I’ve been busy buzzing around Myrtle Beach for nearly a week now as part of my Society of American Travel Writers Freelance Council Meeting. Tomorrow’s the last day of exploration. Our workshops earlier this week were what brought me up here, including an excellent day-long session on podcasting by podcasting guru Dave Slusher. After being one of the first to start podcasting years ago, he’s just debuted a new podcast, Reality Break, drawing on interviews he did a decade and more ago with serious sci-fi and comic greats. Episode one is one of my husband’s favorite storytellers, Will Eisner. Tune in!

Today was the first day I spent any significant time on or near the beach, some of which was at Myrtle Beach State Park, pictured here with its popular pier. It’s a lovely slice of nature amid a sea of waterfront condos, hotels, and homes, the beach shown here backed up by a dense maritime forest with plenty of salt-spray sculpted sand live oaks and wax myrtle. 

…opens my eyes to the heart of old New Orleans. I cross Bourbon Street, where drunken men stagger past in loud clumps at noontime, and I continue along Iberville until a street calls out to me– Royal. From a line of antique shops, it morphs into the unabashed artisan’s row, a cornicopia of color and form, gallery after gallery of delights. The street is full of music, with buskers set down mid-Avenue, and barricades set up to define their space, the complicit approval of the police who man them. Horse-drawn surreys slip past. Behind intricate wrought iron fences and gates hide inner courtyards with grand brick homes, a city within the city.

On this avenue of delights, I uncover special treasures. Alley-like ships lead to inner courtyards filled with colorful local art. There is a concerted pastiche of water meter covers in fabric, clay, and glass. In one welcoming cottage, The Great Artists Collective, the manager points out the paintings of “Paxton,” scenes of strong women on the streets of New Orleans…and reveals that the artist is none other than one of my favorite authors, Nevada Barr, she of Anna Pigeon and mysteries set in the National Parks.  See them in her online gallery.

…training writers to use Wordpress! How cool is that?

It seems like an eternity ago, but at the beginning of this month I made good on a couple of promises to myself: to start taking my fiction seriously, and to visit Taos. Luckily, both converged at a nexus that involved my cousin Sean Murphy, who with his wife Tania Casselle is living the writer’s life that I’ve always dreamed, spending days in the desert sun in a remote conservation area spinning yarns for your reading pleasure. Sean and Tania run regular writer’s workshops (in fact, they met at one), and I attended “Writing from the Ground Up,” with a great group of go-getters. The landscapes, the teachers, and the camaraderie in the group inspired. It all went by too fast. I’m pleased to report that, although my volume of work is overwhelming, I am taking time to write, and am getting together with fellow writers to share. It feels right. This is a photo of Sean with the Rio Grande Gorge in the background. Go check out his website … his books are great!

I recently finished reading Anne Rudloe’s book on beginning Zen, Butterflies on a Sea Wind, and found it a breath of fresh air in explaining the whole retreat-and-meditation part of Zen within the scope of daily life. I had the pleasure to meet Anne and her husband Jack last fall during a visit to one of my favorite spots in Florida, Wakulla County, when I finally had a chance to tour their Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory, a place like no other, where you see the small creatures of Florida’s Big Bend estuaries up close. The Rudloes embody environmentalism, their staunch stands to prevent the “Miami-zation” of the Panhandle’s coastline grounded in their intimate knowledge of living as a part of an estaurine coast teeming with life. They are fine people. And until I read this book, I had no idea that Anne practiced Zen. But it fits. The book does well to illustrate how the practice resonates so well in a life given over to preservation. Check out this great little video on YouTube where Anne talks about her experience recovering from cancer and how her connections to Florida’s outdoors helped her through.