Mo Conlan | Updates

The Impatient Patient

Mo Conlan — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:46:31 -0400

After suffering a stroke and consequent fall, I have been in ER, in hospital, in rehab, and now home.

My brokenness was profound – right leg and foot frozen, broken bone in my back, slight loss of fine motor movement in my right hand – my art and writing hand.

My degree of healing since then seems nearly miraculous and has given me new appreciation of my body and my “village.”

But nothing could have prepared me for the indignity of being “patient-ized.”

The hospital was a madhouse in the midst of Covid. They did not realize I had had a stroke until about Day 4. The rehab nursing center where I spent a month was even crazier (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).

In the nursing home, the “call button” at my bedside is my only link to human help– my only link to the nurse’s aide who might answer before I wet my pants –adult diapers – or worse. I try to figure out how soon to press the call button for help. At first inkling? When pressure begins to build? Certainly, don’t wait until last minute!

Some aides come late to the call. This is a source of great anxiety. Then a stranger is wiping my bottom and giving me a new “brief.” Ghosts of babyhood, with all its helplessness, lurk.

That call button is now central to my existence. But it resides at the end of a cord that snakes among a jumble of other cords – for a phone, a remote for the bed, and others. These cords invariably fall from the nightstand onto a tangle on the floor. At night, though substantially paralyzed, I lean over and fumble around the floor for that lipstick-sized lifeline. In the dark – because the button for the lights is down there, too.

A patient is a person who immediately loses status as soon as she signs the papers and slumps into a hospital or nursing home bed. The patient thereby loses “statehood” – the state of being a free, thinking, respected, choice-making adult.

One of the first sounds I notice in the nursing home is from a woman across the hall. When frightened, she emits sounds like birdcalls, high pitched whoop-whoops. They are almost melodic – not cries or yells. But I know the likely terrors that lie behind those sounds.

More ominous sounds come in the night. The creaking of a cart going down the empty hallway. I think of the Tale of Two Cities and the tumbrel carts leading victims to the guillotine.

The carts might be dinner arriving, or the nurse with medicines, or injections to plunge into my belly. Possibly, medicines prescribed by doctors I never see, who never see me, who know me only from reports in the computer.

When I ask a nurse to tell me the names of medicines she is giving me, she huffs and says, “I can’t remember. Do you want me to go back to the computer and write down every one?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Yes,” says my outraged sister, who is visiting me at the time. This sister is one of several advocates who do battle with the staff on my behalf. But they cannot be with me all the time. To feel safe and cared for, I would need a 24/7 advocate who questions every medicine given or not given, every incident of careless, dangerous, or uncaring treatment.

For a while, this nurse reluctantly writes down all the medicines she gives me at night. After awhile, she stops. The other nurses do not even tell me verbally what I am being given, and most egregiously, they do not tell me when they are not giving me a needed medicine. I notice that one medicine is not among my nightly ones and ask about it.

“The pharmacy ran out,” the nurse tells me.

I am without this critical medicine for three days.

Often, I hear a kind of shuffling or clanking sound with the carts, like the dragging, tired feet of women who work for 12 hours doing all the hands-on patient care. Many go home to babies, older children, and aged parents to care for.

These nurses aides are poorly paid and hard used. But they also are now the backbone of what we once called “nursing.” If ever I am shown a kindness, any hands-on care, it is from one of these women.

Registered nurses have become pill dispensers and statistics-takers. I soon learn that these machines they rely on can be wrong. Machines malfunction, they fritz out or are not available when needed – “sorry, it’s down the other hall” (blood pressure monitor).

Computer data can be faulty or incomplete because reports are made by nurses and doctors who have no time to do them. I have a knock-down, drag-out argument with one nurse –whom I think of as Nurse Bossypants and who calls to mind all the scary, bad nurses I’ve seen in movies. She insists she cannot give me a certain medicine because it is not in the report from the hospital.

Nurse Bossypants is wrong. This is a needed medicine that had been prescribed for me in the hospital. But, if she doesn’t see it in the computer, it must not exist.

The reason the medicine is not in the hospital report is that the doctor who made that report was finishing a stint of 12-hour days, three weeks straight, without breaks. She could barely stand from fatigue, let alone dot the “I” s for a report.

There are fallibilities all along this precarious route – human and machine. This data-gathering satisfies insurers and anybody who fears a possible lawsuit, but it devours time. That leaves little time for hands-on care. If a doctor or nurse had been paying attention to my body instead of my data, they might have seen, as one nurse finally did, that my right leg was paralyzed–that I had had a stroke.

Numbers might be the death of me. I never could do math. Now, everything in my world is numerical, 16 744 199 recorded above some other numbers, 14 84 1000. Ad nauseam.

I resent and resist being numbered. But numbers are at the heart of patient care –numbers on computers and screening machines. At the nursing home, soon after I arrive, I hear the ominous creak of a machine coming down the long hallway toward my door. It is 6:30 in the morning. A nurse’s aide opens my door and announces, “Time to get weighed!”

She is toting a machine that looks like a primitive “electric chair.” She expects me to get out of bed – though I am substantially paralyzed – sit on that cold metal chair so she can record my weight. At 6:30 in the morning!

“I don’t think so,” my inner rebel says.

“I don’t wish to be weighed,” I tell the aide.

Startled, she begins telling me why I must be weighed every morning.

I dredge up a reply that stops her mid-sentence: “As a patient I have the right to refuse.”

Just then, Nurse Bossypants, sensing commotion, enters. She looks at me, then at the aide and the weighing contraption, and hears my refusal. Nurse Bossy is forced to admit: “She does.” It is in the rulebook that a patient can refuse treatment, and rules enumerated in the computer, she understands.

Several times throughout my month-long stay, aides bring the electric chair back to my room, trying to get me out of bed to weigh me.

“I have the right to refuse,” I tell each one.

They have numbers they barely need, soon forget, probably wrong. They are not getting my actual poundage.

I create an artwork to signify this triumph: A shadowy figure in the background, me, with numbers in various sizes and fonts super-imposed –with the words: “I am not a number.”

An aide helps me hang this up on the bulletin board in my room.

There is a hierarchy here worthy of the Soviet Era, and secrets worthy of the old Stasi. One of my first days in the hospital, when I am barely able to move, a large black man delivers my dinner. I thank him and ask if he can crank up the head of my bed so I can eat.

“No, ma’am,” he says respectfully and regretfully. “I am not allowed to touch hospital beds.”

The biggest secret of being a patient is that you are not the customer. You may think you should be because that is how doctoring used to work. You hire the doctor who then is responsible to you.

Now, however, there is a nefarious underworld of players – the three-headed mythical dog Cerberus corrupting this once simple exchange. First: the moneymakers, shadowy figures deciding what care you will get, what medicines you will be allowed – the Insurance Industry. Secondly: Big Pharma. Thirdly: for-profit medical centers.

The Patient becomes a commodity in a system that is about making money, satisfying regulations with endless reports, and ensuring the bottom line for owners and investors.

This may well be why the patient is at the bottom of the communications chain in the nursing home, a ridiculous Catch-22 system. The patient presses the call button that summons the aide. The aide listens to a request and tells the patient she will relay the message to the nurse. The aide may or may not relay this message and the nurse may or may not respond.

If the nurse does respond, that day or some other day, she goes to the patient’s room and listens to the request or complaint and, if it is about a change of medicine or care, tells the patient she will relay the message to the Nurse Practitioner. This may or may not happen.

Still, getting to this level is progress. The Nurse Practitioner is the big cheese – the closest thing to a doctor on board. She can adjust medicines or care routines. However, she is one person with about 150 patients to care for.

When an angry, itchy rash spreads over much of my body, my brother tries to cut through the communication chain and speak directly with the Nurse Practitioner. By now I have been itching for three days.

A few days after his entreaty for help, she stops by my room. The exhaustion in her face tells of her 12-hour days. Still, she exudes a rare caring. She is valiantly trying to take care of 150 patients. Where are those shadowy doctors when they are needed?

The Nurse Practitioner orders ointment for my rash that possibly might arrive the next day. Meantime, one of those veteran aides takes one look at my rash, leaves my bedside, and returns with a tube of ointment from some secret stash. She applies it and I am immediately relieved. This takes less than half an hour – vs. the three days stuck in the official communications chain.

Rarely seen are the doctors, available by phone only, normally. The nurses tell me they cannot bother the doctors, especially on the weekends, unless it is an emergency. Being in pain is not seen as an emergency.

There are many excuses as to why I have not for three days received a second dose of pain medicine (non-narcotic) as prescribed by the Nurse Practitioner. The most common being the change in dosage is not in my file in the computer.

I tell my occupational therapist of my dilemma. He tells me, indignant on my behalf: “I was there in your room when that second dose was prescribed for you!”

Aha! I have a witness! After three days of wrangling, and after listening to what the OT has to say, Nurse Bossypants finally calls the Nurse Practitioner and learns that, yes indeed, she had prescribed a second daily dose of pain medicine for me, which Nurse Bossy will now dispense.

As I had said. But nobody believes a mere patient.

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Northern Lights

Mo Conlan — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:43:33 -0400

I envy Alaskans. They find meaning in place. I live in a place that has never felt like my own, a city I am often at odds with, a climate that aggravates my sinuses, under a sky that has never made me giddy.

Under the Northern Lights and the brilliant shadow-casting sun, Alaska might have been my place.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

They say people go to Alaska looking for something. Gold. Oil. The Wild. I went looking for love.
It didn’t begin in Alaska. It began in Ohio one winter when a boy I knew growing up came back into my life. Though, he was no longer that tall, fidgety boy who chained-smoked Pall Malls and recited Robert Service poems. We were both middle-aged. He taught mathematics at a school in Alaska and was in town for a math conference.

A mutual friend had a dinner party. I recited the first part of my favorite Yeats poem: “I shall arise and go now, and go to Inishfree…’’ I could not remember the next lines.
My old friend spoke them for me: “And build a small cabin there, of clay and wattles made.”
We had dinner together the next night. I went with him to one of his math lectures, something about Fermat’s Last Theorem.

“It’s about connections, isn’t it?” I whispered to him as I tried to make sense of what the lecturer was saying. He nodded.

“Can you give me a simple explanation?”

He shook his head. There were no simple explanations to a puzzle that some of the best mathematical minds had been working on for more than 300 years.

Over coffee he told me he had been in love with a woman in Alaska. It didn’t work out. She was married. Then in his understated, shy way he told me he’d “thought quite a lot of me” all those many years before when we were growing up together.

Snow was beginning to stick to our coats when we hugged good-bye. He flew back to Alaska, where a woman lived who loved him, perhaps, but who would not leave her family for love. I thought that I might.

I wrote a poem about Fermat’s Last Theorem and sent it to him. Only, it was more about the connections between a man and a woman than math. I never understand Fermat’s Last Theorem.
We wrote letters, talked on the phone. The five-hour time difference caused a slight voice delay that made conversations just a bit off.

Then I was going to Alaska for a visit. I’d envisioned it as just above Washington, forgetting about Canada. I should have realized how very far it was - 3,000 miles as the crow flies, more than 4,000 by land. Only, you can’t get there as the crow flies. You leap-frog from Ohio to Salt Lake to Seattle to Anchorage and then to the interior towns in Alaska.

Seattle to Anchorage seemed longest – many hours hurtling through darkness. I stared out the window of the plane into black nothingness and thought of the author and pilot Saint-Exupery who disappeared into skies like this, whose Little Prince lands on a strange planet.

A few hours out of Seattle, the man sitting across the aisle took his shoes off, propped his stocking feet up on the bulkhead and smiled at me. It signaled a coming into Alaska territory. The last American frontier. I was a fellow traveler.

When I arrived, the sky was immense with stars. The cold air tasted clean. It was too dark to see the snow.

He was shy and ill at ease, the way he’d been as a boy. Only the sun- squint lines around his eyes hinted at the 30 years in between. We used to heist champagne punch after my parents’ parties, smoke cigarettes and read poetry to each other. When I was 16, he took me flying in a two-seater plane he was learning to pilot. It was my first time up in an airplane, though I’d once jumped off the garage roof, believing I could fly. What had been between us had been platonic, but somehow charged.

Now, I did not know if I was visiting an old friend or a new lover. Perhaps a wiser woman would have gotten this straight before traveling so far.

It was March. I’d come prepared for cold and dark, not the dazzling newborn sun that bounced off the snow and ice the next morning. I took to shielding my eyes from the glare with my right hand over my brow. My body cast elongated blue shadows on the porcelain snow. Washed in sunlight, Denali rose a giant totem over the immense landscape.

Four days passed. He avoided touching me, even casually.

Oh, that’s it, then, I thought, friends.

I told him I would like to see moose, those funny looking members of the deer family that roam alone until they want mates. Then they bellow forlornly. Though we drove around looking, we couldn’t spot any.

“Moose are a figment of imagination up here,” I told him. It became our joke.

His Alaska friends were flower children with a few decades added. Women worked, raised children, skied, chopped wood, got through winter depressions. They let their hair go gray, went without lipstick. A man was jack of all trades – carpenter, car mechanic, bread baker, lover.
They wanted to know what the story was between us. “Friends, I told them. “Old friends. We were neighbors growing up.”

In Alaska, people are scarce relative to the land, women especially so. It seemed wasteful for one to go unclaimed, is the message I saw in their eyes.

The Alaskan poet John Haines came one night to a gathering – lamb curry, lots of wine and poetry. One guest was the woman my friend had been in love with – slim, dark eyes full of soul. A poet. A slight discoloration of a front tooth only added to the charm of her face. After the party, he spent a long time walking her out to her truck.

I wondered why the hell I’d come to Alaska and began throwing clothes into my suitcase, packing to leave early, half listening until the front door opened and closed again and I heard his boots in the hall. I stopped packing.

The Alaska air or something was working on me like a drug; I couldn’t sleep. It was past midnight when one of his friends phoned with news. “Northern Lights!” We bundled into parkas, boots, gloves, wooly caps pulled down over our ears and went out to look. The black sky was painted with great swirls of neon green, overcharged particles from the sun meeting vapors from Earth – Aurora Borealis. Couples come to Alaska to make love beneath them, believing their babies will be born strong.

I don’t remember who took whose gloved hand first. We walked a long time. The air was that dry cold that takes your breath away. But I wanted to go on breathing it. I thought maybe that’s how you could freeze to death – drunk on the air, giddy from looking at the giant painting in the sky, and never feeling the cold.

The next day he drove me deeper into Alaska, over the White Mountains on a road only partly paved. Whiteouts whirled like dervishes at mountain passes. Here and there hulking frozen wrecks of cars that had plunged off the road. I was completely at the mercy of this road, this dangerous road, this man driving me.

When we got to a place nearly at the top of the world, there sat an old clapboard inn with gabled windows. A sign read “Arctic Circle Hot Springs.” We put on bathing suits, ran outside and jumped in. The Arctic air meeting hot sulfur water made a heavenly fog. Our eyebrows and eyelashes froze. Swimming in clouds, snowflakes falling on my face, I no longer knew where I was, how I would ever get back.

The news crackled over a radio in the lobby: A blizzard has closed passes over the mountains. Snow fell all that night. Under the gabled roof of the inn, I could sense its falling, falling, blanketing and holding us.

He is a man of much cynicism, few words, but he spoke: “You are so beautiful all over,” in a tone of near reverence, like a boy.

It is useless to try to describe why our lovemaking felt so fierce, necessary, otherworldly. Not what I might have expected from this reticent math professor who had “thought quite a lot of me” when I was a girl.

The day I flew home from Alaska, he said less than usual. Quiet on the ride to the small airport. Awkward hug. When I looked back at him one last time before boarding, he was unsmiling, eyes dull and, I thought, sad.

Why sad? I wondered. We had found each other again after all these years, hadn’t we? We would call and write and go to Yeats country in Ireland together. Thousands of miles between us meant little compared to the possibilities between a man and woman. That was my theorem.
Half a year later, we went to Ireland. He was careful to avoid touching me, even casually. We missed Yeats country altogether.

I felt loss. Puzzlement. Over time, I came to realize that the woman he had loved in Alaska was jolted by my visit, seeing me with the man she loved. Jolted them right into each other’s arms. So, this is a love story, all right, just not my love story.

But why had he not declared himself all those many years before?

He and I had taken to the skies, gone nearly to the end of the Earth together. Why had I married and divorced his friend, who only wished to go to Washington, D.C.?

Finally, I had to dig out of my psyche a false theorem: that in regaining him, I might regain a piece of that time when we were young. Not an especially happy time – it’s untrue the young are happy – but one thick with the primordial stuff of my life.

Now, I have another theory: that under certain circumstances, people may become charged like sun particles and collide with great force and little meaning. Little meaning that we understand, that is.

Alchemy is possible: I have pulled out photos from that trip; one taken before the night of Northern Lights shows a pleasant looking woman of middle age. One taken the next morning – sun streaming through the windows of that Alaskan cabin – a girl of, perhaps, 18.
Possibly I wasn’t looking for love at all – just wanted to fly. And even if things had worked out with us, all his not talking could have driven me crazy.

Fermat’s Last Theorem was finally proven, at least in part. The same year I went to Alaska, Professor Andrew Wiles won a prize of $50,000 for his solution. As complex as Wiles’ proof is at 100 pages, I think it is less complex than love. There are just too many variables. And no proof.

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The Greening of My Soul

Mo Conlan — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:36:19 -0400

I don’t know that I felt my true soul until I got off the airplane at Shannon airport, Ireland, and stepped into green – emerald green, mint green, cats-eye green, just-budding-tree green. Like Oz. Though I was 40 years old and this was my first visit, it felt like coming home.

I sensed at once how the culture I’d grown up in no longer fit. A culture born of Yankee adages. America writ large. Build businesses. Get on with it. Get rich. Follow the rules. Don’t cry. Get a move on. Something new was awakened in me on that trip. The kindness and graciousness of the Irish people seemed somehow right to me.

This was soon after the terrible loss of my father. I was grieving and, at the same time, discovering the Celtic spirit I’d inherited from him and our forebears – a people with time enough to stop and tell a funny story or just to chat. A people who cherish time spent with friends and kin. And at the same time, nobody’s fool.

“This is the land and people I truly belong to,” I thought.

Kindness and keenness. I looked into Irish eyes in Ireland and saw that burning keenness of mind and spirit that was my dad’s. And love of story. Such love of language and story! Irish songs are filled with tales of troubles and survival, and love. Funny stories and jokes are told in the pub and around the kitchen table -- many with well-earned gallows humor. Even in the smallest towns, theater groups put on the classic Irish plays, keeping the old stories alive.

Perhaps this hunger for story relates to the time when the Irish were colonized, beaten down by cruel laws – forbidden to attend school, forbidden to wear the color green. Now, even on a dull, rainy St. Patrick’s day, I pull on my green sweater to honor those who risked jail for wearing of the green. I honor my great-something grandfather who risked his life by secretly instructing children in the hedgerows at night, despite the law. He was betrayed, a price on his head. The soldiers, not content with driving the family out, burned down the farm and the barn with the cow in it. This drove them to America.

The family, with several children, sailed over in separate bunches. One of the boats was a leaky “coffin” ship that sank. My family survived, but many did not – Irish emigrants who would never make it to America.

In America, the progeny of my great-something Irish grandfather first went to work in the textile mills of New York. Eventually, by that reverence for education, whether in hedgerows or halls of ivy, they became teachers, social workers, lawyers, business men and women, politicians, clergy, writers, poets and artists.

Perhaps this family history is what made my father such a visible champion of civil rights in mid last century. During the riots, as black men were thrown into jail for merely being on the street, without due process, dad and a handful of other lawyers went down to the county jail and bailed them out.

The home of my heart is a cottage in the west of Ireland, in a town where the family goes to the pub in the evening, where they randomly stand to recite poetry and sing the old songs, where one evening, urged by the locals, I stood and sang “Danny Boy.”

It was not a great performance, but they clapped and cheered loudly. I was one of them, a cousin from America come home.

This is why I tell stories, rail against injustice. This is why my artworks are filled with many shades of green.

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Irish Immigrants felt like exiles

Mo Conlan — Mon, 9 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

They were thrown out of their homes, off their lands – starved out, beaten out. For many, it was leave or die and those healthy enough and brave enough made the journey to America. The Irish.

In the middle to latter decades of the 19th century and the first few of the 20th, more than 7 million Irish came to American. Their descendants number more than 40 million.

The coffee table book “Out of Ireland – The Story of Irish Emigration to America,” by Kerby Miller and Paul Wagner, published by Elliott and Clark, tells the story. The authors rely on letters sent back home to Ireland for much of their material.

More than any other immigrant group, the Irish saw their coming to America as an “exile” forced upon them by the British, Wagner said in an interview. It was this sense of exile that produced a body of Irish-American songs, such as “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen.”

“No other group was obsessed to the degree the Irish were about this notion of exile – that they didn’t choose, that they were forced out. That shows up so clearly in the letters,” Wagner says. The letters in the book reveal twin themes of gratitude for opportunities in America and intense longing for Ireland. They were culled from thousands in the collection of the book’s co-author, historian Kerby Miller.

The similarity of experiences recounted in the book and my own family’s is striking. My great-great grandfather Stephen Cooke and his family, who lived in the town of Galmoy in County Kilkenny, were among those millions who came to American in the mid-19th century. It was 1847, the Great Famine had struck. Stephen was teaching catechism to children of the town. “Such teaching was forbidden by law. In fact, it was punishable by death,” wrote my cousin Leona Garrity in the family history she published.

Catechism classes were conducted clandestinely, behind the hedgerows, with one of the children standing guard to warn of British constables or informers. “Besides teaching catechism,” Leona Garrity writes, “Stephen taught his children to read and write (also forbidden by British law). Someone informed on him, reported his illegal hedgerow teaching and activities to the British, who dispatched soldiers to enforce discipline.

“However, the Cookes were warned of the approach of the soldiers. Leaving land and house, pig and cow, Stephen fled at night with his family…When the British soldiers arrived and discovered that the family had gone, they burned the house to the ground and killed the pig and the cow.”

The Cookes, like many emigrants, went first to England, where they worked – including my great-grandfather, Michael, a boy of 7 or so – in the cotton mills. About five years later, the family came to America in three contingents. Two Cooke sons were shipwrecked aboard one of the leaky Irish immigration boats, called “coffin ships,” but survived and later made a successful crossing.

This kind of story was repeated again and again as the Irish streamed into America, an adolescent country growing to adulthood and needing the brawn, brains and imagination the immigrants brought.

In Ireland, the Irish had faced the hatred and cruelty of the British and their inhumane Penal Law. As newcomers to a largely Protestant America, they faced religious bigotry and “No Irish need apply” signs. Still, they built railroads, dug canals, mined coal, and fueled the engine of the growing industrial giant, America. Irish women were readily hired as cooks, housekeepers and nannies. The labor often was back-breaking, hours long (16 not uncommon) and wages slavish. Some Irish entrepreneurs became wealthy industrialists – banker Thomas Mellon and mine owner Marcus Daly, for examples.

As more and more Irish came to America, there was increasing incentive for those left behind to follow. As their numbers increased, the Irish helped build the union movement, established a strong American Catholic church and shaped the politics of cities. And they sent money back home to bring mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters here. Eked out of cooks’ and nannies’ wages, small paychecks of longshoremen, textile workers and miners, a king’s ransom poured over the ocean. Some $250 million was sent from America back to Ireland, “the largest transatlantic philanthropy of the 19th century,” Wagner said. But even as they prospered in America, the Irish mourned for their homeland. Here is an excerpt from a letter in the book, written in 1870 by Maurice Woulfe, an Army soldier in Wyoming territory, to his brother in the town of Cratloe, County Limerick.

“I have everything that would tend to make life comfortable. But still at night when I lay in bed, my mind wanders off across the continent and over the Atlantic to the hills of Cratloe… every stone, gap and field.”

Ireland never replenished its population after the losses from famine and emigration. Irish immigrants continue to come to America. They come for economic opportunity – and to join their 40 million relatives.

*Excerpts from a story that appeared, in its original form, in The Cincinnati Post Newspaper.

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It could have been frogs

Mo Conlan — Tue, 3 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I look out my window at the beautiful snow on the ground, falling flakes light as confectioner’s sugar.

I have loved this wintertime with so much snow. Seeing photos online of snow scenes from around the country and the world. Snow everywhere.

I love how sunshine paints blue shadows of trees on the snow canvas. I love my trees as if they were people – nice, wise people with only good intent.

Still, I wonder why this snow- so heavy, so cold, so everywhere this particular winter. Recent winters have seen no snow in my city. The poet/writer in me thinks metaphor.

In Mt. Olympus, the God of Raining is raging.

“I will punish them for their evil!” he shouts to his wife. “I will rain down frogs. The frogs will destroy their crops. They will have to tend their fields instead of making terrible mischief. Evil. Yes, evil. Frogs it is!”

Mrs. Rain God listens patiently. She has heard his rants before, but never has he been so angry with Earthlings as now. So much cruelty, so much killing, so much lying. So little love.

She chooses her words carefully. “It has been a long time since you sent frogs, dear. And I have another thought.”

“Oh,” the Rain God raises his eyebrows.

“The evil is done by a small but bad lot with a lot of power – not by all humans. Many are doing good. Why one young troubadour sings to animals.”

“Harumph! He sings to his cat in the shower!” her husband snorts.

She shakes her head. “He goes around the world singing to all kinds of animals –penguins and turtles, lions and such. The animals listen. Really quite extraordinary to forge this new link between man and animals.”

“Hmmm,” he mutters. “If not frogs, what?” he asks.

“Snow,” she says.

“Snow! Why snow?”

“To remind them of the beauty that enfolds them on their beautiful planet. The lovely lacy snowflakes. The way snow cleanses the land, makes it new and pristine.”

The God of Rain sniffs. He loves his wife and knows she is wise, but sometimes overly soft.

“This seems overly soft for such grievous offenses humans are inflicting on each other and the land.”

She has anticipated this: “Let it snow and snow and snow, so that they know the power of it. The beauty and the danger of what may rain on them. The danger they inflict on a world that wants love and beauty!”

The Rain God thinks a moment, smiles, then barks an answer. “I will send it everywhere, every day, every night –snow, snow, snow. Snow it isn’t just pretty; snow is mighty. And they ought to know that it could have been frogs!”

And so it snowed all around the world for 40 days and 40 nights. It was beautiful, and fun, and dangerous. It united a fractured world for a sliver of time one winter as neighbors and strangers helped each other shovel out of snow drifts. Brought freezing strangers and animals inside. Went sledding on hillsides with their children and the children of complete strangers.

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You're doing OK, kid... letter to my writer self

Mo Conlan — Thu, 1 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I belong to an online writers class, UnMute, taught by Ann Randolph. I meet other writers from around the world there. (Next session begins Jan. 12) The class manifesto is supportiveness for the writer, for the writing, and for growing your creative voice. One exercise we do is to write a kind of pep talk to ourselves at the final class of a session. I think this is a good idea for any writer at year end. Become a cheerleader for your writing!

Dear Mo:

You decided to not be afraid of your story. Good on you for persevering even when lost in the maze of a second novel. Your first book seemed to come easily; not so this one. Attention wanders. Let it. Make art, daydream. Ideas will come – perhaps solutions to a knotty plot.

Let your writing be your learning ground as you struggle to inhabit a long-ago time in history, characters with real feelings and ambitions, loves and hates.

Good for you to recognize the value of the writing you have done already. Brava for writing a personal memoir of a bittersweet love, Girlfriend ~the Longing and Short of it. And getting recognition of its excellence in the Writers Digest contest.

Do you write just for this kind of recognition? Not solely, and yet writing is a way for an overlooked child to become a seen adult. But there is the joy of writing for its own sake. The struggles and discoveries, the playtime with words and stories. And, too, the struggle to cut your way through the thicket, to find your way home to that last page of your story.

You are in mid-slog, but good on you for realizing that you need to give yourself room to roam within your story – without demands. You are not going to set a record for number of books written – and marvel at those writers who do, if they do it well.

Many of your writing friends are using AI to plot their stories. You don’t. Face it, you are a bit of a purist. Still, AI is a help to some writers, and you do not begrudge that.

What is the old saying, something like: Give a chimp enough time and it could type out Shakespeare. I don’t believe this for a minute. My story (your story) is as individual as my fingerprints as I type. As unique as my soul.

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What a character!

Mo Conlan — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I think a lot about the most famous characters in fiction –the ones we read and never forget. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock in 1887. One hundred and thirty-eight years later, Holmes remains one of the most beloved characters of western literature: a tall, lithe Englishman wearing a deerstalker hat, an Inverness cape and Ulster coat, and often smoking a pipe.
I found Sherlock at age 10 and could not let go. When our family – seven kids and parents –went on vacation, I packed my complete Sherlock canon, in one volume. It was so heavy I could barely lift it. While others went swimming, I spent days and nights reading – plus a little fishing when I could tear myself away from Sherlock’s current case.
As a writer, I ask myself: What makes Sherlock so compelling? He appears at first more anti-hero than hero. He is odd. He is a loner – unfeeling, obsessive, given to episodes of depression. He is a drug addict. He is often rude and imperious with his friend Watson. And let’s face it, misogynistic.
Why should I and millions of others want to keep reading him? His passion for truth, his indefatigable resolve. Sherlock is on the case. Mysteries are solved, criminals caught, and order restored, fictionally at least.
Because of his absolute brilliance, we can forgive Sherlock’s cold rationality. And under the crust, we suspect he has a heart. We get glimpses of this in Sherlock’s admiration for The Woman, Irene Adler. And that violin. Surely this implies a deeper connection to a tender, feeling heart.
Sherlock values his street urchins as highly as his clients. He does not suffer fools. He does not kowtow to lords, ladies and kings. He receives them all equally in the rather humble apartment he shares with Watson. I like this egalitarian spirit. In Sherlock’s world, there are no “betters.” This is, in part, ego: How could anybody be smarter, better than himself?
Writers do not make characters out of whole cloth. How much of Sherlock is also Doyle I wonder? How did he first conjure up this enduring character?Doyle’s visual image of Sherlock so indelibly imprinted in global consciousness nudges me to think about how I dress my own characters. What do they wear? What color eyes do they have? What are their favored accessories?
After all these years, we can’t stop reading Sherlock Holmes. Yes, he is a flawed hero, a mix of light with quite a bit of dark, but we like heroes with flaws – a bit more human, a bit more like us.
There is only one Sherlock. He seems to be eternal. When Doyle, weary of writing about Holmes, kills his character off at Reichenbach Falls, readers demanded he be brought back. So Doyle resurrected Sherlock – who as it turns out wasn’t really dead at the hand of master criminal Moriarty.

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How we reveal ourselves in our writing

Mo Conlan — Sun, 9 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Writing a novel has its own pleasures and pains. It takes a long, long time. I relished writing my novel The Lost Books-Romance and Adventure in Cornwall. I’m having a harder time with its sequel. Poetry is not necessarily easier, though it is much shorter. One reason I am so fond of poetry is that it can tell a large “story” in just a few stanzas.

I once interviewed poet and novelist Marge Piercy (prolific author of many books of both genres.), who told me she writes poetry to discover what she feels and fiction what she thinks. This seems to be true for me as well. As I write fiction, I have been surprised how characters and their actions reveal my own deeply held beliefs. I find my poetry often brings up deeper feelings.

I am going to submit the poem below to Writers Digest Poetry Contest. I have no expectations. All writing is subjective in the reading/judging. A poet might find on the other end of the process, say, a judge who loves lyric phrases, or lots of alliteration. A judge may love or hate your subject matter; may prefer rhymed couplets, or sonnets; brevity and concision. I like all these devices, but I must admit I do like wrangling with the straitjacket of haiku. Give me a poem worth reading in just three lines, 17 syllables!

Polishing up a poem and submitting it encourages faith in myself as a writer. And by entering a contest, a poet can pretty well be assured that at least one other person will read it (a little poet-gallows humor).

Cloudland

The clouds spread all above, all around us

as we drive the backroads of Northern Michigan.

Cloud barges. Floating pillow clouds.

Fluffy animal clouds.

The brightest ones glow

white as sunlit swans on the lake.

Angels spin them from heavenly thread.

“Do you remember their names?”

I ask my daughter. We both admit

we have forgotten, though I do recall

Cumulous, a friendly word I like.

A little stranger cloud nudges in –

gray as the lake on a gray day.

But driving through cloudland,

through forests and farms and lakes

with the land full of apple trees

putting out fruit, blueberries for sale

at roadside stands, everything green,

ripening in a short season –

the air the way we remember ,

the pure air of long ago – my daughter

and I are happy for a time.

Not worrying about the dark clouds

That are coming.

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Heavenly distractions

Mo Conlan — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s hard to get back into writing my novel while I am at the cottage in Michigan. Partly I am procrastinating at writing a difficult scene – but mostly I want to breathe in Michigan.

The air smells of nothing false. The wind shushes through the trees, a musical backdrop; no other sounds, nothing but nature. Birds chime in with chirps and cheeps and sounds without names. One is a dolorous bell chiming. The owl that lives in the woods nearby?

Into this nature wonderland has just come a FedEx truck rumbling by heading to the cottage up the hill. This causes the dog to bark. But this is a minor incursion – just enough to remind me how I dislike the sound of truck engines, and the driver cursing at someone on his phone.

Maybe this truck driver will come to the end of his day and take time to go down to the little lake, Portage, stretch out on the beach and watch the fishing boats; or trek over to the Big Lake –Michigan, with its vast blue expanse, whitecaps fringing waves that go far beyond what we can see. And that immense Michigan sky that stages light shows – clouds of all shapes and colors – blazing white to dark blue rain clouds, lightning thunderbolting through the sky. Sunsets of reds and oranges, purples that paint the clouds into magical cities in the sky.

Then the night sky. Away from the city, over the lake, millions of diamond stars. The Milky Way, Orion’s Belt.

People are kind here – in this shared natural wonderland. Nobody, for now, talking about the elephant outside this magic bubble.

Better get down to writing. Uh-oh, another intrusion, a lawnmower buzzing nearby. I can tolerate this – it is just one, and the mowing is nearly finished. Not like the squadron of mowers and hedge trimmers I hear at home in the city. Disrupting all sense of peace and quiet.

There is respect for quiet here. Enough quiet to hear the shush shush of the wind in the trees and the waves on the lakes. Enough, I should think, to finish at least one chapter. Blast it, mower coming back around. Why do people mow lawns. Have lawns? Let nature be, I say. Let us be.

Ah, mower shut down. Sweet smell of pure North Michigan.

Even on the lakes, there is quietude. Most boats are powered by wind. Some smaller motorboats. Few of those hyper-noisemakers, jet skis. The sleepy fishing boats use put-put motors whose sounds are almost comforting, the way the sounds of a baseball game on the radio are.

Yes, I well know the outside world is full of woe. Oh so much woe. I do not know how it will end. Who will win and who will lose. If we will be plunged into a Dark Time from which we cannot extricate ourselves. Or a time of more light. Yet in this land beyond cities, beyond beyond, for this slice of time – I know not how much longer – we live in paradise.

I believe I am ready to tackle that difficult scene now.

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Never stop writing

Mo Conlan — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I will look for that new moon outside my bedroom window tonight. A new Moon even as I grow old. Old in numbers, that is. Inside I am still much as I was, blessed by the writing that flows through my life and connects the younger me to now. A river of goodness and “me-ness.”

Old in the sense of being long-lived brings more experiences and wisdom to write about – lost loves and broken hearts, bottom-of-a crumpled-paper-bag despair. And triumphs.

One thing old does not mean is stopping. Not stopping writing. Not stopping making art.

Still learning. Still growing more gratitude and trying to learn and relearn love. And doing new things. This next part of my journey with my novel is to get it out into the world. That is complex and involves technologies and ways of being foreign to me. I have to trust the process, the people helping me along the way.

“How many books do you want to sell?” someone asks me.

What a good question to make me think.

“I don’t care so much about numbers as connections,” I say. I know so well that big sales and large numbers are a dream for many writers, reality for a few.

“What I want is to present my book person-to-person, to invite my friends, to talk to readers in book clubs. To touch minds and hearts. And then, such connections can grow.”

I have seen this with friends’ books. Once you have it, the book itself is the treasure, not money you may or may not make with it. The book will lead to so many new people and places and experiences. And once a book is written it cannot be unwritten. It can stand forever.

I would love to see my story as a movie, but if that happens, well and good. If not, I have the treasure –my words and thoughts, my voice, my characters, my story for all time.

I must be careful of what I wish for: giving up control of one’s story to others, on film or TV can lead to angst, sorrow and anger. These people are in their jobs to make money from our creative product. They don’t have the same care and respect for our creative “chidren. As we dol”

I think the late novelist M.C. Beaton might be appalled at what television has done with her Agatha Raisin character and stories. Beaton is a brilliant writer, with prolific output in many genres. (Also writing under the name Marion Chesney.) The richness, intelligence and wit of her writing has been turned into a daffy kind of sit-com-ish Agatha Raisin series.

Many of the great writers of history wrote to put food on their tables. They also fed their stories with love of words and characters, with all the passion and creativity of their souls. That is why we still read them today. Shakespeare, Dickens, Hugo, Austen, Conan Doyle – the Russian guys whose names I cannot spell…

Write for money, write for love. No shame in either, or a combo. Just know what it is you truly want.

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Those Wonderful Terrible Tudors

Mo Conlan — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Author’s note: I have done research using todays’ tools, including Wikipedia (to which I contribute) and Google AI as well as print history books, etc.

The Tudor Era was both the best of times and the worst, to borrow lines from Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.

The Tudor era saw a British Renaissance, with advances in farming and other technologies, the arts, shipbuilding and empire-making. It was a time of new thinking about what it means to be human and what it takes to be in harmony with God.

It was the era of William Shakespeare.

Those are some of the best things.

The worst were embodied by the murderous King Henry VIII. His killing rampages –two queens beheaded, friends murdered, countless others. And the bloody wars of religion that followed Henry’s break with Rome that left the country battling between Protestants and Catholics.

It brought the Reformation and destruction of church buildings, lands and goods; and, most egregiously, of the nation’s illuminated manuscripts. These books preserved Western knowledge – dating back to the classical era of Rome and Greece. Monks and nuns had painstakingly scribed them. The so-called Reformation saw most of them destroyed.

Here are more facts about Tudor times:

The Tudor era in England spans the years 1485–1603. King Henry Vlll and Queen Eizabeth I were the key monarchs.

Henry reigned 38 years, from 1509 to 1547.

Queen Elizabeth I, Henry’s daughter by his marriage to Anne Boleyn, reigned from 1558- to 1603 ,44 years, outstripping her father in longevity.

Historic irony: Henry VIII was obsessed with providing a male heir to the start-up Tudor dynasty. Yet, he had in the royal nest a monarch- in- the making, Elizabeth. This daughter, whose mother Ann Boleyn he had beheaded, became more illustrious than her father.

Elizabeth was disowned by her father as was her sister, Mary. She was restored to the line of succession, though, when the family became reunited at the urging of Henry’s sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr.

Tudor teeth: Tudor-era peasants had healthier teeth than their betters, archaeologists find. The new import of sugar from the Americas was costly. Wealthy Tudors were swimming in it. Peasants could not afford it, though they made good use of honey. Lack of coin saved teeth.

Big spender: Unlike his miserly father, Henry VII, Henry VIII's spending was so lavish that, for example, one year’s Christmas celebration lasting 12 days at court reportedly cost the equivalent of his entire year of tax revenue. It featured dishes such as roast swan, grand masques and pageants, and gifts for more than 1,000 guests and staff.

Weird Tudor stuff: The Groom of the Stool – a coveted position in the Tudor court, assisted the king with bowel movements. All the better to whisper ideas to the king and to learn the news – such as planned executions.

Though the era was well behind modern medical practices, use of herbs for tonics and poultices was widespread. Some worked. Alehoof , for example – an herb taken with honey and hot water–was a remedy for congestion. (Today we might add lemon.)

While courtiers ate venison, game pies and lavish desserts, commoners mostly ate potage –a thick soup or stew made of grains, vegetables such as turnips, herbs and perhaps a bit of salt pork or fish. Also bread, butter and cheese. The rich drank wine and ale; the poor drank ale and beer.

Biggest land grab in history: The English Reformation began in 1534 when King Henry broke with Rome, declared himself head of the Church, and began seizing, selling off and tearing down abbeys and convents. This began England’s rocky turn from Catholicism to Protestantism.

Goodbye to great edifices: Approximately 800 religious houses, including monasteries, priories, convents, and friaries, were dissolved. Most were sold, many torn down, goods plundered.

The monastic libraries had huge collections at a time when books were relatively rare. Historians vary in their tally of books lost and destroyed, with estimates of thousands to hundreds of thousands. It is reported that only three volumes of more than 646 in the abbey of the Augustinian Friars at York, remained. Some books, though, were saved.

The Tudor era is so rich, so much to discover. In retrospect, it displays both the best and worst of humanity: The religious mania and intolerance that caused so many murders (ironically and sadly, in the name of the Prince of Peace); and the imagination and verve that led to new worlds of thought and invention.

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Coming to America

Mo Conlan — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote this in honor of my granddaughter Sydney, who this week begins her first teaching job with Teach for America, in an inner-city school in Chicago.

A teacher brought us to America… Our great-something Grandfather Stephen Cook was a Hedgerow Teacher in mid-19th century Ireland. This was a terrible era for the Irish. England had subjugated them to an extreme degree – even forbidding them to educate their children, or to wear their national color green. How mean could they be!

Men and women of that era began to teach Irish children clandestinely, in barns and hedgerows – dense bushes that lined the farms and roads. This was against the law, and those caught were imprisoned.

Grandfather Stephen Cook was one of these teachers. His activities became known to the English, and a price was put on his head. Somebody must have ratted him out. English soldiers, angry that Stephen had escaped, burned down his home and barn, with the cow in it.

Stephen, his six children and wife Julia managed to escape Ireland and come by leaky coffin ship to America. These ships were so old, overloaded and unsafe, that many sunk, with their passengers who would never see America.

The family first came to New York where they worked in the textile mills. They scattered into all parts of the country pursuing careers such as law, arts, religion, politics, of course, teaching. There are now hundreds, possibly thousands, of Cook descendants.

In mid-20th century, our Aunt Leona Garrity traveled from her home in Detroit to Ireland to collect this history and publish it as The Cook Book. At this time, such travel was unusual, especially for a woman alone. Leona no doubt traveled by ship. It is from this history that an annual gathering of the Cook clan in New York has come.

Teachers have such incredible impact. It was a teacher who led me to writing as a career. After I turned in an essay for class, she returned it, no letter grade, just this: “The written word needs you.”

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Thrilled with my new audio book!

Mo Conlan — Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have a new website up and running! https://moconlanwordsandart.com

And I have a new audio edition of my book "The Lost Books-Romance and Adventure in Tudor Times."

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Books-Romance-Adventure-Tudor/dp/1639888004

(You can also listen for free on some sites, including Hoopla.)

I got to this high point with a lot of help from my friends. Author and fellow member of the Monday Morning Writers Group in Cincinnati Richard Hoskin, (https://www.amazon.com/stores/Richard-Hoskin/author/) still writing with such style and wit after all these years, told me: You have to toot your own horn.

Richard, who was born in Cornwall and came here many years ago to work for Procter & Gamble, knows a thing or two about tooting one’s own horn. His two wonderful books are: “The Miner and the Viscount”, an historical novel set in Cornwall, of which I was one of two chief editors; and “Memoir While Memory Lasts” ,engaging, often funny stories from a master wordsmith, which I also edited.

Despite Richard’s sound advice, I am not very good at tooting my own horn. I am very good at tooting others’ horns. So, I called my daughter Heather, who also is reluctant to toot her own horn, but as president of Efficiency Marketing, is excellent at tooting others’. EfficiencyMarketingandPublicity.com

We both are superb at tooting horns for each other.

I took the step to hire her to create this new “rollout” website, and a marketing plan. She is an excellent writer and editor, always willing to read my stuff – to cheer me on, and/or ask good editor’s questions.

Heather is as devoted to me as much as any mother could wish for – and more. And, ditto, I to her. So, I could have just asked for her help as a daughter. But I decided to hire her for her professional skills, for pay.

We are a dynamic duo, intuitively in sync. She has wonderful online and other tech skills. The new website she designed for me has just gone live on BookBub (link above). (We recommend BookBub as being relatively low cost, easy to use, and, perhaps best of all, responsive. Responsive by real actual human beings.

Heather, as Chief Marketer, is about to post a story about my book and run ads on Facebook. The main thrust is that we now have an audio version of my story – so well read by voice actor Robin Rappaport. We chose Robin from other candidates because, as Heather said after listening to her demo: “She embodies your story.”

You may think that with all this effort and fanfare, I am expecting to make a lot of money. Or any. I know that most authors – writers of really good books – rarely make much money. The cards are stacked in favor of “best-seller” authors who continue to churn out books.

I am in the enviable position of not having to make a living from my writing – though I did for 35 years as a working journalist (not big bucks, but priceless). If I do make money, by chance, I will think of some way to give back to the community.

What I’ve learned from living with my published novel (print version) awhile, though, there is other gold to be gotten. The fun and pain of writing, firstly. A sense of pride and accomplishment at finishing a novel. New friends and connections. And this is a big one: the thrill of having readers “get” my story. That is what I mostly am after – readers. (I have done a few guest appearances at book clubs, in person or via Zoom, and that is so fun.)

And, as ever, many thanks to my writing communities – Unmute and Monday Morning Writers Group.

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Mo Is Now Available for Book Clubs!

Mo Conlan — Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mo loves to talk to fellow book lovers.

Contact her if you would like her to visit your book club in person (in Cincinnati) or over Zoom.

Get the inside scoop on why Mo chose a pirate and a former monk as heroes.
Find out how the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" sparked her story idea.
Learn how precious books were destroyed and hidden during Tudor times.

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Telling Stories That Need To Be Told

Mo Conlan — Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I could say I do not wish to be famous as a writer, but that would be a half-truth. Growing up I kept my brighter lights under a bushel barrel – middle of a “gang of seven” siblings.

I was the quiet one. Maybe I was a bit famous for that. My father saw me as I was – a quiet one, smart, a voracious reader. With affection, he would sometimes call me Little Mouse.

Inside my mouse-ness, unrecognized by me, I was burning for recognition I believe. So when I extricated myself from my brown wool uniform and the mid-century Catholic strictures that came with it, I became a writer, a journalist.

I wrote stories, sometimes front page stories, and got to see my name there in the byline. A certain kind of fame. It made me feel real.

As I matured as a writer, I realized I was not just doing this for my own ego. I was telling stories to the world for people whose stories needed to be told: the frightened, exhausted Russian Jews who escaped from the old Soviet Union, and those in this city who took them in.

The young woman who had been date-raped on campus and needed to tell her story – before the MeToo movement, when rape, especially among college students, was often swept under the rug.

The woman who in deep middle age was finally ready to tell about living through the Holocaust and, upon being liberated by the Americans, with her mother, another survivor, trekked through dangerous war-torn Europe to get home. She chose me to tell her story to the world. I felt honored and awed.

The college president who lived through Kristallnacht – telling me how his grandfather stood in the ruins of his business, clutching tattered pieces of the destroyed Torah, telling his young grandson, “We can put it back together.”

I had to meet in secret with the woman who was starting up the first local chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in our city. She feared for the members, and for their queer children and friends who would need to remain closeted for a long time, yet. I like to think that my story helped to bring about the time when they no longer needed to hide.

I told a lot of other stories, not all serious, along the way in more than 30 years in the game. And I learned to listen. All those years ago, as Mouse, I had been learning to listen.

I was famous, for a time, to those whose stories I told to the world. I would not mind being a bit famous with my foray into novel writing. I don’t think I would enjoy being a “celebrity” though. Getting thousands of people to “like” me has no appeal.

Writing a story that connects with readers – large numbers, or small – matters. And what truly matters is the writing itself. The pain and pleasure of doing it. The getting lost in the world of Story. Writing a story, a word artifact, that has the chance to sail out into the world, perhaps forever.

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Why did I write a book set in Tudor times?

Mo Conlan — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It was by accident that I wrote a novel set in the Tudor era. I was a member of an online writers group, called Unmute – which I recommend.. The prompt was to write about a holiday song. It did not interest me. Too serious.

Then I had a second thought: instead of dreary as piped-in Christmas music, maybe I could make this a fun write. “The Twelve Days of Christmas” came to mind. It was already fun and silly.

I imagined a scenario where a suitor sends over-the-top gifts to his beloved. She wants none of them – except possibly the gold rings to help pay for farm expenses. She is tired of cleaning up bird droppings from the partridges and other fowl he sends to her – in multiples.

The Tudor era seemed a good setting for this story. Henry Truelove, the hero, and Morwenna Goodwin, the heroine, were neighbors in the Duchy of Cornwall. Henry is a young squire gone to court and wooing the girl he left behind. Morwenna is a girl of lesser social standing who lives on a farm nearby.

Being the only child of the family, Morwenna helps her ma and da with the lambing and haying, planting and hoeing. She has no time for Henry’s romantic fancies and such that go on at court. Grown men, wearing flouncy clothing, putting on airs and dancing about, she thinks disdainfully.

She returns most of Henry’s gifts – keeping the French hens, which bring in good egg money, and the swans that are too beautiful to part with.

In short order, I had a nice neat little story, done and dusted. But then I found I did not want to leave these characters. I was having too much fun writing about them.

I immersed myself in Tudor history. That history gave me a more serious purpose for a story that is primarily lighthearted: When King Henry Tudor destroyed the monasteries, thousands of laboriously scribed illuminated manuscripts were plundered. The very books that preserved ancient history during the Dark Ages were torn apart for their components. gems and precious metals. Some were stolen and sold to the wealthy. Some burned by those ignorant of their value.

This historic atrocity fueled the heart of my story.

Henry, Morwenna and a band of friends form a pact to save as many precious books as possible. Thus, my title: The Lost Books – Romance and Adventure in Tudor Times.

I kept writing and writing. And in not too long a time, I had a novel.

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The poet vs. the novelist vs. the journalist

Mo Conlan — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am a poet, and a novelist; but I also am a journalist, and sometimes these literary impulses do not jibe. The poet wants beautiful language and metaphor. The journalist wants simplicity, clarity, facts. The novelist wants to take a long scary journey into Story, find her way out again to produce a book.

Recently, I wrote an essay about a prose poem, a prompt in my writing group. The poem reads, in part: …He said, every object sings. He said, if I built a room it might give me an A-flat and the harmonic series that goes with it, he said, every empty space sings. All weekend I listened to hundreds of objects… I placed my ear to the empty Tecates, the can of black beans, the path along the sand, I put my ear to the sand…

Perhaps I am too literal-minded, but this makes me question if my hearing is OK. Sure, the wind sings, the birds sing, even the sand can sing. But I cannot hear every object singing. I know, it is metaphor, but…

Do I need better ears?

I can buy into scientific facts we now know about our world. We all have vibrations, apparently; and somebody may hear them. But, I cannot hear them. So much that connects us to each other– to all the world – goes unseen and unheard by us. Perhaps we would be better humans if we heard everything; perhaps, though, we would go mad.

I have lately become charmed by elephants. They are magnificent creatures – with extraordinary hearing. Wikipedia tells me: Elephants are able to detect rain storms from distances as far away as 150 miles.

So, elephants, and many other animals do, no doubt, hear the sounds of many things. Do I ask too much of a poet to not rub my nose in it that I cannot hear the sounds of all things?

Having read this poem, I will try harder.

Sounds I do love: rain, of course, even thunder; my cats purring; the way certain people laugh, like Bex, the blacksmith on the show Money for Nothing (I am addicted); the faint sounds of amicable conversation among women in the next room; waves rolling onto the beach in Northern Michigan. The shrieks of children sledding down the hill outside my window.

Birdsong of all kinds; these have become my other new passion, in addition to elephants – rediscovering the beauty of birds, their vocals, their magnificent costumes, their mysteries of flight and migration.

Recently, as some things in this world get darker and, perhaps, as I get older, I have become more loving of the world’s sweetness. Wanting to hang onto the goodness in all its complex, miraculous forms.

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Audio Book Now Available!

Mo Conlan — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Now Available as an Audiobook

Listen to The Lost Books – Romance and Adventure in Tudor Times wherever you are.

Wonderfully narrated by Robin Ann Rapoport.

Unabridged · 8 hours, 7 minutes

See links below to get your copy.

Buy Audio Book at Barnes and Noble

Listen on Audible

Listen on Google Play

Listen on Hoopla

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