I’ve been working from home since March 2020. I am one of the lucky ones, able to sit in a comfortable chair and do all my paid tasks with the joining of fingertips and keycaps, sometimes with video and audio, sometimes with time-sensitive texts, but always with communication, cooperation and collaboration of real people. I…
Come December, I will bake many cookies–hundreds, I suppose. I try to call these Holiday Cookies, not Christmas Cookies because I am an atheist, though I wasn’t always. Many years ago, I adopted the yearly cookie-baking to which my mother-in-law introduced me. My own mother had never baked, so I reveled in this new endeavor,…
Congratulations to Club Plum’s 2021 Best of the Net nominees! It looks like this year is the first year Sundress Publications has opened up a category for art, and I am thrilled they did so because our pages are full of wonderful visual offerings. See last year’s Best of the Net winners and finalists in…
Yesterday, I trimmed the one hedge that occupies our small bit of property. I always wait until the purple flowers bloom, wait until the bees have danced and pollinated, wait until the blossoms are no more. The waiting creates a wild display of California Lilac branches, sticking this way and that way, perhaps an eyesore…
Welcome, April. We are so glad you are here–bringing with you, in some places in our world, vaccinations aplenty, infrastructure plans, a killer cop in court, and for some, the luxury of sitting in a restaurant, at a little table for two, eating beautiful food placed on a surface in close proximity to our very…
Dropping today is the first-year anniversary issue of Club Plum. I state this with calm and little fanfare, though not too much trepidation because with all the bad we’ve had, there is now hope. The Bad Man is almost out the door, and though blood has been shed at his behest, he is packing his…
Unexpected things happened in this last issue of the first volume of Club Plum–mainly, horror and hybrids. Horror, because one playfully creepy submission landed in my inbox and ignited my desire to put out a call for more. Hybrids–or hybrids of hybrids one might say–because we were presented with pieces that seemed to contain more…
Hello, dear Writers, I offer you the opportunity to make a video statement (or a text-only statement) and add it to the growing voices at Writers Against Trump. “Why bother?” you may ask. “What difference will it make?” Just like the writing process, we often cannot see the results of our efforts while in the…
On the side of my small house, where nobody looks, save our beloved eight-year-old black Lab, Roxxanne (spelled correctly), I planted St. John’s Wort, a plant that grows well in partial shade. In a corner, next to the shed, surrounded by a short wall of decorative bricks, I had placed a starter, not so much…
Otherwise, George Floyd’s killers would still be free. The police and government officials who back them had to gaze on the orange glow and see that–by golly–there actually may be repercussions for their heinous actions and decisions. They had to be hit where it hurts, their home. They had to experience fear. Just as with…
Club Plum 