Happy New Year! I hope you had a restful, creative holiday.
I got some reading done…* and some decorating!
My last Museletter came out in June, highlighting my Joaquin Miller Park interview on the East Bay Yesterday podcast and some recognition for The Dirndl Diaspora.* *
The big news since then is I started posting weekly right here on Substack! How’s it going for you? I wish I could talk to each of you individually; short of that, I wish I could see you smile when you read this. (I get dopamine hits from likes and comments, hint hint!)
Last year featured a lot of “coming full circle” events, wherein things from the beginning of my writing career finally came to fulfillment.
For example, “Fashionable Foods for Deco Dining,”** my presentation for the Art Deco Society, was a reboot of my first public lecture, inspired by my first nationally published article, Deconstructing the Deco Diet. I even did an interview about my apron collection inspired by that event.
The first short story I ever submitted, “The Spirit of 76,” finally came out, fifteen years later! If you know any Type 2 fans, the anthology, Bus Love: Stories of Life and Adventure with the VW Bus Bus Love: Stories of Life and Adventure with the VW Bus makes a great gift. I’ll be posting this story about the end of my happy childhood in a rag-top VW bus sometime this year.**
Finally my client, whose projects I’ve been shepherding for nearly three decades at Spiraling Music, decided to publish her human rights education project as a fully accessible workbook. It has been such an honor to be in collaboration** on this with composer, activist, and peace teacher Merrill Collins. Her song project guide, Every Man, Woman and Child + Every Living Soul came out in December, for the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I hope you will try one of the book’s many ways to engage with the UDHR in its diamond jubilee year! Here’s what I did with my class and here’s how you can do it with yours. I’ll be teaching with Merrill on the morning of MLK Day if you would like to learn different ways to do a musical human rights project using this beautiful song. Here’s the Eventbrite page… all attendees get a copy of the book.
Also last year, I was also honored to read poems** at Beast Crawl for the first time, as well as at the Hayward Lit Hop and Poetry Express.
At the (What’s Left Of) Mills College Writers Salon in October, I read an excerpt from the Coping Skills and Trauma Prevention chapter from The Winning Family **—as if it could help matters. (They settled the lawsuit, by the way. More words coming up on that.) At that event, Arabella Grayson debuted her Barbara Lee paper doll, another long-time-coming project! I got both of them to sign it. Hearing Barbara speak to a room full of educated women in Julia Morgan ‘s Student Union was inspiring, powerful, and bittersweet, both symbolizing and naming what we need to fight for in 2024.
In October, I also hosted my annual literary picnic, this one titled “A Circle of Voices,” but it got rained out. Nonetheless, we made more history with a guerilla christening of the stage that made the newspapers!
Now I want to show you something. In December I finally updated my Traveling Bookstore and realized what a stack of books I’ve either birthed or midwived or put words into in the past 18 months.
Clockwise rom left:
Bus Love: Stories of Life and Adventure with the VW Bus Bus Love: Stories of Life and Adventure with the VW Bus
We Declare! Songs, Chants, Dances and Multimedia Projects based on the Global Ethic
Every Man, Woman and Child + Every Living Soul: The Original Musical Presentation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Fountain of Jewels (I added 11 more!) , thenLiking Myself (coming out this month!)
But Books are Not Everything…
These were a few of my favorite things from my life in the rest of the world:
The Little Free Library my husband almost built, and the one he built and dedicated to his mom (a.k.a. “Snort”);
The pair of Chuck Taylors my son designed for my birthday with “Cool” on one heel and “Mom” on the other. (He also got me Legos for Christmas);
The battle scars we added to the Enterprius.
Hiking and ziplining in the Redwoods, and the Jules Verne room at the Sylvia Beach Motel—a bucket list vacation for book nerds!
Moving my businesses to Notion, keeping up my BuJo evangelism, getting encouragement from my Fitbit;
Knowing all the lyrics to sing along to at the Devo concert;
My clever and lovely cat, who learned to use the toilet;
Oh, and getting that random thing that was trying to kill me out of my neck!
Thanks for reading!
Stay tuned for more in 2024. Please read and review and share my books!
NOTE: If you’d like to get ONLY this semi-annual Museletter instead of the weekly postings, check the bottom of the About page for how to adjust your subscription.
* My Fairy Godmother is a Drag Queen, Fifty First Dates After Fifty, The Odditorium, The Lost Apothecary, The Messy Lives of Book People…
** $upporting $ubscribers can or will soon be able to see for free at anytime in The Cave.) Here’s the button for that:
Thanks for the update! I ended up listening to Barbara Lee's whole speech that you linked here. 🤓 She's amazing. And I also have a selfie with her over my shoulder, similar to yours - haha!