A question I get a lot is: am I Catholic? Understandable. My altered books and art journal work rely heavily on saints, angels, madonnas, rosaries, sacred hearts, and so on. But no, I am not Catholic, not even religious. I turn to saints because they they are my alter egos. For some people it is mermaids, for others fairies, and for a whole lot of people it seems to be vampires. For me, it’s the saints, the madder the better, the outrageous ones lost to time and myth.

If I have no well-defined religion, I do very much believe in the Divine, and contemplation of It runs through my work and writing. Look, there are up to 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy and there are more than 100 billion galaxies out there beyond ours. And the greatest minds in science can only identify 4% of what makes all of that up. The other 96% is shrouded in mystery called dark matter and dark energy but nobody knows what the heck it is. As in, 96% of all measurable reality is the Unknown.

Try to think about this. I do, every day, all the time, so is [read more]

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Growing up on a farm on a dirt road in Mississippi I dreamed of travel, of one day living someplace far away and glamourous. Like Swansea. Okay, maybe not glamourous in the sexy sense of the word but in the sense that it is unfamiliar and offers endless opportunities for discovery. This is in itself a kind of enchantment.

For me, a trip to Swansea Market is a strange delight. Fishmongers! Of course you can get fresh fish in America but until I moved here I had never seen  honest-to-gosh stalls devoted to nothing but fresh, shiny seafood. Pig’s trotters! You know what you just do not see in America? Severed pig’s feet piled in a cardboard box and skinned porcine carcasses on a pallet. Gruesome, yes, but fascinating and a deeply important reminder that our food comes from a living source, not some sterile styrofoam factory. Oops, my proofreader (otherwise known as my husband) says that we say “polystyrene” here.

Well, there you go. Hubby is a nice boy from Manchester. We’ve been together for ten years and after all this time we still find differences in our so-called common language. For instance, did you know that in [read more]

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