This biography tells such a coherent story. It is not merely a sequence of events, but the account of an extraordinary transformation: that of a man who moves from being a banker in China in the 1920s and 30s, raised in a traditional family of nine children, to becoming a Taoist teacher—humorous, unconventional, ever surprising, and persistently challenging—in the late 1960s and 70s.
It is a vast transformation, and Carol Wilson does it full justice.
Dodging cyclists, I scurried across the narrow road and headed toward Gaiole’s town center. A small Tuscan village of twenty-seven hundred souls in the Chianti region, Gaiole is known for its idyllic beauty, and these days for L’Eroica, an increasingly popular vintage cycling event.
Taking in the surrounding low hills, pear orchards, and omnipresent vineyards glowing in the early autumn sunlight, I was also taken by the single and tandem riders whooshing by. Warbling lively tunes at the top of their lungs, some wore cycling kits—jerseys, shorts, helmet and accessories—that matched their bikes’ vintage. Families, teams and friends zipped along, dressed in their kits or turn-of-the-century costumes, singing and chatting with each other as they pedaled by.
The closer I got to the center, the better I could hear the PA system barking enthusiastic event descriptions in Italian cadences, only a little of which I could understand. Interspersed, a variety of Beatles songs, old swing favorites, and a little opera added to the festal atmosphere. All around me cheerful Italian accents mingled with German, Scandinavian, Spanish, Japanese, English and languages I couldn’t identify. The mix of familiar and strange struck just the right note for the occasion, especially for this American. The diverse voices reminded me of the founding promise of my own country, whether melting pot or tossed salad. I was captivated—again.
Bruce and I stand on a small makeshift pier that sits just barely above the shallow water’s edge. We’re at Blue Springs in the Florida panhandle. Bruce, five years old and wearing overalls and cowboy boots, is reaching for my hand. I, his three-year-old sister, am holding on to his pants leg for security as I extend my lace-up boot to touch my reflection in the water. Below his thick, dark hair, my big brother’s expression is a mixture of caution and protectiveness, somehow caught up in a sweet smile. We were children then, with two lifetimes of testing, shaping experiences ahead. And while the essence of my brother’s nature that smile revealed didn’t change, I know that over the years the depth of it did.
About a decade and a half after that photo, Bruce wore, not his Blue Springs cowboy boots and overalls, but the combat boots and fatigues of a Marine in Viet Nam. Deeply committed to serving his country in that war, he had argued his way in with military doctors, despite a knee injury serious enough to result in a medical discharge.
Celebrating a life infused with nature, beauty and love, Mary Anna Scenga Kruch’s Grace Notes: a memoir in poetry & prose invites the reader to savor these elements of her world as one would a full-bodied Italian wine. It’s an easy invitation to accept as evocative imagery and layered insights tempt one from poem to poem, with narratives interspersed like supportive commas, and popular songs as section titles, their occasional lyrics providing emphasis.
Ghosts walk this land with me. My ghosts are not spectres nor apparitions, but tender confluences of memories and gratitude for loved ones I have lost. Through Stillpoint’s tranquil meadows and untamed forest, they accompany me, their absence a gentle yet profound presence that has taken on their shape, and I feel them with me.
My ghosts are intertwined with the birdsong of this land, with the soft ripple that stirs inside me when I hear it. They are present in the supple motion of tall grasses swaying with the breeze, and in the majestic spruce and fir, the sturdy ponderosa, all reminding me of the strength and courage I witnessed when they encountered challenges in their lives. All I’ve learned from them continues to live in me. My sister Susan most of all, and especially at Stillpoint.
The Awakenings Review publishes poets, writers and artists experiencing mental illnesses, and related writers. It is a print-only journal, but you can see a sample in this PDF file.
Throughout psychiatry’s history, its view of delusions has centered on their imperviousness to contrary evidence. In Kraepelin’s influential (1899) textbook Psychiatry, he writes that a delusion is a belief that is not open to doubt. (K.Arnold & J.Vakhrusheva, 2015)
It was mid-October 2008 and our last evening in Italy after spending several weeks in the Chianti countryside. With an overnight stay in the fishing village of Fiumicino near the Rome airport, we slept unaware of what was happening at home in Colorado.
Back in Boulder, through the fog of jet lag, I checked my email messages, something I hadn’t been able to do consistently in Italy. And there on my screen was a message from Vandy, a friend who had been restoring a small building at Stillpoint, our beloved property in the mountains. She had written it October 6, more than a week earlier.
Hi Carol,
I want you to know that we did not end up camping at Stillpoint last weekend. We arrived at the property and encountered a man who said he was the owner. He was not familiar with your name. After a short conversation with him we left. I felt as though the person we met did not belong there and thought you should know. He said that he planned to stay until November or so.
When I was eight years old, many decades ago now, I learned there were different kinds of dirty. We were new to the mountains, my family and I, renting a cabin at a small, rustic resort where the ghost town of Bakerville usedto be, near Loveland Pass. Down the creek a ways, lived an old man we called Pops. At least we thought of him as old, with his pudgy frame, poorly shaved face, saggy skin, and well-worn clothes. Pops would come around to the picnic area and play his harmonica for my brother, sister, and me. He would also perform magic tricks and give us silly names. Stump-a-Doodle-and-Bunch was one. He made us laugh as he entertained and teased us. We liked and trusted him because he seemed to care about us.
“Just Like Your Father” – 2nd Place, Unlimited Literature Flash Nonfiction Contest
“How’s Little Bob today?” the principal asked as he swung tiny five-year-old me up in the air, bringing us face-to-face. I liked that he called me Little Bob because it connected me to my dad, whom I adored. It meant that I was part of him, that I was like him.
Years later this connection to my dad acquired a different hue. On the cusp of my teens, I began questioning and trying to understand my world, my mother in particular.
“Don’t argue with me. Your father is always arguing with me. And you’re just like him!”
I was trying to explain something I did, something my mother didn’t like, something I don’t even remember. What I do remember is standing by a spigot in our back yard, washing out a galvanized steel pail. I remember the warm day, the earlier breeze on recess, drops of sweat trickling down my back. I remember her fury, the churning in my stomach, anger and dismay at feeling unjustly accused. And I remember vowing never to bring a child into this world to suffer its cruelty and injustice, a vow I was to keep.
For over forty years, you have been a teacher, high school principal, assistant principal, university instructor/visiting professor, and a consultant. What have you learned about the public school system in the U.S.?
Our system of compulsory schooling grew from the recognition that a healthy democracy depends on an educated public. An educated public is laudable and essential, and we still have work to do toward that end. What has struck me over the years is the unevenness of quality in schools across the country and, not uncommonly, within some school districts.
Follow up to the book review published in bookscover2cover Recently, listening to a talk by poet David Whyte, I heard him speak of “the parts of ourselves we have yet to meet.” I thought of those mystery rooms, and something clicked, finally. The rooms are parts of myself I have yet to meet, to know, parts of a bigger me to be discovered and explored.
Nonfiction essay published in The Wrath-Bearing Tree June 1991. I’m half-way up a seventy-foot rock facing at Camp Hale, Colorado, my body pressed against the hard, cool granite. My fingers search for purchase on what feels like a polished surface. I’m ascending one of the rock towers the Tenth Mountain Division, a unit of 15,000 men, scaled when preparing for mountain and winter warfare during World War II. CIA secret operatives trained here, too, including Tibetan freedom fighters in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Inside me, my own war rages. I took the lead instructor, David’s, suggestion that I climb blindfolded, because I trust him. But under normal circumstances, even trusting an experienced instructor, I wouldn’t climb this giant slab for love or money.
Please check out The Wrath-Bearing Tree for essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry on military, economic, and social violence: https://www.wrath-bearingtree.com
Invited review published in bookscover2cover “Even dawn begins before its beginning . . .” writes poet Claudia Rankine in “The White Lion.” It is a fitting early line in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a book comprising poetry, essays, fiction, photography, and a timeline that leads the reader through four hundred years of history, much of it rarely, if ever, told and through voices that seldom pierce the citadel of popular historical certainty.
This dawn features a ship, the White Lion, arriving at Point Comfort in the colony of Virginia in 1619, a year before the customary chronicling of the 1620 pilgrims’ landing at Jamestown. The timeline entry preceding the poem tells of the ship’s chained cargo of twenty to thirty captive Africans, who are traded to the colonists for supplies, “making them the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies that will become the United States.”
Standing in Tiananmen Square that autumn day in 1998, I marveled at its vastness. The few people populating its more than fifty-three acres seemed like ants on an enormous sidewalk. The square could hold many, many more. Multitudes. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine multitudes there, specifically the million protesters packed into those 4,736,121 square feet at the height of the 1989 pro-democracy movement.
Conjuring the protests, images of the movement’s final hours flooded my mind— tanks, heavily armed soldiers, protestors desperate and defiant, their fervor steadfast despite the overwhelming threat of being shot or crushed, their inevitable fear. Read more…
Please check out the whole issue for compelling short stories, long short stories, poetry, novel excerpts, and other creative nonfiction: https://thewritelaunch.com
I first saw Hong Kong from the air, late into the night. It was February 6, 1997. As our plane descended into the vast constellation of varicolored lights, it seemed as if we were landing in a box of sparkling jewels, layers and layers of them. The contrast of dark night and myriad lights further heightened my sense of adventure, adding to the city’s already bold allure. Read more…
How can I forget the press of the crowd, the feeling of being swept up in history that lunar New Year in Hong Kong? Throngs packed the walkway by the city’s harbor, and we were snugly pressed in the midst of them. We had stopped in Hong Kong for a few days on our way to Shanghai for research on a book I was writing. And those few days coincided not only with the Chinese New Year, but also Hong Kong’s last New Year celebration under British rule. Read more…
A faded color photograph is my sole relic from the days I spent in Meridian, Mississippi. Creases span the worn surface, and smudges stain the yellowing border, hinting at its age. Creases span the worn surface, and smudges stain the yellowing border, hinting at its age. The date printed on the top border, May ’67, confirms it.
In the photograph, my twenty-two-year-old self leans against a red Camaro, smiling. I’m wearing an outfit I made on my Singer sewing machine: a short-sleeved, white blouse and a straight, red skirt that hits just above the knee. A red ribbon ties my then-dark hair up and back, and white three-inch heels encase my feet, one foot slightly ahead of the other in a kind of fashion-model pose.
The cherry red of the Camaro almost matches that of my skirt. A sign atop the car shouts, “The Girl from Coca-Cola is Here! Hundreds of chances to win $10-$35!” Looking at that old photo of myself, I see a version of me, a version that can’t know all that experience has taught me these many years since. The 1960s in the Deep South held almost unimaginable turmoil—hate, fear, violence. Yet possibility somehow lay in the mix. The possibility that the country really could do better in fulfilling its founding promise of equal opportunity for all its citizens. But who was I then? And how did that person find her way to being the current me?
With an overnight stay in the fishing village of Fiumicino near the Rome airport, we slept unaware of what was happening at home in Colorado. 
When I was eight years old, many decades ago now, I learned there were different kinds of dirty. We were new to the mountains, my family and I, renting a cabin at a small, rustic resort where the ghost town of Bakerville usedto be, near Loveland Pass. Down the creek a ways, lived an old man we called Pops. At least we thought of him as old, with his pudgy frame, poorly shaved face, saggy skin, and well-worn clothes. Pops would come around to the picnic area and play his harmonica for my brother, sister, and me. He would also perform magic tricks and give us silly names. Stump-a-Doodle-and-Bunch was one. He made us laugh as he entertained and teased us. We liked and trusted him because he seemed to care about us.
Years later this connection to my dad acquired a different hue. On the cusp of my teens, I began questioning and trying to understand my world, my mother in particular.“Don’t argue with me. Your father is always arguing with me. And you’re just like him!”I was trying to explain something I did, something my mother didn’t like, something I don’t even remember. What I do remember is standing by a spigot in our back yard, washing out a galvanized steel pail. I remember the warm day, the earlier breeze on recess, drops of sweat trickling down my back. I remember her fury, the churning in my stomach, anger and dismay at feeling unjustly accused. And I remember vowing never to bring a child into this world to suffer its cruelty and injustice, a vow I was to keep.
For over forty years, you have been a teacher, high school principal, assistant principal, university instructor/visiting professor, and a consultant. What have you learned about the public school system in the U.S.?
Recently, listening to a talk by poet David Whyte, I heard him speak of “the parts of ourselves we have yet to meet.” I thought of those mystery rooms, and something clicked, finally. The rooms are parts of myself I have yet to meet, to know, parts of a bigger me to be discovered and explored.
“Even dawn begins before its beginning . . .” writes poet Claudia Rankine in “The White Lion.” It is a fitting early line in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a book comprising poetry, essays, fiction, photography, and a timeline that leads 
How can I forget the press of the crowd, the feeling of being swept up in history that lunar New Year in Hong Kong? Throngs packed the walkway by the city’s harbor, and we were snugly pressed in the midst of them. We had stopped in Hong Kong for a few days on our way to Shanghai for research on a book I was writing. And those few days coincided not only with the Chinese New Year, but also Hong Kong’s last New Year celebration under British rule. Read more…
A faded color photograph is my sole relic from the days I spent in Meridian, Mississippi. Creases span the worn surface, and smudges stain the yellowing border, hinting at its age. Creases span the worn surface, and smudges stain the yellowing border, hinting at its age. The date printed on the top border, May ’67, confirms it. 
How can I forget the press of the crowd, the feeling of being swept up in history that lunar New Year in Hong Kong? Throngs packed the walkway by the city’s harbor, and we were snugly pressed in the midst of them. We had stopped in Hong Kong for a few days on our way to Shanghai for research on a book I was writing. And those few days coincided not only with the Chinese New Year, but also Hong Kong’s last New Year celebration under British rule.