arleen williams

Kent Reporter

2012-01-29T08:25:00.000-08:00

Here's an article written back in October 2008 that somehow I missed... Sister of Green River Killer victim pens memoir

Aunt Grace

2012-01-14T11:03:00.000-08:00

Christmas is gently packed away. Each fragile ornament wrapped for protection; the strings of lights twisted in bundles and labeled: mantel, piano, tree. All in hopes of avoiding a bit of frustration next December. We store the large plastic boxes in the attic and give the house a good cleaning, vacuuming and dusting away the pine needles, cobwebs, dog hairs and magic. The glitter of New Year’s celebrations fade, until we scribble 2011 instead of 2012 at the top of a journal entry, the corner of a check, and remember. The house is clean, quiet and empty. And for me another academic quarter begins with an array of new classes, students, challenges and rewards.

When the call came, I didn’t answer it. Restricted. Montana. Another sales call, I figured as I continued to dress for work. The last thing I needed as I hurried to work during the first week of a new quarter was another sales call. I ignored it until I heard that mechanical voice telling me that I’d received a message. What kind of sales call leaves a message? Who do I know in Montana? I listened to the message.

“I didn’t send cards this year,” the voice said. “So I thought I’d give you a call. This is your aunt Grace.”

A normal belated holiday greeting from an elderly aunt. A conversation picked up after lying dormant for a month, maybe two. That would make sense, except that I don’t know my aunt Grace. I know of her. I may even have met her once or twice as a young child on one of those rare family visits with my maternal grandparents in South Dakota. My family would drive cross country from Seattle; hers from Minneapolis. A hometown reunion of sisters: my mother, Marcella, the eldest; Grace, the middle sister, and Lilly, the baby.

I have only wisps of memory of the visits that decorated my early childhood. The images that I do hold of my aunt Grace come from old family photographs and the letters and stories Mom shared with me in that handful of years we spent together between my father’s death and my mother’s dementia.

“You remind me of my sister, Gracie,” Mom would say. “You make me laugh.”

As dementia stole Mom’s memory, I made it my personal mission to make her laugh. She would show me a letter or card from Gracie stuffed full of newspaper clippings from their hometown newspaper – she kept up a subscription all those years. My mother did not. I would read the articles aloud.

“Remember so and so?” Gracie scribbled under the photo from the obituaries. “Quite the ladies man, wasn’t he?”

In the last couple of years, the years since we moved Mom into a dementia care facility, Aunt Grace’s letters for my mother have arrived in my mailbox. It was understood that I would share them with Mom, and once in awhile I’d write a formal note back to this aunt I do not know updating her on her sister’s condition. That was the extent of my contact with her. I didn’t know the sound of her voice when I listened to her phone message, her questions about Mom’s health. I listened once, twice. And then I called her back.

“Did I wake you up? Have you eaten your breakfast yet?” she asked.

“No worries,” I said. “Just getting ready for work.”

“I had my toast and cereal and coffee and orange juice. Now I don’t have to eat all day.”

“All day? That doesn’t sound like enough food for the whole day.”

“Well, maybe I’ll have a piece of candy later,” she said. “How about you? What did you have for breakfast?”

Here I was talking to a virtual stranger about breakfast cereal and eating habits. Yet I knew she was pulling me in, making me instantly comfortable with her blatant silliness. We spoke of Mom, of Aunt Lilly, of the years in nursing school that she shared with my mother during the war.

“She was the smart one, your mom. You know, we had to work full time in the hospital and go to school at the same time. Your mom could do it all. She was so smart. It was harder for me.”

But now the tables are turned. Now this intelligent, articulate, funny woman only a few years younger than Mom was sharing stories that my mother could no longer remember. As the years slip away and our elders pass, our personal history is lost to unasked questions and empty answers. Filling in the blanks in personal story becomes an impossible challenge when there’s nobody left to ask, when you wait too long.

I never asked my mother why she gave up her young dream of flying or how a small town socialite like herself adjusted to farm life in the Issaquah valley, the mother of nine children. I never asked who she talked to when she was lonely, when she had a fight with Dad, when she wanted to throw in the towel. Did she ever want to throw in the towel?

I ended the call and turned to my husband listening at the kitchen table. “She holds a treasure trove of stories about Mom, about my parents’ early life together. I wonder how much she’d be willing to share with me. Do you think we could make a road trip to Montana this spring?”

“…it’s undergoing review!”

2011-12-02T19:58:00.000-08:00

Those three little words from a literary agent carry such weight, such hope. I’m buoyed for days, even weeks. And there’s that perky little exclamation point at the end. What secret message of encouragement is it meant to convey?

As a child, whenever I complained about too much silence from my older siblings away at college or I worried because Dad was late from work, Mom’s comment was always the same: No news is good news. And so, as I enter the agent search for a second time in hopes of landing a home for my new memoir, I keep my mother’s words in the back of my head.

The first time around, when I sought publication for The Thirty-Ninth Victim, it was a largely USPS process – expensive and cumbersome. Not only did you have to print and mail the materials, but also include that awful Self Addressed Stamped Envelope for the return of rejected materials. I learned to dread getting the mail. But at least I knew when my work was rejected. I had physical evidence.

With electronic submissions I have learned that one must read agent submission guidelines more carefully than ever before. No news is good news no longer holds weight in a world where on-line guidelines include some version of the statement: If you haven’t heard from us within 3 weeks, assume that we are not interested. You’d think they could simply send an It’s not for me email. And some agents do. But many do not. So even if the writer maintains a neat little Excel spreadsheet to track submissions, in the absence of careful reading, said writer may find herself waiting longer than any reasonable person would wait in hopes of a positive response. On the other hand, if a writer reads each and every detail (more than once) – as I have now learned to do – she still waits. But then, after the appropriate time has elapsed, she scratches that agent’s name and submits to another to keep her active submissions list at a nice even dozen.

Given this world of electronic silence, any response – even a rejection – I welcome. (Is it just me, or are there others who feel that an email, like a letter or a phone message, deserves a response?) So when an agent requests the full manuscript, my heart swells. And when I open my email to the words “…it’s undergoing review!” I still use my mother’s words of comfort as I wait and wait and wait with fingers crossed. No news is good news, I tell myself as I imagine my manuscript moving from computer to computer, hand to hand (does anyone print hardcopies anymore?), meeting to meeting, slowly climbing that humble path to publication.

Defining American

2011-10-30T20:47:00.000-07:00

Fall has arrived in Seattle, and I’m back in the classroom: my microcosm of immigration. I’ve been following the story of Jose Antonio Vargas, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist whose article in the New York Times Magazine on June 22, 2011 told of his illegal immigration to the United States at age 12. Despite telling his truth – a decision made because living the lie became harder than facing the consequences of telling the truth – Vargas has yet to be picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As he waits for ICE to knock down his door, he has dedicated himself to building a conversation around immigration reform in the United States. And as the Dream Act continues to flounder, Vargas asks us what it means to be American on his website: www.defineamerican.org . I’ve asked my student to read Vargas’s story and to meet his challenge by writing their own definitions of “American.” This is not an easy assignment. I decided I should try it myself…

I am not one who believes much in national borders: artificial lines drawn and redrawn in the dirt by warring parties throughout the ages. The word “American” is equally problematic. Used to define those holding the coveted U.S. passport, it is a misnomer I have struggled with since my early years in high school geography class when I questioned if Canadians and Mexicans were also called Americans. Later, during my ex-pat years in Latin America, I struggled to get my tongue around Estadunidense because I quickly learned that use of the word Americana was offensive to some. In Mexico, when still others reminded me that they too were Estadunidenses given that the legal name of Mexico is the Estados Unidos Mexicanos, I would smile and quote Gertrude Stein: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” At times I claimed Canadian citizenship just to avoid conflict as I continued to work both with and without documents on the southern side of the U.S. border.

In today’s world of political and economic crisis, of failed immigration reform, child deportations and apples rotting in the vast orchards of Eastern Washington, use of the word American becomes more than a mere question of semantics. Jose Antonio Vargas defines American “…as someone who works really hard. Someone who’s proud to be in this country and wants to contribute to society.” I am comfortable with this definition. This land that we claim as the United States of America was taken from the native people by hordes of immigrants from around the globe. What right do any of us children of immigrants have to slam the immigration door behind us? The reasons for immigrating to this land given by our parents, grandparents or the ancestors before them are no more valid than those given by today’s immigrants.

I know those reasons. I work with immigrants – both documented and undocumented. I listen to their stories, and I am present in their pain. Few immigrants leave home and loved ones, culture and language to face an uncertain future in a foreign land unless under extreme duress. There are no easy solutions to the huge immigration mess this country is experiencing, but building a wall won’t work and ripping families apart is immoral. Undocumented immigrants come from around the world, and yet the target continues to be on the backs of those from Mexico, and by extension all Latin Americans because we seem unable to distinguish between Mexicans, Central Americans and South Americans. Interesting how easily we distinguish between Latinos and Canadians.

Choosing to Remember

2011-10-08T13:13:00.000-07:00

Maureen would be 48 today. Her hair would be streaked with hints of gray. She’d be seeing life with the perspective of maturity, the patterns of her life well-established. Would Maureen be an empty-nester this autumn, her children off to college, her home a silent shell of the family life once contained within its walls? Would she have a career, the career in early childhood education she was studying for? Would she be working in a pre-school, now the experienced, wise teacher or director, now the funny, gentle soul that younger, inexperienced teachers turned to for advice and direction?

How do you imagine a sister’s life that was taken violently at 19? And how do you let go of the pain without forgetting, while still holding tight to those precious moments of childhood? I hold tight to the images of Maureen with bouncy, blond ringlets, Maureen in her Blue Birds uniform, Maureen, her blond hair now cropped short, soaking up the rays on a Mexican beach.

Violent death of a loved one cannot be forgotten, put aside, blocked without consequences – physical or emotional. My mother turned 87 two weeks before Maureen’s 48^th. Though her physical health is remarkable, she no longer remembers that I was once her middle child, the middle of nine; that she once had a daughter who was viciously murdered. Perhaps that is the blessing of dementia, the silver lining – to lose the pain. But with it she has also lost the memories of joy and love, the experiences garnered in her long life.

I choose to remember – all of it. And on this day, I choose to celebrate my sister’s short life. We can choose to embrace life’s joys and gifts or sink into the mire of pain and regret. Though a memoirist, I don’t live in the past, but I do remember the past. I cherish the memories both glorious and horrific because they form the bulk of who I am. I choose to remember it all because I believe that by blocking this painful memory or that one, we also lose the neighboring memories of joy, of excitement, of that last trip to Puerto Vallarta together.

I am grateful to have known Maureen for the 19 years of her short life. Perhaps we’ll cross paths again someday. Perhaps we already have.

Rejection

2011-08-23T09:21:00.001-07:00

I pulled myself out of bed Sunday morning, poured a cup of steaming black coffee and stumbled into my writing room. I used to be one of those people who jump out of bed, rested, alert, looking good and ready to face a new day full of energy and vigor. Not anymore. Now I struggle to fall asleep, struggle to wake up and would be hard pressed to find anyone who’d say I looked good first thing in the morning.

Cup in hand, I leaned over my desk and switched on my laptop – a morning routine repeated every day of the year. I sank into the desk chair and stared at the creamy yellow wall in front of me. A beep from the computer told me to key in my password. A few taps and I waited. A squirrel scavenged for hazelnut fragments in the shelled picnic area under the overgrown cherry tree. A serious pruning and one more year before decide what to do with the monster. I clicked on Outlook and took a few more sips of hot coffee, willing myself awake, alert.

Outlook opened, and Renee Zuckerbrot was in my Inbox. I’d submitted the query less than 24 hours prior. In less than 24 hours this literary agent in New York opened her own Inbox and looked over my synopsis, bio and first chapter. Her decision: “Moving Mom isn't a good fit for my list.”

I was stunned. This world of email queries was new to me. Less than half dozen years ago when I was querying The Thirty-Ninth Victim few agents accepted on-line submissions, making the process costly, slow and wasteful. Here I had a response, albeit not the response I wanted, in 24 hours and it cost me nothing. Not a single trip to the post office.

I slumped at my desk. Rejection. Such a harsh word. I decided to search for a positive spin. What good comes in an agent’s rejection? At least she read it, I thought. Or, at least she read enough to know it wasn’t a manuscript she’d be successful representing. And that’s what any writer wants, isn’t it? An agent who is as passionate about the work as the writer herself. An agent who feels a strong enough connection to the piece to know she’ll be able to place it with just the right publishing house.

Another positive lies in the quality of the response. Renee Zuckerbrot responded not only with courtesy and respect, but she also included a list of on-line, searchable agent databases to help me locate an agent who might be a better match for my work. A rejection that offers that type of advice and encouragement is definitely a positive.

There could be as many agents as there are writers, and it may be a bit like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack to find the right match, but I’ll put a dozen queries into cyberspace. With each rejection, I’ll narrow my search, blowing the chafe from the stalk, moving the haystack one handful at a time until the needle pricks my finger, until I wake one morning, pour my coffee, click on my computer and find an offer of representation.

For those who are interested, here are the websites that Rene Zuckerbrot suggested:

AAR online: http://aaronline.org/
Agent in a Box: http://www.webook.com/literary-agents/writers.aspx
Agentquery: http://www.agentquery.com/
The Agent Database at Poets &Writers: http://www.pw.org/literary_agents?perpage=*

Correction

2011-08-13T11:09:00.001-07:00

I titled my last post “Seat Time,” a term used in education (hours in the classroom which may or may not lead to learning) and in writing (hours needed to create anything of quality.) The appropriate title for that blog entry would have been “Saddle Time,” hence the correction below. A quick Google search of saddle time shows references to bikes, motorcycles and horses.

My apologies to those educators who know that seat time has nothing to do with anything on two wheels or four legs, to writers aware of the impossibility of creating a decent piece of writing without endless hours of seat time, and to the bikers who had a good laugh at my ignorance. I’ll see you at STP next year.

Saddle Time (formerly Seat Time)

2011-08-04T16:28:00.000-07:00

Regularity without some metaphysical value behind it, some beauty of soul or character, was more disappointing – and indeed repulsive – than the honestly haphazard, the humanly messy. It was more disappointing because it promised something that was not there: it should engage the soul, but did not. It was shallow and meretricious.

44 Scotland Street, Alexander McCall Smith, p. 219

My first purchase was a guitar, the second a bicycle. The guitar is still stashed in the attic four decades later. The bike is gone. I remember it as a yellow, drop bar, ten-speed. I was a high school senior, living in my parents’ home at the top of Tiger Mountain. Like most teenagers, I was driven by a strong desire for independence and a total lack of funds. I didn’t have a car and there was no bus service, so I landed my first job at Clampitt’s Cleaners and bought a bike from the Issaquah Hardware Store. The summer after graduation I rode that bike seven miles to and from work along the narrow, rough shoulders of the Issaquah-Hobart Road with traffic whipping by at fifty. I don’t remember a helmet.

I’ve ridden a bit off and on through the years, but never considered myself a biker, never commuted to work by bike, never participated in long distance, organized rides. A lifetime has passed since that younger version of me rode a bike to her first job. Maybe two or three.

In late May, I was walking Alki Beach with a friend. It’s a weekly routine that we both cherish: a long walk followed by a beer at the local Irish pub.

“I’ve signed us up for the Seattle to Vancouver ride,” she said.

“Us?” I asked.

“The whole family.”

“Do they know it yet?”

“I thought it would be a good way to get in shape this summer,” she said, a laugh in her voice and a mischievous twinkle in her dark eyes.

She told me it was a two-day ride, similar to the well-known Seattle to Portland ride, but north bound instead of south and in August rather than July. I’d never heard of it.

“We’ll be riding every weekend,” she said. “Why don’t you join us?”

“Sounds like fun,” I said. “The weekend rides anyway. I’m not so sure about the whole group ride thing. And I’m definitely not up to riding two hundred miles.”

That evening I started googling. I wanted to learn what I could about the ride and about how to prepare for it. I found a training schedule that outlined regular rides three times weekly with target distances beginning in February. We were already four months behind schedule, and I was a good fifteen pounds overweight. Despite regular walks and gym workouts, I was out of shape. I knew that the two-day ride was out of the question, but the exercise sounded like a great idea.

After the first twenty-mile ride, my husband decided he was having none of it. A gentle ten miles on a designated path was fine, but accumulating miles and seat time for an artificial goal made no sense to him. He had better things to do with those hours. But I continued to ride three days a week through June and July.

Now it’s August and each challenge, every hill, has given me greater confidence. I no longer fear living at the top of a hill. I know I can ride it. My quads burn. My knees talk to me. I’ve found muscles and bones I didn’t know I had. But I keep riding.

I’ve always considered myself a very alert person, but with biking I am developing a level of awareness surpassing anything I’ve ever known. But still there are surprises.

A little girl stopped in front of me as I rode the Seattle waterfront. Pink dress, blond curls, she seemed no taller than my front tire.

Her family crossed in front of me from the parking lot to the waterfront attractions. Hands poised on my brakes, I slowed, but there was plenty of space. Then, something caught the child’s attention. She paused. I braked hard and landed on my handle bars. Skidding to a stop, the edge of my front tire grazed one sparkling sandal. Her eyes met mine, round and blue.

“Are you okay?” the father asked me through his cigarette smoke.

“Are you okay?” I asked the child. She nodded to me, and I rode off.

“Look what you did. You’ve got to watch where you’re going.” I heard the father scold the child as I rode away. I smiled thinking of her wide eyes, her nod. I hope she holds tight to her curiosity, to her understanding, to her forgiveness.

Each ride opens my eyes to the city in ways I’ve never seen it before. I often ride Alaskan Way from West Seattle to downtown. A towering wall of shipping containers line the rail tracks on one side, cranes tower above me on the other. The bike lane is rough, uneven and checkered with detours for road construction – a new off-ramp from the West Seattle Bridge, prep work for the tunnel designed to replace the unstable north-south viaduct by boring through the same unstable tide flats that the viaduct is built on.

I ride Alaskan Way through dust and exhaust fumes and think about my ride the day before along the Sammamish River, the sun warm on my back, the sweet fragrance of rugosa roses and fresh cut grass floating on a soft breeze. I remember the words of McCall Smith, words that made such an impression I copied them into the small notebook I use for those ideas that I don’t want to let slip away.

McCall Smith expressed a sentiment I was never able to put into my own words: that more beauty can be found in the haphazard grit and grime of hard work and daily life than in the idealized perfection of a materialized world. For while I loved the natural beauty of the slow moving Sammamish River with tall grasses lining its shores, the open fields once dotted with large dairy herds, and the musical call of a gold finch perched on an overhead branch, the picture perfect condos along certain strips of the trail and the looming reality of Redmond Town Centre, an upscale world of commercial materialism, just beyond the long row of tall cottonwoods swaying in the gentle breeze, made me uncomfortable.

As I wave a morning greeting to the immigrants fishing off the Harbor Island dock, as I ride past the homeless waking under the overpasses, some in semi-established tent homes, others under nothing more than a pile of ratty blankets, I feel the pulse – and messiness – of human life.

Goals on the First Day of Summer

2011-06-21T08:27:00.000-07:00

“Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost. That idea is hard to accept. We all have an emotional equity in our first draft; we can’t believe that it wasn’t born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn’t.”

William Zinsser, On Writing Well (p. 83)

In life, as in writing, reaching a goal without a tremendous amount of rewriting is an impossible task. I watch immigrant and refugee students rewrite their lives each day with their commitment to learning English, adapting to a new land, setting new goals for themselves and their families. As I sat on the stage of Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle last Thursday for the South Seattle Community College graduation ceremony, I was thinking these thoughts, thinking about how these students in front of me, their faces painted with the joy of accomplishment, were rewriting their own destinies and perhaps the future of their families as well. When President Gary Oertli asked those graduates who were the first in their families to attend college to stand, it seemed that at least half the graduating class was on their feet. The audience went wild with applause. My hands stung. These are graduates who are indeed rewriting the future by reaching for and achieving goals that at one time may have seemed impossible, and perhaps even unnecessary.

As I sat and watched the graduates cross the stage, my thoughts began to wander. I started to think about my own goals. I had thought that I’d spend the summer focused solely on the first rewrite of my current manuscript because despite my emotional attachment to each and every single typed word, phrase, sentence and scene, I know perfection has eluded me. But, as always, there are distractions. A writer friend sent me information about a contest that might be a perfect match for that unpublished novel of mine. Another writer friend suggested I apply for a writing residency, but the dreaded Artist’s Statement is a requirement of the application process. A third writer friend sent me a list of agents to contact as I begin the query process to find a home for my new memoir.

The more personal temptations in life also possess a strong pull. Friends have invited me to train with them for the Seattle to Vancouver bike ride in early August – training that sadly should be well underway by now. And then there’s the wonderful distraction of summer visitors and the tempting appeal of a summer road trip; there’s the siren song of stacks of books waiting to be read while swinging gently in the hammock strung in the shade of the magnolia and the red bud. So, like those students graduating last Thursday, I need to rewrite my priorities and hone my focus in order to reach the goals I set for myself as the morning sun glows on this first day of summer.

Costs of Immigration

2011-05-09T21:23:00.000-07:00

Saturday evening. I sit at our heavy dining room table, a stack of papers in front of me, a grade book to the side, another stack still in my book bag. The life of a teacher. The light is soft, the walls warm sienna. I hear the sounds of water in the kitchen as Tom prepares a late dinner of salad and fresh crab. My daughter’s boyfriend, Elliot, sits at the opposite end of the table, protractor and pen in his hands, doing his homework. I am reading “practice” scholarship applications - an exercise I have my upper level ESL students do in preparation for college, in preparation for the long arduous task of finding funding to cover the rising costs of a community college education.

We live in a culture that demands we bare our souls – and our economic urgencies – before help is offered. I feel embarrassed, intrusive, as I as read these personal documents of income and expenses, these narratives of struggle to overcome unbearable odds that have led these students to my classroom.

I teach immigrants and refugees at a community college in Seattle. This quarter I have a group of 23 students from 16 different nations. This is not unusual. My college serves one of the most ethnically diverse zip codes in the country. The average age on my campus is 36. This too is reflected in the range of ages in my students. Diversity stares me in the face every morning at 8:00 a.m. But there is also hidden diversity that is easily overlooked or ignored in a culture like ours that does not want to think about social class, that prefers to think of itself as a classless society in a global economy.

“So here’s one,” I say. “A family of 3 living on $700 a month. And here’s another. A family of 6 on $550 a month.”

“How can they do it?” Elliot asks.

“I don’t know. Multiple families in single-family homes,” I say. “They’re survivors. Not like the TV show, but the real thing. These people have been through hell and they know how to live on nothing.”

I look around me. The soft chandelier overhead, the billowing curtains hung on handcrafted iron rods, the leather love seat on the plush rug, the paintings on the walls. I imagine the full refrigerator and packed cupboards in the adjacent kitchen. By American standards, I do not live an opulent life. I live on a teacher’s salary with an artist husband. And yet, I think of these students who struggle each day for survival while I live my life sheltered by the cloak of privilege – white middle class privilege.

These feelings – guilt, anger, sadness – are not new. I have been teaching refugees and immigrants for over twenty years. Still, the reminders hit hard each quarter with each student paper, and I wonder. Do I push too hard? Do I expect too much of people on the edge? Yet these students know, just as I know, that only through education will they overcome the challenges of war and hunger, illiteracy and prejudice. Only with an education will they find comfort in this new land. In their narratives, all express gratitude despite the hardships they face each day. Gratitude for the opportunities they find in this new home – if not for themselves, at least for their children. These opportunities, easily taken for granted, are what made leaving behind all they knew and loved – homeland, language, culture, food, family, friends – worth the loss.

I pick up another application: a family of 4 living on a monthly budget of $325. My heart swells with respect and I am honored to hold their stories in my hands.

An invitation...

2011-04-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

I'm looking forward to reading at the Ballard Library this Thursday evening where I'll have the pleasure of sharing the podium with several wonderful writers and friends. Below I've attached the information from the library website. If you're in the Seattle area, I hope you'll be able to join us. And bring a 3-minute piece to share during open mic!

'It's About Time Writers' Reading Series'
Ballard Public Library

Thursday, Apr. 14, 2011, 6 – 7:45 p.m.

Event type	Author Readings/Lectures
Where	Ballard Branch
Audience	Teens, Adults
Language	English
Summary	The Ballard Branch welcomes the 258th meeting of the "It's About Time Writers' Reading Series," featuring author readings and open mikes.
Full Description	This month's presentation features the work of Mike Hickey, Don Harmon and Corbin Lewars, with a short lecture by Arleen Williams on The Writer's Craft. Between author readings, open mike time is available for three minutes per person.
Event Notes	Library events and programs are free and everyone is welcome. Registration is not required.
Contact Info	Ballard Branch 206-684-4089 or Ask a Librarian

For Judi

2011-03-26T12:36:00.000-07:00

Judi Bond

December 11, 1952 – March 24, 2011

I was raised Catholic – at least through my early teens – but haven’t been to mass in years. I no longer believe, perhaps never believed, in the rituals of organized religion. And yet throughout my years living in Mexico and travels in Europe, the Catholic church was always a place to go for quiet rest and reflection, for peace and refuge. The doors were always open to those in need of a place to sit for a few moments or a few hours.

Yesterday I received word of the the death of a dear friend, a woman I knew and loved during our shared lives as expats in Mexico in the 1980s. A friend who returned to her home in England with her young son only shortly before I moved back to Seattle. We remained in contact through the years – long rambling letters back before email, holiday and birthday cards. Judi never missed a birthday, mine or that of my daughter. Yesterday my daughter, now twenty-one, said, “I loved her birthday cards. I always looked forward to opening them.”

Judi came to Seattle only once. June 1998. We took a girls’ road trip down the Oregon coast and hiked the dunes. We went white water river rafting and attended a play in the Elizabethan theater of the Ashland Shakespeare Festival. Judi spent her life in theater – teaching, acting, directing. The trip was perfection.

Last winter, when I learned that Judi was fighting cancer, I decided to spend June in England. She met me at Heathrow, and I recognized her by her eyes. Brilliant blue vibrant eyes. Her body had changed. Once plump, Judi was not only thin, but somehow smaller than I remembered her. Still, she was energetic, and she wanted an adventure. We met another friend from our Mexico years and spent a long weekend in London together: Judi, Leandra and me. We hadn’t been together in twenty-five years, but it was as though we’d never separated. It was as though we were in our twenties again. We talked of our lives, present and past. We laughed about writing a book together, even choosing a title: The Ex-Mexican Wives Club.

After London, Judi and I did another road trip together, this time to the east coast of northern England, Edinburgh, Loch Lomond, the Lake District. We stumbled into an art gallery in Judi’s hometown of Birmingham, surprised by a Bob Dylan show, and bought matching prints: Rose on a Hillside. By the time we returned to her home in Cheltenham, Judi was tired, but happy. I hoped she was truly in remission, that she had fought and won. But nine months later, Judi lost the battle.

When I learned the news yesterday morning, I was lost in the universal pain and sorrow of grief for a friend, a woman who will not see her son’s wedding, will never hold her future grandchildren. It was a beautiful day in Seattle – bright blue sky, pink cherry blossoms, yellow daffodils. The sweet fragrance of spring was in the air. I wandered my neighborhood trying to walk away the pain. I walked to exhaustion and still felt troubled, a heavy sadness settling into my bones. I’d been calling England every other weekend or so since last summer, not wanting to lose the close connection we’d reestablished during those long driving hours last June. We talked of dreams. “What’s on your bucket list?” I asked during a recent call.

“More travel,” she said without pause.

“Where?” I asked.

“Southern Italy,” she said, her voice dreamy and soft. “I’ve never been to southern Italy.”

I wanted to make that trip a reality this summer but that too was taken from Judi.

As I walked the streets blindly until I passed Holy Rosary, the local Catholic church – a church I have not entered in the many years I’ve lived in West Seattle – an old urge returned. I longed for the cool quiet of an empty church, the filtered light through stained glass windows, the heavy smell of candles and incense. I wanted to find that gentle peace of acceptance. I tried the side door. Locked. I tried the front doors. Locked. I stood for a moment, surprised and disappointed. Solace denied. I could not sit in meditative silence. I could not light a candle for my dear friend. I didn’t know that churches were locked. I remembered entering churches on a recent trip to the east coast. Is it only tourist churches that remain unlocked during the day?

Disappointed, I walked home. There, I gathered a few photographs of those I have lost: my dear friend, Judi; my writing partner, Sandra E. Jones; my sister, Maureen, my father. I collected a few mementos: a jade ring, a tiny theatrical mask, a Celtic medallion, a candle. I arranged my tokens on the corner of a bookcase in my writing room under a red T-shirt shaped lamp that once belonged to Sandra, and I lit the candle for my most recent lost loved one. For Judi.

Again

2011-02-21T10:57:00.000-08:00

This piece appeared in The Seattle Times on March 4, 2011, under the title, "The painful legacy of Gary Ridgway." It also appeared at seattletimes.com.

Saturday, February 19, 2011. The face of my sister’s killer fills the front page of The Seattle Times. Again. Older now, balding, his expression somehow more menacing than in the 2001 photographs. His orange prison jumpsuit stark against the gray background jumps from the six by eight inch photograph. My morning coffee sloshes as once again I begin my day by reliving the horror of my sister’s murder.

“The nation’s most prolific killer marked his 62^nd birthday Friday by pleading guilty to his 49^th murder." A birthday gift to Gary Ridgway. Another notch on his belt. I remember other birthdays. I remember the November 30, 2001 arrest on my father’s eightieth birthday. I remember that my sister would be forty seven today if not for this man. Ridgway claims over seventy victims but has been convicted of only forty nine murders – those whose remains have been found.

I wonder how many times other teenagers have stumbled across remains just like those who found Becky Marrero’s skull. I wonder how many times those finds have not been reported because by making a police report, the teens fear they’d have to explain what they were doing in the woods in the first place. I imagine kids partying – drinking, drugs, sex – all the teen vices that would land a kid in trouble. I am grateful to the teens who reported finding Marrero’s remains, just as I was grateful many years ago to those who found my sister.

I read The Seattle Times article and learn that Ridgway was moved from the state penitentiary in Walla Walla to the Regional Justice Center in King County, and I remember the paper I signed. The paper that assured me that I would be notified of any movement of the prisoner, any changes in the conditions of his incarceration. I received no such notification. I do not know when the prisoner will be transported back to Walla Walla. Once again the failures of our legal system haunt me. I am not an abused wife or a key witness to a mob crime. I do not need police protection. But still, I was assured I would be notified, and I was not.

Gary Ridgway confessed to the murder of Becky Marrero over a decade ago. Because her remains had not been found, he could not be convicted of that crime. Still, because of this earlier confession, Ridgway is protected by the plea bargain that spared his life. I understand the anger and pain expressed by Becky Marrero’s sister: “What does it take to get the death penalty in the state of Washington, your honor? It makes me sick to my stomach that he beat the system.” Still, I cannot agree with Mary Marrero. Without the plea bargain, Ridgway would be dead, and she and her family may never have had their day in court. And what about the other thirty one possible victims? Girls, young women, that Ridgway claims to have murdered? With Ridgway’s death, his secrets die and so does the possibility of ever finding the truth behind the disappearances of so many young victims. I would not wish to deprive anyone, any family, of even the slightest possibility of finding the truth behind the disappearance of a loved one.

From a practical sense, what would the death penalty give us? Another couple of decades of legal procedures at the cost of hundreds of thousands of tax dollars? Better to let the man rot in prison. Better to see his aging face on the front page of the newspaper each time the remains of another victim are found and identified. I only ask that I be notified of the prisoner’s movements so I do not have to learn of it from The Seattle Times. And I ask that he not be given anymore outings on his birthday – a bit too much like a gift for someone in solitary confinement.

The Painting

2011-01-21T17:42:00.000-08:00

Published in Crosscurrents, the annual literary magazine of the Washington Community College Humanities Association,The Painting received the best prose award for 2010. I hope you enjoy the story...

The room was cold: cement block walls, a high ceiling with exposed beams, cracked linoleum over a concrete floor. I was with a friend in a working class neighborhood in the industrial north of Mexico City. The earthquakes of 1985 had not yet leveled large areas of the city, many much like this one, a barrio that saw few young gringa faces.

I stood just inside the metal door, awestruck by the artwork that covered every inch, floor to ceiling, of the ten foot walls. Bold, powerful paintings. I didn’t know how to respond to the work that surrounded me: a Parisian salon in Mexican concrete, a room full of paintings in one of the poorest barrios in the capitol.

My friend had brought me to meet his uncle and aunt, Antonio and Domi, both political activists and talented artists. I tried to follow the conversation as we stood in the first of a string of connected rooms that formed the apartment, one room running into the next through a single door, no wasted space for hallways, no luxury of privacy. My Spanish was good, but still I struggled, comprehension floating just beyond my grasp.

“La mesa,” Antonio said. “The table is all that is needed.”

And, indeed, a large, rough hewn table and a scattering of chairs were the only furniture in the large, cold room.

“La mesa is used for all. For preparing and eating the food. For painting and making the clothes. For love making and sleeping. La mesa is the center of the proletariat life.”

Domi smiled, calm and silent. She excused herself with a nod to cook a simple meal of beans and tortillas in a dark, corner kitchen as I followed my friend and his uncle into the next room. This one was a clutter of books, drawings and political pamphlets. A mimeograph machine stood in the middle of the room. There were several easels and shelves lined with paints. Brushes stood, bristles up, in empty glass jars. I was unable to understand the stream of rapid-fire conversation between the two men and soon lost interest, impatient to return to the first room.

Like most old Mexican buildings, the apartment was dark with few windows. How was it possible to create such vivid, powerful images in such darkness, I wondered as I slipped back through the open doorway. Intense, haunting paintings in deep, rich, dark oils hung from every wall. Some in rustic wood frames, others only stretched canvases. Images of campesinos doing fieldwork and obreros in urban factories, street scenes that reached out and grabbed me. These paintings told the story of the life and struggles of the disenfranchised, the working poor, the campesinos who left their subsistence farms to seek a better life in the capitol only to find themselves struggling to survive. Daily life depicted in dark oil with thick, heavy brush strokes. These were the images, the contrasts of wealth and poverty, beauty and squalor, that I struggled to capture in my own black and white photography. I stood overwhelmed by a sense of guilt and dismay before the injustices that stared me in the face.

I moved around room like a sleepwalker, staring at the images, large and small, absorbing, smelling, savoring the world through Antonio’s brushstrokes. I knew nothing of art, only that I was in the presence of immense beauty and unrewarded talent. I lost sense of time until I felt someone at my side.

“Which you like?” Antonio asked.

“All of them,” I whispered.

His deep, hearty laugh startled me. “Ahhh, but I cannot give you all,” he said. “But one, yes, you take one.”

“I can’t.”

“You must. I sad if you no take.”

These words, spoken in broken English, I understood with total clarity, and I was stunned silent. I knew I couldn’t pay him. I was earning pesos, but often paying tourist prices. More importantly, I knew that even the offer would be an insult.

“Which one?” he insisted.

“That one,” I said. I pointed to a painting I’d returned to several times as I wandered through the room. A campesina wrapped in a reboso, her body round, a cloth bag heavy in the crook of her bent arm. She walked along railroad tracks at the end of a long day. I knew before Antonio told me that Domi had posed for this painting, that Domi posed for many of his paintings.

“You like this one, yes?” Antonio said from behind me as I stared up at the painting.

“Yes,” I said.

I watched in disbelief as he took the painting from the wall where it was tacked to crumbling concrete and handed it to me. “It is yours,” he said. “Now we eat.”

* * *

For almost thirty years that painting has been with me, moving from Mexico City back to Seattle, through divorce and remarriage, motherhood to middle age. For most of those years the painting remained unprotected in the rustic wooden frame that held it when Antonio removed it from the wall.

Odd how we live many lives, how we bury the relics of our past lives when we begin new adventures. When I remarried in Seattle, most of the mementos and the associated memories of my years in Mexico were pushed aside, boxed and shoved out of sight. For over twenty years, Antonio’s painting hung in a dark corner of a basement bedroom. I suppose I wanted a new beginning, a new life, so I pushed aside the intense memories of that young woman who lived in Mexico City. But like all memories, they needed air and surfaced of their own accord.

It was a late morning Sunday in early autumn. With coffee in hand, my husband and I stood in the living room of our small West Seattle home.

“We need to get some real artwork,” Tom muttered.

“Tired of the prints from Italy?” I asked.

“Tired of prints in general.”

“We could put up some of your work. We have a few pieces in the attic.”

“Too big. All wrong,” he said.

My husband, the artist, spends his life doing murals and room designs for others. Our home is a classic example of the proverbial shoemaker’s barefoot children. His years of art school and fine art are boxed in the attic, packed away along with my life in Mexico. Both of us buried large parts of ourselves and our personal histories as we ended first marriages and the pain that patterned their failures. I hesitated before speaking.

“What about that painting downstairs?” I asked.

“From Mexico?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve always liked that piece. It doesn’t belong in the basement.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

He looked at me with that expression of his. The one of shallow patience.

“I thought you didn’t like it,” I said. I thought you didn’t want the reminder of my past life, my past husband, staring you in the face each day was what I was really saying.

“The only thing I ever said was that it needs a decent frame,” he said.

“I thought that was just an excuse,” I said.

“Excuse?”

“Yeah, I thought you didn’t want Mexico on these walls.”

“I want good art,” he said. “That piece is good art.”

Later that day, I removed the framed print from above the piano and replaced it with the painting Antonio gifted me in Mexico some thirty years earlier. The canvas hung loose from the rough frame.

“It can’t stay there without a decent frame and some protective glass,” Tom said when he walked into the room. “The sunlight will ruin it.”

Now, Antonio’s painting hangs in a hardwood frame, behind museum quality glass on our dining room wall. A peasant woman in a long skirt, dark reboso and huaraches walks home at twilight. A woman like so many I knew at a distance and respected without reserve during my years in their city. The women whose children could never attend the English classes I was hired to teach, could never afford the schools of the privileged class. These were the women who sold me their fruits and vegetables in open air markets, who prepared my comida corrida in the cafes of the working class, who sold cobs of corn from iron grills or tamales from large kettles on every street corner.

The railroad crossing signs stand stark against a cobalt evening sky. In burnt sienna and brown ochre, Domi walks through my middle class, middle American life, reminding me each day of all I have and all I cherish.

Headline News – Christmas Eve 2010

2011-01-01T16:20:00.000-08:00

The rains fall. The land shifts.

From under the mud and water, Earth reveals her secrets.

Memories shift. Only pain is constant.

“Anything interesting in the news this morning?” I asked as I do each morning. My husband is the newspaper reader, my source for daily headlines.

“Yeah, but you’re not going to like it.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“He’s in the news. Again.”

It was early morning Christmas Eve. Maybe I was a bit slow, distracted by a sense of well-being. Our daughter was home for the holidays. The house comfortable, warm, fragrant. A beautiful tree, a tree we had selected and chopped down in the shifting mud of the Issaquah Valley on a bright sunny day only a week before, now stood regal in the corner window of our small living room. The lights on the tree, the mantle, the piano twinkled bright in the morning darkness, and I felt only joy in the early minutes of the day.

“What is it?” I asked again as I poured my first cup of rich dark coffee.

“Another victim,” he said.

“Let me see,” I said with more force than I intended.

He handed me the paper and there it was. Gary Ridgway’s face on the front page of the Seattle Times. The Green River Killer. The man who murdered my youngest sister. Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. The horrors of Christmases past overwhelmed me. The Christmas of the sentencing, December 18, 2003. The Christmas of the arrest, November 30, 2001. Here it was all over again smeared across the front page of the morning paper.

I scanned the article and then went back and read it slowly, carefully. The same paragraph that appeared in every article, almost the exact wording, was here again. The same paragraph about how Ridgway preyed on young women “most of whom were runaways, prostitutes and drug addicts.” Even now, even in today’s newspaper, that’s all they were. Even on Christmas Eve 2010 that’s all they remain. Have we learned nothing?

Rebecca Marrero was a friend of Marie Malvar. My sister’s story always comes back to Marie Malvar. The girl whose father tracked Ridgway back to his house, who called the police demanding that they come and question the man who was the last person seen with his daughter. The cops came, chatted with Ridgway and left. Twenty some years later Ridgway led those cops to the remains of that father’s daughter, remains only a short distance from where the cops chatted with the polite, white, Kenworth truck painter while the Filipino father with broken English waited for something to happen, waited for the cops to find his daughter. The cops failed.

They failed when my sister was still alive. Failed to catch Marie Malvar’s killer before he caught my sister.

Now the remains of Marie Malvar’s friend, Rebecca Marrero, have been found. Last seen in November 1982, Mother Earth waited almost 30 years to reveal her secret. If DNA proves that Rebecca Marrero was a Green River victim, Gary Ridgway will be up for the death penalty. The case will remain front page news and we, the victims of his slaughter, will never be left in peace to mourn our losses and get on with our lives.

One of these victims is the daughter of Rebecca Marrero. I cannot imagine the horror of learning of your mother through the media, through articles like the one in the newspaper on Christmas Eve. The scars must run so very deep. Thick Grand Canyon scars. The Seattle Times stated that the family was unavailable for comment. Go figure. Give them some respect. Give them some peace. Back off and let them mourn this Christmas Eve. I screamed in silent despair. Will this nightmare never end?

Ghosts of Christmases past. Three other photographs were splashed across the front page on Christmas Eve. Photographs of three other girls, suspected Ridgway victims, victims who he did not name or claim, who DNA cannot confirm. Another public reminder to the families of loved ones lost. The article also mentioned three more sets of unidentified human remains, descriptions limited to estimates of age and race. Also probable Ridgway victims. Seven victims in one newspaper article.

I took the scissors from the kitchen knife rack and slowly, gently, respectfully cut the article from the newspaper.

“I’ll add this to my collection,” I told my husband as I folded the article. I saw the sadness in his eyes, that cloud of worry and concern I see whenever the case resurfaces in the news.

“How long have you known about this?” I asked.

“Only a few days?”

“When?”

“Really, just a few days. There was an article about the remains being found, but it hadn’t been tied to him yet.”

“Tell me,” I told him. “I’d rather know.” I’d rather learn about it in the safety of your arms was what I should have said. I’d rather be affronted by the horror of memory, the pain of a scab scrapped off, of stitches pulled taunt by festering inflammation, in the safe security of my peaceful kitchen in the company of my loving, supportive partner than anywhere else in the world. I can handle the horror in his embrace.

Writing Tip #2

2010-12-19T07:39:00.000-08:00

As I reshape my daily schedule to allow more writing time, I find myself digging deep into memory to write my truth. At the same time the evil censor kicks in telling me what I can and can't write. That's when I turn to the godfather of writing instruction and cling to the life raft of his words:

“You’re under no obligation to ask all your brothers and sisters and cousins how they remember the family saga. They will all remember it differently; there’s no one authorized version of the shared past.”

William Zinsser, Writing About Your Life – A Journey into the Past (p. 112)

Sandra E. Jones

2010-12-12T15:42:00.000-08:00

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Dear Sandi,

I write these words on your deep blue sofa in the company of your loving friends, my loving friends – the Uptown Writers – and my heart aches for you. We gather to write, to cry, to remember because you wanted us to write today. A final request. We make scribbles on pages damp with tears.

I don’t know how to say good bye. I have never learned this lesson. So I write a letter, just as I wrote to my sister and then to my father.

I’m wearing my orange T-shirt. I tell you this because you would want to know. You always said it was a good color for me. I know that the next time I go shopping I will look for more oranges, earth tones, the colors of autumn, the colors of this season of thanks, this season when you were taken from us.

I don’t remember the day we met. It’s hard to admit, but I was so wrapped up in my insecurity about joining your writing group I fear I hardly acknowledged anyone’s presence. I do remember your 60^th birthday at Camp Long shortly after I joined the group. You were beautiful and you were exhausted, yet you encouraged all to enjoy the evening, enjoy each other, enjoy life. I admired your strength even then, not yet knowing, not understanding the gravity of your condition or the determination with which you were fighting for your life.

I wish I had known you before the illness. I did not know the healthy Sandi, the cancer-free Sandi. Still I was fortunate to know the fighter, the woman warrior who endured more suffering than most can imagine, the woman warrior who maintained a sense of humor, that wry cleverness that at first I struggled to understand. You fought and won for four years – with style, with humor, with grace.

The fight is over. I do not know where you are now. I have no belief system that explains death through comforting promises. But the sun has just shone bright through your window onto the bowed heads and moving pens of the writers gathered here, and I know that for this brief moment you are here with us.

Through your fight, your determination, your humor and your total absence of self pity, you taught me to get on with my life, live it to the fullest, and let go of the pain and insecurities of the past. That’s the curse of a memoirist – always digging in the past turning the soil, trying to find worms of truth, of understanding. But by turning the soil of the past, I learn to live stronger in the present just as you lived in the present during these short years I have known you. You were always present, always at the writing table, always listening to our collective words, always ready with a nugget of encouragement. Now there is an empty chair at our table but your spirit is alive in the hearts of the writers seated there.

Good bye, dear friend. I will miss you. I will remember you. Always.

Arleen

Writing Tip #1

2010-11-23T16:07:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a lot of reading about writing lately. I thought it might be fun to share some nuggets of wisdom that I'm gleaning from others. To that end, I'll post a quote every week or so.

Here's the first quote:

"Writing every day is the key to becoming a writer. Writing every day is the key to remaining a writer. It is the only secret, the only trick. Don't despise the fifteen-minute write. Don't despise writing in your journal. Don't despise writing down your complaints for fifteen minutes before going to work. Any writing counts."

Priscilla Long, The Writer's Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life

Hope You Can Make It...

2010-11-16T18:03:00.000-08:00

Oh, what a night...

2010-11-08T20:50:00.000-08:00

Seattle’s Richard Hugo House was standing room only as Janet Yoder launched the first ever reading of Sunday Ink: Works by the Uptown Writers. We sailed through our selections of work and introductions of each other. At the close of the evening, we gathered on the stage and linked arms in an impromptu celebratory bow of appreciation to our fabulous audience of family, friends and fellow writers.

Sunday Ink: Works by the Uptown Writers is an eclectic, multi-genre anthology of fiction and fairytale, poetry and play, with a touch of memoir that adds an element of personal narrative to the collection. The Uptown Writers—Carol Bolt, Pamela Hobart Carter, Geri Gale, Sandra E. Jones, Susan Knox, Stacy Lawson, Arleen Williams, and Janet Yoder—gather for timed-writing practice every Sunday morning. Sunday Ink is a product of that process and their commitment to writing and art.

This anthology is unique not only due to the supportive nature of our writing practice, but also in the way the individual pieces came together to form a book. We did not plan our pieces, or select them collectively, or even choose a controlling theme. We each simply offered the work that we wanted to include and our talented editor, Waverly Fitzgerald, and designer extraordinaire, Pamela Farrington, melded our works into a book. Priscilla Long’s beautiful introduction completed the process. Like the reading itself, the book flows like the water of a gentle summer stream.

If you'd like to join us for a reading, we'll be at the Writers’ Cottage, the home of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association in Issaquah on Saturday, November 20^th at noon.

The PNWA Writers’ Cottage

317 NW Gilman Blvd, Space #8

Issaquah, WA 98027

For me, this reading will be a homecoming of sorts, having grown up in the Issaquah Valley and graduated from Issaquah High School. I hope to see you there!

Sunday Ink: Works by the Uptown Writers

2010-10-06T18:19:00.000-07:00

I have the amazing good fortune of sharing timed writing practice every Sunday morning with an eclectic group of talented writers. Week after week words flow from pens to paper as the minutes tick away. Some of those words flow into fiction and memoir, others into poetry and plays.Now some of those words are available for your reading pleasure in a new anthology titled Sunday Ink: Works by the Uptown Writers.

If you're in the Seattle area, I hope you have the opportunity to celebrate the book release with us at Richard Hugo House on Thursday, October 28th at 6:30 p.m.

An Invitation

2010-09-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

Back in June, I enjoyed the pleasure of announcing the publication of my short memoir piece “The Promise” in a newly released anthology edited by Nancy Worssam titled In Our Prime: Empowering Women on Love, Family, Career, Aging and Just Coping.

Today I’d like to invite those of you in the Seattle area to a reading at Richard Hugo House. "Inviting the Truth One Personal Essay at a Time" will be Tuesday, October 5th at 7:00 pm.

Time to Process

2010-08-04T07:16:00.000-07:00

At the close of an equity and social justice training institute in the coastal town of Ocean Shores, Washington, my husband joined me for a few days on the beach. This intense training fell on the heels of a three-week visit with a dear friend in England; a friend who spent the past six months fighting the cancer that had invaded her body. I needed time to process.

To process = to make sense of events lived, images observed, feelings triggered, stories shared; to understand and make sense of experiences. But how? Where to begin?

At the end of the road. A coastal highway lined in deep towering green with glimpses to the west of the wide Pacific shrouded in fog. Mist, rain, clouds, fog, gray. I’d been in gray for a month. The gray of confusion. I walked with the mist of the Pacific clouding my thoughts with heavy pungent emotion.

We drove north on the coastal highway to its end. A dead end. A town of ramshackle homes; broken windows covered with heavy woolen blankets to keep the ocean air from penetrating bones and hearts; boats that will never again float atop trailers without tires; cars abandoned to rust, stripped of all value, residence taken up by local wildlife; plastic bags, empty milk cartons, beer cans and cigarette boxes lost in the dry, unmowed grass in front and behind the hopeless homes. All contrasted against the mystical beauty of an estuary outlined with bleached drift wood and smooth-washed stones.

The natural beauty tugged at my husband. “Let’s stop and take a look.”

“No,” I said, a voice harsher than intended. I felt eyes at my back. “We don’t belong here,” I said in a feeble attempt at explanation. It felt a bit like stopping to gawk at a multiple car pile-up on Interstate 5 at rush hour, our eyes violating the privacy of the victims. “Let’s get out of here. We don’t belong,” I repeated. “We didn’t come with anything to offer. We don’t even know if there’s any way we could help. Would our help even be wanted?”

We talked of what we had to offer, of what would be of meaning or value to a depressed community, a reservation culture of which we were no part. Could my husband offer art classes? Would memoir or journal writing have meaning to people lost in the hopelessness of poverty? We talked of stereotypes. Was this reservation town the norm? An aberration? We didn’t know.

At the equity and social justice training, a YouTube video was shown. In the interview from "Our Spirits Don't Speak English: Indian Boarding School," Andrew WindyBoy spoke of his childhood experiences in a boarding school where he was violently forced to learn English and conform to the norms of white culture. I saw the lasting tragedy of his words at the northern end of that coastal highway.

We drove south.

“I have to see it,” I said.

My husband knew what I meant and turned up a road we’d passed earlier which led to a hilltop development with a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean. A planned community of perfection – perfect houses on perfect streets with perfect trees and perfect white crushed stone pathways leading from one perfect cluster of houses to the next – Key West here, Martha’s Vineyard there. I felt like vomiting.

Two realities juxtaposed against each other, separated by less than 15 miles. MapQuest precision = 12.76 miles of separation.

“The Truman Show,” my husband said.

“Disneyworld,” I said.

“Holiday escapism of the privileged,” he said.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. Again. “At least the reservation is real. The dirt, the pain, the poverty are real. What’s this? Plastic. A lily white make-believe world for the rich right next door to historic devastation of a nation of people.”

The contrast hit hard, deep. The two worlds stood as physical realities of all the theories and personal stories of oppression shared throughout the institute on equity and social justice that I’d just attended in the sterile comfort and insulated world of a hotel conference room. And now I return to my life in Seattle, a life of teaching and curriculum development; of writing, friends, family and comfort. But what do I do with these images of contrasting realities that plague my quiet moments? Realities that lie side by side on the Pacific coastal highway, in a landscape of lush green, towering evergreens and the pounding of waves on a long barren beach lost in heavy fog and floating mist.

I need more time to process.

The Promise

2010-06-19T12:10:00.000-07:00

A reader's comment about "The Promise" recently released in In Our Prime...

It’s as if I’m asked to enter a home and meet a mother and a sister and a husband and a daughter and a child for a brief moment of intimacy and sadness with the allure of a promise that hangs and hangs and hangs--the author begging herself and asking us to believe that the cyclical family pain will be at last, broken. -- Geri Gale

New Release!

2010-06-01T04:50:00.000-07:00

I'm very happy to announce the publication of my short memoir piece, "The Promise," in a new collection titled In Our Prime - Empowering Essays by Women on Love, Family, Career, Aging, and Just Coping edited by Nancy Worssam. To read more, please visit www.inourprimebook.com.

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest... An Update!

2010-04-02T11:27:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a few good friends who understand these things a whole lot better than I do, I just learned that you don’t have to own a Kindle to read an excerpt from Running Secrets and to write a customer review on www.amazon.com books. That’s good news since nobody I know has a Kindle and because the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award is one really weird contest... a bit like American Idol for books!

Here’s how it works… they accepted 5,000 general literature submissions. 1000 moved to the Second Round. Then 250 Quarterfinalists were chosen (my first novel, Running Secrets, has made it this far – yeah!). Now the complete manuscripts of those 250 are being reviewed by Publishers Weekly (the magazine that can make or break a book!) and they choose 100 semifinalists. Of those 100 (and I won’t know if I make this next cut until the end of the month), editors from Penguin publishing will choose 6 finalists.

You can go on-line to read the two Amazon.com Reviews and a Production Description. You can also access a short-short excerpt and write review “providing feedback to the Penguin Editors about the submissions.” They only give you the first page of the manuscript, but at least it’s free! I suppose they figure that’s all most agents or editors will read, so it’s enough. If it gets the reader’s attention, that’s what matters. And here’s the good part… as I mentioned above you don’t have to own a Kindle to submit a customer review. There’s a really simple way to download Kindle software to your PC (not MAC, I’m afraid). Just click on “Available on Your PC” right there in the right column next to the book info. I did it last night and if I can do it, anybody can!

Of those 6 finalists that the Penguin editors will select, only 1 manuscript is chosen for publication. Amazon customers will choose the winning manuscript through on-line voting!! The winning manuscript will be published by Penguin books. It does sound a bit like American Idol, doesn’t it?

Anyway, if you’d like to help me get my first novel published, or if you just want to see what I’ve been up to lately, please check it out at www.amazon.com books. Just type in my name or Running Secrets. And, of course, I’d love it if you’d write a review!

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest

2010-04-01T11:51:00.001-07:00

Some exciting news today!

I just learned that my first novel, Running Secrets, has been selected as one of the 250 quarterfinalists in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest. As a quarterfinalist, the full manuscript will be reviewed by Publishers Weekly. The Top 100 Semifinalists, to be announced on April 27th, will be read by Penguin editors who select the 6 finalists.

Are any of you Kindle readers? According to the contest guidelines: “Amazon customers can download, rate, and review excerpts on Amazon.com, providing feedback to Penguin Editors about submissions.”

So if you go to www.amazon.com books and type in Running Secrets - Kindle, this is what it looks like (or you can just click on the Running Secrets link below):

Running Secrets - Excerpt from 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award entry by Arleen Williams (Kindle Edition - Mar. 23, 2010) - Kindle Book
Buy: $0.00

I’d really love to get some reviews… especially if they’re good!

Juggling

2010-03-06T10:44:00.000-08:00

Do you ever feel that life is just one big juggling act? I sure do. Like many of you, I find myself juggling family and friends, work and writing. Within each of the areas of our lives, there seems to be an endless number and variety of balls that we're trying to keep in the air at any given moment, on any particular day. When I began this blog, I intended to update it monthly. Somehow I dropped the month of February.

A friend once suggested the importance of determining which of the balls we juggle each day are made of crystal and which are just plain rubber. If we drop a rubber ball, no harm is done. It bounces and rolls. We can retrieve it if we choose or let it roll into a corner or under the sofa and just leave it there for a while, for that day when we're taking stock, when we collect all the balls and reassess their value, their texture, their importance in our lives. But the crystal balls are different. The crystal balls shatter if dropped. A million tiny shards. Gathering those shards, a dangerous, impossible task. Reconstructing the ball, an unthinkable challenge. The crystal balls must never be dropped. They must be treated with gentle care and deep respect. Polished and cherished. Freed of the mars of daily juggling.

Now, when life seems to be racing out of control on a blind collision course, I stomp on the brakes, slow down, stop. I gather my juggling balls, some from the corners where they've rolled, others from their boxes. Some of these boxes are made of simple cardboard, nothing more than deli food containers. Inconsequential, disposable. Others are finely crafted beauties of stained glass, pressed silver or fragrant cedar, each lined with deep, rich velvet of varying hues. I line up the juggling balls, both rubber and crystal, on the table in front of me. A row of balls. Another of boxes. And I begin another kind of juggling act. I examine each ball, assessing its weight and texture, its value in my life.

Some balls have always been, and will always remain, cherished crystal. These retain their precious boxes with velvet lining. Others are rubber, nothing more, a lifetime of rubber. But I usually find that some of the balls have mysteriously transformed, magically changed from rubber to crystal, and others from crystal to rubber through the passing months and years. I must recognize and respect these changes. Should I fail, I could carelessly drop a crystal ball, mistaken for simple rubber.

Curriculum Writing

2010-01-29T20:58:00.001-08:00

There are many kinds of writing, and many writers do more than one. I write both memoir and fiction, both manuscript length and short pieces. I also write curriculum.

For the past year and a half, I have had the pleasure of working with a wonderful group of creative, fun people at South Seattle Community College (SSCC). We call ourselves the AANAPISI grant team. That’s “ay-na-pea-z” and it’s the acronym for Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution. In 2008 the U.S. Department of Education created this designation, and SSCC was one of only six two-year and four-year schools in the United States to receive this award. To learn more, please visit our temporary website at www.successatsouth.org or go to www.southseattle.edu.

So what does any of this have to do with writing, you might ask. Well, my role on the grant team is to write curriculum. With the collaboration of numerous colleagues, I have created the Transition Portfolio. This is a collection of activities designed to help English as a Second Language, Adult Basic Education, and other pre-college students learn to navigate the American college system. The Transition Portfolio is available on-line, free-of-charge at www.successatsouth.org. Just click on “Resources.”

Another of our AANAPISI grant projects involves creating a series of short videos to provide college-related information to students or potential students and their families. As the curriculum writer, my task is to create instructional materials for classroom use with each video. The videos are being posted to the website as they are completed. The the curriculum packets will follow by summer 2010.

Just as creativity takes many forms, so does writing. The challenge sometimes lies in finding a way to balance it all.

It's About Time Writers Reading Series

2010-01-09T11:53:00.000-08:00

Happy 2010! We've survived the holiday season, and now it's time to get back to what matters...writing! I find I need structure. I need a schedule. And I need the opportunity to share my work...

If you're in the Seattle area, I'd like to invite you to a group reading at the Ballard Public Library at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, January 14th. The It's About Time Writers Reading Series, coordinated by Esther Altshul Helfgott, is now on Facebook. For more information and regular updates, you might consider joining the Facebook group by going to www.facebook.com. For information on past readings, you can check out http://itsaboutimewriters.homestead.com/.

January seems like the perfect time to share a bit of the old and a bit of the new. To that end, I'll be reading a short selection from The Thirty-Ninth Victim and another from my work-in-progress, a memoir carrying the working title, Moving Mom. It's the story chronicling the 7 years and 6 days between my father's death and my mother's move to a dementia care facility. It took an astute writing partner of mine to point out to me that Moving Mom picks up where The Thirty-Ninth Victim left off. Funny how we (or should I say "I") so easily miss what's right under our (my) nose. Or in this case, pen.

I hope to see you Thursday night!

The Supermarket

2009-12-06T18:51:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to share a new memoir piece, recently published in Crosscurrents, the annual literary publication of the Washington Community College Humanities Association. Because this publication has limited distribution, and because this edition is not yet on-line, I've decided to share the piece here. To learn more about WCCHA, please go to www.wccha.org .

The Supermarket

The supermarket was shiny – newer, bigger, fancier than anything my sleepy hometown had ever seen. A farm girl, I knew little of supermarkets. With nine kids, Mom shopped alone whenever possible. How could a woman shop with nine kids trailing behind? We’d fill a whole aisle, even one of the long aisles in the new supermarket. No, I rarely went shopping with Mom. But now that I was in junior high school, I could walk down the hill after school to the new supermarket off Front Street to wait for a ride home with Dad on those days when I stayed late.

I loved the new supermarket. The bright lights and colorful packaging. It was clean and neat and full of abundance. On cold winter days, I was pulled towards the delicious aroma of the bakery, pretending I was in the kitchen at home and Mom was baking cookies just for me. On warm spring afternoons, I wandered the frozen food section, dreaming of huge ice cream sundaes with thick chocolate syrup and peanuts on top.

It was late spring. School was almost out and my afternoons of exploring the long aisles of the supermarket would soon end for the summer. Living eight miles from town, summers were spent doing farm chores or playing in the woods. Trips to town were rare in the summer. Only for church on Sunday, and those trips didn’t involve a stop at the supermarket.

I was alone, walking up and down the long aisles, my long dark hair in what Dad called squaw braids, large coke-bottle glasses weighing my nose, so tall and skinny my older siblings called me String Bean. My ill-fitted hand-me-down clothes hung off my scarecrow body – high water pants and a baggy T-shirt. To the eyes of the supermarket manager, I suppose I looked needy, hungry, and in my shyness, a bit shifty.

I had no backpack. Kids in the sixties didn’t carry backpacks. I carried a paper grocery bag full of library books and homework assignments. A sweatshirt stuffed in on top.

“You there. Stop right there.”

I heard a harsh male voice. It was a voice I didn’t recognize, so I ignored it, intent on my dreamy wanderings, reading labels, trying to figure out what all these strange and exciting items stacked high above me on each side of the aisle could possibly be used for.

“Hey, you there. I told you to stop.”

Again, the voice. Then a hand. A hard, tight hand on my shoulder spinning me around.

“Come with me, young lady.”

The man released his hard grip on my shoulder, and I followed him in obedient silence to the front of the store. I’d been taught to obey authority. Adults were authority. Especially big, tall men with loud, harsh voices and strong hands.

The man stopped near a cash register at the front of the supermarket. “Now young lady, what have you put in that bag?”

I was stunned. It was one thing to be ordered around by the store manager. It was a totally different thing to be called a thief, and despite my silence, I was smart enough to know who this man with the name tag pinned to his broad chest was and what he was calling me.

I broke my silence. “I haven’t put anything in my bag.”

“What’s in it then?” he demanded.

“Just my school stuff.”

“Show me.”

I couldn’t believe it. I heard the words, but I didn’t understand, and I didn’t react. The next thing I knew, the store manager pulled my bag from my arms and dumped the contents on the checkout counter. I watched in silence, willing myself not to cry as I felt the curious eyes of strangers watching the show. With all my might I prayed to be invisible, to disappear. I prayed that nobody would recognize me. In such a small town, that was a mighty prayer.

The store manager fingered through my books, notebooks, pencils and sweatshirt. Finally, satisfied that there was nothing of any worth there, no unpaid for candy bars or gum, nothing that I had shoplifted, he shoveled it back into the torn bag and pushed it into my arms.

“Okay, it’s clean. But don’t you be wandering around in here, young lady. We don’t take kindly to shoplifters.”

I could only look into his dark angry eyes. Words wouldn’t come. I couldn’t defend myself against this bully. At the very least, I knew he owed me an apology, and I knew just as clearly that I would never get one. So, I hurried out the sliding glass front door of the new supermarket and sat on the curb waiting for my ride home, tears of anger and frustration streaming down my young face.

Author! Author! :: Anne Mini's Blog

2008-12-13T14:52:00.000-08:00

On Dec. 13, 2008, Author! Author! :: Anne Mini's Blog featured a guest entry by Arleen Williams: Bringing a memoir to successful publication at an indie press. Williams writes: "How did a middle-aged straight woman get a memoir published by a small press with a lesbian fiction focus?

"This is a question I am often asked in one form or another. It’s a sort of how and why question, I suppose. So here’s the answer I tell readers and fellow writers alike: it took relentless determination and a whole lot of luck."
Read the entire blog entry…

Video Feature: Arleen Williams and her memoir: The Thirty-ninth Victim

2008-10-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

Issaquah Reporter: Memoir shares tale of Green River Killer

2008-10-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

Memoir shares tale of Green River Killer victim who grew up in Issaquah

By WENDY GIROUX 
Sammamish Reporter Editor
Oct 03, 2008

Twenty-five years ago, Gary Ridgway killed Arleen Williams’ sister, irrevocably changing her family. In her first book, Williams tells the tale of growing up on a remote parcel of land on Tiger Mountain in the Issaquah Valley. Her sister, Maureen Sue Feeney, was killed at the age of 19, just a month after moving out of the family home and into a Seattle apartment. “Like all victims of violent crime, Maureen was more than just a number,” Williams said.

“This is not another book about Gary L. Ridgway. There are plenty of those out there,” she said of her book, “The Thirty-Ninth Victim: A Memoir.” “I wrote it not only to remember my sister, but also to understand the circumstances that led to her death.” King County Court documents listed Feeney as Ridgway’s 39th victim when he was sentenced in December 2003 to life in prison for killing 48 women.

“My truest memories of Maureen are of this beautiful little girl,” Williams said, remembering her sister’s blond curls and love for nature and animals. Nicknamed “Maurie,” Maureen later became interested in working with young children, first in a daycare and later hoping for a career in the early childhood development. “The 39th Victim” was published earlier this year by Blue Feather Books, and describes Williams’ life as the middle child in a family of nine. “I am no longer a middle child,” she said in an interview. “When there is a death, of course it changes that whole structure.”

The writing started as a cathartic process — something Williams said she needed to do for herself and her own teenage daughter as much as for the rest of her family and the community — and, of course, for Maureen. “ ... I tell Maureen’s story, because she can no longer tell it,” Williams writes in the book.
Now a resident of West Seattle, she is an English professor at South Seattle Community College and has taught the English language for more than 30 years.

She believes in communication — so strongly, in fact, that she believes lack of communication caused the unraveling of her large family and also that Ridgway could have been arrested decades sooner if detectives and officers had communicated more effectively.
The book is an attempt to point out the vital need to clearly talk with others in our families, our community and our society at large.

A silent family
Williams describes her family, her upbringing and her relationships in a level of detail that is both excruciating and addictive for the reader. “Making the decision to publish was extremely difficult,” Williams said. “In publishing this book, I have broken every family rule it was possible to break.” To be as conscientious of her family’s feelings as possible, she tried to limit the material she included in the book to only those things that had a direct impact on her and her life. And, she changed the names of some people — no easy feat given that her parents named each of their six daughters with a name that ended in “een.”

The Feeney family went through many difficult times, long before Maureen went missing. While Williams said she believes that her parents were doing the best they could to parent nine children in the turbulent times of the 1960s, it simply became more than they could handle. When their oldest daughter was 17 and they felt she was no longer within their control, the parents called the police and had her taken away. Two other older siblings left home or were disowned, and Williams and the younger kids weren’t allowed to ask questions, talk about any of what had happened or even mention the missing siblings’ names. “ ... I don’t think we ever learned to communicate among ourselves because we never learned to communicate with our parents,” Williams writes in the book. “We imitated the silence that they modeled.” That fact continued later on, when no one in Williams’ family told her that Maureen was missing until a month had gone by. Living in Mexico at the time, Williams finally received a letter from their mother telling her of Maureen’s disappearance. “I needed to break the cycle of silence,” Williams said.

Intertwined with Green River case
The Feeney family moved from Seattle to 10 acres in Issaquah in 1959. The land where the family plowed a road through, laid water lines and built a house sat less than 10 miles from where Ridgway left the body of Maureen Feeney near the intersection of Interstate 90 and Highway 18. The children’s mother worked as a nurse at Echo Glen, just a short distance from the spot where Maureen’s remains were found 31 months after she went missing. Life in Issaquah certainly wasn’t all bad. In fact, some of Williams’ childhood memories were quite rosy — gathering blackberries with her brothers and sisters, playing in the woods and riding horses along the Bonneville Power Administration access line among hosts of daisies. They even made chores into games. “For a while, we really were that big, happy family building a dream.”

In the book, Williams touches on other coincidences and oddities, such as the fact that nearly her entire family was gathered together — something that happened only a handful of times after the elder children began leaving home — to celebrate their father’s 80th birthday on the day that Ridgway was arrested. They had no warning of the arrest, and woke up to see the headlines the next day.
Their father died about two months later. “I was a basketcase. My husband said, ‘You’ve been talking about writing forever. Maybe now is the time to do it,’” Williams said. “I had put it off for so many years.” So, she began researching and found a course through the University of Washington extension called “Turning Journals Into Memoirs.” Through that class, and with the help of writing coaches and a writing group at Louisa’s Cafe, the winding story of Williams’ family and Maureen Feeney’s early death came together about five years later into a book that invites compulsive reading.

Issaquah resident Suzanne Suther, whose family were the only “real” neighbors the Feeney family had, lost touch with them after Maureen’s funeral. She recently spotted a listing about Williams giving an author’s reading at the Issaquah library, and reunited with Williams last week.
The Feeney kids played with and babysat for Suther’s four children, the youngest of whom was the same age as Maureen. “I think it’s a very courageous journey you’ve been on,” Suther told Williams after the reading at the library.

First — and last — visit as friends
The last time Williams saw her sister alive was when Maureen visited her in Mexico City, where she was working and living in the early ‘80s. Maureen stayed with Williams and her husband for a three-week visit. The two siblings, six years apart in age, began to get to know one another as adults for the first time. Maureen had been only 11 when Williams moved away from home. They went sightseeing in Mexico, awkward together at first but beginning to glimpse a true relationship between one another. While she does have happy memories of spending time together and watching Maureen go parasailing and swimming, Williams said she regrets not remembering their last conversations and moments together more clearly.

“I didn’t know that she’d be murdered 13 months later, or that I’d never see her again,” Williams wrote. “So I wasn’t affixing her face, her voice, her smell in my permanent memory. I wasn’t present in the moment, and the moment was lost.” She does, however, have a snapshot from the day they dropped Maureen off at the airport for her return flight to Seattle. The photo shows Williams and Maureen, grins on their faces and arms thrown around one another.

“I wish I had never let go.”

To read more about the Feeney family and the years before and after Maureen Feeney’s death, visit Williams’ Web site at www.arleenwilliams.com or look for the book at www.bluefeatherbooks.com.
Sammamish Reporter Editor Wendy Giroux can be reached at wgiroux@reporternewspapers.com or 425-391-0363, ext. 5050.

the thirty-ninth victim: a memoir

2008-05-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

The Green River murders were headline news throughout the 1980s. By the time the perpetrator was sentenced in 2003, at least 48 young women had met an untimely death at his hands.
What started as as string of local killings in Seattle became a national nightmare before it was over. In homes all across America, television news programs and newspapers large and small carried feature stories about the ever-growing list of victims.
Now imagine that during this time, someone you love--your baby sister, a beautiful young woman of 19--suddenly goes missing. The police are at best unhelpful, and at worst, seemingly uninterested in what's happened to her.
And then comes word you hoped you'd never receive: your youngest sister's remains have been found. She is yet another victim of the Green River killer.
With amazing candor, Arleen Williams tells the story of her family's journey, before and after the Green River killer murdered her sister Maureen and left her body in a stretch of wilderness off the west side of Highway 18. As insightful as it is heart wrenching, The Thirty-Ninth Victim gives you a window into the family dynamics that contributed to this life-altering tragedy.
This is a memoir unlike any other. The author set out to tell Maureen's story, but in doing so, she tells bits and pieces of every family's story. You cannot read this profoundly personal and cataclysmic tale and come away unchanged, nor will you ever view your own family in quite the same way.
You will applaud Ms. Williams's courage in sharing this recounting of her family's trauma through one of the most atrocious streaks of serial killings in American history. And like the family, you will never forget The Thirty-Ninth Victim.

Published by Blue Feather Books, Ltd.
ISBN 978-0-9794120-4-2

Available at:
Blue Feather Books
Amazon Books