Margaret Owen's Brilliant Palette

Painter Margaret Owen works with a brilliant color palette. Think Matisse, with a feminine sensibility. She lives in Rhode Island and sometimes paints in Morocco, where she has been involved in Moroccan Sketchbook, a drawing and painting retreat held just outside Marrakesh. Sounds like a dream vacation to me!  The next Sketchbook is scheduled for April, and you can learn more about it here.

For a midwinter pick-me-up, I recommend a visit to her blog, Daily Painting  She also has some of her current paintings on display at a cafe in East Providence, Tea in the Sahara. I'm hoping to get there to see them soon.

If you search for her name on Pinterest, you'll find many of her popular paintings. Here are some to lift your spirits. We always need more color in February!

Qualey's Review of The Girl Who Fell to Earth

Marcia Lynx Qualey is an American resident of Cairo who writes a fantastic blog about Arabic literature in translation. She also reviews works in that genre for the English language press in Cairo. I'm posting a link to the excellent review she wrote of "The Girl Who Fell to Earth" by Sophia Al-Maria, a coming of age story of east and west. Her review appeared in the Egypt Independent. The story is not what you'd expect however, and Marcia tells why.  I am putting this on my to-read list!

You can link to her review  here.

Cab Driver in Fez

So Fez is my absolute favorite city in the Middle East. I have not yet visited Jerusalem, so if I ever have the chance, it will likely move to #1. However, for now at least, Fez is my favorite. Why?

Courtyard of the Qarawiyyin Mosque, founded in 859 AD

• It is the only intact medieval walled city in the Arab world, and I've heard in the whole world.
• Fez has been a center of learning for over a thousand years.
• At its center is a mosque called the Qarawiyyin, founded by a woman named Fatimah in 859 AD. It later expanded into a great university. It attracted students and scholars from afar. That university continues to operate; it's the oldest continually running university in the entire world.
• In the medina (old walled city) itself, no motorized vehicles are allowed. You either walk or ride a horse, donkey or mule.
• Most of Morocco's legendary handcrafts are made in the Fez medina.
• You can speak real full-bodied classical and modern standard Arabic, and they understand you.
• The people are hard-working, and know that what they have, do and are has great worth.
• The city is full of mysteries. 
• The city is beautiful.

During my first visit to Fez in the fall of 2005, my friends and I took a 'petit taxi' cab from our hotel in the new part of Fez to one of the gates of the medina.

A 'petit taxi' outside one of the gates of the Fez medina.

I sat in front since I was the Arabic speaker. We got to chatting, the cabbie and me. He was not white haired, so I'd say he was in his late 40's. Yet he seemed older and wiser. He asked where we were from, I explained we were on a tour of Morocco and studying its culture and folk music and folk dance. When he then said he really liked America, I asked why.

"Simple," he said. "On your coins, it says, 'In God We Trust'." 

That conversation has stayed with me for  a long time. Our founding fathers were men of strong principles and beliefs, but they recognized everyone's right to believe what he or she wanted and there was no talk of imposing beliefs on others. Yet that doesn't mean we have to be godless. There were other times in history when this kind of openness and respect was the order of the day, and some of those times took place in Fez. Scholars from Europe, Africa and all over the Arab World - Muslims, Christians and Jews - studied together there and shared knowledge. It was an example to the world. I think we have to hold fast to that openness and make it our banner for the next millenium. We can't survive with religious groups claiming the sole divine correctness. It's just not going to work. Our founding fathers figured that out, and before them, the good people of Fez - and many other places through history. It's not a new idea; it's a very old one that would help us all.

Writer's Group at the Cafe

My writer's group is a God-send. Not only in terms of regular check-ins, feedback and camaraderie.  For me, the most important thing is the motivation to produce something in time for our next session.

Some of us are writing novels and short stories. Two of us are poets, and most of us also dabble in essays and features. The regulars of the group have all been published. Our goal is to improve our craft, produce more work, and get it published. We are all members of AAUW, (American Association of University Women) which sponsors our group.

 We meet in the evening at Brewed Awakenings, a cafe in Hingham, south of Boston. We are usually the only patrons, and sometimes we have to ask the staff to turn down the pop music on the sound system. They oblige, and over the months have come to know us as 'the writers'.

The first to arrive claims one of our favorite tables near the windows. The seats are comfortable woven wicker. The coffee, hot chocolate, cider and tea are just the thing on a cold winter night. Sometimes one of us will buy a sweet and split it four or five ways.

At first, we sit and read each others' material. Then we give our comments, which range from simple typos and repeated words to big picture points. There is a lot of encouragement.

Last meeting, a group of teenagers, friends of the cafe staff, showed up for a visit just as we got going. A half dozen of them, all at once, decided to sweep the floor under all the tables. It was chaotic and very distracting as they dragged the chairs around and rearranged the tables. But we persevered, for we had nowhere else to go, and we need this time together each month. They would have had to pull us out by the hair to break up our writers group meeting! Eventually things quieted down and we were able to get our work done.

Welcoming Winter

Photograph by Gene Cyr of Northern Maine Pictures

Two or three times a week, I walk with a dear friend, who is also a neighbor and a fellow writer. We cover three miles in a little less than an hour. We talk while walking, attempting to sort out aspects of our lives, including writing projects.

We take one of three loop walks through the neighborhood, up and down hills, under tall white pines and sturdy wild oaks. Twice, we cross a small stream that runs through the neighborhood. Along the way we encounter other walkers and runners, all kinds of dogs, and sometimes a few cats. The other day we came upon a neighborhood cat named Marshall, whom my husband and I had helped rescue from a tree a couple of years ago. He still responded when we called him by name.

Today my walking buddy couldn't make it, so I went alone. I missed her companionship, but was delighted to find many birds out and about, even on such a short December day. I saw and heard titmice, goldfinches, chickadees, and sparrows. I spotted a group of six wild turkeys tromping through the woods. They took their time, crunching oak leaves with every step. The squirrels were busy too.

Here, the seasons tend to lag the calendar by a few weeks, so even in mid-December most of the grass is still green. There is no snow on the ground yet. A recent warm spell brought a big moth hatch and a few still cling to the sides of houses and garage doors. The sun is shining, even though it's nearly at its weakest strength now.

It does my heart good to get out and find the animals active as we prepare to welcome winter. In a week or two the snows will come, and we'll adjust our walks to smaller loops where we don't need shoveled sidewalks. But those short walks have their rugged beauty too.

In the spirit of winter to come, here is a photograph by Mainer Gene Cyr. This photo won the Aroostook County Tourism Authority photo contest. His website is Northern Maine Pictures

I wish you all a wonder-filled holiday season, winter, and new year.

Oh Well and Oh My

So perhaps it's a function of getting older, but for whatever reason, I don't enjoy browsing in antique stores the way I used to. I used to love to soak up the atmosphere, listen to the classical music playing and the store owner's banter with customers. I browsed in slow motion, the way a heron wades in a stream looking for fish. I'd stop to look at 80% of the things on display, and I'd seriously consider buying things.

Now, I look for things that are new to me, in an antique way of course. Last week, the day after we spent a lovely Thanksgiving in Maine with dear friends, we stopped at an antique barn on Route 1 near Wiscasset. It was one of those places with many many dealers. The best ones specialize. There was one person who sold antique postcards, categorized by state. Another sold antique tools. Yet there was little else of interest and I found myself cruising through the entire building, my eye only caught by something unusual. My favorite thing was a 'cookie corner' chest of drawers from the early 1800's. The inside of the drawers were made of hardwood, and all the joints were extremely well made.  Then there were some nice rustic cider jugs. But aside from that, I could have left within ten minutes. I obliged my husband's interest in a slow perusal, which gave me a chance to notice more.

It was the art that finally got to me. Antique shops always seem to have an oversupply of old prints or original artwork that was never of gallery quality. Certainly there is a chance one might come upon a hidden masterpiece, but in New England, in the 'antique barn' type places, it's hard to find decent art. I really wonder who buys those old paintings. Maybe people collect them. To me, the value for money equation doesn't match up. I left the antique barn with a feeling of "Oh well."

Fortunately, there are plenty of living artists in Maine (and all over New England) who make their work available for reasonable prices. Earlier in the day we had visited the Tidemark Gallery in Waldoboro, and I was really taken by the paintings of Audrey Bechler on display there. Here is a sample of her work and you can link to her website here.  When I left the gallery, which is set up in a very small house (as opposed to a huge barn), my feelings were more like, "Oh my!"

Thursday Night Fever

What is it about Thursday nights?

This fall I've been double and even triple booked on Thursday nights. When I worked in banking, the 20 somethings told me that was the big night to go out with work colleagues and party. For them, Friday night was recovery night, and then Saturday night was 'couples' night. Not sure if that is still the case, but even then, Thursday night was very big.

This fall, Thursday nights have presented marvelous options, but I have stuck to my first commitments, while wondering if it's foolish to do so if something more interesting comes along. The possibilities have been tantalizing: music concerts; debut author book readings; literary association panels; author talks and all kinds of meetings.

I conclude that the Thursday Night pile-up is the usual super-heating of the greater Boston culture scene right before the holidays. It seems everyone wants to finish their events before Thanksgiving, Christmas and Hannukah. But even more importantly, before the snow begins to come down with conviction.

December is filled with holiday-related events. January is the Deep Freeze Month, but stalwart souls organize events and people actually show up at them. However, organizers are gambling that a big Nor'easter won't blow up and stop the city in its tracks. My friend Lisa Esperson and I are organizing a Khaliji (Gulf) women's folk dance workshop for the last Saturday in January on Cape Cod. Are we nuts? Only time will tell. I remember going to a church event on Cape Cod in mid-January when about two feet of snow had fallen the night before. The sun was out, it was as beautiful as a Christmas card, and despite the hassle of coming out in the winter, the church was packed. So I'll take heart from that.