T.D. Whittle's Blog, page 4

A tree forms itself

  Winter, Spring by Jim Harrison   Winter is black and beige down here from drought. Suddenly in March there’s a good rain and in a couple of weeks we are enveloped in green. Green everywhere in the mesquites, oaks, cottonwoods, the bowers of thick willow bushes the warblers love for reasons of food or the branches, the tiny aphids they eat with relish.   Each year it is a surprise that the world can turn green again. It is the grandest surprise in life, the birds coming back from the south to my open arms, which they fly past, aiming at the feeders.     Sabbaths IV (1999) by Wendell Berry   What a consolation it is, after the explanations and the predictions of…

Book Review: Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs, by Linda Olsson

Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs by Linda Olsson My rating: 5 of 5 stars Come, sit by me, and I shall tell you all my sorrows; we shall talk to each other about secrets. p. 63 quote from Edith Sodergran’s Sorger (Sorrows), 1916. As the title suggests, this is a gentle song of a book. It’s a quiet story about two women, one in her thirtieth year and the other decades older, helping each other through terrible losses merely by being present to one another. Veronika and Astrid meet as new neighbours who are situated on a hillside overlooking a mountain town in Sweden. Each is isolated in her own silent, aching grief, and together, they are isolated from the rest of the…

Wishing You a Happy & Bookish New Year

xo, Sandra & td

New Release from Thirteen Ways Press: The Infinite Loop, a novella

We are excited to announce that our second book, The Infinite Loop: a novella of spaceships, time warps and free pie, is available in Kindle and paperback formats at Amazon.   Lenie and Rachel are two old friends sharing a road trip and a new vision of life, beyond marriage and children. Things begin to feel strange out in the West Texas desert: a buzzing, tingling kind of strange. An aircraft appears to be following them and distant lights shine from a town that doesn’t appear on their maps. What awaits them there is a tidy RV park boasting modern amenities and fresh all-you-can-eat pie. Feeling lucky to have landed in this quiet oasis under a star-strewn desert sky, the women are reluctant to leave,…