I wrote this tale for my children when they were little. The Djinni Seeker "Madho!" cried a childlike voice from somewhere nearby in the thicket. "Do you laugh at the tigers that lurk in these woods? Foolish duck! Does a boy of fourteen have no fear?" Startled, Madho dropped the bundle of twigs he had gathered and glanced all around him. Seeing no one, he shouted, "Who calls me? Sodewa, is it you, little sister?" No answer came. He peered into the leaves of the oak tree towering above ...

Happy St. Pat's Day, everyone! Please enjoy this beautiful Irish whistle/piano rendition of "Sally (or Lully) Gardens," with the prelude, "Eleanor Plunkett." One of my daughters-in-law plays the Irish whistle, as well as the Pan flute, and we often play this song together. (I accompany her on my hammer dulcimer.) "Sally Gardens" is one of my family's favorite Irish airs. (Link) (Edited to add the URL of the site from where the sound file came.) (Link)

Excerpt from the Ashfall Fossil Beds (Orchard, NE) website: About 12 million years ago, a volcano in southwest Idaho spread a blanket of ash over a very large area. One or two feet of this powdered glass covered the flat savannah-like grasslands of northeastern Nebraska. Most of the animals that lived here survived the actual ashfall, but as they continued to graze on the ash covered grasses, their lungs began to fill up with the abrasive powder. Soon their lungs became severely damaged and th...

While it's still officially winter (it's snowing here today), I thought I'd post this winter-themed story I wrote a few years ago. Wintersong Standing in the ankle-deep snow by the fence, Einar winced as another blast of icy Wyoming wind bit his weathered face, yet not even then did he take his eyes off the pasture. Huddled there near the propane-heated stock tank, among his prized cattle, stood goats—all kinds of goats—hundreds of goats—more goats than he'd seen in the pasture since the w...

the majority of voters there, being republicans, are too stupid to know whose fault it is that they're poor and keep voting the fascist dickweeds back into office. I had an abortion in Rapid City before abortion was legalized in SoDak. My doctor in Deadwood, where my husband and I lived at the time with our three young kids, sent me to a RC gynocologist who performed abortions, because the Deadwood hospital was a Catholic establishment and wouldn't allow them. (Other doctors in the state perf...

a relative of my husband's, at his urging. We are adamantly opposed to Bush's war on Iraq, as well as to his fascist policies here at home. Despite the disingenuous, trick lead-in that says Worth reading no matter what you think of our President! the email you just sent us is pure neo-conservative propaganda in which the so-called "Stats" have been cherry-picked and skewed to suit the neo-con agenda. Please don't send us any more rightwing malarky, whether it's designed to try to rationalize...

The is the only poem I've ever written, though I'm not sure it qualifies as a poem. Whatever it is, the piece started out (in a different form) as a prologue to a story I was writing but soon put on the back burner. AlienGirl's superb "Parrot Understood as Therapod" made me remember my piece, because they both allude to paleontology. Indricotherium, Unearthed The beast had not known the light of stars for countless nights; Nor would it on this night. The searing winds had come at dusk, Swe...

This story, among my first, originated as a writers' group assignment. Once a month we all wrote a poem, short story or essay on a group-selected theme, or sometimes on a single word that everyone agreed upon. "Sundown" was a single-word-based piece, though I can't recall now what the word was. :shrug: (Hmmm...come to think of it, maybe it was "mirror.") These assignments really helped jumpstart my imagination. About half the stories I've written began as writers' group assignments that th...