Sallie Bingham

 

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This is a complete listing of Sallie's posts in reverse chronological order

Photo of antique friendship quilt , May 18th, 2025
Categories: Kentucky, My Family
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On the question of continuity.
T-Shirt that reads I Read Banned Books , May 15th, 2025
Categories: Politics, Kentucky
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My shopping cart was half full when I rolled it past a tall, handsome African American wearing a blue suit.
Official portrait photo of Donald Trump , May 11th, 2025
Categories: Politics
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We are in danger of overreacting. Every day the front pages of newspapers and the news shows scream. Every day friends use more and more exaggerated terms...
Photo of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning , May 4th, 2025
Categories: Writing
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I face this crucial question whenever I am about to begin teaching another workshop, always now in memoir writing, which over the last twenty years has become a crucial form of self-expression for many women and some men who aspire to shape, refine and share their stories.
Cover image for She Who Rides Horses , April 30th, 2025
Categories: Women
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It's too late to roll back the advances of the last 80 years, the changes in laws and behavior and expectation that have been and are the work of thousands of nameless women.
Photo of a mallard duck in flight , April 27th, 2025
Categories: Religion
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It seemed to me so beautiful, such a miracle, that I wondered why we were not all dancing and shouting jubilee.
Photo of Pope Francis , April 23rd, 2025
Categories: Religion
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The death of the people's pope brings universal sadness but also for me a sense of great gratitude for what he was and what he stood for in spite of mighty resistance.
Statue of Quan Yin , April 20th, 2025
Categories: Writing
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To me, Good Friday now means that we are about to experience She Is Risen: spring, the yellow tulips in my garden, and the statue of the goddess Quan Yin.
Photo of a common raven flying above a pine tree , April 13th, 2025
Categories: New Mexico
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I keep waiting grumpily for a spell of warm, settled weather. But not my friends the ravens. This is the weather they adore.
Photo of small book on a quilt , April 9th, 2025
Categories: Writing
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One of the many advantages of a long life is that there’s time—if it is well used—to keep on learning. I’m reminded of this as I begin again to work   
Illustration of a boot about to step on a worm , April 6th, 2025
Categories: Politics
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With the march yesterday—snow and severe cold here—I'm sensing something is changing that doesn't depend on crowds turning out. It seems this country is finally rebelling.
Black and white photo of Wolf Pen Mill possibly 1920s , April 2nd, 2025
Categories: Kentucky
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All hail Eva Lee Smith Cooper and all women who persevere.
Adult Western Screech Owl , March 26th, 2025
Categories: New Mexico
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How lucky I am, how lucky we all are, who can find moments of joy to set against the chaos that surrounds but must never be allowed to overwhelm us.
Cate Blanchett as Blanche DuBois , March 23rd, 2025
Categories: New Mexico
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We have friends, we have family, but in many of the ordinary events of daily life, they are not at hand. Strangers are.
Yellow daffodil centerpiece on table , March 19th, 2025
Categories: My Family
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Now as spring slowly, very slowly, arrives here in the southern Rockies with what may be the last snowfall of the season just a week behind us, I'm reminded of all the spring gardens I've enjoyed, beginning with Easter in Kentucky.
Photo St. Paul's German Evangelical Church and its rectory. , March 16th, 2025
Categories: Women, Kentucky
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Why does historic preservation matter, and why should these designations be supported by the communities in which they are found?
Photo of a chaise lounge with Emily Dickinson pillow , March 12th, 2025
Categories: Women
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If you don't already have one, take a few minutes now to create your own cozy corner and devote a portion of every day to inhabiting it.
Deb Haaland campaign slogan hashtag Be Fierce , March 9th, 2025
Categories: Women
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I've been wondering why I have a certain lack of enthusiasm for Women's Month, Women's Day, et al. It seems a betrayal of the active feminists I know...
Cover of The Earth and I , March 2nd, 2025
Categories: New Mexico
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I used to see Arthur Firstenberg on Saturday morning at the Santa Fe Farmer's Market, walking alone; I never saw anyone speak to him and the casual gossip I picked up was that he was a nut of some kind, preaching a gospel nobody wanted to hear.
Photo of a gray bird with a red back , February 26th, 2025
Categories: New Mexico
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As we hurry and scurry about, the birds are still attending my feeder and the crows are performing their ballet in the sky.
White and Black women holding up We Shall Overcome sign , February 23rd, 2025
Categories: Politics
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This great Civil Rights era anthem is one I'll be humming or singing every day now as I work to keep my spirits up during the current onslaught.
Rainbow gay pride flag , February 19th, 2025
Categories: Women
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Yes, I have excellent women friends... but there is something in the companionship of my two closest gay men friends that offers something different.
Photo of Snowdrop flowers sprouting out of dried leaves , February 16th, 2025
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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I look on the eighteen short stories in How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories as a miracle I will never entirely understand—or need to—but here's a stab at it.
Truchas, New Mexico library book shelves , February 12th, 2025
Categories: Writing
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I've changed and the site has changed since I started it in 2002.
Women towing gun-carriage in crowd armed with weapons and agricultural implements. , February 9th, 2025
Categories: Politics
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I propose to counter panic with specific remedies, for panic only hands more power to the oppressor.
Sallie Bingham wearing Linda Stein's handmade armor , February 5th, 2025
Categories: Women, Art
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The world seems to require us to protect ourselves now, and maybe always.
Photograph of man holding a fish on fishing line. , February 2nd, 2025
Categories: Writing
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I’ve been blessed often in my life but seldom as fully as in this past week.
Spanish-language flyer , January 29th, 2025
Categories: Politics
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As the tide of misogamy sweeps toward us, I'm noticing—as perhaps some of you have—that women are falling silent.
Sermon by Bishop Budde , January 26th, 2025
Categories: Politics
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In the last few days, I've had to face the fact that now, if for the first time, Evil is operating in our world.
Photo of the Civil Rights memorial , January 22nd, 2025
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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We cannot afford to be discouraged for long. Above all, we cannot afford to be afraid.
Photo of a snowy frozen mountain stream , January 19th, 2025
Categories: Writing
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We've been told by many authorities to get outside and walk... another surefire cure for the blues is poetry... And then there's the power in singing, anytime, anywhere with any kind of voice.
Black and white photo of Dorothy Dean , January 15th, 2025
Categories: Women, Theater
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An article in a recent New Yorker reminded me of how unable to change I was as a college student in the late 1950s when the old rules were breaking all around me.
Photo of Jimmy Carters coffin , January 12th, 2025
Categories: Politics, My Family
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Wherever you are as you read this, however disturbed and disheartened by the condition of our country, remember the Nigerian Leaper.
Book cover of Taken by the Shawnee , January 8th, 2025
Categories: Writing
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Perhaps this great success of Shawnee is what all writers finally achieve—this is my sixteenth published book—but I doubt if it's that alone.
Photo of the USS Constitution , December 29th, 2024
Categories: Politics
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I often turn to Emily Dickinson's poems in troubled times. Friday I came across one of her more startling aphorisms..
Cover of the book I Hear America Singing , December 24th, 2024
Categories: Writing
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I just learned that today 91 million Americans are singing: in choral groups, choirs, schools, singalongs and all kinds of informal gatherings, many more than participate in other forms of the arts.
Photo of the Santa Fe Desert Chorale performing , December 22nd, 2024
Categories: My Family
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My excitement leading up to Christmas Day was so powerful it hurt, and I dimly felt that I was excited in a way that couldn't be easily resolved.
Photo of sandhill cranes taking flight , December 18th, 2024
Categories: New Mexico
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Feeding the birds that remain has become my passion.
Newspaper text of General Order 28 , December 15th, 2024
Categories: Politics, Women
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As we again face a form of invasion, of lies and distortions, not soldiers, will we again be crippled by our adherence to older forms of "correct behavior"?
Santa Fe Snow painting by Clark Hulings , December 10th, 2024
Categories: Women
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Just when the first real cold hits and I face another winter here in the mountains, I'm rejoicing in the company I keep with wonderful women.
Photo of a buck in tall grass , December 7th, 2024
Categories: Kentucky
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Even before I decided, years ago, to put the 420 acres of blessed open space into conservation easements, I felt the wild fields and thin woods had long since belonged to the creatures that have always lived there.
Photo of a German Weather House , December 4th, 2024
Categories: Kentucky
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As I approach my 88th birthday next month, I'm amazed at the long life of my feelings and opinions.
Photo of Christmas Tree in Louisville Airport , December 1st, 2024
Categories: Travel
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When I have to travel... I'm uncomfortable, discombobulated, homesick. But since I do have to travel about four times a year, I want to teach myself how to do it with less discomfort.
Book cover of Taken by the Shawnee , November 27th, 2024
Categories: Writing
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So many possible scenarios! So much fascinating reading!
Black and white photo of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. , November 24th, 2024
Categories: Politics
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As we struggle for balance in the maelstrom of public events, it may be helpful to remember that we have been through this before in the period seventy years ago called McCarthyism for its creator, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
Photo of woman reading newspaper headline - They're Pouring In From All Over , November 20th, 2024
Categories: Politics
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We have been through hard times, politically, often before, although many are probably too young to have witnessed Vietnam or the McCarthy period, when it also seemed as though Democracy was at stake. 
Image of a robed figure threatening a mother and two children , November 17th, 2024
Categories: Politics
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The bogeyman is a mythical creature, used to frighten children. It can take many forms. One form may be a loud, big, tumultuous man.
Photo of Amy Biehl , November 12th, 2024
Categories: Politics, Writing
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So how do we move forward?
My mother's nightgown , November 10th, 2024
Categories: My Family, Politics
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Wednesday as we were reeling from the aftereffects of the election, my dear sister Eleanor sent me a care package.
1862 cartoon from Harper's Weekly , November 6th, 2024
Categories: Politics
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Early yesterday evening as I was watching the election coverage, I saw it on the screen: the solid South, the mass of red states in the Southeast that told me too clearly who our next president is going to be. 
Roxanne Swentzell bronze sculpture , October 30th, 2024
Categories: Art, Kentucky
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Rather than descending into crankiness, I decided on my last trip away from home to give it a try. So here goes...
Photo of the Derby Clock in Louisville , October 27th, 2024
Categories: My Family, Kentucky
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I remember my father, at the end of a long family trip to Europe, exclaiming with delight as we drove home: "Still the most beautiful place in the world!"
Canadian Geese on pond , October 23rd, 2024
Categories: Women, Kentucky
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One of the poems that means most to me is Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese." I remember when I first read it, years ago, I felt moved and inspired—and then wondered, "How does she dare?" The message remains revolutionary.
Photo of old white ice skates , October 20th, 2024
Categories: Kentucky
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As I prepared on Friday to head back to Kentucky for a short visit, I was reflecting on the meaning of home.
Photo of ancient stone gate , October 16th, 2024
Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Religion
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I sometimes think I go to church to hear what I don't want to hear. After all what would be the use of hearing reinforcements of my rock-hard opinions?
Cover for Dr. Spocks Baby and Child Care 6th Edition , October 13th, 2024
Categories: Women
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We didn’t and we don’t obey our instincts; we’ve been trained to ignore them over the millennium.
, October 6th, 2024
Categories: Women
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It’s possible that Emma Goldman, the American revolutionary, would never have been able to have her effect on history without the financial and emotional support of another dangerous woman, Aline Barnsdall.
Photo of a Santa Fe Church with a clear sky , October 2nd, 2024
Categories: New Mexico, Travel
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Often when I'm asked, with less and less surprise, why I moved to Santa Fe in 1991, I repeat the familiar explanations...
The cover of Mend! , September 29th, 2024
Categories: Politics
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The facts of the manufacture and eventual demise of clothes are becoming clear... this is an area where all of us who consume can contribute.
Photo of woman wearing t-shirt that says "I'm a Trump Girl Get Over It!" , September 25th, 2024
Categories: Writing
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I've been thinking a lot about the reasons why some women may vote for the felon...
Black and white photo of Etowah Cliffs mansion , September 18th, 2024
Categories: My Family, Writing
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How fortunate I am to have access to this incredibly rich trove of letters! Now that letter writing is at an end, there will be no more such collections.
Photo of Hopscotch House , September 15th, 2024
Categories: Philanthropy
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I would be most grateful for your responses, both from you who enjoyed Hopscotch during its long history and you who might want to avail yourselves of it in the future.
Hand-painted watercolor of a bouquet of flowers , September 11th, 2024
Categories: My Family
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Writing to "My Dear Mary"—her niece and my mother—in 1954, Rose Caperton explained that the three leather-bound books she was sending had belonged to Mary's great-great-great grandmother.
Photo of rock studio building with fence , September 8th, 2024
Categories: New Mexico
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There are many benefits to putting land in conservation easements, and it is happening more frequently all over the country.
Santa Fe Adobe home , September 4th, 2024
Categories: New Mexico
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Fear knows nothing about physical distance. It's always fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar.
Pullman porter photographed at Chicago Union Station, 1943 , September 1st, 2024
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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Screams of "Burn him! Burn him!" Friday night as the puppet went up in flames also burned what little is left of our understanding of the original meaning of Labor Day.
Photo of Miss IGRA 2024 , August 28th, 2024
Categories: New Mexico
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It almost seems, at least here in Santa Fe, that the presence and participation of gay people in public events have been folded into the omnipresent family culture...
Photo of Sallie Bingham from the 1990s book Upstate , August 18th, 2024
Categories: Writing, Kentucky
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I was single and at that time and in that place, single women seemed slightly suspect; when I called the local ballet company to order one ticket, I was told they were only sold in pairs.
Photo of three figures leaping over a bull , August 14th, 2024
Categories: Writing, Religion, Women
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Perhaps a healthy dose of heathenism would restore us to the churches (or other forms of organized spirituality) so vital to healthy communities.
Simone Biles in 2024 at US Championships , August 11th, 2024
Categories: Women
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I want to congratulate not only Biels and Jackson but the unrecognized women who initiated and supported the programs that allow women athletes to bloom.
Construction worker at Apache Mesa Ranch in 2012 , August 7th, 2024
Categories: New Mexico, Politics
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Disappointment and depression are hard to shake; they become a habit, protecting us from hopes that seem doomed.
Cover of The Movement by Clara Bingham , August 4th, 2024
Categories: Women
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It is a decade that seems to me to be largely neglected... but it was crucial for me and for many other women and what we achieved does endure although constantly under threat.
Photo of Kamala Harris and Gila River Indian Community , July 31st, 2024
Categories: Politics
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A friend's question prompted me to wonder why I've felt and heard so little enthusiasm—in fact, almost no mention among family—of the extraordinary elevation of Vice-President Kamala Harris to the position of Democratic nominee for the presidency.
Film still from Fitzcarraldo showing Klaus Kinski with stranded boat , July 28th, 2024
Categories: Women, Art
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To what degree are we talented women constrained in fulfilling our ambitions by the fear of being labelled insane or cast out?
Photo of Pip the dog in the garden , July 24th, 2024
Categories: My Family
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Pip, my shelter dog pitbull mix, died peacefully on Saturday after nine years of a beautiful life, hiking, enjoying the dog park, going with me on all kinds of adventures.
Drawing of Hades and Persephone , July 21st, 2024
Categories: Politics
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We are now caught in an unarticulated contest between "strength" and "weakness" going into the presidential election.
Image of Hawk-Eye deciding tennis shot , July 17th, 2024
Categories: Politics
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After Donald Trump's ear was shot at the rally last Saturday, one of the uniformed men rushing onto the stage shouted, “Hawk-Eye is here!" and I felt the thrill I used to feel as a child when a wizard or a powerful fairy arrived to set things right.
Black footprints on sidewalk , July 14th, 2024
Categories: Kentucky, Art
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Recently when I was in Louisville, I walked down to the Ohio River to see In Our Elders' Footprints and On the Banks of Freedom, installations which commemorate the enslaved people of the state.
Still from 2024 Presidential Debate , July 7th, 2024
Categories: Politics
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As always happens when the United States is at war, now on three fronts, women disappear.
Photo of Las Trampas Church figurine , July 3rd, 2024
Categories: Philanthropy, New Mexico
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Recently I toured the Las Trampas Church where the elaborate interior, with altar screen, bultos, and other religious paintings was being skillfully restored by local craftsmen.
Photo of Oxmoor Farm Lousiville KY , June 30th, 2024
Categories: Kentucky
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Since coming home from Kentucky last week, I’ve had the privilege of connecting with several academics who have put many hours into researching this controversial and hidden topic.
Black and white photo of Margaret Sanger in 1879 , June 26th, 2024
Categories: Women, Politics
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Michelle Goldberg's column in The New York Times describes the 1935 Federal Comstock Act as a threat that Americans have not taken seriously.
Lizzie Baker, photographed by Cecil Beaton , June 19th, 2024
Categories: My Family, Kentucky
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Jacob Street when I was growing up in the prosperous white suburbs had only one meaning: that was the address of Lizzie Baker's house.
Image of Tecumseh statue by Alan Cottrill , June 16th, 2024
Categories: Writing
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Margaret, if she were alive, would smile secretly, shielding her pleasure from her censorious Virginia relatives.
Photo of Slave Trading In Louisville historic marker , June 12th, 2024
Categories: Writing
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There's a magic for me as a somewhat hidden writer (essential for my work) when a book launch brings me into connection with new people.
Painting of a woman writing in a journal , June 9th, 2024
Categories: My Family, Writing
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It will soon be time for me to start another three or four year writing project. I’d love to hear which of these three ideas you find most appealing...
Illustration of a girl cleaning a gun , June 5th, 2024
Categories: Writing
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Margaret could watch, she could listen, and she could learn—and I learned along with her through research, thought, and writing and rewriting her story.
Cartoon of jury stating we the jury find the defendant to be the guiltiest , June 2nd, 2024
Categories: Politics
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The bad boys all share a certain set of characteristics, which I think of every time I see women's enchanted faces turned up toward Donald Trump as he speaks.
Book cover of Taken by the Shawnee , May 29th, 2024
Categories: Writing
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I'm hoping that the individuals who object to my book may in some form or another communicate with me.
Cover of The Right To Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom , May 26th, 2024
Categories: Politics
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Do we really believe in education as a free exchange of ideas?
Photo of wedding couple , May 22nd, 2024
Categories: My Family
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My generation was known for our disruptions, the massive number of divorces and desertions that the rapid changes of the 1960's and 1970's ushered in… Fortunately, that bitterness seems by now to be at least partly assuaged.
Poster depicting a woman in white wit h a flag on a white horse , May 19th, 2024
Categories: Women, Theater
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I have been feeling for years that the big effort we made in the early 1980's to expand the presence of women as playwrights and directors had stalled.
Photo of large stone sculpture , May 15th, 2024
Categories: Women, Politics
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All around me I hear people disparaging the campus protests so brutally put down at a number of "top" universities, disparaged as a meaningless waste of time...
Image of the Painting The Blessed Damozel , May 12th, 2024
Categories: Women, Writing
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We live in a Noah's Ark society where the expectation is that everyone, but especially women, will be paired.
Photo shows police officers breaking through the pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). , May 8th, 2024
Categories: Politics
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Although routinely disparaged by mainstream reporting as having no meaning or results—as the Vietnam protests were disparaged—and resisted with increasing violence, the students at big and small colleges and universities are taking risks for us, the silent older generations.
Drawing of silver wedding bells with heart handles , May 5th, 2024
Categories: Women
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The old vows for heterosexual couples now seem not only outdated but impossibly demanding; gay couples perhaps have a different attitude.
Black and white photo of girls high school team , May 1st, 2024
Categories: Women, Kentucky
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Yes, we always wanted to win. And sometimes, we do.
Painting of 4 children, three white and one African American , April 28th, 2024
Categories: Kentucky
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As we stumble as individuals and as nations through a time of great uncertainty, some individuals and even some nations also stumble toward various forms of often painful enlightenment.
Photo of Virginia Sole-Smith , April 24th, 2024
Categories: Women
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I hate to write the first line of a disgraceful ditty that I probably said more than once with other girls when I was a fourth or fifth grader. I was ashamed to say it, I knew it was wrong, and yet I did, which is probably the case with all wrongdoing.
Photo of Dorothy Brett in New Mexico , April 21st, 2024
Categories: New Mexico, Art
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Blessed as I always am in my work, I've discovered a possible new topic for a biography in the life of the British/American painter, Dorothy Brett.
Photo of backpack with mindfulness cards attached , April 17th, 2024
Categories: Women
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Now that girls are not routinely instructed in fear—of mice, spiders, snakes, and the unknown—our native courage is much in evidence.
Book cover for This Republic of Suffering , April 14th, 2024
Categories: Writing
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Obsessions always interest me having hosted several of them with various results but I doubt that any of mine have shared the intensity with which Jews at the conclusion of Passover all over the world shout, "Next year in Jerusalem!" the dynamite that powers the unending war to erase Palestine.
Carla Garrett crossing the finishing line , April 10th, 2024
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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Girls need to learn to play rough, a lesson we may be trying to forget today with our return as mothers and grandmothers to a relentless obsession with our female offsprings' looks.
Photo of the Hopscotch House, Louisville, KY , April 8th, 2024
Categories: Kentucky
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I've been asked many times the last few months what can be done to support Hopscotch. What are your ideas for how Hopscotch could be used?
Black and white photo of Woodstock attendees , April 7th, 2024
Categories: New Mexico
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When Woodstock happened in 1969, I was deep in my baby-making and raising years with a young son and two more soon to arrive, and if I'd seen this photograph I would have been horrified.
Photo of the Hopscotch House, Louisville, KY , April 3rd, 2024
Categories: Kentucky
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Having long learned… the effect of art created by women on the lives of other women… I decided to design a foundation that would support women artists in Kentucky working as feminists for social change.
Crowd of people outside of the Santuario de Chimayo , March 31st, 2024
Categories: New Mexico, Kentucky
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Now that I've placed the issues around saving Hopscotch in the hands of my very competent attorneys, for today a few thoughts about Phillip and Good Friday.
Photo of a male and female Northern Bobwhite Quail , March 24th, 2024
Categories: Kentucky
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It may seem strange that in the midst of the problems with Hopscotch and the Kentucky Foundation for Women, I'm choosing to write about the Bobwhite Quail. There are two reasons...
Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm , March 20th, 2024
Categories: Women, Kentucky
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I can't go into detail about our plans to preserve Hopscotch; this is complicated legally, and if successful, would be a landmark case, protecting other donors who find that their gifts have been abused by the not-for-profit they trusted.
Photo of the Hopscotch House, Louisville, KY , March 17th, 2024
Categories: Kentucky
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To my friends, more soon about Hopscotch.
Logo for The Hotflash - KFT , March 11th, 2024
Categories: Kentucky
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I would like to hear a reaction from any woman who has used Hopscotch House in the past. Please leave a message below, on Facebook, or via email.
Photo of Sallie and friend on streetcorner , March 10th, 2024
Categories: Philanthropy, New Mexico
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His suit against OpenAI, just commencing in California, has some similarities with my struggles with what has become of the Kentucky Foundation for Women.
Black and white photo of women marching with large banners , March 6th, 2024
Categories: Women
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I'm dismayed to see how rapidly the women's movement is fading, eclipsed by monstrous wars but also by young women's failure to engage.
American Girl in Italy, Florence, 1951 , March 3rd, 2024
Categories: Women
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Women's History Month began without much attention and certainly without fanfare on March 1, 2024 and will end in deafening silence on March 31.
Painting of Abraham , February 28th, 2024
Categories: Religion
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After finding a church where I feel at least to some degree at home and grow to love the Christian ritual… I hit an obstruction.
Pip lying on a rug , February 25th, 2024
Categories: New Mexico
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Pip is full of self-will—one of the reasons we get on so well—and likes to dictate as much of his life as he can.
Photo of the Hopscotch House, Louisville, KY , February 21st, 2024
Categories: Kentucky
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I am writing to protest the just announced sale of Hopscotch House by the Kentucky Foundation for Women.
Postcard of people creating a human confederate flag , February 18th, 2024
Categories: My Family, Kentucky
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As I begin reading the collection of nineteenth-century Stiles letters that may provide the core of my next book, I'm brought reluctantly to remember two long ago incidents when loneliness pushed me closer to belief.
Interior photo of Uli's Santa Fe , February 14th, 2024
Categories: Kentucky, New Mexico
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It strikes me that I have days like Sunday which seem to be a beautiful weaving of threads: red, blue, and all the other colors of the rainbow.
Still image of Sallie Bingham from video , February 11th, 2024
Categories: Writing
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Memoir writing is a much more serious task than it's often considered to be. It's not informal, it's not casual. It really is the writing of history.
Book cover of Maria Kalman's book Women Holding Things , February 7th, 2024
Categories: Women, Politics
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As a worldwide conflagration of violence has broken out, we women are not even holding our own. Our voices and faces no longer appear in the news.
Photo of the Hopscotch House, Louisville, KY , February 4th, 2024
Categories: Kentucky
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Today I'm celebrating something that happened several decades ago when Hopscotch House, belonging to the Kentucky Foundation for Women in Louisville, was just getting started and we needed an executive director.
Drawing of a woman's face in bronze , January 31st, 2024
Categories: Women, Art
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It is with dismay but not surprise that I read a description of the reaction of two “Silver Heads” to Tracy Emin’s panels on the main doors of the National Portrait Gallery in London.
White truck on highway with mountains in the background , January 28th, 2024
Categories: Travel
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She is, she told me, a professional long-haul truck driver, steering eighteen-wheelers with enormous trailers across big swatches of this county.
Black umbrella with water droplets , January 24th, 2024
Categories: Women, Travel
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For my daily walk I borrowed a big black umbrella. But—how to open it?
Amtrak Southwest Chief Poster , January 21st, 2024
Categories: Politics
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Every time I ride the Southwest Chief East or West from Lamy, New Mexico—my preferred way of traveling—I meet at least one fascinating fellow traveler.
Martin Luther King Jr speaking behind podium , January 17th, 2024
Categories: Politics
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When I listened to Dr. King's speech on NPR Sunday night, I was moved by the great power of his church-trained voice as well as by his revolutionary message.
Sallie ballroom dancing with instructor , January 14th, 2024
Categories: New Mexico, Theater
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A few weeks ago, my beloved dance studio threw its bi-annual Showcase, an afternoon of dance performances by students and teachers for our own pleasure and satisfaction after a lot of hard work and many lessons.
Photo of a desert packrat , January 3rd, 2024
Categories: New Mexico
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I read somewhere that the world is divided between those who only care about family and friends and those whose empathy extends to include people far away, strangers, never to be included in the near and dear.
Painting of Saint Stephen by Carlo Crivelli , December 27th, 2023
Categories: New Mexico, Religion
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As the old song says, "Ye who now do bless the poor/Shall yourselves find blessing."
Etching of Ghost of Christmas to come and a young Scrooge , December 24th, 2023
Categories: My Family
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I have such blissful memories of the Christmases of my childhood, first and foremost the firm insistence on going to church Christmas morning.
Black Pip Sleeping , December 20th, 2023
Categories: New Mexico
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It took six weeks and three trips to the vet after his savage attack but we just took the first hike since that happened...
Photo of Tony Felix and Azim Khamisa , December 17th, 2023
Categories: My Family, Politics
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In the tumble of donated books in the Little Free Library, I saw one with a title that spoke to me: From Murder to Forgiveness: A Father's Journey by Azim Khamisa with Carl Goldman.
Photo of girl in air kicking , December 13th, 2023
Categories: Politics
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Is it a coincidence that the head of Penn and the head of Harvard, one ousted the other threatened with ouster, are both women?
Black and white photo of Indian making smoke signals next to horse , December 10th, 2023
Categories: Writing
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Today I'm wondering about the future of literature in our beleaguered country.
Photo of a Winter Fairy doll , December 6th, 2023
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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We've spent too many words bewailing the sins committed against us in our childhoods, and they were sins, and they had drastic effects, and that matters; but Sunday when I bought this charming "Winter Fairy" at my church's St. Nicholas Bazaar, I decided it's high time to enter into my second childhood...
Photo of the San Francisco de Asis Catholic Mission Church in snow , December 3rd, 2023
Categories: My Family, New Mexico
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I'm witnessing a surge in big, old-fashioned weddings for those who can afford up to half a million dollars to rent tents, clubs, hire staff, and buy the necessary clothes.
Taos Pueblo Two-Sided Hand Drum with Buffalo Hide , November 29th, 2023
Categories: My Family
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As our first snow fell here in the southern Rockies, my granddaughter asked me why I moved to Santa Fe 35 years ago.
Graphic that says I refuse to have taxes withheld for war! , November 26th, 2023
Categories: Women, Politics
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I feel as helpless and depressed as many of us do, watching the endless destruction wrought by the wars we largely finance with our tax dollars.
Photo of two Navajo-Churro sheep in snow , November 22nd, 2023
Categories: My Family, New Mexico, Kentucky
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Thinking about Tierra Wools' herd of sheep moving from their summer in the highlands here, reminds me of the two orphan lambs I raised in Kentucky when I was growing up.
Sunset at Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm , November 19th, 2023
Categories: Women, Kentucky
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It was never my intention to create a private estate, and it gives me great satisfaction to know that River Fields organizes seasonal wildflower walks at the farm, and that a generation of children is growing up in my three rental houses.
First edition bookcover of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying , November 15th, 2023
Categories: Writing
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Jong's courage in going to bat for all of us who couldn't speak up for ourselves is a quality I will always admire.
Black and white photo of migrant woman in tent , November 12th, 2023
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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Many who hear or read the phrase seize on its Biblical meaning which was literal and remains literal today, and as yet no one has suggested attempting to replace the book with Let Us Now Praise Famous Women.
Photo of man in front of Pete's Place sign , November 8th, 2023
Categories: New Mexico
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Once a year members of my church here in Santa Fe volunteer to cook a week's supper for our unhoused population; I look forward to it.
Black and white photo of the dog Pip on Apache Mesa , November 5th, 2023
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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A few days ago, my dog Pip was attacked as he lay sleeping on my patio here in the mountains, bitten savagely in three places.
Photo of the Otero Arts Inc adobe building , November 1st, 2023
Categories: Writing
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...Not exactly a wilderness but a great expanse of desert, south of Santa Fe, that goes on for miles and miles to the sprawling town of Alamogordo.
Photo of Black lesbian feminist activist Mandy Carter , October 29th, 2023
Categories: Women
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This is a time when we all need to be reminded that there are rewards for years of hard work, devotion and persistence.
Photo of the Roquefixade castle , October 25th, 2023
Categories: Writing
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Ideas are dangerous: it’s of their very nature, and it’s a danger that permeates the world of reading and writing.
Photo of an elderly woman's hands , October 18th, 2023
Categories: Women, Travel
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Our faces show the inevitable effects of age but our hands seem to me to retain a little of our youthful hopefulness.
Book cover of Taken by the Shawnee , October 15th, 2023
Categories: Writing
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The design for the cover of my next book, my historical novel, “Taken by the Shawnee” just arrived from my publisher, Turtle Point Press.
Promotional image for the play Somewhere Out There You , October 11th, 2023
Categories: Travel, Theater
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As I'm listening to long-forgotten but amazingly familiar tunes, I'm remembering the high point of my visit to Dublin last week...
Book cover of The Invisible Rainbow , October 8th, 2023
Categories: Politics
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Today I’m headlining an important message from one of my friends, Arthur Firstenberg, author of the remarkable book The Invisible Rainbow.
Girl walking away in college graduation gown , October 4th, 2023
Categories: Women
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There's a shift of large proportions in what girls and young women are doing in this world.
Photo of The Plutonium Facility at Los Alamos , October 1st, 2023
Categories: New Mexico
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The Federal government is having difficulty picking up its socks, in this case, the toxic waste left here in New Mexico and elsewhere as the result of sixty years of nuclear weapons building.
Photo of Chaco Canyon Ruins , September 24th, 2023
Categories: New Mexico, Travel
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Of course equinoxes happen everywhere even in places that seem oblivious like midtown Manhattan where I'm roosting for a few days...
Photo of a woman peeking out of her blinds at sunset , September 20th, 2023
Categories: Writing
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When I pass a pretty adobe house on my street walking Pip, a disembodied voice suddenly speaks: "Hi. Your approach is being recorded."
Book cover of 50 Years of Ms. , September 17th, 2023
Categories: Women, My Family, Writing
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It arrived yesterday, a large, heavy, hardbound anthology of fifty years of writing from Ms.
Photo of young woman testifying in court , September 13th, 2023
Categories: Women
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I wasn't surprised to learn according to the "Newspaper Of Record" that "On the Internet, Everyone Wants to be a Girl."
Photo of a pinon jay , September 6th, 2023
Categories: New Mexico
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Years of drought and now weeks, perhaps months, of extreme heat have caused the loss of 2.3 million pinyon jays, which is 78.7 percent of their total population.
Photo of the Sandy Neck Lighthouse , September 3rd, 2023
Categories: My Family
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Now with the summer coming to an end, I'm remembering what Labor Day meant to me growing up: the dispersal of the summer community.
Photo of a quilt showing two angels cranking a large circle , August 30th, 2023
Categories: New Mexico
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Tonight will see the rising of the first full blue moon... I'm making deviled eggs to take over to my friend Doug's house.
Photo of Queen Liliʻuokalani, 1891 , August 27th, 2023
Categories: Politics
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Queen Liliʻuokalani was the constitutional Queen of the Hawaiian islands before she was overthrown by the mainland government and its forces in 1897, ending her long struggle to preserve the independence of her people
TV Color Bars saying Technical Difficulties Please Stand By , August 20th, 2023
Categories: Writing
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Friends, due to issues with my email there will be no posts for the indefinite future… I hope to be posting again very soon!
Photo of a cell phone tower , August 16th, 2023
Categories: Politics
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HR-3557 would mean "unrestricted proliferation of cell towers...near homes, schools and playgrounds" and "on any structure that could support an antenna."
Still image from Superstar (1988) , August 9th, 2023
Categories: My Family, Art
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In the middle of all the shouting about the Barbie movie and the millions, if not billions, Hollywood plans to make, it's worth remembering that there was an earlier, much earlier, independent video.
Photo of Laguna Beach Lifeguard , August 6th, 2023
Categories: My Family, Travel
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It's no longer just the perfectly proportioned who wear thongs on the beach; the size of some of the buttocks on display is awe-inspiring.
Photo of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning , August 2nd, 2023
Categories: Writing
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Writing workshop wisdom used to be write what you know, a doctrine I've found increasingly confining.
, July 30th, 2023
Categories: My Family, Writing
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My mother didn't favor books written for children since she believed we could all absorb adult literature at an early age and be the better for it—and I think she was probably right.
Movies posters of Barbie and Oppenheimer , July 23rd, 2023
Categories: Women, Politics
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The release of Oppenheimer at the same time of a new Barbie film is not a coincidence... But what is the connection?
Painting of the Storming of the Bastille , July 19th, 2023
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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It may be the role of our spiritual leaders—those we accept—to give us the wood for a fire but expect us to provide the match. I thought of that Monday   
USPS postage stamp with a volleyball , July 16th, 2023
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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As I sit on a bench in the shade waiting for him, I see a group of eight young people working at pegging the outline of a big square and digging in two posts for a net.
Photo of Archbishop John C. Wester , July 12th, 2023
Categories: Politics
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What happened to the energy and hope that created the Women's Movement? The urge to reform capitalism that was a part of the 1960s?
Photo of the Hopscotch House, Louisville, KY , July 9th, 2023
Categories: Women
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By an unfortunate coincidence, both of these houses are in danger of losing their primary purpose.
Interior Photo of The Silver Fountain , July 5th, 2023
Categories: My Family
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I have passed on my fascination with trains to at least one of my granddaughters.
Cover of novel The Road , July 2nd, 2023
Categories: My Family
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New thoughts about the way we are raising our sons are uppermost in my mind.
Still image of the horse-breaking scene in Wild Rovers. , June 28th, 2023
Categories: Women
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I try to ration my secret passion, or rather its secret satisfaction, like a love affair I don't want anyone to know about.
Photo of graduates at Harvard's Baccalaureate 2023 , June 25th, 2023
Categories: Women
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It’s not a surprise to find that many young people are employed at firms where the parent of their same gender work, but since women are earning at a lower rate, I’d be surprised to find that as many young women follow their mothers into the job market as men follow their fathers.
Photo of Vincent Van Gogh's Peasant woman binding sheaves (after Millet) , June 21st, 2023
Categories: Women
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Am I pessimistic? Maybe so. But it's a pessimism that I think is appropriate.
Press photo of Bill and Bonnie Hearne , June 18th, 2023
Categories: New Mexico
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I sometimes think the greatest disservice of many which has been done to women is the writing, recording and endlessly repeating of romantic songs.
Man in underwear playing air drums , June 14th, 2023
Categories: Women, My Family
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I’ve just spent a few days with my son and grandson and am reminded of the delightful chaos of living with boys and men.
Photo of the Wolf Pen Mill at Wolf Pen Mill Farm , June 11th, 2023
Categories: Kentucky
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I'm visiting my old farm, Wolf Pen Branch Mill, ten miles east of Louisville, Kentucky for a few days, and find myself appalled, as always, by the spread of development.
Lizzie Baker, photographed by Cecil Beaton , June 4th, 2023
Categories: My Family
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I remember with increased gratitude the women I've known who, no matter what their circumstances, were able to continue to bring me light, warmth and humor.
The Acequia Madre next to an adobe house , June 1st, 2023
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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To me the Acquia Madre's presence is a reminder every day of the central influence of women here in Santa Fe.
Portrait of Harry Belafonte, singing , May 28th, 2023
Categories: Writing
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The role of popular performers in reshaping political opinions, especially for young people, has never been fully recognized.
First edition cover of The Years , May 24th, 2023
Categories: Writing
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I'm reading Virginia Woolf's "The Years," the only one of her novels I haven't read.
Vintage Amtrak Southwest poster , May 21st, 2023
Categories: Travel
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Everywhere I travel on Amtrak, I meet people who are dedicated to avoiding planes.
Photo of woman's arm holding bouquet of Peonies , May 14th, 2023
Categories: Women, My Family
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In the stories of my two old friends, both equally dear to me, I see a reflection of the problems of our country.
Photo of tree in bloom with white flowers , May 7th, 2023
Categories: New Mexico
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"'Hope' is the thing with feathers," Emily Dickinson wrote in 1861, wisely putting quotation marks around the word to signify its unreliability, for nothing is more easily crushed in our world today.
Sculpture by Camille Claudel: The Wave or The Bathers , May 3rd, 2023
Categories: Women, Art
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Is it possible for us to be perceived as original when the shadow of this inevitably more esteemed man falls so heavily across us?
Photo of the sculpture La Vieille Hélène , April 26th, 2023
Categories: Women
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A dear friend recently sent me a surprising announcement from the Centers for Disease Control. Why am I not surprised?
Pink female gender symbol , April 23rd, 2023
Categories: Women
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It seems to me that, especially since Covid, we are going backwards in terms of equality, having made a bit of a progress before the plague.
Photo of the sculpture The Mature Age by Camille Claudel , April 20th, 2023
Categories: Women, Art
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To me, Camille Claudel's story represents in heartbreaking terms the problems faced by talented women who depend on recognition by a better-known man.
Publicity photo of Jessie Buckley in Women Talking , April 16th, 2023
Categories: Women
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We are still frequently silenced, either by our own fears or the manifest disapproval of the men and women around us.
Photo of a statue of Mary of Cleophas (Santa Maria Cleophas) , April 12th, 2023
Categories: Religion
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Surrounded as I am, and as all of us are, by unbelievers, I search for my own moments of connection with the Gospels, my own slender path out of the deep despair of agnosticism.
Photo of a bear on my patio , April 5th, 2023
Categories: New Mexico
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I know she/they are back because my tube bird feeders are lying on the ground, seeds scattered and gone.
Photo of Margaret Erskine , April 2nd, 2023
Categories: Women, Writing
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Surrounded by disasters of every kind, we are seeing the great strengths of our extraordinary adaptability, valued and valuable as it has never been before.
Old photograph of Old Kentucky Home , March 26th, 2023
Categories: My Family, Writing
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I’ve just received word that my new short story, “What I Learned From Fat Annie” has won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize for 2023.
Photo of a Lilly in bloom , March 22nd, 2023
Categories: Women, Writing
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Here with the first day of spring yesterday in the midst of heavy snowfall—98 inches on the mountain, the most in many years—I am announcing the Revolution.
Photo of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas with dog , March 19th, 2023
Categories: Women, Art
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Gertrude Stein managed her life to make her writing possible.
Photo of a mouse , March 15th, 2023
Categories: Women
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In this case, it's the opinion of scientists about female mice, attempting to explain why over the decades females have never been used in experiments.
Sculpture by Rose B. Simpson , March 12th, 2023
Categories: New Mexico, Art, Women
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I remember when I first met Rose at her booth in Santa Fe's August Indian Market. She had hung an astonishing large color photograph on the front of her booth...
Photo of Liana Fernandez , March 10th, 2023
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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The staunch Las Vegas Optic, one of a number of small town newspapers that have found the cash and the spirit to survive the universal collapse of print news publications, recently ran a photo and story on its front page that caught my eye.
Collage of a woman in a bird cage , March 5th, 2023
Categories: Women, Theater
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Reviews and revisions of Ibsen's "A Doll's House" sprout with each new Broadway season, an indication of how relevant, and how difficult this 1879 play continues to be.
Photo of Mabel Dodge Luhan House living room , February 26th, 2023
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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One of my pleasures here is eating dinner alone in a good restaurant and drinking a glass of wine. It is my best opportunity to watch people and to jump to perhaps wrongheaded conclusions about them.
Photo of ashes held in hands , February 22nd, 2023
Categories: My Family, Politics, Religion
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Over my long writing career, I've kind of resigned myself to being a Cassandra: the voice in the wilderness that speaks, or writes, about things most people would rather ignore and forget.
Painting of cows at dusk by Ann Cooper Dobbins , February 19th, 2023
Categories: Women, Art
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Twice in my life, I’ve had the rare privilege of encountering a young woman of promise. Only twice because promise is handed out randomly or according to a pattern I can’t discern.
Photo of Marly Fisher , February 16th, 2023
Categories: New Mexico, Women
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As the country turns away from supporting issues crucial to girls' and women's health, the scorn that is faced by all women, especially those young enough to appear vulnerable, is creating a mental health crisis.
Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm, 2023 , February 12th, 2023
Categories: Kentucky
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Resounding through the maple and sycamore forest, the clanking must have drawn farmers from miles around, loading their carts with corn and driving over the rough stone road to the mill.
Photo of a 1930's Valentine's Day card , February 5th, 2023
Categories: Women
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A few days ago when I was poking in one of my closets, I found a battered old scrapbook from the 1930, a big collection of greeting cards spasted onto the scrapbook’s yellowish pages.
Photo of author Rachel Aviv , February 1st, 2023
Categories: Women
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I discovered for the first time an idea I've been revolving in my own mind: that the past, and the settings and people of the past, are crucial.
Virgin of Guadaloupe - Paz Winshtein , January 29th, 2023
Categories: Writing
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Must the divine feminine be denatured?
Photo of high school girls in 1954 , January 26th, 2023
Categories: Kentucky
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My rebellion, uncomfortable as it was—for my classmates were my closest friends—also signaled my leaving the South, going to college, settling in the Northeast and marrying a man my mother's friends identified, with horror, as a Yankee...
Photo of a trail marker in the winter mountains , January 22nd, 2023
Categories: New Mexico
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Such a bland word, and I haven't always appreciated its value, assuming that kindness is just one of our many gifts as human beings.
Photograph of Schnee with "Slits and Slats" , January 19th, 2023
Categories: Women
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Sometimes it seems we only learn of remarkable woman when their obituaries appear, even in the case of movie stars.
Photo of women rowers , January 15th, 2023
Categories: Women
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We seem never to entirely escape from our fear of powerful women.
Photo of small stuffed animal on a pillow , January 8th, 2023
Categories: Women
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Now that we are entering the coldest months of the year here in the Southwest, I’m saying a prayer of gratitude for all the animals I’ve slept with over the years.
Photo of a woman wearing a pink extravagant mask matching her lipstick , January 1st, 2023
Categories: Women
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Don’t make that list, just imagine it or dream it and make a totally unrealistic vow and watch it, in unexpected ways, come into being.
Photo of a confident young woman , December 28th, 2022
Categories: Women
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It is appropriate to applaud the changes in our culture that have allowed these women to grow into adulthood free of the shackles—at least in part—of harassment and intimidation that made my young life such a challenge in the 1950’s.
Painting of the Virgin nursing Infant Jesus , December 25th, 2022
Categories: Writing
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Oh the ghosts of Christmas past! We all have them. May yours wear holly wreaths and drag chains of tinkling bells if they have to drag chains at all.
Photo of Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, arms raised , December 21st, 2022
Categories: Women
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I like to remind myself of how radical our philosophy is, and how often targeted, diminished and deleted by the patriarchy that surrounds us like a woolen scarf tied much too tight.
Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto by Ayun Halliday , December 18th, 2022
Categories: Women, Writing
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One of those rare fortuitous meetings that make life so interesting occurred in the fall in a hallway at the New York Society Library, my home away from home in that city.
Crowd of people on their cellphones , December 14th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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In the New Year, I’m going to attempt something radical...
Photo of a running stream with snow on the bank , December 7th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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As we move into another dry, warm winter here in the high desert Southwest, it's sometimes hard to believe that this may be what we are going to experience for the indefinite future...
Photo of Margaret Erskine , December 5th, 2022
Categories: My Family, Writing
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I started writing Margaret's story, based on a brief memoir she dictated to her nephew many years after her taking...
Photo of Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer , November 27th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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I’m always interested in the lives of women who jump into these ambitious, deadly federal projects—jump in, fall in, are pulled or sucked in.
Photo of Thanksgiving dinner , November 23rd, 2022
Categories: My Family, New Mexico
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I will be giving a special thanks for those who read these thoughts, and whose mysterious presence in my life keeps me going.
Watercolor of Mary Jane Colter by Chandler O'Leary , November 20th, 2022
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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There’s nothing to equal to results of our ability to collaborate, and to remember and record our foremothers whom the powers that be usually neglect.
Photo of The Carlisle Indian Industrial School , November 16th, 2022
Categories: Politics
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The power to say no. Without it, can we ever feel we are in charge of our own lives?
Photo of three protestors holding signs , November 13th, 2022
Categories: Women
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We feminists hope and even believe that the work we've done over the past decades has expanded the boundaries of what it means, and can mean, to be a woman, but that hope and belief seems to me to have foundered on the pronoun issues of gender fluidity.
Photo of an iron skillet , November 9th, 2022
Categories: Women, Politics
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We plan, we get ready, and we go. Nobody hold us back. Our own fears don't hold us back.
Photo of Oak Alley Plantation , November 2nd, 2022
Categories: My Family
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Times change. Time passes. A younger generation stands to inherit. One of its members challenged her ancient relative, the present owner, with what she feels is his guilt because of slavery.
Painting by Gari Melchers of mother and child , October 30th, 2022
Categories: Women, Religion
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The image of Mary as "Virgin Mary, Meek and Mild" has been a problem for many women and probably some men during the 100 years when this became her most common representation.
Watercolor by Chandler O'Leary - Route 66, La Fonda , October 26th, 2022
Categories: Women
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There are a lot of us. And many of our stories have yet to be written.
Photo of Annette Funicello wearing Mickey Mouse ears , October 23rd, 2022
Categories: Kentucky
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I never saw the Mickey Mouse Club, but I do remember adolescent obsession.
Portrait of George Rogers Clark , October 19th, 2022
Categories: Kentucky
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Our questioning of historical "truth" may be invalid when we are possessed of what we believe is the answer.
Photo of a section of a friendship quilt , October 12th, 2022
Categories: Women
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The power of the feminist movement always was and always will be drawn from the friendship of women.
Photo of author John Cheever , October 9th, 2022
Categories: Writing
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“Master” is what John Cheever (1912-1982) was, and is, although largely forgotten now in spite of the acclaim and the many awards he accumulated during his long career as a successful novelist and short story writer.
Photo of Rosie The Couse Mobile Machine Shop , October 5th, 2022
Categories: Art, Women, Writing
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The idea of collaborating has always made me a little squeamish.
Rio Grande Sun logo , October 2nd, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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The Rio Grande Sun devotes a whole page to its police blotter.
Photo of Sallie Bingham looking out over the Gallinas River valley , September 28th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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The ranch is not really for us human beings with our thin skins and our need for comfort.
Official Portrait of U.S. Rep Melanie Stansbury, 117th Congress , September 25th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico, Politics
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I find myself getting annoyed: not another fundraiser when I'd rather be taking Pip for his evening walk and making some more progress in the book I'm reading!
Hermit's Peak Howler logo , September 21st, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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I didn’t realize until Saturday that the Hermit's Peak firefighters and their engines had come to us from all over the West.
Antique photo of two little girls in dresses , September 15th, 2022
Categories: My Family
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My first party dresses were sewn by hand—not machine—by my adored grandmother, Helena Lefroy Caperton, my mother's mother, of Richmond, Virginia.
Photo of La Reina de Santa Fe , September 11th, 2022
Categories: Writing
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What could be more different than these two queens?
Photo of a girls' dress made out of a map , September 8th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico, Art
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Just as I was beginning to feel discouraged came a revelation as I was getting a cup of coffee at my neighborhood hangout here in Santa Fe.
Photo of Snake Goddess - Heraklion Achaeological Museum , September 4th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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I must write my story of this place… a story of the intersection of cultures here that seem to have no history or sense of conservation in common.
Photo of sunset at Apache Mesa Ranch , August 31st, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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I haven't written about my ranch in south-eastern New Mexico, near the old town of Las Vegas, for some time. In the interval, a lot has changed.
Photo of Jonathan Worth Bingham , August 28th, 2022
Categories: Writing
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We may all be susceptible to thinking our “personal” stories are nothing more than personal, forgetting over and over again that, as Gloria Steinem said, “The personal is political.”
Scan of painting "A man consumed by flames" , August 24th, 2022
Categories: My Family, Writing
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As I come to the completion of this draft of The Eyes of Addicts, I work hard not be overwhelmed with sadness... yet there is always light in the darkness.
Issue 4 of LUX Magazine , August 21st, 2022
Categories: Women, Writing
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At a fundraiser I was hosting the other day for New Mexico Women Rising, I met the publisher of LUX, a new slick magazine aiming to secure “The Future of Feminist Journalism.”
Photo of crowd , August 17th, 2022
Categories: Travel, Women
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We've all experienced the overcrowding of big cities, from which some of us fled to small towns like Santa Fe, now overwhelmed too with commercial development and part-time residents.
Photo of a painting of Gutle Rothschild , August 7th, 2022
Categories: Women, My Family
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One of the most interesting facets of my biography of Doris Duke was the question of her inheritance.
, August 3rd, 2022
Categories: Travel
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As Queen Elizabeth announced, the players had "set an example that will be an inspiration for girls and women today, and for future generations."
The Pope greets an indigenous leader , July 27th, 2022
Categories: Writing
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I want to draw my readers' attention to the extraordinary visit of Pope Francis to Canada to apologize personally for the destruction of thousands of Native children over the course of two centuries.
American Girl in Italy, Florence, 1951 , July 24th, 2022
Categories: Travel
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After graduating from college and becoming engaged with a ring that was too expensive, I was spending a month of a sort of pre-honeymoon with the man I was going to marry in the fall.
Photo of Pip, the dog , July 20th, 2022
Categories: Writing
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Actually not so small.
Photo of Virginia Woolf , July 14th, 2022
Categories: Women, Writing
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This summer is my sixth at Summer Classics, and I'm fortunate to be re-reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway with seventeen other people and two tutors, as professors are called here.
, July 10th, 2022
Categories: Women, Politics
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In the many debates I’ve been reading and hearing about the criminalization of abortion with the overthrow of Roe v. Wade, there is a major deletion: men.
The exterior of Jackson Women’s Health Organization (JWHO) , July 6th, 2022
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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We always have, and we always will...
Photo of Dover Beach , July 3rd, 2022
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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This week’s dismaying Supreme Court decisions made me fear for the first time in my life for the future of our world, not our Democracy, always somewhat in doubt, but the spiritual, emotional and physical world we all live in.
Photo of protestors and tear gas outside United States Capitol , June 29th, 2022
Categories: Politics
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We must watch the ongoing hearings into what happened in Washington on January 6, 2021, not to hear more detail about Trumps' malfeasance—we already know plenty about that—but to hear about the acts of courage some of those around him displayed that day and in coming forward now to testify.
Photo of the 2022 Pride Parade , June 26th, 2022
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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I doubt if any other town in the U.S. could celebrate Gay Pride with such a plethora of business and government floats. And with an enormous crowd composed of all ages and all genders.
Charlie Russell painting of a cow circled by wolves , June 22nd, 2022
Categories: Kentucky
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We need to feel a connection to the heroic, so often defined as inherently male.
Photo of daylily flowers , June 19th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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Whether I'm leaving on a short trip like this one or a long trip like the one next month, I feel the same mixture of nostalgia and apprehension...
Ceramic wall sculpture of a heart with an arrow through it , June 12th, 2022
Categories: Women
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I’ve really never imagined that there could be rules of the heart, but yesterday morning a dear friend laid his rules out in no uncertain terms.
Photo of an opened book , June 8th, 2022
Categories: Writing
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One of the many blessings of my life is my book group.
Painting of a woman writing in a journal , June 5th, 2022
Categories: Women
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Writing in public insists that we exist as thinkers and creators of our own reality. It is of enormous importance.
Photo of the interior of the Santuario de Chimayo , June 1st, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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I dug up a pinch of the holy dirt kept in a hole in the ground in a side chapel with convenient trowels laid alongside.
Photo of dirty Tiffany jewelry box , May 29th, 2022
Categories: Women
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Are we resigned, patient, wise? Or do we all learn sooner or later that pressing our noses against plate glass windows is the closest we will ever get to the goodies?
Photo of Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller, MSpS, Archbishop of San Antonio , May 26th, 2022
Categories: Women, Politics, Religion
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We are deep into another recreation of a woman-hating culture when the gains we'd painfully achieved in the 1960's are overridden by darkness...
Photo of The Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi , May 22nd, 2022
Categories: My Family, New Mexico
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The great benefit of an education in the humanities, now becoming a rarity, is its introduction via the Greek and Elizabethan playwrights to what they called "The tears in things."
Bee drinking syrup , May 18th, 2022
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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As a devoted reader of all of Shakespeare's poems, I've always been puzzled by the verb, "sucks" in this line from The Tempest.
Photo of ad for slave name Hope , May 15th, 2022
Categories: Kentucky
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This is the way we save our history. Otherwise much of what we know becomes irrelevant.
Photo of The Plutonium Facility at Los Alamos , May 11th, 2022
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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The national news, which almost never recognizes that New Mexico is a state—after all we have only five Congressional delegates—has been pricked into awareness by our five fires, one of   
Cover of the book Little Brother , May 8th, 2022
Categories: Writing
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As the first copies of my memoir, Little Brother, begin to circulate, I’m struck by the way some friends have responded to the photograph of Jonathan on the cover.
Photo of the Supreme Court , May 4th, 2022
Categories: Politics
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We really can't be expected by any sane human being to take ALL the responsibility for consequences that will burden and at times nearly destroy our lives.
Photo of Vsevolod Meierhold , May 1st, 2022
Categories: Theater
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One of the serendipitous rewards of time spent in New York City is the rediscovery of long lost and forgotten connections.
Photo of dirt road and sunbeams in forest , April 27th, 2022
Categories: Religion
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Looking at it closely, I saw that it had been much used, the gilt on the edges of the pages half worn off, the pages themselves, thin as onion skin, dry and vulnerable.
Photo of Rachel Carson , April 24th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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Would it have made a difference if a man had written it, a well-known scientist? I wondered that this morning as I walked through our parched and silent woods here   
Photo of Harvard Hall at the Harvard Club, New York City , April 17th, 2022
Categories: Women
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It’s a small example and yet, I think, a telling one: how women were admitted as members to the Harvard Club of New York City.
Photo of Palm Sunday procession , April 13th, 2022
Categories: Religion
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It was a surprise to find myself on Palm Sunday, at the end of a crowd of several hundred people, following a cross through midtown Manhattan with police cars barring traffic.
Photo of Kristen Costa and Sallie Bingham , April 10th, 2022
Categories: Writing
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Thursday night I was privileged to present a conversation about my book and Doris Duke in one of the huge gilded rooms at Rough Point...
Poster for the play Confederates , April 6th, 2022
Categories: Writing, Theater
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I'm about to leave New York City in its grey rain for Newport and Rough Point, the big house on Ocean Avenue Doris inherited from her father and that seems to have been closely associated, for her, with her mother.
Photo of a metal and granite sculpture by Celeste Roberge , April 3rd, 2022
Categories: My Family
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Do I think grief is catching, like some new variant of the pandemic?
Photo of worm wrapped around matchstick coming out of leg , March 27th, 2022
Categories: Politics
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Sometimes it seems to me that we are all suffering from another form of Fireworm called War, or "Imperial Infantilism," as one commentator called it.
Photo of spring waterfall with snow , March 24th, 2022
Categories: Writing
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Out of the sour ground of NO spring many hopeful sprigs, especially the generous responses to so many of my posts from you.
Photo of woman's legs walking , March 20th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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It’s a small idea. A simple idea: One day a week we don’t drive—to let the earth breathe, as a friend of mine described it.
Photo of Margaret Erskine , March 17th, 2022
Categories: Women, Writing
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Surrounded by disasters of every kind, we are seeing the great strengths of our extraordinary adaptability, valued and valuable as it has never been before.
Photo of Margaret Randall , March 13th, 2022
Categories: Women
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Margaret raises what has always been a complex issue: should men be included in celebrations of women?
Photo of The Witch House - Laguna Beach , March 9th, 2022
Categories: Travel
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I imagine the success of the Beach House was largely due to the energy of these women: Grandma on the rooftop, her three daughters, and their many daughters and nieces who enjoyed the house for three generations.
Photo of my son Will's grave , March 6th, 2022
Categories: My Family
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Riding Amtrak's Southwest Chief, the only train left that travels east and west across our country and down to New Orleans, I notice as we cross the desert in New Mexico the small forgotten places...
Photo of cross of ashes on woman's forehead , March 3rd, 2022
Categories: Politics
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Now, as always, there is the question of our minor influence as women on public events, even now when our faces and voices seem to indicate our ascendancy.
Photo of praying hands , February 27th, 2022
Categories: Religion
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Lent is about to begin. Let us all get on our knees, whatever faith or lack of faith we hold and say one of the prayers from the Ash Wednesday service...
Photo of T.S. Eliot in 1923 , February 23rd, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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It’s always fun to dispute with Mr. Eliot who used to reign supreme in English Departments all over this country.
Photo of The Plutonium Facility at Los Alamos , February 20th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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Innocent till proven guilty? A sword with two edges.
NY Times Best Seller List logo , February 16th, 2022
Categories: Writing
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For me as a writer, the NO that seems to set a limit to all my hopes comes in response to an idea, a manuscript—or, in this case, a proposal.
Lillian Hellman - Blackglama - 1976 , February 13th, 2022
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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"That's quite a coat," I murmured as she slid past me into the next seat.
Photo of Virginia Woolf by George Charles Beresford , February 10th, 2022
Categories: Women, Politics
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Last weekend I wrote about sisters. Inevitably I am now writing about daughters. Both posts concern lives of privilege but are not limited by that definition.
Painting by Dorothy Brett , February 6th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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How does it happen that here in (relatively) remote and small Santa Fe, New Mexico, I’ve come to know about two sisters from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
Still from the video Dylan Winter and the Starling Murmurations , January 30th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico, Writing
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In the midst of so much bad news, this astonishing performance of starlings, those little birds many of us have learned to hate, is a reminder of our ability to communicate and cooperate
Photo of Madame Helena Modjeska smoking , January 26th, 2022
Categories: My Family
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I never asked my father about his manicures. It didn't seem appropriate to raise such a frivolous topic with a dedicated newspaper publisher.
Photo of the March for Life in 2020 , January 23rd, 2022
Categories: Politics
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I'm finding it difficult to celebrate my 85th birthday, the anniversary of the decision half a century ago that legalized abortion, forbidding the states to outlaw abortion in all cases and asserting this freedom as a constitutional right.
Photo of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. , January 19th, 2022
Categories: Women, Politics
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Who is willing now to take these risks to try to preserve the future of the world?
Photo of vintage doggy bank , January 16th, 2022
Categories: Philanthropy
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We are a long way from the feel and the look of coins and bills; we are being moved rapidly toward an economy which will operate only with various forms of credit.
, January 12th, 2022
Categories: Women
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The US economy has long been based on consumerism and it seems very likely to me that most of the consumers are us women.
Photo of an Amaryllis flower , January 9th, 2022
Categories: New Mexico
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I have learned in dark times to turn to a few trusted resources.
Santa Fe Snow, painting by Clark Hulings , December 29th, 2021
Categories: My Family, Writing
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A dear friend of mine reinvented the ritual of New Year's Resolutions this year, writing a letter on paper trimmed with gold stars to send to his friends...
Photo of Mary Caperton Bingham , December 25th, 2021
Categories: My Family
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No, not that Mary, who was busy having a baby, but my mother, Mary Caperton Bingham.
Photo of Duane Koyawena and Mike Kayser , December 22nd, 2021
Categories: New Mexico
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Yesterday morning on KUNM, the invaluable National Public Radio Station where five days a week I listen to "Native America Calling," the only program in the country to showcase the tribes, I heard about a business in Arizona that makes prosthetic devices—arms, hands, partial hands and legs.
Photo of bell hooks , December 19th, 2021
Categories: Women, Writing
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I only met bell hooks once at a large feminist gathering—but as it happens when a powerful woman is in the room, her presence registered.
The Silver Swan book cover , December 15th, 2021
Categories: Writing
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Due to the generosity of a store here in Santa Fe called Travel Bug, I was able to give a reading from the biography a few days ago to a large and appreciative crowd.
Photo of Lawrence Olivier , December 12th, 2021
Categories: Women
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Where are our heroines?
Photo of Sallie Bingham as young woman , December 8th, 2021
Categories: My Family, Writing
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On a recent trip home to Kentucky, I came across a small worn black journal called "A Page A Day."
Photo of a sunset , December 5th, 2021
Categories: My Family
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I think in fact there is no forgetting, but a different kind of remembering that goes on all the time in a deep, hidden layer...
Poster: Indian Land for Sale , December 1st, 2021
Categories: New Mexico
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Finally, finally, the story of the Native American boarding schools in the U.S. has been sprung open by the discovery of the buried remains of more than a hundred children at a residential boarding school in Canada.
Cover of the book Little Brother , November 23rd, 2021
Categories: My Family, Writing
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Jonathan will be back in the place he loved best, and the only place he ever felt he really belonged.
Photo of a church procession , November 17th, 2021
Categories: Kentucky
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As long as guilt and fear hamper us, what weapons do we have to combat cruel and unfair treatment?
Sketch of Camille Claudel by Monica Lundy , November 7th, 2021
Categories: Art, Women
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An indication of the “treatment” they were given is shown in Lundy’s sketches of the medicine bottles she found: mercury cyanide, mercury chloride and tincture of belladonna (deadly nightshade.) The sketches are burnt into paper with a soldering iron.
Photo of old horseshoes , October 31st, 2021
Categories: New Mexico
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This broken fragment means more to me than the vaunted collections of art I’ve seen in many museums, here and all over the world—this humble evidence of respect for handiwork and the human need to embellish.
Photo of Margaret Erskine , October 27th, 2021
Categories: My Family, Writing
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We have no heroes and we blindly search for them everywhere. Women heroines need not apply.
A model with one earring on a colorful background. Natural full lips with red lipstick and lip gloss , October 24th, 2021
Categories: Women
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I often smile now to think of my vow and my doomed attempt to get my friends to copy me. But I also love and admire that earnest girl who knew, even then, that I was going to choose a different path.
Photo of the Globe Theater, London , October 19th, 2021
Categories: Theater
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Ordinary, daily speech has always been sloppy, but what is sliding away is the higher use of words as in the great plays, great literature, and great poetry.
Cover of the book Little Brother , October 11th, 2021
Categories: Religion
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I have no other way to accept—or begin to accept—the tragedies over four generations that have engulfed my birth family.
Poster for Museum of the Sixties , October 3rd, 2021
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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I am not an unequivocal admirer of that period, those people, and all that they caused—or helped to cause—to happen, in the early 1960’s and continuing to this day.
Photo of Margaret Erskine , September 24th, 2021
Categories: Women, Writing
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I've come to believe over the years that there is a core similarity that connects the lives of all women. I think it is our ability to adapt.
Photo of Chimayo Museum , September 19th, 2021
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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No one in her right mind is "pro-abortion." I know from personal experience what a difficult decision this is.
Photo of Robert E Lee Memorial , September 12th, 2021
Categories: My Family, Politics
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My beloved grandmother could never have imagined that the enormous statue towering over her hometown would be pulled down, carved up and crated off to an uncertain future as it was a week ago.
Photo of grapes , September 8th, 2021
Categories: Writing
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The soft, slow ending of the summer here brings much needed rain, coolness, and the coming to fruition of many fruits and vegetables.
Photo of RV , September 1st, 2021
Categories: New Mexico
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One of the many blessings of my life is the trail system in Hyde Park which starts about ten miles north of my house.
Photo of the "Mother of All Bombs" , August 29th, 2021
Categories: Politics
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I have trouble saying "we" dropped the bomb. But ... we must accept a degree of responsibility.
Photo of Elina Brotherus' self-portrait, "My Dog is Cuter Than Your Ugly Baby , August 22nd, 2021
Categories: Travel
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We pay the price for our many forms of immaturity—but I prefer that to what seems to be the ironclad maturity of the well-cared-for Danes.
Photo of Karen Blixen with her brother Thomas , August 18th, 2021
Categories: Travel, Writing
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The habit of forming pacts to shape her chosen life began when Karen Blixen was standing on a granite boulder at Folehave with her younger brother Thomas, then fourteen.
Copenhagen Hotel Windows , August 11th, 2021
Categories: Travel
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The Danes are a practical people living within the limits of a limited world.
Photo of my privy (outhouse) , August 8th, 2021
Categories: New Mexico
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My plight is not so dire as what will face all of us when our water really is gone.
Book cover: The Flowering , August 1st, 2021
Categories: Art
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Her life has been full of difficulties but she has made or forced her way through, never using excuses, always questioning why the art world, which has been so cruel to her until very recently, diminishes the importance of women's art.
Screenshot from CNN insurrection video , July 28th, 2021
Categories: Politics
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A crucial question from a congressman: "Is this America?"
Photo of defendant , July 25th, 2021
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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Does fearlessness on the part of girls and young women cancel judgement and common sense?
Photo of Crayon box - Colors of the World , July 14th, 2021
Categories: Politics, Writing
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We are rounding the curve and coming into the homestretch—as we often do, both as individuals and as a culture—in the race toward what I'll call SUPERSENSITIVITY rather than its usual and somewhat discredited name, Political Correctness.
Photo of Brian Herrera , July 8th, 2021
Categories: Art
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I, along with thousands of other teenagers, did "speak for democracy" in a laboriously fashioned essay, presented on the radio, and winning me a prize—a black and white TV set my parents insisted that I return.
Murder In Mississippi painting by Normal Rockwell, 1965 , June 27th, 2021
Categories: Art, Travel
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I know what to expect of Rockwell’s art, or I thought I did: homey sentimental depictions of an America that no longer exists and perhaps never did.
Photo of LA Union Station interior , June 24th, 2021
Categories: Travel
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I still don’t want to go anywhere but if I go I want it to be on a train.
Painting by Mary Southard, CSJ , June 13th, 2021
Categories: Philanthropy
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As often the case with big gatherings (on Zoom or otherwise), there is often one phrase that stands out.
Painting by Mary Southard, CSJ , June 9th, 2021
Categories: Philanthropy
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For all my friends who might be interested in attending the free online U.N. conference The Vanguard tomorrow, here is the final agenda.
Photo of a addiction recovery poster at the Santa Fe Farmers Market , June 3rd, 2021
Categories: New Mexico
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For me, there's an irresistible connection between the baskets of glowing vegetables at our Saturday Farmers' Market and the hope expressed in this poster for recovery from addiction.
Painting by Mary Southard, CSJ , May 30th, 2021
Categories: Philanthropy, Writing
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I am looking forward to the rare opportunity that will be offered me, and I'm looking forward with even more interest to the fascinating variety of presentations that will make up the program.
Book cover: Three Martini Afternoons by Gail Crowther , May 23rd, 2021
Categories: My Family, Writing
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We all want to forget our history, especially when it is shameful, and for this reason I am particularly grateful for a just-published biography of my peers.
Photo of actress Lilly Langtry, 1885. , May 20th, 2021
Categories: Writing
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We are still engaged—and will probably always be engaged—in smashing the canon.
Photo of American Flag , May 16th, 2021
Categories: New Mexico
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Driving down from Taos yesterday, I followed a dusty, beat-up pickup truck with an American flag painted on the tailgate.
Photo of Nina, Linda and Cokie from NPR , May 12th, 2021
Categories: Women
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I have to recognize that we have not made the progress in the arts that women have made in journalism for reasons of class and white privilege
Sculpture of African American head , May 9th, 2021
Categories: Art
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I was delighted to visit, yesterday morning, Nikesha Breeze’s astonishing show, “Four Sites of Return: Ritual, Remembrance, Reparation, Reclamation” at form & concept gallery.
Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm , May 5th, 2021
Categories: Kentucky
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Wake up, you well-off widows! We are all part of a world that is threatened by our individual decisions.
Photo: Washington State chapter meeting of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1925. , May 2nd, 2021
Categories: Kentucky
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Mark Twain's novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, easily his masterpiece, was published eighteen years earlier and would have given the ladies palpitations if they had dared to read it.
Painting: Big Daddy Times Three, 1973 , April 28th, 2021
Categories: Art
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We met one summer in the 1980's when we were both artists in residence at the remarkable Blue Mountain Center, situated on 1600 acres of woods in the Adirondacks in New York State.
Photo of George Floyd square when verdict was announced , April 22nd, 2021
Categories: Kentucky, Writing
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We stopped yesterday in the middle of my class on writing memoir to listen to the verdict in Minneapolis that will send the policeman who murdered George Floyd to jail on all three counts.
Artful Tea shop logo , April 18th, 2021
Categories: Politics
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We may not be able to stop this radical change that is ruining so many but that does not excuse us from doing whatever we can.
Photo of Dame Ivy Compton Burnett , April 14th, 2021
Categories: My Family, Writing
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During a vacation trip to England years ago, I became aware, to my surprise, of my father's fascination with two British writers: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Painting of Breonna Taylor , April 11th, 2021
Categories: Kentucky
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The degree of change that has transpired since the long overdue advent of Black Lives Matter and the murder of Breonna Taylor in Louisville last spring is summed up for me in a Community Forum essay by columnist Quintez Brown.
Photo of semi-trailer trucks parked off highway , April 7th, 2021
Categories: New Mexico
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I can't forget an eloquent letter in The Santa Fe New Mexican recently from a man who is invisible to most of us except when his monster eighteen-wheeler rushes past on the throughway.
Sculpture: Käthe Kollwitz, Pietà (Mother with dead Son), 1937-1939, bronze , April 1st, 2021
Categories: Writing
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Tillie Olsen, for me, is a startlingly loud call to continue to work, no excuses allowed.
Book cover: Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside The Center By Ray Monk , March 28th, 2021
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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How often have those of us—and there are many—whose sharp intelligence and ambition have not provided an escape from unresolved psychological problems found a route to normalcy through intellectual achievement and acceptance?
Image saying Virtual Teaching is my Superpower , March 25th, 2021
Categories: Writing
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I want to persuade writers to use all five senses in their writing, instead of just the visual—and to sharpen visual descriptions with fresh, unexpected adjectives.
Vintage Illustrated Maytag ad , March 21st, 2021
Categories: Women
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I was converted a long time ago—one of the possibilities of privilege—to the belief that we women have more important things to do than the laundry.
Still image from my Zoom talk, Doris Duke: A Lifetime Search for Faith , March 17th, 2021
Categories: Writing, Religion
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On Tuesday, March 9, 2021 I presented a talk to The Library Committee of The Church of the Holy Faith in Santa Fe, New Mexico entitled "Doris Duke: A Lifetime Search for Faith."
Still from Q&A with students from the Christa McAuliffe Middle School, Florida , March 14th, 2021
Categories: Writing
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On February 4, I spoke to students at the Christa McAuliffe Middle School in Palm Beach County, Florida over Zoom at the request of Dr. Alexander Bellas, Grade 8 English Language Arts Teacher.
photo of Debra Haaland , March 7th, 2021
Categories: Politics
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Probably, these two women don't know each other but they share certain defining characteristics: age, wisdom, and a recognition that the earth is our mother.
Photo of Polly's Restaurant in Greenwich Village , March 3rd, 2021
Categories: Women, Writing
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Yesterday I was mesmerized by two presentations at our Women Writing Women's Lives Zoom meeting.
Photo of my doll, Cherry Ripe , February 28th, 2021
Categories: Women
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She's back in force.
Still from the play, Waiting for Godot , February 24th, 2021
Categories: Theater
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I just received an email which appeared to be from Amazon—logo, etc.—advising me of a purchase of a laptop by a man named Craig something in Delaware and asking me to call.
Photo of Quan Yin , February 21st, 2021
Categories: Writing
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One of the problems with memoir writers, as I see it, is that we aim too low.
Doris Duke - Rubenstein Library , February 17th, 2021
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's grant of 1.6 million dollars to pay for the digitalization of thousands of tape-recorded oral histories of indigenous people has a special meaning for me.
Photo of working mom with dancing children , February 14th, 2021
Categories: Women
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The problems have always been with us, but they were easier to ignore when the economy boomed.
Photo of mountain in Santa Fe , February 10th, 2021
Categories: New Mexico
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I am proud of the Red-Headed Man.
Photo of a groundhog , February 7th, 2021
Categories: Kentucky
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I might have forgotten Groundhog Day entirely except for a box that’s just arrived from my dear friend, Wren Smith, in Kentucky.
Photo of Kamala Harris from video , February 3rd, 2021
Categories: Women, Politics
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Here is the proof, internationally as well as nationally: women do more than survive; we lead.
Photo of my gilded iron cuirass (breastplate) , January 31st, 2021
Categories: Women, Art
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My dinner guest sits quietly as the sun sinks in the west behind her, but her quietness is temporary.
Photo of Pip in the Snow - 2021 , January 27th, 2021
Categories: New Mexico, Writing
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For anyone who lives where early January brings the first major snowfall, there is a feeling that everything is right with the world.
Photo of Teeter Totter Wall (2019) , January 24th, 2021
Categories: My Family, Art
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I just passed a most delightful birthday with my Santa Fe family, outdoors, in 45 degrees, with coats and coconut cake baked by my eldest granddaughter.
Photo of Jake Angeli (Qanon Shaman) , January 20th, 2021
Categories: Women, Politics
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We are in the time now of the spouting of the dragon's teeth but the soil was prepared for them decades ago.
Photo of my son Will's grave , January 13th, 2021
Categories: My Family
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It is still my flag, and ours.
Photo of protestors and tear gas outside United States Capitol , January 10th, 2021
Categories: Politics
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Sooner than we might expect, we will begin to blot out, explain away or even deny the importance of what happened in Washington, D.C.
Mary Caperton Bingham , January 3rd, 2021
Categories: My Family
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It has taken me so long, decades after her death, to realize what a blessed and blessing spirit my mother, Mary Caperton Bingham, was.
Photo of Sacred Pinon , December 30th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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Where tribes were destroyed or driven out, many of us relative newcomers are not aware of the history that confronts us here in the Southwest every day.
Photo of Duygu and Ozlem Ezer , December 25th, 2020
Categories: Women
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As I prepare to enjoy Christmas in blissful solitude, I'm particularly grateful for having learned during the past ten years how to love myself alone.
Photo of the author Starhawk , December 22nd, 2020
Categories: Women, Writing
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For me this solstice has special meaning, perhaps because last night at sundown I was hoping to see the close conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, so close they are being called "The Christmas Star."
photo of Debra Haaland , December 20th, 2020
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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This week, president-elect Joe Biden’s appointment of Laguna pueblo native, Debra Haaland, as Secretary of the Interior, gives proof positive of change.
Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper logo , December 17th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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Every year at about this time, Yolanda leaves a typed note with the newspaper.
, December 13th, 2020
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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Cooperation to restore rights, to serve justice, and to recognize the sacred. That's what I hope for when our new administration takes over in January.
Photo of Las Vegas, New Mexico , December 9th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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What has happened since to weaken our moral fiber and make some of us unwilling to sacrifice?
Photo of Jonathan Worth Bingham , December 6th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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Can we be forgiven for signing these disreputable contracts, which often do not stipulate the amount of money we are expected to contribute to the publishing of our books until after we've signed?
Photo of Richard Oakes , December 1st, 2020
Categories: Women
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The dramatic figure of Richard Oakes obscures two Native women who were crucial to the eighteen-month occupation of Alcatraz.
Photo of Natalie Goldberg , November 25th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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I've never been enthusiastic about writing prompts, but these were of a higher imaginative quality than anything I've encountered before.
Photo of Groton School , November 22nd, 2020
Categories: My Family, Writing
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As I begin to re-read piles of research, looking for details I may have missed and will want to include in this final revision of Little Brother, I find myself face to face with this issue.
, November 15th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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We all need comfort, especially now with the pandemic raging across the nation. I was reminded of my all-time comfort sources: an open log fire, a line of poetry, and a beautiful overblown pink rose.
Photo of Jonathan Bingham , November 11th, 2020
Categories: My Family, Writing
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For the past four years, I've been chipping away at this complicated and difficult subject...
Photo of the poet, Seamus Heaney , November 8th, 2020
Categories: Politics
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Poetry is essential in my view, the only art form complex enough to deal with the contradictions of human nature.
Image of United States flag , November 4th, 2020
Categories: Politics
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Regardless of who wins this election, we as a people need to think about the results of the disruption of the past year.
Photo of anonymous artwork in Santa Fe Railyard Park , October 28th, 2020
Categories: Art
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A group of our local artists on their own initiative, without official permission or sponsorship, built an altar in the Railyard Park.
Painting: Road to Pedernal, 1936, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe , October 25th, 2020
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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O'Keeffe's assertion of ownership of a mountain is outrageous and refreshingly so, in itself affirming that she was not a "nice woman."
Photo of protestors in the Santa Fe plaza , October 21st, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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Radical change is never achieved slowly and quietly. This is a conservative country, by and large, and we have to be shaken out of our complacency for anything notable to happen.
Black and white photo of the dog Pip on Apache Mesa , October 18th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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I was unable to move through my bitter disappointment that my original dream, dependent on a man, had collapsed.
Photo of a bear on my patio , October 14th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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She's not my bear, she's certainly not my friend, but I am very happy to share my porch with her.
, October 11th, 2020
Categories: Women, Writing
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The conference reminded me that we women offer each other extraordinary support and encouragement in all walks of life, essential to our achievement and even to our survival.
Sallie Bingham Reading - Duke University - Video still , October 7th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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A wise interviewer asked me yesterday what I hoped to achieve through the presentation of my two current books...
"Bad Boy" image , October 4th, 2020
Categories: Politics
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How often have we witnessed in our own behavior, in others' or in literature, what seems to be women's archetypal empathy for the bad boy?
Photo of golden Aspen trees , September 30th, 2020
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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At this time of year and on till the end of October, the hills around Santa Fe are heavy with gold hunters, carloads of people who want to look at the gold leaves on the Aspens.
, September 27th, 2020
Categories: Politics, Religion
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I may have missed their presence at the demonstrations that have been happening all over the country, most recently in Louisville, Kentucky, but I doubt it.
The New York Review of Books logo , September 23rd, 2020
Categories: Writing
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I attended some of those early meetings, since my then-husband was one of the founding group, but I don't remember venturing an opinion. In those days, the opinions of young women weren't usually regarded.
President Richard Nixon with Taos Pueblo Tribal Elders during the 1970 legislative signing that returned Blue Lake. , September 20th, 2020
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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We are riven, today, not only by righteous concerns for justice on all levels but by the need to express those concerns in very loud voices
Solid black image , September 17th, 2020
Categories: My Family, Writing
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Whether it's black rage or white rage—justified or not—rage makes me uncomfortable.
Lizzie Baker, photographed by Cecil Beaton , September 13th, 2020
Categories: My Family, Politics
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What we are all obliged to do now: to join in sweeping the cobwebs. There is a little time and a little space, provided by the pandemic, for such a sweeping...
Photo of high school runners in New Mexico , September 9th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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This past week brought about the demise of the Los Alamos Monitor here in New Mexico, done away with by its owner Landmark, with the usual excuses about declining advertising.
Photo of the Pit Bull mix, Pip , September 6th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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Yesterday morning Pip and I started on a new adventure: our first obedience class.
photo of Claudio's house , September 2nd, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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I saw Claudio the other day, waiting for his order of barbecued ribs at the van that sits these days of the pandemic in a parking lot...
Photo of a path in Santa Fe with redbud tree , August 30th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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As we head into the sixth—or is it the seventh month?—of the pandemic, I'm reflecting on what sweet juice can be extracted from these sour grapes.
Photo of smoke over Santa Fe, New Mexico , August 26th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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It happens every summer during these years of drought, and we should be thankful it didn't happen until last week...
Photo of a British housewife in the 1930's , August 23rd, 2020
Categories: Women
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The housedress and its definition mark a shift in what we expect of women in the midst of this pandemic.
, August 19th, 2020
Categories: Women
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As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, I am remembering the role that music, as well as words, played in this extraordinary triumph.
Photo of my privy (outhouse) , August 16th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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If there is any excuse for privilege—and I don't think there's any hope of eliminating it in the near or long future—it's that inheritors have an obligation to preserve land.
, August 12th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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One of the saddest effects of COVID for me is the closing of our neighboring eighteen northern pueblos, especially as we are in the summer season of harvest dances.
Photo of my hat, with snakeskin , August 9th, 2020
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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The Peruvian hat makers shown in this film made by Erica Nguyen, a fellow at the Women's International Study Center here in Santa Fe, are part of an ancient tradition.
Publicity photo from Downton Abbey , August 5th, 2020
Categories: Art
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During the early years of the last century, American girls were shipped to England to find husbands lured by their family dollars... Winston Churchill's mother was one of these so-called "Dollar Princesses."
Photo of Mill at Wolf Pen Mill Farm , August 2nd, 2020
Categories: Kentucky
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We never escape our past or our responsibility for our past, as we never escape the future we have agreed to create.
, July 29th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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The rest of us have to find a way to write bold and glittering and daring fiction without their form of fairy gold.
Oil painting of a Santa Fe garden in Summer , July 26th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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After supper on these warm evenings in Santa Fe, my dog Pip usually insists on a walk.
Time magazine cover , July 22nd, 2020
Categories: Philanthropy, Women
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Yesterday, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York removed the name of Margaret Sanger, "founder of the organization," from its Manhattan clinic because of her "harmful connection to the eugenics movement."
Bear in Garden, Santa Fe New Mexico , July 18th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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A few years ago when I built my studio on the edge of the Santa Fe Watershed in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, I was visited by two bears.
Still image from Russian video , July 15th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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That's what we all need right here (wherever here is) and right now.
Photo of No Trespassing sign on gate , July 12th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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We took our usual shortcut through an open field where an old house used to stand...
Photo of oilworkers in Carlsbad New Mexico , July 8th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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We need to define, and vigorously defend, the line between art and politics.
SOMOS logo - Taos, New Mexico , July 5th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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What I can inspire, if not teach, is the appetite for putting words down on the page that has been my theme and my salvation since I was a child.
, July 1st, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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Why dance now, when we are all wrapped to a greater or lesser degree in gloom, even despair, with worse times ahead?
Photo of the Santa Fe Plaza obelisk, base covered with plywood , June 28th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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Where are we to turn for sustenance, the well-off as well as the less comfortable?
Fainting couch, Bernheimer House, Port Gibson, Mississippi. , June 24th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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We tend to be rather forgiving of ourselves and others when we describe the fears we are experiencing as "paranoid"—whether they are or not. The same forgiveness is not granted to those of us who say we are "full of self-pity."
Photo of the Wolf Pen Mill at Wolf Pen Mill Farm , June 21st, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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There has to be some kind of work, it seems to me, to bind a group together. Socializing and shopping together are not enough.
Statue of Juan de Oñate , June 17th, 2020
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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As we are seeing all over the country, protests against police brutality stir protests against other forms of brutality—they are all the same, and recognizing this energizes all of us organizing for radical change.
, June 14th, 2020
Categories: Politics
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Will this younger generation find those flowers? I don’t know, but at least there’s a chance that they may try.
, June 10th, 2020
Categories: Politics
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How much of what is wrong with our world today could be fixed by an outpouring of love?
Photo of wildflowers in New Mexico , June 7th, 2020
Categories: Politics
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What destroyed the hopes so many of us had in the sixties and seventies, when the deep-rooted racism in U.S. culture seemed to have been... well, not uprooted, but at least disturbed?
Solid black image , June 3rd, 2020
Categories: Politics
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We won't change anything without violence and destruction. Good intentions have done all they can do.
, May 27th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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I'm going to treat you—and it will be a treat—to bits and pieces of what I really want to write.
Painting by William Frith, Pope Makes Love To Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , May 24th, 2020
Categories: Women, My Family
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Hearsay, sometimes passed down for three hundred years, sticks—especially if it is negative, and especially if it adheres to a woman.
Photo of writing "Girl Power" on a mirror with lipstick , May 20th, 2020
Categories: Women, Politics
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Are women somehow exempt from the deleterious influence of power? We have so seldom exercised visible power in the past that the question hasn't been asked.
Photo of Sallie Bingham wearing a face mask , May 17th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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Amazing to see the way friends and strangers here in Santa Fe do more than "adapt" to the virus—they make hay out of it.
, May 10th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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As I put my files, copies of the originals at Duke, into boxes for the shredder, I glance at a few that came as such pleasant surprises when I first found them eight or nine years ago.
Women House - Laurie Simmons , May 6th, 2020
Categories: Women
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It is important for the 9% of U.S. women who belong to what the Harvard study calls Elite/Independent to step up to leadership roles.
Photo of Queen Liliʻuokalani, 1891 , May 3rd, 2020
Categories: Women
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If we treat ourselves as the queens we are, the example of Liliʻuokalani may inspire us.
, April 29th, 2020
Categories: Kentucky
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I didn't think the horseback-riding British midwives I worked for years ago in the Kentucky mountains were heroes.
Poster for the play Treason , April 26th, 2020
Categories: Writing, Theater
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It was Ezra Pound's personal story of committing treason against the U.S. during World War Two and his even longer-lasting treason against the three women who loved him that drove me to writing this play.
Photo of a nursing student , April 22nd, 2020
Categories: Women
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I was raised by one of the millions of women who then as well as now fill the most essential U.S. jobs.
Book cover for Treason, with colored markers for final edits , April 19th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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I like to write about risk... and risk, by its very nature, seems best suited to shorter forms.
Doris Duke - Rubenstein Library , April 12th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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There is nothing like opening a file box, with some unknown's penciled label at the top, and diving into an absolutely unpredictable collection of letters, notes, interviews—anything Doris Duke, in my case, decided to save.
The Silver Swan book cover , April 7th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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I am so grateful to all my readers and potential readers and I look forward to being in touch with each and every one of you.
photo of Julia Miles , April 5th, 2020
Categories: Theater
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Instead of Swan talk, I’m attaching an announcement about the recent death of my dear friend and mentor, Julia Miles, founder of The Women’s Project and Productions in New York City in the 1980’s.
photo of the monk Thich Nhat Hanh , April 1st, 2020
Categories: Writing
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I've always been comfortable with what I think is my healthy dose of vanity. Don't we all need it to enjoy our blessings?
, March 29th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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We're learning—in small towns, in countries, in continents—the lessons we desperately need if we are going to survive... not only this crisis, but the far greater looming crisis of global climate disruption.
, March 25th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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For all of us who have bad moments in the dark of night, try opening a bedroom window...
book cover of The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico , March 22nd, 2020
Categories: Writing
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As we advance into—and, I hope, through—various stages of panic and hysteria because of the virus, I am reminded of what the British went through during the German Blitz in World War Two.
, March 15th, 2020
Categories: Women, Kentucky
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How ironic and, yet, how strangely fitting, that this flying virus arrives at the middle of Women's History month and just before the April 7 publication of The Silver Swan...
The Silver Swan book cover , March 8th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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What do I hope my biography will accomplish? Nothing less than a complete reconsideration of Doris Duke.
, March 1st, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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I'm so carried away when I dance that I sing along with the music and hardly know or care where I'm putting my flying feet.
antique postcard from Taos, New Mexico , February 23rd, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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For Taos, a small town in the Rocky Mountains near Santa Fe, another snow means first of all figuring how to move around... but there are other stories.
Photo of Doris Duke swimming in the ocean , February 16th, 2020
Categories: Writing
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I suppose it’s a stretch—but then what is the point of writing without stretching?—but I think if Doris Duke had known about Julian Abele’s work, she would have admired him and regretted that during his life time, he was never given his due.
, February 9th, 2020
Categories: Women, Politics, New Mexico
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In the middle of all the horrors in the U.S. Capitol, we need to remember that much more significant events are happening.
, January 26th, 2020
Categories: New Mexico
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Since I've never lived in a village, this statement, made by Hilary Clinton a while ago, never had much meaning for me until a now.
Photo of a yellow rose , January 19th, 2020
Categories: Women, Politics
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Sometimes the Trojan Horse is actually a country or some part of a country in the grip of intolerance.
, January 12th, 2020
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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I've had the singular good fortune to meet this past week a most remarkable young woman, Mara Zepeda.
, January 5th, 2020
Categories: Women
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We are at a curious moment today, in terms of suffrage and of women's rights generally.
Dancing for the New Year , January 1st, 2020
Categories: My Family, New Mexico
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I'll be dancing in the New Year—out with the old, in with the new, and hope springing eternal.
Santa Fe Snow, painting by Clark Hulings , December 30th, 2019
Categories: New Mexico
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I think I'd rather fall down in the street, which would be easy to do today in snowy, icy Santa Fe—at its most beautiful, and, like everything beautiful, somewhat treacherous.
, December 24th, 2019
Categories: New Mexico
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The ritual of planting candles to light the way to church for midnight mass on Christmas Eve was brought first to Mexico by the conquistadores.
, December 22nd, 2019
Categories: Women
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Now that we have it all, what will we do with it?
, December 1st, 2019
Categories: Women, Travel
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There is an avidity, even an arrogance, and a superb energy I sometimes detect in those who live alone...
, November 29th, 2019
Categories: Women, Politics
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The public shaming of Hill is yet another example of the hypocrisy of our culture, which pretends to respect or even worship difference, but is deeply and actively hostile to it.
, November 24th, 2019
Categories: Politics
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Dr. Hill... seemed to me, uniquely as a woman, to represent a fearless insistence on doing the right thing.
, November 17th, 2019
Categories: Philanthropy
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From early childhood, the children of the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens receive the education, the grooming, the allowances, loans and preferential treatment that make the Dream (however it is defined) possible.
Painting by Anne Cooper Dobbins, Victorian Sofa , November 10th, 2019
Categories: Women
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Except for so-called celebrities, or criminals, we are all forgotten within few years of our deaths.
Photo of Anne-Marie McDermott , November 3rd, 2019
Categories: Women, Art
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I give you several women who have been seen as remarkable; they stand for a multitude of others who through timing, luck or geography are never given the accolades they deserve.
, October 27th, 2019
Categories: Women, Writing
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The death of the writer Kate Braverman here in Santa Fe a few days ago led me to think about the accomplishments, and the legacy, of other Bad Girls.
, October 20th, 2019
Categories: Women, Politics
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How often over the centuries women have banded together all over the world to stop invasion, conquest and bloodshed.
, October 13th, 2019
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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New Mexico has been a blessing for me, which may explain (but not excuse) the fact that I had very little idea of the dire condition of many of our children.
Image of President Nixon's cabinet , October 6th, 2019
Categories: Politics
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It's a badge of honor, as well as proof of membership in a certain group, bound together by familiarity and a shared ethic.
Cover of Naomi Klein's book On Fire , September 29th, 2019
Categories: Writing
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Activists like me who have spent decades working in various fields for social justices are, I think, right to assume that this new young militarism is drawing on our work of many decades.
, September 24th, 2019
Categories: Politics
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They are so beautiful, the young people—from press photos, largely young women—who marched through the streets of our cities and towns Saturday demanding crisis responses to climate change.
Photo of feminist Mary Daly holding an axe , September 15th, 2019
Categories: Women
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It's hard now to believe the extraordinary sense of liberation I as well as many other women felt during the early 1970s
Photo of Pip, the dog , September 11th, 2019
Categories: New Mexico
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We love dogs, we spoil dogs, sometimes we give dogs the love we can no longer afford to give human beings, after so many losses and disappointments.
, September 8th, 2019
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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Seldom has a book caused me to change my mind... but D.H. Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia changed me.
, September 3rd, 2019
Categories: Politics
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When will we avid consumers quit going to Walmarts? Are lower prices really a defensible excuse?
photo of The Black Bird bar and restaurant , September 1st, 2019
Categories: New Mexico
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How blessed I am to leave near a little spot in the desert that deserves, and is given, its very own ode.
, August 25th, 2019
Categories: Travel
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Generalizations about countries are always questionable... yet as I reflect on my recent tour, the contrast between them seems to boil down to these qualities.
, August 16th, 2019
Categories: Travel
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The heroic in some form is essential to our souls.
, August 11th, 2019
Categories: Writing
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Morrison’s raw courage in confronting and describing the effects of incest, racism, and the tragedy of women forced into its confines will be with me always.
, August 7th, 2019
Categories: Travel
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Women should not wear veils. A religion that insists on that is as culpable as a man who insists on it.
, August 4th, 2019
Categories: Women
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Abuse is screwed into the frame of the patriarchy. Top males so often exert their power over people they perceive to be weaker. Once, it was slaves.
Santa Fe Spanish Market - 2019 , July 31st, 2019
Categories: New Mexico, Art
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These staring female saints, these progressing pilgrims, are as far as can be imagined from the images in European churches—or even in the "white" churches of the northeast.
, July 24th, 2019
Categories: Writing
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What did these two stout scrapbooks mean to my mother?
Photo of my century plant , July 17th, 2019
Categories: Women
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When I saw the Century Plant blooming in my dooryard garden yesterday morning, I remembered the letter Sido wrote to her son-in-law, Colette's husband, turning down his invitation to come for a visit.
Boonesboro, Kentucky re-enactment , July 7th, 2019
Categories: Women
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There are so many hidden stories that we as writers and readers need to write and to read—and to demand that they be written by women.
Photo of father and daughter drowned in the Rio Grande , June 30th, 2019
Categories: Politics
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The history of our shared responsibility, as U.S. citizens, for the deaths at our border is also our responsibility for our government's decades-long covert attacks on the democratically-elected leaders in those countries.
Lucía Álvarez "La Piñona" , June 23rd, 2019
Categories: New Mexico, Theater
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The whole tragic history of Spain seemed contained in this music and these movements.
Judy Chicago: Birth Project , June 16th, 2019
Categories: Women, Art
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Elemental, terrifying, and beautifully rendered—often in tender pastels—these images of women in the throes of labor and birth speak to the power we, as a gender, are often afraid to claim.
Children in Church , June 6th, 2019
Categories: Religion, Writing
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They made no noise, having been warned beforehand, and perhaps silenced by the the powerful male voices of the priests and the bellowing of the organ. But they moved. Oh, how they moved...
James Buchanan Duke , June 2nd, 2019
Categories: Philanthropy, Writing
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Doris Duke must at least have wondered if her generosity, in all its forms, could ever compensate for the destructive effects of nicotine addiction.
Glenda Jackson and Cast of King Lear Brigitte Lacombe , May 30th, 2019
Categories: Theater
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I wonder if this is where we are going, toward a future where gender and even appearances are the last rather than the first details we notice and judge in friends and strangers.
The Silver Swan - In Search of Doris Duke , May 26th, 2019
Categories: Writing
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In Manhattan last week, I was finally able to assure myself that The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke, will be published next spring.
Annette Bening and Tracy Letts in "All My Sons" - Roundabout Theatre Company, NYC , May 19th, 2019
Categories: Theater
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When I came out of the Roundabout Theatre production of Arthur Miller's play, All My Sons, I immediately faced an unbearable truth.
Ellsworth Gallery dragon - Bruce Danz , May 16th, 2019
Categories: My Family, Art
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I am devoutly grateful for the lives of Will's two older brothers who have mourned him with me and yet managed to go on.
Greek Satyr , May 5th, 2019
Categories: Writing
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A short course in how a short story might be made.
The Greenbrier Hotel & Resort , April 27th, 2019
Categories: My Family
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A big resort in the mountains of West Virginia, called The Greenbrier, figured often in my great-grandmother Sallie's tales of her girlhood in Richmond.
Double Cottonwood , April 21st, 2019
Categories: Women, Writing, New Mexico
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I find myself involved in three groups to my great pleasure and satisfaction, this after many decades avoiding groups as a waste of time.
Notre Dame de Paris - Fire , April 17th, 2019
Categories: Travel
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Notre Dame has always seemed to me a dark, brooding and august female presence presiding over Paris.
While The Ravens Laughed - Paul Pletka , April 13th, 2019
Categories: New Mexico, Religion
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Are we entering a time of converging faiths, offering hope to some, or only another giant step in the widespread agnosticism that seems at times a sure forerunner of despair?
Einstein at the Grand Canyon , April 11th, 2019
Categories: New Mexico
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Mileva... may have contributed to her husband's discoveries; in letters he alludes to them as "ours" although the question is unanswerable for lack of evidence.
Visual documentation of Anderson’s artistic process during the making of the Hot Flash Fan , April 7th, 2019
Categories: Art, Women, Kentucky
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When a great woman dies, we need to think about her again and again.
Apache Mesa - Barn , April 2nd, 2019
Categories: New Mexico
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Continuing to own an unproductive piece of land at the end of a terrible road broke through several layers of my dreams—or where they delusions?
Agnes Varda , March 31st, 2019
Categories: Women
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Women's History Month ends today—one month out of the twelve to represent more than half of the world's people—with the hope and the promise that we are just beginning.
McClure Reservoir 2013 , March 24th, 2019
Categories: New Mexico
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What is it in men that delights in lighting fires?
Florence Price , March 19th, 2019
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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The first issue, of course, is to level the playing field so that women have the same opportunities for education and performance as men.
Enid Yandell with her sculpture of Pallas Athena, 1896 , March 16th, 2019
Categories: Kentucky, Art
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Several decades ago, I became aware of the work and life of Enid Yandell, a Kentucky-born, Paris educated sculptor whose statues I used to see at various ceremonial points in   
Achilles slaying Penthesilea , March 10th, 2019
Categories: Writing
Tagged:
A bookstore offers companionship, conversation, perhaps even a sense of community which nothing arriving by mail can ever hope to deliver.
Drawn while on the Great Plains, among the Sac and Fox Indians, the sketch depicts a ceremonial dance to celebrate the two-spirit person. , March 7th, 2019
Categories: New Mexico
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Two Spirits have always walked among us, unrecognized and, at least in the past, often reviled.
Wonderful Old Women - No. 12 - Bessie (2012) Paper Mosaic 15"x11" , March 3rd, 2019
Categories: Kentucky, Art
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I immediately recognized the originality and daring of a kindred spirit.
18 Favorites of 2018 , February 26th, 2019
Categories: New Mexico, Kentucky, Travel, Religion, Women, My Family, Politics, Writing
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I've once again chosen my most popular posts of 2018, based on visits, comments, Tweets and Facebook likes.
1976 Women Against Porn march, photo © Freda Leinwand , February 21st, 2019
Categories: Writing
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The discussions about gender were more congenial to me than the groups that confronted the problems heterosexual relations posed for women committed to some form of the revolution.
Eleanor Roosevelt, school portrait , February 15th, 2019
Categories: Women, Kentucky
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A small school in a southern city where girls were usually curbed physically or mentally, the Louisville Collegiate School for Girls and its teachers did not deal in... limits. My years there started me on my way as a writer.
Susan B. Anthony by Saroney , February 14th, 2019
Categories: Women
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My only problem with this pleasantly mad-cap idea is that it seems to focus on friendships between ladies...
Confidential, May 1953 , February 10th, 2019
Categories: Women
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One of the most notable differences between women and men in public life is we seem to know better how to avoid scandal.
Vinales, Cuba. Photo by Augustin de Montesquiou on Unsplash , February 3rd, 2019
Categories: Travel
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I have more questions, most of them unanswered, which adds a piquancy to the beautiful aquamarine seas through which we are traveling off the south coast of Cuba.
Street in Havana - photo by Augustin de Montesquiou , February 1st, 2019
Categories: Travel
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I feel an affinity with what I can see of Cuban life today and what I know this island had gone through.
Clip from video , January 29th, 2019
Categories: Politics, Kentucky
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It was only words. But words have gotten us where we are now.
Photo: Tamara Rodriguez Reichberg , January 24th, 2019
Categories: Philanthropy
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The cliche, "All great fortunes are founded on a crime" is true more often than not.
Mary Oliver, photo copyright Rachael Giese Brown , January 20th, 2019
Categories: Writing
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Her gift seems simple and yet it is neither simple nor common but the "confiding intimacy" of her great poems.
Rose Simpson - Wheelwright Museum , January 13th, 2019
Categories: Art
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Rose Simpson's warrior women become women of flesh and blood... this is a fearsome prospect for some, maybe many, women.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Blessed Damozel (wikipedia) , January 10th, 2019
Categories: Writing
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Beginnings of anything are always inspiring, more than middle or ends, which tend to be tedious.
116th Congress - Freshman Class Photo, C-SPAN , January 5th, 2019
Categories: Women, Politics
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The opening of the U.S Congress, two days ago, showed us what happens when we are in the room.
Madonna omringd door serafijnen en cherubijnen, Jean Fouquet, (1454-1456), Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen , January 1st, 2019
Categories: Women
Tagged:
Let's begin the New Year with a salute to an astonishing woman, Agnes Sorel, the "acknowledged mistress" of the French king Charles the Seventh.
The Welcoming of Friends , December 30th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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Over the twenty-seven years I've lived in Santa Fe, many people have come and many people have gone.
Photo of Mustard Seeds , December 25th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico, My Family
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As a child, I planted seeds every spring and knew how likely it was that, when I forgot to water them, they would never spring from the dry earth.
Free To Be You And Me , December 23rd, 2018
Categories: Women
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For a while, there was magic in the air.
Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). The Dinner Party (Mary Wollstonecraft place setting), 1974–79. , December 18th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico, Art
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Sometimes I'm grateful for the old Roman Catholic doctrine of Original Sin that held there is no innocent being, even a newborn, since Eve's fall.
Our World - Molly Malone Cook , December 16th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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Bells are ringing all over Santa Fe and the Plaza is blindingly bright with tree-strung lights...
Pip in Winter , December 9th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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My black dog Pip, now three and a half years old, fears not cold, snow or rain. For him it is all an adventure.
Spitfire - photo by Deby Dixon , December 4th, 2018
Categories: Politics
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There is something about the fierce wordless independence of the female wolf that stirs an atavistic antagonism.
Santa Fe Snow, painting by Clark Hulings , December 2nd, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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I will always miss the sensation of diving off the slope, at ten thousand feet, and sailing down the longest run with big curving sweeps of my skis.
Too Many , November 28th, 2018
Categories: Politics
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We all know, if vaguely, that we are facing something we might call a catastrophe.
Victoria's Secret Display - image from Wikipedia , November 25th, 2018
Categories: Women
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I look for changes that seem small, even ridiculously small, and yet may herald changed attitudes in this slow-moving country of ours.
Deb Haaland , November 11th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico, Politics
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I have lived here for twenty-seven years, and in all that time, I’ve felt and seen a slow progression in state politics toward justice.
Ruth Reinhardt , November 6th, 2018
Categories: Women
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So what is the difference between a woman conducting and a man?
The Matchlock Gun by Walter D. Edmonds , November 4th, 2018
Categories: Writing
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How to live on nothing is a question the publishers have not condescended to consider.
Chez Maxim's , October 28th, 2018
Categories: My Family, Kentucky
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I did make some progress... although probably my greatest accomplishment was mayonnaise made in a blender.
photo of William Bingham Iovenko , October 13th, 2018
Categories: My Family
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The art of losing, if it can even be called an art, can’t be mastered.
Taos Farmers Market - October 2018 , October 9th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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What a way to celebrate the vibrant heart of a small town.
Tooth illustration , October 7th, 2018
Categories: Writing
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Since the tooth has been with me for a long time and has served me faithfully, I decided to write its story.
Two Women in an Elevator , October 4th, 2018
Categories: Politics
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Women have been taught not to scream lest we be discounted as "hysterical"... and so the strength of our voices, and of our fury, has been denigrated and eliminated from public discourse.
, September 30th, 2018
Categories: My Family, New Mexico
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Like the medieval desert mendicants, holy men who lived their lives in remote caves and were sometimes fed by ravens, Will had long ago lost any interest in possessions, or any taste for food.
Will, walking away , September 23rd, 2018
Categories: My Family
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What is it about our world that destroys our young men?
Apache Mesa - Barn , August 28th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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It is finished after almost two years of work, with many changes—some of them drastic, others simply disappointing—along the way.
Maruja Mallo - Sorpresa del Trigo , August 26th, 2018
Categories: Women
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My self is precious, and it needs and deserves nourishing as the center of my life, not an outcropping.
Navajo Weaver - Santa Fe Indian Market , August 23rd, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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Through all these years of turmoil and change, the Santa Fe Indian Market has persisted.
Aretha Franklin, 1968 , August 19th, 2018
Categories: Women
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No one can appreciate the depth of Aretha Franklin's influence as clearly as women, like me, who came of age in the Feminist Movement in the late 1960's.
The Fire This Time - thumbnail , August 16th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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Burning to prevent burning produces unwelcome results... even in the face of wildfires, we may do our forests a favor by leaving them alone.
Basket , August 12th, 2018
Categories: Politics
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My friend Katie is a Cassandra, cursed by the god to know and speak prophesies that no one would believe... Her mission is the end of the world.
Girl 27 by David Stenn , August 7th, 2018
Categories: Women, Art
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Patricia Douglas was “Girl 27” on a long list of young extras who were invited to an MGM party in Hollywood, in 1937, under the guise of a casting shoot for a movie.
Coyote, New Mexico , August 5th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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Life gets pretty boring for a lone dog like Pip, especially now—it is so hot and the hiking trails are so crowded we don't go there much.
Red Sneakers , July 29th, 2018
Categories: Women
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Shoes tell a story. Many stories.
Doris Duke, standing in front of small clipper plane , July 22nd, 2018
Categories: Writing
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These days if a writer is smitten with the idea of writing a new book—a new analysis—of any supposedly well-known person, the obstacles to her research will be enormous.
Apache Mesa - July, 2018 , July 15th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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As always with a big new project, the day of reckoning comes at last.
Agave americana in bloom in Portugal (Wikipedia). , July 1st, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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The wisdom of old age: to stay and savor, rather than leaving to experience more.
Dresden - World War II , June 29th, 2018
Categories: Writing
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I've been wondering why we in the blessed U.S. seem so frightened of just about everything.
Doris Duke and James Cromwell - Hawaii , June 24th, 2018
Categories: Writing
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We are all too complicated and contradictory to be explained.
City of Angels , June 17th, 2018
Categories: Travel
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Los Angeles is somebody’s kingdom, maybe everybody’s kingdom, but I don’t think it’s mine.
Mary Jane Butler - Dolls , June 10th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico, Art
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The last few days have brought me into contact with four extraordinary people... this seems amazing.
Koi Pond , June 7th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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In times like this, I'm grateful that—so far—Santa Fe has been spared, and perhaps the closing of our neighboring national forest will prevent disaster.
Forest Trail , June 3rd, 2018
Categories: Writing
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We don't know how to behave in the woods.
1960 National Book Award winners , May 27th, 2018
Categories: Writing, Women
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As a young writer publishing my first novel at the time of Roth's debut, I wondered even then why this gentle, pastel novel received so much attention.
American Girl in Italy, Florence, 1951 , May 24th, 2018
Categories: Travel
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What do we do with the remnants of romance when we have long outgrown it?
Title page of the first book on obstetrics to be published by a woman. , May 20th, 2018
Categories: Women, Writing
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A great collection is always based on a passion. It is not random. It grows from a strong root.
Kate Mllett, author , May 13th, 2018
Categories: Women, Writing
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If our coming together seldom includes our work, and is largely social, our influence on our communities is limited.
Duke University Chapel , May 8th, 2018
Categories: Women, Writing
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My surprise almost outweighed my satisfaction when I found that in one letter, written in middle age, Doris referred to the patriarchy.
Once On This Island - The Musical , May 6th, 2018
Categories: Travel
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Walking back to my hotel through the nighttime madness and splendor of the city, I felt the hope that dancing always brings, the hope of not just enduring despair but leaping over it.
Summer and Smoke - Classic Stage Company, 2018 , May 1st, 2018
Categories: Writing, Travel, Theater
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I have been blessed this week by two immersions in the work of Tennessee Williams, a writer I've always adored.
Spring Has Sprung , April 29th, 2018
Categories: Travel
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I am fortunate on this visit to find the dampness of New York City a great relief after the deadly dryness and manifold allergies of the Southwest.
Spring Planting - Wolf Pen Mill Farm, Kentucky , April 24th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico, Kentucky
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The Horsetooth Corn will grow vigorously to remind us all that fertility, growth and abundance is still possible.
Garcia Street Books, Santa Fe NM , April 22nd, 2018
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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I believe in books printed on paper, and a lot of others do too.
Pip - April 2018 , April 17th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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It has become clear that saying, "Come, Sweetie" in a treble voice may work with your lover but not with your canine. Actually it probably doesn't work with either.
Zuckerberg - Congress , April 15th, 2018
Categories: Politics
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Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress brought to my mind James B. Duke’s testimony more than a hundred years ago explaining and excusing his tobacco monopoly.
Sanctuary - Pond , April 10th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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I am blessed to have, in my life, several sanctuaries, one of which I am able to visit daily, the others at least once a week.
, April 8th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico, Religion
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I have been thinking about faith, manifested in two of its aspects in Taos: The Penitente Morada behind Mabel's house, and the nearby graveyard.
Victoria Pickering March For Our Lives , April 1st, 2018
Categories: Women, Politics
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Dear Believers, dear Marchers and Speakers, I beg you to immerse yourself in our history, in all the aspects of violence so deeply embedded in money-making and male entitlement.
Erin Currier, Parsnips, Carrots, and Beans, 2015, Acrylic and mixed media on panel, 60 x 48 inches , March 27th, 2018
Categories: Art
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I am ever grateful to the Harwood Museum, its board, staff and director, and especially to the two women who curated this extraordinary exhibit: Janet Webb and Judith Kendall who have the courage of their convictions.
City Plaza, Athens , March 20th, 2018
Categories: Politics
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But then... an email from a dear friend who has been transcribing and editing and putting together a book of her interviews with Syrian refugees.
Laurie Simmons, Walking House, 1989; Collection of Dr. Dana Beth Ardi , March 16th, 2018
Categories: Women, Art
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Whether we dare, or do not dare, with our work and our voices and our actions to make trouble, we are living in the midst of trouble, nationally and globally, trouble that no amount of soothing the waters is going to solve.
International Women's Day 2018 , March 11th, 2018
Categories: Women, Politics
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Not Women's Month or Women's Day but Women's Time—Our Time—long overdue but come at last.
Doris Duke - Glamour Puss , February 27th, 2018
Categories: Writing
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Scheduled to be published in August, 2018, The Silver Swan is now delayed till sometime in 2019.
Clara Porset , February 25th, 2018
Categories: Women, Writing, Art, Travel
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I loved our tour of architect Luis Barragán's masterpiece in Mexico City, a great collection of brilliantly-colored walls, streams and pools.
Ernest Hewmingway - Lion , February 20th, 2018
Categories: Politics, Writing
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Where are the fathers?
Frida Kahlo's Studio , February 13th, 2018
Categories: Women, Art, Travel
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Mexico City seems to be a city of women. We are everywhere.
, February 7th, 2018
Categories: Travel
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In all countries, in the midst of our confusion and fear, there is nearly always, somewhere to be found, a brief smile.
, February 4th, 2018
Categories: Travel
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Is it possible to be free, and also an active member of a community?
Piñon Seedlings - Santa Fe New Mexico , January 21st, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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I believed that this hillside I walk past every day would remain desolate, the first evidence in my life of global warming.
Martin Luther King Jr. , January 15th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico, Politics
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By now we all know that the discrimination that afflicts one group afflicts all of us.
Playgirl magazine: May, 1974 , January 14th, 2018
Categories: Women, Writing
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Our desire to be liked and loved is passionate, unequivocal, and it makes us vulnerable to every rejection.
Doris Duke Reading (painting) , January 9th, 2018
Categories: Women, Writing
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Does it matter that she never found her match in terms of money, status and achievement?
Dance Station, Santa Fe, NM , January 4th, 2018
Categories: New Mexico
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My wish for all my loyal readers and for the world at large in this fresh new year.
, January 1st, 2018
Categories: Kentucky, New Mexico
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I am particularly blessed in these special places that seem to have come into my life by chance or luck but are in fact the material manifestations of prayer.
St. Francis Cathedral, Santa Fe NM - photo by Jim Nix , December 28th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico, Religion
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Faithlessness is, first of all, a failure of the imagination.
Top 10 - 2017 , December 27th, 2017
Categories: Politics, Writing, New Mexico, Kentucky, Women, My Family
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As this year comes to a close (some might say thankfully), I've once again chosen my most popular posts of 2017, based on visits, comments, Tweets and Facebook likes.
Acting Christmas - Sallie Bingham , December 24th, 2017
Categories: My Family
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The ritual that returns to me most vividly this December is one I call Acting Christmas
, December 17th, 2017
Categories: Women
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I remember being amazed when my young granddaughters and their friends listened, apparently unperturbed, to hip hop verses that demonize or degrade women.
Las Posadas Procession in Santa Fe. Photo: Santa Fe New Mexican , December 12th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico, Religion
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There was a magic in the pretty Mary and her shiny blue gown next to the tall Joseph with his staff.
, December 8th, 2017
Categories: My Family
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The value of the collection I keep on the top of my bureau seems suddenly, mysteriously clear.
Andrea Dworkin , November 28th, 2017
Categories: Women, Writing
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The great advantage we are gaining from enduring this age of suppression—internal and external—is that there are no unimportant words, no expression in a medium that is not political.
Doris Duke as a child , November 22nd, 2017
Categories: Writing
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Sometimes a choice of a name without family connotations means an attempt to break loose from the past.
Tesuque Pueblo Highway Sign , November 14th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico
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It was with a feeling of gratitude and relief that I went Sunday to the Tesuque Pueblo traditional dance.
The High Desert Sax Quartet with Peggy Abbott , November 12th, 2017
Categories: Art
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I grew up with almost no music at all. Music, after all, is not words and only words counted in that world.
Biography of a Grizzly by Ernest Seton-Thompson , November 5th, 2017
Categories: Women
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We see their faces every few days on top of articles about various forms of mayhem—group slaughter, murder, violence against women.
, October 31st, 2017
Categories: Women
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Remarkable women are surrounded by a ring of fire... made up of glowing embers of gossip, innuendo, and misunderstanding.
Surgery: photo by sasint, Pixabay , October 29th, 2017
Categories: Politics
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President Trump has been "in there" too long. We must gear up for a Caesarian.
"Spider Rock", Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona. Photo by Brian W. Schaller. , October 24th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico
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Time in the wilderness is essential to my soul.
Harvey Weinstein 2010 Time 100 Shankbone , October 17th, 2017
Categories: Women
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My story is in different ways horrible from the gross physical attacks perpetrated by men I would not honor with the term, “sick.”
Doris Duke and the Sea , October 15th, 2017
Categories: Writing, Women
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Both Doris and Alleda developed physical strength, courage and confidence battling the waves on the beaches at Newport.
Doris Duke - Glamour Puss , October 8th, 2017
Categories: Writing
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My relief in learning that “The Silver Swan” will be published next June prompts me to rejoice like old-time newspaper editors when the daily edition was put to bed.
Adventure / Adventuresses , September 24th, 2017
Categories: Women, Kentucky
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The threats we still face from the dominant culture, the insults and violence, have not stopped us. We still go for the outer air.
Adventure / Adventurer , September 17th, 2017
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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The price exacted by a culture determined to keep us in our place is high. It has always been high and I think it may always be high.
Doris Duke - Glamour Puss , September 12th, 2017
Categories: Women
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Our culture is unjust because we, its citizens, are satisfied for it to be that way.
Kate Millett in 1970 , September 10th, 2017
Categories: Women
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Kate Millett, a great leader and inspirer for many of us in the 1970’s and 80’s has just died at 82.
What A Summer , September 5th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico
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May we all sail into the fall, feathers ruffled, but still gliding ahead.
Spider Rock - Canyon de Chelly , August 29th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico
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I hope the day never comes when I am dead to adventure.
Step movie - girls dancing , August 25th, 2017
Categories: Women
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Wherever you live: search for it, go to it, even if it means a big change in your plans.
Solar Eclipse - image from NASA , August 21st, 2017
Categories: New Mexico
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I’m honoring an ancient tradition which probably predates the negative connotations of the eclipse and of the moon herself.
Apache Mesa - Barn , August 20th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico
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An escape, a refuge, to write my next two books seemed not a luxury but a necessity...
We'll Marry Your Girlfriends , August 15th, 2017
Categories: Politics
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I don’t ordinarily bother with YouTube... but this time, the title got me.
Their Eyes Were Watching God , August 13th, 2017
Categories: Politics
Tagged:
There is something about Donald Trump that makes his misogyny, vulgarity and ignorance seem not only amusing, perhaps somehow alluring.
, August 10th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico
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For me, a worthy emblem of smallness is the Las Vegas, New Mexico newspaper, the Optic.
Godiva Flickr/Los Alamos National Laboratories , July 9th, 2017
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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Would it matter if women or members of minorities were working in executive positions at Los Alamos or any of the other dozen or so bomb factories scattered throughout our country?
Aleda Shirley , July 6th, 2017
Categories: My Family, Politics
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How to keep a spark of hope alive in our so-called democratic process? How not to drop into numbness and apathy?
The Silver Swan: Searching for Doris Duke , July 4th, 2017
Categories: Women, Writing
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Changing the title of my biography of Doris Duke, especially after more than six years of work, is a big deal.
Angel Sallie , June 25th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico, Art
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No longer subject to colonization and condescension, have we found our landscapes, at last?
Santa Fe Farmers Market , June 18th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico
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Local, organic produce is of the blessings of our age—which at times seems cursed.
A Working River , June 13th, 2017
Categories: Travel
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Life is to be lived, and it is also to be walked.
The Age of Maturity - Camille Claudel , June 11th, 2017
Categories: Art, Travel
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In the end, France comes to honoring its extraordinary women
Alain Passard ©Douglas McWall , June 8th, 2017
Categories: Travel
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Dazzling as this food was, it was not as impressive as the army of back-suited, beautiful young men and women who flew between the tables.
Rafael Nadal - Aegon Championships, 2016 , June 6th, 2017
Categories: Writing, Travel
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Great athletes inspire. This is not something I have always known.
Rough Point - Newport, Rhode Island , June 1st, 2017
Categories: Writing, Travel
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I am blessed—and have been for six long years—in being given the responsibility of writing Doris Duke's biography.
The Age of Maturity - Camille Claudel , May 28th, 2017
Categories: Women, Writing, Art
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Artists use all the material our lives deliver to us–but the professional cost can be very high.
Dante: The Divine Comedy , May 23rd, 2017
Categories: Writing
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Now that writers are abjured not to write in dialect, we may be losing a connection to an older source than standard English.
Eating Alone , May 21st, 2017
Categories: My Family
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Last night I noticed how a repetitive task—each leaf pulled off the stalk, dipped in French dressing, and eaten—demands a particular sort of attention.
Dennis Stock - USA. New Mexico. 1969. Lorien commune. Copyright Magnum Photos. , May 18th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico, Art
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For most of Grandfather's neighbors and friends, memory of the communes is sharp and sour. We have yet to sweeten it.
Dogs, Horses and Fish , May 9th, 2017
Categories: Travel, Kentucky
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“Don’t feel sorry for The Teaser,” our guide told us, though it seemed to me more likely we might feel sorry for the mares.
Apache Camp in Hondo Cañon, New Mexico (1920) - Joseph Henry Sharp , May 7th, 2017
Categories: Art
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Art doesn’t “fix” pain, but it provides a version of that tiny interval after the sufferer wakes and before the pain is remembered.
Two horses in Kentucky , May 4th, 2017
Categories: Women, Writing
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I'm annoyed at the concert of writing in newspapers, magazines and books that claim that women don’t really want to work.
Jeanne Roberson - The Rocking Chair Tour , April 30th, 2017
Categories: Women, Theater
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We never even got as far as humor when attempting to redefine manhood. Will humor get us nearer the starting gate when redefining age?
"Old Woman Tossed Up In A Basket" , April 25th, 2017
Categories: Kentucky, Women, Politics
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The witch with her broom is also the woman tossed up in a basket—the high flyer, the visionary, terrifying to many... and more necessary now than ever.
Duke Chapel - photo: WIilliam H. Majoros , April 20th, 2017
Categories: Women, Religion
Tagged:
Reimagining the way the Christian Church in all its forms might benefit women... raises, inevitably, the issue of language.
David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library - Watercolor , April 18th, 2017
Categories: My Family, Writing
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Certainly my methods of research are sometimes unorthodox... but I am not saddled with the literal-minded over-reliance on facts that a PhD sometimes confers.
The Joy of Sex , April 11th, 2017
Categories: Women, Politics
Tagged:
With our silence, we are promoting, however unintentionally, the Trump administration’s war on women.
Bill Hearne , April 9th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico
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I find my solace in all my familiar places, none more familiar, or more comforting, than the Country-Western songs I listen to on KUNM or KSFR.
Marlon Magdalena - Flute Making , April 4th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico, Travel
Tagged:
Many of us come to New Mexico to visit and find ourselves over weeks or months deeply engaged.
Lynn Nottage, left, and Paula Vogel in New York this month. Credit Tawni Bannister for The New York Times , March 30th, 2017
Categories: Women, Theater
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Broadway... really can’t maintain its status as the place where new playwrights, especially women, go to gain recognition.
Ms. Magazine - Winter 2016 , March 21st, 2017
Categories: Women, Politics
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The only possible solution is radical, and like all radical ideas, it is impractical and idealistic, like some of the programs that will be cut.
State Street Wall Street Statue - photo by Rachel Levy , March 12th, 2017
Categories: Women, Writing
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I know Doris Duke would have enjoyed seeing the statue of a little girl confronting the bull of Wall Street.
Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeeshouse , March 9th, 2017
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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I’m honoring the day by writing about the businesses here in Santa Fe that are owned by women, said to be somewhere around forty percent.
Terry Tempest Williams credit Marion Ettlinger , March 5th, 2017
Categories: Writing
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Writers have never been paid a living wage... never a princely—or princessly sum—our incomes are now not equal to sustaining even a modest life.
We Have Done It Before , February 28th, 2017
Categories: Politics, New Mexico, Religion
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We rounded up men who had committed no crimes, on suspicion only. We are doing it again.
We Did It , February 26th, 2017
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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On Wednesday, the Santa Fe City Council passed, unanimously, a resolution reaffirming our status as a Sanctuary City and spelling out exactly what this means.
Story of the Hummingbird , February 21st, 2017
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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I’ve found a solution to these times that will work for me, and perhaps be helpful to all of you. It’s the example of the hummingbird.
Wild Animals I Have Known , February 19th, 2017
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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Seton's animals remind me of how essential that bit of wildness is to us, not only in the precious few wild animals nearby but as an essential bit of our own souls.
Sleeping with Soldiers - Rosemary Daniell , February 16th, 2017
Categories: Writing, Women
Tagged:
Where, now, are the women writers we could call “outrageous”?
How to Be a Goop , February 12th, 2017
Categories: Politics
Tagged:
Many of the actions described in today's news could have been carried out by Goops.
A Perhaps Hand - 2017 , February 9th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico, Politics
Tagged:
Even now with our country in a state of hysteria over the goings on in Washington, we can’t seem to summon the will, or the skill, to write plays—or fiction, or poetry, or paint, or sculpt—in ways that would be relevant to our crisis.
Arthur Lopez Painting , February 1st, 2017
Categories: Women, Politics
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We elected him. We can’t comfort ourselves with signs that say, “Not My President.”
What a day what a day what a day , January 23rd, 2017
Categories: Women, Politics
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Here, in the blessed city of Holy Faith, Santa Fe, there was the biggest, happiest, most determined march.
Armando Laras - Corn Mother , January 19th, 2017
Categories: Women, Politics
Tagged:
Let's all smile as we recognize that the violence of this backlash represents the enormous progress we women have made in the past century.
Best Photos of 2016 , January 8th, 2017
Categories: New Mexico, Kentucky, Travel
Tagged:
These are my favorite photos of the last year, with links to their blog posts (if any)—Sallie Little brother made up for Christmas play, my next book…: This Writer’s Life   
Breakfast with Deer , January 1st, 2017
Categories: New Mexico
Tagged:
Something about the grazing deer and my breakfast in bed made me want to start the New Year with a few words about self-indulgence.
2016 , December 26th, 2016
Categories: Theater, Religion, Women, My Family, Politics, Writing, New Mexico, Kentucky, Art, Travel
Tagged:
As this memorable year comes to an end, I've chosen my sixteen most popular posts of the year, based on visits, comments, Tweets and Facebook likes.
Christmas Roses , December 24th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
Tagged:
There are roses blooming even in the darkness of this December.
Sallie Bingham - Nasty Women , December 20th, 2016
Categories: Theater
Tagged:
Women do not see their crucial concerns acted on the stage, we do not read theatre reviews written by women critics, and... women do not buy the majority of tickets to the plays we write.
Rumpelstilskin threatens the Queen , December 18th, 2016
Categories: My Family, Writing, New Mexico
Tagged:
The writer's challenge is always to create the life rather than the theory or the explanation of the life...
Fish in Winter , December 13th, 2016
Categories: Art, Writing
Tagged:
It took a revolution in critical standards for the way women work to be given equal status with the way traditionally men have worked.
Before Dawn in the Mountains , December 11th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
Tagged:
The excitement of the season plus a few flush-inducing angers led to one of my rare sleepless nights, here in the mountains north of town.
Pip at Creek , December 8th, 2016
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
Tagged:
Our blue bubble here in New Mexico may be where we are all heading as we fight our way our of this crisis.
The Holy Family , December 4th, 2016
Categories: Women, Religion
Tagged:
The American Dream didn’t just promote home ownership. It also promoted large families... The ideal, for some, was The Holy Family of the Bible.
Fidel Castro , November 28th, 2016
Categories: Politics
Tagged:
If our president-elect has his way, despotism will return to this country, but without any commitment to or understanding of equality.
The Kindness of Strangers , November 24th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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May it be this way for all of us, this blessed season: hearing new opinions, based on experience, that contradict a doctrine of faith.
Anne Stuart Anderson - Michelle (2009) , November 22nd, 2016
Categories: Art, Women
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I felt the absence of art, in any form, during the last, terrible week.
Wolf Pen Farm - Kentucky Progress Magazine , November 20th, 2016
Categories: Women, Politics, Kentucky
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No connection erases the primal fear that is a constant in our culture: the fear of the power of women.
How to Celebrate , November 16th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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What a party it was!
Notes for a First Lady , November 13th, 2016
Categories: Politics
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Certainly they will send you advisors from the campaign, but you might be more comfortable with a few homey tips from well-meaning strangers. So here goes.
How to Raise a Boy President , November 10th, 2016
Categories: Politics
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We have elected a boy to be our president and we are going to have to help him to grow.
Big Four Pedestrian Bridge: Louisville, Kentucky , November 6th, 2016
Categories: Kentucky
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My hometown city of Louisville, Kentucky is blooming as it never has before.
Over the Hills and a Great Way Off , October 25th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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In the midst of the confusion and chaos of this presidential race, I’m comforted by my daily walk to the pond.
Tony's Stairs , October 23rd, 2016
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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In Mabel's case, as in the case of so many women, it’s the myths rather than the facts that are remembered.
Standing with Standing Rock , October 19th, 2016
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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An auction to benefit the tribes gathered at Standing Rock may not have raised a lot of cash, but it did help us in the audience to have a clearer sense of what is happening.
Standing Rock Sioux protests - photo by Terray Sylvester, Outside Online , October 16th, 2016
Categories: Politics
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At issue is the question of whether Native American sovereignty has ever really been recognized or accepted by the powers that be.
Doris Duke - Glamour Puss , October 13th, 2016
Categories: Writing
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I'm asking you, my able and loyal readers, to “come too” as I head into yet another revision of my biography on Doris Duke. Originally set to be published in 2016, it is now delayed until October, 2018.
Damnatio ad bestias. Third-century AD mosaic in the Museum of El Djem (Tunisia) , October 11th, 2016
Categories: Politics
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I’ve avoided writing about what is going on in our presidential election, not wanting to focus more attention on this ignoble display. But Sunday night was too much.
A Walker in the City , October 9th, 2016
Categories: Writing, Travel
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My visual recordings of New York City are written in words, not images, as part of my new venture which is called, “You Travel, You Write.”
NPG 1452; Charlotte Brontë by George Richmond , October 6th, 2016
Categories: Writing, Art
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Charlotte Brontë described the alienation that colored my childhood, and the childhood of so many girls, then and now.
Dirt , October 2nd, 2016
Categories: Women, Politics
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We all need to get dirty more often, for our health and possibly for our souls, which may need to root in something more substantial, and messier, than words.
Presidential Debate 2016 , September 27th, 2016
Categories: Politics
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We are debaters; we are leaders; we are women who have learned a lot of the lessons of the past... we now know how to defend ourselves, both literally and legally.
Moses - Leonardo Salazar , September 27th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico, Art, Politics
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I expect Moses will be with me for a long time, urging me on toward improbable destinations with his wide-flung arms.
Back Pip In The Autumn Woods , September 18th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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Pip and I were on to adventure, on the edge of danger, full of life and energy—the way I want to live.
The Beauty Way , September 14th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico, Travel
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Since I first moved to Santa Fe twenty-five years ago, I've longed to gain an authentic and appropriate understanding of the people among whom we live and who were here long before us, and will remain.
The Annunciation - Domenico Veneziano , September 8th, 2016
Categories: Women, Politics, Religion
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As we head, again, into the season of attacks on reproductive rights... I wonder how many of them stem, unconsciously, from the familiar version of the Annunciation.
Picture of flowers next to fence , September 1st, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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Perhaps even the natural cycles we have abused to such a great degree have an innate strength and will to survive not only human depredations but the disorders of our disordered climate.
Oldest House Historical Marker , August 30th, 2016
Categories: Travel
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Like Ernest Hemingway’s mother, gifted women are all around us in Nantucket.
Gift From the Sea , August 28th, 2016
Categories: Women, Writing
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Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s shells are long gone but the lessons she draws from them are as fresh as the sunrise this morning.
Aboard the Arabella , August 26th, 2016
Categories: Travel
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I find waves of sentiment washing across my mood; this experience, with this boat and this crew, won’t be repeated. And it is precious.
Aboard the Arabella , August 25th, 2016
Categories: Travel
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All our plans changed, again, when a very stiff wind made it impractical to motor to Nantucket.
Aboard the Arabella , August 23rd, 2016
Categories: Travel
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Five or six hours of rolling on the Arabella laid several passengers low, knocked out by nausea and Dramamine on the boat’s benches, covered with blankets, solicitous husbands bringing wet washrags to put across their foreheads.
Aboard the Arabella , August 21st, 2016
Categories: Travel
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Young and curly-headed, Captain Mike seems to have some of the fishy nature (so-called) of the captains who manned the whaling ships out of Nantucket in the last century.
Every Three Seconds , August 16th, 2016
Categories: Travel
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I don’t know if any woman is allowed to have two best friends—there may be a rule prohibiting it written in the stars—but I will boldly claim my two.
Endangered , August 14th, 2016
Categories: Writing, Travel
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I’m wondering if, as I have suspected, we women writers are endangered...in a novel way.
Small Is... , August 11th, 2016
Categories: My Family, Travel
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The little house is the cocoon for my escape, as smallness is and has been for so many others.
Mule Day in Santa Fe , August 9th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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I’ve always been fascinated by mules, perhaps because Kentucky and Tennessee were said to breed the best mules in the country because they were part thoroughbred.
Nance's Garden, Santa Fe , August 7th, 2016
Categories: My Family, Politics, New Mexico
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Torrential rains are pouring across our political landscape these days, and sometimes seem about to erode all vision.
, August 2nd, 2016
Categories: New Mexico, Religion
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It has always been clear to me that words, on which I’ve built my creative life, can’t heal. They can illuminate and inspire... but those same words would be powerless to heal in the face of tragedy.
My Wild 2 , July 26th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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What is priceless about the enclave on Apache Mesa is that it is not only us newcomers who have found little pockets of paradise there; the people who have lived there for decades are still in place.
Mabels House , July 22nd, 2016
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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It seems we are still confined, in our appreciation of women, to admiring our roles as facilitators of other people’s lives.
Sallie Bingham - 2015 , July 19th, 2016
Categories: Women, Politics
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The “angry white men” we hear so much about have every reason to be angry. Their reign, centuries long, is over.
And Sparklers , July 14th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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Since I have plenty of reservations about July 4th... it seemed wise to give a party to celebrate.
Cliveden House , July 7th, 2016
Categories: My Family
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Why is it interesting or worthwhile to continue to wonder about the fate of my first cousin?
Girls of Summer , July 3rd, 2016
Categories: Women, Travel
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If she can move like this playing paddle ball, surely she can act with equal skill, grace, and assurance in a board room, a corporate office, or an artist’s studio.
My Writing Group , July 1st, 2016
Categories: Writing
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For any of you who think, or have thought, about starting a writing group, here is a model that works.
The Little House on the Prairie , June 28th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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At last I’ve found a house that fits me perfectly. I call it (with a bow to Laura Ingalls Wilder) The Little House on the Prairie.
Gallup Vintage Postcard , June 19th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico, Travel
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We are an odd bunch, we people who ride the cross country trains.
Flag of New Mexico , June 17th, 2016
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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These days we are hearing language that is the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded movie theater, language that whether the speaker is aware of it or not, incites to violence.
Cache , June 16th, 2016
Categories: Politics
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There is still goodness in this world, and often it seems to be the goodness of strangers, as Blanche DuBois proclaimed at the end of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
Orlando Shooting - photo by Phelan M. Ebenhack - AP , June 14th, 2016
Categories: Women, Politics
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Part of our deep emotional and spiritual connection to the babies we bore means that we sense, wordlessly, their injury and violation.
Stanford University , June 12th, 2016
Categories: Politics, Women
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We have spent several decades trying to undo the pernicious syndrome that blamed the victim for these attacks... but our attempts falter when common sense is thrown to the wind.
Iona Graduation , June 5th, 2016
Categories: My Family, Kentucky
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Expertise is always thrilling... the crucial ingredients are the same: talent, persistence. And heart.
I'll Sing One Song , June 2nd, 2016
Categories: Kentucky
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I didn’t know many men who had fun. I didn’t know any women. It seemed scandalous to me that Willie Snow could enjoy herself.
Commemorating What? , May 30th, 2016
Categories: Kentucky
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Memorial Day, commenced in 1866 as Decoration Day, was at first specifically meant to honor the Confederate dead; when it became a national holiday in 1921, it was renamed to honor the dead in all our wars, another effort to erase differences and commodify mourning.
Wolf Pen Mill at Twilight , May 29th, 2016
Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky
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A community limited to those who look like us will never be a community, which can only be formed through an amalgamation of differences and the necessary level of trust.
Chaco , May 24th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico, Travel
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I loved the baldness of my visit last weekend to Chaco: sleeping on the ground, during two nights in May when the temperature dropped into the thirties, was an ordeal of amazing benefits.
Spring , May 22nd, 2016
Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky
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I dig a hole and add my load, closing it over with a prayer, as well as more dirt: that I, too, my be more happy, considering my extraordinary good luck in just about all areas of my life: work, love, family, friends, health…
Tesuque Pueblo , May 17th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico, Travel
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Emigdio introduced us to the day by reminding us of what we may hear often but seldom observe: the sacred and essential nature of Mother Earth, and the need to play, not work, at restoring her native plants to her while loving her with all our hearts.
Sangre de Cristo , May 15th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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We must find a way—we women who must claim our wild.
Sugar Nymphs , May 13th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico, Writing
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The bistro is always full with what I’ve come to call Refugee Tourists: men and women of a certain age who look to be fleeing from highways, motels, retirement homes, fast food, and who knows, maybe even from Donald Trump.
The Story of Kentucky , May 10th, 2016
Categories: Kentucky
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Has this box come to me as a necessary interruption, a reminder, as a Zen teacher said, that our plans are never as tasty as reality?
Readers in Other Countries , May 3rd, 2016
Categories: Writing
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If I have been able to touch one of them with stories that mean so much to me, I will feel my long years of work as a writer are worthwhile.
Karl Ove Knausgaard , May 1st, 2016
Categories: Writing
Tagged:
A novel about the struggles the individual always faces in an engaged life... and a novel based on a lived life but moving beyond autobiography into art.
What It Takes to Be a Writer , April 28th, 2016
Categories: Writing
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Abandon professionalism. Hard work, always, is essential, but the notion that there is such a thing as “success”—a large audience, critical acclaim, and money—is, for nearly all of us, a delusion.
The Rogue Factor , April 26th, 2016
Categories: Women, Kentucky
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A week ago, I had the distinct honor and privilege of speaking to 300 students and faculty at Morehead State University in the far eastern corner of Kentucky. The experience will stay with me for a long while.
Cowboys are my Weakness , April 12th, 2016
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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The ur-stories of the West are still ours to tell, not the stories of whores or missionaries, but of buffalo-killers who gut and skin their prey.
David Saliamonas , April 7th, 2016
Categories: Art
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There are so many obligations, so many treats and distractions, that I have failed—until now—to change my life to accommodate the books I still want and need to write.
Egg Day , March 29th, 2016
Categories: Religion
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This past Lent I thought I made an agreement with myself to enter into all the ceremonies of that six-weeks season of suffering... and then to reward myself with the glorious resurrection of Easter.
Mr. Toad , March 27th, 2016
Categories: Travel
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Over the weeks, my anger grew at the thought that such an inconvenience—a turn signal that wouldn’t stop—was somehow considered an improvement.
Ginger and Pickles , March 24th, 2016
Categories: Writing
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Is there any reason to hope that we humans can also “abandon our usual strategies and learn something new and unexpected?”
Black Pip in Springtime , March 20th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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Our spring comes with a roar of wind and startling blasts of cold air, but it is spring, nonetheless, and Pip and I rejoice.
, March 18th, 2016
Categories: Writing
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As my biography of Doris Duke continues to simmer in the editing vats at Farrar, Straus, I must for my salvation begin to write—again.
Chartres Cathedral - The Virgin Mary , March 13th, 2016
Categories: Women, New Mexico, Art, Religion
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Women have always thronged to churches, finding solace in this image of holy suffering. Is it possible that someday we will throng to the images of the Queen?
Marsha Blackburn , March 10th, 2016
Categories: Women, Politics
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Even in writing this piece, I am affected by the anxiety that grips all of us who write about contentious matters.
Flamenco Dancer - Alejandro Mallado Erbez , March 6th, 2016
Categories: Women, Art
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If so many of us feel we don’t belong... it is not surprising that we are terrified of exhibiting the political will that might conjure up images of rageful, extreme and radical women.
Bitch Magazine , March 1st, 2016
Categories: Women
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These once-forbidden words are now as meaningless for most people as the words used to describe a rainy day: grey, overcast, chilly… by what magic has the violence been drained out of them?
Bonnie Jo Campbell , February 28th, 2016
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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Healing, for me, comes in the spectacle of nature shifting into another key... and, always, in books.
Cameron Carpenter , February 25th, 2016
Categories: Art
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There remains for me always an uneasiness about those large egos that can so easily trample smaller ones, even when the owner of the ego does not choose to exercise that power.
Donald Trump , February 21st, 2016
Categories: Politics
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We need to be alert, this strange campaign season, to the way language is being distorted, subtly, to convey certain points of view.
When We Fight We Win , February 16th, 2016
Categories: Politics, New Mexico, Art
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The presence, the faces, and the words of the Navajo were themselves living images, engraving on my mind the urgency of a cause I've known about for years but never felt personally.
Astride: Women, Girls, Horses—and Wolves , February 14th, 2016
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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Wilderness can be healing. So, too, can the company of horses... they give a woman perched bareback sustenance, reassurance, even love.
Valentines and Red Velvet Boots , February 12th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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So where will I wear my red velvet boots? Certainly on Saturday night to my beloved dance studio here...
Hillary Clinton , February 10th, 2016
Categories: Women, Politics
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It is not too late for us women to wake up and realize what a woman president could do for all of us.
The Broken Saddle - Cerrillos , February 9th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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“Single blessedness,” this state was called a hundred years ago, and enjoying it means rejoicing in my own skin.
Smyser Memorial Cave Hill Cemetary , February 7th, 2016
Categories: My Family, Kentucky
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I don’t adore the day because of the early arrival of spring but because it is the birthday of Lucy Cummings, the blessed woman who raised me from birth to age thirteen.
Pompeo Batoni , February 2nd, 2016
Categories: Religion
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The return of the prodigal recreates my faith in returns, generally—that the lost are never truly lost, or at least rarely.
The True Secret of Writing , January 31st, 2016
Categories: Writing
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What a long way we have come, all of us who have been writing now for decades, published and unpublished, read and unread.
Sarah and I , January 28th, 2016
Categories: Women
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These are the women I know I can call on in times of need...who will understand what I want, oversee my progress toward some form of wisdom with courage, humor and compassion—and, above all, tell me the truth.
Acequia Madre House , January 21st, 2016
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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Let the women of the Acequia Madre House serve as our examples. They led comfortable lives, but their privilege did not prevent them from extending hope and help to those in need.
Garcia Street Books , January 19th, 2016
Categories: Writing
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For words really to matter, they must illuminate a larger reality than the inevitably small perimeters of our daily lives.
Santa Fe Ski Trail Map , January 17th, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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This winter we have the best snow in the West outside of Wolf Creek in southern Colorado which benefits from its high pass. We also have the nicest people, the warmest sun, the stiffest winds, and the most amazing views over the Rio Grande Valley, all the way up to the Colorado border.
Sitting - Sallie Bingham , January 14th, 2016
Categories: Religion
Tagged:
For a restless woman, sitting is always a challenge... yet I believe the ten minutes I sit every morning literally save my life.
, January 10th, 2016
Categories: My Family, Kentucky
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Those of us who are still alive must try to thrive outside of the tight circuit of the myth, which might be summed up in the Biblical phrase, “How are the mighty fallen!”
Roxanne Swentzell: “Pueblo Girl” , January 10th, 2016
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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I think we women writers sometimes scant the snow, and the weather in general, in favor of the human characters that obsess us.
New Year's Day 2016 - Mabel Dodge Luhan House , January 3rd, 2016
Categories: New Mexico
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I am wishing all of you, friends, acquaintances and strangers, who are kind enough to read these thoughts, the most beneficial, peaceful and fruitful new year—a cold winter with lots of snow, a spring full of bloom.
Mary Caperton Bingham , December 24th, 2015
Categories: My Family
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I understand her decision although it causes me a spasm of regret, as all the dreams abandoned by women do: the great heap of the unrealistic and the unrealizable that lies alongside nearly every woman’s life.
, December 22nd, 2015
Categories: My Family, New Mexico
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Nostalgia is not my strong suit. Most family rituals, in my experience, long outlive their usefulness... Fortunately, there are exceptions.
Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict , December 17th, 2015
Categories: Women, Art
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All those big artist's names, and never a woman’s, although she did have a show in the gallery she owned earlier, first in London and then in New York, of thirty-one women artists.
, December 10th, 2015
Categories: Writing
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What a hegira this has been, from the first day I called for a box of research materials at the Duke University Library to the pile of manuscript pages lying beside my computer.
Colorado Springs - Black Friday , November 28th, 2015
Categories: Women, Politics
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When deranged individuals receive permission for their deranged acts from irresponsible political groups and irresponsible demagogues, why are we unable or unwilling to make the connection?
, November 24th, 2015
Categories: New Mexico
Tagged:
All of us who live alone although close to family and at times sharing seasonal celebrations know that we have a core of friends who are not just an alternative to relatives. They may know us better and even love us more!
Doris Duke - Tex McCrary , November 19th, 2015
Categories: Writing
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My chapters about Doris’ war-time service are some of the most revealing, and most controversial, in my upcoming biography.
A Day of National Humiliation , November 15th, 2015
Categories: Kentucky
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Perhaps a national day of humility might disembarrass us of some of the pernicious would-be leaders we are now threatened with anointing to the position once held by Abraham Lincoln.
When Words Really Matter , November 12th, 2015
Categories: Writing, Kentucky
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I have never really understood the importance of words until I taught ten undergraduates at Western Kentucky University four days ago.
University of Missouri Football Team Protest , November 10th, 2015
Categories: Kentucky
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As football teams at all our universities, which are the major force in alumni giving, realize their power, we will begin to see changes on campuses that previously seemed oblivious to the demands of student civil rights activists.
Pip Goes To Taos , November 1st, 2015
Categories: New Mexico, Travel
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Pip watches intently as though monitoring our progress through the sixty miles from overpopulated Santa Fe to the little mountain town of Taos.
Black Pip , October 25th, 2015
Categories: Women, Writing, New Mexico
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The snowfall heralds real winter, even though our aspens are still golden, leading me to plan the season’s reading in the hope of more evenings spent quietly by the fire.
Wolf Pen Mill Farm - October 2015Wolf Pen Mill Farm - October 2015 , October 22nd, 2015
Categories: Kentucky, Philanthropy
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After decades of neglect, the great wheel and all the internal parts have been repaired and replaced by our talented millwright, Ben Hassett, and last Sunday, October 18th, water was released from the millpond through the sluice and the great wheel, creaking and groaning, began to turn again.
The Mother of All Questions , October 15th, 2015
Categories: Women
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If our basic belief about the role of women is that we must have children—despite a world groaning under overpopulation—women will never be able to crawl out from under the definition to achieve what calls for single-minded devotion.
Back Pip In The Autumn Woods , October 11th, 2015
Categories: New Mexico
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I call him “The ambassador for Pit Bulls” since he is so gentle, and even walkers who have a prejudice against his kind sometimes let him approach.
Doris Duke - Glamour Puss , October 6th, 2015
Categories: Writing
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I wonder what Doris would think if she could sit at the breakfast table with my editor and me and talk about who the book’s readers will be.
Women Writing Women's Lives , October 4th, 2015
Categories: Writing, Women
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To speak to my peers, who know exactly where I am coming from as a writer and a feminist, is such a rare and compelling treat.
, September 29th, 2015
Categories: Women
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Right around me, signs sprout, against the backdrop of the beautiful mountains, signs that signal fear, possessiveness, and an almost obsessive need for protection.
Black Pip and Quan Yin , September 27th, 2015
Categories: New Mexico
Tagged:
It has taken me all these years to begin to spare myself from battling reality, to begin to admit that certain human beings whom I love cannot love me, and that the leash around my neck is made out of links forged every time I battle this fact.
Feminism - source: Nation of Change , September 24th, 2015
Categories: Women, Philanthropy
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I believe there are young women, as well as older women and certainly some men, who are beginning to claim this noble, long-rooted word—feminism—that connects us to a heroic tradition as well as spurring us forward into the future.
Smiles - Nance , September 20th, 2015
Categories: New Mexico
Tagged:
We grimace, we grin, but how often during daily life does anyone give, or receive a smile?
, September 17th, 2015
Categories: Women
Tagged:
Sometimes I think we are all too nice.
Hopscotch House - Nicci Mechler , September 10th, 2015
Categories: Women, Philanthropy
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Thirty years ago, it was a big plain farmhouse on a high rise of pasture when I first saw what would become Hopscotch House.
Cleaning Out My Outhouse , September 6th, 2015
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
Tagged:
I enjoy my outhouse because it is in my view transgressive. I enjoy transgressions and I miss the energy of evil... the shaking of the roots of our assumptions... in most of the contemporary fiction I read and even in a lot of the fiction I write.
Wolf Pen Mill Farm Waterfall - Photo by Laurie Doctor , September 1st, 2015
Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky
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We women are creators, and when we have the means, we are creators of historic proportions.
The Happy Miner , August 30th, 2015
Categories: Kentucky, Travel, My Family
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When I worked as a courier for the Frontier Nursing Service, we were told to sing as we rode in the mountains so the moonshiners would know we were girls and hold their fire.
Pip on Rug , August 23rd, 2015
Categories: My Family
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He let me know he feels leashes are an indignity by chewing up two of them and making good progress on the third.
Shakertown Trustees House - Pleasant Hill, KY , August 20th, 2015
Categories: New Mexico, Kentucky
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It was a revelation to me when I was lured back to Kentucky and saw the reverence people there felt for old houses—and how hard they would work to preserve them.
Joan Didion - Spring 2015 , August 18th, 2015
Categories: Women, Writing
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The world as we know it would grind to a halt if all the talented women—millions of us—insisted on their primacy and the primacy of the conditions they need in order to create.
Gorilla Girls - Anniversary Museums , August 16th, 2015
Categories: Art, Women
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In the end, the cage the Guerrilla Girls are rattling are the cages that confine all of us, tighter and tighter as we devise more categories that define us narrowly and separate us more completely.
Mabel Dodge Luhan , August 11th, 2015
Categories: New Mexico
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Dillen ends with her arms raised high above her head, exhorting her audience, and particularly the women in her audience, to be shining stars, rising to shed our light on the parched and desolate landscape that surrounds us.
Dani Shapiro , August 4th, 2015
Categories: Writing
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Whether in total isolation or in the compromised solitude most of us suffer, writers create characters whom our readers recognize, care about, and remember; this is the strand that connects us all.
Doris Duke Moves Into The Limelight , July 30th, 2015
Categories: Writing
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I am now reading, and occasionally wrestling with, what might be call the collision—or the creative cooperation—of two minds, essentially different: the mind of the writer and the mind of the editor.
, July 26th, 2015
Categories: Women
Tagged:
I think my wild bunny wildness—which clearly is not very wild at all, and is vulnerable to all sorts of harm, outside her cage—does represent something so important for women: the attempt, at least, to imagine freedom.
Cochiti family - 1918 , July 19th, 2015
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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I’ve been to a lot of pueblo ceremonials over the years, and this one was as impressive as all of them: huge crowds of dancers, including small children, the women in black mantas, wooden tablitas shaped like mountain tops, or clouds, the men bare chested, painted, with shell bandoliers across their chests, and kilts with swaying fox or coyote tails down the back.
Int'l Folk Art Market , July 14th, 2015
Categories: Women, New Mexico, Art
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I have daughters-in-law, granddaughters and many friends who see no use in the women’s movement; this is partly due to privilege, lack of information, and our discomfort with ideas that are presented as being controversial.
Sweet Honey In The Rock , July 7th, 2015
Categories: Women, New Mexico, Art
Tagged:
These women were so large... so encompassing in their warmth and passion, even for their audience of white women, that I was stunned—this is the way we can all go, I thought, if we have the courage, we who are all hurt to some greater or lesser degree by the cruelties and injustices of this society.
Black Pip Sleeping , July 5th, 2015
Categories: My Family
Tagged:
He’s proving to be a great trail dog, too. Meeting something about his size but old and timid this morning, he greeted her politely; her owner congratulated me on adopting a black male pit bull.
Black Pip , July 2nd, 2015
Categories: My Family
Tagged:
I have never understood prejudice although I grew up encased in its most virulent form, in the pre-integration south. Hatefulness always seems to me put on, curiously beside the point, as though an evil wind passed through and deposited nasty expressions and ugly words randomly as it passed.
The Gospel According to Nance , June 30th, 2015
Categories: Women, New Mexico
Tagged:
Nance, and her garden in the barren border of the trailhead parking lot, is another uplifting example of our ability to both create, and to hold on, to see possibilities in the sand...
Mary Wollstonecraft , June 18th, 2015
Categories: Writing, Women
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Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument is familiar, these days, and unheeded; we are still nursing, helping, filling in as we have been trained to do, sometimes paid, often not, and I reflect with discouragement that if we have not been formed genetically to perform these roles, centuries of training have stored these expectations in our bones.
Irrepressible - Emily Bingham , June 2nd, 2015
Categories: My Family
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Mother is long dead, and so the revelation of the second autopsy, in this book, has meaning only for me. But it has a great deal of meaning, reminding me, forcibly, to rely on my intuition, not matter what the cost.
The Manless World: Show Jumping , May 28th, 2015
Categories: Women
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Somewhere along the way, women took over this sport, although there are still men at the highest levels.
Passion and Prejudice , May 24th, 2015
Categories: My Family, Kentucky
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As William Faulkner wrote in “Requiem For A Nun”, “The past is not dead. It’s not even the past.” But perhaps the past can, with will, imagination and love, be at least partly transformed.
Lee Sunday Evans and Kate Benson , May 21st, 2015
Categories: Theater, Women
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The number of produced plays written by women (although not necessarily directed by women) has inched up; we are still far from being represented as we should be on the stage but our efforts, over time, are bearing fruit.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (Nadya) and Maria Alyokhina (Masha) , May 10th, 2015
Categories: Women, Politics
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We are perhaps naïve if we believe that women in the U. S. are free of danger, especially young women who are expected to belong to young men.
Doris Duke and James Cromwell - Hawaii , May 5th, 2015
Categories: Writing
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Almost the only question people asked me about her is, “Did Doris Duke marry her butler?” No, she did not. But does that question really matter, in a long, complex and accomplished life?
355 East Palace - Santa Fe, NM , May 3rd, 2015
Categories: New Mexico
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This house has reigned on a leafy corner of a beautiful street, a few blocks from the Santa Fe Plaza, for 150 years, inhabited by a distinguished family.
Doris Duke: Dancing , April 28th, 2015
Categories: Writing
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Doris Duke practiced with Martha Graham’s company in New York and proudly wore their black satin jacket with her name and the company’s name on the back.
Lizzie Baker, photographed by Cecil Beaton , April 23rd, 2015
Categories: My Family
Tagged:
It is no surprise that Cecil Beaton, fashion photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair in the 1920’s and 1930’s, portraitist of Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of Windsor, should have taken several shots of Doris Duke; but it is surprising that in 1953 when he visited my parents in Kentucky, photographed Lizzie Baker.
Doris Duke - Glamour Puss , April 14th, 2015
Categories: Writing
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I sometimes think that love never touched her, although she knew many lovers. Always she seemed to be asking as she did of one of them, “Are you doing what you’re doing to please ME?”
Doris Duke, standing in front of small clipper plane , April 7th, 2015
Categories: Women, Writing
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The variety is endless, but the end result is the same: enormous fledglings crowding the adult bird out of the messy nest.
Colette, Paris, 1951 - Irving Penn , April 5th, 2015
Categories: Women, My Family, Writing
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Apprenticeships of any kind—even that sort involved in learning to sew on a button—depend on a bitter and prolonged deprivation of pleasure, a narrow and deep focus that will never allow for what we call a balanced life.
Doris Duke, with dog , March 31st, 2015
Categories: My Family
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Today I find myself in complete sympathy with Doris Duke’s passion, even with the uncomfortable assumption that dogs are sometimes better companions than complicated, changeable humans.
Kentucky Foundation for Women , March 17th, 2015
Categories: Kentucky, Art, Women, Philanthropy
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Women artists are always in danger of extinction; already low on the pay scale, often with too many children and no support, they can hardly be expected to devote their limited time and energy to becoming proficient professional poets, painters, sculptors…
Doris Duke - James Cromwell , March 10th, 2015
Categories: Writing
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Was Doris Duke in love with, or—more cogently—did she love any of these men, or the six or seven others who took up portions of her life? Hard to say.
Doris Duke - Rubenstein Library , March 5th, 2015
Categories: Writing
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Getting dirty as a child allowed Doris Duke to develop into the daring woman she became. I wonder how many eight year old girls today would be allowed to wander on the beach in a dirty shift, with mud up to their knees?
Doris Duke - Rubenstein Library , February 24th, 2015
Categories: Writing
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Doris, high-diving, surfing in Hawaii, battling the waves on a stormy day off Newport as she had ever since childhood, might have resisted pop music’s anthem of female submission.
Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm , February 22nd, 2015
Categories: Kentucky, Philanthropy
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Wolf Pen is the way many people in this country lived, when we were still agrarian and made do with much less, in the material sense, than we consider essential now. We lived in a few small rooms, we farmed, milled, carpentered, built, ran cattle or horses—managed to survive.
Waking Up Singing , February 15th, 2015
Categories: Religion
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Afflicted with black humors these black, cold winter mornings, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I decided to wake up singing.
The Best Present , February 5th, 2015
Categories: My Family
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My father's appetite for what he was reading, and, doubtless, for the sound of his own mellifluous, slightly Southern voice, created in me the appetite for words that has provided the meaning of my life.
Invisible Eve by Yousef Khanfar , February 1st, 2015
Categories: Women
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Is it true that our culture, in general, supports this form of entitlement, as it supports or at least allows the depredations of the entitled, whether they are the super-rich, the socially connected, the politically powerful—or simply possessors of the marks of male virility: height, handsomeness, self-assurance, athletic ability?
The Littlest Rebel - Shirley Temple , January 29th, 2015
Categories: Writing
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Pantaloons and golden curls do not limit her temerity. It fascinates me to see that this long-forgotten children’s book seems in a strange way more modern than The Trial.
Best Friends - Sallie Binghham , January 25th, 2015
Categories: Women
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What do we offer each other? Shared habits, shared likes and dislikes, an astonishing ability to chose the best possible presents for each other; and the frankness that never seems barbed by ulterior motives—to instruct, to reprove, to create distance. Frankness that is a bridge to closeness rather than a bulwark against it.
Old Woman in Sunbonnet by Doris Ulmann , January 20th, 2015
Categories: Women, Kentucky
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I... felt the midwives, and Mrs. Breckinridge, were just as foreign to me, possessed of some vision, some energy I’d never encountered before. I felt very small and very ignorant among them.
The Murder of Laius , January 18th, 2015
Categories: Women
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A world in which women, defined as mothers and wives and daughters—not inheritors—have no power and no role to play in the lives of their adult sons.
She's Beautiful When She's Angry , January 13th, 2015
Categories: Women, Art
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This is the documentary we have all been waiting for—for decades: a restoration through rediscovered news footage and interviews of that great time in the late sixties and early seventies when the contemporary women’s movement stormed the two coasts and took possession of our imaginations…
Virgin of Guadaloupe - Paz Winshtein , December 30th, 2014
Categories: New Mexico, Art, Women
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The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is especially prized here because of her Mexican antecedents, and yet, even though she represents a beleaguered minority, she must still be seen only in the terms set by the church, terms that have constricted the image, and confused women followers, for hundreds of years.
Scrooge and Bob Cratchit , December 23rd, 2014
Categories: My Family
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The five of us children were persuaded, or if necessary, dragooned, into producing a truncated version of “A Christmas Carol” which I, as the writer in the family, was charged with shortening.
, December 18th, 2014
Categories: My Family
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Although I loved presents, even hankered for them, the ones I received—mainly books—never mattered as much as the presents I gave, and for that I will always be grateful.
Sallie Bingham Wedding Dress , November 27th, 2014
Categories: My Family
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How extraordinary it seems that this artifact has survived while marriages, wives, husband, aunts, uncles and parents have all withered and passed into oblivion. It seems to me as much a monument to the past as the Lincoln Memorial or the Eiffel Tower, also great erections that long outlasted their makers, their funders and generations of their viewers.
Melcombe Estate / Bingham Estate , November 16th, 2014
Categories: My Family
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How will I feel when I lift that dusty lid, and rustle through layers of tarnished tissue paper?
Doris Duke and Sam Kahanamoku Surfing in Hawaii , November 11th, 2014
Categories: Writing
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Nothing could prevent Doris from seizing that moment in the surf at Hawaii when she reared high in the air, arms thrown back and chin lifted, exulting in her power to do what she wanted.
Melcombe Estate / Bingham Estate , October 30th, 2014
Categories: My Family
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Now, before too long, another generation of young women will need to decide whether they want to compete with the Big House on a day that we all need to believe is one of the most important of our lives. No proof to the contrary seems to matter.
Melcombe Estate / Bingham Estate , October 23rd, 2014
Categories: My Family
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What she will do with that enormous house, which seems to me mired in the past, will surely be different from what my parents did with it in the 1940’s and 50’s, when its prime function was to serve as a weekend roost for drunken Derby guests, who terrified me with their antics.
Moby Dickens, Taos, N.M. , October 16th, 2014
Categories: Writing, Travel
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We have an obligation to be fearless, never leaving out “the good parts,” those hidden parts of lives that are of most interest to all of us: it is in “the good parts” that the essence of a human life is often revealed.
Show Business - Sallie Bingham , October 12th, 2014
Categories: Theater
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Every few years, for reasons no has explored, women playwrights find a less chilly reception than we have usually encountered in the theatre. Such a blissful period, in the eighties, ushered in my first plays, and now another blessed moment gives me a chance to submit one of those first plays to a short play festival in New York.
Women, Land and Missed Opportunities , October 8th, 2014
Categories: Kentucky, Women, Philanthropy
Tagged:
Women in the United Sates now control 11.2 trillion dollars in investible wealth, 39 percent of the total. But are we wielding the decisions?
The Touching Hand (1967) - Sallie Bingham , September 9th, 2014
Categories: Writing
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There are moments in life that are so precious, so sweet, that years later they still ring like a set of silver chimes.
Helena Lefroy , September 4th, 2014
Categories: Writing, My Family
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My mother wisely warned me many times against “kicking against the pricks,” by which she meant the inevitable barriers we face in life, not the male appendage. She would have been horrified by that association.
The Blue Box , September 2nd, 2014
Categories: My Family
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I have the historian’s skeptical view of the past and of the vestal virgins who attend it so assiduously. Their reverence seems to depend on a net of lies and denials. But when I touch the soft feathers of my mother’s hat, preserved for seventy years, I understand a little of what the other women in the family feel.
Santa Fe Indian Market , August 26th, 2014
Categories: New Mexico, Art
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In choosing invention, I chose my own view, my own voice, as I chose the woven forms of the marble statue I bought at Indian Market from a young Navajo sculptor.
Ferguson On My Mind , August 22nd, 2014
Categories: Politics, Kentucky
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It’s awkward, to say the least, for a privileged white woman like me to even attempt to touch the subject of racism; yet we are sometimes the women who knows its effects most intimately. Many of us were raised by a black woman and realized the limits put on their love for us when our mothers told them to stop kissing us and to add “Miss” to our first names. For me, that strange change marked my entrance into adolescence.
Melcombe Estate / Bingham Estate , August 19th, 2014
Categories: My Family, Kentucky
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I don't usually call it the Bingham Estate but just the big house, which gives it the same moniker as SingSing; but when big news breaks, the big name seems appropriate.
Carrigglas Manor House , August 7th, 2014
Categories: Writing, Kentucky, My Family
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Both houses, uninhabitable due to size in both cases and dereliction in one, will continue as housing for myths, the myths that always throng around fortunes and obscure most of the facts about the fortune-makers lives.
The Blue Box , August 5th, 2014
Categories: My Family, Writing, Kentucky
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This morning I found a faded copy of a newspaper photo, certainly from the old Society Page of a Richmond Virginia daily, showing a group of three young people, two men and a woman, marching down Monument Avenue in that city, the broad magisterial artery where the greats of the Confederacy are memorialized in huge marble statues.
The Blue Box , August 3rd, 2014
Categories: Writing
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The Blue Box does not share the soft glow that softens the details of so many family histories; its light approaches a glare.
The Blue Box , July 31st, 2014
Categories: My Family, Writing, Kentucky
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As I prepare for publication next month, I face the daunting task of listing all the material I’ve used in The Blue Box, many letters, speeches, bills of sale, wills and genealogies that were stored in the blue box itself.
Lisa McNulty , July 29th, 2014
Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Theater
Tagged:
Over time, the survival of the Women’s Project, the largest and oldest theatre in this country supporting the work of women, will depend on our ability as past and present and future supporters to believe in a restored vision. Good luck, Lisa!
Women's Project Theater , July 27th, 2014
Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Theater
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The petition protesting the termination of Julie Crosby as Artistic Director of the Women's Project gained the signatures of over seven hundred people. The signers included this country's most accomplished theatre artists, leaders, managers, and supporters.
A Croup Kettle , July 27th, 2014
Categories: My Family
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Waking up sick reminded me of the way I learned to take care of myself from watching what my earliest mentor, Lucy Cummings, did when one of her five charges was taken ill.
Mary Clifford Caperton , July 22nd, 2014
Categories: My Family, Writing
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She remains for me a difficult and challenging example of what a woman of character who makes good choices can become.
Sallie W. Montague , July 17th, 2014
Categories: My Family, Writing
Tagged:
I realized today...that I never heard anyone in my family or outside of it mention my material grandmother, Sallie Montague Lefroy. This seems particularly strange since it seems I was named for her—seems because no one ever mentioned that either, but since we are both called Sallie Montague, it seems likely that I was named for her—and I am the only one of five siblings given a name from my mother’s family rather than my father’s.
Helena Lefroy , July 15th, 2014
Categories: My Family, Writing
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As I prepare to let go of the previous trove of letters that make up the body of my next book, The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters, and that detail the lives of my great-grandmother, grandmother and mother, from 1850 to 1931, I realize that I am most fond of my grandmother, Helena Caperton Lefroy, or at least of her memory.
Judy Chicago - Tasting The Mortal Coil , July 13th, 2014
Categories: New Mexico, Art
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One of the many things I’ve always admired about Judy Chicago is that she constantly reinvents herself.
Sallie Watson Montague , July 11th, 2014
Categories: My Family, Writing
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Now that my next book, my thirteenth or fourteenth—I’ve lost track—is only a month away from publication by Sarabande Books, I’m thinking of the three women whose lives my book attempts to encompass: my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother.
Self-Realization Fellowship , July 8th, 2014
Categories: Writing
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If there is a chance, and I think there is one, that Doris was touched and perhaps even changed by her connection, whatever it may prove to have been, with the Self-Realization Fellowship, her miseries would have been if not reduced, placed in a realistic context, uniting her with her fellows.
Bethany - The Women's Project Theater , July 6th, 2014
Categories: Philanthropy, Theater
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Commitment to this kind of work, edgy, daunting, representing visions seldom seen on our stages, demands a commitment over the course of two generations that may be simply too hard to come by.
Sallie Bingham , July 3rd, 2014
Categories: Writing
Tagged:
I’ve always drawn a firm line between my writing and my cooking. Bonnie Lee Black has managed to meld them both.
The Women's Project - Paducah , June 30th, 2014
Categories: Philanthropy, Theater
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Somewhere among us there is another inspired woman producer, another inspired women director, and surely more than one inspired woman playwright who will bring on the next transformation.
Women's Project Theater , June 27th, 2014
Categories: Philanthropy, Theater
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I tended my resignation from the Advisory Board of the Women’s Project, as have most of its other members.
Duke University Chapel , June 26th, 2014
Categories: Writing
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I’m sometimes surprised that the death of the woman whose vivid, exciting and controversial life I’m recreating in her first serious biography should seem more interesting to more people than her life.
Just Walk , June 24th, 2014
Categories: Travel
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As the level of anxiety rises around us, for reasons that are palpable and known to all, our efforts to retain even a modicum of calm become more urgent, and more difficult.
Judy Chicago , June 19th, 2014
Categories: New Mexico, Art
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The rage expressed by some of the female faces, tongues extended, foreheads contorted, is still unacceptable by many who may unconsciously expect or hope to be soothed or lulled by art. One of the notes left for the artist by a visitor expresses dismay at the rage and calls it “preachy” rather than the visceral scream we all know, even if it is a deeply submerged knowledge, as we make our way through a violent, sexist culture.
The Blue Box - Sallie Bingham , June 15th, 2014
Categories: Women, Writing
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The first review of my next book, “The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters”, is just in from the prestigious Kirkus Reviews from which many libraries order.
New Ventures , June 13th, 2014
Categories: New Mexico, Art
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Right now I am privileged to be at the birth of two new ventures: a gallery in Santa Fe, designed, stocked and overseen by my son Barry, and Apache Mesa Ranch, a wild mesa top and deep valley near Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Here Comes The Future , June 1st, 2014
Categories: My Family
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All of us who are actively engaged in life feel ambivalent about the generations that are rushing to take our place on this earth, even those that are made up of our most beloved relatives.
Memorial Day , May 29th, 2014
Categories: Politics
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As a way to celebrate next Memorial Day, why not spend an hour asking at your favorite store whether they carry anything made in the U.S.A.?
The Blue Box - Sallie Bingham , May 27th, 2014
Categories: Writing, Kentucky
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The long waits publishing entrails always make me wonder why writers sometimes refer to their new books as their children; surely no pregnancy lasts two years or more, and few professional writers wait to see their next book launched before laboring mightily to begin the next one.
Stephen Sondheim , May 23rd, 2014
Categories: Theater
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I must make a terrible admission: I believe Stephen Sondheim is the most talented composer of this century or any other. Yes—not Bach, Mozart or any of the other so-called on greats we are called on to worship from grade school on, but dear, beautiful, ironic, soulful Sondheim.
Just A Girl From Kentucky , May 20th, 2014
Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Kentucky
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There is a thread connecting Jill Abramson to the girl buried in my woods: both confident, outspoken, strong women, they faced an opposition they perhaps could not have imagined because it is almost never mentioned: the opposition of the male establishment, in the person of a famous publisher or in the person of a nameless drunk, who made them examples of the price we must still be prepared to pay.
hio River Project Construction , May 15th, 2014
Categories: Travel
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I find it easier to take the temperature of the world (or my version of the world) when I’m moving around than when I’m at home, which at this point means moving through the air.
The Blessing of Rain , May 13th, 2014
Categories: New Mexico
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A brief dash of rain last Thursday, hardly more than a few drops, reminds me of how badly we need the moisture here in the southwest, described by some as being likely the most hard-hit by climate change.
Old Love , May 7th, 2014
Categories: My Family
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Now and then, due to luck or grace or the peculiar workings of that agency those of us who have any sense call A Higher Power (drawing the line at The, though), people come back into my life, vastly changed but still recognizable, at least after a while, as newer versions—reincarnations—of people I lost or sloughed off years ago.
Wolf Pen Mill , May 4th, 2014
Categories: Kentucky, Philanthropy
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The Wolf Pen Mill millstone is turning for the first time in three decades!
Garden, Spring 2014 , April 26th, 2014
Categories: New Mexico
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This spring, for the first time in my twenty-three years in Santa Fe, I will not be planting a flower garden.
Easter , April 20th, 2014
Categories: Religion
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I would always find, outside my bedroom door, a basket with a child-sized rake, shovel, hoe and trowel as well as five or six bright colored packets of seeds: squash, tomatoes, radishes, lettuce. Mother was a passionate gardener and hoped that her five children would develop her love for getting her hands in the dirt.
Rana Plaza building collapse , April 17th, 2014
Categories: Politics
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We are not powerless. One of the great moments in the history of The Civil Rights Movement―April 11th, 1970―occurred when African-Americans in Atlanta boycotted Rich’s Department Store where traditionally they spent a lot of money buying Easter suits and hats.
Roald Dahl , April 15th, 2014
Categories: My Family, Writing
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Thank God for Roald Dahl. Thank God for parents who read aloud to their children. In spite of all the signs to the contrary, we may not have lost books and readers—or the writers that grow out of this blessed combination.
My Privy , April 13th, 2014
Categories: New Mexico
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Yes, indeed, I have a privy.
Fred and Ginger , April 10th, 2014
Categories: New Mexico
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I will dance—we will dance—as long as we have feet and legs under us, and that is all that matters.
West Wind Blows , April 3rd, 2014
Categories: Art
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Two of my sons have been or are in the independent film business where I thought it only grew - New York and Los Angeles. The cost there is prohibitive and finding money is nearly impossible; the star system makes casting a low budget film impossible. But here, in this small southern town and doubtless in small and larger towns all over the country, creativity reigns.
Good Angels Hover , April 1st, 2014
Categories: My Family
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Curtie would never have imagined that her handiwork, perhaps not appropriately valued during her life time, could inspire such awe and pleasure in a group that knows their textiles and their important role in interpreting our history.
Signature , March 27th, 2014
Categories: Philanthropy, Women
Tagged:
It is not only the personal that our papers record but the way the personal becomes political, even for women who may never recognize the connection.
Sting at TED , March 25th, 2014
Categories: Kentucky
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How do we teach girls the daring they need to leave home? Perhaps it depends on dismissing some of the sentimental clouds that obscure the reality of home, and remembering that Sting’s north of England was a place of grime and hard work.But he clearly was born with the need and the drive to get out. Is this something that comes naturally, without encouragement, to boys? What are our girls missing?
Tarte Tatin , March 23rd, 2014
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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It has been difficult, all these years, for me to say, “My teacher,” to accept with gratitude and a degree of humility that I have more to learn, and that when I’m ready to learn, the teacher will appear. Now it has happened.
Women's Project Theater , March 18th, 2014
Categories: Women, Writing, Theater
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We were fearless back then, as we have continued to be.
Harvard Club , March 13th, 2014
Categories: Travel
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So the place breathes—if it breathes at all—an air of masculinity and propriety that seems to have disappeared but of course has not really. When I go into the dining room to eat, I am nearly always asked, “Are you meeting your husband?” (“No, I’m meeting myself”) or “Just one?” (“Isn’t one enough?”).
Schonefeld - Wikipedia , March 11th, 2014
Categories: Politics, New Mexico, Travel
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It doesn’t matter where the airports are in the U.S.-other countries are different-or how large or how small because since nine eleven (I spell it out to make its strangeness visible), we are all under the rule of fear.
Boston Ivy , March 6th, 2014
Categories: My Family
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Now, all these years later, I wonder if the fact that these boys were all scions of well-known families contributed to their noteworthy mildness. Was there then—certainly not now—an emphasis on right behavior and staying out of trouble that actually corralled their adolescent male desire?
New York 1968 , March 4th, 2014
Categories: Travel
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New York is no longer my city of dreams, and has not been for many years, but it will be fascinating as the plane descends through dense layers of fog to remember that girl who thought that New York, alone, could supply her with the satisfaction of her desires.
Iona , March 2nd, 2014
Categories: My Family
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Yesterday my granddaughter Iona Ellsworth invited me to tea and we chatted for a while with the particular warm intimacy and understanding that seems to exist, often, between grandmothers and their blessed grandchildren—blessed by our love as well as by their many gifts.
Santa Fe Sunset , February 27th, 2014
Categories: Writing, Art
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Community in the end is not what it’s all about—at least for artists. What we see, hear and smell is the core of our work, and the core of our survival.
Danger , February 25th, 2014
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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I’m fighting a sense of angry uselessness brought on by a couple of recent setbacks, both here and in the nation at large.
Rodr , February 23rd, 2014
Categories: New Mexico
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My dear little dog Rose, a British Staffordshire Bull Terrier who has been my constant companion for twelve years since the times I carried her on walks as a tiny puppy in a baby sling has just endured her first physical pain.
Las Vegas Optic , February 18th, 2014
Categories: New Mexico
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My newspaper of choice is the Las Vegas Optic, a thrice a week little dandy that manages somehow to keep up the brio we used to expect from all newspapers.
The Jeweled Piano , February 11th, 2014
Categories: Women
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Some conversations are so brief they seem not to leave a mark, yet in the case of the unnamed woman sitting at the card table, whose words I only heard as I was already turning away, the words left a trail.
Flannery O’Connor , February 4th, 2014
Categories: Writing
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I have special respect for teachers because I finally had to admit, a few years ago, that I can’t do it… at least not directly.
Doc - Santa Fe , January 31st, 2014
Categories: New Mexico
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I’ve lived in the mountains outside of Santa Fe for a couple of decades now, and for nearly that entire time, I’ve been picking up Doc when I see him hitching a ride along the road to town. Doc is not your typical homeless man, if there is such a thing.
Something Has Gone Wrong , January 27th, 2014
Categories: Politics
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Something has gone wrong with this coun­try, and I don’t know how or exactly when.
Photo by the Santa Fe New Mexican , January 20th, 2014
Categories: New Mexico
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The meeting in Lamy this afternoon was not about losing our train—although I hope in the future that will be addressed—but about the plan, discovered by accident a week ago when workmen began to lay a concrete pad near the train station (there was no state, county or federal oversight, no permits required because of the special status the railroads hold here) where Pacer Oil Company of Farmington, New Mexico is planning to built a depot for the deposit of twenty-five to fifty double-tanker-trailer loads of crude oil weekly, to wait for shipment on tanker cars that somehow can travel on tracks that are unsafe for passenger trains.
, January 7th, 2014
Categories: New Mexico, Theater
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After waiting a long time, years in fact, I was finally able to buy two tickets to Robert Mirabal’s performance here in Santa Fe, at the old Canyon Road restaurant and bar, El Farol.
, January 5th, 2014
Categories: My Family
Tagged:
My granddaughter told me last evening that she in fact DID NOT WATCH “Sex in the City” as I had assumed, but “Desperate Housewives.”
, December 31st, 2013
Categories: Women, My Family
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Since from the beginning of my career as a writer, I’ve written about women and sex, I bought this series... and watched about twenty minutes of the first episode.
, December 26th, 2013
Categories: Women
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Now that Christmas has fallen half way out of the day-I imagine it on its edge, sliding off all those cards that wish, so blandly, “Season’s Greetings” (and what are they?-I am coming to terms with the usefulness of Facebook.
, December 13th, 2013
Categories: Women, New Mexico, Art
Tagged:
As I look around this big room, I see many people, friends, acquaintances and strangers who all have something to say that I would like to hear… But since I am honored by the New Mexico Women in the Arts with the responsibility of speaking to you tonight, I want to draw our attention to the two young women, seniors at our high schools this winter, who will receive the scholarships to which all of you have contributed.
, December 3rd, 2013
Categories: New Mexico, Travel
Tagged:
They are taking our train away, eliminating Colorado and New Mexico from the line that has stopped at Lamy, New Mexico since 1887; there is some problem with the tracks in Kansas, no one wants to pay for their repair, and so in two years my beloved Southwestern Chief may be southwestern no more, routed down through Texas, leaving us stranded.
, May 14th, 2013
Categories: Writing
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All writers complain at one time or another about the time we spend waiting: for the proposal to be read, and accepted or rejected; for the manuscript to be edited; for the final longed-for publishing date to arrive.
, April 23rd, 2013
Categories: Kentucky
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The truth is that progressive ideas, whether about equality or water quality, have never taken root here; those are the seeds that fall on rocky ground, sprout and rapidly wither.
Hopper - Early Sunday Morning , March 4th, 2013
Categories: Art
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Hopper light doesn’t protect, but neither does it isolate; in his mysterious paintings, it sometimes seems to me that the slightest movement—getting up off a bed, going out a door—would change not only the composition and the meanings we gladly ascribe to it, but the light, itself.
Posture Photographs , February 28th, 2013
Categories: My Family
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It seems that the pros and cons of relationships, or individuals, have in the end little influence on my decisions, which spring usually from a hidden pocket of my intuition—hidden, even from me, as well as from the lovers or would-be lovers or husbands who encounter my will.
, February 25th, 2013
Categories: Travel
Tagged:
... what has been lost is valuable, too, since it includes a shared heritage of literature, especially poetry, even though it was entirely the poetry of nineteenth century men.
Sallie in Yellowstone , February 8th, 2013
Categories: Travel
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A part of my delight in my recent trip to Yellowstone National Park in north-western Montana, was to experience real cold.
www.seededearth.com , February 6th, 2013
Categories: Travel, Art
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Wandering the lobby of the Mammoth Hotel in Yellowstone National Park last week, I came on a little fountain buried in an obscure corner.
Icebox , January 16th, 2013
Categories: My Family, Kentucky
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When I was growing up in Kentucky, an enormous wooden box with chrome handles on its many doors crouched in the back pantry, a dark room that I felt was not really safe. Why? Probably just the darkness, the many closed cupboards, and the icebox, which I didn't know how to name.
Omitted , January 10th, 2013
Categories: My Family
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...its threat lingers, as we know today when girls starve or bloat themselves, cut their arms, or sacrifice their skins to tattoos: the old horror of the natural female body, reappearing like some monster from the deep, in every generation.
Doris Duke , January 2nd, 2013
Categories: My Family
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Now that my newest book, Mending: New and Selected Short Stories is reaching its readers, I find myself in a rather delightful quandary.
Yoga Park Ave , January 1st, 2013
Categories: Women
Tagged:
My little practice restored my faith in one crucial phrase, one crucial possibility, which I feel to this day, and that is the possibility of achieving through my body the peace that passes understanding.
Hats and Pearls , December 31st, 2012
Categories: Women
Tagged:
“Doing good” has always been associated with that look which is why Doris Duke, mysterious, unpredictable, may turn out to be an interesting subject for my next book. Already I gather that she “did good” without caring much about it or dreaming of wearing “do good” clothes.
Colette , December 30th, 2012
Categories: Writing
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So often, when I’m teaching in these uncelebrated venues to women who sometimes seem lost to my word, I feel fruitless and frustrated; yet any one of the many women I have taught might, also, has written WOW next to startling lines in a poem they would never have read without my class.
Las Conchas Fire , December 29th, 2012
Categories: New Mexico
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Meanwhile, Santa Fe is not directly threatened; both the Pacheco and the Las Conchas fires are several miles away, but the smoke is so thick this morning that mountains a mile and a half to the west and east are invisible.
A Town Made For Women , December 28th, 2012
Categories: Women, New Mexico
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When people ask me why I moved to Santa Fe twenty years ago, I answer according to my mood: the mountains, the sky, the light—all familiar answers that most of us offer, particularly if we are artists for whom such attributes are especially important.
, December 27th, 2012
Categories: Writing, Travel
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Our books are expensive and employ language that is rapidly becoming obsolete. They are sold in bookstores, which are themselves, special, separate, threatened, and rare. These books are written slowly, sometimes painfully, and edited slowly, and also sometimes with pain, all to conform to a standard: what serious literature ought to be. But to uphold a standard that no longer means anything to most people seems an exercise in futility.
Milk of Paradise , December 26th, 2012
Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Writing, Theater
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It was the 1980's and the three of us-Julia, Joan and I-were possessed by the spirit of the times-that energizing, reckless, laughing spirit that was born of the modern women’s movement. We could do anything. Even stir up trouble.
Wolf Pen Mill, Kentucky , December 24th, 2012
Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky
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Stream water will gush over the wheel, and it will turn, and the stones will grind, and the old building will shake, just as it was all intended to do more than 150 years ago.
It Takes Years , October 31st, 2012
Categories: New Mexico
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It take years, decades, even, for me to begin to know a place, and usually that's just when I'm packing to leave. It's easy to confuse the blindness that can come with familiarity with boredom; it's easy to confuse the geographical solution—moving somewhere new, to escape old problems—as the true solution it never is. My eye, grown blind to one set of trees and shadows, soon grows blind to the next set.
Palgrave's The Golden Treasury , October 19th, 2012
Categories: My Family, Writing
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These sisters, my father remembered, always sang and accompanied themselves on the piano at this time of year in a duet to the dying of summer, called “The Last Rose of Summer”
Colette , October 16th, 2012
Categories: Writing
Tagged:
So often, when I’m teaching in these uncelebrated venues to women who sometimes seem lost to my word, I feel fruitless and frustrated; yet any one of the many women I have taught might, also, has written WOW next to startling lines in a poem they would never have read without my class.
, August 27th, 2012
Categories: Politics
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Sometimes it takes a green man to wake up comfortable people in the United States. The green man, Arturo, came to Santa Fe this past weekend as one of 110 citizens of the latin states, mainly from Mexico who are traveling across the country in two large buses labeled "Caravanas Para la Paz."
My Week In Pictures (thumbnail) , August 14th, 2012
Categories: Art
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In June, I finally decided to learn how to use my new digital camera. It’s a small Sony Nex-7, which seems easy to use but was causing me a lot of frustration. I decided to sign up for a beginning digital photography workshop at Santa Fe Photographic Workshops a few blocks from where I live.
, July 12th, 2012
Categories: Travel, Art
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This forgetting nearly happened to two of the cultural monuments in Spain that now seem central to the country and its history: Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona, and the Alhambra in Grenada.
Water , July 10th, 2012
Categories: Art, Travel
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We seem particularly unable, here in the desert Southwest, to learn from these earlier techniques; there are no light-proof shades over the windows here in the middle of the day, no habit of closing early and opening late (which used to be the rule in the U.S. South), no planting of trees to provide crucial shade.
Kings, Queens and Visionaries , July 4th, 2012
Categories: Art, Travel
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Someone-a queen, a king, or a so-called Captain of Industry, our version-finds inspiration bursting out in bright colors in an unexpected corner: a peasant, an explorer, an architectural genius, and brings the essential power of money, wealth and prestige to force the bloom.
George Orwell , July 2nd, 2012
Categories: Writing, Travel
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As I try to understand something about Barcelona, this anthill on the coast that seems closer to Miami than to Sevilla, I am reading George Orwell’s half-forgotten “Homage to Catalonia.”
Nora Ephron , June 27th, 2012
Categories: Writing
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A lot of us are feeling a sense of loss on hearing that Nora Ephron is dead at 71-not because we knew her, saw her movies or read all her writing-but because she came to represent something hard to define about an era that began with the first issue of Ms. in 1973 when Ephron was what was called a “mail girl” at Esquire.
Bull - Spain , June 26th, 2012
Categories: Travel
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This shocks us, as we are shocked by Flamenco and the bullring. At least since the enlightenment, we of the New World have believed in our perfectibility, if not in our perfection, in our concurrent right to protection and ease. The essential tragedy of life is not for us; we will circumvent it, somehow, as when I was a small child I believed death would have been “cured” by the time I was old.
Belen Maya , June 22nd, 2012
Categories: Politics, Travel
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Today’s Spanish newspaper announces that the bailout from the European Union, a sum of money too large for me to imagine, is going to happen, although a woman I spoke with yesterday says no one knows where the money is really going-probably to the banks, as in the U.S.
, June 20th, 2012
Categories: Politics, Travel
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This may be the road to compromise we must all follow: the ancient privilege of a small class and the endless cheerful protest of the mass of those who have less-at least in our eyes,the disadvantaged.
, June 18th, 2012
Categories: Writing, Travel
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For my “Doris,” a home at the university her father founded...you will understand my delight and appreciation as well as my humility in the face of the many challenges I will encounter as I being to write.
A Town Made For Women , June 11th, 2012
Categories: New Mexico, Women
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When people ask me why I moved to Santa Fe twenty years ago, I answer according to my mood: the mountains, the sky, the light—all familiar answers that most of us offer, particularly if we are artists for whom such attributes are especially important.
Wolf Pen Mill, Kentucky , June 5th, 2012
Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky
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Stream water will gush over the wheel, and it will turn, and the stones will grind, and the old building will shake, just as it was all intended to do more than 150 years ago.
Milk of Paradise , June 1st, 2012
Categories: Philanthropy, Writing, Theater, Women
Tagged:
It was the 1980's and the three of us-Julia, Joan and I-were possessed by the spirit of the times-that energizing, reckless, laughing spirit that was born of the modern women’s movement. We could do anything. Even stir up trouble.
Night of Literary Feasts , May 28th, 2012
Categories: Writing, Kentucky
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A few days ago I spent time in Lexington, Kentucky, one of the prettiest towns I’ve ever visited, in order to be a featured writer at the annual Literary Feasts, which supports the Lexington Public Library.
The Times They Are a-Changin' , May 24th, 2012
Categories: Kentucky
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Sometimes, not too many times, I find myself complaining that things have stopped moving forward and even begun moving backwards after the heady transformations of customs and attitudes that changed my life in the 1970’s.
Sweet Seduction Thumbnail , May 21st, 2012
Categories: Kentucky
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When I visit Lexington, Kentucky, in the heart of the part of the state that would have sided with the Confederacy if President Lincoln hadn’t prevented it, I remember Stephen Foster’s “Old Sweet Song.” Is there anywhere else in the world that has such lush enormous maples, magnificent Tulip Poplars, hedges of spun sugar white flowers I can’t identify? Or such blocks of handsome turn of the century houses, as in Fayette Park, each with its distinctive Richardsonian bay window or Victorian white trim, each set at a comfortable distance from its neighbors in a broad pad of Bluegrass lawn and flower borders?
Photo of Sweet Briar College , May 15th, 2012
Categories: Women, Philanthropy
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When you have learned to use your money, and your power, you will arrive at an appreciation of your womanhood unlike anything you have ever imagined.
Dynasty Trust , April 10th, 2012
Categories: Politics
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In the next decade, as the so-called Baby Boomers retire and-is it possible?-die, an enormous transfer of wealth, the largest in our history, will take place-largely secretly and in silence.
Adrienne Rich , April 3rd, 2012
Categories: Writing
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How reassuring it is to find a second appraisal, to my mind more sensitive and compelling than the first, in The New York Times (March 31).
Adrienne Rich , March 30th, 2012
Categories: Writing
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In my heart, she has a special place because of some curious connections: she was at Radcliffe a few years before me, in the wretched fifties, and came out of that experience with formal training, an early marriage, and three sons.
Spellbinding Short Stories , March 29th, 2012
Categories: Writing
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This essay, by Steve Almond, from the March 25th edition of The New York Times, comes like a bombshell, dispelling not only my notions about why people take the writing workshops I teach, but why I often find teaching them frustrating.
shorts , March 27th, 2012
Categories: Kentucky
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Five days ago I had an astonishing experience as I was waiting in line to get on an American Eagle regional jet in Louisville, Kentucky, flying to Chicago.
Hats and Pearls , March 15th, 2012
Categories: Women
Tagged:
“Doing good” has always been associated with that look which is why Doris Duke, mysterious, unpredictable, may turn out to be an interesting subject for my next book. Already I gather that she “did good” without caring much about it or dreaming of wearing “do good” clothes.
Doris Duke, 1925 , March 2nd, 2012
Categories: Women, Writing
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Next week, as I begin to unravel the many strands of Doris Duke’s life, I must work hard to clear away my prejudices.
Barney Rosset , February 28th, 2012
Categories: Women, Writing
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BARNEY ROSSET died a few days ago and the New York Times ran a long obituary on February 23, celebrating his role in freeing the U.S. reading public from censorship.
A Perhaps Hand , February 23rd, 2012
Categories: Writing
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“Spring is like a perhaps hand in the window,” e e cummings wrote, and while I can never literally explain what he meant—what line of poetry can be literally explained?—the line always comes to mind when I see the first hints that spring will eventually be here, even in the mountains of northern New Mexico: a bud encrusted with snow, a nest that will soon be used, the first leaves of the daffodil bulbs I planted last fall.
Chicken Picking and Flag Waving , February 21st, 2012
Categories: New Mexico
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As the snows begin to recede here in the southern Rockies, the descansos by the sides of our roads come back into view. These are shrines created by families who have lost someone in a car wreck at that spot.
Whitney Houston , February 15th, 2012
Categories: Women
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Whitney Houston’s death last Saturday alerted me to a part of her story: the roles played in her rise to fame by her mother, Cissy Houston, a gospel and pop singer who sang back up to Aretha Franklin, whose triumphant hymns to women’s independence heralded my political coming of age. Aretha was Whitney’s godmother. This matriarchy, source of strength and grace, is rarely recognized as such.
Mr. Toad , February 9th, 2012
Categories: Writing
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Sitting long hours in the classroom arouses in me the restlessness that was the bane, or perhaps the blessing of my childhood: when will I be let out? Eventually the discussion catches my attention, but first there is the longing for the open road that I first encountered, in fiction, in Kenneth Grahame’s delicious The Wind in the Willows.
Little Tesuque , February 4th, 2012
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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I’ve lived in the mountains for a long time, gotten the knack of it. Every morning down the hill by eight to catch a ride, if I’m lucky, with some guy going to work in Santa Fe. Always a young guy alone in a beat-up car, maybe driving in for breakfast from the campground.
Plato , February 3rd, 2012
Categories: Women, Writing, New Mexico
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Fifteen years ago, when I first encountered Plato's teachings at St. John's College here, I railed against them. My mother used to call this, "Kicking against the pricks," no pun intended.Today I'm beginning to realize that this curriculum, based on the Great Books, a system devised in the 1940's to encompass the whole of a gentleman's essential library, reveals the base-the stones-on which we all stand.
Plato - Raphael , January 28th, 2012
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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I’m trying, with a good deal of anxiety, to put together what I know and believe with the suppositions and proofs of the ancient Greek philosophers. They use a language and a way of thinking, totally abstract—almost—that is as foreign to me as the abstruse calculations each member of my class must write, from memory, on the blackboard.
The Atlantic , January 12th, 2012
Categories: Women, Writing
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What a pleasure it is to see, in the midst of disheartening news about the low number of women writers whose writing appears in major national periodicals, that the Atlantic is at least at the top of the list.
Name It. Change It. , December 29th, 2011
Categories: Women
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Our heartfelt attempts at cheer and goodwill this holiday season bark their knees-if they had knees-on reports like Name It/Change It. Just when we wanted to forget all about misogyny comes this portent reminder that it is always with us, especially in the various forms of media I attempt to ignore but which bathe our country in a bath of vitriol.
Doris Duke , December 20th, 2011
Categories: Writing
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Now that my newest book, Mending: New and Selected Short Stories is reaching its readers, I find myself in a rather delightful quandary.
Pepper Spray , November 26th, 2011
Categories: Politics
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In an economy of high unemployment, dependent on five percent annual growth, the woman spraying her fellow shoppers joins the ranks of the immigrant shattering the peace of a neighborhood with a leaf blower and the bulldozer beeping as it destroys a hillside for another expensive development.
The Blue and White Bandana , November 23rd, 2011
Categories: My Family, Writing, Kentucky
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“Look at the embroidery,” she said, spreading out the bandana. Dense, tiny silk flowers in red, gold, purple and blue covered every inch.“On the other side, too.” She turned it over; miraculously, it seemed to me, the wrong side of the bandana was also completely covered with tiny flowers. I’d been sewing letters on a sampler, much against my will, and I knew how messy the back side of anything embroidered usually looked.
, November 22nd, 2011
Categories: Writing, Travel
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Our books are expensive and employ language that is rapidly becoming obsolete. They are sold in bookstores, which are themselves, special, separate, threatened, and rare.
My Mothers Eyes , November 17th, 2011
Categories: My Family, Writing, Kentucky
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When I became aware of her as my mother (I was her third child), she was a tiny blond woman, almost doll-like, formed by the conventions of upper class marriage. I almost never saw her without make-up, her hair set in careful blond curls, wearing a powerful girdle, a suit and carrying a purse; she seemed always to be armed for a distant battle.
Knife, Dagger, Poignard , November 15th, 2011
Categories: My Family, Writing, Kentucky
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It glittered obscurely in the back of the curio cabinet my grandmother kept in her dark little house in Richmond, Virginia, the house where she’d raised six daughters and a son. On the walls there were snapshots of all those golden-haired girls, and the one dark-haired boy, as well as their equally fair children and grandchildren, but I don’t remember them. Familiar icons, alike in all houses, they were not interesting; but the curio cabinet, and its contents-which only my grandmother touched-alerted me instantly to the electric presence of stories.
Misses and Her Servant - Harry Smith , November 11th, 2011
Categories: My Family, Kentucky
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It has taken me a long time to realize how little I knew about the women who raised me.
Yoga Park Ave , November 8th, 2011
Categories: Women
Tagged:
My little practice restored my faith in one crucial phrase, one crucial possibility, which I feel to this day, and that is the possibility of achieving through my body the peace that passes understanding.
City Night - Georgia O'Keefe , November 1st, 2011
Categories: Travel
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The city has a way of enforcing its rules on the unwary that even the Wall Street protesters might find oppressive: a way of dressing that implies a way of being, a way of talking that depends on a certain kind of conformity—the reason, in addition to the expense of living here, that writers and artists get out.
Dorothy Parker , October 28th, 2011
Categories: Writing, Travel
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When I started out as a writer in the 1960’s, I had to go to New York. There was no alternative. Even Boston, where I lived for a few years after college, and which had an old literary tradition, wouldn’t do; the real publishers, agents, bookstores and readers were—they had to be!—in New York. I had no idea, really, what New York was like; I’d never lived there; and I couldn’t have predicted how hostile the environment would be to me.
We Live Here , October 25th, 2011
Categories: Women, Writing, Theater
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When a play by a woman is reviewed, I notice, certain attitudes prevail. Of course there are exceptions, but the rule is that the play is treated with condescension if not outright hostility. Women authors face the same barrage but it is much more intense, and more universal, for playwrights.
After A While In Cities... , October 22nd, 2011
Categories: Travel
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There is nothing wrong with cities. They are occasionally beautiful, always stimulating, and as my beloved daughter-in-law, Camila, said as we were walking back last night, everyone feels at home in them—or at least in New York.
Purple Ribbon , October 17th, 2011
Categories: Women, Writing
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A while back, or perhaps it was more than a few years ago, we all became aware of the epidemic of violence against women in this country, and memoirs began to be written as the survivors felt empowered to describe what they had gone though, battling through shame and the fear of family repercussions. We all have our lists of these titles, some of them bitingly effective, others less so, and perhaps I was not alone in imagining that writing about the problem would make the problem go away, or at least diminish it.
The New York Society Library , October 12th, 2011
Categories: Writing
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Years ago when I was living in Manhattan with three small sons, desperately trying to continue the writing to which I’ve devoted my life, I stumbled on a hidden jewel: The New York Society Library, on 79th Street just off Madison.
, September 26th, 2011
Categories: Writing, Kentucky
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My last reading—this month—in Kentucky was for another of what I call a dear audience, at the second floor library above the police station in the little outlying town of Prospect. Years ago this was a farming community; now, it has sprouted prosperous subdivisions, green with trees and grass, strip malls, gas stations—but also a small wildlife sanctuary, in easements, and residents who still remember the value of the land.
Jeffersonville Township Public Library , September 23rd, 2011
Categories: Writing, Kentucky
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Now and then I have the privilege of reading to an audience I can only describe as dear. That was the case with the group at the Jeffersonville Public Library this evening: twenty or so people who hung on every word of my story, “Selling The Farm,” as though the two sisters in the story were their own friends, or even their own sisters.
Carmichael's Bookstore , September 21st, 2011
Categories: Kentucky, Writing
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I always find that a reading in my hometown is both warmer and more disconcerting than reading in other cities, warmer, because so many old friends and relatives are sitting on the chairs at the back of the bookstore, disconcerting because they are old friends and relatives who do not view me first of all as a writer. Either they know too much about me, or not enough. They have come out of that mixture of kindness and curiosity—what we call support—that leaves me a little breathless, like a hearty slap on the back.
Kentucky Women Writers Conference , September 20th, 2011
Categories: Writing, Kentucky
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Twenty-five years ago, a group of women from all over the state started to put together what would be, for the area, the first gathering of women writers. I remember the first meeting I attended, in a tall office building set in the middle of the green University of Kentucky campus. Women writers came together who would become well known: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bamberra, and many others. We were all at the beginning of something big—we knew it, rejoiced in it, and wondered how time would define, or change, our original dream.
Sallie Bingham , September 14th, 2011
Categories: Writing, Kentucky
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Like all authors, I face an interesting paradox when I travel to teach and read in my hometown—or, in this case, my home state.I am grateful that the hometown aura will bring in listeners, both to my class and to the reading I will give next Saturday.We are all curious about people who grew up near us, or are our age, or nearly, with the expectation of a shared point of view (and prejudices)—or at least shared experiences.
Sallie Bingham Alamosa Books - Sept. 2011 , September 13th, 2011
Categories: Writing, New Mexico
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I’m always a little nervous before my first reading from a new book, so far untried by readers although with two wonderful reviews, some of my best (Library Journal, Publishers’ Weekly) but without the surge of comments that gathers slowly, in the media and in the form of email from strangers and friends, over a period of months.
Mending (2011) - Sallie Bingham , September 8th, 2011
Categories: Writing
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Preparing to read from my new collection Mending: New and Selected Stories, at the Alamosa Bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico, goes beyond wondering who will be there, which is always impossible to predict.
, September 6th, 2011
Categories: Writing
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For the past three years, I’ve had the deep pleasure and privilege of working on a collection of papers found in the top of my mother’s closet after she died, letters from long forgotten relatives, mainly women, in Virginia, West Virginia and Georgia, covering more than 150 years.
Cape Cod Writers Conference , August 24th, 2011
Categories: Writing
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After teaching last week at the Cape Cod Writers’ Conference, with, for and among an amiable group, I came home with a few thoughts: what students are seeking in workshops such as this one (I imagine academic classes may be different) is contact.
Cape Cod Writers Conference , August 18th, 2011
Categories: Writing
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It's important to avoid overusing your own point of view.
Cape Cod Writers Conference , August 16th, 2011
Categories: Writing
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My poetry leads me to focus on word choice, the rhythm and sound of language, the flow of sentences—all of which are essential to the success and the intensity of the short story.
Cape Cod Writers Conference , August 15th, 2011
Categories: Writing
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These five days are about your expansion. This doesn’t mean belittling who you are right now as you sit here. It reflects what I’ve learned from my own writing and from teaching workshops: that we all have more possibilities and potentials than we realize.
Cape Cod Writers Conference , August 14th, 2011
Categories: Writing
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From the series: On Teaching Writing A series of essays on writing short stories, timed to coincide with my class “Spellbinding Short Stories” at the 2011 Cape Cod Writer’s Center   
, July 7th, 2011
Categories: New Mexico
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“The Las Conchas fire, started on June 26 by a downed power line, has been near-apocalyptic in its dimensions and its danger."
, July 6th, 2011
Categories: Art
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Perhaps we no longer believe we can roar.
Las Conchas Fire , June 28th, 2011
Categories: New Mexico
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For us here in Santa Fe, the worst has passed, since we are directly across the valley from Los Alamos and therefore most disturbed by heavy smoke and the terrifying vision of huge plumes rising thousand of feet into the air.
John Pilger , June 17th, 2011
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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An Open Letter to the Santa Fe New Mexican in response to their June 16 editorial “Lannan credibility suffers self-injury“ BRAVO TO THE NEW MEXICAN FOR RUNNING A STRONG EDITORIAL   
Where's Your Cynefin? , June 15th, 2011
Categories: New Mexico
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On the New Mexico Wildfires Here in the mountains north-east of Santa Fe, the winds are carrying more smoke up from the Wallow Fire, down on the Arizona border; the   
John Pilger , June 10th, 2011
Categories: Politics, New Mexico
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The interlacing of public and private, as Gloria Steinem famously explained, is choking individuals who attempt to speak out and crippling this country.
VIDA , June 10th, 2011
Categories: Writing, Women
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You can easily finish this sentence: why are so few women writers reviewed in The New York Times? Included in literary quarterlies? Republished in anthologies? Given major prizes? Well… VIDA’s   
Jill Abramson , June 3rd, 2011
Categories: Women, Writing
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Having lived through the bad old days of journalism... I was elated to hear that Jill Abramson has been appointed the first women executive director of The New York Times.
Memorial Day , June 2nd, 2011
Categories: New Mexico
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Does anyone visit cemeteries anymore? Here in Santa Fe, the huge Rosario Cemetery, dedicated to the war dead, is ablaze with small American flags planted in front of each identical   
High School Reunion , May 23rd, 2011
Categories: Kentucky
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SO HERE WE ARE after all these years—more than fifty—gathered together for the second time since we graduated from the private all-girls school in Louisville, Kentucky—before the Civil Rights Movement, before the Women’s Movement, before Vietnam and all the wars that have followed it.
Photo by Martha Tabor , May 9th, 2011
Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Politics
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A report released in 1997 reveals that sixty-six percent of the country’s poor adults are women.
Are Boxcars Beautiful? , May 4th, 2011
Categories: Art
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I wonder at times about the narrow definition I hold to for what is beautiful—or “beautiful,” to give it is usual ironic twist. This question becomes more pressing as we   
, March 9th, 2011
Categories: New Mexico, Women
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Most of the lone hikers I meet, often accompanied by one or two dogs, are women, young, old and in between.
, March 5th, 2011
Categories: New Mexico
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We don’t plant, or spin, or weave, we buyers, but at least we are able to appreciate the labor of those who do.
, February 27th, 2011
Categories: New Mexico
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Galloping across a dusty plain may be the best possible preparation for dealing with the complexities of negotiating a woman’s life in the twenty-first century.
Helen Hokinson , December 25th, 2010
Categories: Travel
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The sun has set, leaving a rapidly fading orange sky in the west when we pull into Mendota, Illinois on our way west...
Henry Hudson's Boat , December 22nd, 2010
Categories: Travel
Tagged:
On the train, I reclaim my original identity, to discover, visually, at least, a part of the U.S. I have never known.
Hook , December 22nd, 2010
Categories: Women
Tagged:
In old seaside cabins I have found the wise hook nailed to the splinter-board bathroom wall, opposite the small sink and the plain toilet that has no special adaptors for   
Kentucky Farm , December 22nd, 2010
Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky
Tagged:
When I was a woods-running girl, years ago in Kentucky, I explored every inch of the old overgrown farms I could get into.
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