Monthly Archives: April 2026

The Writer’s Life: Training for the Marathon of Writing My First Novel

26 Sunday Apr 2026

Posted by in The Writer's Life

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The three stories that illuminated my path to completing my first novel: A House for Mr. Bismas, Beloved, and The Good Earth

When we migrated to the United States from Brazil in October 2003, I had hoped that, with fourteen years of experience in international trade, I would have no problem in finding work in my area of expertise. That proved more difficult than I had imagined. Instead, there I was in West Hollywood, working as a salesperson in the jewelry department of a large retail store. We do what we must to pay the bills. Unknowingly, we find ourselves where we’re meant to be.

At the retail store, I worked with and attended to creative artists of all kinds. Some worked in commercial productions. Others played extras in movies or TV shows. Many others struggled to grasp opportunities for getting into the movie industry.

The creative pulse of the heartland of Hollywood was infectious. Becoming a writer was not just a dream. It was within reach. But it would take training in the craft of writing to bring my story of Richard Cheong to life on the pages. With a crazy work schedule and limited funds, I opted for a correspondence course by snail mail. Those were the days before online courses. The Creative Writing course at the Stratford Career Institute in Vermont guided me from writing my first scene of up to 500 words to finding my writer’s voice in a 3000-word short story. Working at my own pace, I completed the writing course within two years (2004-2006).

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“Disease Is Not the Only Thing That Spreads” – Poem by British American BreakBeat Poet Seema Yasmin

19 Sunday Apr 2026

Posted by in Health Issues, Poetry

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Left: Front Cover: If God Is A Virus: Poems by Seema Yasmin
Photo Credit: Haymarket Books
Right: Photo of Seema Yasmin by Lucas Passmore published on her Official Website

My Poetry Corner April 2026 features the poem “Disease Is Not the Only Thing That Spreads” from the first poetry collection If God Is a Virus (Haymarket Books, 2021) by Seema Yasmin, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, medical doctor, professor, and author. Inspiration for this book came from her reporting as a doctor and journalist on the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa and its aftermath. The poems explore which human lives are valued, how editorial decisions are weighed, role of the aid industrial complex during health crises, and the way medical myths and rumors can travel faster than microbes. By chance, the book was released during the coronavirus global pandemic.

Yasmin writes in the seven-verse poem “We Are Watching” (p. 40):

Brown deaths six (thousand) / Miles away matter less // Or not at all if that segment / Airs before commercial break // We regret to inform you // Your scheduled programming / Has been interrupted

Born in Warwickshire, England, Yasmin was raised in East London by immigrant Muslim parents of Indian and Burmese ancestry. She studied biochemistry at Queen Mary University of London where she graduated in 2005 and earned her Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree at the University of Cambridge. Permission to study medicine did not come easy for a girlchild born into a conservative religious Muslim family. She shares her frustration and anger in the poem “lady doctor” (stanzas 2 & 3, pp. 12-13):

I was vexed slammed the kitchen door twelve-year-old girl with a penchant for electrons and using the ice cube tray to freeze different molarities of saline to find the lowest freezing point not to mince garlic green chilies into frozen cubes for speedy curry making to feed hungry doctor husband one day

lady doctor you say to the receptionist and then how can there be none? it is a women’s health clinic how can there be none? none? in all the NHS there is none? and the tug in your uterus is so deep you say a man cannot go that deep cannot go so deep as a woman you say as I cringe behind you and the woman whose mother let her be a receptionist shrugs

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The Changing Earth – Sacred Feminine and Sacred Masculine

12 Sunday Apr 2026

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Human Behavior

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Palisades Fire January 2025 – Los Angeles County – California – USA
Photo Credit: CalFire Photo Album
Great Flood Baton Rouge August 2016 – Louisiana – USA
Photo Credit: Climate Central (Photo by Bill Feig/The Advocate)

This is the third 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.

#3: Terri Delahanty (Cree) – Sacred Feminine and Sacred Masculine
      (Chapter 7, pp. 96-107)

Terri Delahanty, a Cree woman, was interviewed by Dahr Jamail in her home in October 2019, several months before the COVID-19 lockdown. (The majority of the Cree Nation resides in Canada. In the USA, they are primarily located in Montana.) A Sun Dancer for eleven years, she maintains a regular practice of Native ceremonies, meditation, and women’s traditional ceremonies. Also an ordained minister, she is the Native American chaplain for York Correctional Institution, a high security women’s facility, as well as for three of the men’s prisons in Connecticut. She is a founding member of the board of Women in the Spirit and sits on the board of trustees at the Institute of American Indian Studies in Washington Depot, Connecticut.

As a certified parent educator, at the supervisory level, through the National Parents As Teachers Organization, she is the director for Greater Hartford Even Start, a family literacy program. For over twenty years, she is also the director for the extended day program and program coordinator at the University of Hartford Magnet School.

Terri sees her spirit’s journey as bringing knowledge to the Indigenous community about returning to the Sacred Feminine and Sacred Masculine, lost through patriarchy. “We’ve gotten away from our heart center,” she told Jamail.

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