May 1Beltane and a Black HeroineMy Regular Pagan Holiday Greeting — My Regular Pagan Holiday Greeting Dear Friends, Beltane, May 1, is a pagan holiday celebrating the spring at its peak and the coming of summer. It is halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice. Driving by the Beltane Ranch, I’ve always wondered about its history and its association with…Mary Ellen Pleasant6 min read
Apr 25Mom Kept Her Abortions SecretSolving a WWII-era mystery — Solving a WWII-era mystery The most personal most shocking secret my mother never told me I had to find out from my cousin Sandy. In 1974 Sandy had just returned from a decade working for the U.S. Army in Germany. She came home and she came out, returning with a female lover and a…Abortion9 min read
Published in Prism & Pen·Mar 24Remembering My Lesbian Communist Friend: What Happened to the Revolution?Shelby Morgan 1949–2017 — The Soviet Experiment 1917–1992 My latest favorite T-shirt shows two punks of indeterminate gender kissing. Its message is in Cyrillic script. I once asked my friend Shelby, who lived in Russia for a year, to translate but she couldn’t make sense of it. …Russia9 min read
Mar 20Hope for a New DayMy Regular Pagan Holiday Post — Dear Friends, Happy Ostara, the celebration of the vernal equinox, which takes place this year today, March 20. Searching for spring festivals and hoping for inspiration, I found one from Iran. “In Iran, the festival of NowRuz begins shortly before the vernal equinox. …Spring4 min read
Feb 28Wood Smoke KillsMy letter to the editor was published in our local paper — My mother died at 70 from COPD and air pollution. She was ill the last two decades of her life until she coughed herself to death. We lived in a small town very like Santa Rosa where people (including my family) relied on burning wood for heat in the winter…Wood Smoke2 min read
Jan 29Celebrating National Freedom DayMy Regular Pagan Holiday Greeting — February 1 gives us many reasons to celebrate. Imbolc, the Celtic pagan holiday celebrated February 1 and 2, marks the mid-point between the winter solstice and spring equinox. And February 1 is the first day of Chinese New Year, the year of the tiger. February 1 is also National Freedom…2 min read
Jan 4Terror? Dread? Trepidation?Stating Intentions for the New Year — My wife Holly and I have a tradition at the end of the year — declaring our intentions for the new year. We usually revisit the previous year’s intentions, but we couldn’t really remember what was said last year, at the close of 2020. We were in the midst of…New Year Resolution3 min read
Published in Prism & Pen·Dec 27, 2021How I Got My Book PublishedSurviving the vagaries of the industry — I’m a writer not completely unfamiliar with the publishing process. I published a book in 1988 with a new edition in 1993. Hard Hatted Women: Life on the Job is an anthology of stories by and about women working in the construction trades and blue-collar jobs. I had a publisher then, Seal Press, a woman-owned press that focused on women’s…LGBTQ4 min read
Dec 20, 2021God Jul and Good SolsticeMy Regular Pagan Holiday Letter — Our family never did that thing where white-robed virgins with candle crowns bring breakfast, but we did celebrate Swedish Christmas. Culture was supplied by my grandmother, Gerda, who grew up on a farm near Lake Vänern in central Sweden in an age when you really did hitch the horse up…Sweden8 min read
Published in History of Women·Dec 7, 2021How Women Broke into the TradesTradeswomen Organizing at the City Level: San Francisco Women in Trades — Tradeswomen activists changed our world from the personal realm up to the national and international. This is the story of San Francisco Women in Trades, one of hundreds of local organizations in cities across the country dedicated to the success of women in nontraditional blue collar jobs. The tradeswomen movement…San Francisco10 min read
