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Showing posts from August, 2015

Brave YOU World: Create & Fund an Unorthodox Life

Jerusha rockin' it a la peacock at Houston Pride 2015 My fabulous daughter, Jerusha Rodgers , spent the better part of two years traveling the world with nothing but her own ingenuity, a genuine desire to live in a yurt, and an income cobbled together from freelance editing and online essay grading. My amazing dad, Del Lonnquist , scaled tall buildings and toured with a rock band in his youth. More recently, he cared for my mom as she was dying of Alzheimer's and then took to the road on his motorcycle-sidecar rig. He's since ridden tens of thousands of miles and, at age 80, earned his Iron Butt certification as one of the World's Toughest Riders. And then there's me. Hate to toot my own horn, but I will claim for myself that I discovered the absolutely WORST Way to Become an Almost Famous Author . In addition to the gene pool and our love for lefse , all three of us share a flare for the arts, an insatiable curiosity about what lies around the next bend,...

Into the Mystic: Prepare to discover/rediscover the great WB Yeats in Her Secret Rose by Orna Ross

On the flight over to Ireland this weekend, I was reading The Secret Rose , a strange and wonderful collection of stories by William Butler Yeats. One of the many lines that leapt off the page: "...the dreamers who must do what they dream, the doers who must dream what they do." The words find new context in Her Secret Rose by Orna Ross , the first in a trilogy of novels about young Willie Yeats and Maud Gonne, a British heiress, change agent, mystic seeker and champion of Irish civil rights. Gonne was the muse that catalyzed Yeats' career as she became the object of his unrequited passion/obsession. Their political and personal lives were intimately entwined; they were kindred spirits, soul mates, and partners in a long journey of spiritual exploration that included mind-altering drugs and secret occult rituals. But Maud had another life, another love, that Willie knew nothing about, and inevitably, the two worlds would collide. With great insight, wit, lyrica...