Mary Beth Writes

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November 22, 2022
Posted by Mary Beth

The photo is not by Len or me, its from I Love Canada on FB. I've seen a sky like that just once. 

11/21/2022

Last week I read two books about young people who left their homes. They experienced some good and too many rough experiences and they couldn’t go back until they figured out how to not be who they used to be. Both novels knocked my socks off.

July 7, 2022
Posted by Mary Beth

7/7/2022

To remember hard stories truthfully requires bravery.

October 13, 2021
Posted by Mary Beth

10/13/2021

“Brotherhood” by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr is the most compelling novel I’ve read this year. I read the first half as if I was reading a book for the first time; it felt as if the writer was expressing a story so powerful he called it fiction just to get it out, to me, to us. 

August 21, 2021
Posted by Mary Beth

I woke up this morning feeling wistful. It’s the third week of August. Where did this summer go?

April 21, 2021
Posted by Mary Beth

Are we feeling the relief? Relief that we can see George Floyd’s face, his profile, that awful image of him under Chauvin’s knee – and feel some accountable closure to such a brazen murder?

February 24, 2021
Posted by Mary Beth

Go ahead, ask me what I’ve been doing lately…

The movie we watched is Nomadland directed by Chloe Zhao.

February 8, 2021
Posted by Mary Beth

My personal goal is to write this in one day. Sometimes my thoughts and ideas fly and dip like ‘always soaring never landing’ albatrosses – but do you know what happens to people who pursue albatrosses? They end up in the drink. Which is where more of my writing ends than you’d think.

January 27, 2021
Posted by Mary Beth

How many feelings have you cycled through since the Inauguration? I’ve been the Lance Armstrong (without the drugs or cancer) of ups, downs, responses, relief, and outrage.

I read that the Twitter word trending last Thursday morning was “slept.” As in “I slept well last night for the first time in four years. How about you?”

October 22, 2020
Posted by Mary Beth

I heard part of an NPR / Fresh Air interview with writer Ayad Akhtar so I borrowed the book from the library and read it.

August 21, 2020
Posted by Mary Beth

“A powerful, rollicking adventure that takes us across America and deep into one person’s life-and-death experience.”

Carl Zimmer, one of America’s foremost science writers

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Outpedaling ‘The Big C’: My Healing Cycle Across America