_ Hundred-mile-an-hour wind gusts are fairly common in Boulder, Colorado, at least since I moved here. The gusts last night started around dark and walloped our cul-de-sac without mercy until noon today.

I slept approximately not at all.

The house shook,
the windows howled,
the fireplace flue played
the pan flute all night long.

_ This morning around five thirty I heard a little tap, a dainty scrape outside.
When I walked out my door at eight thirty, I saw this--

_ being held up by this--

_ engulfing both cars like this--

_ as nearly 8,000 pounds of pine tree blocked our driveway.

_ The arborist from Blue River Tree Care was already on the scene. He called in the largest crane that I have ever seen (and I’ve installed landscapes for 14 years)

which dropped a daredevil
down into the crown of the tree
who chopped two branches out
with a hand saw, attached the cables

and while we gaped from the upstairs landing window

that two-story pine tree

_ danced like a baby ballerina up over our heads

_ and touched down in point, where the crew promptly undressed her.

_ This miracle surpassed the miraculous activity indoors: my final day polishing
the last draft of my novel Tributary, 19.6 years in the making. Sharing the very last hours on this my magnum opus with the flight of the bumblebee pine tree--

I may have to take up the pan flute.
And play it hiking in the pines.

_ Authors have spilled their sweat and inky blood for you. It’s time you paid them back.

We count on online reviews to spread the word and promote our titles. Luckily, an online book review can take just a few minutes. So challenge yourself to review the best ten books you’ve read in the last year. And then do it every year. Contribute reviews to help boost your favorite authors and keep their books from going out of print!

It's simple. Here's how:

On any of the following bookseller sites, enter the title of the book you’d like to review. Then, once you’re on that book’s page . . .

_ Scroll down past the professional reviews and the “Product Details” to “Customer Reviews.” On the right hand side of the page, there’s a button called “Create your own review.”

_ You’ll be given the opportunity to create your reviewer name and password. Then you can 1) rate the book with stars, from one to five 2) enter the title for your review 3) type in a written review of at least 20 words. You can then preview your review and post it, once it says what you like.

_ Similar to Amazon, scroll down to “Customer Reviews.” Click on the “Write and Review” button on the right hand side of the page. Create an account for your reviewer self, and then proceed to rate with stars and a written review. You can choose to show your pen name or write an anonymous review.

_ On this site, you can only enter a star rating, so it is fast and easy!

All of these booksellers give you the chance to post your review to Facebook or Tweet it or email it to friends. It’s up to you, how far and how wide you’d like your review to spread its wings.
_

This is a great website for book fanatics. You can meet other folks with your reading tastes, read reviews by your "friends," write reviews of your favorite and unfavorite books, and win free books on giveaways. It really is a fine way to keep a journal of all you’ve read.

You won't be alone! Goodreads has 6,700,000 members who've added more than 230,000,000 books to their online "shelves."Click here for a pitch from one devoted fan. Or just join the conversation.

It’s easy to sign up on Goodreads. Once you have an identity, you get your own reviewer page. You can enter the name of any book, and it pops up cover and all. You can then read existing reviews, say whether you’re reading it or have already read it, and give it a star rating and/or add a written review.

When you sign up for favorite reviewers, you'll get updates on books they’ve read. You can join groups of like-minded readers. You can also visit author pages, to read blogs and watch book trailers.

Goodreads will send you handy suggestions for titles you may love and a monthly newsletter of what's new in your favorite genres.

Better still, you can go to authors' pages, and leave encouraging words. If they're active Goodreads members, you will be able to find out what they're reading and reviewing. Wouldn't you love to know what's on your favorite author's nightstand?

*NEWSWEEK reports that one way to get smarter and "Buff Your Brain" is to WRITE REVIEWS ONLINE. I quote: "Anyone can be a critic on the Internet—and you should too. When you like or hate something, review it on Amazon, Yelp, whatever. Typing out your opinion will help you to better understand your own thinking." (Sadly, the online version does not list the 31 ways to get smarter faster. But it does have a link to a great article on meditation and brain happiness by Amy Gross, former editor of O Magazine.)

_ May you live in the flow, however chilly.

_ Shelter from the storms . . .

_ And please buy books, give them away, pass them on and cherish them.

“The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.”
--Dr. Samuel Johnson, Preface to his Dictionary 

_

This is a butterball of a book! You have your dark meat, your light meat, your alien abduction, your two-headed cowboy, your small-town pranks, and The Scholar of Moab is literally stuffed with the screwy innocence of Hyrum LeRoy Thayne, strayed Mormon and willing servant of the Lord.

 

I do not normally review a book before I’ve finished it, but The Scholar of Moab is no ordinary book.

_ You need this book for the holidays. Your estranged aunt who wears brogans in the snow needs this book. Your brothers-in-law who are impossible to buy for need it. Your bishop needs it (if he has a sense of humor. If he doesn’t, he may need it even more.) I think you could safely send a copy of Scholar to philosophy majors, outdoor addicts, Moab addicts, high school drop-outs, romantics, cynics, geologists, belly dancers and German Shepherds.

_ Do yourself a big literary favor and read
Stephen L. Peck’s The Scholar of Moab.
Then please pass the gravy.*

*Share it with friends.
You can read more about The Scholar of Moab at Torrey House Press.

The brush tepee she builds near the old sod-roofed hut at the ranch.

The sacred Raft River Mountains where the novel ends.

The sacred white-faced ibis of Northern Utah.

And proving the vitality of black life in the white West,
Frank Durham's son rides rodeo in Pocatello, Idaho in the 1930s.

Of course, these historical photos are not actually my characters. But I love the juice they inject in my soul! I needed to let go of the final sleepy 100 pages of my manuscript and start anew. These photographs gave me the courage to do it.By Christmas, I'll have a novel worthy of its Utah roots.

Thanks to the Columbia River Basin project for photos of the buckaroo Tracy Thompson.

My ex-husband gave me this as a card once long ago, and I burst into tears. Here was the secret woman I was not, a woman writing in a room filled with air and light. A woman undistracted. The painter is Vuillard. No painter has loved women and interiors so dearly.

I spent a dozen years with my writer-desires hidden in a tumble of life, like sheets, pulled over me. A potent simple love-filled sleep, and then

once I entered graduate school and started to write in earnest, a darker draining jumble.

I remodeled and walked and sewed and knitted and gardened my way through the birth-pangs of my first novel. It went nowhere in the real world. This longstanding pain remained private. The manuscript, after two years going the rounds with various publishers, collapsed in a closet from exhaustion.

About a decade after receiving that Vuillard card, I visited The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. One painting in particular stopped me. I stood mesmerized by this very small, very intimate portrait called “Woman Sweeping.” I trembled and I wept. I simply could not believe the domestic radiance, the woman and the room warm as velvet. The patterns wrenched me out of my twentieth-century freedoms into the intimacy of belonging somewhere.

This unassuming, glorious 17” x 18” painting is by Edouard Vuillard. Yet again, I didn’t choose Vuillard as a favorite painter. Vuillard chooses me.

He helped me through the brighter years, the green period when landscape design and planting trees and still a bit of sewing for tranquility flung me into the arms of a new novel, a contemporary novel, the novel where perfectionism dropped in a puddle and I wrote like a drunk on fire. Guest House. How fitting that most of

Vuillard’s paintings are interiors. Interlocking interiors which glow with belonging. Belonging is a central theme of Guest House.

And still the story goes. Just last week, I went to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, to see a Post-Impressionist exhibit. I expected to be ravished by some of my old pals, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne. I have to admit I loved Renoir’s “The Dancer” so there was a small contest for my heart—but truly and utterly, Vuillard won the day. And I’m proud to say the painting among his half-dozen paintings which threw me over its shoulder and hauled me into its crazy den was “Profile of a Woman in a Green Hat.”

Can you begin to calculate the impact this 8” x 6” card-sized portrait has in a hushed crowd of reverent onlookers? With a Picasso blaring trumpets at it from across the room? I laughed out loud. I love it dearly. It’s Olive Oyl asking Popeye to can the spinach and give her a kiss.

Simeran Maxwell, of the National Gallery of Australia, says about our Olive: The face is an enigma. The conspicuous brow evokes a variety of responses in the viewer. Is the woman anxious, persecuted or suspicious? Is she shying away from our intrusive gaze, archly teasing us, questioning what we are looking at, or crossly glaring at us?

Simeran, she is saying: I am in my place. Don’t you envy my green lucidity?

Edouard Vuillard lived with and adored his mother for sixty years, his dress-maker mother. He loved his best friend’s wife chastely and was often in their company. The radiance of his heart seems the topic of each painting; love of women and their interiors.

A gal could do worse for a favorite. "I don't paint portraits," Vuillard once said. "I paint people at home." Ah, there’s the attraction. Being at home.

NPR on Vuillard.
The New Yorker on Vuillard.

And for the first time on my blog, here is the man himself . . . stunning.

I am rewriting my Utah historical novel, Tributary, for the last time. It will be published late this year. The first draft arrived in 1992. Only now, at age 55, with all of the events that have happened since I began, am I able to give my character Clair the full power and range of her voice.

The most recent and remarkable life event came three weeks ago when I accompanied a Shoshoni healer, Rose Soaring WhiteEagle, to the Washakie graveyard thirty-five miles north of Brigham City. Rose was born in Brigham as were both of my parents, and all of my Mormon ancestors who displaced the Shoshoni from their lands. Tributary is set largely in Brigham City and northern Utah.

Traveling with Rose in this deeply loved land, boundaries dissolved. She and I blessed the graves, marked and unmarked, of her ancestors at Washakie. I sang a lullaby in Shoshoni to the twenty children buried there. Animals and spirits guided us, because we asked them to. No act was taken without first asking.

This generosity is the generosity of the land.

This way of living counteracts a separate self.

Spirits in these latter days, and the healing has begun.

Hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park yesterday, I sang—heaven help me—“Rocky Mountain High." I pondered a Henry James novella I’d just read, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Because I wore brown-tinted sunglasses, the beetle-kill pines stood out on every slope, and I could not feel anything but implicated in and convinced of our changed planet.

In James’ story, the hero John Marcher misses the event of his lifetime. He feels chosen by an obscure destiny, waiting as if anointed for some beast to leap onto him and render his life profound. May Bartram, the only friend who knows of his obsession, stands beside him for decades, waiting, but Marcher’s self-absorption is so complete he only realizes when flinging himself on May’s grave that he has missed out on her love. That was his unrecognized beast.

The twists and turns of James’ syntax far exceed plot points, and I dismissed “The Beast in the Jungle” as a windy staid study in the human ego; profound—the beast is within not without us—and a dated sleeper written by a man who spent all his time indoors.

But as I hiked the thousand feet up toward Lake Helene, surrounded by vast browning slopes, the power of his novella came at me from an unexpected quarter, haunting my climb. James’ protagonist fit perfectly our environmental dilemma: we cannot really love the earth, though it offers itself, so we use it and simultaneously feel cut off from it, valuing our self-importance more than the opportunity to genuinely live, which makes us unable to stop pillaging, unable to stop missing the point, and we're just about to throw ourselves on its grave in misery and cowardice, like James' hero. Empty, when what is offered us is so full.

I have found no good way to face such a grand-scale environmental demise. Which leaves me in the Jungle with John Marcher.

Whatever you can do to plunge into this love, do it now.

At a writer’s party last night, a discussion about parenting leapt a generation and an ocean. The dead spoke to the living. This is why I love literature.

We had all been asked to bring a favorite passage to read. In the high Boulder dusk after an eclectic potluck dinner, books came out and pages from Rushdie and Eisley and M. F. K. Fisher were read aloud by lamplight. Topics ran the gamut. Several touched on parenting, and two in particular collided nicely.

E. M. Forster wrote, in Where Angel’s Fear to Tread, that unconditional love ran from parent to child but could not reverse the course, from child to parent. A child loved but not unconditionally. The geology professor from Texas who read this passage said she didn’t know if she agreed with him, but it had set her thinking. She had sons. She wondered if she loved them more than they loved her . . .

Later, we heard a passage from Nicole Krauss’ Great House, in which a father says he ceased to be the center of the universe with the birth of his second son. Being a parent removed the veil of self-importance for good. He wasn’t a model parent, by any means. The birth of his first son triggered no such understanding. Parents fail to show up for duty. Many resent what’s asked of them.

At night’s end, people remembered these two passages as contradictory. Wasn’t it interesting that Krauss and Forster disagreed? To me, they’d said the same thing: it is human to love the self until parenthood blasts you beyond self-interest. If children loved their parents unconditionally, they would never individuate. Parents feel devotion to protect and preserve; children feel devotion to the calling world. And so parental love is a repeating wave, a generational movement from self to selflessness. The decades of a life determine which part of the wave you are riding.

Krauss spoke to Forster. We rode the waves. Makes me want to roll up my sleeves and get bookish. Makes me love the Rouault lithograph that hangs in my stairway more than ever. Its title is “Have Mercy.”

Many thanks to Lisa Jones for collecting us all around her festive table last night.
And thanks to Dreamstime for the book/wave photo.

One thing I would like my novel Tributary to have, which my first novel Guest House did not, is professional reviews. I loved the reviews that Guest House readers posted online. There were many, they had a big impact, and I appreciated every one. They gave Guest House a large rich presence in online bookstores and on my website. Thank you so much for that.

And now it’s time to find authors and professional reviewers for Tributary.


Here’s where the angels come in.


If you know a published novelist, or a literary reviewer, or have a favorite feature writer/reviewer in your local paper, or read a magazine with book reviews, would you consider letting them know about my novel? Tributary follows the life of Clair Martin, a misfit in 1870s polygamous Utah, who sets off for Mississippi in search of her kin. Steady humor and keen instincts sustain Clair through multiple trials. Tributary explores a deeply human spirituality we all share.

If you need more info, I’ll be glad to send you a longer book description, just request it. And you can mention my website, to give folks a sense of my earlier novel Guest House: www.barbarakrichardson.com. I do hope Clair and company find their way to the light of popular notice.

Thanks so much for any clues or leads you send my way, and/or fan mail you send to those you know in the book business. Writers can’t make any headway in isolation. We live to share. I can’t expand the readership for Tributary without you. Start flapping those wings.

They make a lovely sound, like unnoticed weeds in a free open field,
setting seeds.