writing
What Is Home?
Thomas Wolfe’s novel, posthumously published in 1940, was titled, You Can’t Go Home Again. This title has become a warning and an often-deployed platitude. Books have been written, movies made with that question at their core, can she/he/they/them go home again––because the question is universal and timeless.
Many of those movies portray a family in a splendid home with enough bedrooms for all the bickering adult siblings, maybe an attached winery, horse barn, cattle ranch or at least a guest house by the pool. None of that privilege was my experience.
Nonetheless, can we really go home again? And what is home?
Is home a place, sound, taste, or feeling?
For example, an elderly neighbor of mine, in her 90s, walks by my house every day and admires my roses. Today she saw our newly placed realtor’s ‘For Sale’ sign.
“You are to move from das house?” she asked in broken English.
“Yes,” I said, standing up from weed pulling. “We are moving home to Oregon.”
“Home,” she said. “Home vwould be nice ….” Her gaze drifted to the sky. Her thoughts seemed to drift as well. She’d been having memory issues lately, likely dementia. “No …” she whispered to the sky. “Vwe can never go home.”
“Poland, right?” I asked, recalling one of our many previous conversations. “When did you leave?”
She glanced up and down the street, then cast her eyes downward to her mismatched shoes, and grumbled, “Stalin.”
I felt her anger and deep sorrow. “Oh … I’m sorry. Those were terrible years.”
“Yes,” she met my gaze for a long moment. Then she lifted her arthritic fingers to her mouth. “I taste mama’s potato pierogis.” She gently tapped her lips. “Das vwas home, das taste.” She closed her eyes, smiled, and then laid her hand over her heart. “Go home for me who cannot.” She walked away, lost in fading memories.
As she continued her walk, I knew she’d already forgotten our conversation. But I won’t forget her reminder of how tastes and smells are portals to memory, maybe especially when endangered memories vanish as quickly as that elusive word lost at the edge of your tongue.
As I watched her amble down the road, I summoned the familiar senses that remind me of home;
Coffee. Shoe wax. Bacon. Mom’s Emeraude perfume.
Each of those smells arouses a unique memory, conjures images and evokes emotion, connecting me to so many stories.
Coffee: mornings with dad, either at our home in Portland, or most favorably sitting by the campfire in Nehalem or on the beach in Manzanita. Dad’s old percolator pot on its makeshift wire rack above the fire, gurgling to life, generating the smell that has lingered in my senses for a lifetime.
Shoe wax: Saturdays, since I was nine years old, working with my dad at his shoe repair. Then, as a teen 3-4 days a week. That waxy smell always transported me into our secret world where mom and my brothers never interfered. A world of dad’s jazz music, or Dean Martin, playing in the background, and dad whistling along. And the sound of the eight-foot-long, five-foot-tall shoe repair and brush machines where he was putting a final waxy shine on boots, high heels, and leather loafers. And of course, the smell of coffee from his back shop burner. My roll top desk was always littered with sketch pads and writing paper in the back of the shop. With three younger brothers at home, quiet time was rare, so in between customers, this was precious writing, drawing, and coffee time. And a time when dad and I could just hang out, quietly absorbed in our music or art, refilling coffee cups and enjoying the peace. The waxy smell of a shoe repair makes me feel calm––said no one ever!
Bacon: Bacon was Dad’s favorite breakfast food, but he rarely made it, and Mom didn’t cook. If I woke up and smelled bacon, it generally meant Grandma was there, living with us for a while to help manage ‘the kids’ and poor mom’s wickedly hormonal mood swings. Life was great with our stabilizer, Grandma Ollie. And my dad adored her. Grandma brought peace, stopped my parents’ non-stop fighting, soothed the day for mom, and made my brothers behave. It was heaven, and at the core of that heaven was the smell of bacon. The smell of bacon makes me feel safe and protected.
Emeraude Perfume: Mom’s favorite perfume in the late 1950’s and 60s. When she wore it, it meant she felt pretty, and if mom felt pretty, the universe took notice. I mean literally: newspaper interviews, stage performances, and being at the center of a prestigious social circle. All of this meant she was in a good mood, and in a good mood, Mom was delightful, charming, loving, and caring to the extent she was capable. The smell of Emeraude Perfume makes me feel cheerful, but also reminds me there is a shadow side to that transitory cheer.
More than a house, nostalgia, and memories, home is a deeply spiritual experience. When I was young, we moved around Portland too many times to count, so home is not a specific house for me. Though my family was troubled––my father and two of my three brothers’ lives mired in alcoholism and drug addiction, and my mom’s mental health issues haunted every aspect of our lives–there was love.
And it is that love that anchors my feelings about home.
I’ll continue this exploration of what is home in the next post. Meanwhile, what is home for you?
That’s my dad at the brush machines, lost in his work sometime in the early 1970s, then him and I late 1970s, and me, old now but still my father’s daughter in my devotion to a good cup of coffee
The Women of BEYOND THIS WICKED REALM
My novel, for which I am seeking representation, is titled BEYOND THIS WICKED REALM.
In 1970s, Portland Oregon, when stagflation met disco-mania, Portlanders seeking liberation from urban blight, lights out orders and ambushed pipe dreams turned to sexploitation. Mary’s Club, which features prominently in my newly completed novel, and other strip joints packed in customers. X-rated theaters and bookstores of the ADULT sort exploded around the city. To learn more about the background, please read my previous post titled, Mama Told Me Not To Come.
Below is a brief glimpse into the brave women in the story.
In 1972, Portland Oregon, four women—a Holocaust survivor, a mobster’s daughter, a drug dealer’s abused girlfriend, and a lady-scholar turned drifter—form an unlikely sisterhood in a fight for survival against Portland’s illicit porn and drug trades.
In Portland Oregon, our protagonist, Etta Broussard, has stopped taking her decades-long prescribed Valium drugs. Etta, a forty-five-year-old Holocaust survivor who views the evil in her world through the prism of The Lord of The Rings––suffers greatly from past trauma.
When Etta discovers that her neighbor is a pornographer and an inhuman monster, like Tolkien’s Orcs and Wargs in the concentration camps of her youth, she is dragged back into her nightmares. She vows to stop him from doing what the Nazi’s did to her. Her fervent mission launches the story.
Etta is a devotee of Tolkien’s work, sharing its message like a missionary on fire. She inspires these abused women to discover shieldmaiden-like courage in a battle with the criminal underworld.
When Etta meets fifty-year-old Ireland Ó Luain in a downtown Portland park, they become fast friends and form an unlikely sistership. Ireland becomes a big sister to Etta. Once a professor of women’s studies at Portland State, erudite and wise, Ireland now appears to be living rough on the streets of Portland. She pushes a grocery cart of her belongings around town and dispenses hard-earned wisdom.
Ireland considers herself as Persephone, sent to the underworld–a mental institution–for accusing a powerful man of rape. The commitment of a troublesome woman was acceptable in a city controlled by wealthy men. Cast into darkness, she now seeks to find her way back into the light.
Etta and her husband own a neighborhood bar. Two young friends, Maxie and Neva, are regulars. They offer Etta a bitter-sweet glimpse into the life of a normal twenty-something woman, laughing with friends, beautiful and confident. The life that was taken from her when she was sent to a concentration camp at fourteen. She adores them like daughters she never had.
One of the beautiful young women is Maxwell, ‘Maxie’ McGee, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of Portland’s most notorious gangster. Victim of her father’s increasing alcohol and drug-fueled rage, she longs to escape his wicked world and have a life without goons, corruption and murder. But she is terrified to go against him. She and Etta develop a sacred bond; Etta is the only person Maxie has found who knew her mysteriously disappeared mother. Maxie loves Etta as a symbol of her beloved mother, who she believes was murdered by her father.
One day, while sitting in the park, Etta and Ireland meet young Cleo Dubois. Cleo is a sixteen-year-old unwanted child, and now unwitting girlfriend of a violent drug dealer who works for Maxie’s mobster father. Etta saw darkness like these men in the camps: the SS had those dark souls—the most malevolent Nazgûl. They vow to save Cleo no matter what it takes.
After Etta makes a dreadful sacrifice, Ireland rescues Cleo. She hides Cleo away from her abuser and ushers her into a life Cleo never dared dream: family, friends, and a home of her own. Ireland mentors Cleo about surviving the darkness, then embracing life as it is, and thriving. And that thriving means fighting back, embracing her innermost shieldmaiden as Etta taught them. While mentoring and saving Cleo, Ireland finds redemption.
After Etta’s shocking brave sacrifice, Maxie ruminates on her many illuminating Tolkien-esque conversations with Etta and decides to embrace her inner shieldmaiden. She takes action to end her father’s wicked dominion over the city through drugs, pornography, and more.
****
Next time, I’ll share a brief glimpse at the men in BEYOND THIS WICKED REALM: a mobster and his brutal, devoted lieutenant, a truth-seeking reporter (and love interest), and a mortician with a strong sense of justice.
Thanks for reading. Please LIKE and share.
And if you’re an agent who is interested in BEYOND THIS WICKED REALM, please contact me.
2 responses to “The Women of BEYOND THIS WICKED REALM”
Author, Storyteller, Poet, Instructor
Mama Told Me Not To Come
Yesterday, while writing in a coffee shop, a stranger decided to join me. Despite my suggestive glance at the room full of unoccupied tables, she plopped down at mine. “You’re a writer,” she said. And then she proceeded to interview me about the who, what, when, and where that inspired my newly completed (not yet published) novel…. I got over my annoyance and had an interesting conversation, which ultimately inspired this blog post and future posts. I explained to my curious new friend ….
In 1970s, Portland, Oregon, when stagflation met disco-mania, Portlanders seeking liberation from urban blight, lights out orders, and ambushed pipe dreams turned to sexploitation. Mary’s Club, which features prominently in my newly completed novel, and other strip joints packed in customers. X-rated theaters and bookstores of the ADULT sort exploded around the city.
It was a boom era fueled by relaxed obscenity regulations that led to porn palaces and live performances that ruled the neon landscape. Ultimately, The Oregonian Newspaper, where my grandfather worked, named Portland “the pornography capital of the West Coast.”
Religious cults, Vietnam protesters, and abortion rights activists heralded signs on every street.
The day before my fifteenth birthday, Grandpa pulled me aside at the Oregonian. “A lot of things aren’t making it into the paper,” he said in a solemn tone. “We got crooked cops, racketeers, editors on the take,” he whispered. “Pretty girls like you are in danger.”
He explained in one wide-ranging account how girls my age were easy prey, often collateral damage in a metropolis run by the mob. And how Portland’s corrupt politicians had earned a new moniker for The City of Roses; the vice capital of the northwest. Police corruption extended further than pacifying Teamsters on the docks; it was citywide. The thriving narcotics trade enticed officers to look the other way while their palms were greased and young girls vanished from the streets.
Grandpa never spoke to me about such shocking (to my naive sensibilities) issues. So, I listened.
Planted deep within grandpa’s warning that day were the seeds of my novel, Beyond This Wicked Realm to follow some fifty years later. For which I am seeking representation.
Grandpa made sure I had a bus pass, a library card, and books; the classics on which he expected a verbal book report. In his way, he was making sure his teenage granddaughter was too busy to go looking for trouble. Nonetheless, trouble was around every corner looking for her.
After school, a couple of days a week I worked for my dad in downtown Portland, just a few blocks from the Oregonian. I rode the bus into the city past businesses with handwritten signs in dark windows (victims of the governor’s lights-out orders), gas stations with NO GAS signs at the curb, hippies sleeping on park benches, and the yeasty smell of the Henry Weinhard Brewery that permeated everything. I leaned my head against the bus window and studied the girls walking up and down Broadway and Burnside. Some were my age, even younger; black fishnet stockings, black raccoon eyes, and faux fur cropped sweaters, sashaying down the streets, unsteady on their platform shoes. At ten in the morning, they already looked like they had been out partying and drinking all night. Maybe they had. I didn’t know. My grandma called them the lost girls. All I knew was that I never wanted to get lost.
One day when I got off the bus, as I hurried through a group of shouting Vietnam War protestors, a man grabbed me. He had an Afro the size of a beach ball, wore a long black leather coat, and dark glasses. He towered over me. At first, I thought he was one of the Black Panthers, though they normally weren’t in that part of the city. I was terrified. I didn’t speak.
Then he let go of my arm and said, “Hey foxy mama, you a stone fox.” He looked me up and down.
My eyes burned with tears, but I stood paralyzed.
“We could make some moolah,” he said, rubbing his fingers together.
But then, a woman who looked to be my mom’s age slammed his head with her protest sign and shouted, “PIMP! Leave that child alone.” When she did that, a group of protesters ran over to us, shouting, “Police … PIMP!”
That woman turned to me and said, “Honey, you should run now.”
Like Forest Gump, I bolted and ran all the way from 3rd and Washington to 11th, without looking back or stopping for traffic. People honked and shouted, but I didn’t care. I ran to the safety of my dad’s shoe repair shop on 11th. I never told Dad why I was out of breath and crying that day. He gave me a cup of tea and suggested I go read my book in the back of the shop for a while. He no doubt figured it was ‘that time of the month.’ It wasn’t.
It was the first time I was ‘approached’ by a pimp, but it wouldn’t be the last. They were on every corner trying to recruit girls for strip clubs, and worse, much worse. One day, when I left the Multnomah Library on 10th street, carrying my homework books, a man in a black car at the curb offered me three hundred dollars––in today’s money that’s over $2000.00–– to dance in a cage that would be hanging from a ceiling in a local nightclub. I backed away, turned, and ran like that protestor woman told me to do. I wasn’t going to freeze and cry again. I ran.
Being a teenage girl in 1970s Portland was like being a gazelle pursued on an open tundra to the soundtrack of Three Dog Night’s, Mama Told Me (Not to Come). I learned to run, hide, seek shelter, and NEVER talk to men in parked cars at the curb.
I had a few safe havens, good people around me, shelter, and some good sense handed to me by my family. I survived, but many didn’t.
I wrote this novel for them, the lost girls, those who didn’t make it out and those who did make it through the darkness to the other side.
This is the environment for my current novel, titled Beyond This Wicked Realm–In 1973, four women—a Holocaust survivor, a mobster’s daughter, a drug dealer’s abused girlfriend, and a lady-scholar turned drifter—form an unlikely sisterhood in a fight for survival against Portland’s illicit porn and drug trades.
That highlights some of the backdrop for my novel. In an upcoming post I will share my characters, women I’ve grown to love, mentors I wish I’d had, and lost girls I knew.
Leave a comment
A Tragedy Inspired Poem
Recently, one of my poems was published in The Edmonds Beacon newspaper. The poem was inspired by a tragic car accident I witnessed several years ago. A scene that etched into my memory.
That’s how it often happens for us writers, something––a face, a scarf, a doorway, or an incident––imprints on our psyche and ultimately, we use it in a piece of work. Here is the poem that resulted from that tragic afternoon, followed by a brief epilogue.
SEPTEMBER MOON
Beneath the September moon
A flicker of weak light
The faint memory of her mothering years––lost
Unraveled
Tiny strings frayed
Scattered
Across the fallow fields of her life.
Alone in the darkness she feels
Loosely tethered to both worlds
One where she still sees her children
Hears them sing
The other where she floats endlessly in the hollow silence of night
Linked to them by one last ethereal string.
She closes her eyes
Afraid to see, to hear, to know,
What happened
––in her wine-colored afterglow.
Beneath a September moon
Reminders––
Buried deep
Lost in her spirit
The solitary tills of time
Of heart
And soul
Barren of love, barren of life
––and she knows
The piercing betrayal of one more glass of wine.
She now imagines her children as dormant butterflies
Who will not awaken any time soon
Their innocent lives arrested by
Mommy’s cocktails at noon.
Beneath fading lunations
She hears their cries
Her sweet butterflies
And she knows
Therein is her penance
Her dark destiny
––a life sentence
To carry aural witness of their final cries
To her spiritual wasteland
Filled with echoes of a mother’s bittersweet lies.
Tiny fingertips, like frayed strings
Once adored
Now, grasping
Reaching
Weakening
Tearing away from the cord.
Epilogue
This was a tragedy about a mother who attended a wine tasting luncheon, tasted too much wine, and then decided to pick up her two toddlers from daycare.
I was three cars behind her on the road when suddenly her car veered over the side of the road and crashed into a tree. We all slammed on our brakes. There was an officer parked in the parking lot not ten feet away. We all ran toward the car, but he arrived first and motioned for us all to stand back.
He pulled the mother from the front seat. Her head was gashed, blood dripping into her eyes, all over her hands, and was sprayed against her white silk blouse like blood on snow.
Her piercing screams horrified us all. She kept screaming and crying hysterically. “I’ve killed my babies!”
The five or six of us who’d leapt from our cars to help stood frozen. Collective dread filled all our faces. Approaching sirens echoed in the background.
The officer got her seated at the curb while the rest of us, me included, finally inched up to the car, fearful of what we might see in the back seat.
Her screams grew more hysterical. “I’ve killed my babies! … Oh God, I‘ve killed them.”
But as we all leaned down and trepidatiously peered into the windows, we were surprised by what we saw.
There in the back seat, staring at us, were two small children, safely buckled into car seats, looking at us like we were aliens.
They were fine. Afraid, but otherwise fine.
The mother was arrested for drunk driving and endangering her children, who again, I stress, were unharmed.
I learned later in the newspaper that her husband divorced her, and she lost custody and all visitation of her children. It was her third drunk driving incident, so she also went to prison for a time.
Perhaps her drunken terror that awful day was a mournful premonition. She did, after all, lose her children.
Leave a comment
What’s Mold Got To Do With Politics?
Right now, I am staying in a hotel, a nice hotel, but still, away from my home, my husband, and dog. Mold was discovered in our attic and the removal, repair, and roof replacement has become a major ordeal. With my compromised immune system, I can’t be around the mold or the abatement spraying. So, here I am in a rainy coastal town 25 minutes from my house, with a fireplace and a view of the water––I know, poor me.
You’d think I’d be delving into writing more than I am, but I feel anxious and unfocussed like someone’s tearing my home apart in the middle of winter, and I’m not there to protect it. I know my precious doggo is scared and missing my cuddles, my husband is managing things as best he can from his home office––and maybe he’s missing my cuddles too. Anyway, it’d be better if I were there in person dealing with the contractors, instead of by phone.
Distractions like this tend to silence my muse. Stress is always a writing disruption, but this feels more like a psychic disturbance. Does tearing the shielding roof off my home and ripping the protective insulation out of my attic have spiritual significance to me?
In these troubling times of chaos and tearing our political agencies apart, leaving us exposed and vulnerable to the elements, I can’t help but wonder if that’s the true source of my soul-deep sense of unnerving disorder.
Even with mold in our attic we wouldn’t burn the house down. No, we eradicate and repair, because it is otherwise a great house. That’s what I feel should be done with our democracy, it’s a great house with some rot that should be eliminated. Instead, the house is being burnt down, and we are left exposed and in danger of all looming storms. And they are looming.
To ease my unease I’m taking walks, writing this in a coffee shop, and meditating on my life’s blessings that were once only impossible dreams.
So now, on the eve of our country’s nightmare, I count the blessings of dreams come true and feel empowered to do things once thought impossible: like being 70 years old and trying to muster my inner 17-year-old revolutionary, again––and sadly, to fight for the same things as before.
For me, participating in politics other than voting, attending city meetings, and door-knocking for a few politicians––and once, in the 1970s being quasi-arrested for protesting the Vietnam War, and demanding women’s rights, including abortion rights––has been random participation.
My husband says I’m too political. My grandson says I’m not right enough, and my granddaughter says I’m not left enough. So here I am, standing firm in the middle of a burning house, realizing that random participation is no longer good enough.
I have learned that I can’t fix everything––a tough life lesson––and it’s not my job to mend the world all at once. But I can heal some small part within my reach.
“Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.” François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a. Voltaire
Times like these, as with a writing deadline, force me to focus on what can be done instead of catastrophizing about what can’t and what’s gone wrong––instead, focusing my energies on what could go right. So, I started thinking about a few of those things that could go right, for example:
- Troubling times are opportunities to rise and get in-spirit. I turn to the elders for inspiration; Martin Luther King Jr., Voltaire, Margaret Mead, The Bible, Edmund Burke, J.R.R Tolkien, and so many others. I’ve included their words below.
- Activists who in the past faced a drought of public interest are now facing a tsunami of awareness and volunteers, turning helplessness into hope. From immigrants escaping violence, food-deprived senior citizens, and underprivileged kids in need of schooling, food, and shelter, to the unhoused we see in every city, there is no shortage of ways we can make a difference.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead.
3. The rules of routine politics have been tossed into a bonfire––no more business as usual––it’s time to engage anew, rise from those ashes a bright and radiant phoenix of this modern revolution. After all, WE ARE THE PEOPLE damn it!
4. This is a unique opportunity to turn the tables and capitalize on intentional chaos (being created as a strategic plan to distract) and alter the political landscape of our country. It’s time to challenge elected officials and compel them to resist this inhumane administration.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
5. As writers, activists, and concerned citizens we must reevaluate and revise the conditions of debate around issues concerning our society at large. It is time to eradicate the mold under our roof, to reign in our spending without harming those most in need. Time to tax those inclined toward greed. It is time to get big money out of politics, time to do away with the corruption of organizations like citizens united, deliver a gut punch to the donor class (a plutocracy), and to alleviate greed and corruption to the best of our ability. It’s time to build that sheltering roof for our communities. It’s not time to move backward via Project 2025, but forward to a new humanity. And that takes active participation.
“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed.” – Proverbs 31:8-9
6. Go sign up for something, lend your voice, carry a sign, contact your representatives (repeatedly) about climate change, women’s rights, voter rights, gun control, civil rights, immigrant rights, and so much more. Use your voice to speak up against evil.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke
7. Visit sites and resources like the MASA––Let’s Make America Smart Again website for free resources, even print your own posters and so much more.
8. Right now, our house is burning, but it’s an opportunity to remodel and build a new house with a mold-resistant roof.
“From the ashes, a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring…” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Come on fellow citizens, let’s be that light!
Mindy Meyers-Halleck 
Leave a comment