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My mother a woman of great vision, imagination, and versatility. She was also a woman with many unfinished projects. She was a painter and an renowned stained glass artist. She made glass sculptures and sand-blasted glass creations, did batik painting, created wearable art, and occasionally mixed several media in a single project. After she died, I looked through the sizable stack of water color pieces she never had framed. Some were obviously practice or experimental pieces. Some seemed unfinished. Others may have been finished, but she hadn’t framed or hung them. How sad, I thought, that she had left so much unfinished work. With her talent, it seemed that she should have had more to show for her efforts. Today I see that scrap pile quite differently. As I look around the houses of my siblings and children, as well as my own, I see her art hanging in places of honor. And now I recall that her work hung in many galleries, and lots of pieces sold. I compare her work to my writing...

Adventures of a Chilehead initially began as a simple story album – a term I use in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing to describe a collection of free-standing short stories. But a funny thing happened as I began assembling the loose stories into a document: they evolved into a memoir. Here’s how. I began with three stories , two of which appeared in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing . I’d already written the third back then, but decided to save it for later. Through the years I wrote other stories on this theme. When I put the collection together for this album and arranged them in chronological order, I thought of a couple more. As I wrote and edited, I shared each story with a writing group. “Great story, but tell us more about this, this and that,” they said. “This line would sound smoother like so.” I love my writing group. My writing is always better with their help! Although they hadn’t said it in so many words, they wanted more reflection, They wanted to k...

That curve ball I reported in the previous post about my book title has been tossed all over the field. I appreciate the comments many left there. An update is in order about  principles validated, lessons learned, and conclusions reached. Principle 1: Do your research. When controversy arose over the spelling of chile or chilehead, I did do lots of research, and I learned many fascinating facts about chile/chili quite apart from the spelling lessons and history. Principle 2: Check your references When I called my father to double check my memory of what he told me, I was in for yet another surprise. Without knowing why I was asking, he turned my memory inside out. In his considered opinion, replacing the “e” at the end of chile with an “I” is an affectation that became fashionable about the time people began naming baby girls Christie rather than Christy. I never did understand how he could be at such odds with local custom, so although chagrinned at this outcome, I’m relieve...

Adventures of a Chilihead is the title I chose ages ago for what I intended to be a story album or themed collection of short stories about my experiences eating hot chili peppers and other blow-your-head-off food. As usual, getting the book pulled together is an adventure itself as it morphed from loose stories to mini-memoir, and part of that adventure includes resolving a quandary about the proper spelling of the main subject. More years ago than I can remember, my father sorted me out on the proper spelling of chile. “Chile is a country in South America. We eat chili !” He grew up in New Mexico, staying there until he was a grandfather. He’s a reliable trivia consultant and can always back up his opinions, so as far as I was concerned, that settled it. I consistently used the correct spelling in my manuscript. Or so I thought. I follow a couple of Facebook groups populated with people who grew up in Los Alamos. On a whim, I posted a request for comments testifying to their lov...