I get juiced on Mateus and just hang loose. – Elton John
How it liberates the soul to drink a bottle of good wine daily
and sit in the sun. – Virginia Woolf
These two quotes introduce the role of wine at different times in my life. A handful of vignettes make up “Wine,” which was published last fall in Tangled Locks Journal and is scheduled for inclusion in a to-be-published anthology.
A slice of a city on a small strip of paper.
I’ve always saved bookmarks – mostly bookmarks from bookstores. At some point I deemed them a collection, a massing of memories.
My personal essay, “Marking Time and Place,” was published in the excellent South 85 Journal. Read it here.
San Diego’s famed Lafayette Hotel has reopened, and it’s a many splendored thing. But I remember it fondly in its shabbier days.
“Glory Days at the Lafayette Hotel“ appears in the spring issue of Change Seven, a literary journal that takes its name from the words of the inestimable Dorothy Parker:
“It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I can change seven.”
“The bracing fragrance of rain on dry ground—on eucalyptus and pavement as well—is precious given the scarcity of rain in San Diego. I didn’t know there was a name for it until it popped up in my email as the Word of the Day….”
From my short essay “Petrichor,” which was published in Eunoia Review this summer. I was drawn to this journal by its name, another wonderful word, which not only means “goodwill” or “beautiful thinking,” but is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels.
I’ve written about baseball, even once about football, but bowling is the first sport I’ve written about that I actually participated in. Like Laverne and Shirley, I had happy days at the neighborhood lanes.
“Bowling, Bucks, and Boys” was published earlier this year at Words & Sports.
The bright red and green cover caught my eye: The Poet’s Cookbook: Recipes from Tuscany.
Here’s my paean to Italian food and the Italian language: “Fritto Misto di Verdure” is on pages 57-58 in the food issue of Superpresent.
Que bellissima!
It wasn’t just any old bucket of bolts — it was my trusted companion for almost 30 years.
Now I’ve memorialized it in “Mellow Yellow,” a short essay published in Fauxmoir.
Recessive traits are known to skip a generation or more—like red hair and twins and a love of lobster. I like lobster–who doesn’t?–but my mother and my daughter shared a passion for the clawed critters.
My “Lobster Legacy” was published in Eat, Darling, Eat, a site dedicated to stories of mothers and daughters and food. With recipes! Read mine here.
Today I saw glimmers of lavender on Juan Street, my favorite tree at the start of its bloom season – a week from now it will be a vast purple umbrella.
Last summer I wrote about it – read “Jacaranda” in Bluebird Word, published in September 2022. And here’s the photo they didn’t run with it.
Alice Lowe -- still writing 