just smart business.”

Or maybe I’ll tackle publishing this third novel myself.

After all, Walt Whitman paid to publish 795 copies of Leaves of Grass when he was 37 years old. Mark Twain and Jane Austen self-published. Andy Weirposted his novel The Martian as free chapters on his website.

They’ve done all right.

Meanwhile, there’s no reason for traditional authors to talk smack about authors who choose other paths or don’t follow outdated rules about the ever-changing publishing world.

Times are also changing for bookstores that also used to be able to rely on endowments, grants, and generous donors. For example, LibroMobile.

Save the dates, August 21st to the 23rd, for LibroMobile’s Weekend Litfest. There will be mixers, workshops, talks, panels, and poet laureate announcements. It would be wonderful to see you there and if that’s not geographically feasible, go support an independent bookstore in your own community.

I’m grateful for the shelf space at LibroMobile for both of my novels, Those People Behind Us and The Lockhart Women. Signed copies are always available as well as terrific book swag.

I got permission from Texas singer/songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard’s publishing company, BMG Cicada and Snake Farm Publishing, to use this quote for the epigraph to my first novel The Lockhart Women which will celebrate its fifth birthday on June 1st.

I’m a long-time a fan of Mr. Hubbard and thought the three characters in The Lockhart Women could use his advice. They all have more expectations than gratitude when the novel begins.

Brenda Lockhart is sure she’s settled for less of a husband than she deserves. Peggy Lockhart sees herself as better than the community college her father talks her into attending. Allison Lockhart expects a life of romance by the sea because the coolest surfer at HB High School says he’s in love with her.

Unsurprisingly, life doesn’t work out quite the way they planned.

Does it ever?

Hubbard’s advice turned out to be wise words for me as well. When I first signed the contract to publish The Lockhart Women, I had big dreams of a huge book launch party celebrating in a local brewery with food, friends and family.

But then the pandemic.

My novel debuted just before California lifted the Stay at Home COVID-19 mandates, which meant planning an in-person book launch was problematic. I enlisted a few friends for a Zoom launch, an Instagram Live interview, another Zoom interview, and finally an in-person event at my favorite bookstore.

It makes me laugh now to think that I only invited newsletter subscribers to my first event. What was I thinking? Why didn’t I invite everyone I knew?

By June of 2021, most folks were completely sick of Zoom and Instagram Live and neither of my first two events were well attended. I was very grateful for those faces that did show up on the screen, but I had higher expectations.

My “Live in Person” event on June 26, 2021, had to be moved at the very last minute from LibroMobile’s downtown Santa Ana location to the Bookman in Orange. I don’t remember why now. It was stressful, but I am ever grateful to Sarah Rafael Garcia from LibroMobile and David Hess from the Bookman for pivoting and being so accommodating.

And I was thrilled that friends and family filled all the seats that afternoon.

There have been many thrills, surprises, disappointments, awards, events, educational moments, and so much to be grateful for on The Lockhart Women journey.

As some wise wordsmith told me years ago, books are not like cartons of milk. They don’t have expiration dates.

The Lockhart Women are still on the road. And if you haven’t read it yet and enjoy eBooks, I have a few free links to giveaway in celebration of the birthday. Write back and let me know you’d like one and I’ll send a link your way.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the first ever Surf City Author Fest. The idea was for 26 authors to set up easy ups in front of the entrance to the Central Library in Huntington Beach and sell books all day. The librarians put this together, at the nudging of local author Rose Molina, and they all did a terrific job.

The weather was perfect and there was steady stream of library patrons heading in and out of the library all day. Most of them weren’t necessarily there for the Author Fest. The HB library always has a ton of human traffic.

The event didn’t get a great deal of publicity, but those who stumbled into it seemed delighted to find themselves among authors and books.

I also didn’t know what to expect from the author panel I moderated that afternoon in the Library Theatre. It was a wide spectrum of genres, novels (me), short stories (Lisa Alvarez), adult memoir (Christine Amoroso), children’s books (Toni Haas), surfing (Mark Zambrano), and history and pop culture (Chris Epting.)

The idea was to discuss how the place where we live influences our writing. It was challenging to think up questions that applied to everyone. We were also all over the political spectrum, but we managed to have a civil conversation.

We all agreed that there are so many more stories that need to be told about the place of Orange County and the city of Huntington Beach. Ninety-seven people showed up to listen to our conversation on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

I was grateful we were all there.

I also had a lot of fun with these characters who read from the White Picket Fence Anthology, from Flower Song Press, in the lovely quad at the Riverside City College as part of their “Lit-Chella” literary festival. Big thank you to Jo Scott-Coe for inviting us and to Gina Rae Duran for editing the anthology.

You never know what to expect from a festival or a reading but these two were terrific.

I know what to expect from Surf City’s City Council. They’ve been suing the state of California for years over housing mandates, arguing that Huntington Beach can do whatever it wants because it’s a charter city. The state countersued in March 2023, stating that Surf City violated state law by refusing to zone for its mandated 13,368 housing units. The city appealed.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Katherine Bacal ruled against Huntington Beach in May 2024. Last December, the state Supreme Court declined to review an appellate court ruling in the state’s favor. A related 2023 federal lawsuit filed by the city against the state, arguing that housing mandates violated the city’s 1st and 14th Amendment protections as a charter city, died in February when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Now, Judge Bacal has retroactively charged Huntington Beach penalties of $10,000 a month from January 2025 through the end of this month (as in $170,000) plus $50,000 a month starting in June until the city adopts a housing plan.

As expected, Mayor Casey McKeon, pictured above said, “The city strongly opposes these penalties, and will continue fighting for the rights of our residents and for the principle of local control against ongoing efforts by the Attorney General to centralize land use authority in Sacramento.”

Apparently, Surf City’s City Council has yet to realize the connection between rote repetition and insanity.

Also as expected, the realtor in our neighborhood just planted American flags in every front yard in our neighborhood. She’s been doing this every Memorial Day since we moved in more than 30 years ago.

I’ve always found real estate agents intriguing, especially the ones who live in their “territory” which is the case in my neighborhood. Realtors are fully invested in keeping property values high, they know their clients’ family structures, finances, and what home improvements residents have and have not made. They also give away sometimes useful swag. Magnets, calendars, note pads, and newsletters.

A realtor who writes newsletters acts a throughline character in my second novel Those People Behind Us. Her newsletters at the beginning of the story are pretty mild. They promote her skills and services, sing the praises of Southern California surf, sand, and sun, and offer helpful household hints like how to get smudges off stainless-steel appliances.

But when she hears about an affordable housing project replacing a nearby apartment building, the newsletters become increasingly unhinged. Her household hints are about preventing roaches and suggesting that women carry mace when they walk the neighborhood.

Unhinged or not, the newsletters were fun to write.

In other unhinged news that is not fun to write about, we are currently waiting for either an explosion or a toxic chemical dump from a malfunctioning chemical storage tank at a Garden Grove aerospace company. We are NOT in the evacuation zone, but since this tank sits 6.1 miles away from our house it’s still unnerving.

As my friend Lisa Alvarez posted, “Somehow the two official outcomes offered: the tank fails or the tank explodes, seem like an apt metaphor for where we are at this moment as a country.”

Happy Memorial Day.

Gracias to Lindsay Merbaum, author, high priestess of home mixology, and leader of the Pick Your Potions’ Study Coven, for featuring Ainslie Hogarth’s Motherthing in her latest study coven. Motherthing is sinister, sad, and stunning and prompted a thought provoking discussion of mothers and motherhood.

I’m a fan of Lindsay’s cocktail recipes. She designed a bourbon drink for my first novel The Lockhart Women. I also highly recommend Lindsay’s study covens. In addition to the main text, Lindsay creates a detailed and inspiring syllabus and offers creative writing prompts to accompany the readings.

The next coven meeting, an ocean horror-themed class, is in July and will feature Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield.

Last weekend, I talked storytelling and politics with these incredibly smart women, Victoria Patterson, Dana Johnson, and Lisa Alvarez. My books were in great company on the rack with their wonderful titles. Thanks Flintridge bookstore for vending books and Litfest in the Dena for putting the festival together.

Victoria asked challenging questions. There were points in the conversation that I really wanted to go sit down in the audience and listen instead of trying to think up an answer.

For example, how do we continue to create art in these times when democracy is imploding and it’s hard to believe in the decency of humanity?

Here’s what we came up with: Give ourselves grace, turn off the news, find joy in other artists, and do what we can. Write letters, march, support community food banks, campaign for better politicians.

And as Dana Johnson said, (forgive my paraphrase of her wise words) remember that no sees the world like we do from our own eyes, and that no one can tell our stories like we do.

We also sat in on a powerful panel on “Recovering Victim -Survivor Voices” where I got to meet Victoria Waddle in person, add Casandra Lopez’s poems and Cassandra Lane’s memoir to my “want to read” stack, and see Jo Scott-Coe again.

Jo Scott-Coe is also reading next Wednesday at Riverside City College at their Lit-Chella Festival, along with me, Editor Gina Rae Duran, Mark Hein, and Thea Pueschel. We will be reading from The White Picket Fence Anthology, Stories of Individuality vs Rebelliousness from Flower Song Press.

My dear friend Lisa Alvarez has been an English professor at Irvine Valley College (the little college in the orange groves as she’s always called IVC) for 33 years and is retiring this year. Issue 29 of the wonderful literary magazine, “The Ear,” is dedicated to Lisa.

Kristen Skjonsby wrote in the issue’s Editorial Note that Lisa “has proven to us that there is no real difference between the big world and our little college in the orange groves. One should strive to bring the world to our small place, not to keep it out. This seeming irony is what brings us closer together, and we must do everything we can to maintain the intimacy, conversation, and connectedness that art provides.”

True words, Kristen. Bravo, Lisa!

I met Lisa K. Richter in one of Professor Alvarez’s workshops and got to celebrate her new memoir fly my darling, a love story, at her beautiful top of Laguna Beach home. There were flowers, family, friends, and food and an amazing view of the Pacific Ocean, as well as a beautiful tribute from Lisa’s daughter to her mom.

This week I met with Kathy Dunlap’s book club in her beautiful hilltop home up in Cowan Heights to discuss Those People Behind Us. I was too busy talking and listening to take any photos, but Kathy gifted me these beautiful note cards by her late mother, the artist Helen Gerrard.

Kathy has room enough for a dining table that seats twenty people (!) and every seat was taken with a variety of book loving women with the best stories. One of them has a nearby menagerie with horses, llamas, chickens, dogs, and a zebra. One was a flight attendant who has evacuated airplanes. Kathy’s daughter teaches dance. Some of us talked about glaucoma and hearing aids but mostly we talked books.

I’m reasonably sure not everyone in Kathy’s book club loved my book but I admired their questions and comments about what they found confusing or disturbing and their willingness to keep turning the page.

There are all kinds of book clubs and recently the LA Times has been shouting out a few of them.

The Booked Babes (pictured above) recently read “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” by Patrick Süskind and journeyed to a gothic mansion in La Jolla to discuss the novel. They also played croquet, designed a custom perfume, and took lots of photos.

I’m wondering why they didn’t put down their champagne glasses and include the book they were discussing in the photo.

Becky’s Book Club in Pacific Palisades has been meeting for over 25 years. Members, ages 83 to their 90s, have collectively read 252 books since 2001. They don’t dress up in costumes or travel to gothic mansions.

They don’t always agree on the books either. They couldn’t stand Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays for example, but the group’s open-mindedness, willingness to read a wide variety of books on different subjects, and respect for other members has kept the group going for all these years.

“We don’t reject any ideas,” says member Gail Heltzer. “Everybody has opinions and is extremely respectful, and everyone leaves smarter.”

My kind of book club.

Saturday May 9th is the Surf City Author Fest. Twenty some authors will be set up in front of the Central Library in Huntington Beach talking and vending books just in time for Mother’s Day shopping. Come by between 10 am and 4 pm.

I’m also moderating a panel with five local authors at 2 pm.

It’s all free, there’s some great book swag, terrific prizes, and I get to hang out with some of my favorite authors.

Happy Mother’s Day. Buy your mom a book!

Like most authors these days, I’m deluged with spammy, scammy marketing emails, promising fame and fortune if I simply let them rebrand me and my novels. “A well-executed rebrand can enhance customer perceptions and increase revenues,” they say.

My favorite rebrand idea so far is an offer to pitch me as “The CPA of Southern California Soul.”

It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

Huntington Beach Mayor, Casey McKeon has decided Surf City needs rebranding. On April 9, 2026, Casey was all set to pay a company called Wolffhaus, operated by Tyler Wolff, $720,000 for “a comprehensive Surf City branding and marketing overhaul.” Casey had already paid Tyler Wolff $30,000 for an “audit” that determined that the majority of news coverage of HB was negative, which impacts city revenues.

I could have told them that for free. And I put quotes around “audit” because Wolff admits in the document that financial, operational, and contractual data was not available. This former CPA has a problem with that.

“Not so fast,” the community and three other city council members told Casey because that kind of contract needs a study session first and then to be offered to other firms. Requests for Proposals were immediately sent out with a due date of April 27th and this week the city council narrowly agreed to set up a three-member committee to make the final decision instead of having city staff or the full council decide.

What’s the rush? Casey has apparently just realized that the 250th anniversary of the Fourth of July is coming right up, and Surf City can’t afford to miss the chance to capitalize.

In better news, Protect HB screened The Librarians at the Huntington Beach Central Library on April 22nd, and the 300-seat theatre was packed with residents, educators, and librarians.

The documentary is about the Texas “Krause List,” which targeted 850 books focused on race and LGBTQ+ stories and triggered book bans across the U.S. including Huntington Beach. There’s still a stack of books on a tall shelf on the fourth floor of the HB Central library that Surf City’s council deems “too obscene for children,” despite a judicial order to make the books available.

“The Librarians” documentary is powerful and often depressing but it convinced me of the importance of electing the right decision makers to local school boards and city councils. I may be a childless cat woman, but even I understand the importance of school curriculums and available library books to my future.

I’ll be moderating a panel on May 9th at 2 p.m. in the same 300-seat theatre at the Huntington Beach Library. The title of the panel is “Surf City Under the Surface” and includes a very diverse group of authors. The genres span from a short story collection to my novels, from a children’s book to an adult memoir, and to non-fiction about surfing and Teddy Roosevelt.

What we have in common and what I hope we are going to talk about is our focus on place and our connection to Surf City and Orange County. In fact, when I googled “books, or novels, or surf stories, set in Huntington Beach” most of these names came up.

RSVP here.

This is part of the first ever Surf City Author Fest, which will set up outside the front of the library all day on Saturday May 9th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Just in time for Mother’s Day shopping!

I have a bunch of fun stuff coming up in May. I’ll be talking politics on May 1st at Litfest in the Dena in Pasadena, partying at the launch party for The Ear on May 5th, paneling with Surf City authors on May 9th, and reading my story from the White Picket Fence Anthology out in Riverside on May 13th.

Hoping to see you out there.

In celebration of Indie Bookstore Day, Bookshop.org is offering free shipping this weekend (April 25th to April 26th.) You can support your favorite independent bookstore, like LibroMobile, and pickup copies of my novels The Lockhart Women and Those People Behind Us.

If you’d like to win (US subscribers only) a copy of Volume 20 of “The Ear” which includes a story by me titled “Carr Park,” write back and tell me how you spent Independent Bookstore Day. A revised version of “Carr Park” ended up in Those People Behind Us.

Congrats to Karen D’Ambrosio who won a copy of The Lockhart Women in last issue’s giveaway.

These days, I’m researching independent publishers for my new novel. What I’ve learned so far is that publishers generally require a query letter with an elevator pitch, a brief summary, and a bio. Sometimes they want the full manuscript. Sometimes they prefer the first fifty pages. Some also want chapter summaries, publicity plans, at least three recent comparative midlist titles (published within the last three to five years) and the answer to this question:

Who is the audience for this book?

I get it. Publishers want to make sure someone will buy the book before they agree to print it. and bookstores like to have an idea where a new book might fit on their shelf. I, of course, prefer to believe that my books are unicorns. Incomparable. Nothing in the world quite like them.

I’d love to say this new book is a cross between the dark humor of Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find, the romance of rock and roll in Cameron Crowe’s 2000 movie Almost Famous, and the horror story of Brandon Jacob-Jenkins 2011 Tony award-winning play Appropriate.

Except, despite being many decades too old, these references sound quite pretentious.

So, wish me luck finding something more relevant.

We didn’t have any luck getting tickets for the Late Show when we went to New York City last month. Stephen Colbert is going off the air next month and everyone wants to see him. Even Oprah.

This week we caught a recording of his conversation with Ms. Winfrey. She made him switch places and in typical Oprah fashion, although she didn’t make him cry, she did ask him real questions.

“What will you miss?” she asked. He said interviewing people, his band, his crew, but mostly he will miss his audience. Here’s what he said to Oprah:

“When you and I are talking to each other, there’s a third person in the conversation and it’s the audience right there. And they are actually doing their job better than you and I can, because they know what their job is and they’re very committed to their job, which is to listen to what’s going on and having a reaction to it. The audience is very pure in their engagement in our conversation. And if you stay tuned to them, you know where the conversation is going.”

I never have any idea how the audience is reacting to my words because I have to take off my glasses in order to read. My spectacles are for distance. I can’t see past the page I’m reading without them.

I’m so glad someone got behind me at the recent Five Women Over Fifty reading at the Santa Ana Art Walk so I could see the faces.

Some of them were even smiling, including my husband.

Of course, there’s always some guy in the back looking at his phone, but the other folks seem entertained. I read the first chapter in my new novel, and it apparently was well received.

I’ve been in the audience many times for each of the three other women pictured above.

• Victoria Patterson is commonly described as the Edith Wharton of Orange County. I heard her speak at my first Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference and bought a copy of her novel The Little Brother which inspired the troubled character Kevin in The Lockhart Women. Victoria also blurbed my second novel Those People Behind Us.

• I first heard Lisa Alvarez speak many years ago at Literary Orange and then took her creative writing class at Irvine Valley College. She’s encouraged me ever since, to apply to the Community of Writers, to read a short story in front of people for the first time, to submit a poem or a story to a journal, and to read something new out loud in front of people.

• Dana Johnson is Professor of English at USC. I’ve been in her audience multiple times at the LA Times Book Festival. Dana’s novel and short story collections illustrate life in Southern California. Break Any Woman Down published in 2012 won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She’s also teaching an online short story writing class on April 20th. Check it out here and sign up! I did.

It’s unbelievable to me that I now get to sit facing the audience with these women next to me. Come to our Litfest in the Dena panel on May 1st, 6:30 p.m., at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church for our panel, spearheaded by Victoria Patterson, on Story Telling as a Political Force.

Anyone heading to the LA Times Festival of Books this year? It’s next weekend, April 18-19th at USC.

This year I’m on the fence about going. The drive. The parking. The crowds. The overwhelm of realizing how many folks are trying to do the same thing I am.

Write back and convince me why or why not I should make the trek, and I’ll enter you in a drawing (US only) to win a free signed copy of either one of my paperbacks. Or you can purchase them on my website, at LibroMobile, or wherever you like to buy books.

I recently joined L.A. Times journalist Gustavo Arrellano’s book club “Guti’s Fookin Ingrates.” He selects the books and so far, he’s picked things I never would have thought of reading. I wasn’t a big fan of last month’s Watchman but I really liked his most recent choice.

The Perfect Tuba by Sam Quinones is inspiring storytelling. It’s a love letter to public school music teachers and band leaders and makes me regret giving up the clarinet back in junior high school.

Here’s some of the back cover copy:

The tuba's sound is mighty, emerging, it seems, from deep in the human body. Very little music has, up until recently, been written to play to its strengths. The best the tuba seems to promise is a seat at the back of the band.”

“Quinones takes us through the tuba scenes of New Orleans, Orlando, Knoxville, New York City, and, most importantly, Roma, Texas, a dusty town in the Rio Grande Valley where a visionary high school marching band director fashioned a program that now regularly wins state championships and sends its students off to college.”

Those band kids in Roma, Texas didn’t have parents who could offer private lessons or even buy them an instrument and yet they managed to compete against wealthy schools in Austin and Dallas and win.

When I was their age, I thought band kids weren’t cool. One of the many things I’ve been wrong about.

I also used to say I didn’t like thrillers so much, but I was happy to oblige when Matt Witten reached out to me and asked if I’d like to read an Advanced Reader Copy of his new novel 51%. Release date is April 28, 2026.

in 51%, Witten has created a disturbingly believable dystopian New York City twenty years in the future, where syndicates own schools, roads, the police, and percentages of human beings. In this world, humans sell percentages of themselves in exchange for college education and health care.

Since we’d just returned from New York City, I enjoyed the slightly tweaked local references. Witten’s attention to detail in this world building is impressive, his cast of characters are distinct and memorable, and his pacing, stakes-raising, and tension building lead to an electrifying and satisfying ending. Relevant and accessible and hopefully not a prediction of what is to come.

Bravo Matt.

A Sea of Lemon Trees by María Dolores Águila was a Christmas gift from a dear friend. I savored this book. It’s an unusual combination of prose and poetry, based on the true story of Roberto Alvarez and the Lemon Grove Incident, a landmark case in 1931 that was the first successful desegregation case in the United States.

Mexican American children in the Lemon Grove neighborhood near San Diego, California were forced to go to a “so-called new school that had been built for them. In the words of students of the time “It wasn’t a school. It was an old building. Everyone called it ‘La Caballeriza' (the barnyard).”

The community banded together and won, establishing the rights of their children to an equal education. The language is beautiful and this heartbreaking history is important and timely. Recommended for middle school and adults.

A wonderful book club called “Bound by Books” selected Those People Behind Us for their March read and I joined them for dinner last night. They’ve been meeting for two years and are related either by geography, employment, or education to the Town and Gown organization from Chapman University in Orange, California.

These folks are on a mission to read local authors from Orange County and were a delightful bunch. They asked great questions and had terrific book suggestions. They all seemed to enjoy Those People, which makes them my favorite type of people.

I love book clubs. Reach out to me if you’d like me to join yours, either in person or on Zoom.

Come to Art Walk in the Downtown Artist Village next Saturday, April 4th. I’ll be on stage sometime between six and 10 p.m. as a part of “Five Women Over Fifty,” sponsored by LibroMobile.

I’m definitely the furthest from fifty in this lineup but I’m excited to join them. We’ll all be reading…something. Maybe from these books below.

all available at LibroMobile.

I was a volunteer book seller at the bookstore for a few hours last Saturday. They need free labor to stay open, but what they really need is for folks to buy books.

My shift was a lot more fun that I was expecting. I figured out how to get the door open and sell things anyway and I really liked talking about books and making suggestions. I also really love pointing to the Local Authors shelf where my novels have found a home.

I plan on volunteering again on April 11th from nine to one, so please stop by and purchase something.

What are you reading this spring? Write back and let me know and I’ll enter you in a drawing (US readers only) for a signed paperback of The Lockhart Women.

A woman stood near to the #1 train door holding a cup of coffee in one hand and her phone in the other. She wore a cool leather jacket over a simple black dress and low heels. The train jerked along the track heading from the Upper Westside toward South Ferry, but she never once reached for the pole to hang on.

She was not me.

I did my best to grab any available seat on the train. When forced to stand I gripped the center pole with both hands, planted my feet, flexed my knees, and reminded myself that I do have some core strength. I admired folks who ran up and down flights of stairs as I clung to the railing and kept my eyes on my feet.

Traveling is a good test of one’s physical and mental health. Flexibility is key. We’d prepared for cold weather and had to shift our wardrobes as best we could when temperatures reached 70+ degrees. A nice problem to have, while it lasted.

Traveling also allows a spectrum of emotions. Gratitude first, for having the means and ability to get out of town. Bittersweet nostalgia as well, during our morning stroll through Strawberry Fields in Central Park.

I felt some regret, in our afternoon Artistic, Alternative Greenwich Village Walking Tour, that I didn’t pay enough attention to what was going on in the 1960s. In the Village there were the Women’s House of Detention protests, the Stonewall Riots, and Jane Jacob’s quest to save Washington Park.

I was thrilled to spot the Statue of Liberty when we flew into Newark, and it was exciting to take a ferry out to Liberty Island a few days later and see all of Manhattan from the water. The story of the Statue of Liberty’s creation was surprising and inspirational. I didn’t know the statue was made of copper, for example, or that the French people paid for the statue and Americans paid for the pedestal.

But reading the inscription on the statue left me in despair with how far away we’ve come from Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus,” written to raise money for the pedestal.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

There was joy as well. There’s nothing better than seeing a great band like the Tedeschi Trucks Band perform in a venue they love, the beautiful Beacon Theatre.

Our view of the entirety of Manhattan from the Top of the Rock (at the top of Rockefeller Center, ice skaters below) was impressive as was the attire of the young professionals on a team building trip. Wide legged pants are definitely a thing these days.

The play we saw that night at the August Wilson theatre, Dog Day Afternoon, was terrific and timely despite being set in 1972. We were twenty years old back then. The young sound and stage design student sitting next to us said he’d just turned twenty-one, was from Hong Kong, didn’t have legal status in the U.S., and planned to move elsewhere once he earned his degree, unless we knew someone willing to pay him under the table.

We all liked the play a lot.

We spent the better part of a cold, rainy, then snowy day at the American Museum of Natural History. We calculated that our tour guide was five years older than we are. He was sharp, and spry, with an impressively understandable way of explaining the creation of life.

Favorite quote: “Human life is no more valuable than any other form of life. Everything alive today is equally evolved.”

We also learned about cats’ jaws and why they are such good biters.

We found New Yorkers in general to be friendly and helpful. When we first arrived at our hotel and got out of the Lyft, a man walking his dog stopped and said, “Welcome to New York.” The doormen at the hotel always seemed delighted to see us. At any moment of map confusion, passersby offered direction.

Maybe it’s because we’re old.

We also felt safe taking the subway and walking the streets, although we were always back in our comfortable room before midnight.

Well past our usual bedtime.

Stay up late with me on Saturday, April 4th for Artwalk in the Artist Village in Santa Ana, California. Stop by the LibroMobile Stage from six to ten p.m. where five women over the age of fifty (including me) will be reading from their work and signing books. It’s the first of a series of events sponsored by LibroMobile that will include poets, authors, and artists.

I am most definitely the one furthest away from fifty in this lineup, but I’m delighted to be a part of it.

And please save the date for Litfest in the Dena, May 2nd and 3rd at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church. Friday night at 6:30 p.m. in Pasadena, California. I’m on a panel with storytellers Victoria Patterson, Dana Johnson, and Lisa Alvarez talking about Storytelling as a Political Force.

You can find my novels The Lockhart Women and Those People Behind Us wherever you like to buy eBooks, paperbacks, and audiobooks. Signed paperbacks are always on the shelf at LibroMobile.

To win a signed copy of Those People Behind Us, (US readers only) write back and let me know your travel survival tips. Congrats to Gin who won the last giveaway.

Last Saturday, ten of the authors in the anthology “The White Picket Fence” from Flower Song Press celebrated the official book launch with a reading at the beautiful community bookstore Cafe Con Libros in Pomona, California. It was long drive for me, but the local mountains were covered in snow, the sky was a brilliant blue, and the sun was shining.

What I particularly loved about this reading was how all of the stories we shared somehow spoke to each other. I read a story called “Satisfaction” about a young girl in 1965 feeling angsty about her looks and having a blowout fight with her mother. Here’s a snippet:

Olivia went into her bedroom and clicked on the tiny transistor radio next to her bed. “Satisfaction” was just starting, a song her mother hated, so she cranked up the volume.

I understand why Olivia’s mother didn’t like the song. My mother didn’t either and now, with older ears and eyes, I recognize the cynicism, privilege, and misogyny in many of the Rolling Stones’ song lyrics. For example, “Under My Thumb,” “You’re Out of Touch,” and “Stupid Girl.” And of course, “Satisfaction.”

Here’s more from my story.

Keith Richard’s opening guitar riff repeated three times, so urgent and furious that Olivia could not stand still. She danced in front of the mirror, waving her arms overhead. Someday, someone would ask her to dance and be amazed at her moves. Her father’s voice now, downstairs in the kitchen, talking to her mother, clearing his throat, something he did when he was angry.

“A herd of elephants,” he’d said before.

I was thirteen in 1965 when “Satisfaction” was released on the Stones third studio album “Out of Our Heads.” It’s a great song to dance to, but “Satisfaction’s” lyrics have always confused me as they do Olivia:

Mick Jagger sang “I can’t get no,” which made no sense. He was a rock star, flying around the world, making tons of money. He could get whatever he wanted. Maybe he was the same as her father, never satisfied no matter what. And what exactly was girly action? She wasn’t sure if she’d want to have it with Mick or Keith, but she doubted they’d want to have it with her anyway.

Her mother pushed the door open. “Please turn that down.”

Olivia reached for the volume knob. Maybe the lyrics meant the exact opposite. It was a double negative. Can’t get no satisfaction meant that Mick could get some.

Not too long ago, the Beatle’s bass player Paul McCartney called the Stones “just a blues cover band.” He might have meant that as a slam, but their bluesy music is the main reason I’m a big fan. I’ve always loved the blues. The Stones may have “borrowed” this music from Black American artists and then fed it back to us through a 1960s English party boy pop lens, but they also brought these Black artists (such as Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Bo Diddley) along with them on tour and introduced them to new audiences.

“Satisfaction” was the band’s first number one U.S. hit. Radio stations refused to play it in certain cities, and the Stones weren’t allowed to sing the line about “trying to make some girl” on a 1965 performance on Shindig!

It wasn’t only the sexual content that was problematic to radio. There’s also an anti-consumerism thread throughout the lyrics, ironic since the Stones have never had a problem accepting corporate sponsorship for their tours.

When I'm watchin' my TV/ And a man comes on and tells me/How white my shirts can be/But he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke/The same cigarettes as me

Brian Jones supposedly hated “Satisfaction” so much that he played “Popeye the Sailor Man” during performances of the song.

I still dance in front of the mirror sometimes and these days, I probably sound even more like a herd of elephants.

If you’d rather hear me read than dance, I’m honored to be a part of LibroMobile’s Oral Histories in an episode called “On Mailrooms, Stability, and How to Be a Better Neighbor.” You can listen here.

LibroMobile’s goal with these oral histories is “to empower community members to take ownership of their own histories.” If you’re interested in participating, LibroMobile provides technological tools, virtual applications, workspace and one-on-one tutorials as well as collaborative workshops. They can assist in archiving family albums too. Check out their website for more information.

Meanwhile, in Surf City, the city council got no satisfaction from a recent Supreme Court decision that had nothing to do with tariffs. SCOTUS declined to hear HB’s appeal of a lower court decision that sided with the state of California over housing mandates. Former city attorney Michael Gates (now running for state Attorney General) has argued for years that HB doesn’t have to follow California’s mandates because we’re a charter city. The state of California does not agree and now the Supreme Court doesn’t want to hear any more about it.

Mayor Casey McKeon said the U.S. Supreme Court decision not to take the city’s case was disappointing but “other paths will always exist for us to continue to rigorously fight to defend the Huntington Beach residents’ local control.” I’m not sure what these paths might be, but the council only has until mid-April to update its housing plan. The city is required to zone for 13,368 new units.

Matt Szabo reported that “the council has yet to have any open session discussions.”

Stay tuned.

Save the dates. May 1st and 2nd, Litfest in the Dena is returning to Pasadena. The theme this year is “Books That Changed the Public Narrative” and their website lists a few examples:

• Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring

• Sinclair Lewis, The Jungle

• Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

• John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath

I’m on a panel with some incredible authors talking about storytelling. More information coming soon.

What book would you recommend as one that changed the public narrative? Write back and let me know and I’ll enter your name in a giveaway chance (US only) to win a signed copy of my novel Those People Behind Us which is also available wherever you like to buy books and always on the shelf at LibroMobile.

Not much gets past our landlord. He has better ears and eyesight than we do and is the first to hear someone at the door or to spot anything out of order.

I’m still pretty thrilled that one of the poems in the “Bright As Life” exhibit at the Huntington Beach Art Center has my name on it. I love the accessibility of this exhibit. Anyone can walk in during Art Center hours, for free, and read the poems. They’re on the walls until today, February 14th, and in the meantime, I’ve been hanging out with them.

After one of my visits, I took a walk downtown to the end of the pier to catch a glimpse of the power plant mentioned in my poem. I also checked out the planned new restaurant/bar “Huntington’s on the Pier” which will replace a former bait and tackle shop.

The project was approved in 2021, but construction has yet to begin. In January 2026, the city council approved a $1.3-million completion bond and locked in a 50-year agreement with Surf City Partners, providing rent credit of $300,000 for restroom improvements and waivers of up to $50,000 in city fees.

Our council likes generous long-term agreements. They made a similar arrangement with the Pacific Air Show.

Normally, Surf City’s council votes in unison. For example, when the California Supreme Court denied the city’s appeal of the 4th District Court ruling that Huntington Beach’s proposed local voter ID requirement violates state election laws, the city council agreed 7-0 to appeal the decision all the way to the Supreme Court.

But there’s dissension among the council about this restaurant project. Three of the members voted against approving the agreement. And, although he ended up voting for the agreement, even Pat Burns noted that the project had been “stumbling along” and wondered “if there’s supposed to be some kind of deadline or something ... on the life of this bond.”

Ya think?

Personally, I wondered about the poster in the window depicting the folks who “inspired” the restaurant. Ella Christensen is an obvious choice although I wish they’d found a better photo of her. She was known as “Queen of the Pier” and owned and operated three pier concession stands from 1951 to 1988. Ed Manning makes sense too, I guess. He was a plumber who had the contract for the pavilion on Balboa Peninsula, was elected HB’s first mayor back in 1909, and had a fine head of hair.

But what’s so inspiring about Henry Huntington?

When I stopped in at the Main Street Library branch to check out how many books the city council will have to remove to make room for their desired relocation of the Surf Museum (a lot of books is my opinion) I noticed The Art of Wealth, The Huntingtons in the Gilded Age on the shelf.

Henry Huntington inherited one fortune, built a second, and married a third, shocking society in 1913 when he divorced his wife to marry his uncle’s wealthy widow, Belle Huntington. Although Huntington amassed and donated a huge collection of rare books, tapestries, and art to the public after he died, I don’t find him inspirational.

One reason—he’s largely responsible for So Cal’s urban sprawl. As Medium reported last year, in the early 1900’s Henry Huntington built the largest streetcar system on Earth, with 1,300 miles of track that had one purpose only — to carry people to his real estate properties scattered across LA’s outskirts, including Huntington Beach. Henry ran his transit system at a loss but made a fortune selling houses to everyone who rode his rails. Once the land was sold, Huntington stopped funding and maintaining the streetcars and then abandoned them. Southern Californians have been stuck in their cars ever since.

And no surprise to anyone who is a fan of the television series “The Gilden Age,” Henry Huntington was also a notorious anti-labor businessman who fired union members demanding better wages and working conditions, hired strikebreakers, and joined and funded multiple anti-labor organizations (such as the LA Times) to subdue union activity.

I find no art or inspiration in any of that.

But I am grateful to find art and poetry at the Huntington Beach Art Center.

In other encouraging news, plans are in the works for the first ever Surf City Author Fest on May 9th. Applications close Sunday February 15th. Apply here if you’d like a chance to be part of it.

My books are available for your favorite valentine wherever you like to buy books, and always on the shelf at Santa Ana’s only bookstore LibroMobile.

My husband always calls Valentines Day, “Thanksgiving,” which is one of the many things I love about him. In celebration of Thanksgiving, I’m giving away a signed paperback of “Those People Behind Us.” To win (US READERS ONLY) write back and tell me who you find inspirational. As long as it isn’t Henry Huntington, I’ll enter you in the drawing.

Congrats to PJ who won the last giveaway.

I’ve always liked knowing where I am on a map. I live on the Pacific Ocean coastline, technically 3.5 miles inland from that line. I’ve stood on the equator in Kenya and nine degrees north of the equator in Panama. I’ve shopped at Talk Story, the westernmost American bookstore and sipped beer at Kauia Island Brewing Company, the westernmost American brewery.

One day I’m going to Cape Town.

Last year we gazed across the Atlantic from the port in Lisbon where Portuguese explorers set sail for the “New World.” This week we climbed up and down the historic forts of Old San Juan Puerto Rico where the first colonizers, Columbus and Ponce de Leon, landed.

It took us a full twelve hours, considering the four-hour time difference, to find our way from Southern California to San Juan, Puerto Rico, about 1,000 miles southeast of Miami. When we finally arrived after ten p.m. on a Wednesday night in late January, the bars on Calle de San Sebastian were still lively, music at full blast, packed with young people celebrating being young people.

And two weary old folks, sipping a beer at La Taberna Lupulo, celebrating being old.

The next morning, we visited the Castillo San Felipe del Morro, a National Park. The ranger gave an excellent tour and talked about the resilience of the Borinqueños, who have defended their island for more than 500 years from the Spanish, the Roman Catholic Church, the English, the Dutch, the French, the Protestants, and finally the Americans in the Spanish/American War of 1898.

After the Americans won, Spain ceded colonial control of Puerto Rico to the United States. Now, Puerto Ricans use the U.S. dollar as currency and are American citizens but cannot vote in general presidential elections and do not have voting representation in Congress.

The old town of San Juan is also a cruise ship port, and the cruise ships seem to always be in port. The cruisers wear wristbands, are on a tight schedule, and travel in packs.

We felt lucky to be on our own, admiring the wild roosters and cats.

We were also happy to venture out of the old town to the murals in the Santurce neighborhood, the beaches in Isla Verda, and the flora, fauna, and waterfalls in El Yunque National Forest, the only tropical rainforest in the U. S. national park system. El Yunque is on the eastern edge of Puerto Rico.

Our guide Freddie told us about the damage Hurricane Maria did to the island in 2017. Almost 3,000 Puerto Ricans died. Monetary losses are estimated at $92 billion. Freddie’s family had no electricity for six weeks, but he was proud of how people in his local community helped each other.

They had to, considering the lack of government response.

Freddie also explained environmental resilience, how the chaos and destruction of the storm prompted regrowth and rejuvenation.

I tried to remember Freddie’s optimism later that day, when I read online about Alex Pretti’s murder in Minneapolis. No matter where I stand, this country appears on the edge of fascism, if not already tipped well beyond.

In the spirit of resilience—considering Surf City’s City Council’s infamous acrimony with libraries and books—the Huntington Beach Public Library is hosting the first Surf City Author Fest on May 9, 2026, at the Central Library from 10am to 4pm. The festival includes a free outdoor book fair and two discussion panels in the Library Theater.

Applications from local authors interested in participating in this year’s festival are available here. Apply before February 15^th, 2026.

Gratitude to Los Angeles Literature for celebrating the previous calendar year successes of the Greater Los Angeles literary community. I’m thrilled they included some of my work in 2025 in their list that includes so many friends and terrific authors.

Here’s what they shared about me.

Mary Camarillo—Citric Acid Issue 15: Second Guessing My Second Novel on Its Second Birthday, Issue 14 The Golden Women of Orange County; Women Who Submit, This Makes Up the Sky, Birds: Red Light at Bolsa Chica and Edinger

Gracias for the shoutout.

What edge of the world have you been to? Where would you like to go? Write back and I’ll enter you in a drawing (U.S. readers only) to win a copy of The Second Corona Book of Horror Stories. The collection includes a story of mine and seems appropriate for these times.

There are many misconceptions about California. No one walks here. No one is really from here. Both are clearly untrue.

Folks from other places also like to make fun of Californians for not having weather or seasons when the exact opposite is true, especially this winter. Just before Christmas, Huntington Beach was socked in with fog for a solid week. And then the rains came. We currently have sandbags stacked outside our back patio door.

One of our nephews from the Netherlands arrived for the holidays looking forward to sunny days. We found them in a quick trip to New Orleans for New Year’s Eve, but NOLA was very cold. It was pouring rain when we flew back to California and landed in Long Beach, but a few days later the skies finally cleared.

Hosting visitors gives me a chance to rediscover what’s good about living here. We took the kid (actually he’s almost 22) on a small Southern California tour. We ate churros and octopus ceviche from Mercado González in Costa Mesa and sampled seaweed wrapped spicy salmon at Tenori at Rodeo 39 in Stanton. We admired the Christmas decorations at Crystal Court at South Coast Plaza and the art at the Cheech Museum in Riverside.

He jumped in the ocean at Crystal Cove and Seal Beach, walked to the end of the pier in Huntington, and bird watched in the Bolsa Chica Wetlands. He hiked to a point up in Silverado Canyon where he saw Catalina Island.

It was wonderful to get out in the fresh air and admire the green hills around us.

It made me realize I need to get out more.

I drove down to Laguna Beach for the sold out, first annual Laguna Beach Litfest on January 10th. It was a beautifully coordinated event, the venue (the Suzi Q Senior Center) was stylish and comfortable. Lisa Alvarez’s keynote speech was completely inspirational. I started a new poem in Gustavo Hernanadez’s workshop. I ran into so many writer friends that I’d met in a writing classes, workshops, and conferences and was delighted to realize how many of them already knew each other.

I also loved the table centerpieces.

I gave a workshop on Creating Complicated Characters. Since the theme of the festival was California stories, I talked a bit about the place, weather, and seasons of California, which can be another complicated character.

After all, Raymond Chandler infamously wrote about “meek little wives feeling the edge of the carving knife during the Santa Ana winds and then studying their husband’s necks.”

My favorite essayist D. J. Waldie wrote this about the first day of autumn in Lakewood. “It had a different light, more oblique and if anything, slower than midsummer’s light. Perhaps that light makes whole days in this season seem like an interminable afternoon.”

The whole winter day at the Litfest flew by. My workshop went well mostly because the attendees asked such smart questions and were so eager to participate.

“I loved your poem,” a woman said to me last Sunday at my brother-in-law’s memorial celebration. “The sad thing is,” she added, “It could have been written by AI.”

“No,” I said a bit too firmly. It was an emotional day. This brother-in-law was a good man and his death, like too many deaths, was unexpected and painful. The memorial speeches and songs were heartfelt and personal. As was my poem.

Anyone who knows me knows how I feel about AI. This woman did not know me, so I decided she needed further education. “AI can only draw from what it has stolen from previously published works,” I said. “This is something new that I created.”

Again, probably a bit too firm.

She gave me a kind smile. “Oh,” she explained helpfully. “It’s actually really easy. You just plug in the words you want. I used AI to write a Christmas poem for my granddaughter.”

“It’s not the same thing,” I insisted.

“Well,” she said. “It’s a different world. What can we do?”

I detected some frustration in her voice, at the world maybe, or more likely at me. “We can keep reading and writing and making music,” I said. She shrugged and nodded. I was afraid she might argue that AI could write music too but someone else interrupted and she moved away.

Some folks seem to have bought into the mythology that since AI is already here, we might as well just accept it and give up on creating new work on our own. I obviously don’t agree. AI was useful when I shopped for a new dishwasher and clothes dryer. It gave me nice summaries of the pros and cons of different models but I still had to make my own decision about what to buy.

So, what can we do in this new world? Keep reading and writing and making music. And avoid making assumptions.

Here’s a video of me reading the poem.

IVC English Professor Kristen Skjonsby and Citric Acid Editor Andrew Tonkovich offered a terrific panel at the Laguna Beach Litfest about Small Press Journals and their role in the Writer’s Journey which made me realize how fortunate I’ve been to be included in The Ear.

I have a couple of past issues to share. One includes a short story by me. If you’d like me to send these to you (US readers only,) write back and let me know some of your favorite literary journals. I’ll put your name in a hat.

Even though I’m out of bookshelf space and have no empty walls, I’m apparently unable to stop buying more books and prints. Here are 2025 highlights from Southern California’s local art community that I admired and a couple that I couldn’t resist.

Frank Romero

Frank Romero’s “Pleasantville” was offered by the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) as a fund raiser. The original mural was created for the 1998 Academy Award nominated film of the same name, filmed in black and white, except for Romero’s mural.

In March, MOLAA invited Frank Romero to recreate the Pleasantville mural on one of their walls. We went a couple of times to watch him work and listen to him talk about his life. Romero is one of the “Los Four” early pioneers of the Chicana/o art movement that began in the 1970s and he’s got some stories.

I’m a longtime fan of Romero, especially the “Going to the 1984 Olympics” mural he painted on the north side of the Hollywood Freeway North between Alameda and San Pedro Streets.

I also love Romero’s “Arrest of the Paleteros” which is on the wall of the Cheech Museum in Riverside. The arrest of the paleteros, or ice cream vendors, occurred in Echo Park, Los Angeles, during early 1990s immigration raids.

Lalo Alcaraz

Romero’s painting might have inspired LA Times cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, who offered prints of “Summer of Ice” as a tribute to all immigrants, but especially to Enrique the Paletero, an ice cream street vendor who was kidnapped by ICE in Culver City, California. On July 18, 2025, Lalo donated $2,000 towards Enrique’s defense thanks to folks who purchased the print.

Emigdio Vasquez

We have a print of this painting in our guest room. The original is currently on display at the Hilbert Museum in Orange, California as part of a 50-year retrospective of his work.

Emigdio Vasquez, aka the Godfather of Chicano art, lived and worked in North Orange County, California where he painted over 400 oil works and 32 murals.

Anger, Huerta, and Russo

• My friend, author, and playwright Kate Anger sent me the cat portrait in the mail, and it is now part of my Cats on the Mantle collection.

• The haunting blue self-portrait is by friend, artist, musician Ed Huerta and is on display now as part of the Golden West College Self/Not Selfie exhibit.

• Dr. Stacy Russo’s art is currently on the black wall at LibroMobile. Stacy is a friend, publisher, English professor, author, and dog whisperer.

Laguna Beach Lit Fest January 10th

In other local community news, the first annual Laguna Beach Lit Fest is coming right up and the theme is literary community, specifically the power of California stories. Workshops, panels and presentations will address the craft of writing followed by a public celebration of authors and readers, where you can buy more books from local authors!

Friend/author/professor Lisa Alvarez is the keynote speaker. Friend/author/agitator Andrew Tonkovich is heading up the lunch time panel. I’m hosting a workshop on Character Development.

Andrew just did a great interview about the festival on KXFM radio. Listen in here. (Scroll down to find “Talking Litfest with Tonkovich.” I promise I didn’t pay him to say all those nice things about me.

Hope to see you at the festival. Tickets on sale now. Register here to attend.

Recently I described my novels to someone as “contemporary stories about complicated neighborhoods and dysfunctional families.” Their response: “Sounds exactly like my life. Why would I want to I read that?”

It’s a fair question. Life these days is overly complicated and often dysfunctional but maybe you simply need reassurance that you’re not a unicorn. You might find some people in my stories that you’ll love to hate. Or maybe you’ll realize that no matter who “those people” are you might still have something in common with them.

Available wherever you like to buy books and always on the shelf at LibroMobile.

Hoping you find some joy in music, art, books, and/or humanity this year and next.

I realize I’m fortunate to have a house to complain about but in the last two months we’ve sent our vacuum cleaner out for repair, replaced two exterior doors, a dishwasher, and a dryer, scheduled a house painter, had our garage and tool shed flooded during a recent horrific downpour (read more about that here) rescheduled the house painter, and found a repair person to redo the shed roof.

Not the kinds of projects that visitors will ever notice or admire but still necessary homeowner stuff.

I guess I’m also fortunate that my house is in a town that offers so much drama to write about. The city council just selected shopping center renovator and Beef Palace owner Casey McKeon, pictured above with the new city logo, as the 2026 mayor because he had the most seniority of the 7-member council. Chad Wiliams, (infamous for the porn signs he plastered all over town during the special election to protect the library from the council) was slated to be mayor pro-tem because he got the most votes in the last election. A huge crowd from Calvary Chapel, where Chad is the youth minister, showed up to cheer for Chad.

However, the normally 100 percent in sync MAGA city council decided to appoint Butch Twining (infamous for always vaping during council meetings) as Mayor Pro Tem. The reason for the snub? Chad claims it was because of something that happened during a council discussion regarding the rehiring of former city attorney Michael Gates. “I got the Judas kiss today,” Chad said.

Speaking of Michael Gates, he’s back from his short stint in the Department of Justice and now acting as Surf City’s CACA (Chief Assistant City Attorney.)

You have to admire the acronym.

CACA Gates is back just in time to reargue two more of his losing battles with the State of California. This week, a second federal judge dismissed Surf City’s lawsuit challenging the state’s sanctuary law and the California Supreme Court refused to hear the city’s arguments for why Huntington Beach shouldn’t have to zone for more housing since we’re a charter city. Surf City could possibly lose control of their own zoning plan or be placed in a court receivership.

The council plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, former mayor Pat Burn’s bragged in his state of the city speech to the chamber of commerce about drinking and beating up people during his former Long Beach police days and the new mayor pro-tem Butch Twining sued the Ocean View School District trustee Gina Clayton-Tarvin for $25 million for calling him a white supremist. Butch was videoed hanging out with a group of Patriot Front members who marched down Main Street in Huntington Beach after Charlie Kirk’s murder chanting “White Man, Fight Back!”

But let’s talk about something else.

There’s poetry on the walls of the beautiful Huntington Beach Art Center, from now until February 14th! The poetry exhibit is titled “Bright As Life” and was curated by Orange County Poet Laureate Gustavo Hernandez.

The phrase bright as life was taken from a poem by Professor Lisa Alvarez titled “Living Below the Burn Scar.”

The opening reception for the exhibit was on December 9th. It was a thrill to see my words on the walls of the art center and slightly terrifying to have people stand in front of those words and read them as I watched.

The open mic also featured a very diverse group of poets, including me.

This city is in desperate need of diverse voices reading poetry and I’m so grateful to Gustavo and to the Art Center for putting this beautiful exhibit on display. The art in the gallery is also worth checking out.

Big gratitude also to all of the friends who came to the reception.

Big gratitude also to Christal Ann Rice Cooper who writes a blog called “Evidence of the Essay” where she asks authors to dissect their published essays. Cooper is a newspaper writer, feature stories writer, poet, fiction writer, photographer, and painter. She invited me to explore an essay I wrote recently about Imposter Syndrome for Women Writer’s, Women’s Books. Read the full post here. Thanks Christal!

The Third Street Writers in Laguna Beach are hosting the inaugural Laguna Beach Literary Festival on January 9th and 10th. Festivities include a Friday-night invite reception at Laguna Art Museum honoring novelist Richard Bausch, named Laguna Beach’s Literary Leader 2026.

On January 10th at the Susi Q Center there will be ticketed workshops and panels with award-winning writers from 9 - 3:30. I’m doing a workshop on Complicated Characters at 10:00 a.m. A public reception with food and drinks that celebrates writers and readers starts at 3:30.

I’m very grateful to be included in all of this.

Local authors can reserve a table free of charge to display their books. Pre-registration is strongly encouraged. For registrations of all events, there’s more info at the LitFest 2026 page.

In Iceland on Christmas Eve, there’s a tradition of receiving a brand-new book and cozying up with a mug of hot cocoa or your beverage of choice and reading until Christmas morning. It’s called Jolabokaflod which roughly translates roughly to a Christmas book flood in English.

I hope you find a good book to cozy up with. My novels are available wherever you like to shop and signed copies are always on the shelf at LibroMobile.

Big gratitude to you for reading Life With Riley.

Webster’s dictionary defines a hobby “as a pursuit outside one’s regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation.” AI calls a hobby a leisure activity done for pleasure, rather than profit, as opposed to a business where the intent is to make money.

When one no longer has a “regular occupation” (like me, thanks to my USPS more than decent pension) it’s easy to assume that their pursuits are hobbies especially when those pursuits don’t appear to result in financial gain.

But I tend to bristle when folks call my writing a hobby. I do find enormous pleasure in this “leisure activity” but sitting for hours in front of a blank page or screen, moving words and punctuation around and then back again, isn’t exactly “relaxing.”

Those brilliant and fully formed ideas in my brain never quite morph into what I was going for in my first, or second, or thirtieth draft. I start to wonder if I’m just wasting my time. Who would even publish this crap and who is going to read it? No one reads anymore anyway, if you believe the news.

I’d call my work a vocation or a calling that I’d do regardless of whether I’m making money or not (I’m not) and that I feel compelled to do regardless. And please don’t tell my CPA that writing is my hobby. She’s managed so far to convince the IRS that I’m running a business.

This has been a good year for me in getting my words out in print. Gracias to The Ear Magazine for including a poem of mine in Volume 28, to Cindy Eastman for including a short essay in Grief Like Yours, to Gunpowder Press for including a micro essay in Women in a Golden State, and to Gina Rae Duran and Flower Song Press for including a short story in The White Picket Fence.

My thrifty father would ask, “Did they pay you?” (one of them did!) Regardless, I’m very grateful for the ink and paper.

I’m honored that my poem “Power Plant” was selected by Orange County’s Poet Laureate, Gustavo Hernandes, for the upcoming Bright As Life: Southern California Poets exhibition at the Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main Street, HB.

The poem is about my mom dropping my brothers and me off in front of the power plant on Pacific Coast Highway to spend a day at the beach, back in 1967.

The opening reception is on December 9^th from five to eight p.m. at the Art Center. As you know, I’m often quite critical of my hometown but I am very excited to have my words up on the wall at the Art Center, which is one of the best places in Surf City. Maybe I can get a photo of me with the mayor.

Or not.

If you’re in the area, please stop by.

Save the date for the first annual Laguna Beach LitFest on Saturday, January 10, 2026, at the Laguna Beach Community & Susi Q Center, 380 3rd St, Laguna Beach, California.

You can register here for the craft workshops, panels, and presentations. Lisa Alvarez is the keynote speaker. I’m doing a workshop on writing characters. More announcements are forthcoming.

There’s a reception at 3 p.m. that is free and open to the public. The inaugural LitFest Leader 2026 Award will be presented to award-winning author, Guggenheim Fellow and Chapman University professor Richard Bausch. Local authors and LitFest guest presenters (like me!) will be on hand to sell their books and visit with guests.

RSVP here for the reception.

Jeff Bezos doesn’t need any more of your Black Friday money. You can still shop in your pj’s and support your favorite independent bookstore (like LibroMobile) by heading over to Bookshop.org. They’re currently offering free shipping and 25 percent off certain books.

I’m very grateful for the readers of this newsletter. If anyone (US only) would like a copy of one the four journals pictured above with Riley, let me know. I have extras to share.

Congrats to Warren Zevon on his induction (finally!) into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, whatever that means. And my apologies for appropriating his song title to summarize some recent Surf City shenanigans.

I’m calling my version, “Attorneys, Copters, Money” which I realize is a stretch, but it’s still a catchy tune. Hum along if you like.

This week Michael Gates, who served as Huntington Beach’s city attorney for more than a decade, announced that he’s resigned as the deputy assistant attorney general in the Federal Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and is returning to the Huntington Beach city attorney’s office as the chief assistant city attorney.

Gates lasted in Washington DC for about 10 months.

Why would he give up working for Pam Bondi? Rumors are flying of course. It’s hard to believe this particular administration would have fired him for incompetence. Gates claims he resigned because he missed his family. I wonder if he missed the money. As a City Attorney, his salary was $350,000. My google research showed that the estimated average salary of a federal Assistant Attorney General was around $157,405.

Gates may have earned more. I don’t know. I do know that a few years ago, he spearheaded a 4.9-million-dollar payment to the Pacific Airshow, LLC, (aka Code Four) which is owned by Kevin Elliot. Kevin Elliot is largely responsible (through campaign donations and free advertising) for the election of Gates and the current seven MAGA city council members.

Gates plans to run again for his old position of City Attorney next year. In the meantime, he’ll be the chief assistant city attorney for Huntington Beach. He’ll be busy fighting some familiar battles, initiated by him.

Gates has long argued that because Huntington is a charter city, it can do whatever it wants as far as banning books in the library, implementing voter ID measures, or not following state mandates on affordable housing.

Consequently, Huntington Beach is currently appealing a recent state order to cease and desist its implementation of voter ID measures. The council is also appealing a superior court ruling prohibiting the city from implementing and enforcing its censorship scheme in the Huntington Beach Library system. Yep, we still have banned books despite the recent passing of two measures that required the council to cut that out.

And after a three-year fight with the State of California over housing development mandates, Surf City could be on the hook for fees as high as $600,000 a month, with the added possibility of the city losing its zoning power.

Gates is an expensive rehire.

This year’s airshow was very quiet, due to the government shutdown, but there was a horrific accident the following weekend at an event called Cars and Copters on the Coast.

While practicing for a beach landing (is that a good idea on a crowded beach?) a twin-engine Bell 222 helicopter spiraled toward the ground and crashed into palm trees and a staircase in front of Hilton’s Waterfront Beach Resort on Pacific Coast Highway. An 8-year-old boy who was on the staircase at the time suffered a collapsed lung and a brain bleed. He was one of the five people injured, including two other people who were on the ground at the time, as well as the pilot and another occupant of the aircraft.

A Go Fund me set up for the eight-year-old has now raised over $115K. He is recovering. Additional lawsuits are predicted. The National Transportation Safety Board is looking into the incident.

Regardless of copter collisions, the city council is considering a possible three-year pilot program that would bring something called a “vertical taxi” to Huntington Beach.

The aircraft is zero-emission, all-electric and supposedly 100 times quieter than a helicopter. It uses vertical takeoffs and landings and does not require a runway. The idea is to utilize the plane for short hops between Huntington Beach and Los Angeles International Airport with future plans to become an air taxi provider for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

The council promises no money investment from Huntington Beach will be necessary.

Call me skeptical but I find that hard to believe. And even though flying out of LAX is never my first choice, when it’s necessary, I’ll stick to automotive transportation.

But there is some good news in Surf City.

OC Poet Laureate Gustavo Hernandez is curating a poetry display for the Huntington Beach Art Center. “Bright as Life: Southern California Poets” will run from December 9, 2025, to February 14, 2026, on the walls of the art center.

Submit poems online now until November 20. More information here.

Gustavo Hernandez also has a new collection of poetry out from Flower Song Press titled “Bachelor.” There’s a virtual reading celebrating the release on December 10, 2025, when Hernandez will be in conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets. Sign up here.

On December 14th, I’ll be hosting a brunch for Gustavo at LibroMobile during his Poet Laureate office hours. More information about that coming soon but save the date in the meantime.

Also from Flower Song Press, is the long-awaited release of “The White Picket Fence, Stories of Individuality as Rebelliousness.” I’m excited to have a short story included in the anthology that stars a character from my still-in-progress-but-finally-getting-there new novel. Readings from the anthology are in the works. Stay tuned!

I have an extra copy to share. If you’d be interested in reading the anthology and promise to post an honest review on Goodreads, Amazon, Bookbub, and/or Barnes and Noble write me back and let me know. I’ll put your name in a hat and pick a winner. U. S. Only.

I’ll leave you with some Zevon.