* SATURDAY SALMAGUNDI *

Happy Saturday, everyone.

I have lots of news & information that didn't get posted during my blog hiatus, (due to my laptop/internet issues. Grrrr..!) so today I'm going to post a bit of a salmagundi. << If you don't need to look up the definition of that word, you have my sincere admiration! 

** Please stop by Bish Denham's blog to read something really uncanny! **

First of all, at Coffee & Critique about a month ago, one of the members, Jack Zerr, read from the novel he's presently writing, The JO Bunkroom. (JO stands for Junior Officer.) It is set in 1970/71 and concerns Vietnam, and carrier pilots encountering the war at that time. The two main characters are Amos Kane (self-proclaimed Cool Hand Duke) and Jon Zachery. I asked Jack for permission to post the following paragraph because I thought it was so beautiful. It was just one of those times when the writing really "got to me," ya know?

It was like I was the airplane. I didn’t pull back on the stick, to get the plane climbing. It was more like I got my nose up, to get me climbing. I felt as if I had two sets of eyeballs. One set flew the instruments, the other took in the stars, gazillions of them against the black, and they seemed to twinkle happy light at me. It was the first time I’d felt like flying was just the coolest damned thing, and at night, too. Night flying’s kind of like work, but, man, not that night.

To learn more about Jack, click here.

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On January 28th, I received Mary Kay Shanley's e-newsletter, which included a little write up about my memoir! I had the pleasure of meeting Mary Kay in 2010 when I attended the wonderful writer/spiritual retreat in Des Moines, Iowa. (Although I was born in Illinois, my roots are in Iowa. My parents, both sets of grandparents, and my two older sisters were eith born there, or lived there for many years.) I included a few chapters about Iowa, particularly Greenfield, Iowa, in my memoir, and I still love to visit as often as I can. I wrote about the 2010 retreat on my blog in the following posts, if anyone would like to read about it:

http://beckypovich.blogspot.com/2010/02/some-concluding-thoughts-on-retreat.html

http://beckypovich.blogspot.com/2010/01/day-two-of-winter-retreat-saturday.html

http://beckypovich.blogspot.com/2010/01/day-one-of-writerretreat.html

~~~

 

Hopefully, I'll do more catching up tomorrow with another new blog post!



"Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You cannot get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself." -- Alan Alda