June 22, 2008

Hi,

I'm in Austin, Texas, for a wedding this weekend. Then I will be in Houston to visit family and meet a bunch of readers. And then Peru. If I haven't answered your e-mail, I apologize. I haven't been very good at replying....I was just having too much fun in Tennessee.

Have a great summer. Talk to you when I get back.  

Love,

Rita

June 12, 2008

Hi,

I'm still in Tennessee...for another nine days. Then I'll be in Texas until I go to Peru. My niece lives in Houston, and my brother and sister-in-law have just moved down.

Yesterday I made balloon animals at the Athens' Fisher Library Festival- launching the kids' summer reading program. We went through more than 300 balloons! Hats and dogs. I decided not to make swords, which can turn a peaceful event into dozens of sword fights. Balloon-swords don’t hurt anyone, but they are symbolic.

It's easy to learn to make balloon animals; there are books and online lessons too. I learned how to do it when I was at clown school in Minnesota several years ago. You can order balloons (260's) and a pump online. Go for it. It’s a fun skill to have.

I’ll be going to Peru on the 27th, and I'm trying to figure out how I can limit my Peruvian baggage to one large book bag. While I was in Athens yesterday, I bought a maroon duvet cover at Goodwill, and today I cut it in half and turned it into a lightweight sleeping bag with the help of my friend Renee and her sewing machine. I also bought a thin towel, the well-worn kind most people give away, to add to my travel pack. Three pair of pants, five tops, a sweatshirt, a flashlight, a small toiletries bag, sandals, sneakers, a cap, and hopefully not much more. I'm just starting to think about what to take. Traveling is so much easier if you don't have to carry a lot of stuff.

Tarapoto, Peru, is in the mountains and I promised myself that I would walk and get in shape before I left. But once again, I am failing in the physical fitness department. This time I'm using the weather as my excuse. It's very hot here in Tennessee and I don’t feel like exercising.

My garden isn't doing very well either. It's sort of a grass forest at this point. I'm too lazy and it’s too hot to weed.

Last night I wrote to Maria in Mexico and she is having a go at shortening the proposal for the collaborative story/cookbook so we can sent it out again.

That's all for now.  More later. Thanks for coming by.

Rita

Thursday, May 29, 2008

I have another three weeks and then I’m off again…to Texas. For now, I’m loving Tennessee and all my new friends here. And the trees and the birds and the river and the garden, all pretty much in my backyard.

The peas and beans are more than six inches tall; I have to get out there and string up something for them to climb. The corn is nearly to my knees. And there are tomatoes on the four big plants (the smaller plants aren’t doing anything). And the millions of tiny lettuces are almost ready to be thinned. The last garden I planted was in Massachusetts more than forty years ago and we couldn’t even put the seeds in until after Memorial Day. Yesterday I went out to visit the garden and a rabbit hopped away! Not a good sign.

A few miles from my house here in Reliance, Tennessee, is a Mennonite community. They have a farm market where they sell wonderful vegetables which they grow and I’ve been going there since I arrived. The people who work in the market are all men from the community, bearded and clothed in dark colors. I’ve never seen a woman except occasionally in horse-drawn buggies on their way to town. Then, last week, I was walking on a beautiful trail along Gee Creek when I stopped to rest near a small waterfall. After about ten minutes, six beautiful women in long blue dresses and white caps were walking toward me. It was a scene that could have been out of a fairy tale. A mother, four daughters, and a friend. The five girls were all under twenty two.

We talked for about fifteen minutes and I asked them if outsiders were permitted to visit the community. They said yes and we made a date. A few days ago I visited Michelle’s house. She and three of her five brothers spent an hour or so chatting with me. They live without electricity or phones or machines of any sort.

There was a ton of laundry in their yard, literally hundreds of shirts, pants, and dresses all strung up on multiple clothes lines. I asked if they did all that laundry by hand and they said no; they do it with horse-power; horses turn the paddles that wash the clothes in a huge tub!!  They could teach us a lot about living naturally in a world that is choking with pollution and going to war over oil. I plan to go back next week to learn more; Michelle promised me a buggy ride around the community.

Yesterday I had lunch with Rozetta Mowery whose book I was given when I arrived here in Tennessee. Her memoir (TRAGEDY IN TIN CAN HOLLER) is absolutely horrifying. Her grandmother was a beautiful serial killer who lured men into her home and killed them. Grandma Grace also had babies she didn’t want, so she chopped them up and fed them to the hogs. Rozetta’s father battered her mother to death. And Rozetta and five siblings were shipped off to a home for children that placed them in foster homes, some of them homes from hell. All of Rozetta’s siblings experienced abuse in their marriages, and a number of their children are carrying on the tradition. Rozetta is now in her fifties, beautiful, charming, and not the least bit crazy, which amazes me. She does a lot of speaking; her mission is to tell the world her story and to educate people about abuse and its consequences….child, spousal, elderly….even animal abuse.

Her website is:  www.tragedyintincanholler.com

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As I said above,  I’m going to Peru at the end of June with Global Citizens Network. They will be sending a group to a small village to do volunteer work and they still have a couple of places. Think about joining us. It might be fun to have a few of you on board. The fee for the 16 days (without airfare) is $1,725. Here's what Linda Stuart told me when I said it seemed expensive: 

"Financial assistance is available for those in need.  They should contact the GCN office for more info on that. "     info@globalcitizens.org

They also said that it is tax deductible. They are a 501c3 organization.

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I haven’t done any more work on the collaborative/cookbook. I’m actually going to try to get that revised proposal written in the next couple of weeks.

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Take care, Rita

PS There are about 12 migrating goldfinches crunching seeds on my porch at this moment. They’re actually flying around kicking each other off the perches. The goldfinches all take off when the red-winged blackbirds come along. They’re a lot bigger and more aggressive.

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Monday, April 28, 2008

Reliance, Tennessee

OK, OK. It’s time to talk about southeastern Tennessee where I have been for the past three weeks. (I’ve had two letters in the last couple of days asking me if I’m all right. Yes, I’m fine. Just having too much fun to write.)

Reliance is in the Cherokee National Forest on the Hiwassee River. It’s beautiful. Spring is exploding in these here mountains: newborn leaves, blossoming red-bud trees, white and pink dogwoods, lots yellow and purple flowers along the roads, gorgeous rivers, and warm sunny days.

Two days ago I filled the bird feeders and yellow, blue, red, black and white, and other not-so-colorful birds are constantly chirping and eating outside my living room windows. Only two hummingbirds have discovered the sugar-water, but I’m hoping they’ll tell their friends.

The cabin I’m in belongs to Rebekah Williams Cessna, a friend whom I stayed with in India a few years ago. She’s from here, and I used to tell her I’d love to get to know Appalachia. She wrote a few months ago and invited me to hang out in Reliance for a while. She’ll be here in two weeks. Her father, my new friend, Baptist preacher Jimmy Williams and his friend, Martha, took me for a drive along the Tellico River a week ago….waterfalls, rapids, fly fishermen, a trout hatchery, all tucked into mountains that are turning greener by the minute. It was spectacular.

My first community event, just a few days after my arrival, was a graduation ceremony at Miracle Lake, a rehab center that focuses on helping newly released prisoners to accept Jesus in their lives. The celebration and ceremony were deeply moving. The three graduates gave “testimony” to the dramatic change in their outlook on life and their new hope for the future. The parents, grandparents, kids, siblings, and friends of the three graduates spoke, and we all cried. Then there was more than an hour of fabulous Gospel singing….groups, soloists (including my friend, Jimmy), and those of us in the pews. It was a joyous evening. I love singing.

A week ago I delivered four of Rebekah’s antique quilts to the committee preparing a show at the Appalachian Heritage Museum in Athens. Rebekah is a collector and there are dozens of quilts in this house. I spent more than an hour at the museum learning about quilts from real quilters. I have a lot to learn, not only about quilts, but about faith and food and family values.

I’ve scheduled a couple of talks and school visits, thanks to Marilyn Joiner (a reader who e-mailed me when she discovered two months ago that I was headed her way) and Renee Nicolo, who runs a Young Authors’ Conference for local kids. I’m too late to be a visiting author at the conference, but I will be going as a guest.

Both Marilyn and Renee have been introducing me to local events and culture. I played Bunco for the first time the other afternoon in the Senior Center of Athens; I had breakfast at a local hangout; participated in two book club discussions in Knoxville and another at the library in Athens; I visited an amazing used-book store (McKays) in Athens). I’ve also been to two schools and am scheduled to talk in two more…first, second, third, and fifth grades. And I have two adult talks set up in May: the Etowah Arts Commission on the 15th at seven PM, and the Athens’ Fischer Library at one PM on the 20th.

And that’s not all. I’ve been busy. Rebekah’s brother-in-law plowed and planted a garden in my yard that will ripen when they are here over the summer. Corn, beans, zucchini, tomatoes, peppers. I’m planning to add spinach and lettuce and peas. I’ve been to church, shopped at Piggly Wiggly, gotten a membership card to Bi-Lo, and had family and new friends over for dinner several times.

Everyone I’ve met has been welcoming and warm. I get my e-mail down the road about a mile at the Fly and Tackle store. I can sit in my car and use their unsecured wireless. Jerry (most people pronounce it Jury) and Sharon, the owners, are another part of my education. Yesterday, I spent more than an hour in the store, talking, answering e-mails, listening to the fly-fishing guys in those rubber pants that go all the way to their chests. They buy lures, eat lunch (I had a hamburger), and pile up on bags and bags of chips. Jerry says mornings people buy stuff for fishing, mid-day, they buy lunch, and late in the day, it’s beer. (No liquor or wine in this county.)

My next door neighbor, Dane Law, leads fly-fishing trips in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia. In the winter he guides groups in Pategonia, where it's summer. (www.southeasternanglers.com.

The other two neighbors that I’ve met aren’t technically local, they’re weekend- summer people from Chattanooga and Knoxville. And there’s a family across the street that I haven’t met from Atlanta, two-and-a-half hours away. The good news about the Atlanta family is that there are kids and they have two swings in their yard. Rebekah’s niece, Andie, has seven-year-old triplets, cute, smart red-headed boys who love that tire swing.

I knew when I chose to hang out here that I would be meeting lots of people whose views about the world we live in would differ from mine. That was one of the reasons I decided to come to Appalachia. I'm here to learn about a culture within a culture, not teach or get upset, but to learn. A sort of personal challenge. So far I’ve been able to listen and learn about other people's beliefs regarding faith, politics, patriotism, the War, immigration, states’ rights and lots of other things.I'm determined to bring the same "participant-observer" role here as I do when I'm in other countries. The questions I'm asking myself are: How do we develop our beliefs? What is it in our environment and upbringing and life-choices that determine our belief system? Does it ever make sense to think we have the only answer?

I'm enjoying the language and the sounds of Tennessee. My friend, Martha, says she likes to listen to me talk because of my accent. And I’m having fun with the local accent as well. The biggest difference is the long “i.” It’s “ah”  as in  naht,  or simple “ah” as in “I.”  Nahse, kahnd, Hah. One of these days ah’ll sit down with a friend and make a long list to put here. Ah’ll include some phrases too. Rebekah sent me the following a couple of months ago:

"You'ns" means You all and "Y'oun" means You in the singular. You might could get by with Y'all too as they have gotten used to that. Reckon and Yonder are not archaic there and "Tendin To" means Taking care of. As in "I reckon you'n is tendin to your grandbaby, then?" They are also extremely polite most of the time.

I’ll try to add to the list next week..

OK. Enough for today.    rg

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This is still true. I haven't done any more work on that proposal!

Written last month:  To the contributors to BREAK FREE:  Random House rejected the collaborative manuscript saying that they weren’t interested in an anthology. Elaine, my agent, wants me to reconfigure the proposal before she sends it out again, and I haven’t done it yet. Soon.  Sorry.

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A special request if you are planning to e-mail me:  please put your city or country in the subject line. That way I can write to you when I'm in the area and perhaps we can have coffee. I've met some great readers along the way and I love the contact.

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Oh, and I have to tell anyone who wants to know, that I recently had a computer tech guy, Stan, over to help me with a couple of problems, and he convinced me that I should gradually wean my e-mailers off Hotmail and back to my webmail address (femalenomad@ritagoldengelman.com).  It’s the address that is in the book but I haven’t been able to access it for several years.  The Hotmail address is the one that has been on my website and most writers go to my website, get the new address, and write to me at Hotmail.  

While Stan was doing what tech people do to make things happen, he reactivated the above address, and 546 e-mails, which I never received, popped up, all of them written during the last year. (I guess they save them for a year.) If you are one of those people whom I never answered, I’m sorry. I wonder how many others were written in the years before that, when I couldn’t get to those either.

I’m going to try to answer them all….. but it won’t happen in a day. I apologize if you are one of the unanswered readers….but if I didn’t answer you, you probably aren’t reading this. If you are one of the ones from previous years, please write again….your earlier e-mail is floating somewhere in cyberspace, never to be read.

And for those of you who are using my Hotmail address……I will get your e-mails. Stan has had those letters “aliased” to my webmail account (don’t know if I’m using the word correctly)…..but it will be more direct if you write to me from now on at:  femalenomad@ritagoldengelman.com.

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For people looking for ways to live and work in another country

Have a look at the website, www.TransitionsAbroad.com. There’s stuff on teaching English, on cultural trips, on other jobs, and tons more. 

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Attention:  Book clubs

If you are part of a book club…..I hope you will suggest NOMAD as a choice…….and tell other book clubs how the discussion went. It’s usually a pretty lively evening.    E-mail and if I can, I'll "visit" your meeting on speaker-phone.  
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Click here for some suggestions for topics to discuss.

At this point, book clubs are the answer to keeping the book in print, so any help is appreciated.

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Some interesting links:

As part of my new PR mode, I am inviting fellow writers with websites to exchange links. Here are the first five.

This is commercial but interesting and a fit with my passion about "connecting." Maura Cassidy has created cards with questions for family people to ask each other. I see it as especially useful if there are teen agers in the house. www.goaskanyone.com

Kelly Hayes-Raitt has shelved her political career to travel to countries that have difficult relations with the US.  Her blog, www.PeacePATHFoundation.org, carries her personal stories of the people she's met in pre- and post-invasion Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and more.  She intends to travel to North Korea, Nigeria and Iran soon, putting a human face on US foreign policies.

Heather Hapeta is another passionate nomad. She ran away from her New Zealand home when she was fifty. She then reinvented herself as a freelance writer and wrote, Naked in Budapest. You have to buy it from her directly.

www.kiwitravelwriter.com

Beth Whitman is a veteran traveler. She has motorcycled, climbed, and wandered all over the world. Her book, Wanderlust and Lipstick, has some great advice for women who want to travel alone.: www.WanderlustAndLipstick.com  Her travel blog at the Seattle PI: :http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/travel

Meg Noble Peterson has traveled off the beaten track for the past twenty-five years. In her memoir, Madam, Have You Ever Really Been Happy? An Intimate Journey Through Africa and Asia, she writes about her first solo backpacking trip around the world--across four continents and twelve countries--from Cairo to contentious apartheid South Africa, to India, to the Himalayas. Approaching sixty, the newly divorced mother of five grown children takes off, armed with an open ticket, a backpack, a camera, and empty journals. www.megnoblepeterson.com

  (Watch for more.  rg)

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Promoting NOMAD

I’m trying promote TALES OF A FEMALE NOMAD to keep it alive.

If you are part of an organization that has a budget for speakers, I’d be happy to come and talk.

I do get a fee and travel expenses, unless you are a small book club and I happen to be around the corner.

Know any Women’s Study programs at universities or Rotary Clubs or travel organizations or AAUW meetings or Wild Women groups, or even not-so-wild women's groups? Whatever. If they have a budget for speakers, I’m up for the trip and the talk…and when I’m in town, I’ll throw in some free visits to classrooms to talk about and read some of my kids’ books. Second grade is my favorite age group.

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Calling all Nomads

I’m still looking for other long-term nomads so I can pitch talk-show hosts for a program on an “alternative” way to live. Nomad candidates should have already spent a few years "nomadding." They can’t have a home

somewhere….or lots of stuff in storage. If this show is to have an impact, we all have to be committed to the nomad way of life. I suspect we’d all probably have to do a short home video so the producers know what they're getting. I'm hoping to get to this after the cookbook is ready.

What's driving me is that I have lots of letters from people who say they read the nomad book and felt inspired to revisit their own dreams. Some took off….and they've "never been so happy."  Most of them are not nomads, but they have discovered that there is more to life than living it in a box. I’d like to reach millions . There is such joy in connecting!!!

I've also had a lot of mail from current and former Peace Corps volunteers.........and I just want to pass on the news to you alumni that a friend of mine, Jane Albritton, is working on a book about the first 50 years of the Peace Corps. If you think you might have something to contribute, check the website, www.PeaceCorpsat50.com.    

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Attention AAUW Book club members

I learned recently that AAUW recommends a monthly book to its Adelante book clubs. If you're a member, and if you think NOMAD would be a good choice for your club, I'd appreciate your recommending it. Apparently it's too late to get into the 2008 list.....but I'd take 2009! Thanks. Here's how to do it:

Download the ¡Adelante! recommendation sheet and fill it in.

The copyright date of Tales of a Female Nomad is 2001.

ISBN 0-609-80954-7

Publisher--- Three Rivers Press/Random House

Audience--- Adults

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