Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

Stuff gets done here

recent posts

  • Gratifying but not easy

    My nephew Logan at the Eugene Marathon. Logan ran a personal best of 3 hours, 23 minutes, 21 seconds. His mom, Elaine, and Craig and I had the pleasure of cheering him on. A week later, during a Mother’s Day Zoom call, Logan’s Grandma Irene, plus aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. were congratulating him as well as recognizing what a physical challenge running 26.2 miles is. Logan noted that having run the race is sufficiently gratifying to overcome the physical pain during the race. And this prompted Irene (my 96-year-old genius mother) to ask the rest of us to share similar experiences in our own lives, things that are gratifying but not necessarily easy.

    Some of the things that got brought up: herding cattle, being an air force pilot, writing, taking on the challenge of a new job. It was a fine family discussion as it helped us all know each other a little better. And that’s why I call her my genius mother. She’s good at drawing us out this way.

  • Place matters

    willcather.org

    I’m embedded in “The Essential Willa Cather Collection” and revisiting my profound appreciation for her work. Cather wrote in the early part of the 20th century, and among many accolades her novel “One of Ours” received a Pulitzer Prize in 1923. I had previously read her classic “My Antonia” but I wasn’t familiar with her other books, short stories and essays.

    This collection includes many short stories, essays and critiques and her first novel, “Alexander’s Bridge,” as well as “My Antonia.” Cather is known for bringing alive the Nebraska prairie and the immigrants who lived there at the turn of the century. I am in awe of her ability to shape mood through descriptions of place.

    Here’s just a bit from “Alexander’s Bridge” where Cather is describing Chestnut Street in Boston: “Wilson was standing quite still, contemplating with a whimsical smile the slanting street with its worn paving, its irregular, gravely colored houses and the row of naked trees on which the thin sunlight was still shining.”

    I hadn’t read any of her short stories until now and just finished “On the Divide,” published in a shortlived magazine The Mahogany Tree in 1892. It’s an odd, rich story that does that thing at the end that some authors manage. With one last sentence, the entire story is perfectly knit.

  • A gifted sister

    Seven Cities of Gold: Wings, Artist Betsy James

    My good friend Chris James and I have known each other 40 years, and while I knew he had a gifted sister — Betsy James, both an author and an artist — I hadn’t ever seen her work until we visited the Nedra Matteucci Gallery in Santa Fe this month. Goodness me.

    I just felt drawn into her work, which captures a magical nexus of sky/land/humans. Oh and birds.

    Then I checked her web site and now I’m pulled into her books. Currently reading “Roadsouls.” It’s still early days, but there is something a little Ursula-Le-Guin Earthsea-ish about this book.

    Her webpage has some fine observations about creativity. I particularly liked this bit about tithing.