The Alexandria Papers Newsletter #127
8 December 2024
Mindfulness & Meditation
7 mindfulness tips to help you stay calm this Christmas | Calm
If the holiday season has you feeling not-so-jolly, explore these 7 ways to practice mindfulness during Christmas. Plus, 6 mindful activities you can do with the whole family.
A 12 Minute Meditation to Defuse Holiday Stress | Mindful
'Tis the season to give up the guilt. Taking a more mindful approach to the season with this holiday meditation practice.
A 4-Minute Practice to Clarify What's Important Right Now | Mindful
Feeling scattered or disorganized? Pausing to take just three breaths can help you discern what's important right now and direct energy toward that.
Migraine
Keeping a headache diary (with a free headache diary template to download) | The Migraine Trust
A general guide to recording your migraine attacks
Migraine attack triggers | The Migraine Trust
Factors that can be involved in triggering migraine attacks
Preventing migraines: beyond medication | Jennifer Barraclough
Feverfew, Tanacetum Parthenium This is not an "anti-drug" post - I fully accept that prescribed medication is the mainstay of migraine prevention. Certain beta-blockers, antidepressants and anticonvulsants are long established for reducing the frequency and severity of attacks, and the newer CGRP...
Trauma and Sexual Abuse
Healthy Holiday Boundaries | Psychology Today
Are you feeling stressed, overwhelmed, or resentful? These are signs that you may need better boundaries this holiday season.
Navigating the Holidays: Self-Care Tips for the Holidays | Washington Psychological Wellness
Navigating the Holidays. Self-Care Tips for the Holidays from a licensed therapist that can help you take control of the holiday season.
Gratitude Journal: 66 Templates & Ideas for Daily Journaling | Positive Psychology
Gratitude is like most desirable traits and qualities in that it is usually not enough to simply decide to be grateful—we must actively practice it to cement its place in our lives.
Mental Health
How to have a stress-free holiday: 16 holiday self-care tips | Calm
Learn about the importance of self-care, especially during the holidays. Plus, 16 holiday self-care tips to help you take care of yourself as well as each other.
Self-Care for the Holidays | The JED Foundation
If the holidays are more stress than joy for you, you're not alone, and there are things you can do to manage difficult moments.
Books
Best Historical Fiction of 2024 | She Reads
Every year, She Reads reaches out to readers to discover the books that they thought were the best of the year! This year we had over 8,000 of you cast your vote and the results are in.
The best crime and thrillers of 2024 | The Guardian
A choice of whodunnits, a return for le Carré's Smiley, and dark, disturbing encounters in the woods
The Best Audiobooks of 2024 | Literary Hub
Each month, for your literary listening pleasure, our friends at AudioFile Magazine bring us the cream of the audiobook crop. Now, at 2024 draws to a close, they've rounded up the very best audiobooks of the year.
Cooking and Baking
This Is Our Most Popular Thanksgiving Leftover Recipe of All Time | All Recipes
Thanksgiving leftovers are one of the joys of the big meal, but what is the best way to use them? Our most popular Thanksgiving leftover recipe combines white and dark turkey meat with fresh and frozen veggies to make a delicious pot pie.
93 Easy Fall Recipes for Celebrating Cozy Season | Country Living
These smart, simple recipes will warm your home and fill your family's bellies!
10 Holiday Cakes So Beloved, Our Editors Make Them Year After Year | Southern Living
These are the ten cakes our editors make every holiday season.
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My Books: Poetry & Fiction
The Ghost Walk, a poem
I will die here where I have walked.
And I will walk here, though I am in my grave.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
There is no doubt that Marley was dead.
This must be distinctly understood, or nothing…
can come of the story I am going to relate.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
There is a ghost who walks my garden each night, summer or winter, rain or snow, and this ghost causes quite a furor in the village. People look at each other and raise their eyebrows when they see me, they whisper behind their hands when I come into the grocery or the local hardware store, they talk to each other over coffee or tea, sitting in a huddle under the trees at the outdoor summer children’s concert, wondering, no doubt, why I ever moved here in the first place, it’s such a nice village after all, or at least it used to be before I came here with my incessant talk of ghosts.
“One ghost,” a young man interrupts, before withering looks from the others make him stare into his empty teacup as if, instead of its being lined with hand-painted flowers, the faces of spirits, their ghost-hair curiously and incessantly stirred, silently gazed up at him. Very well, the original speaker continues, one ghost, one ghost in particular, a ghost who walks, not in the house like ghosts are supposed to do, but a ghost who walks in the garden of all places. People respected the village before all this talking of ghosts, and outsiders wanted to live here themselves although it is rather expensive what with most of the houses being over 200 years old and costly to keep up.
Of course, everyone knows that ghostly noises are not entirely unheard of in old houses, so surely one can expect bumps and creaks and groans, occasional rustles or whispers, and sometimes even faint music or a hint of singing from a distant room in a house so very old, but before I moved here, no one in the village ever talked openly about seeing ghosts or wraiths or spirits, and certainly no one ever mentioned them in connection with this particular house and garden, so the only logical conclusion, the only explanation that temporarily calms the fears and anxieties of all the listeners gathered in the corner of the parking lot during the weekly farmer’s market is that the ghost must have some unfinished business with me, and though that seems a satisfactory enough explanation to most of them, it doesn’t stop them from silently watching me as I examine the lettuces and tomatoes, or from jumping ever so slightly when I bid them “good morning.”
Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes,
are only three feet apart, but in thin places,
that distance is even shorter.
Eric Weiner, "Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer"
for Max or Alex or, maybe, James
Last night I dreamt of you, after all these
years, and you were lying in my arms, in
the middle of the day, the sunlight showing
the first strands of silver in your hair, and
your eyes blue, so blue, heart-poundingly
blue, like something out of a romance novel
only better because, at last, you were mine.
Afterward, in the dream, we walked through
your garden, lush with peonies, pink and red,
heavy with daffodils and yellow roses, and
you showed me the freshly dug corner where
you were going to plant carnations, red and
pink, because they were my favorite. I stumbled
along beside you, wondering that someone as
beautiful as you could actually love me, and
when you kissed me, the sun warm on my
back and you warm and strong in front of me,
bees buzzing faintly behind us, a lush carpet
of violets under our bare feet, the cat rubbing
against our ankles, when you kissed me and
whispered my name, the walls around my heart
crumbled into useless piles of rock and salt.
Last night, I dreamt of you, after all these
years, and of our worst argument...
Love in the Time of Dinosaurs (poetry)
As powerfully written, darkly humorous, surprising, and accessible as Szeman’s prose works, these poems let you glimpse into the hearts, lives, and minds of ordinary people — whether they be mythological, biblical, literary, or contemporary — as they struggle to make sense of relationships, family, marriage, divorce, children, spirituality, faith, and the existence of God. As they struggle to comprehend the very things each of us experiences every day.
Awards:
• Grand Prize Winner, Elliston Poetry Prize
• Isabel & Mary Neff Creative Writing Fellowship
• First Place, Elliston Poetry Prize
• Second Place, Elliston Poetry Prize
• Centennial Review Prize for Poetry
• Honorable Mention, Non-Rhyming Poetry,
Writer’s Digest Creative Writing Contest
The Kommandant's Mistress (a novel)
Part One: The Kommandant, Chapter One
"Then I saw her. There she stood, in the village store, her hair in a long braid down the center of her back, her skin white in the sunlight, and my hand went to my hip, seeking the weight of my gun. As the girl spoke, I stumbled back against one of the shelves, my fingers tightening at the leather around my waist. While the shopkeeper arranged the food in the bag, the morning sun glinted on the storefront windows, illuminating the girl. The wooden shelves pressed into my shoulders and back. Sweat dampened my forehead and ribs. Another shopper spoke, frowned, pushed aside my arm to reach a jar on the shelf behind me, but I didn’t move. My hand slid down over my hip and leg. No, I’d forgotten that I no longer wore my gun..."
About The Kommandant's Mistress
The rumors spread by the Camp’s inmates, other Nazi officers, and the Kommandant’s own family insist that she was his “mistress,” but was she, voluntarily? Told from three different perspectives – that of the formerly idealistic Kommandant, the young Jewish inmate who captivates him, and the ostensibly objective historical biographies of the protagonists – this novel examines one troubling moral question over and over: if your staying alive was the only “good” during the War, if your survival was your sole purpose in this horrific world of the Concentration Camps — whether you were Nazi or Jewish — what, exactly, would you do to survive? Would you lie, cheat, steal, kill, submit?
Flashing back and forth through the narrators’ memories as they recall their time before, during, and after the War, and leading, inevitably, to their ultimate, shocking confrontation, “Szeman’s uncompromising realism and superb use of stream-of-consciousness technique make [this novel] a chilling study of evil, erotic obsession, and the will to survive” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
A New York Times Book Review “Notable Book” and one of its “Top 100 Books of the Year,” Winner of the University of Rochester’s Kafka Prize for “the outstanding book of prose fiction by an American woman,” the tales told by the Kommandant, his “mistress,” and their “biographer” will mesmerize and stun you, leaving you wondering, at the conclusion, which, if any, is telling the complete truth about what happened between them.
Awards:
• New York Times Book Review “Notable Book”
and “Top 100 Books of Year”
• University of Rochester Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize
“the outstanding book of prose fiction by an American woman”
• Publishers Weekly * review: “Outstanding Merit”
• Talmadge McKinney Award “Excellence in Research”
(1st edition published by HarperCollins / HarperPerennial NYC; 2nd edition published by Arcade, NYC; 20th Anniversary Edition published by RockWay Press)
Where Lightning Strikes: Poems on The Holocaust
Where Lightning Strikes includes all Szeman's Holocaust poetry, from the poems featured in her Ph.D. dissertation Survivor: One Who Survives, to the original versions of "Rachel's poems" appearing or mentioned in Szeman's award-winning, critically acclaimed first novel The Kommandant's Mistress. The poems in this collection revisit the classic themes that have inspired poets for generations: love, passion, betrayal, doubt, loyalty, despair, faith, and survival — this time in the context of the period before, during, and after the Holocaust with its systematic persecution and extermination of the majority of European Jewry by the Nazi regime.
Along with her non-Holocaust poetry collection, Love in the Time of Dinosaurs, this volume, Where Lightning Strikes, was unanimously accepted for publication by all outside readers of UKA Press in 2004. Szeman's themes, though set, in this collection, around the Holocaust, are universal, encompassing the perpetrators', victims', and survivors' perspectives equally insightfully. As powerful, unsettling, and lyrical as her first novel, The Kommandant's Mistress, these poems will take you on a compelling, chilling, and unforgettable journey into the lives, hearts, and minds of all those who were in the Holocaust.
Awards:
• Grand Prize Winner, Elliston Poetry Prize
• Isabel & Mary Neff Creative Writing Fellowship
• First Place, Elliston Poetry Prize
• Second Place, Elliston Poetry Prize
Only with the Heart (a novel)
Part One: Claudia, Chapter One
Doubts are more cruel
than the worst of truths.
Molière
Chapter One
They got there sooner than I expected. I was waiting at the upstairs window, so I saw them when they arrived, their lights flashing, their sirens silent. There were two policemen, in two separate cars, and the paramedics in the ambulance. As they got out of the vehicles, the emergency lights turned everything a strange, pulsing red: the snow, the ice at the edge of the window, the bedroom where I stood. They slipped across the yard on their way to the front porch, their breath hanging white in the air. As they rushed up the front steps and disappeared from my view, I let go of the lace curtain and turned around to look at the body. I suppose I should’ve gone over to the bed and closed its eyes or covered its face, but I couldn’t make myself do it.
The squad stopped at all the other bedrooms on the floor before they found the right one. When they saw me and the body, they rushed in, plying stethoscope, oxygen mask, and blood pressure cuff, calling out to each other in their own telegraphic language. Their hands rushed as quickly as their words, but none of that made any difference. There was no life left in that body. There hadn’t been for ages.
All that time, I didn’t move or make a sound. When the policeman came over to me, he had to put his hand on my arm to get me to look at him. It was almost as if I were the one who was dead.
And to think that was only the beginning...
About Only with the Heart
When Claudia Sloane is arrested for the murder of her mother-in-law, everyone is stunned, especially her husband Sam. Claudia loved Eleanor as if she were her own mother and would never have hurt her. At least, that’s what Claudia insists. But even Sam begins to wonder how far Claudia would go in the name of love: did she help the terminally-ill Eleanor commit suicide?
During the widely publicized trial, Sam tries desperately to maintain his belief in his wife’s innocence despite the mounting evidence against her. Meanwhile, Claudia unwillingly begins to suspect that Sam may have helped his own mother commit suicide, but is letting his wife risk conviction for the murder.
Gripping and suspenseful, compassionate yet unflinchingly honest, Only with the Heart deals with the dreadful effects of terminal disease on its patients and their Caregivers, explores our primal need for acceptance and family ties, and examines the complex and evolving nature of love.
"Piercing, close-to-the-bone fiction." -- Barnes & Noble
"Bold and ambitious." -- San Francisco Mercury News
"[A] delicately structured, poignant novel of love, memory, & family responsibility." -- Publishers Weekly
(First edition published by Arcade, NYC; Second edition, Revised & Expanded, Legally & Medically Updated, published by RockWay Press)
My Other Books
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