Mumbai and Misfits

Sparkle Hayter is a terrific writer (the hilarious Robin Hudson murder mysteries) and comedian, who now lives in Mumbai. She has done so for a couple of years now, working in Bollywood. She seems to love living there, as she has loved living in Tokyo, The Chelsea Hotel (NYC), and in an art squat in…

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Reconciliation. Compassion.

Here’s the dilemma — as a writer, I feel some responsibility to write about what’s bugging me. It is, after all, in the job description. On the other hand, I’m a novelist, not a journalist, not a damn pundit, and my readers have granted me, through their support, the privilege of spending my days, as…

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The Thunderstorm and the Lion

“We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain. . .” Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) US “essayist, poet, naturalist” A line of…

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An Inconvenient Faith — Part 2

Have you had an experience that ‘resonated’ deep within you? Something perhaps challenging, or uncomfortable? Something perhaps inconvenient, but which you still couldn’t ignore? Sometime after the experience I talked about in “An Inconvenient Faith 1”, back when my husband and I were still living in France, Ron asked me where I wanted to go…

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An Inconvenient Faith – Part 1

One summer, just after The Best Beloved  and I had moved to France, we were driving over a rather desolate but shockingly beautiful mountain range, seemingly miles from nowhere, and not a person in sight, when we came upon  small, very old chapel in the beehive style. We went inside and found a small and…

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