Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

Stuff gets done here

recent posts

  • The Booker Rebellion: on its way

    Forest at dawn. Photo by Susan Palmer

    The Booker Rebellion came to me as I drove on a two-lane highway somewhere between Alsea and the ocean. I had been thinking about my nieces and nephews in the magic of a temperate rainforest, all rich and dark and riding the steep ridges of the Oregon Coast Range. The kids I adore, the landscape I love merged into a story. It has never let me go.

    Those kids are much taller now, and The Booker Rebellion is a real thing, a literary thriller coming from Sibylline Press in November. The Booker siblings — fifteen-year-old Belinda, twelve-year-old Jack and six-year-old Emmy — discover a corpse in the forest near their remote home and are on their own as they uncover a secret militia caching weapons in the woods, see their aunt disappear, and find themselves the target of a deputy who’d rather they disappear too. Their parents may be off fighting wildfires in Alaska, but these free-range kids have operating instructions: Pay attention. Notice what’s right. Notice what’s wrong. Do what must be done.

    In coming months I’ll be sharing more news: a cover reveal, an opportunity for early readers, an upcoming writing workshop. I’ll keep you posted.

    A note to the nieces and nephews: I swear, kids, it’s fiction. None of the stuff you actually did is in here. Promise.

  • What cats know

    Kate’s been gone a while. Years. Today, while tidying the electronic desktop, I stumbled on several images that made me smile. Kate loved investigating a lower kitchen cupboard during late-night wanderings. The open cupboard door next morning always revealed her secret.

    This particular morning was the beginning of a gut-the-first-floor house remodel. We’d set up a safe room for her in the upstairs bathroom: her toys, her food, the litter box, a cushion she liked to drowse on.

    The construction crew was due to arrive and I wanted Kate (a stranger-averse being of the first order) safely tucked away before they showed up. But Kate, anticipating disruption, had safely tucked herself away. I searched high and low and couldn’t find her.

    That morning, she had added a new skill — closing the cupboard door behind her. When, as a last-ditch effort, I checked, there she sat looking at me like “May I help you?” I laughed and grabbed the phone, and she, with great dignity stepped out.

    Twenty minutes later, the doorbell rang.

    Photo by Susan Palmer

  • Bascule, baby: In praise of bridges that move

    I really wanted to see the Johnson Street Bridge spanning Victoria Harbor raised. A massive steel thing going up in the air, smooth as thought. It’s saying “come on in” to the big boats, the tall-masted sailboats, the working tugs, the industrial, the commercial, the research vessels, sliding past at the harbor’s narrowest point.

    I’m a sucker for drawbridges and I blame that on Chicago and on Craig. Once, visiting the windy city in September, I learned that the 18 drawbridges spanning the Chicago River all rise up in the spring and in the fall to let the pleasure boats go out onto Lake Michigan and come back in for winter storage. These bridges sit low for ease of the downtown street traffic. Once Craig (spouse, best travel buddy, engineer and lover of infrastructure) learned there was a drawbridge museum in Chicago, we had to go. A museum’s where you get to stop and think about things you otherwise would never give a thought to and I began to think about drawbridge leaf weights, the weight of the part of the bridge that must be raised. Chicago’s Michigan Avenue drawbridge has a leaf weight of 4,100 tons. That’s over 9 million pounds, which to translate into a number I well know: 60,000 of me. Only made of steel. In Chicago that day, we had a good vantage point to watch what we thought would be a stately procession of sailing vessels coming in from the lake, bridges raised to let them through. Only one boat passed, holding up traffic, one bridge at a time, as it sailed up the Chicago River. I think sailors, being perpetually optimistic, figured they could wrangle a few more fine days on the windy lake.

    Here’s an interesting language tidbit: Bascule, the formal name for these kinds of bridges, comes from French and means “seesaw.”

    We didn’t get to see Victoria’s seesaw bridge (3,300 tons, 6 million pounds, 40,000 Susans) rise up while we were there. But we did learn, from one of the drivers of the water taxis that dart across the harbor (you can order them up via QR code from various docks around the city) that the locals call it the blue bridge because a previous iteration of it was painted blue (the color choice practical, the city had a ton of leftover blue paint from some other project). In honor of the previous paint color, the Johnson Bridge is lit up at night. In blue.

    We did take one of the little pickle boats (who knows why they call them that) that motored underneath, a mere speck on the water on a fine sunny afternoon in spring.

    Photos by Susan Palmer