ONE MORE TIME by Melodie Johnson Howe I am now on my sixth, seventh, eighth—I’ve lost count—draft of a short story titled, “A Hollywood Ending.” It’s the ending I’m having trouble with. I’ve been writing long enough to know that the problem is not always where you think it is. In other words, I’m having […]

QUIET PLEASE, WOMAN AT WORK by Melodie Johnson Howe Silence. It’s hard to come by in a wired world. We’ve all seen the people in their cars talking on their cell phones. Or the people with a Blue Tooth stuck in their ear walking around looking as if they’re talking to the air. Recently I […]

My UNCLE’S LIBRARY by Melodie Johnson Howe Deborah’s column on libraries and reading her first “adult” novel created some powerful memories for many of us. What I recalled was my Uncle Richard’s library. He and my aunt lived in Massillon, Ohio in a big brick house on a slope of lawn surrounded by a black […]

DIMMABLE by Melodie Johnson Howe Dimmable. This is a word that describes the new ecological light bulbs as compared to the old ecological ones that could not be dimmed. These bulbs are not really bulbs. They are long coils. My husband loves them. He has put them in our library where they hang below the […]

WORD RIFFING by Melodie Johnson Howe Sitting at my desk I couldn’t decide if I should finish my short story or work on my new novel. Paralysis. Sometimes to free my mind I like to just think about words. I call in word riffing. For instance I hate the word grass. It doesn’t do the […]

FACES by Melodie Johnson Howe I went to the Santa Barbara Museum of History Sunday to see the Edward S. Curtis photographs of American Indians. What was extraordinary about this exhibit was not only the intimate portraits of the Indian men, but the portraits of the women. It was the first time I realized that […]

TO A TEE by Melodie Johnson Howe My inspiration to become a writer came from Chandler, Fitzgerald, West, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Stout…. I could go on and on. So I took up golf because of John Updike, P. G. Wodehouse, and other writers I admire who played the game. The connection seemed logical to me. It […]