Kathy Duval's Blog, page 4

UFO’s in Roswell and South Texas!

This year my annual Christmas visit to Santa Fe was filled intrigue.

Snow! Tales of a UFO crash and recovery of alien bodies! A strange sighting in the early morning West Texas sky!

And after I got home, a news article in the Houston Chronicle about UFO sightings in South Texas!

Weird. Very weird!

On the road from Houston to Santa Fe, snow covered the ground from Wichita Falls on. Not such a big deal if you’re from Chicago, but if you’re from Houston, it’s a big deal.

This year I wanted to make a pilgrimage to the UFO Museum in Roswell – fitting, since my new children’s book TAKE ME TO YOUR BBQ (farmer+BBQ+UFO) is coming out on March 15.

 

For a couple of years since the book was bought by  Disney, I’ve had a google alert for UFO sightings. I’ve watched lots of UFO videos. Some looked like Chinese lanterns, a street light, or  a hubcap or paper plate thrown in the air. Usually somebody is screaming in the background – “What the heck is that?” – using somewhat saltier language. But every now and then, I saw a compelling video, done either by a budding sci-fi film maker – or who knows? Maybe someone who really saw something?

I’d been to the Museum before, but I wanted to take another look and visit the gift shop to get give aways for my book launch at the Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston on March 23.  So my husband and I left our cozy room at Suitable Digs in Santa Fe and headed out in the snow to Roswell.

After three hours we were close.

 

 

Finally we made it to the Museum.

 

The museum contains fascinating original national front page news articles and radio news reports verifying the crash of a flying saucer in Roswell in 1947. There are also the day after rebuttal stories which believers say is a huge cover-up. If you want to know more, go to their website for the full story and other videos of sightings.

 

Here is a painting in the Museum of what happened in Roswell in 1947 done by local high school students.

I was glad they kept these little men fenced in.

An recreation of an alien autopsy (Yes! They say bodies were recovered!)

This trip left me with a lot of questions. A bunch of people saw something in Roswell in 1947, obviously different from anything they’d seen before or since. If not a UFO, then what?

On the way back to Houston, we avoided West Texas due to a blizzard and made our way to one of our favorite B&Bs, the Hudspeth House in Canyon, Texas, where Georgia O’Keefe ate breakfast when she taught there. Leaving out before sunrise the next morning, I kept my eyes on the sky. This would be a perfect time and place to see a UFO. A huge ball of light floated in the sky, which my husband finally convinced me was Venus, and not a method of interplanetary transport.

But I kept my eye on it, just in case. For miles and miles, I kept glancing as the sun rose. Finally the spot turned gray and we were getting closer to it. Whatever I was looking at now was definitely not Venus. Finally the spot was to our left, and it morphed into a plane making a trail.

Now how could that be? A planet turns into a plane? Did I not keep my eye on the spot well enough? Did a plane fly into the sky without me seeing it?

Maybe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take Me To Your BBQ

 

The arrival of Take Me To Your BBQ is approaching!

I’m thrilled to announce that the launch date will be March 23, at the Blue Willow Bookstore in Houston. Barbecue plus bluegrass plus aliens! An out-of-this-world experience.

To prepare myself, I went on a pilgrimage to the UFO Museum in Roswell over the holidays. More on that soon.

Today Adam McCauley posted a blog about the process of illustrating the book along with his wife Cynthia Wigginton. The illustrations are amazing, and it was fun reading about how the magic happened.

Check it out:

http://www.drawger.com/atomic/?article_id=13838

 

 

Dreaming and Writing

Today I met with my dream group. Once a month, a yoga instructor, an origami artist, an environmentalist and I spend an afternoon sharing dreams. We catch up, eat, and read dreams from our dream journals. Kind of like a critique group, only we don’t suggest changes to our dreams. We do try to understand them, and sometimes we act them out or create art inspired by them.

When I started keeping a journal, I had almost zero dream recall. Now I’ve filled volumes. Here’s my stack of dream journals, which comes up to my elbow.

 

So what does this have to do with writing? First of all, there are thousands of stories in those journals— snippets of stories, mostly tales that only fascinate me. Have you ever noticed that no one is really interested in your dreams but you? However when I look back in old journals, I see characters or situations that I did include in stories later, without remembering that I dreamed them first.

Australian aboriginal people believe everything in the past, present, and future originates in dreamtime. Makes sense to me.

When I was a kid, I took piano lessons. Those scales I practiced everyday were never played in a recital. Maybe remembering and writing dreams is like that— practice looking at the movie that’s always playing in your head— the one writers spend a lot of time trying to access.

Whatever purpose dream work serves, it’s fun. Today the group was at my house.  Figs, chocolate, and cherries. Yum! And more fascinating tales from Dreamtime.

If you’re interested in dream groups, here’s an2010 article from the New York Times about dream groups, featuring my dream group and several others.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/fashion/11dreams.html?pagewanted=all

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to my blog!

I’m delighted with my brand new website and blog! Saying goodbye to my old site designed by my daughter is a bit sad, but it needed updating. She’s busy with two businesses now, as a massage therapist and photographer, so Jenny Medford of Websy Daisy created this gorgeous new website. Happily Kara’s vision is still present. The still life on the home page of my “stuff” is her creation.

Thank you Jenny and Kara!

This has been a busy summer. Besides working on the website, I completed my picture book A BEAR’S YEAR, which sold to Schwartz & Wade. I finished a first draft of a YA novel, and am starting revisions. I’m planning for the release of my picture book TAKE ME TO YOUR BBQ, which is coming out next spring.

In the midst of it all, I traveled to the Pacific Northwest to attend a retreat hosted by Erin Murphy, for her clients. This year it was at Port Ludlow, a beautiful resort on Bainbridge Island near Seattle. I’ve gone to all but one of the six retreats that have been held, and  each year feel like I’m getting together with old friends. The retreat is a high point of my year.

Something was strange this year, however.

On the second day, everybody started wearing these crazy hats!

 

Colin Murcray and Ruth McNally Barshaw

Cynthia Levinson and Conrad Wesselhoeft



Lynda Mullaly Hunt



Phil Bildner and Jeanne Mobley



Even Erin was wearing a hat, along with Phil Bildner, Lynda Mullaly Hunt, and Carrie Gordon Watson



So I decided to join the party. Here are Kristin Wolden Nitz and I in our fascinators.

I found it fascinating that these little hats are called fascinators. I’d been calling mine a poofy little thing you wear on the side of your head.

After the retreat, my husband joined me and we went to Vancouver, BC where there were all these laughing guys. Could they tell we were tourists?

 

Here’s some of the beauty of the Pacific Northwest that we saw.

Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC

And something perhaps strangely beautiful, and definitely interesting.

The Gum Wall in Seattle

This is only a small section of an entire wall filled with gum. A person could go nuts trying to guess how many wads of gum are stuck on it.

Picture this: As I’m preparing to shoot this picture, lots of people are standing behind me chewing gum they bought from a guy who sells gum to people to put on this wall. The gum chewers wait until I snap the picture, and then giddily spit the gum into their hands and leap to stick it on the wall.

I finally tore myself away from the gum wall, and now I’m back at home, getting back to work, my spirit renewed!

Hope you’re having a beautiful and interesting summer, too.