Collie's Bestiary

This month's Firestarter is a (badly needed) review and reflection on How Do We Keep Honesty? I figured since February is traditionally a month for love, this time I'd attempt to achieve love of self, and gently engage in some internal reflection — always a scary proposition. :-) Fair warning: this Firestarter will make the [...]

Spent most of yesterday in a state of carefully controlled panic. I've been desperately working on finishing my late papers for last quarter — thank goodness for being able to "pre-load" WP with my reviews and Bestiaries!
So I have a desktop with Word 2007, the latest version, on it… and a nice but very old [...]

Unreliable Truth: On Memoir & Memory
by Maureen Murdock
I find myself wondering, as I read, what was Murdock's solution to her loss of faith within the Roman Catholic Church — is it applicable to my situation as well? I am faintly amused at the thought: clearly her efforts to appeal to a universal human truth within [...]

Unreliable Truth: On Memoir & Memory
by Maureen Murdock
Murdock muses that she writes in an effort to disentangle her voice from the grip of her mother's anger. I wonder as I read: would that be how her mother saw the relationship? My reflections are an effort to disentangle myself from the grip of the remembered mocking [...]

Unreliable Truth: On Memoir & Memory
by Maureen Murdock
I believe there are as many different truths as there are people to hold them, and likely even more than that, considering how we all grow and change over the years. Mine is in the process of being re-crafted, in fact — the master's program in Women's Spirituality [...]

Unreliable Truth: On Memoir & Memory
by Maureen Murdock
Fact can exist without human intelligence but truth cannot.
– Toni Morrison

Ordinarily I write my postings for this blog several weeks, or at least days, in advance. I do this because I suppose I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to my attempts at communicating via the written word. I want to read the entire article over before it goes public, making sure I've [...]

On the other hand, heroically doing the right thing is important to Karen Chance's heroine, Cassandra Palmer. Perhaps because she remembers what it is to be small and helpless before immensely powerful forces, at one point Cassie refuses to leave behind prisoners who are trapped before the lethal onslaught of an upcoming natural disaster. She [...]

Oddly enough, in Midnight's Daughter (Karen Chance's story of a "dhampir" or half-vampire), Dorina Basarab is specifically a killer — a bounty hunter for the vampires, in fact. Yet, despite her clearly acknowledged violent and murderous tendencies, and her extraordinarily rude mouthiness, the author's light touch has somehow taken this potentially unpleasant character, and [...]

I believe it's reasonable to therefore conclude that personal independence is at the very least a necessary marker on the Heroine's Journey. Further, the struggle to accomplish financial (or, in some cases, physical) independence can make for a more interesting story — one where we can more easily identify with our heroine. If I'm remembering [...]