Tag: America

General

Maisie is gone but we can still save her cousins, the wolves

Posted on by Margaret C. Murray
Maisie on her rug

 

Maisie by the back fence

Almost three and a half years ago Maisie was picked up on a road by the El Sobrante local sheriff and taken to the Pinole Pound where I found her. I named my German Shepherd “Maisie” after the dark brown and black, blood-red Manzanita tree she reminded me of when I first saw her curled up in the pound. My dog and I were so close, so happy together.

Maisie and I worked together to save America’s wolves.  Wolves are in a dire situation with the Trump Administration intending to drop them from the Endangered Species List. This terrible blow would mean a return to the days when wolves were shot on site and killed in traps. Ignite Change and The Center for Biological Diversity are fighting back with their Call of The Wild campaign and my dog and I were part of it.

Maisie rolling over.

Last Saturday at the local Petfood Express the employees were petting Maisie and giving her doggie treats while I collected signed Save America’s Wolves letters to Trump. The store manager even offered to let us sit outside the store entrance with  posters, pens and forms.

Then the next day Maisie squeezed through the fence gate when I was not home. When I returned I found a note on my door from a California Highway Patrol officer. Maisie had been hit by a vehicle on the freeway entrance a mile away.

I am grieving and desolate that I could not save my dog. But I can keep working with Call of the Wild and fight to save her endangered cousins, America’s wolves. You can too.

Click here to urge Trump to Save America’s Wolves.

On Mt. Tamalpais, in front of a manzanita tree,  January, 2018

 

 

Maisie and I thank you.

 

 

 

 

Click here to  Save America’s Wolves.

Events, General, Readings

Music of the ’60s to Read By

Posted on by Margaret C. Murray

In my book readings, I’ll be calling up the power of  music as well as story. I’m having several book readings coming up and I’m including music I’m wild about. Great music from the ’60s, music I’ve been listening to with stars in my eyes still.  Yes, and the words too mean something still. Like this song.

This is the music the characters in my novel, Dreamers, listen to also. Like  “So Long, Marianne” by Leonard Cohen.

As I wrote Dreamers, I heard music all the time.  I put that music into the book. There’s 32 pieces of music mentioned, classical titles, pop and rock & roll, plus other genres. Think of Elvis, Arethra Franklin,the Beatles, Dylan, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins, Simon and Garfunkel and The Youngbloods.  Remember this one “House of the Rising Sun”?

Dreamers is full of music. My next reading  is June 21st, Thursday night, in Boulder Creek, CA a sixties town if I ever saw one. I’m reading from the first scene in the book which begins with Annie sitting in the Pittsburgh International Airport waiting for Thomas to arrive. It’s 2008 and she hasn’t seen him  in nearly forty years.  A song by folk artists Peter, Paul and Mary is playing over the airport loudspeakers. Here’s what it might have been. John Denver, the composer, is  singing along too.

Dreamers takes place in 1966 when Thomas arrives back home at Christmas after five years away in New York City, trying to make it as an actor. Returning to his family home, he hears his sisters and son listening to WAMO,  a radio station in Pittsburgh. Back in 1966, there wasn’t any hip hop just a lot of R&B, blues, jazz and pop too.

When Thomas’ Momma arrives home that evening from church choir practice, she laments that Thomas should have been there with her to sing “Amazing Grace”. Here’s a powerful version of that traditional spiritual. Amazing Grace by the Soweto Gospel Choir, South Africa

Also in Dreamers are Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, Handel and other classical composers that Annie, majoring in violin, knows well. In one of the first scenes I read from, Annie’s coming out of the Pittsburgh Playhouse, having just seen an outrageous production of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream put on by the Negro Ensemble Company of New York. As in Shakespeare’s time, all the actors playing women are men–black men in this case, shocking casting in the volatile Civil Rights Era of America. Annie has the music of Mendelssohn gliding through her head as she steps out into the cold, Pittsburgh night.

No wonder  when Annie passes a tall, dark, handsome man on her way up a snowy Pittsburgh hill, she mistakes Thomas for the  actor playing the King of the Fairies, Oberon.

In my book readings this summer, I’ll be calling up the power of  music as well as story.  And just for this Thursday, we’ll be having our own Midsummer Night’s solstice ceremony. Here comes the sun! By you know who, The Beatles.

 

Check out all my upcoming events. There’s music in them!

 

General

I Hate Romance Novels & Now I’ve Written One

Posted on by Margaret C. Murray
It's a romance of the '60s.
Dreamers, a Dangerous Romance of the '60s

I hate romance novels and never buy them, never even look at them at the supermarket checkout counter. Why? The very first sentence turns me off. I feel angry. How stupid the writer of this must think me to expect I’ll believe this  preposterous story! The plots are stupid and embarrassing, the settings outlandish, the language trite, the characters cartoonish. “When you’ve read one, you’ve read them all,” as my dad would say. Another word he’d use is “trash”.  According to Wikipedia, “Despite the popularity and widespread sales of romance novels, the genre has attracted significant derision, skepticism and criticism.”

Given all that, why the hell did I subtitle my new novel, Dreamers, a dangerous romance of the ’60s?

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I liked historical romance novels once–when I was young, a pre-teen, maybe as old as thirteen. What I liked (though I didn’t realize it then) was the secret, forbidden, dangerous adventure of sex! Yes, I loved all the twisted longing in the historical romances about pirates, counts, renegades, swashbuckling commanders, deposed kings and would-be outlaws. And oh, how I longed to be their women–those princesses and countesses, those ladies-in-waiting, the half-naked milkmaids and abandoned orphans, so young, so innocent and so beautiful with wet, red lips and long, curling tresses. All those women destined for capture, for adventure in their rags, their voluminous silk dresses, who were seduced and Yes! seduced in turn. I wanted to be them! I reveled in the veiled sensuality, the heated embraces, the–sex.

What is romance anyway? Is it love? Is it illusion? Is it dreams? Is it reality? According to Wikipedia again, the bottom line is that, for a book to be a romance novel, the romantic relationship between the hero and the heroine must be at its core.

In many ways Dreamers is the opposite of romance. Neither the hero, Thomas, or the heroine, Annie, believes in romance nor has faith in the other to provide it.  When he meets Annie accidentally, Thomas, the black actor from Pittsburgh, is mired in a painful, impossible affair with Lana, a rich, self-absorbed WASP from Connecticut. When she meets Thomas, Annie, naive as she is, struggles in a bind of acute family tension, wrapped in a rope of self-criticism too tight to breathe in, much less prevail against.

What is worse, the fact that their relationship is interracial makes all thought of romance a forbidden secret played out in the prevailing strife of the civil rights showdown in ’60s America.

But, though in many ways Dreamers is the opposite of romance, Thomas’ and Annie’s relationship IS the core of the book. What they both believe in is the pursuit of their art; for Thomas, art is theatre. For Annie, art is music.  And they believe in each other.

As artists, we are all romantic dreamers. All art is romantic and allows, even demands, we fall in love with it. It’s we who are the romantics.We have to fall in love with a book in order to even want to turn the page.

I’m hoping you’ll fall in love with Dreamers,and that’s why I wrote it.