Category Archives: MOTHER TONGUE

Life Interrupted

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P1010462I retired FOR GOOD four and a half years ago (the 100 flamingos in my yard were proof of that) after a forty-year career as a Clinical Psychologist. That’s eight thousand patients and tens of thousands of hours of listening to the basic seven stories of humankind: bad spouse or partner, bad job, bad kids, lousy childhood, maltreatment, bottom of society’s totem poles, or spiritual vacuum. But each retelling had its own flavor or its own horrors (just when you think you’ve heard the worst!) and the resilience of the human soul is a marvel to observe. Give it a place to flourish and flourish it will.

I turned my attention and my time toward being a loving grandparent and to fiction writing. I enjoyed putting the final touches on my second novel, MOTHER TONGUE, and developing a social media campaign to sell the first, DEGREES OF OBSESSION. How different the market has become for self-published authors. I even created a book trailer, which brought out the “director” in me.

And then my stellar work history caught up with me. A former colleague gave my name to a large heath care plan that services the Medi-Cal (Medicaid) population in 14 northern California counties. They were seeking someone with clinical experience and organizational skills (which I had obtained through leadership in my union) to serve as their Mental Health Director. Two days a week seemed doable and the lure of having a paycheck again, and a handsome one at that, led me to applying and then accepting the position.

So the plan is to sort out the new position, see what I can contribute to serving the Medi-Cal population in terms of mental health services, and run the Grammie and fiction writing “businesses” on the side. Who knew that entering the eighth decade of my life would be so invigorating and challenging. And I can always quit after I earn enough money to buy that Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce I’ve been hankering after!

Traveling in Corsica with my daughter

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Arriving Corsica Ile RousseHere we are, coming in by ferry from Nice to L’Île-Rousse. One of the perks of traveling with my grown daughter, besides the fact that she is very outgoing and fluent in French, is that we are in complete sync as traveling companions. No squabbling over when to get up or when to go to bed. And with her encouragement, I see many sights that would have passed me by had my “old bones” been making the decisions. Her theory: if we’re here we should see everything! So, armed with our favorite travel book, a DK Eyewitness Travel Guide we set out to see every nook and cranny possible during our scheduled days in Corsica.

Top on the agenda was to see many of the places that serve as locations in my novel MOTHER TONGUE which included Bonifacio, the Citadelle at Corte, the Restonica Valley, and L’Île-Rousse. Even made a few stops to capture roadside graffiti scrawled by FLNC sympathizers.Dinner on the beachMaggie dinner on beachBut one of my favorite memories was dinner on the beach at L‘Île–Rousse, the western port where we had arrived by ferry earlier in the day.

Why a novel about Corsica?

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The cliffs of Bonifacio, birthplace of MOTHER TONGUE

Fiction is delivered into the world, much like babies, in one of two ways. It is born naturally, accompanied by the pangs of hard labor, from the depths of an author’s imagination or cut from the world’s belly in the form of an unforgettable adventure.

My own such adventure began on a spring afternoon in 1963,  incubated in  a white Victorian two blocks off Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, where three sorority cast offs shared space with one transferee from Stanford. The latter would be moi, who moved in after a  rash decision that only an eighteen-year-old with a broken heart can make.

widgeonThe wacky idea? Round up a bunch of students from California colleges, charter a yacht, and sail around the Mediterranean. I was the only taker and certainly the only one whose mother would have paid for such a dubious  plan.

two legionnairesAt the end of our adventure, more of which will be revealed later, we found ourselves stranded in Bonifacio, Corsica for five days while a mistral storm raged on, sending six more modern and less sturdy yachts to Davy Jones locker. Not a single inhabitant spoke to us—it was still the ugly American days—until two young Foreign Legionnaires approached and begged us to sneak them off the island. Our devious plot was foiled by a snitch among the crew, and we endured an hour’s dressing down by the Captain.

The next day we were surprised and delighted when the two Legionnaires present us with a gift for at least trying to liberate them. I will never forget my first glimpse of that stunning Corsican dagger, its blade inscribed with a Corsican proverb.daggers That image turned first into a screen play and many iterations since into MOTHER TONGUE. The protagonist, Liz Fallon, is conceived during a reminiscent five day stay in Bonifacio and thus MOTHER TONGUE, the novel, was born.