Toasts! A Book Giveaway

 

I’ll toast to just about anything. I love to celebrate (and I love to raise a glass). When June Cotner and Nancy Tupper Ling put out a call for toasts for their upcoming anthology, I couldn’t resist!

I’m lucky enough to have 14 toasts featured in Toasts: The Perfect Words to Celebrate Every Occasion, published last fall by Viva Editions.

Since  it’s almost April Fools Day, I present to you my toast, “To Foolish Fun!”

Friends, you can fool me once!

Friends, you can fool me twice!

Here’s to lots of foolish fun,

Before this crazy day is done.

 USA Today calls Toasts an “adorable collection of special thoughts.” You’ll find toasts and blessings for weddings, funerals, christenings, retirement, birthdays, graduations, bon voyage, holidays, and plenty of  other occasions.

I was surprised and touched to read my name in the Introduction:

Wouldn’t my British Literature professor at Duke, now gone to the ivory towers in the sky, get a jolt out of that one! I remember her quoting Wordsworth with gusto shortly after returning papers. Mine had a less than stellar grade at the top in a large red letter.

Back to April Fools Day. Promise me you’ll use my toast on April 1. Offer it at breakfast, send it over the office email, put it on your FB page. I’d be delighted, no fooling!

Giveaway: Thanks to Viva Editions for offering Friend for the Ride one copy of Toasts: The Perfect Words to Celebrate Every Occasion. For a chance to win, please enter a comment by April 5. (The comment link is at the bottom). U.S. and Canada only. Thanks!

You’ll want your own copy of Toasts, and the book makes a creative gift, especially for graduations, wedding showers, and birthdays. Click here for the Amazon link.

Menopausal Cut-out Lady (and a Craft Book Giveaway)

I need a new hobby, something to provide a happy break from writing. I love to work with my hands, so I’ve been  pondering.

The pondering took a disarming plunge  last week when I spent long minutes threading a needle. I even had trouble with the handy dandy needle threader. I take this as final proof that my failing eyes, plus my lack of fine motor skills, rule out most hobbies that demand exact hand-eye coordination.

Then, like a flash, I remembered Henri Matisse! When his health began to fail, he took up paper cutting. Peinture avec du papier.  Painting with paper.

And so, I present to you, Menopausal Cut-out Lady.

To learn more about Menopausal Cut-out Lady, see the Artist’s Statement at the bottom of the post.

For a craft guide to inspire all of us, there’s Crafting Calm: Projects and Practices for Creativity and Contemplation by Maggie Oman Shannon (Viva Editions, 2013).

 

The publisher writes:

Rev. Maggie Oman Shannon illustrates that you can literally ‘craft the crazy away” through beading and crocheting, candle-making, and collaging…Each chapter presents five different practices, offering forty activities to inspire, along with a series of questions for journaling and reflection.

Shannon presents plenty of intriguing crafts, but what I love the most are the quotations on creativity. Here are two favorites:

When the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

 Leonardo Da Vinci

 I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

 Saul Bellow

Giveaway: Thanks to Viva Editions for offering  a copy of Crafting Calm to one Friend for the Ride reader. For a chance to win, simply enter a comment by November 25. U.S. and Canada only please.

Read about Matisse’s cut-outs in this article.  And if you can get to NYC, the show at the MOMA looks spectacular.

Menopausal Cut-out Lady, Artist’s Statement: 

Barbara Younger  Construction Paper  and Glue on Sketch Paper   2014

Menopausal Cut-out Lady’s skin is green, which represents the new life, the fresh spouts, of menopause. She wears her hair in two lengths,posing this question: At what age should a woman switch to shorter hair? Menopausal Cut Out Lady feels sporty and confident with both lengths. Hooray for her!

Her breasts are blue, symbolizing the blues brought on by the droop of aging. Yet the blue represents water too, and the buoyancy and lack of inhibition she feel as she floats in a lovely blue lake or sea.

Her reproductive organs take the form of a heart. This symbolizes her adoration for her offspring, and the hope that her love life, despite changes, is far from over

Menopausal Cut-out Lady waves a fan, not only as a nod to her night sweats and hot flashes but as a welcoming signal to the changing winds of menopause, bringing relief from periods and a new zest for life.

Garden Blessings, a Cancer Diagnosis, and a Giveaway

I’m a reluctant gardener.

Perhaps because I can only grow zinnias and marigolds.  For real. All other seeds fail me. Perennials, except for a few, refuse to reappear in the spring.

But this year the gardening muse took over, and I planted zinnias galore.

I even dragged pots out of our shed and created a porch garden of zinnias and marigolds.

Blooms abound.

Never have blooms looked more beautiful.

Because a month ago, I was diagnosed with endometrial cancer.

And the life that I sometimes grumped about and worried about and wondered about became the life I wanted to hold onto with every ounce of my being.

As surgery approached last week, an unexpected joy showered over me. The bold colors of my zinnias shouted, “Notice us!” And I did.

Pizza on a neighbor’s patio became the best I’ve ever tasted.

The riverwalk on our new trail in Hillsborough felt like a grand wilderness adventure.

I was scared and nervous, for sure, but this worrier took on a type of calm. Grace in its finest form.

I’m through with surgery. I need a few weeks to catch my breath. Then I’ll tell my cancer story.

Hope you’ll come along for the ride!

This morning, I was well enough to go into the garden and pick a bouquet of zinnias. Never has my garden been such a blessing.

I love you, zinnias!

Giveaway: Anthologist June Cotner is offering one reader a copy of her gorgeous new book, Garden Blessings: Poems, Prose, and Prayers Celebrating the Love of Gardening (Viva Editions, 2014).  For a chance to win, simply enter a comment  by August 15 saying you’d like to be the winner. Thanks, June!

Here’s what the publisher says about June’s latest collection:

Our gardens grow us, and this collection of readings takes us down a path of pleasure. The overriding intention of Garden Blessings is to provide a heartwarming, spiritually focused collection of uplifting prayers, prose, and poems that share a common joy and appreciation for the love of gardening and the many blessings that gardens bring to our lives. June Cotner, a best-selling inspirational author, has gathered a bounty of garden blessings here, offering gems of wisdom that remind the reader and gardener in all of us just how much we learn from our gardens.

Me again: You’ll want your own copy, and the book makes a great gift. Here’s the Amazon link.  I do think this is one of the loveliest book covers ever! I had fun photographing it a few weeks ago on an old pedestal that usually holds a stone frog in my garden.

Switching to Spring (And a Gardening Book Giveaway)

For years, fall was my favorite season. Crisp air, pumpkins, all that sort of fall stuff.

But then something switched.

Spring!

Shout it from the rooftops!

S P R I N G !

The season of seasons.

Maybe it’s my old cold house made warmer by spring temperatures.

Maybe it’s because I’m now a confirmed walker, and there’s no walking like spring walking.

Or maybe it’s because in high school, I went nuts over e.e.cummings.

in Just-

spring          when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

But spring is now my favorite season.

What’s yours?

In honor of spring, a gardening book!

A gorgeous one written by Great Britain’s master gardener Alys Fowler.

 

 

Alys writes in her foreword:

Making The Edible Garden has been about finding a way to garden that is as gentle as possible upon the world. A garden that will please and feed me and still be a home for all others that visit it. By choosing to grow my vegetables alongside my flowers in a perfectly pleasing muddle that is polyculture, I have found a way that allows the best of all worlds.”

And from Viva Editions, the publisher:

Alys Fowler, author of Garden Anywhere, shares her expertise on floral food and edible landscaping, providing tips and tricks on everything from seeds to compost to preservation. You’ll learn how to:

•       Mix trees, edibles and flowers in one space
•       Sustainably forage for wild food
•       Plant the prettiest vegetables for container gardening
•       Grow and brew comfrey for “liquid love”
•       Cook deliciously hearty harvest dishes
•       Make gifts from the garden: canned jams, chutneys and fruit liqueurs

Giveaway!  Viva Editions, is offering a copy of The Edible Garden to one lucky Friend for the Ride reader. To enter, please leave a comment before May 15. U.S. only, thanks.

Meet Alys and see her garden here: