On this day in 1888 in Glasgow, Scotland, a female child named Helen was born to a young weaver named Helen Kelly and what we today would call her "boyfriend," a fellow whose name was either Bernard or Patrick Havlin. The child's… Read full post »

Writing is the easy part. After 17 or 18 traditionally published books, I've pretty much got the writing part down pat.

Book design, cover art, layout, etc., are probably better left to the pros, but I can't afford pros, so I'm doing most of it myself, with… Read full post »

At the risk of alienating, or at least, annoying, many of my friends, both gay and straight, who have turned facebook red in the last day or two, wondering, why has being married taken on such social significance that gay men and women, who once celebrated their… Read full post »

After at least two decades fending off the fame enjoyed by her more talented, or at least less oddly unsettling, musical contemporaries, folk singer Michelle Shocked is getting more publicity than ever. Sadly, it has nothing to do with her music, which was usually classified as "indie-… Read full post »

I may have become so sophisticated that I look back with bemusement at my devout Roman Catholic girlhood, when I attended Mass on Sundays and my bedroom wall was hung with a portrait of Pope John XXIII sprigged with a bit of Easter palm.

When I had a small, white… Read full post »

North Korea is said to be a desolate, frozen, land, with a terrain like a charcoal briquette, and populated by an angry, starving, dwarf-like people, led by a demented, overweight son-of-a-despot. Can it be so different from its southern neighbor?

The Imperial Spa, located north of Sahara Avenue and… Read full post »

 I never longed for a daughter that I could dress like a Disney Princess-- I wanted sons, and I got lucky, 'cause sons is what I got.

Starting in the year of the bicentennial, and at two to two-and-a- half year intervals afterward, I had three of them. Raising those boys… Read full post »

My hands are full.

I need to put something down.

In the too-short evening, in order to love you,

I need to let go of myself.

I will empty my hands of myself,

In order to carry your love.

Leaving myself to love you, then,

In the too-short… Read full post »

Salon's always excellent Mary Elizabeth Williams has a blog today on Time Magazine's provocative new cover article, Are You Mom Enough? which is, as Williams points out,"accompanied, by the way, by a picture of a hot blonde and her 3-year-old son standing on a chair to suckle her breast. " (Partial… Read full post »

I get it.

Conservative America embraces "stand your ground" laws, because everywhere they look, their ground IS threatened.

While Progressive America keeps moving the tent pegs farther and farther apart, stretching the fabric of the constitution to cover more and more of those who had been left… Read full post »

On the way to work this morning, I was mostly listening to KNPR like a good progressive. I was also making the decision to yes, take the freeway, indicating, changing lanes, and generally just listening with half an ear. I heard a news report about a "hate crime" (like there are "love"… Read full post »

My president, Barack Obama, is absolutely within his rights to say that if he had a son, the child would look like Trevon Martin, and those, like the odious Michelle Bachmann and Newt Gingrich, who have called him out for it are not only wrong, they are dishonestly so. Disgustingly and… Read full post »

I remember the days when authors wrote books, and publishers published them, and bookstores sold them, and all was right with the world. Those days are gone.

My last two books sank into the salty sea off the coast of the Island of Broken Toys, I think. Unpublicized, unsold, they… Read full post »

The Pill - by Matt McGinn - 1968 

"I wed when I was seventeen,

I hadnae many brains,

Says I, "the very thing to do

Is fill the hoose with weans,"

But when I got the room full,

I went tae see the priest,

Tae tell him my man… Read full post »