I was gifted the book “The Secret Life of Sunflowers” (by Marta Molnar, 2022, 399 pages) and told I would like it. Usually, this kind of gift ends up not being what it was purported to be by the gift-giver.

Melanie Sue Bowles will join Renea Winchester for a conversation about their books, publishing and Bowles’ work at the Proud Spirit Horse Sanctuary at 3 p.m. Saturday, May 10, at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva.

Gary Carden has accomplished a great deal in his life. But by his own estimation, none of it compares to his most recent endeavor — donating a treasure trove of books to the Jackson County Public Library that took him a lifetime to collect. 

As a practitioner and student of poetry all my life, I’ve noticed that while there is a lot of poetry written well and with talented reach, at the same time, there is little current poetry that I’ve experienced that one would classify as being “wise” or “transcendent.”  

It’s the spring of 1873 in the Wyoming Territory, and U.S. Marshal Tim Colter and his grizzled mentor and best friend, mountain man Jed Reno, are hunting down some train robbers when they come across a man dying of gunshot wounds. The victim turns out to be a Secret Service agent who as he breathes his last says, “President Grant … assassination … Dugan … trust nobody.” 

“We are not human beings on a spiritual journey,

but rather spiritual beings on a human journey.”

Teilhard de Chardin

— from: “Thoreau’s God” 

Having read and relished Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow,” I picked up the first novel he published, “Rules of Civility” (Penguin Books, 2012, 368 pages) prepared to enjoy it as well. Unfortunately, some satisfying experiences elude repetition. 

In the early 1900s, in Tsarist Russia, young intellectuals with means would study philosophy and history. Some would feel a longing for their country to become more modern, to become a nation under the rule of law, as other nations in the world had done. 

Growing up as an educator’s daughter, I spent afternoons running the halls of my mom’s school with the other teachers’ kids, waiting on our parents to finish grading papers, attend faculty meetings or otherwise close out their duties. My mom was a public school librarian.

Having grown up in proximity to a Cherokee community (Little Snowbird in Graham County), I’m familiar with and sensitive to the history and the psychology of Native peoples who have been marginalized and worse from their cultural roots and their homelands.