Book to Read, Books for 2022, Books for Sale, General

Friends, let me tell you a story!

Margaret C. Murray reading from Pillow Prayers, Fourth Street Fine Arts, Berkeley, CA

 Give the gift of story this holiday season. Stories are powerful and can change lives. As a writer, I know because I work with them all the time. What a delight for me to find the story  in the process of writing it.

In the photo above I’m standing in front of my audience at the book launch of Pillow Prayers in Berkeley, CA about to read from my new book. I’m feeling great and I love my story.

That all happened a few years ago. Maybe you were there!

Pillow Prayers: Love Ruined, Love Reborn after the Summer of Love

Around ten years before I published Pillow Prayers, here I am in a friend’s backyard with my first novel, Sundagger.net.

Sundagger.net: One Family, Two Worlds, Many Lifetimes

My next book became Dreamers, a Coming of Age novel I began when I was just the age of my characters. Back then it had a different title and feel. It took several decades before Dreamers became the book I wanted.

Dreamers, set in the turbulent 1960s.  Street-savvy actor Thomas, desperate for stardom, meets music student,  Annie, desperate for love. 

A few years after publishing Dreamers, here I am feeling elated as I hold out the first printed copy of Spiral, a prequel to the “old story” in Sundagger.net. It’s a strange kind of delight to find the deeper story when you go back in time.

Spiralan epic adventure set in the ancient American Southwest

It took me much less time (and angst!) to complete my companion novels Sundagger.net and Spiral. Maybe the Southwest desert landscape allow my imagination to run wild? Or perhaps it was the amazement I felt visiting the Four Corners area multiple times.

From the start I knew what my titles would be.The “.net” in Sundagger.net speaks to the magic of electronics  in our internet/cybernetic culture today. I had a sun dagger in my mind after seeing videos and reading the history of the actual spiral carved at the top of Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon National Park.  Yes, a spiral! And now the title of my second Anasazi adventure. It wasn’t until 1973 that a perceived “dagger” of sunlight through the spiral was discovered during the summer solstice, leading to the realization of the advanced knowledge these prehistoric Native Americans had of the heavens.

Order now and save.

 For New Year 2023, give the gift of story.

 

 

Order today.

Any single title $17.00*

More Savings** when you buy Sundagger.net and Spiral together! Both for $22.00!

*Plus Sales Tax and Mailing charges.
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Book Titles



May you enjoy a good story always!
-Margaret

 

Create Your Own World

Friends, Let Me Tell You a Story.

Now in this time of the epidemic, racism, mass shootings and threats of war, the first line of an Emily Dickinson poem speaks to me.

“A wounded deer leaps highest.”

The story I imagine from the above line fits with my upcoming novel I’ve been rewriting, Deer Xing, which I began in the early ’90s. A time that seems like forever and also yesterday.

My title evokes the image of a deer crossing a road at a deer warning sign. Its message is clear;  drive carefully to save a deer.

Elm Creek Doe photo by Rick Cavalieri

The sign gives us humans driving our cars, RVs, trailers and trucks the chance to be present to what is possible and how carefully we can choose to live our lives.  And how possible it is to change, to save the life of a deer, such a beautiful, gentle, quiet, vulnerable creature.

Hungry Doe photo by Rick Cavalieri

Both deer and sign inspire and uplift me to continue reworking my draft. As I edit the final section of my story, I experience deep silence, the same feeling I imagine in the eyes of a deer. And gratitude too.

 

 

Pillow Prayers book launch at Fourth Street Fine Arts, Berkeley, Ca

 “Every book is a world.” –Gabrielle Zevin.

 Margaret

 

Give yourself the gift of a book.
Buy here!

Books for Sale, Events, Readings

Hidden Treasure in Desert Daylight

Valley of the Gods, Cedar Mesa, Bears Ears National Park

Pictographs, Petroglyphs and Potsherds are the clues to hidden treasure in pure daylight at two National Parks in the American Southwest.

Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Parks are located in the Four Corners area of the Southwest: Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. Bears Ears, the largest park in the United States at 1.9 million acres, was designated a National Monument (Park) by President Obama in 2017 after thirty Native American tribes, including the Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Zuni, Paiute, and Apache, advocated for its protection as a sacred site.

Potchards at Chimney Rock, CO, site of Spiral 

The pre-puebloan people known as the Anasazi disappeared from this land by the 13th century, leaving behind their petroglyphs, pictographs and potsherds, a mysterious gift to explore.

“This place is a part of the history of all the Native peoples in this region. It’s like a book for us, and when many tribes have a chapter in this book, it tells us a lot about why we are the way we are. But it’s also part of the history of the peoples of the United States and the world.” Jim Enote, Pueblo of Zuni

Petroglyphs by Anasazi at at Bears Ears National Park

Bears Ears (1.9 million acres, designated by Obama, 2017) and Grand Staircase Escalante (designated by Clinton, 1996) contains 4,000 years of Native American culture.

In Grand Staircase Escalante National Park are buried the richest deposit of dinosaur bones in the world, with fossils 75 million years old. So far twenty-five new species of dinosaurs have been discovered.

Dinosaur’s tail embedded in sandstone, Grand Staircase Escalante National Park

There was danger that these precious parks would be destroyed to make National Park land ripe for “development”, i.e., private mining, fracking, conglomerate agriculture, and industrial off-road recreation. An extremely rare dig of dinosaur fossils was looted before development could be stopped.

I wrote my novels of the ancient Southwest after traveling to the Four Corners, amazed to realize that here in the American desert was over 100,000 sites of Native American archeology.  Click on the YouTube video “Stones of Chaco Canyon” and feel the magic that led me to write Sundagger.net and Spiral.

Click the Paypal button below to order Sundagger.net and Spiral.

Ancient Southwest Novels
signed by author to:



 

Dear Diary, Events, General, Journal, Press Release

Writing your life: Journaling Workshop with Margaret C. Murray on Zoom

Free, hour-long Journaling Workshop on Zoom sponsored by the Richmond Public Library

 Received a journal as a gift? Have a journal stuffed in a drawer?
Journaled in the past? Never journaled before?

Join this free, one-hour Journaling Workshop via Zoom on Thursday, March 10th, 2022 at 6PM sponsored by the Friends of the Richmond Public Library.

 

To sign up for the free Adult Journaling workshop, click HERE.

There’s more! The Richmond Public Library is offering you a Journaling Adult Craft Starter Kit.

 

Each kit includes:

         Sixty-page, lined notebook
         Pen
         Journal prompts
         Glass jar to hold your journal prompts! 

Pick up your free adult journaling starter kit while supplies last at the Richmond Main Library:

Richmond Public Library
325 Civic Center Plaza
Richmond, CA 94804

To sign up for the free Adult Journaling workshop, click HERE.

You can find me at writewordspress.com

 

Spark your creativity while writing your life.
–Margaret C. Murray

 

 

For more information, go to www.richmondlibrary.org or contact Catherine Ortiz, Adult Reference Librarian,
(510) 620-5515.

 

 

 

 

 

Book to Read, Create Your Own World, General

How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare?

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You might think that a book about the most famous writer in the English language would be boring: trite, repetitious or full of pompous academic abstractions, especially if you researched and wrote your master’s thesis on “Murder and Honor in Hamlet and Othello” like I did at Hunter College. But you’d be wrong.

With impressive credentials and superior narrative ability, Stephen Greenblatt in Will in the World unearths and illuminates Shakespeare in the Elizabethan world in ways I could never before consider, especially given that facts about Shakespeare’s life are, according to the author, ”abundant but thin.”  I couldn’t put the book down. The thing is, I was learning so much about myself, how to be a writer in my world.

Greenblatt writes: “We know all about the property Shakespeare bought and sold, the taxes he paid, the theatrical companies he worked for. We have his baptismal record, his marriage license and his last will and testament. But what he felt in his heart, what dreams he nurtured, what beliefs he himself had…..”.

What lover of words isn’t fascinated by the mysterious, brilliant William Shakespeare, aka “Will”? Who was Shakespeare really? I was hooked when Greenblatt sets up Shakespeare, at 18, marrying Anne Hathaway, age 26, in Stratford six months before their first child was born. What, if anything, did it mean that soon after–the exact date is vague like so much else–Will left it all to spend the rest of his life in rented rooms in London, two days ride away? Did he love her? Was he forced to marry her? Did he marry her for her money? Did she love him (But he was Shakespeare. How could she not?!)

Greenblatt speculates how Shakespeare may have been wanted for deer poaching, a 17th century theory. Was Shakespeare down and out, stealing venison and rabbits for food? With many credible details, Greenblatt explores and then discards this possibility with great authority, while being cautious about claiming any other hypotheses as certain either.

I was impressed by how masterfully Greenblatt lays out Shakespeare’s world—and mine too. Maybe Shakespeare left Stratford for the same reason I left my hometown, Pittsburgh, PA, to seek my fortune in the big world.

The artistic, political and religious intrigue is both detailed and gruesome, with beheadings at the bequest of Queen Elizabeth as common as parking tickets today. The victims, many of whom were Roman Catholics, are believable and very sympathetic. Greenblatt explores the possibility that Shakespeare may have been a Catholic too. That could explain the secrecy around his life. After all, it was dangerous to be Catholic in Elizabethan England.

Then there’s the mystery of the love sonnets, seemingly addressed to a man, but who? And did Shakespeare actually write the sonnets? Ah, but Greenblatt shows us how we moderns no longer understand the game of sonnet-making, so popular in Shakespeare’s world, where the trick was to be naked while revealing nothing, and tell revealing secrets to only a few chosen intimates.

So much is speculation! Did Shakespeare even write those plays or was it Marlowe for that matter? Was he a fraud as the feature movie, Anonymous (2011), claims?  No, Stephen Greenblatt doesn’t buy that theory.

What really kept me reading Will in the World was that I felt supported and encouraged by Shakespeare as a writer in the world.  Greenblatt convinced me to identify with this ”amazing success story,” of a bright young man from the provinces who took on the hard, yet exciting game of writing great plays for a popular audience in a tumultuous, changing, exploding world.

I might have guessed that Shakespeare too had problems I have as a writer: daunting competition from establishment writers (e.g., Marlowe), lack of funds, absence of entitlement, spotty, non-existent publication, pressing family responsibilities, in fact, “an upstart crow” in the literary world as the contemporary playwright Robert Greene called him. But that’s beside the point as Will in the world pressed on—and succeeded. Not just for his time but for all time.

Greenblatt’s astute analysis of the playwright’s characters, so modern in their angst, confusion and daunting dreams, illuminates Shakespeare’s own evolving understanding of the world. Will in the World  challenges me to understand our world now, four hundred years later, through my writing.

Events, Press Release, Readings

Let’s Celebrate the Winter Solstice Together!

Solstice Celebration sign lit up outside the Richmond Library

The Winter Solsticea time to honor the promise of rebirth in the dead of winter, the ancient legacy of prayer and hope in the face of the unknown darkness, the sun returning, and the power of Nature.

I’m inviting you to join me at the interactive Zoom Winter Solstice Celebration hosted by the Richmond Public Library, Richmond, CA on December 21, 2020, the day of the Winter Solstice. 

I’ll be welcoming this darkest time of the year with music, art, drumming and a book reading. I’ll share astronomy and  history, focusing on the Chaco Puebloans known as the Anasazi, the ancient Native Americans of the Southwest who constructed massive buildings aligned with the heavens.

Learn more and register now by clicking HERE.

In honor of the Winter Solstice I’m offering a Special 2 for 1 Solstice Bundle of my Anasazi companion novels Sundagger.net and Spiral for a limited time. Buy one and you’ll receive the second book FREE.

Buy the bundle! Two novels for the price of one. SAVE 50%!

 for just $17.00*




See you on the Solstice!
Margaret

* Offer good through December 31, 2020. Tax and mailing costs not included.

Book to Read, General, Journal

My book in a little, free library?

It’s raining (rare in California in May). I’m in Coronavirus quarantine, bleary-eyed in front of my computer. If I could just get away! I click on a Nextdoor post about a little, free library. I’ve enjoyed looking into these tiny libraries on corners in Palo Alto and Berkeley, in front yards in Sebastopol and Santa Rosa, but never saw one in my neighborhood.

Lily’s Little Free Library in Green Hills, Richmond, Ca

The Nextdoor post is an invitation by Sarah and her daughter to come by Lily’s Little Free Library, leave a book and take a book. Take a tiny succulent plant too. How generous, how inviting.

I consider all those boxes of books I have stacked in my office closet. I could easily gift one of those novels. But which? I begin to talk myself out of it. Would Jane Austen have left Pride and Prejudice at a little, free library? Would Charles Dickens leave Oliver Twist? Stephen King  Shawshank Redemption?  Maya Angelou and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?  Besides all my books  can be purchased at any bookstore and on Smashwords, Bookshop and my Writewords Press website.

Nevertheless, it’s an adventure into the unknown and an opportunity to take my dog, Laurel, for a walk. I’ll take a drive to this little, free library on Hilltop Green. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll find a good book to read.  I’m feeling better.

I’ve stuffed Spiral, An Epic Adventure in the Ancient Southwest in my purse and Laurel is looking at me eagerly from the back seat of my Honda Civic as I drive off in the rain to 1203 Greenway Drive,  Richmond, CA. The GPS says it’s 8 minutes by car.

Despite the GPS, I get lost in this housing development in the Richmond hills, quarantine-quiet this afternoon. Okay, just one more turn, one more dip in the road. There it is, perched on its pedestal across a manicured green park.

Holding Laurel on her leash, I open the little library doors and look through the books. A inconspicuous, grey-toned paperback catches my eye, a coming of age memoir, Ticket to Exile. The title is intriguing, ironic, unforgiving. I see the publisher is Malcolm Margolin of Heyday Books whom I greatly admire for his histories of Native Californians. The author, Adam David Miller seems familiar to me.

“Murray Library” is stamped on the cover and spine. That’s my last name!  Inside I discover “Murray Library, 166 East 5300, South Murray, Utah 84107”.  Is this an omen? A message? Serendipity?

The cover shows a man’s  silhouette  in front of a dark house shaded by looming trees; across the bottom is an image of a torn page from a notebook. I’m getting the feeling I know this writer.

Then I remember Adam David Miller, the African-American poet I met at the National Writers’ Union we both attended during the 1990s.  I recognize his photo in the frontispiece and am impressed with his bio. I remember Adam as a friendly face at numerous NWU writing events. Paging through his non-fiction story of growing up in the South during the Depression era, I note the quality of the careful prose, the formatting where each chapter is prefaced by a singular poem.

Suddenly the day turns brighter, the grass greener in the rain and I no longer am alone.

Lily’s Little Free Library Close Up

I squeeze Spiral between the other books on the top shelf of Lily’s Little Free Library.  Adam David Miller’s Ticket to Exile is in my purse now and a tiny succulent in my hand.

Laurel wags her tail, sniffing each tuft of grass as we go through the park.  I wonder how a little, free library might work out in my own front yard.

 

 

Concerned about the Quarantine? Click on Best Practices at Little Free Libraries During the Coronavirus Outbreak

 

Book to Read, Create Your Own World, General, Upcoming Book

Writing in the time of Coronavirus

Elm Creek Doe photo by Rick Cavalieri

Reading is a gift to yourself. Writing is a gift too. I’ve been struggling to rewrite Deer Xing, a novel I began in the early ’90s, even before the Coronavirus quarantine overturned my daily life.

At my computer today, I experience deep silence and unfathomable time, feeling more pressure and less inspiration than ever to work on Deer Xing. I constantly interrupt myself to check updates on COVID-19, putting off editing the pages stacked in piles all over my desk.

At present Deer Xing is a long, knotted rope of words tied to an old vision. Frustrated by my old story, I imagine a new one shaped by this fearful epidemic, upending us all everywhere. I slash whole chapters, Xing-out characters, freeing me up to see everything—differently.

I take notes looking out my living room window at the four-way crossing on the corner of my emptied street, a concrete desert of unmoving silence, no one driving or walking by.

How to begin again? What would a deer see at a deer crossing?

Hungry Doe photo by Rick Cavalieri

I think of how my novel Dreamers starts in the green hills of Pittsburgh, PA seen through a young woman’s eyes who imagines Dad loves this city more than he could ever love her.

How Sundagger.net begins when a middle-age, single mother enters a sweat lodge in the Oakland Hills and grapples with Silicon Valley while making peace with ancient spirits in the Anasazi Southwest.

Spiral, the prequel to Sundagger.net, begins in a desert canyon in the Southwest, 12th century A.D, with a teenage girl searching for a hunter she cannot bear to lose.

And my latest, Pillow Prayers, that begins with a photo and a prayer: three women posing in a zen pillow stitchery with its brand new owner, Beth, who imagines a  star-twisted prayer, the first of many that follow.

 “Every book is a world.” says Gabrielle Zevin, author. In this time of quarantine and isolation, books open our minds and nurture our souls . You can buy Pillow Prayers, Dreamers, Spiral and Sundagger.net in ebook form on Smashwords.com. They can be read on Kindle, computer or another device. 

Buy now! Click on Smashwords.  Type “Margaret C. Murray” in the Search for books, authors, or series field to select ebooks.

 

Not satisfied with ebooks? Give yourself the gift of a physical book you can hold in your hands and turn the pages!  It’s so easy.
Buy here!

Create Your Own World

Discovering Our Power: Howard Zinn Book Fair 2019

Stay Calm, Keep Writing.

“There’s nothing like it anywhere.”

Strike! Discovering Our Power!
Howard Zinn Book Fair 2019
Sunday December 8th, 10am to 6pm
City College of San Francisco, Mission Campus

Who wouldn’t like to attend a life-changing, fun, insightful book extravaganza  in  the Mission District of San Francisco for a $5 suggested donation?!

By accident I discovered the Howard Zinn Book Fair last year where I was privileged to show and sell WriteWords Press books to interested folk.  That day I also was able to sample outstanding  lectures, workshops, readings, and presentations by other small press book publishers and authors. It was a blow-out experience of inspiration and insight for me.

Learn more about Howard Zinn.

At the Howard Zinn Book Fair 2019  you’ll be able to interact with sixty publishers, booksellers, and grassroots organizations. You can  experience dozens of author readings, panels, and workshops. Some of the presenters include voices from The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, The Yellow Vest Movement in France, and the Oakland Teachers Strike.

Believe me, there’s nothing like it anywhere. Here’s just a few of the events at the 1st Session (10:30AM -12PM)!

More Power, Better Jobs, Less Work

Yellow Vests One Year Later: Workers Struggles in France Today

Women’s Work – Gender, Labor and Capitalism

The novel as counter-history: how fiction can serve truth by departing from fact

 Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse

Poetry By Any Means Necessary. What Is revolutionary poetry and why is it crucial?

Click here for the entire program. I’m aiming to be in that audience exploring The novel as Counter-History.

Do stop by my WriteWordsPress table when you come to the Howard Zinn Book Fair.  We can talk of traveling, of the research I did about the ancient Anasazi of the Southwest while writing Spiral and Sundagger.net, of my daydream in the 1960’s that lead to writing (and rewriting) Dreamers, and about my last work, Pillow Prayers, drenched in San Francisco and Berkeley after the Summer of Love.

Howard Zinn Book Fair 2019
Sunday December 8th, 10am to 6pm
City College of San Francisco, Mission Campus
1125 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA
$5 suggested donation (no one turned away for lack of funds)

“When we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress.” — Howard Zinn

Mark your calendar. You’ll be glad you did. There’s nothing like it anywhere.

General, Press Release, Readings, trip

Back from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

Hola! I’m back in California now, missing San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Here I am with my new best friends at an art gallery extravaganza for the Day of the Dead.

Alas, we’re all a little worn out. If you’ve seen the Disney movie, Coco, you’ll have a good idea of the Day of the Dead festival. In San Miguel de Allende, I was very fortunate to be invited to stay with an old friend in her sister’s elegant home.

There’s nothing like a live performance of Mozart’s last work, Requiem, to make me feel holiness all around. I took this photo as I sat enthralled in the packed La Parroquia Cathedral in Centro, the center of town, on the night of The Day of the Dead. What a feeling of communion and comfort I experienced with a diverse, appreciative crowd.

A few days  later I had a book reading nearby at Garrison & Garrison Books that took place in a charming courtyard. I was surprised to have my audience’s rapt attention as I pointed out details from my Southwest Anasazi books, Spiral and Sundagger.net, with characters whose ancestors clearly would have come from Mexico. Wherever I could, I included actual Southwest artifacts that I’d learned of in my research. For example, in Spiral, Little Hawk, savors a small jar of chocolate that a park guide told me about during my 2015 trip to Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. The chocolate shows that Southwest Pre-Puebloans knew of, and traded, with ancient pre-hispanic Mexico as cocoa plants do not grow in the American Southwest.


My last day in Mexico I went on a day tour of ancient pyramid ruins with Albert Coffee, an expert tour guide in the region’s archeology, who spoke of recent findings of human and dog skeletons, a severed head carried hundreds of miles for final interment, and even a young elite, female warrior, all buried in the pyramid complex of Canada de la Virgen (Canyon of the Virgin). The name refers to a geode rock discovered at the site during excavation that broke, revealing an image of the Virgin Mary.

It’s thought there are other pyramids inside this visible one. That day my big accomplishment was to climb the tiered pyramid of the Canyon of the Virgin, just recently excavated. I made it all the way to the top! The rocks were huge and uneven, of sparking limestone. The pyramid itself was built to match the paths of the sun and moon across the sky, much in the same way as the Anasazi aligned their Great Houses in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.

Waiting by an iron bull sculpture for the tour van to pick me up.

 

I wonder if I’ll ever find words to describe my enchantment with “The Heart of Mexico”, as San Miguel de Allende is called.

 

 

 

If only I could sing like this bird I saw as I was walking along the path of a botanical garden in the hills outside the city.

—Yellow headed blackbird in the Charco del Ingenio Botanical Garden.

Take a breath. Imagine the deep, quiet, heartbeat of stillness. Breathe in that feeling of Peace.

Happy Holidays!
—Margaret