Cannabis is Medicine

 

Don't forget to migrate over to Substack to see my new post!

Here's the link!

Making Art, Making Cake, Making Love

Let the sunshine in
Photographer: Carl Jackson 

I'm excited to tell you that I have three pieces in the Michigan Quarterly Review. It's a special themed issue titled "Caregiving." I'm in pretty darn august company, including Suzanne Edison and Heather Kirn Lanier. The review has categorized my work as "poetry," but between you and me, they are really prose poems or fragments that appear in my larger manuscript.  You can order a paper copy or download a PDF for $10. There's some amazing stuff in there, and let's hear it for supporting the work and art of caregivers. I recently sent about 180 pages to an editor. I have about 3/4 of the first draft revised and am determined to get the last quarter done by the end of the month. The publication in Michigan Quarterly Review is such an honor —I've probably sent out ten things over the last couple of years and have had all rejections, so this gives me that extra kick in the ass that I need.

Maybe I'll have a book published before I turn eighty but probably not before the Disunited States turns from plutocracy to autocracy.

I guess we have to just keep doing the work. Making art, making cake, making love.

In other news, my fellow co-host and friend Jason Lehmbeck and I had the most profound discussion with two women on the Who Lives Like This?! podcast. Jennifer Siedman and Blyth Taylor Lord spoke to us about their own families and lives, about palliative care, bereavement and the remarkable organization Courageous Parents Network.  Even if you aren't a caregiver, you must listen to it. I beg you to listen to it. Please share the link, too. Remember: we're making art, making cake, making love.

Here's the link.

What are you up to, Reader?

MQR 57|4 Fall 2018

Seeking Position

Experienced freelance writer looking for work. Experience includes several ghost-written books of non-fiction, medical writing, healthcare writing, personal interest articles for The Los Angeles Times, marijuana.com, Spirituality and Health Magazine and contributions to gratefulness.org and OnBeing. Personal work published in numerous literary anthologies and journals. Micro-memoir published by Shebooks in 2015 and available for purchase online at Amazon for a ridiculously low price. Skills include editing, proof-reading and an uncanny ability to mine story from seemingly ordinary things and lives, and don't we need stories in order to live?

Website with CV and all relevant publications is here.


Salary negotiable.

Where've You Been? and My Marijuana.com Link-A-Rama

Berkeley, CA

I flew up to the San Francisco area for the weekend and spent some wonderful time with one of my oldest and best friends, Jody. We sat in her kitchen for hours talking and laughing so hard that I now feel positively purged of any bitterness, fatigue, confusion, despair, encroaching old age, neuroticism,  dedicated overthinking, anxiety, sadness and melancholy. What we talked about is entirely private, but Reader: Laughter.

On Sunday night we met Sally and Lisa in Berkeley, ate a delightful dinner (my favorite mussels and fries, along with a cocktail made with bourbon and lemon and jalapeno) and then went to Zellerbach Hall to hear Billy Collins and Aimee Mann do a really interesting and unique performance of music and poetry. It was the first time that I'd ever been to Berkeley and quite thrilling. I've long held fantasies of going to school there and am a bit gobsmacked by its hippie history. I didn't really get a chance to see much of it, but I loved the name of that bookstore and my favorite site was a man sitting on the street, cross-legged with a MacBook on his lap that was plugged into the building behind him. His belongings appeared to be scattered around him, including clothes and toiletries and foil-covered food containers. I have no idea whether he was a student, homeless or just a Berkeley hippie of the twenty-first century.

What else?

The Virgin terminal at the San Francisco airport is exactly what I imagined the future to look like when I was a child. Really. Exactly.




This is my last week at Marijuana.com, so I'm tying things up and will have a new interview posted at some point. Below you'll see a list of the articles, features and interviews that I did while at Marijuana.com -- such a great opportunity while it lasted, and a somewhat devastating and certainly unexpected end. I don't feel free to discuss those details, but it's Big Business, ya'll. Marijuana is officially Big Business, and you know how many of us who frequent a moon, worn as if it had been a shell feel about that:

Better go down upon your marrow-bones   

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones   

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;   

For to articulate sweet sounds together 

Is to work harder than all these, and yet   

Be thought an idler by the noisy set 

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen   

The martyrs call the world.’ 

That's a bit of Adam's Curse by William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet. It's one of my favorite poems and the reason for the blog's rather cumbersome title. Check it out here if you need diversion, but please come back and read the next line.





I am now officially LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB.

Did you hear that?

I am now officially LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB.

Are you Ten Thousands Minds On Fire? If you send me a lead, I will be of service to you in some significant way.


Cannabis Medicine and Autism: An Interview with Ana Maria Abba
How to Talk to Your Teenager About Marijuana: An Interview with Dr. Bonni Goldstein
Vaccination Injury, Seizures and Cannabis Medicine: An Interview with Georgia Smithson
The Literal Beating Heart
Keeping Monkey Neurons on Their Toes: An Interview with Allison Jackson
Purple Day
The Wisdom in the Room: A Cannabis Community for Women
Cannabis as Totem and Connector: An Interview with Allison Ray Benavides
A Passionate Mother's Reluctant Path to Lobbying
The Beginning - March 8, 1995
Making THCa At Home: An Interview with a Mother

On On Being

I woke up yesterday morning to a long, kind email from a stranger who claimed to have read my writing on Krista Tippett's On Being website. I didn't know what she was talking about. Then I got a notice that someone had tweeted something I said, or should I say I got a tweet? I have a twitter account (is that how you say it?), but I have used it maybe four times. I have no idea what I'm doing reading or writing tweets. Or twittering. And then someone liked -- or is it favorited? -- that tweet. Or is it twitter? Oh, twat! In any case, I eventually made my way to the On Being site and saw that a post I wrote years ago was their featured blog post for the day and that they'd also posted many photos from my blog and the Extreme Parenting Video Project. My name was right on there, as was my picture and a little bio. A link to the ebook was there, too.

I'll make a long story short. I had no idea why all of this was published. I never received any word from the site that they were publishing my work, and here's the clincher: I have no memory of submitting anything to them. I wrote the editor and explained that while I was thrilled and honored to be featured, it felt weird to have not been contacted beforehand.

The internets are strange and wild, indeed.

The editor got back to me with an apology for their oversight in not contacting me. Evidently, I had submitted the piece, but I'm not sure when. Have I gone mad? Again, I have no recollection of doing so, and the piece was written in 2012, well before we embarked on the cannabis odyssey.

 The On Being website and recorded interviews are some of my favorite things generated online, and I have often felt that Krista Tippet might have the best job in the universe. So, wow. I'm honored and grateful to be included on the site.

You can read it here.

Feel free to tweet and twat and twank about it, too.

"Hope for a Sea Change" is out and available for purchase! UPDATE!

A new version of the book with an added, short chapter about medical marijuana, is available and will be downloaded wirelessly if you've already purchased the e-book. Thank you so much for all of your support today and always!

I woke up bleary this morning after last night's festivities to a message from Angella at 37Paddington that my Shebook e-book was available for purchase on Amazon right this very second!

Good lord, ya'll. This is very exciting for me. I hope you'll download it for $2.99 and then spread the word to your friends and accomplices in life.

Forgive the shameless self-promotion that you might witness over the next few weeks. I promise that if I become a gazillionaire, I'll buy us all a private island where we can lie around all day talking about books and poetry, sip bourbon and relax.

Here is the link:

Amazon
Shebooks.net

Vesuvius in YOUR Home

I've told ya'll about the new e-book publisher, SheBooks, right? They'll be publishing a bit of my writing in the next few months, but right now, right this instant, they've published my dear friend and writer extraordinaire Brittany Tuttle's (of Vesuvius at Home fame) novella. It's called Stone and Spring, and I have already downloaded it on my Kindle and read about half of it last night before finally having to go to sleep Like everything Brittany writes, it's gorgeous, tight -- lyrical and intense. And like nothing she's ever written (that I've read) or that's been written, maybe, by anyone, it's at once deeply feminine, childlike and just this shy of brutal. I felt, reading the first half or so, like I was unwinding a spool of film -- black and white -- the images transparent and haunting, an undercurrent of violence. But, hey, I'm not even finished with the book. I can't wait for tonight when I'll climb into bed and finish it, come up for air.

Go over to Shebooks.net and order yourself a copy.








P.S. That film analogy was a careful one -- I can imagine some unwitting person reading it lightly and then realizing that they're holding the next great independent film.

A Notice That Yours Truly (me) Will Be Reading in the Southland

along with other contributors to my favorite writing teacher and mentor, Barbara Abercrombie's new book, Kicking in the Wall. I have two small pieces that Barbara included in the book and will probably be reading one or both tonight along with a few other people and the great woman herself. Here's the notice for any of you Los Angeles, Pasadena or southern California people out there. It'll be fun!

You can read more about Barbara's book here and purchase it at your local bookstore or here.

A Blackbird Sings

I participated last January in a project called small stones, an exercise in mindfulness where I wrote a short, observant prose poem each day for a month. Some of these small stones -- and one of mine! -- were gathered and edited and published in a book just released today on the Kindle and will be available in paperback shortly. Edited by Fiona Robyn and Kaspalita, you can read more about the book here. I found the exercise incredibly helpful for my writing both online and off and would encourage you to try writing your own small stones.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

William Blake 

Archives of my Small Stones

I have an essay published!

Click HERE and then scroll down. The journal is part of the wonderful website epilepsy.com.