The Writer’s Life: Creating Authentic Female Characters

02 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by in Human Behavior, The Writer's Life, Women Issues

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

, ,

Chinese Actress Gong Li – My pick for antagonist Mildred Gomes nee Cheong
Photo Credit: Fandango

I was born and raised in a time and place where children did not enjoy the rights they do today. When adults or big-people (Caribbean English) were engaged in conversation or disagreement, children were not allowed to put their mouth in big-people talk. Children, they said, should be seen and not heard. Break the rules and you could get a licking (flogging). And so, from a young age, I learned to observe women’s behavior and listen in to their conversations.

Big-women often spoke in coded language that I learned to decipher when I entered my teenage years.

—Watch yourself around Mary husband. He hand fast.

—She sleeping with her boss. He promise her the world.

—Mary daughter get a big-belly for the landlord son.

—He take advantage of his own daughter/niece.

—Open your eyes, girl. The white man (British soldiers) only want a good time. When the time come, he going up and gone. And you get left behind as spoiled goods.

Continue reading →

Thought for Today: AI gobbles up land, energy & water

26 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Technology, United States

≈ 65 Comments

Tags

, , ,

Aerial view of large-scale land clearing for a data center campus adjacent to a residential neighborhood – Clarksville – Arkansas – USA
Photo Credit: Brochovich Data Center (submitted by community member)

AI is no ethereal entity that lives in “the cloud.” It is a machine that lives in an AI Data Center. Not just one data center, but several data centers across our nation. Over 4,000 data centers operate in the USA. Many of them were built before generative AI came on the scene and captured our imagination with its superpower to create text, images, art, video, and sound in response to our instructions. We never questioned the origin of its source material. But that’s another story. My focus here is on the AI Data Center.

AI Data Centers that power your favorite chatbot—OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Anthropic Claude—are massive structures. What’s more troubling is that these centers need vast expanses of land, as well as lots of energy, and water to power their AI machines. With lots of money to be made during the generative AI boom, data centers are sprouting up everywhere across the United States. Your community could be their next target.

Continue reading →

“Watch” – Poem by American Poet Dan “Sully” Sullivan

19 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Poetry, United States

≈ 35 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

American Poet Dan “Sully” Sullivan
Photo Credit: Sullivan and Sullivan Studio, Poet’s Official Website
Front Cover – Poetry Collection O Body by Dan “Sully” Sullivan
Photo Credit: Haymarket Books

My Poetry Corner July 2026 features the poem “Watch” from the poetry collection O Body (Haymarket Books, 2023) by Dan “Sully” Sullivan, an American poet and educator based in Bloomington, Indiana, with nearly two decades of experience in Open Mic Poetry performance and teaching. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he earned an MFA and MA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Indiana University (2016-2019). Since 2019, he holds the position of Student Support & Registration Representative – Advance College Project at the university.

O Body, Sully’s second full-length poetry collection, delves into questions of masculinity, fatherhood, home, and learning to live in and love one’s own body.

We learn in “Wave Built in the Form of Prayer” that the speaker/poet is on the heavy side (pp. 13-14):

I get this gravity from my mom’s side. My father was always thin
& I don’t mean to speak of him like he’s dead—he’s not
thin anymore. I know the earth pulls us closer as we age, but his softer
body does not make me think of tombs. I think of passage & mirrors.

Continue reading →

The Changing Earth – Kinship

12 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Human Behavior

≈ 52 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

Infrastructure in permafrost areas is threatened by riverbank erosion, Mackenzie River Delta, Canada
Photo Credit: Bioengineer Magazine, January 16, 2025

This is the sixth article in my series about our changing Earth from interviews with Native Americans shared in We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth (USA 2022). My presentation does not follow the order of the interviews.

#6: Dr. Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi)
      (Chapter 6, pp. 73-95)

Kyle Powys Whyte, PhD is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. A faculty member of the University of Michigan, Illinois, he is a George Willis Pack Professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). He is founding Faculty Director of the Tishman Center for Social Justice and the Environment, Principal Investigator of the Environmental Justice & Humanities Hub, co-Principal Investigator of the Global Center for Climate Change and Transboundary Waters, Faculty Associate of Native American Studies, Principal Investigator of the Secretariat for the Pathways Alliance for Change and Transformation, STRIDE Committee member, affiliate Professor of Philosophy, and Senior Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows.

His primary research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples and the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and climate science organizations. His articles have appeared in journals such as Climatic Change, Sustainability Science, Environmental Justice, Hypatia, Ecological Processes, Synthese, Human Ecology, Journal of Global Ethics, American Journal of Bioethics, Journal of Agricultural & Environmental Ethics, Ethics, Policy & Environment, and Ethics & the Environment. 

Dahr and Stan asked Kyle to address the following:

  1. How humanity got to this climate crisis and what’s connected to it.
  2. How the sense of panic in societies around the world might be differentiated from a sense of urgency.
  3. How we might comport ourselves as members of the larger world society to meet the situation before us.
Continue reading →

The Writer’s Life: Creating Authentic Male Characters

28 Sunday Jun 2026

Posted by in The Writer's Life

≈ 44 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Asian Actor Henry Golding – My pick for leading man Richard Cheong
Photo Credit: IMDb

When I began work on telling Richard Cheong’s story in my 2019 debut novel Under the Tamarind Tree, I faced a mental hurdle: Was I up to the task of creating an authentic male protagonist? As a newbie novelist at the time, I followed all the guidelines for creating a fictional character, as set out in the Writer’s Digest Book on Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card.

There was no shortage of Guyanese men of my father’s generation from whom to draw inspiration. Like my father, Richard’s father (deceased) was a Chinese immigrant to what was then British Guiana—the only British colony on the mainland of South America. They both lost their parents at a young age. Richard also enjoys reading and listening to music. But the likeness ends there.

Richard’s obsession with having a son was inspired by a landlord, in the 1960s, who longed to have a daughter. After three marriages and six sons, he never got a girlchild. Was this too much pressure for his wives? Will Richard’s obsession threaten his marriage if his wife, Gloria, fails to give him a son? Gloria knows nothing about his childhood trauma, following his little brother’s murder under the tamarind tree on the sugar plantation where they grew up.

Continue reading →

“Learn to Live” – Poem by Brazilian Poet Cora Coralina (1889-1985)

21 Sunday Jun 2026

Posted by in Brazil, Poetry

≈ 42 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Brazilian Poet Cora Coralina (1889-1985)
Photo Credit: Association of the House of Cora Coralina

In my Poetry Corner June 2026, I feature the poem “Learn to Live / Saber Viver” by one of Brazil’s great twentieth-century poets, known by her pen name, Cora Coralina (1889-1985). Baptized Ana Lins dos Guimarães Peixoto, the poet adopted the name at fifteen years old when she began writing her first poems. Cora comes from coração (heart) and Coralina from the red coralline algae: red heart.

I first featured this poem in April 2014. It soon became the topmost read post on my blog and retained that position for several years. The poet’s message is much needed in today’s upside-down world. Bear in mind that Cora Coralina lived through a turbulent period, both nationally and worldwide: two World Wars (1914-1918 & 1939-1945) and Brazil’s dictatorship (1964-1985). For those who have read my 2014 post, I offer new excerpts selected from her four poetry collections published during the period 1965 to 1985.

Born in the small town of Goiás Velho, then the capital of the State of Goiás, Aninha (as she was called) lost her father, a High Court judge, when she was a toddler. In her poem, “My Childhood,” we learn that she was not favored as the third of four daughters:

Among them, I always occupied the worst place. […] I grew up as a daughter without a father, / second-rate among my sisters. // I was sad, nervous, and ugly. / Yellowish, with a pale face. / With weak legs, falling over easily. / Those who saw me like that – said: / “This girl is the living image / of her sick old father.”

Continue reading →

Thought for Today: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America

14 Sunday Jun 2026

Posted by in Recommended Reading, United States

≈ 56 Comments

Tags

, ,

Front Cover – Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade (USA, 2025)
Photo Credit: Seven Stories Press

Disinformation is the deliberate use of lies to manipulate people, whether to extract profit or to advance a political agenda. Its unwitting accomplice, misinformation, is spread by unknowing dupes who repeat lies they believe to be true. In America today, both forms of falsehood are distorting our perception of reality. In a democracy, the people need a shared set of facts as a basis to debate and make decisions that advance and secure their collective interests. Differences of opinion, and even propaganda, have always existed in the United States, but now, enemies of democracy are using disinformation to attack our sovereign right to truthful information, intellectual integrity, and the exercise of the will of the people.

[…]

Throughout history, authoritarians have used disinformation to seize power from the people. As a former national security prosecutor, I see self-serving forces sabotaging our country. Manipulators are using disinformation to poison discourse and stoke divisions in society…. Our country’s constantly changing demographics naturally bring differences of opinion, but the bitter divides are not the inevitable result of a pluralistic society with diverse ethnic, racial, religious, and social groups. They are the product of a deliberate attack through disinformation. Lies are becoming increasingly normalized, and our democracy is in peril. The conversation I propose is not a debate about Democratic and Republican politics. It is about the essential need for truth in self-governance.

Excerpts from the Updated Paperback Edition of Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade, published by Seven Stories Press, New York, USA, 2025, pp. 5-6 & 13.  

Continue reading →

The Changing Earth – Trust

07 Sunday Jun 2026

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Human Behavior, Nature and the Environment

≈ 54 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

WMO Super El Niño 2026 – Prepare for hotter-than-normal temperatures across nearly all parts of the globe – July-August 2026
Source Credit: World Meteorological Organization (WMO)

This is the fifth article in my series about our changing Earth from interviews with Native Americans shared in We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth (USA 2022). My presentation does not follow the order of the interviews.

#5: Lyla June Johnston (Diné [Navajo], Tsétsêhéstâhese [Cheyenne])
      (Chapter 5, pp. 61-72)

Lyla June Johnston is a Native American poet, singer-songwriter, hip-hop artist, human ecologist, public speaker, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne), and European lineages. She’s originally from Taos, New Mexico. Her multi-genre presentations focus on Indigenous issues and solutions, supporting youth, inter-cultural healing, historical trauma, and traditional land stewardship practices.

She has a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Anthropology (with Honors) from Stanford University (2012) and a Master’s degree in American Indian Education (with Distinction) from the University of New Mexico (2017). Following her 2021 interview with Dahr and Stan, she earned her PhD from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her doctoral research focused on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.   

Having grown up with an Indigenous worldview, coupled with her education, Lyla June’s personal goal is to “grow closer to Creator by learning how to love deeper.”

Continue reading →

California: Spring Garden Delights

31 Sunday May 2026

Posted by in Nature and the Environment, United States

≈ 45 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Rosaliene’s Succulent Garden – Dragonfly on Firestick Plant – Los Angeles – California – Spring 2026

Spring arrived late in my corner of the world. With record-breaking heat for March across Southern California, rising as high as 95°F (35°C) in my neighborhood, we seemed to have jumped from winter to summer. After my winter garden break, I was anxious to get back to tending my garden. The leaves of the potted Ficus tree, standing obliquely across from my front door, were covered with a thick black fungus. Ugh!

Late one Saturday afternoon in early March, a neighbor joined me with his cat, Pumpkin, while I removed the leaves of the infected Ficus tree. Pumpkin settled down nearby on the lookout for our two resident hummingbirds. Thankfully, she’s never been able to grab one of them.

“We’re in for an extra hot summer,” my neighbor told me.
“Looks like it,” I said. “I’m hoping all this heat will help my Ficus to grow back.”

Continue reading →

“Undermining Eden” – Poem by Caribbean Poet Jacinth Howard

24 Sunday May 2026

Posted by in Poetry

≈ 45 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

Caribbean Poet Jacinth Howard with Front Cover of her Poetry Collection The Mother Island (2023)
Photo Credit: Barbados Today – March 18, 2025

My Poetry Corner May 2026 features the poem “Undermining Eden” from the debut poetry collection The Mother Island by writer, poet, and university professor Jacinth Howard, published by Brown Bird Publishing (2023). In 2020, the manuscript of this collection won the second prize at the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award competition. All excerpts of her poetry cited below are from this collection.

Born in the Caribbean Islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the young Jacinth’s love for reading and literature led her to pursue English Literature at the tertiary level. She earned a BA (2014), MPhil (2017), and PhD (2020) in English Language and Literature/Letters from the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. She currently lives with her husband and two children in Barbados, where she teaches Literature at her alma mater.

Continue reading →