Betsy Robinson's Blog, page 2
September 1, 2024
We Are All Alike . . . and Different
I recently had a deep conversation with a friend I’ve known since the first grade. He is one of the nicest humans I’ve ever known. To me, he radiates goodness. But he would dispute that because he isn’t made with the same energetic antennae that make me ME. He’d just read my novel Cats on a Pole and he was deeply shaken by not only the turns of plot but by the protagonist’s sensibilities: she smells things he doesn’t smell and feels energetic sensations he doesn’t think exist, so in his mind, she was possibly mentally ill.
Because he’s such a good friend, I willingly went into the weeds of this with him. I explained about hyperosmia (a smell sensitivity; I just recently learned the name for it from a NY Times article that describes it as a gift—which it is—rather than the “disorder” categorized by medical sites) and I told him I feel energetic sensations everywhere. I told him how this is commonplace and in fact valued in indigenous cultures where people who are particularly gifted are named as shamans or medicine people. (Unlike in our Western culture, this is not something one declares about themselves.) I told him this stuff is ancient and there is tons of literature about it.
All he really wanted was assurance that neither I nor my protagonist is insane. He seemed satisfied at the end of our book-length series of emails.
And I learned from him that what I’ve written may scare some people and I hope I understand better why and how to respond in a helpful way.
Today, September 1st, is a day I glory in being hyperosmic. I smell fall: a heavenly mix of both growth and decay in Central Park, one block away. My apartment is filled with godly perfume, and I wish my friend could experience this.
I wish we all would be curious, rather than judgmental, about one another’s differences. Altogether, we are the most incredible garden we could never imagine.
August 19, 2024
Pick a Side?
This photo is part of the readers and writers BooktheVote.org effort.
Yesterday a friend told me that people feel pressured to “take a side” in war. Maybe in life too. The side I pick is FREEDOM and EQUALITY.
I pick that in this country. I pick that in the world. It’s not that complicated.
If freedom and equality are my side, then everybody’s pain matters. I can wish for wars to end and everybody to have equal rights. I can acknowledge the pain of people who have been attacked, killed, butchered, raped, burned, and abducted while enjoying a music festival, and I can acknowledge the pain of innocents who are being slaughtered by an army directed by a tyrant who cares only about maintaining power. I can call for the release of innocents on both sides from horrific actions.
If freedom and equality are my side, I can acknowledge the history of my own country and also live here, knowing that I have a right to my home, even though others were butchered in a genocide that gave me the land on which my home stands. I can choose personal actions to see that everybody’s pain is acknowledged and everybody matters and that past wrongs are not perpetuated or repeated.
If freedom and equality are my side, I can hold painful contradictions and refuse to give in to catch phrases that condemn everybody of one race or ethnicity.
It’s not that hard.
August 6, 2024
For People Interested in Writing Structure
Here is the Author’s Statement I drafted years ago for Cats on a Pole
Goodreads Book Page
CATS ON A POLE is a metaphysical love story of two psychically-gifted people who are isolated—like cats stuck up on a telephone pole—by their gifts. Charismatic healer and teacher Joshua Gardner and his student Harmony Rogers carry on a passionate love affair without physical contact, a battle of wills without speech, a psychic duel between male and female equals who have, for the first time, met their match … but nobody wins.
This is a complex “under-the-skin” dance portrait of two characters who are usually seen two-dimensionally: a charismatic leader who is either idealized or condemned and an odd-ball loner who watches others but rarely comes out of the shadows. The story emerges like a dance with the first chapter serving as a prelude to something that is repeated later on when the linear story catches up to it.
The essential question dealt with in Cats on a Pole is: What is going on between people in relationship? How do we really communicate? Can we find the courage to admit to ourselves the truth of how much we know and how we know it, and then reveal this to others?
My hope is that readers will recognize their own senses in this story—sensations, smells, or physical feelings they perhaps have dismissed as “nothing” or fantasy—and begin to accept them as real. In so doing, we must then take responsibility for our effect on others. And in taking responsibility, we find freedom.
But all of this is subliminal—in the fiber of a good, sometimes funny, story—and it doesn’t matter if it is ever articulated.
The book and e-book are available everywhere, but you can get discount paperbacks in the USA: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?KD...
Goodreads Book Page
CATS ON A POLE is a metaphysical love story of two psychically-gifted people who are isolated—like cats stuck up on a telephone pole—by their gifts. Charismatic healer and teacher Joshua Gardner and his student Harmony Rogers carry on a passionate love affair without physical contact, a battle of wills without speech, a psychic duel between male and female equals who have, for the first time, met their match … but nobody wins.
This is a complex “under-the-skin” dance portrait of two characters who are usually seen two-dimensionally: a charismatic leader who is either idealized or condemned and an odd-ball loner who watches others but rarely comes out of the shadows. The story emerges like a dance with the first chapter serving as a prelude to something that is repeated later on when the linear story catches up to it.
The essential question dealt with in Cats on a Pole is: What is going on between people in relationship? How do we really communicate? Can we find the courage to admit to ourselves the truth of how much we know and how we know it, and then reveal this to others?
My hope is that readers will recognize their own senses in this story—sensations, smells, or physical feelings they perhaps have dismissed as “nothing” or fantasy—and begin to accept them as real. In so doing, we must then take responsibility for our effect on others. And in taking responsibility, we find freedom.
But all of this is subliminal—in the fiber of a good, sometimes funny, story—and it doesn’t matter if it is ever articulated.
The book and e-book are available everywhere, but you can get discount paperbacks in the USA: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?KD...
July 6, 2024
WE ALL SMELL
An article by Scott Sayare in the New York Times (June 14, 2024) tells the story of 72-year-old nurse Joy Milne who smelled her husband’s Parkinson’s:
Milne’s husband died in 2015, but she went on to diagnose others’ early Parkinson’s and has made a wonderful contribution to medicine with her hyperosmic sense.
I skimmed this very long article with great interest—not in diagnosing Parkinson’s or even in Milne’s ability, but because I was thrilled to finally have a word, “hyperosmic,” for what I’ve called my “canine olfactory system.” I am hyperosmic.
Like Milne, I never talked about this other than saying I was sensitive to smells. And because mentioning people’s odors is rude, it wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I began talking about and exploring my sensitivity. It happened when I attended a healing school and began identifying what specific smells meant. Fear stinks and since I felt so much of it, I was self-conscious. Finally one day I blurted my insecurity in class and was both stunned and relieved that nobody seemed to know what I was talking about—but they were interested.
Fear has a particularly strong odor, but all emotions have odors. All people have odors. Dogs know this and have no judgment about it, and despite our personal oblivion, we know it too: We employ scent dogs to track people; hunters know to stay downwind of their prey; but still we would rather not discuss our odors that are apparent to all nonhuman species and apparently there is now a thriving industry of full-body deodorants.
This is ridiculous. No matter how much stuff you slather on, dogs and hyperosmics still smell you. I know when somebody is angry or seething in resentment without them saying anything. I also know when they have cancer.
Frustrated at our species’ mass delusion that we successfully hide our scent and feelings, I wrote a novel, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg (Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize-winner, 2015), about a protagonist with a perpetual stink. I hoped that by exaggerating all the human traits we are so invested in believing we can hide, and writing it with humor, I could nudge people toward self-acceptance. Predictably readers have broken down into those who love Zelda and those that find her disgusting. (I will not psychoanalyze the responses, but draw your own conclusions.)
My new novel, Cats on a Pole (Kano Press, July 2, 2024), goes further into the hyperosmic world. Without having the descriptor, I wrote the story of a hyperosmic woman who is overwhelmed by the smells and energies that bombard her. She really has no recourse but to learn self-acceptance whose side effect is nonjudgment. The book has humor in it but nothing close to Zelda McFigg. Still, I hope it does its bit to nudging people into self-acceptance.
The truth is we all smell. We can accept that or we can continue to delude ourselves and waste enormous amounts of money on products that promise to make us as odorless as AI—an intelligence with no body. Do we really want that? Or we can delude ourselves into believing that we’re pure and odorless and it’s only the “others” who smell.
Discount Link for paperbacks in USA
Joy’s had always been an unusually sensitive nose, the inheritance, she believes, of her maternal line. Her grandmother was a “hyperosmic,” and she encouraged Joy, as a child, to make the most of her abilities, quizzing her on different varieties of rose, teaching her to distinguish the scent of the petals from the scent of the leaves from the scent of the pistils and stamens. Still, her grandmother did not think odor of any kind to be a polite topic of conversation, and however rich and enjoyable and dense with information the olfactory world might be, she urged her granddaughter to keep her experience of it to herself.
Milne’s husband died in 2015, but she went on to diagnose others’ early Parkinson’s and has made a wonderful contribution to medicine with her hyperosmic sense.
I skimmed this very long article with great interest—not in diagnosing Parkinson’s or even in Milne’s ability, but because I was thrilled to finally have a word, “hyperosmic,” for what I’ve called my “canine olfactory system.” I am hyperosmic.
Like Milne, I never talked about this other than saying I was sensitive to smells. And because mentioning people’s odors is rude, it wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I began talking about and exploring my sensitivity. It happened when I attended a healing school and began identifying what specific smells meant. Fear stinks and since I felt so much of it, I was self-conscious. Finally one day I blurted my insecurity in class and was both stunned and relieved that nobody seemed to know what I was talking about—but they were interested.
Fear has a particularly strong odor, but all emotions have odors. All people have odors. Dogs know this and have no judgment about it, and despite our personal oblivion, we know it too: We employ scent dogs to track people; hunters know to stay downwind of their prey; but still we would rather not discuss our odors that are apparent to all nonhuman species and apparently there is now a thriving industry of full-body deodorants.
This is ridiculous. No matter how much stuff you slather on, dogs and hyperosmics still smell you. I know when somebody is angry or seething in resentment without them saying anything. I also know when they have cancer.
Frustrated at our species’ mass delusion that we successfully hide our scent and feelings, I wrote a novel, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg (Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize-winner, 2015), about a protagonist with a perpetual stink. I hoped that by exaggerating all the human traits we are so invested in believing we can hide, and writing it with humor, I could nudge people toward self-acceptance. Predictably readers have broken down into those who love Zelda and those that find her disgusting. (I will not psychoanalyze the responses, but draw your own conclusions.)
My new novel, Cats on a Pole (Kano Press, July 2, 2024), goes further into the hyperosmic world. Without having the descriptor, I wrote the story of a hyperosmic woman who is overwhelmed by the smells and energies that bombard her. She really has no recourse but to learn self-acceptance whose side effect is nonjudgment. The book has humor in it but nothing close to Zelda McFigg. Still, I hope it does its bit to nudging people into self-acceptance.
The truth is we all smell. We can accept that or we can continue to delude ourselves and waste enormous amounts of money on products that promise to make us as odorless as AI—an intelligence with no body. Do we really want that? Or we can delude ourselves into believing that we’re pure and odorless and it’s only the “others” who smell.
Discount Link for paperbacks in USA
June 15, 2024
NYC’s Upper West Side is a character in two new novels
[Read on Medium: https://medium.com/@robinsonbetsy/nyc...}
Novelist Betsy Robinson has lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for more than 50 years. She’s been an actor and playwright, doing temp work to pay rent; then gradually she dropped the acting and wrote her first novel while working nights in a law office. It took 16 years to get it published and during that time, she switched from temp to working for magazines. A decade before the pandemic, the magazine she worked for went virtual, so her rent-stabilized apartment also became her office. And when the economy imploded and she lost her job, the switch to freelance editing came fairly seamlessly. So did writing more novels.
All her novels take place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her first, Plan Z by Leslie Kove, about negotiating life with PTSD and free-falling through the 1970s, won Mid-List Press’s First Novel Series award and was published in 2001. By the time it went out of print, DIY publishing was easy, so she revised and published a second edition. Black Lawrence Press published her second novel, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, as winner of their Big Moose Prize in 2015, and again, a character without a clue lives for half the book on the UWS.
By 2023, Robinson had done every job in publishing, had a wonderful literary agent, but still her new books Cats on a Pole and The Spectators made the rounds fruitlessly. “They weren’t rejected,” says Robinson. “Nobody would read them!”
Feeling as if both books — firmly rooted in our current cultural tumult — would miss their window, she decided to start her own company, Kano Press, despite the bleak realities of publishing and selling books without a platform of a million followers, without a celebrity name, and given that her stories will most likely appeal to a small, albeit ever-increasing, part of the reading public who are more interested in owning uncomfortable truths than in slick humor or denial.
Cats on a Pole, the first book to launch July 2nd (available for preorder now), is the story of a protagonist who goes to healing school in search of others like her who feel energy, and it takes place not only on the UWS but in many different energetic neighborhoods of NYC.
The second book, The Spectators, is firmly rooted on the Upper West Side. After being blown away by Sun House by David James Duncan (The Brothers K, The River Why), Robinson reached out to him for a blurb for it. Says Robinson, “Duncan not only understood what I’m writing but wrote a treatise, allowing me to extract from it an ecstatic cover blurb:”
The Spectators launches September 3, 2024 (available for preorder now), and is part love letter to the UWS, featuring Central Park as almost a character plus a small band of older women with dogs negotiating chaos in New York City in the era just preceding Trump.
It is the story of reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to UWS resident Paul Simon to terrorists. The Spectators’ cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.
As part of the publicity, Robinson created book trailers about each book’s inspiration:
Cats on a Pole: https://youtu.be/PYsiKDkxuUE?si=EX9bZ...
The Spectators: https://youtu.be/1FanAUJsIq0?si=jbBA0...
For most of Robinson’s 50+ years in the neighborhood, she’s had dogs. Here she is by the Balto statue with her last dog, Maya, who also has a role in The Spectators.
For more information, go to www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.
Novelist Betsy Robinson has lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for more than 50 years. She’s been an actor and playwright, doing temp work to pay rent; then gradually she dropped the acting and wrote her first novel while working nights in a law office. It took 16 years to get it published and during that time, she switched from temp to working for magazines. A decade before the pandemic, the magazine she worked for went virtual, so her rent-stabilized apartment also became her office. And when the economy imploded and she lost her job, the switch to freelance editing came fairly seamlessly. So did writing more novels.
All her novels take place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her first, Plan Z by Leslie Kove, about negotiating life with PTSD and free-falling through the 1970s, won Mid-List Press’s First Novel Series award and was published in 2001. By the time it went out of print, DIY publishing was easy, so she revised and published a second edition. Black Lawrence Press published her second novel, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, as winner of their Big Moose Prize in 2015, and again, a character without a clue lives for half the book on the UWS.
By 2023, Robinson had done every job in publishing, had a wonderful literary agent, but still her new books Cats on a Pole and The Spectators made the rounds fruitlessly. “They weren’t rejected,” says Robinson. “Nobody would read them!”
Feeling as if both books — firmly rooted in our current cultural tumult — would miss their window, she decided to start her own company, Kano Press, despite the bleak realities of publishing and selling books without a platform of a million followers, without a celebrity name, and given that her stories will most likely appeal to a small, albeit ever-increasing, part of the reading public who are more interested in owning uncomfortable truths than in slick humor or denial.
Cats on a Pole, the first book to launch July 2nd (available for preorder now), is the story of a protagonist who goes to healing school in search of others like her who feel energy, and it takes place not only on the UWS but in many different energetic neighborhoods of NYC.
The second book, The Spectators, is firmly rooted on the Upper West Side. After being blown away by Sun House by David James Duncan (The Brothers K, The River Why), Robinson reached out to him for a blurb for it. Says Robinson, “Duncan not only understood what I’m writing but wrote a treatise, allowing me to extract from it an ecstatic cover blurb:”
“A novel that in the last chapter reaches the only heaven to which I aspire: a life fully awake to this beautiful bleeding Earth”
— David James Duncan
The Spectators launches September 3, 2024 (available for preorder now), and is part love letter to the UWS, featuring Central Park as almost a character plus a small band of older women with dogs negotiating chaos in New York City in the era just preceding Trump.
It is the story of reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to UWS resident Paul Simon to terrorists. The Spectators’ cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.
As part of the publicity, Robinson created book trailers about each book’s inspiration:
Cats on a Pole: https://youtu.be/PYsiKDkxuUE?si=EX9bZ...
The Spectators: https://youtu.be/1FanAUJsIq0?si=jbBA0...
For most of Robinson’s 50+ years in the neighborhood, she’s had dogs. Here she is by the Balto statue with her last dog, Maya, who also has a role in The Spectators.
For more information, go to www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.
May 31, 2024
On Starting a Publishing Company
Goodreads friend da-AL has published my piece on starting a publishing company:
https://wp.me/p6OZAy-1SQK
https://wp.me/p6OZAy-1SQK
May 15, 2024
New Short-short Story Published
I'm pleased to have my very short story "The Site Cleaner" published in Fahmidan Journal. You can read it free here:
The Site Cleaner
And there is suggested musical accompaniment at the end of the piece. You can listen before, during, or after reading ... or not at all. I just think it's a good match.
March 2, 2024
Mukoli: Magazine for Peace
I am absolutely thrilled to have my article "Tulsa 1921: The Trauma Continues" in the inaugural issue of Mukoli: The Magazine for Peace. To quote their opening statement:
My article is here: Tulsa 1921: The Trauma Continues
This is a lovely photo of me and Mom. In many ways it is a lie. (Read the article.) Let's all be brave enough to tell the truth and make peace.
Mukoli in the Axamiya (Assamese) language can variously mean open space, openness, & opening up.
Mukoli: The Magazine for Peace is a multimedia space for creative writers & artists whose engagements open up pathways to transforming conflicts, cultivating cultures & structures of peace, & promoting the healing & wellbeing of the planet & its people.
My article is here: Tulsa 1921: The Trauma Continues
This is a lovely photo of me and Mom. In many ways it is a lie. (Read the article.) Let's all be brave enough to tell the truth and make peace.
February 12, 2024
Gordon Parks: His Enduring Peace
"Why not try?" seemed to be renaissance man Gordon Parks's mantra, which sounds like simple wisdom, but I suspect many people have never even thought of, for instance, trying peace, not worrying about failing or dying. Gordon Parks's life was directed by this kind of simple fearlessness.
Many years ago I transcribed an interview of Gordon Parks, done for a series on the original Life Magazine photographers. My copy of the transcript (that interviewer John Loengard used in his book Life Photographers: What They Saw (New York: Bullfinch, 1998)) has been on my top book shelf gathering dust since 1996. I've reread it and had new insights. I've written an essay titled "Gordon Parks: His Unshakable Peace Endures."
You can read it on Next Avenue.
I hope it gives you as much peace as it gives me.
January 11, 2024
ARC Available
Amphibian Press is publishing a new anthology of dystopian, Queer, diverse stories as part of their Aces High, Jokers Wild series (see Playing with a Full Deck). They want contributors to give out review copies to readers (who'll write reviews). So ... I'm in the funny position of promoting a book of stuff that I probably wouldn't read, but I'm so pleased they edited my little story into their language of fighting a dystopian culture in the future. If anybody here wants a digital copy of the book to read and review, let me know and I'll email a PDF or an EPUB file of it to you. These publishers are lovely people, and although this is not really my thing, I want to support them and help. (To read my piece, just zoom in--on a PC, control+plus sign.)
