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In Memoriam: Backpacking the Trinity Alps by Gayle Madden
Welcome back to Member Monday. It’s with heavy hearts that we feature a piece by Gayle Madden. She recently passed away and we offer our sincere condolences to her husband, Michael. While we mourn Gayle’s passing, we celebrate her life, a life well-lived indeed. We’ll be featuring another of Gayle’s pieces next week and we encourage you to read more of her body of work at her blog, aptly titled The Sweet Life: La Dolce Vita. -Writers Forum Board of Directors
In what poets refer to as the dead of night, poets who obviously have never slept beside an alpine lake in the high country during a warm summer night, I got up and stepped out of the tent. I gazed skyward, looking into the purple-black heavens in absolute awe, breathing out slowly, imperceptibly.
Stars hung low, big, bright, too bright to even twinkle, more like a glow. Silent stars tinkling their songs over the millenniums like sirens, luring, rendering one powerless yet powerful at the same time. I called softly to awaken my husband, luring him out to see the starlit sky.
He stepped into the night and scanned the sky with the practiced eye of a pilot and the heart of a mystic. “Look,” he whispered, then nodded. “The Big Dipper.”
There it was. Not only huge in the sky but closer than I have ever seen it, dipping perfectly into the outline of the black-inked mountaintops, cradled like a babe held tenderly in arms, resting before resuming its eternal journey in the sky. It was in that moment that I saw what I had never seen before.
The smooth black water of the lake transformed into sky. The Big Dipper, along with hundreds of other stars, glowed golden white in the watery sky. A perfect mirror image of the lights rose from the bottom of the liquid blackness, mysteriously dancing. I stood frozen in time, gazing into the bigness of nature that man has gazed into since the beginning of man, the Bigness that fills man with a sense of being a part of something greater than himself. There I stood, with ancient man, with every man, filling myself, feeling myself. More than myself. Alive.
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Success Story Saturday: Sharon St. George Signs Three-book Contract
Writers Forum member Sharon St. George recently signed a three-book contract with Camel Press, the fiction imprint of Coffeetown Press in Seattle, Washington. St. George’s hospital-based mystery series is titled The Machado Mysteries, and features Aimee Machado, a forensic librarian who works in an acute care hospital in rural northern California. Her brother, Harry, plays a part in helping Aimee solve these amateur sleuth mysteries.
The debut book in the series, Due for Discard is already in the publisher’s hands. The deadline for her second book, Checked Out, is May 1, and the third, Breach of Ethics, is a work in progress due August 1. They will be published as print on demand (POD) paperbacks and as e-books. At this early stage, the date has not been set for when the books will be available to purchase.
St. George is proud and happy to be published by the same company that publishes Steve Callan, another Writers Forum member. Callan’s nonfiction book, Badges, Bears and Eagles, published by Coffeetown Press, is enjoying great success.
For those who do not recognize the author’s name, Sharon St. George is the pen name of Sharon Owen, Program Director of Writers Forum.
Visit Sharon St. George at www.sharonstgeorge.com