A Newsletter for the New Year
January 3, 2024
Welcome to my quarterly newsletter!
I promised to do a newsletter quarterly, and so far I've been faithful to my word--six. So here's another one. And no, I'm not on time. I'm three days late. No matter. I'm here to talk about the past, present, and future.
The fall is usually busy with Crime Bake in November and at least two library association events. But this year the best event was a December book event in Rockport MA, where Andre Dubus III showed up to sign books and talk about writing with readers and other vendors. I was there promoting Crime Spell Books and our newest anthology, as well as my newest Pioneer Valley Mystery, Grave Legacy, featuring Felicity O'Brien. I grabbed a copy of Andre's newest book also, The Garden of Last Days.
Crime Spell Books has opened submissions to its fourth anthology, Devil's Snare, another name for the poison plant datura. Submissions close April 30, 2024.
My focus this month has also switched to photography. On February 1, I'll be hanging a show of 17 photographs of the Pongala festival in South India. This is a gathering of up to three million women who come for a chance to make an offering to Attukal Bhagavati in hopes of obtaining good health for the family in the coming year. The date varies in Kerala, South India, so the festival is sometimes held in January and sometimes later in the year, depending on how the stars align. The photographs document the setup for cooking for each devotee, the carrying of the sacred flame to light the cooking fires (all three million of them), the preparation of the offering, lunch provided to all, and the final act of blessing the porridge cooked and offered to the deity.
This is one of my favorite festivals in India, and its many rich and interesting aspects make a great setting for a crime story. If you are a reader of the Anita Ray stories and novels, you can look forward to one set during Pongala, when the police gather and hold the known pickpockets and petty criminals, women walk the city streets throughout the night, or sleep on them, without fear of harassment or worse,and men are delegated to assisting--handing out free cups of tea in the morning, cooking and delivering full buffet lunches for all the women, and driving small trucks for errands and as ambulances.
On January 11, I'll be at the Lynnfield Senior Center doing a "Mystery Making" event with Connie Johnson Hambley and Edith Maxwell. These are loads of fun as three mystery writers make up a crime story on the spot with suggestions from the audience. When we aren't laughing, we're plotting murder.
February 1, my photography exhibit "Pongala" opens at the Beverly Public Library for one month. It then moves to the Unitarian Universalist Church in Danvers MA for two months, April and May.
While all this activity has been going on, I've also been at home working on the sixth Anita Ray, and planning revisions for a Ginny Means mystery. Ginny is as yet known only through stories about her in the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. My goal is to show more of her in a full-length novel. Stay tuned.
And now with the closing of this newsletter, I will turn my attentions to spring and gardening.