The other day Nyel came home from Physical Therapy with the news that there is another writer ‘out there’ named Sydney Stevens who lives in either California or somewhere on the East Coast. A friend of Victoria’s (the Queen of PT on the Long Beach Peninsula) is reading a book by her (or possibly, him).
So, I Googled Sydney (and Sidney) Stevens (and Stephens) in various combinations, but didn’t come up with the right (write) person. There are several of us who share this name and who surface when Googled – among them a singer from Los Angeles, a physician from Palm Desert – but no other writer that I could find.
However, I did find several sites about myself that weren’t on the web the last time I checked. (If you’ve never Googled yourself, it’s an interesting experience. It’s a little bit like listening to gossip about yourself; sometimes you’d like to correct ‘the record’ but you realize the futility of such an endeavor.) Most interesting was a review of my 2007 book, Dear Medora on a site called “Book This” which bills itself as “Assisting Northwest authors, book stores, libraries and book clubs to promote and interact with people who love to read.”
The review was fabulous – the best I’ve ever seen! It was posted on March 4th of this year purports to have come from Coast Weekend. If it’s the freebie insert Coast Weekend that comes with every week’s Chinook Observer, I certainly missed the review the first time around. In any case, I commend it to my readers and fans. It can be found at: http://bookthis.eomediagroup.org/2013/03/04/book-reivew-oysterville-author-resurrects-a-slice-of-local-history/
The part of the review that especially caught my eye was the next-to-last sentence of the final paragraph: Ask the author and she will speak to that strange relationship that often skips the natural arbitration of time to bind distant people together. Certainly this is the case for Stevens. She is more than a caretaker of family memorabilia. She has brought back beloved Medora. Getting to know the young lady is the greatest strength of the book. Stevens has brought us home to a goodness so often lost or overlooked in the current charge of modernism. This book is a must for teenagers. For the rest of us, it is a joyful rendezvous with our pioneer ancestors,
It is the “teenagers” comment that strikes a resounding chord for me. When WSU Press was planning their initial marketing strategy for Dear Medora, they suggested that it should be presented as a book for Teens or Young Adults. I adamantly (and, in retrospect, no doubt wrongly) insisted that it be marketed for the general reading public.
Dear Medora has been anything but a run-away best seller. I wonder if things might have been different if I hadn’t been so headstrong. And is it way too late to be eating crow?
Yesterday’s mail brought the unwelcome news that my book about Willard Espy “in its current form is not one that fits the current WSU Press publishing goals.” The letter, while disappointing in the extreme, contained good news as well as bad. Or at least it seemed so to me.
My intent (and the main reason for submitting the book to this particular publisher) was to write Willard’s biography in such a way that it would become a companion piece to Dear Medora: Child of Oysterville’s Forgotten Years. That book was published by WSU Press in 2007. Unfortunately, it has sold sparingly; it hasn’t flown off the shelves. It is definitely a “niche book” and, no doubt, was an unusual choice for an academic press. Perhaps the fact that they had a different editor then had bearing on that decision.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of being the keynote speaker at an awards ceremony honoring twenty-six students from our two local school districts – Ocean Beach and Naselle-Grays River Valley. The event is an annual one sponsored by the Masons. The students, two from each fourth through eighth grade class in our area, were chosen by their teachers and principals for consistently demonstrating “Excellence in Citizenship.”
Some days it seems that we spend an inordinate amount of time looking for things – the car keys, my camera, a coffee cup, Nyel’s checkbook. We fault ourselves for being overly busy or having too many things on our aging minds. We try to remember to return things to their proper locations so they will be readily available but it is a never-ending battle.
Mona’s doll, “Little Flirt,” given to her by Mama’s friend Jenny, sits placidly beside Myrtle, the doll that was Mama’s a generation earlier. Both of these long-time members of the family have been enjoyed by many Espy girls over the years. Though Flirt and Myrtle had to be re-strung recently, and though they have been re-clothed many times, their soft bisque complexions and bright glass eyes are as lovely as ever. Even now I retain my little girl fantasy that, if only my hearing were a little more acute, they could share stories with me of their long-ago adventures. 
When I was a child, we counted the days until Santa would arrive. By the time I had children of my own, the media was letting us know how many shopping days we had until Christmas. Nowadays we are besieged by news of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” and this very morning my computer tells me it’s “Cyber Tuesday.”
They say we’re to expect a storm later today with gale-force winds by evening. Yesterday, though, it was bright and crisp – a good day for working outside. I worked on winterizing; Nyel prepared a bed for planting bulbs. I wondered briefly, as I was cutting back the dried stalks of Shasta daisies and he was thinking about daffodils, if that was a metaphor for our personalities: I looking back; Nyel planning ahead. Not a bad combination…
Willard can really, truly 
Last week my new friend Linda came calling. She arrived at my door wearing a bright pink hat and new pink shoes to match. She brought with her a copy of Dear Medora and her Grandma Stephanie. Shyly she asked for my autograph.
Hal Buttrell is among our Friday Night Irregulars, though he is more regular than most. Since Diane (his other half) often works on Friday nights, Hal comes by himself. He always brings an appetizer – usually one that he has concocted on his own and we have found him to be an imaginative chef, especially with regard to stuffed mushrooms.
Four beautiful young girls, all with lovely names – Sofia, Athena, Phoebe, and Frances – came calling yesterday afternoon. They had each been given a Dear Medora book and they had come to get an autograph.
